Book Viii[61]

The year 1821--The Berlin, Embassy--I arrive in Berlin--M. Ancillon--The Royal Family--Celebrations for the marriage of the Grand-duke Nicholas--Berlin society--Count von Humboldt--Herr von Chamisso--Ministers and ambassadors--The Princess William--The Opera--A musical meeting--My first dispatches--M. de Bonnay--The Park--The Duchess of Cumberland--Commencement of a Memorandum on Germany--Charlottenburg--Interval between the Berlin Embassy and the London Embassy--Baptism of M. le Duc de Bordeaux--Letter to M. Pasquier--Letter from M. de Bernstoff--Letter from M. Ancillon--Last letter from the Duchess of Cumberland--M. de Villèle, Minister of Finance--I am appointed Ambassador to London.

I left France, leaving my friends in possession of an authority which I had purchased for them at the cost of my absence: I was a little Lycurgus. What was good in it was that the first trial which I had made of my political strength restored me my liberty; I was going to enjoy abroad that liberty within the power. At the bottom of this liberty, personally new to me, I saw I know not what confused romances in the midst of realities: was there nothing in Courts? Were not they solitudes of another kind? Perhaps they were Elysian fields with their shades.

I left Paris on the 1st of January 1821: the Seine was frozen, and for the first time I was racing along the roads with the comforts of money. I was gradually recovering from my contempt for riches; I was beginning to feel that it was not unpleasant to roll in a good carriage, to be well served, not to have to trouble about anything, and to be preceded by an enormous Warsaw courier, who was always famished and who, in default of the Tsars, would have devoured Poland unaided. But I soon got used to my good fortune; I had the presentiment that it would not last long and that I should soon be made to go on foot again, as was right and proper. Before I reached my destination, all that remained to me of the journey was my primitive taste for travel itself, the taste for independence, the satisfaction of having broken the bonds of society.

You shall see, when I am returning from Prague in 1833, what I say of my old memories of the Rhine: I was obliged, because of the ice, to ascend its banks and to cross it above Mayence. I troubled myself little with "Moguntia," its archbishop, its three or four sieges, and the invention of printing, through which however I reigned. Frankfort, the city of the Jews, delayed me only for one of their transactions: to change some money.

The road was sad: the highway was snowy and hoar-frost covered the branches of the pine-trees. I caught sight of Jena in the distance, with the worms of its double battle. I passed through Erfurt and Weimar: at Erfurt, the Emperor was wanting; at Weimar dwelt Goethe, whom I had admired so much, and whom I admire much less. The singer of matter lived, and his old dust still adhered around his genius. I might have seen Goethe and did not see him; he leaves a gap in the procession of the celebrated persons who have defiled before my eyes.

Luther's tomb at Wittenberg did not tempt me: Protestantism in religion is only an illogical heresy, in politics only an abortive revolution. After eating, while crossing the Elbe, a little black loaf kneaded in tobacco-smoke, I should have wanted to drink out of Luther's big glass, which is preserved as a relic. From there, passing through Potsdam and crossing the Spree, a river of ink along which crawl barges guarded by a white dog, I arrived in Berlin. There lived, as I have said, "the mock Julian in his mock Athens." I sought in vain the sun of Mount Hymettus. I wrote in Berlin the fourth book of these Memoirs. You have found in it the description of that city, my trip to Potsdam, my memories of the Great Frederic, of his horse, of his greyhounds and of Voltaire.

Alighting on the 11th of January at an inn, I next went to live Unter den Linden, in the house which M. le Marquis de Bonnay had left, and which belonged to Madame la Duchesse de Dino: I was there received by Messieurs de Caux, de Flavigny and de Gussy, the secretaries of legation.

On the 17th of January, I had the honour of presenting to the King M. le Marquis de Bonnay's letter of recall and my own credentials. The King, lodged in an ordinary house, had two sentries at his door for all distinction: entered who would; one spoke to him "if he was at home." This simplicity of the German sovereigns tends to make the name and prerogatives of the great less felt by the small. Frederic William went every day, at the same hour, in an open cariole which he drove himself, in a cap and a grey cloak, to smoke his cigar in the Park. I used often to meet him and we continued our drive, each in his own direction. When he entered Berlin again, the sentry at the Brandenburg Gate shouted at the top of his voice; the guard took up arms and turned out; the King passed and all was over.

On the same day I paid my court to the Prince Royal and the Princes his brothers, very lively young officers. I saw the Grand-duke Nicholas and the Grand-duchess, newly married, who were being feasted. I also saw the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland, Prince William, the King's brother, Prince Augustus of Prussia, for a long time our prisoner: he had wished to marry Madame Récamier; he owned the admirable portrait which Gérard painted of her and which she had exchanged with the Prince for the picture of Corinna.

