[475] Luke, XXIV., 5.—T.
[476] Byron abandoned England for good on the 25th of April 1816 and, in the summer of that year, spent some months at Diodati, near Geneva. It was here that he wrote the third canto of Childe Harold, the Prisoner of Chillon and Manfred, the third act of which, however, he subsequently rewrote.—T.
[477] The Duchesse de Berry was arrested at Nantes on the 7th of November 1832. On the 12th, Berryer walked into Chateaubriand's study at Geneva and told him the news, without being able to give him any details. Chateaubriand at once left for Paris.—B.
[478] Félix Barthe.—T.
[479] Marshal Soult combined the offices of President of the Council and Minister for War.—T.
[480] Claude Emmanuel Joseph Pierre Marquis de Pastoret (1756-1840) filled various legal offices under Louis XVI. and was Minister of Justice and the Interior for a short while. He emigrated during the Terror and returned to France in 1795. After being elected to the Council of the Five Hundred, he was again obliged to flee, and remained in Switzerland till 1800. He obtained a professorial chair at the College of France in 1804 and became a senator in 1809. Under the Restoration, he received a peerage, was appointed President of the House of Peers in 1820, a minister of State in 1826 and Chancellor of France in 1829. In 1834, he was chosen to be tutor to the Duc de Bordeaux. Pastoret was the author of several important works, including a fine Histoire générale de la législation des peuples, and was a member of the French Academy and of the Academies of Inscriptions and of Moral Science.—T.
[481] The text of the letter of the 12th November ran as follows:
"Madame,
"You will think me very daring to come to importune you at such a moment to beg you to grant me a favour, the last ambition of my life: I desire ardently to be chosen by you as one of your defenders. I have no personal claim to the high favour which I solicit of your new grandeurs; but I dare to ask it in memory of a Prince of whom you deigned to name me the historian, and I hope for it again as the price of the blood of my family. My brother had the honour to die with his illustrious grandfather, M. de Malesherbes, on the same day, at the same hour, for the same cause and on the same scaffold.
"I am, etc.
"Chateaubriand."
[482] Jean Marie Pardessus (1772-1853), a meritorious jurist and historian. He was a member of the various legislative assemblies from 1806 to 1830 and occupied different professorial and legal offices, which he relinquished after the Usurpation, devoting the remainder of his life to his historical and critical writings on law.—T.
[483] M. Mandaroux-Vertamy was one of Chateaubriand's executors.—T.