"Your Holiness' most humble and most obedient servant, "CHATEAUBRIAND." For several days I finished rending my bowels in my Utica; I wrote letters to demolish the edifice which I had raised with so much love. As, in the death of a man, it is the little details, the familiar domestic actions that touch us, so, in the death of a dream, the little realities which destroy it are the keenest. An eternal exile on the ruins of Rome had been my idle fancy. Like Dante, I had arranged never to return to my country. These testamentary elucidations will not possess for the readers of these Memoirs the same interest that they have for me. The old bird falls from the branch where it has taken shelter; it quits life for death. Dragged away by the current, it has but changed one stream for the other. [Footnote 1: This book was written in Rome, from February to May 1829, and in Paris, from August to September 1829.--T.] [Footnote 2: The following is the exact text of this letter, which Chateaubriand modified somewhat for publication: "I have attended the first funeral ceremony for the Pope in the Church of St. Peter. It was a strange medley of indecency and grandeur. The strokes of the hammer nailing down a pope's coffin, some interrupted singing, the mingling of the light of the candles and the moon; lastly, the coffin raised by a pulley and hung in the shadows, to be laid across a door in the sarcophagus of Pius VII., whose ashes made room for those of Leo XII.: can you picture all this, and the ideas to which the scene gave birth?"--B.] [Footnote 3: Leo XII.--_Author's Note._] [Footnote 4: Bartolommeo Alberto Mauro Cardinal Capellari, later Pope Gregory XVI. (1765-1846), Abbot of the Camaldolian Monastery at Murano, created a cardinal in 1825. He was elected Pope after the death of Pius VIII. in 1831, when he took the name of Gregory XVI. He is the founder of the Papal Order of St. Gregory the Great.--T.] [Footnote 5: Bartolommeo Cardinal Pacca, Bishop of Velletri (1756-1844), Cardinal Camerlingo to Pope Pius VII., created a cardinal in 1801. Pacca became Prime Minister in 1808, drew up the bull of excommunication hurled against Napoleon in 1809, and was arrested and imprisoned with Pius VII. He returned to Rome with the Pope in 1814 and, in 1816, was instrumental in bringing about the restoration of the Jesuits.--T.] [Footnote 6: Emmanuele Cardinal Di Gregorio (1758-1839), created a cardinal by Pius VII. in 1816.--B.] [Footnote 7: Giaccomo Cardinal Giustiniani, Bishop of Imola (1769-1843), created a cardinal by Leo XII. in 1826.--B.]