I hastened to find M. Ancillon. We were mutually acquainted through our works. I had met him in Paris with the Prince Royal, his pupil; he was in charge of the Foreign Office in Berlin, ad interim, during the absence of Count von Bernstorff. His was a very touching life: his wife had lost her sight; all the doors in his house were left open; the poor blind woman wandered from room to room, among flowers, and sat down at hap-hazard, like a caged nightingale: she sang well, and died early.

M. Ancillon, like many illustrious Prussians, was of French origin: as a Protestant minister, he had at first held very Liberal opinions; little by little he cooled. When I met him again in Rome, in 1828, he had gone back to moderate monarchy, and he retrograded to absolute monarchy. With an enlightened love of generous sentiments, he combined a hatred and fear of the revolutionaries; it was this hatred that drove him towards despotism, in order to ask for shelter there. Will they who still extol 1793 and admire its crimes never understand to how great an extent the horror with which one is seized for those crimes acts as an obstacle to the establishment of liberty?

There was a fête at Court, and with that commenced for me honours of which I was very unworthy. Jean Bart, to go to Versailles, put on a coat of cloth-of-gold lined with cloth-of-silver, which made him very uncomfortable. The Grand-duchess, now Empress of Russia, and the Duchess of Cumberland chose my arm in a polonaise: my worldly romances were beginning. The air of the march was a kind of medley, composed of various pieces, among which, to my great satisfaction, I recognised the song of King Dagobert: that encouraged me and came to the rescue of my timidity. These fêtes were repeated; one of them in particular took place in the King's Great Palace. Not caring to undertake the description on my own account, I give it as chronicled in the Berlin Morgenblatt by the Baroness von Hohenhausen:

BERLIN, 22 March 1821 (Morgenblatt No. 70).

"One of the notable persons present at this entertainment was the Vicomte de Chateaubriand, the French Minister, and however great the splendour of the spectacle that unfolded before their eyes, the fair Berlinese still kept a glance for the author of Atala, that superb and melancholy novel, in which the most ardent love succumbs in the fight against religion. The death of Atala and Chactas' hour of happiness, during a storm in the ancient forests of America, depicted in Miltonian colours, will remain ever engraved in the memory of all the readers of the novel. M. de Chateaubriand wrote Atala in his youth, painfully tried by his exile from his country: hence the profound melancholy and the burning passion which breathe throughout the work. At present this consummate statesman has devoted his pen solely to politics. His last work, the Vie et la mort du duc de Berry, is written quite in the tone employed by the panegyrists of Louis XIV.

"M. de Chateaubriand is of a somewhat short, yet slender, stature. His oval countenance has an expression of reverence and melancholy. He has black hair and eyes: the latter glow with the fire of his mind, which is pronounced in his features."

But I have white hair: so forgive the Baroness von Hohenhausen for having sketched me in my good days, although already she grants me years. The portrait, besides, is very handsome; but I owe it to my sincerity to say that it is not like.

The house Unter den Linden was much too large for me, cold and dilapidated: I occupied only a small part of it. Among my colleagues, the ministers and ambassadors, the only one worthy of note was M. d'Alopeus. I have since met his wife and daughter in Rome with the Grand-duchess Helen: if the latter had been in Berlin instead of the Grand-duchess Nicholas, her sister-in-law, I should have been better pleased.

M. d'Alopeus, my colleague, had a gentle mania for believing himself to be adored. He was persecuted by the passions which he inspired:

"Upon my word," he used to say, "I don't know what there is about me; wherever I go the women follow me. Madame d'Alopeus became obstinately attached to me."

He would have been an excellent Saint-Simonian. Private society has its own aspect, like public society: in the former, it is always attachments formed and broken off, family affairs, deaths, births, private sorrows and pleasures; the whole varied in appearance according to the centuries. In the other, it is always change of ministers, battles lost or won, negociations with Courts, kings who disappear, or kingdoms that fall.

Under Frederic II. Elector of Brandenburg, surnamed "Iron-tooth"; under Joachim II., poisoned by the Jew Lippold; under John Sigismund, who added the Duchy of Prussia to his Electorate; under George William, "the Irresolute," who, losing his fortresses, allowed Gustavus Adolphus to chat with the ladies of the Court and said, "What is to be done? They have guns;" under the Great Elector, who found nothing in his States but "heaps of ashes, which prevented the grass from growing," who gave audience to the Ambassador of Tartary, "whose interpreter had a wooden nose and slit ears;" under his son, the first King of Prussia, who, startled out of his sleep by his wife, took the fever with fright and died of it: under all these reigns, the different Memoirs display only a repetition of the same adventures in private life.

