when he heard of the odious execution of the Duc d'Enghien, and immediately sent in his resignation. He could serve a ruler who had brought order out of chaos, but not an assassin. From that day he never ceased to be hostile to the empire. After wandering, as Ampère did later, along the classic shores of Greece and the monuments of Egypt, and kissing the footprints of his Redeemer on the mount of Calvary, he returned to France, and in the Vallée-aux-Loups composed his prose poem, the "Martyrs," in {91} which, as in "Fabiola" and "Callista," the glowing imagery of pagan art is blended with the ethical grandeur of the religion of Christ. A place was awarded him in the French Academy, which he was not permitted to take till the Bourbons were restored. Their return filled him with joy, and a pamphlet he had written against Bonaparte was said by Louis XVIII. to have been worth an army to his cause. On the escape of Napoleon from Elba he accompanied the king to Ghent, and, on re-entering Paris, was raised to the peerage and made minister of state. In 1816, having published his "Monarchy according to the Charter," he lost the royal favor and his honorary title. His work, however, continues to this day "a textbook of French constitutional law." [Footnote 13] [Footnote 13: Robertson's "Lectures," p. 291.] Such was the statesman, apologist, philosopher, and poet who, in his forty-ninth year, obtained an ascendancy over Madame Récamier's imagination so complete that the religious Montmorency trembled, and the thoughtful Ballanche dreamed some ill. They thought, too, that her manners changed toward them, but she soon restored their confidence. It would be vain, indeed, to deny that her regard for Chateaubriand caused her many anxious thoughts and secret tears, particularly when, after a few years, he neglected her for the din of political debate and the society of beings less exalted and pure. But this estrangement was only temporary, and both before it and after it, till he died, her daily task was to soothe the irritability to which poets are said to be especially subject; to amuse him herself, as Madame de Maintenon amused Louis XIV.; and to surround him with those who, for her sake as well as for his, labored for the same charitable end.