"M. Walsh[383] has handed me the letter with which you have been good enough to honour me. I should be ready to obey Your Royal Highness' wishes, if writing could do anything at present; but public opinion has fallen into such a state of apathy that the greatest events would hardly be able to stir it. You have permitted me, Madame, to speak with an amount of frankness which only my devotion could excuse: as Your Royal Highness knows, I have been opposed to almost all that has been done; I ventured even not to be in favour of your journey to Prague. Henry V. is now emerging from childhood; he will soon enter the world with an education that has taught him nothing of the age in which we live. Who will be his guide, who will show him Courts and men? Who will make him known and as it were appear, at a distance, to France? These are important questions which will, probably and unfortunately, be resolved in the same sense as all the others. Be this as it may, the rest of my life belongs to my young King and his august mother. My previsions of the future will never make me unfaithful to my duty. "Madame de Chateaubriand asks leave to lay her respects at Madame's feet. I offer to Heaven all my prayers for the glory and prosperity of the mother of Henry V. and I am, with profound respect, "Madame, "Your Royal Highness' most humble and most obedient servant, "CHATEAUBRIAND. _"P.S._ This letter has been waiting for a month for a safe opportunity of reaching Madame. This very day, I hear of the death of Henry's august grandfather[384]. Will the sad news cause any change in Your Royal Highness' destiny? Dare I beg Madame to permit me to enter into all the sentiments of regret which she must feel, and to offer the respectful tribute of my grief to Monsieur le Dauphin and Madame la Dauphine? "CHATEAUBRIAND. "15 _November._" [Sidenote: Death of Charles X.] Charles X. is no more: Soixante ans de malheurs out paré la victime[385]! Thirty years of exile; death at seventy-nine in a foreign land! So that none might doubt of the errand of misfortune with which Heaven had entrusted that Prince, it was a plague that came to fetch him. Charles X., at his last hour, recovered the calm, the equanimity which sometimes failed him during his long career. When he learnt the danger that threatened, he was content to say: "I did not think that this illness would turn so short." When Louis XVI. set out for the scaffold, the officer on duty refused to receive the will of the condemned man because there was no time, and he, the officer, had to take the King to execution; the King replied: "That is so."