Frederic William I., father of the great Frederic, a stern and eccentric man, was brought up by Madame de Rocoules, the refugee: he loved a young woman who was unable to soften him; his drawing-room was a smoking-room. He nominated the buffoon Gundling President of the Royal Academy of Berlin; he shut up his son in the Citadel of Custrin, and Quatt had his head chopped off before the young Prince's eyes: that was the private life of that time. Frederic the Great, having ascended the throne, had an intrigue with an Italian dancer, the Barbarini, the only woman he ever approached: he contented himself on his wedding-night with playing the flute under the window of the Princess Elizabeth of Brunswick when he married her. Frederic had a taste for music and a mania for verses. The intrigues and epigrams of the two poets, Frederic and Voltaire, disturbed Madame de Pompadour, the Abbé de Bernis and Louis XV. The Margravine of Bayreuth was mixed up in all this with love, such as a poet might feel. Literary parties at the King's; next, dogs on unclean arm-chairs; next, concerts before statues of Antinous; next, great dinner-parties; next, a quantity of philosophy; next, the liberty of the press and blows with the stick; next, a lobster or an eel-pie, which put an end to the days of an old great man who wanted to live: these are the things with which private society occupied itself in that time of letters and battles. And, notwithstanding, Frederic renovated Germany, established a counterpoise to Austria, and altered all Germany's relations and all her political interests.

In the later reigns, we find the Marble Palace, Frau Rietz, with her son, Alexander Count von der Marck, the Baroness von Stoltzenberg, mistress to the Margrave Schwed, and formerly an actress; Prince Henry and his suspicious friends, Fräulein Voss, Frau Rietz's rival; an intrigue at a masked ball between a young Frenchman and the wife of a Prussian general; lastly Madame de F------, whose adventure we can read in the Histoire secrète de la cour de Berlin: who knows all those names? Who will remember ours? To-day, in the Prussian capital, octogenarians scarcely preserve the memory of that past generation.

The habits of Berlin society suited me: people "went to evening-parties" between five and six; all was over by nine, and I used to go to bed just as though I had not been an ambassador. Sleep devours existence, which is a good thing:

"The hours are short and life is long," says Fénelon.

Herr Wilhelm von Humboldt, brother of my illustrious friend the Baron Alexander, was in Berlin: I had known him as minister in Rome; suspected by the Government because of his opinions, he led a retired life; to kill time, he learnt all the languages and even all the dialects of the world. He reproduced the peoples, the ancient inhabitants of a soil, by means of the geographical denominations of the country. One of his daughters talked ancient and modern Greek with equal ease; if one had happened on a good day, one might have chatted at table in Sanskrit.

Adelbert von Chamisso lived in the Botanical Gardens, some way from Berlin. I visited him in that solitude, where the plants froze in the hot-houses. He was tall, with rather agreeable features. I felt an attraction towards that exile, a traveller like myself: he had seen the Polar seas to which I had hoped to penetrate. An Emigrant like myself, he had been brought up in Berlin as a royal page. Adelberg, travelling through Switzerland, stopped for a moment at Coppet. He took part in an excursion on the lake, where he was in danger of being drowned. He wrote that same day:

"I clearly see that I must seek my safety on the high seas."

Herr von Chamisso had been appointed professor at Napoléonville by M. de Fontanes; later Greek professor at Strasburg; he rejected the offer in these noble words:

"The first condition for working at the instruction of youth is independence; though I admire Bonaparte's genius, it is not to my taste."

In the same way he refused the advantages offered to him by the Restoration:

"I have done nothing for the Bourbons," he said, "and I cannot accept the price of the services and the blood of my fathers. In this age, every man must provide for his own existence."

In Herr von Chamisso's family this note is preserved, written in the Temple, in the hand of Louis XVI.:

"I recommend M. de Chamisso, one of my faithful servants, to my brothers."

The Martyr King had hidden the little note in his bosom to have it handed to his first page, Chamisso, Adelbert's uncle.

Herr von Chamisso embarked on the ship equipped by Count Romanzoff, and, in company with Captain Kotzebue, discovered the strait to the east of Behring's Straits and gave his name to one of the islands from which Cook had caught sight of the American coast. In Kamchatka he picked up a portrait of Madame Récamier on porcelain and a copy of his little tale, Peter Schlemihl, translated into Dutch. Adelbert's hero, Peter Schlemihl, sold his shadow to the devil: I would rather have sold him my body.

I remember Chamisso as I do the imperceptible breeze that lightly swayed the stalks of the heather through which I passed when returning to Berlin.

Following a rule of Frederic II., the Princes and Princesses of the Blood in Berlin do not see the diplomatic body; but, thanks to the carnival, to the marriage of the Duke of Cumberland with the Princess Frederica of Prussia, sister to the late Queen, thanks also to a certain relaxation of etiquette which they permitted themselves, it was said, because of my person, I had occasion to be oftener with the Royal Family than my colleagues. As from time to time I visited the Great Palace, I there met the Princess William: she liked taking me over the apartments. I never saw a sadder expression than hers: in the uninhabited rooms at the back of the palace, on the Spree, she showed me a chamber haunted on certain days by a white lady, and, pressing herself against me with a certain terror, she looked like that white lady herself. On the other hand, the Duchess of Cumberland told me that she and her sister the Queen of Prussia, when both still very young, had heard their mother, who had recently died, talk to them from under her closed curtains.

The King, into whose presence I came as I finished my sight-seeing, took me to his oratories: he called my attention to the crucifixes and pictures, and ascribed the honour of those innovations to me, because, said he, having read in the Génie du christianisme that the Protestants had stripped their cult too bare, he had thought my remark just: he had not yet reached the excess of his Lutheran fanaticism.

In the evening, at the Opera, I had a box next to the Royal Box, situated facing the stage. I talked with the Princesses; the King went out between the acts; I met him in the corridor: he would look round to see that no one was near us and that we could not be overheard; then he would confess to me, in a whisper, his detestation of Rossini and his love of Gluck. He branched out into lamentations on the decadence of art, and, above all, on those gargling notes destructive of dramatic singing: he confided to me that he dared say this only to me, because of the people who surrounded him. If he saw any one coming, he hurried back into his box.

I saw a performance of Schiller's Joan of Arc; the Cathedral of Rheims was perfectly copied. The King, who was seriously religious, with difficulty endured the representation of Catholic worship on the stage. Signor Spontini, composer of the Vestal, was manager of the Opera. Madame Spontini, daughter of M. Érard, was pleasant, but she seemed to atone for the volubility of the language of women by her own slowness in speaking: any word divided into syllables died away on her lips; if she had tried to say to you, "I love you," a Frenchman's love would have had time to fly between the commencement and the end of those three words. She was unable to finish my name, and she did not come to the end without a certain grace.

A public musical assembly took place two or three times in the week. In the evening, on returning from their work, little work-women, their baskets on their arms, journeymen artisans, carrying the tools of their trades, crowded promiscuously into a hall; on entering, they were given a written sheet of music and they joined in the general chorus with astonishing precision. It was something surprising to hear those two or three hundred blended voices. When the piece was finished, each resumed his homeward road. We are very far from this feeling for harmony, a powerful means of civilization; it has introduced into the cottage of the German peasants an education which our rustics lack: wherever there is a piano, there is no more grossness.

About the 13th of January, I opened the series of my dispatches with the Minister of Foreign Affairs. My mind easily accommodates itself to this kind of work: why not? Did not Dante, Ariosto and Milton succeed as well in politics as in poetry? No doubt I am not Dante, nor Ariosto, nor Milton; nevertheless, Europe and France have seen by the Congrès de Vérone what I could do.

My predecessor in Berlin treated me, in 1816, as he treated M. de Lameth in his little verses at the commencement of the Revolution. When one is so amiable, he should not leave minute-books behind him, nor have the orderliness of a clerk when he has not the capacity of a diplomatist. It happens, in the times in which we live, that a gust of wind sends into your place the man against whom you rose up; and, as the ambassador's duty is first to make himself acquainted with the archives of the embassy, behold him coming upon the notes in which he is dealt with in masterly fashion. What would you have? Those profound minds, which worked for the success of the good cause, could not think of everything.

EXTRACTS FROM THE MINUTE-BOOK OF M. DE BONNAY

No. 64. "22 November 1816.

"All Europe has taken cognizance and approved of the words which the King addressed to the newly-formed bureau of the Chamber of Peers. I have been asked if it was possible that men devoted to the King, that persons attached to his person and holding places in his Household or in those of our Princes had indeed been able to give their votes to put M. de Chateaubriand into the secretaryship. My reply was that, as the balloting was secret, no one could know how individual votes went.

"'Ah,' exclaimed a leading man, 'if the King could be assured of it, I hope that the access to the Tuileries would be forthwith closed to those faithless servants.'

"I thought it my duty to make no answer, and I made no answer."

"15 October 1815.

. . . . . . . . . .

