So soon as the marriage was announced, the Breton Royalists decided to offer the Princess a gift, a product of local manufacture. They asked Chateaubriand to take it to Frohsdorf and present it in their name.
"I owe," he said to their delegate, M. Thibault de La Guichardière, "I owe Louise of France a wedding-visit; I shall be delighted to offer her a fine specimen of the work of our Breton looms."
He wrote on this subject, on the 9th of September 1845, to his sister, the Comtesse de Marigny[500], who was living at Dinan:
"I have received your letter, dear sister; it goes without saying that I add my name to those of all the Bretons who wish to make the Princess a present. You can therefore look upon me as a subscriber for the sum which you think right to fix.... But be sure to remember that I want to be mixed with the crowd and that I am ambitious for no distinction but that of my eagerness and my zeal."
On the 15th of the same month, he wrote again to his sister:
"If I am specially charged, by a certain number of Bretons, to be the bearer of their respects, that is all that I want I shall go at my own expense. I know the young Princess; she will receive me well, wherever she may be. I would rather that she were already in Italy. If we are to believe the newspapers, she is already in Venice; but the place does not matter.... You can put me down for 100 francs; once more, the amount makes no difference: it is enough to know that I am commissioned to take a Breton subscription to the daughter of the Duc de Berry; the choice is everything.... Your canton is more than I need to authorize me to go to Madame la Princesse de Lucques, whose brother, moreover, has invited me to go to present my compliments to him next spring."
Shortly before his death, Chateaubriand was anxious to give Henry of France a last proof of his fidelity. By a disposition "outside his will," a disposition specially recommended to his family, of which a duplicate was forwarded to the Comte de Chambord, he gave the latter his little collection of choice books, some of them "annotated," those which he was "re-reading," he said, in order to serve for the Prince's "leisure" and instruction.
Until the end, therefore, to use the very true expression of M. Charles de Lacombe, "his royalist flame, kept alive by honour, did not cease to burn, under an appearance of scepticism, in that disabused heart[501]."
And, in the same way, the Christian remained faithful. A whole volume has been written recently on the Sincérité religieuse de Chateaubriand.[502] This was, perhaps, a good subject for a thesis; it seems to me, however, that the demonstration did not require to be made: one does not demonstrate evidence. For the rest, I have nothing to speak of here except the last years of the author of the Génie du Christianisme, those which go from 1841 to 1848.
In a letter to his friend Hyde de Neuville, on the 14th of June 1841, Chateaubriand wrote: