In the mortuary extract of my mother, the earth revolves upon another axis: a new world, a new era; even the computation of the years and the names of the months are changed. Madame de Chateaubriand is nothing more than a poor woman who departs this life at the residence of "Citizeness" Gouyon; a gardener and a day-labourer, who does not know how to sign his name, alone testify to my mother's death: of friends and relations there are none; no funeral state; sole by-stander, the Revolution[199]. * [Sidenote: Death of my father.] I mourned the death of M. de Chateaubriand: it showed him to me better than he was; I remembered neither his harshness nor his failings. I seemed to see him as he walked in the evenings in the hall at Combourg; I was moved by the thought of these family scenes. If my father's affection for me was affected by his natural severity, it was none the less deep at heart. The ferocious Marshal de Montluc[200], who, disfigured by a terrible cut in the nose, was obliged to conceal the horrible nature of his glory beneath a strip of rag, this man of blood reproaches himself for his harshness towards a son whom he has lost: "This poor lad," he said, "has seen nothing of me save a frowning face and full of scorn; he has died in this belief, that I neither knew how to love him nor to esteem him to his deserts. For whom did I keep it to discover the singular affection which I bore him in my soul? Was it not he who should have had all the pleasure of it and all the obligation? I have constrained and tortured myself to keep on this vain mask, and in thus doing have lost the pleasure of his converse, and his will in all things, which he cannot have borne to me other than very coldly, having never received from me aught save rudeness, nor been treated save in tyrannous fashion."