"It will be the same, monsieur le duc, with the measures of the 5th and of the 20th of September: both meet with nothing but approval in Europe. But what is astonishing is to see that very pure and very worthy Royalists continue to be smitten with M. de Chateaubriand, notwithstanding the publication of a book which lays down the principle that the King of France, by virtue of the Charter, is no longer more than a moral entity, essentially null, and without a will of his own. If any other than he had put forward a similar maxim, the same men, not without apparent reason, would have qualified him as a Jacobin."

There you have me finely put in my place. For the rest, it is a good lesson; that brings down our pride, by teaching us what will become of us when we are gone.

From the dispatches of M. de Bonnay and those of some other ambassadors belonging to the Old Order, it appears to me that the dispatches treated less of diplomatic affairs than of anecdotes relating to persons in society and at Court; they reduced themselves to a journal, encomiastic like Dangeau's, or satirical like Tallemant's. And Louis XVIII. and Charles X. much preferred the amusing letters of my colleagues to my serious correspondence. I could have laughed and jested like my predecessors, but the time was past in which scandalous adventures and petty intrigues were connected with public business. What good would have resulted for my country from a portrait of M. de Hardenberg, a handsome old man, white as a swan, deaf as a post, going to Rome without permission, amusing himself with too many things, believing in all sorts of dreams, given over in the last resort to magnetism in the hands of Dr. Koreff, whom I used to meet on horseback, trotting in sequestered neighbourhoods between the devil, medicine and the Muses?

This contempt for a frivolous correspondence makes me say to M. Pasquier in my letter of the 13th of February 1821, No. 13:

"I have not spoken to you, monsieur le baron, according to custom, of the receptions, the balls, the spectacles, etc.; I have not drawn little portraits nor composed useless satires for you; I have tried to lift diplomacy out of mere gossip. The reign of the commonplace will return when the time of the extraordinary has passed: meanwhile, one should describe only that which is destined to live and attack only that which threatens."

Berlin has left me a lasting memory, because the nature of the recreations which I found there carried me back to the days of my childhood and my youth; only, very real princesses filled the part of my Sylphide. Old rooks, my eternal friends, used to come to perch on the lime-trees before my window; I threw food to them: when they had caught too large a piece of bread, they threw it up again with inconceivable dexterity to catch a smaller one, in such a way that they were able to take another a little larger, and so on up to the chief piece, which, held at the point of their beak, kept it open, without permitting any of the increasing layers of bread to fall. His meal over, the bird would sing after his fashion: cantus cornicum ut secla vetusta. I wandered in the desert spaces of frozen Berlin, but I did not hear beautiful voices of young girls issue from its walls, as from the old walls of Rome. Instead of white-bearded Capuchins dragging their sandals among flowers, I met soldiers making snow-balls.

One day, on turning the corner of the wall of circumvallation, Hyacinthe and I found ourselves face to face with so cutting an east wind that we were obliged to run across country to regain town, half-dead. We passed through enclosed grounds, and all the watch-dogs flew at our legs, pursuing us. That day, the thermometer went down to 22 degrees below freezing-point. One or two sentries at Potsdam were frozen to death.

On the further side of the park was an old abandoned pheasantry: the Prussian princes do not go shooting. I crossed a little wooden bridge over a canal leading out of the Spree and found myself among the pine-wood columns which form the portico of the pheasantry. A fox, which reminded one of those in the mall at Combourg, came out of a hole contrived in the wall of the preserve, passed the time of day, and retreated into his coppice.

What is known as the Park, in Berlin, is a wood of oaks, birches, beeches, limes and alders. It lies outside the Charlottenburg Gate, and is crossed by the high-road leading to that royal residence. To the right of the Park is an exercise-ground; to the left are booths.

Inside the Park, which was not at that time intersected with regular walks, one saw meadows, uncultivated spots, and beech-wood benches, on which Young Germany not long ago had carved hearts pierced by daggers: under these stabbed hearts one read the name of "Sand." Flights of crows, taking up their dwelling in the trees at the approach of spring, were beginning to chatter. Living nature was reviving before vegetable nature, and quite black frogs were being gobbled up by ducks in the ponds which here and there had thawed: those were the nightingales which "opened the spring-time in the woods" of Berlin. However, the Park was not without pretty animals: squirrels scrambled along the branches or darted along the ground, sporting their tails as a flag. When I came near the merry-making, the actors climbed the trunks of the oaks, stopped in a fork, and snarled at me as I passed below. Few strollers frequented the forest, the uneven soil of which was lined and cut by canals. Sometimes I would meet a gouty old officer who, quite warm and lively, would say to me, speaking of the pale ray of the sun under which I was shivering with cold:

"That's scorching!"

From time to time, I came across the Duke of Cumberland, on horseback and almost blind, pulling up in front of an alder-tree, against which he had ridden and knocked his nose. Some six-horsed carriages would pass: in them were the Austrian Ambassadress or the Princess von Radziwill and her daughter, fifteen years of age, charming as one of those clouds with maidens' faces that surround Ossian's moon. The Duchess of Cumberland nearly always took the same walk as myself: at one time, she was returning from a cottage where she had been relieving a poor woman of Spandau; at another, she stopped and graciously told me that she had wanted to meet me: an amiable daughter of the thrones alighting from her car, like the Goddess of Night, to roam in the forest! I also saw her in her own house: she would repeat that she wished to entrust me with her son, that little "George," since grown into the Prince whom his cousin Victoria would, they say, have liked to place by her side on the throne of England.

The Princess Frederica has since dragged out her days on the banks of the Thames, in those gardens at Kew which formerly saw me wander between my two acolytes, illusion and poverty. After my departure from Berlin, she honoured me with a correspondence; in it she describes, from hour to hour, the life of an inhabitant of those heaths where Voltaire passed, where Frederic died, where that Mirabeau hid himself who was to commence the Revolution of which I was the victim. One's attention is captivated on seeing the links by which so many men are connected who have never seen each other.

Here are some extracts from the correspondence opened with me by H.R.H. the Duchess of Cumberland:

"19 April, Thursday.

"This morning, on waking, I was handed the last evidence of your remembrance; later, I passed before your house. I saw the windows open as usual, everything was in the same place, except yourself! I cannot tell you what this made me feel! I now no longer know where to find you; each moment carries you farther away; the only fixed point is the 26th, the day on which you count on arriving, and the memory which I retain of you.

"God grant that you may find everything changed for the better, both for yourself and for the general good! Accustomed as I am to sacrifices, I shall know also how to bear that of not seeing you again, if it is for your happiness and that of France."

"22.

"Since Thursday, I have passed in front of your house every day on my way to church; I prayed hard for you there. Your windows are constantly open, that touches me: who pays you that attention to follow your tastes and instructions, in spite of your absence? It occurs to me sometimes that you have not gone away; that business detains you, or that you want to keep off intruders, so as to finish it at your ease. Do not believe that that would mean a reproach: it is the only way; but, if that be so, pray tell me, in confidence."

"23.

"It is so prodigiously warm to-day, even in church, that I cannot take my walk at the usual time: that is all the same to me now. The dear little wood has no charm left for me, everybody bores me there! This sudden change from cold to heat is common in the North; the inhabitants, with their moderation of character and sentiments, do not resemble the climate."

"24.

"Nature has grown much more beautiful; all the leaves have come out since your departure: I should have liked them to come two days earlier, so that you might have carried away in your memory a more smiling picture of your stay here."

"Berlin, 12 May 1821.

"Thank God, here is a letter from you at last! I knew quite well that you could not write to me earlier; but in spite of the calculations which my reason made for me, three weeks, or rather twenty-three days, are very long for friendship in privation, and to remain without news is like the saddest exile: still, memory and hope remained to me."

"15 May.

"It is not from my stirrup, like the Grand Turk, but still from my bed that I write to you; but this retreat has given me all the time to reflect on the new dietary which you propose to make Henry V. observe. I like it much; the roast lion can only do him great good; only I advise you to make him begin with the heart. You will have to make your other pupil eat lamb, lest he should play the deuce too much. It is absolutely necessary that this plan of education should be realized and that George and Henry V. should become good friends and good allies."

H.R.H. the Duchess of Cumberland continued to write to me from the waters at Ems, next from the waters at Schwalbach, and afterwards from Berlin, where she returned on the 22nd of September in the year 1821. She wrote to me from Ems:

"The Coronation in England will happen without me; I am grieved that the King should have fixed on the saddest day of my life to have himself crowned: the day on which I lost that adored sister. The death of Bonaparte has also made me think of the sufferings which he made him endure."

"BERLIN, 22 September.

"I have already revisited those long, solitary walks. How much obliged I shall be to you if you send me, as you promised, the verses which you have written for Charlottenburg! I also again took the road leading to the house in the wood where you were kind enough to help me in relieving the poor woman of Spandau; how good you are to remember that name! Everything reminds me of happy times. It is not new to regret happiness.

"As I was about to send off this letter, I hear that the King has been detained at sea by the storms and probably driven on to the Irish coast; he had not arrived in London on the 14th; but you will know of his return before we do.

