The rivalries of Madame de Maintenon and Madame de Montespan have been resolved by the marriage of M. le Duc de Noailles and Mademoiselle de Mortemart[487]. At this present time, who troubles his brain about a sovereign's heart? That heart has been chilled these hundred and twenty years; and, in the decrial and vilification of monarchies, are the attachments of a king, even though it were Louis XIV., events? What can one measure by the huge scale of our modern revolutions that does not contract to an imperceptible point? Do the new generations care about the intrigues of Versailles, which is no longer anything but a crypt? What matters to our transformed society the end of the enmities of blood of some women once destined, in bowers or palaces, to lie on beds of flowers or down? And yet, around the general interests of history, would there not be historical curiosities? If some Aulus Gellius, some Macrobius, some Strabo, some Suidas, some Athenasus of the fifth or sixth century, after describing to me the sack of Rome by Alaric, were, by chance, to tell me what became of Berenice after Titus had repudiated her; if he were to show me Antiochus returning to that Cæsarea, the "charming spot where his heart" ...had adored her who loved another; if he were to take me to a castle in the Lebanon inhabited by a descendant of the Queen of Palestine, in spite of the destruction of the Eternal City and the invasion of the Barbarians, it would still please me to come across the memory of Berenice in the "desert East." APPENDIX III (BY M. EDMOND BIRÉ) THE LAST YEARS OF CHATEAUBRIAND On the 16th of November, at daybreak, Chateaubriand wrote the last lines of the _Mémoires d'Outre-tombe_: "It but remains for me," he said, "to sit down by the edge of my grave; and then I shall descend boldly, crucifix in hand, to Eternity." He had lately entered on his seventy-fourth year, and he had still seven years to live. Shortly after the Revolution in July, in April 1831, he had said, in the Preface to his _Études historiques_: "I began my literary career with a work in which I contemplate Christianity under its poetic and moral aspects; I end it with a work in which I consider the same religion under its philosophical and historical aspects. I began my political career with the Restoration; I end it with the Restoration. It is not without a secret satisfaction that I behold this consistency with myself. The main lines of my existence have never wavered: if, like all men, I have not always been alike in the details, let human frailty be forgiven for it." His last years will show him to us consistent with himself to the end. In the first days of October 1843, he received a letter from the Comte de Chambord, dated Magdeburg, 30 September, and concluding with these words: