Things would happen as God pleased; but I would have nothing to do with secret devotions; I know how to be guilty of loyalty only in flagrante delicto.
"Madame, without refusing Your Royal Highness the services which you have the right to command of me, I entreat you to allow the plan which I have formed of ending my days in retirement. My ideas cannot be acceptable to the persons who enjoy the confidence of the noble exiles of Holyrood: once misfortune were past, the natural antipathy to my principles and person would revive with prosperity. I have beheld the rejection of the plans which I had put forward for the greatness of my country, to give France frontiers within which she could exist safe from invasion, to remove from her the disgrace of the Treaties of Vienna and Paris. I have heard myself treated as a renegade, when I was defending religion; as a revolutionary, when I was striving to establish the throne on the basis of the public liberties. I should find the same obstacles increased by the hatred which the faithful of the Court, the town and the country would have conceived from the lesson inflicted upon them by my conduct on the day of trial. I have too little ambition, too great a longing for repose to make my attachment a burden to the Crown and to thrust upon it my importunate presence. I have done my duty without thinking for a moment that it gave me a right to the favour of an august Family: happy in being permitted to embrace its adversity, I see nothing higher than that honour; it will find no more zealous servant than myself; but it will find those who are younger and abler. I do not believe myself a necessary man, and I think that there are no necessary men left at this day: useless henceforth, I am going to retire into solitude to busy myself with the past. I hope, Madame, still to live long enough to add to the history of the Restoration the glorious page which your future destinies promise to France.
"I am, Madame,
"with the most profound respect,
"Your Royal Highness' most humble and most
"obedient servant,"Chateaubriand."
The letter was obliged to await a safe messenger; time went on, and I added the following postscript to my dispatch:
The cholera.
"Paris, 12 April, 1832.
"Madame,
"All things grow old early in France; each day opens out new chances for politics and commences a series of events. We now have M. Périer's illness[375] and the plague sent by God. I have sent to M. the Prefect of the Seine the sum of 12,000 francs which the outlawed daughter of St. Louis and Henry IV. has destined for the relief of the unfortunate: a worthy use of her noble indigence! I shall strive, Madame, to be the faithful interpreter of your sentiments. I have never in my life received a mission with which I felt myself more honoured.
"I am, with the most profound respect, etc."
Before speaking of the affair of the 12,000 francs for the cholera-stricken sufferers mentioned in the above postscript, I must speak of the cholera. I had not met with the plague during my journey in the East: it came to visit me at home; the fortune which I had run after awaited me seated at my door.
*
At the time of the plague of Athens, in the year 431 before our era, already twenty-two great plagues had ravaged the world. The Athenians imagined that their wells had been poisoned: a popular fancy renewed in all contagions. Thucydides has left us a description of the Attic scourge which has been copied, among the ancients, by Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan[376]; among the moderns, by Boccaccio[377] and Manzoni. It is a remarkable thing that, when writing of the plague of Athens, Thucydides does not say a word of Hippocrates[378], in the same way as he does not name Socrates in connection with Alcibiades. This pestilence first attacked the head, descended to the stomach, thence to the bowels, lastly to the legs; if it went out by the feet, after passing through the whole body, like a long serpent, the patient recovered. Hippocrates called it the "divine evil" and Thucydides the "sacred fire:" they both regarded it as the fire of the heavenly wrath.
One of the most dreadful plagues was that of Constantinople, in the fifth century, under the reign of Justinian: Christianity had already modified the imagination of the peoples and given a new character to a calamity, even as it had changed poetry; the sick seemed to see ghosts hover around them and to hear threatening voices.
The black plague of the fourteenth century, known by the name of the Black Death, took rise in China: it was imagined that it moved rapidly in the shape of a fiery vapour, while spreading a noxious smell. It carried off four-fifths of the inhabitants of Europe.