"The poor Princess William to-day received the sad news of the death of her mother, the Dowager Landgravine of Hesse-Homburg. You see how I am telling you of all that concerns our family; Heaven grant that you may have better news to give me!" were having

Does it not seem as if the sister of the beautiful Queen of Prussia is speaking to me of "our family" even as though she the kindness to talk to me of my grandmother, my aunt and my humble relations at Plancouët? Did the Royal Family of France ever honour me with a smile similar to that of this foreign Royal Family, which nevertheless hardly knew me and which owed me nothing? I suppress a number of other affectionate letters: there is about them something suffering and restrained, resigned and noble, intimate and exalted; they serve as a counterpoise to what I have said that was perhaps too severe of the Sovereign Houses. A thousand years earlier, and the Princess Frederica, being a daughter of Charlemagne, would have carried off Eginhard at night on her shoulders, lest he should leave traces in the snow.

I have just re-read this book in 1840: I cannot help being struck with this continual romance of my life. What a series of missed destinies! Had I returned to England with little George, the possible heir to that crown, I should have seen the new dream fade away which could have made me change my country, in the same way as, if I had not been married, I should have remained, on the first occasion, in the land of Shakespeare and Milton. The young Duke of Cumberland, who has lost his sight, did not marry his cousin the Queen of England. The Duchess of Cumberland has become Queen of Hanover: where is she? Is she happy? Where am I? Thank God, in a few days I shall no longer have to turn my eyes over my past life, nor to put these questions to myself. But it is impossible for me not to pray Heaven to shed its favours over the last years of the Princess Frederica.

I had been sent to Berlin with the olive-branch, and because my presence brought trouble into the administration; but, knowing the inconstancy of fortune, and feeling that my political part was not played out, I watched events: I did not wish to abandon my friends. I soon perceived that the reconciliation between the Royalist Party and the Ministerial Party was not sincere; distrust and prejudice remained; they did not do what they had promised me: they were beginning to attack me. The entrance into the Council of Messieurs de Villèle and de Corbière had excited the jealousy of the Extreme Right; it no longer marched under the banner of the first, and he, whose ambition was impatient, was beginning to grow weary. We exchanged some letters. M. de Villèle regretted having entered the Council: he was wrong; the proof that I had seen right was that, before a year passed, he had become Minister of Finance and M. de Corbière obtained the Interior.

I also had an explanation with M. le Baron Pasquier; I wrote to him, on the 10th of February 1821:

"I hear from Paris, monsieur le baron, by the post which arrived this morning, 9 February, that it was found amiss that I should have written from Mayence to the Prince von Hardenberg, or even that I should have sent him a messenger. I have not written to M. de Hardenberg, and still less have I sent him a messenger. I desire, monsieur le baron, to be spared chicanery. When my services are no longer agreeable, let me be told so roundly: I could not be done a greater pleasure. I neither asked nor wished for the mission with which I have been charged; it was neither by taste nor choice that I accepted an honourable exile, but for the sake of peace. If the Royalists have rallied to the Ministry, the Ministry is aware that I had the good fortune to contribute to that union. I should have some right to complain. What has been done for the Royalists since my departure? I do** not cease to write on their behalf: am I listened to? Monsieur le baron, I have, thank God, other things to do in life than to attend balls. My country claims me, my wife is ill and needs my care, my friends want their guide again. I am either above or below an embassy, or even a ministry of State. You cannot lack men abler than myself to conduct diplomatic business; so it would be unnecessary to seek pretexts to chicane with me. I shall understand with half a word; and you will find me willing to return to my obscurity."

All this was sincere: that facility for cutting everything and regretting nothing would have given me great strength, if I had had any ambition.

My diplomatic correspondence with M. Pasquier went on; continuing to occupy myself with the affair of Naples, I said:

No. 15. "20 February 1821.

"Austria is doing a service to the monarchies by destroying the Jacobin edifice in the Two Sicilies; but she would ruin those same monarchies if the result of a salutary and necessary expedition were to be the conquest of a province or the oppression of a people. Naples must be freed from demagogic independence, and monarchical liberty established there; irons must be broken, not chains brought there. But Austria does not desire a constitution in Naples: what will she place there? Men? Where are they? It wants only one Liberal priest and two hundred soldiers for the troubles to begin all over again.

"It is after the voluntary or forced occupation that you must intervene to establish in Naples a constitutional government, under which all social liberties will be respected."

I always preserved a preponderance of opinion in France which obliged me to look at home affairs. I ventured to submit the following plan to my minister:

"Frankly adopt constitutional government.

"Bring in a bill for septennial elections, without aiming at retaining a portion of the present Chamber, which would be suspicious, or keeping the whole, which would be dangerous.

"Give up the laws of exception, a source of arbitrariness, an eternal subject of quarrels and calumnies.

"Free the communes from ministerial despotism."

