At seven o'clock, on the morning on the 31st, I was installed at the Golden Shield, an inn kept for the benefit of Count Bolzona, a very high-born ruined man. In the same hotel were staying the Comte and Madame la Comtesse de Cossé, who had gone before me, and my fellow-countryman General de Trogoff[618], formerly Governor of the Château de Saint-Cloud, born long ago at Landivisiau, within the rays of the moon of Landerneau, and, squat of figure though he be, a captain of Austrian Grenadiers in Prague during the Revolution. He had just been to see his banished lord, the successor of St. Clodoald[619], a monk in his time at Saint-Cloud. Trogoff, after his pilgrimage, was returning to Lower Brittany. He was taking with him an Hungarian nightingale and a Bohemian nightingale which prevented everybody in the hotel from sleeping, so loudly did they complain of Tereus' cruelty. Trogoff used to cram them with grated bullock's heart, without being able to get the better of their sorrow.
Et mœstis late loca questibus implet[620].
Trogoff and I embraced like two Bretons. The general, short and square like a Celt of Cornouailles, has a certain shrewdness under an air of candour and an amusing way of telling a story. Madame la Dauphine was inclined to like him and, as he knows German, she used to walk with him. On hearing of my arrival from Madame de Cossé, she sent to me to propose that I should go to see her at half-past nine or at twelve: I was with her at twelve.
The Duchesse D'Angoulême.
She occupied a house standing by itself, at the end of the village, on the right bank of the Tepl, the little river which rushes from the mountain and flows through Carlsbad from one end to the other. As I climbed the stairs to the Princess' apartment, I felt perturbed: I was going, almost for the first time, to see that perfect model of human suffering, that Antigone of Christendom. I had not talked for ten minutes with Madame la Dauphine in my life; she had addressed scarcely two or three words to me during the rapid course of her prosperity; she had always shown herself at a loss in my presence. Though I had never written or spoken of her except in terms of profound admiration, Madame la Dauphine was necessarily bound to entertain towards me the prejudices of that antechamber gang in whose midst she lived: the Royal Family used to vegetate isolated in that citadel of stupidity and envy to which the young generations laid siege, without being able to force their way in.
A man-servant opened the door to me; I saw Madame la Dauphine seated, at the further end of a drawing-room, on a sofa between two windows, embroidering a piece of tapestry-work. I entered feeling so agitated that I did not know whether I should be able to reach the Princess. She raised her head, which she had kept lowered right against her work, as though herself to hide her emotion, and, addressing me, said:
"I am glad to see you, Monsieur de Chateaubriand; the King wrote to me that you were coming. You travelled at night? You must be tired."
I respectfully handed her Madame la Duchesse de Berry's letters; she took them, laid them on the table beside her and said:
"Sit down, sit down."
Then she began her embroidery again, with a quick, mechanical and convulsive movement.