I have kept the dual text as the reward of the Greek Committee.
Republican Greece had testified her particular regret when I left the ministry. Madame Récamier wrote to me from Naples, on the 29th of October 1824:
"I have received a letter from Greece which has made a long round before reaching me. In it I find some lines on yourself which I want you to see; here they are:
"'The decree of the 6th of June has come to our ears; it has produced the liveliest sensation on our leaders. Their best-founded hopes lying in the generosity of France, they are anxiously asking themselves what the removal may forebode of a man whose character promised them a support.'
"If I am not mistaken, this testimony ought to please you. I enclose the letter: the first page concerned only myself."
Soon you will read the life of Madame Récamier: you will know how sweet it was to me to receive a remembrance of the land of the Muses through a woman who would have adorned it.
As for the note from M. Molé, given above, it alludes to the bargain which I had made relating to the publication of my Complete Works. This arrangement ought, in fact, to have ensured the peace of my life; it nevertheless turned badly for me, although it was profitable to the publishers to whom M. Ladvocat, after his bankruptcy, left my Works[275]. In point of Plutus or Pluto (the mythologists confound the two), I am like Alcestes: I always see the fatal bark; like William Pitt, and that is my excuse, I am a spendthrift, a panier percé: but I do not myself make the hole in the basket.
At the conclusion of the General Preface to my Works, 1826, vol. I., I address France in these words:
"O France, 'my dear country and my first love,' one of thy sons, at the end of his career, is collecting beneath thy eyes the claims which he may have to thy good-will. If he can do no more for thee, thou canst do all for him, by declaring that his attachment for thy religion, for thy King, for thy liberties has been pleasing to thee. Fair and illustrious mother-land, I would have desired a little glory only to augment thine own."
Madame de Chateaubriand, being ill, made a journey in the South of France, derived no benefit from it, and returned to Lyons, where Dr. Prunelle[276] condemned her. I went to join her; I took her to Lausanne, where she proved M. Prunelle in the wrong. At Lausanne I stayed in turn with M. de Sivry and with Madame de Cottens, a warm-hearted, witty and unhappy woman. I saw Madame de Montolieu[277]: she was living in retirement on a high hill; she died in the illusions of romance, like Madame de Genlis, her contemporary. Gibbon[278] had composed his History of the Roman Empire:
"It was ... as I sat musing among the ruins of the Capitol," he writes at Lausanne, on the 27th of June 1787, "while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind."