When, in 1816, I passed this spot, on my way to write the eleventh book of the first part of these Memoirs at Montboissier[485], Maintenon Castle stood empty; Madame de Chalais was not yet born: since, she has spread out and reckoned her whole life over twenty-six years of mine. Thus have the shreds of my existence composed the spring-time of a number of women who have fallen after their month of May. Montboissier is now deserted and Maintenon inhabited: its new occupiers are my hosts.
M. le Duc de Noailles, who, if nothing stops him, will achieve a brilliant career, was not of an age to vote when I was in the House of Peers: I did not hear him deliver those speeches in which he has pleaded, with the authority of arguments and the power of words, the cause of France and of the royal misfortunes. His part in life began when mine had finished: he took the oath to misfortune in a more useful way than I.
Madame la Duchesse de Noailles is a niece of M. le Marquis de Mortemart, my old colonel in the Navarre Regiment; she bears a sad and gentle likeness to my sister Julie[486].
The rivalries of Madame de Maintenon and Madame de Montespan have been resolved by the marriage of M. le Duc de Noailles and Mademoiselle de Mortemart[487]. At this present time, who troubles his brain about a sovereign's heart? That heart has been chilled these hundred and twenty years; and, in the decrial and vilification of monarchies, are the attachments of a king, even though it were Louis XIV., events? What can one measure by the huge scale of our modern revolutions that does not contract to an imperceptible point? Do the new generations care about the intrigues of Versailles, which is no longer anything but a crypt? What matters to our transformed society the end of the enmities of blood of some women once destined, in bowers or palaces, to lie on beds of flowers or down?
And yet, around the general interests of history, would there not be historical curiosities? If some Aulus Gellius, some Macrobius, some Strabo, some Suidas, some Athenasus of the fifth or sixth century, after describing to me the sack of Rome by Alaric, were, by chance, to tell me what became of Berenice after Titus had repudiated her; if he were to show me Antiochus returning to that Cæsarea, the "charming spot where his heart" ...had adored her who loved another; if he were to take me to a castle in the Lebanon inhabited by a descendant of the Queen of Palestine, in spite of the destruction of the Eternal City and the invasion of the Barbarians, it would still please me to come across the memory of Berenice in the "desert East."
[APPENDIX III]
(By M. Edmond Biré)