On his return to Paris, Chateaubriand put the finishing touches to the work which was to close his literary career, the Vie de Rancé. He added to his manuscript some pages on his pilgrimage to Belgrave Square which were worthy of his talent and almost equal to the finest pages of the Memoirs. After a description of the Château de Chambord, in the neighbourhood of which the Abbé de Rancé[490] possessed a priory, the great writer's thought harks back to the Prince whom he has been visiting in London, and he continues in these words:
"That orphan has lately sent for me to London; I obeyed the close writ of misfortune. Henry has given me hospitality in a land that flies from under his feet. I have again seen that town which witnessed my fleeting greatness and my interminable wretchedness, those squares filled with fogs and silence, whence issued the phantoms of my youth. How long a time already has passed between the days when I dreamt of René at Kensington[491] and these last hours! The old exile found himself called upon to show to the orphan a town which my eyes can scarcely recognise.
"A refugee in England for eight years; next, Ambassador to London and intimately acquainted with Lord Liverpool, Mr. Canning and Mr. Croker: what changes have I not seen in those spots, from George IV.[492], who honoured me with his intercourse to Charlotte[493], whom you will find in my Memoirs! What has become of my brothers in banishment? ...On that soil, where we were not noticed, we nevertheless had our merry-makings and, above all, our youth. Growing girls commencing life in adversity brought the weekly fruit of their toil, to revel in some dance or other of the country; attachments were formed; we prayed in chapels which I have just revisited and found unchanged. We wept aloud on the 21st of January, and were much moved by a funeral oration pronounced by the Emigrant curate of our village. We also strolled beside the Thames, to see vessels laden with the world's riches enter the port, to admire the country-houses at Richmond, we so poor, we who had lost the shelter of the paternal roof-tree! All those things constituted true happiness[494]. Will you ever return, O happiness of my misery? Ah, come back to life, companions of my exile, comrades of my bed of straw: behold me returned! Let us go once more into the little gardens of some despised tavern and drink a cup of bad tea while we talk of our country[495]: but I see no one; I have remained behind alone....
. . . . . . . .
"I was not received, on my last visit to London, in a garret in Holborn by one of my Emigrant cousins[496], but by the 'Heir of the Ages.' That heir took a pleasure in showing me hospitality in the places where I had so long awaited him. He hid himself behind me like the sun behind ruins. The torn screen that sheltered me seemed to me more magnificent than the wainscotings of Versailles. Henry was my last sick-nurse: those are the perquisites of misfortune. When the orphan entered, I tried to stand up; I had no other way of showing my gratitude. At my age, we have only the impotence of life left Henry has consecrated his wretchedness; stripped though he be, he is not without authority: every morning, I saw an Englishwoman pass before my window; she would stand still and burst into tears so soon as she saw the young Bourbon: what king on his throne would have had the power to make such tears as those flow! Those are the unknown subjects conferred by misfortune."
The Vie de Rancé appeared in the month of May 1844. Chateaubriand had dedicated his work to the memory of the Abbé Sequin, an old priest, his spiritual director, who had died the year before at the age of ninety-five:
"I have written the story of the Abbé de Rancé in obedience to the orders of the director of my life."
The work had only just appeared, when the Duc d'Angoulême died at Goritz, on the 3rd of June 1844. The author of the Congrès de Vérone, on this occasion, wrote the following letter, addressed to M. le Vicomte de Baulny:
"Monsieur le vicomte,
"I have just read in the France the letter which you were good enough to communicate to me and which anticipated the sentiments so nobly expressed in the Gazette de France and the Quotidienne. I congratulate myself that my family has contracted with yours an alliance which does me honour and which is dear to me. I would myself have tried to raise my voice once more, if it deserved to be heard; I would have said once again what I think of the liberator of Spain, of the man who recalled to existence the last soldiers of Napoleon. M. le Duc d'Angoulême loved and protected my nephew, whose daughter has married your brother[497]. Christian, my second nephew, also much loved by the august Prince, has gone to God. And so all disappears for me! When I cast back my eyes, I see only a woman who weeps; and what a woman! Marie-Thérèse over-towers all ruins. And yet, this family which, for nine centuries, has commanded the world would to-day scarce find an old servant to raise to it, on the sea-shore, a funeral pile built out of the remnants of a shipwreck! Marie-Thérèse buries her grief in the bosom of God, in order that that sorrow may be everlasting. I have said that that sorrow was one of the greatnesses of France; was I wrong? In the wastes of Bohemia, I used to see, at night, at the window of a tower, a solitary light which proclaimed the new exile of the Duc d'Angoulême. Alas, that light has disappeared! The virtuous Prince has gone to seek his true country in Heaven. There revolutions will no longer strike him. He will stretch out his hand to us to climb to him, and, under the protection of his stainless life, we shall find grace with the Father of Mercies."
In the spring of 1845, Chateaubriand wanted to see "his young King" again for the last time. He accordingly went to Venice, at the end of May, and spent a few days with the Comte de Chambord. Seeing him set out in the state of weakness to which his ailments reduced him, his friends in Paris were very anxious about the journey. He bore it better than had been expected. The Prince persuaded him to prolong his stay a little:
"I was about to depart," he wrote, from Venice, in June 1845; "the young Prince's embraces and prayers retain me. My days are his; and, when he asks me only for a sacrifice of twenty-four hours, what right have I to refuse him?"
If rejoicings in exile are rare, the Royal Family nevertheless knew a few. On the 11th of November 1845 was celebrated, at Frohsdorf, the marriage of H.R.H. Mademoiselle with the Hereditary Prince of Lucca[498], like herself of a royal race, like herself sprung from the House of Bourbon. This was that Princesse Louise, the sister of the Duc de Bordeaux, whom Chateaubriand had seen in Prague in the month of May 1833 and of whom he had at that time drawn the following portrait:
"Mademoiselle somewhat recalls her father: she is fair-haired; her blue eyes have a shrewd expression.... Her whole person is a mixture of the child, the young girl and the young princess: she looks up, lowers her eyes, smiles with an artless coquetry mingled with art; one does not know if one ought to tell her fairy stories, make her a declaration, or talk to her with respect as to a queen. The Princesse Louise adds to the agreeable accomplishments a good deal of information....[499]"