The Memoirs of François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand sometime Ambassador to England. Volume 6 (of 6): Mémoires d'outre-tombe volume 6Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de
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The Memoirs of François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand sometime Ambassador to England. Volume 6 (of 6): Mémoires d'outre-tombe volume 6
Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de, 1768-1848
I passed at ten o'clock in the evening in front of Butschirad, in the
silent fields, brightly lit by the moon. I saw the huddled mass of
villa, hamlet and ruin inhabited by the Dauphin: the rest of the Royal
Family were travelling. Such profound isolation came upon me with a
shock; that man, as I have already told you, possessed virtues: he
was moderate in politics, he entertained few prejudices; he had only
a drop of the blood of St. Louis in his veins, but he had that; his
uprightness was unequalled, his word as inviolable as God's. Gifted
by nature with courage, he was undone at Rambouillet by his filial
piety. He showed himself brave and humane in Spain, and had the glory
of restoring a kingdom to his kinsman, but was not able to save his
own. Louis-Antoine, since the Days of July, thought of asking a shelter
in Andalusia: Ferdinand would doubtless have refused it to him. The
husband of Louis XVI.'s daughter was languishing in a village in
Bohemia; a dog whose voice I heard was the Prince's only guard: thus
Cerberus barks at the shades in the regions of death, silence and
darkness.
I was never able, in the course of my long life, to revisit my paternal
hearth; I was not able to settle down in Rome, where I so greatly
longed to die; the eight hundred leagues which I was now completing,
including my first journey to Bohemia, would have taken me to the most
beautiful sites in Greece, Italy and Spain. I have covered all this
distance and spent my last days to return to this cold, grey land: what
have I done to Heaven to deserve this?
I entered Prague on the 29th, at four o'clock in the evening.
I alighted at the Bath Hotel. I did not see the young Saxon
servant-girl[272]; she had gone back to Dresden to console the banished
pictures of Raphael with the songs of Italy.
[Sidenote: I leave Bohemia.]
29 _September to_ 6 _October_ 1833.
At Schlau, at midnight, a carriage was changing horses in front of the
post-office. Hearing French spoken, I put my head out of the calash and
said:
"Gentlemen, are you going to Prague? You will not find Charles X.
there; he has gone away with Henry V."
I mentioned my name.
"What, gone?" exclaimed several voices together. "Go ahead, postillion,
go ahead!"
My eight fellow-countrymen, after being stopped at Eger, had obtained
permission to continue their journey, but under the care of an officer
of police. It was curious, in 1833, to meet a convoy of servants of
the Throne and the Altar, dispatched by the French Legitimacy and
escorted by a policeman! In 1822, at Verona, I had seen cages full
of _Carbonari_ pass, accompanied by gendarmes. What is it that the
sovereigns want? Whom do they recognise as friends? Do they fear the
too-great crowds of their partisans? Instead of being touched by their
fidelity, they treat men devoted to their crowns as propagandists and
revolutionaries[273].
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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