7. A very long letter addressed by the Comte de La Ferronnays, French Minister to Russia, to the Vicomte de Chateaubriand, Foreign Secretary, on the 14th of May 1824 and treating of contemporary politics.
8. The Genealogy of the Family of Chateaubriand, which fills 122 pages of the first edition and is not of sufficient general interest to be included in this translation. I can, however, refer the curious to the very full account of the Chateaubriand Family in M. René Kerviler's Essai d'une bio-bibliographie de Chateaubriand et de sa famille (Vannes: 1895).
M. Louis Cahen, of Paris, who read and collated the greater part of the proofs of the first two volumes, died before those volumes were published and before he could read the tribute which I paid to his kindness. He was a man of leisure and of great intelligence, and he made it a labour of love to compare the two versions sentence for sentence and line for line. I wish also gratefully to acknowledge the assistance which I have received in the translation of many technical expressions from Mr. Oswald Barron, of the Society of Antiquaries; from Mr. W. B. Campbell and Mr. C. H. Swanton of the English Bar; from Mr. Edgar Jepson, the author of many delightful novels; from Mr. F. Norreys Connell, who is as able a military expert as he is a diverting story-writer; from "Snaffle," most accurate of sporting writers; and from more than one of the Jesuit Fathers at Farm street. But I have not consulted these gentlemen invariables; and, if any mistakes are found to occur, those mistakes are mine, not theirs.
No book of reference that I have consulted has been of such constant daily use to me as the Century Cyclopædia of Names, published in this country by Mr. Unwin; this and my old Bouillet have reduced my necessary visits to the British Museum to not more than two a month during the two years and a half for which I have been engaged on the translation. At the Museum, over and above the splendid French biographical dictionaries and the ever-ready Larousse, I have found the Dictionary of National Biography of some service; but it did not tell me who "Master Bernard" was, the "blind poet," to whom Henry VII. gave "100 shillings" (cf. Vol. V, p. 351). This disappointed me; but the dictionary sets no great store by the national poets: it has no biography of Ernest Dowson. In the matter of the European journeys I have found no gazetteer published so useful as Baedeker's admirable Guides, which are always accurate and have not that bad modern fault of too great conciseness which distinguishes so many of their rivals.
The reviewers of the first four volumes have done more than write universally favourable notices: not only have they appraised at its true worth what is, perhaps, the greatest prose work of, certainly, the greatest prose writer of nineteenth-century France; but they have spoken of the translation in generous terms of praise which I cannot feel that I have deserved. But I thank them for their kindness and I only wish that I could have earned it by devoting as long a time to the translating of these Memoirs as Chateaubriand did to the writing of them. That would have been thirty years: but I should have known scarce a dull moment.
A. T. de M.
Chelsea, June 1902.
[456] September 1833.—T.
[457] Antoine Louis Marie Hennequin (1786-1840) was a distinguished member of the Paris Bar, who had made a great name for himself in political cases and invariably placed his talent at the disposal of the distressed Royalists. In 1830, he defended Peyronnet in his trial before the Chamber of Peers and, in 1832, assisted the Duchesse de Berry after her arrest.—T.