"You will think me very daring to come to importune you at such a moment to beg you to grant me a favour, the last ambition of my life: I desire ardently to be chosen by you as one of your defenders. I have no personal claim to the high favour which I solicit of your new grandeurs; but I dare to ask it in memory of a Prince of whom you deigned to name me the historian, and I hope for it again as the price of the blood of my family. My brother had the honour to die with his illustrious grandfather, M. de Malesherbes, on the same day, at the same hour, for the same cause and on the same scaffold. "I am, etc. "CHATEAUBRIAND."] [Footnote 482: Jean Marie Pardessus (1772-1853), a meritorious jurist and historian. He was a member of the various legislative assemblies from 1806 to 1830 and occupied different professorial and legal offices, which he relinquished after the Usurpation, devoting the remainder of his life to his historical and critical writings on law.--T.] [Footnote 483: M. Mandaroux-Vertamy was one of Chateaubriand's executors.--T.] [Footnote 484: Brennus, the leader of the Senonian Gauls who overran Italy and captured Rome, about 390 B.C., laid siege to the Capitol for six months, until bought off by the garrison with 1,000 pounds of gold. According to a later legend, when the gold was being weighed, a Roman tribune remonstrated against the use of false weights by the Gauls. Brennus threw his sword into the scale with the famous exclamation, _Væ victis!_--T.] [Footnote 485: This pamphlet was published on the 29th of December 1832.--B.] [Footnote 486: The Duchesse de Berry was betrayed by Simon Deutz, a converted Jew, to Thiers, for a sum variously named as 500,000 and 100,000 francs. She was discovered in hiding, with her confidants, behind the movable slab or plate of a chimney, in which a fire had been lighted by the gendarmes.--T.] [Footnote 487: LUKE, XXII., 3.--T.] [Footnote 488: St. Laurence (_d._ 258) was martyred by being roasted alive in an iron chair or on a gridiron in Rome. The Church honours him on the 10th of August.--T.] [Footnote 489: Lucius Septimus Severus, Roman Emperor (146-211). He became Emperor in 193; his persecution of the Christians was decreed in 201. Severus died in Britain, at York.--T.] [Footnote 490: This is the text of the declaration, which was inserted in the _Moniteur_ of the 26th of February 1833: "Driven by circumstances and by the measures ordered by the Government, although I had the gravest reasons to keep my marriage secret, I think it my duty to myself, as well as to my children, to declare that I was secretly married during my residence in Italy. "MARIE-CAROLINE. "At the CITADEL OF BLAYE, 22 _February_ 1833."--B.]