"I have just read in the _France_ the letter which you were good enough to communicate to me and which anticipated the sentiments so nobly expressed in the _Gazette de France_ and the _Quotidienne._ I congratulate myself that my family has contracted with yours an alliance which does me honour and which is dear to me. I would myself have tried to raise my voice once more, if it deserved to be heard; I would have said once again what I think of the liberator of Spain, of the man who recalled to existence the last soldiers of Napoleon. M. le Duc d'Angoulême loved and protected my nephew, whose daughter has married your brother[497]. Christian, my second nephew, also much loved by the august Prince, has gone to God. And so all disappears for me! When I cast back my eyes, I see only a woman who weeps; and what a woman! Marie-Thérèse over-towers all ruins. And yet, this family which, for nine centuries, has commanded the world would to-day scarce find an old servant to raise to it, on the sea-shore, a funeral pile built out of the remnants of a shipwreck! Marie-Thérèse buries her grief in the bosom of God, in order that that sorrow may be everlasting. I have said that that sorrow was one of the greatnesses of France; was I wrong? In the wastes of Bohemia, I used to see, at night, at the window of a tower, a solitary light which proclaimed the new exile of the Duc d'Angoulême. Alas, that light has disappeared! The virtuous Prince has gone to seek his true country in Heaven. There revolutions will no longer strike him. He will stretch out his hand to us to climb to him, and, under the protection of his stainless life, we shall find grace with the Father of Mercies." In the spring of 1845, Chateaubriand wanted to see "his young King" again for the last time. He accordingly went to Venice, at the end of May, and spent a few days with the Comte de Chambord. Seeing him set out in the state of weakness to which his ailments reduced him, his friends in Paris were very anxious about the journey. He bore it better than had been expected. The Prince persuaded him to prolong his stay a little: "I was about to depart," he wrote, from Venice, in June 1845; "the young Prince's embraces and prayers retain me. My days are his; and, when he asks me only for a sacrifice of twenty-four hours, what right have I to refuse him?" If rejoicings in exile are rare, the Royal Family nevertheless knew a few. On the 11th of November 1845 was celebrated, at Frohsdorf, the marriage of H.R.H. Mademoiselle with the Hereditary Prince of Lucca[498], like herself of a royal race, like herself sprung from the House of Bourbon. This was that Princesse Louise, the sister of the Duc de Bordeaux, whom Chateaubriand had seen in Prague in the month of May 1833 and of whom he had at that time drawn the following portrait: