I often visit Monte Cavallo; there the solitude of the gardens is increased by the solitude of the Roman Campagna, in search of which one's eyes turn beyond Rome and up the right bank of the Tiber. The gardeners are my friends; there are walks leading to the Panatteria, a poor dairy-farm, aviary, or poultry-yard, the occupants of which are as indigent and peaceful as the latter-day popes. Looking down from the height of the terraces of the Quirinal enclosure, one sees a narrow street in which women sit working at their windows on the different storeys: some embroider, others paint, in the silence of this retired quarter.
The cells of the cardinals of the last Conclave do not interest me at all. When St. Peter's was built, when master-pieces were ordered of Raphael, when at the same time the Kings came to kiss the Pontiffs slipper, there was something worthy of attention in the Temporal Papacy. I would gladly see the cell of a Gregory VII.[78], of a Sixtus V., just as I would look for the lions' den in Babylon; but dark holes, deserted by an obscure company of septuagenarians, represent to me only those columbaria of Ancient Rome, which are empty to-day of their dust and from which a family of dead have fled.
I therefore pass rapidly by those cells, already half demolished, to walk through the rooms of the palace: there everything speaks to me of an event[79] for which one finds no precedent except by going back to Sciarra Colonna[80], Nogaret[81] and Boniface VIII.[82]
My first and my last visit to Rome are connected by memories of Pius VII., to whose story I have referred when speaking of Madame de Beaumont and of Bonaparte. My two visits are two pendentives outlined under the vault of my monument. My faithfulness to the memory of my old friends must give confidence to the friends who remain to me: for me nothing sinks into the tomb; all that I have known lives around me: according to the Indian doctrine, death, when it smites us, does not destroy us; it only makes us invisible.
To M. le comte Portalis
"Rome, 7 May 1829.
"Monsieur le comte,
"I have at last received, by Messieurs Desgranges and Franqueville, your Dispatch No. 25. This rude dispatch, made out by some ill-bred Foreign-Office clerk, is not what I had the right to expect after the services which I had had the honour to render the King during the Conclave; and above all they might have remembered a little whom they were addressing. Not an obliging word for M. Bellocq, who obtained such exceptional documents; nothing in reply to the request I made on his behalf; gratuitous comments on Cardinal Albania nomination, a nomination made in the Conclave which no one, therefore, could have foreseen or prevented, a nomination concerning which I have never ceased to send you explanations. In my Dispatch No. 34, which has doubtless now reached you, I again offer you a very simple method of getting rid of this cardinal, if he causes France such alarm, and that method will already be half carried out when you receive this letter: to-morrow I shall take leave of His Holiness; I shall hand over the Embassy to M. Bellocq, as chargé d'affaires, in accordance with the instructions in your Dispatch No. 24, and leave for Paris.
"I have the honour to be, etc."
This last note is a rude one, and puts an abrupt close to my correspondence with M. Portalis.
To Portalis and Récamier.
To Madame Récamier
"14 May 1829.
"My departure is fixed for the 16th. Letters from Vienna arriving this morning announce that M. de Laval has refused the Foreign Office; is it true? If he keeps to this refusal, what will happen? God knows. I hope that all will be decided before my arrival in Paris. It seems to me that we have become paralyzed and that we have nothing free except our tongues.
"You think I shall come to an arrangement with M. de Laval; I doubt it. I am inclined to come to an arrangement with nobody. I was going to arrive in the most peaceful mood, and those people think fit to pick a quarrel with me. So long as I had a chance of office, they could not praise and flatter me enough in their dispatches; the day on which the place was taken, or thought to be taken, they drily inform me of M. de Laval's nomination in the rudest and at the same time the most stupid dispatch. But, before becoming so flat and insolent between one post and another, they ought to have reflected a little whom they were addressing, and M. Portalis will have learnt as much from a word which I have sent him lately in reply. It is possible that he merely signed without reading, just as Carnot signed hundreds of death-warrants on trust."
The friend of the great L'Hôpital[83], the Chancelier Olivier[84], in his sixteenth-century language, which set politeness at defiance, compares the French to monkeys which clamber to the tree-tops and never cease climbing until they reach the top-most branch, where they show what they ought to hide. All that has happened in France from 1789 to our own time proves the correctness of the simile: every man, as he ascends through life, becomes like the Chancellor's ape; he ends by shamelessly exposing his infirmities to the passers-by. See, at the end of my dispatches I am seized with a desire to boast: the great men who swarm at this present time prove that a man is a dupe if he does not himself proclaim his immortality.