In my despatch of the 3rd of March, No. 18, I reverted to Spain; I said:

"It may be possible that Spain will soon change her monarchy into a republic: her Constitution must bear its fruit. The King will either fly or be killed or dethroned; he is not strong enough to master the revolution. It is possible again that this same Spain might exist for some time in a popular state, if she were to form herself into federal republics, an aggregation for which she is better suited than any other country by the variety of her kingdoms, her manners, her laws and even her language."

The Naples affair returns three or four times more. On the 6th of March, No. 19, I observe:

"That the Legitimacy has not been able to take deep root in a State which has so often changed masters and whose habits have been upset by so many revolutions. Affections have not had time to be born, manners to receive the uniform imprint of centuries and institutions. In the Neapolitan nation are many corrupt or wild men who have no mutual connection, and who are attached to the Crown only by feeble bonds: royalty is too near the lazzarone and too far removed from the Calabrian to be respected. The French had too many military virtues to establish democratic liberty; the Neapolitans will not have sufficient"

Lastly, I said a few words about Portugal and again about Spain.

The rumour was being spread that John VI. had embarked at Rio de Janeiro for Lisbon. It was a frolic of fortune worthy of our time that a king of Portugal should fly to an European revolution to seek shelter against an American revolution, and pass at the foot of the rock on which was confined the conqueror who had formerly compelled him to take refuge in the New World.

"All is to be feared from Spain," I said, on the 17th of March, No. 21; "the revolution in the Peninsula will go through its periods, unless an arm arises capable of stopping it; but where is that arm? That is always the question."

That arm I had the good fortune to find in 1823: it was the arm of France.

I am pleased, in this passage from my dispatch of the 10th of April, No. 26, to find again my jealous antipathy to the Allies and my preoccupation for the dignity of France; I said, writing of Piedmont:

"I do not at all dread the prolongation of the troubles in Piedmont in its immediate results; but it may produce a distant evil by justifying the military intervention of Austria and Russia. The Russian Army is still moving, and has received no counter-order.

"See if, in that case, it would not be for the dignity and security of France to occupy Savoy with twenty-five thousand men during the whole time that Russia and Austria would occupy Piedmont. I am persuaded that that act of vigour and of high policy, while flattering French amour-propre, would, for that reason alone, be very popular and do infinite honour to the ministers. Ten thousand men of the Royal Guard and a selection from the rest of our troops would easily make you up an army of twenty-five thousand excellent and trusty soldiers: the white cockade will be secured as soon as it has faced the enemy.

"I know, monsieur le baron, that we must avoid wounding French amour-propre and that the domination of the Russians and Austrians in Italy may revolt our military pride; but we have an easy means of contenting it, that is, to occupy Savoy ourselves. The Royalists will be charmed and the Liberals can only applaud when they see us take up an attitude worthy of our strength. We should at the same time have the good fortune to crush a demagogic revolution and the honour of restoring the preponderance of our arms. It would show a poor acquaintance with the French spirit to be afraid of collecting twenty-five thousand men to march into a foreign country and to cut an equal figure with the Russians and Austrians as a military power. I would answer for the event with my head. We have been able to remain neutral in the Neapolitan affair; can we afford to do so, for our safety and for our glory, in the Piedmontese troubles?"

Here my whole system lies disclosed: I was a Frenchman; I had a bold policy long before the Spanish War, and I foresaw the responsibility which my very successes, if I obtained any, would cause to weigh upon my head.

All that I am recalling here can doubtless interest nobody; but that is the drawback of Memoirs: when they have no historical facts to relate, they tell you only about the author's person and weary your life out with it. Let us abandon these forgotten shadows! I prefer to remind you that Mirabeau, then unknown, was, in 1786, fulfilling in Berlin an unsuspected mission, and that he was obliged to train a pigeon to announce to the King of France the last breath of the terrible Frederic.

"I was thrown into some perplexity," says Mirabeau. "That the city gates would be shut was certain; it was even possible that the drawbridges of the island of Potsdam would be raised the moment death should take place, and should this happen my uncertainty would continue as long as it should please the new King. On the first supposition, how send off a courier? There were no means of scaling the ramparts or the palisadoes, without being exposed to a fray, for there are sentinels at every forty paces behind the palisadoes, and at every fifty behind the wall. What was to be done?... Had I been ambassador, the certain symptoms of mortality would have determined me to have sent off an express before death. For what addition was the word death? How was I to act in my present situation? It certainly was most important to serve, and not merely to appear to have served....

"I still had great reason to be diffident of the activity of our embassy. How did I act? I sent a man, on whom I could depend, with a strong and swift horse to a farm four miles from Berlin, from the master of which I had some days before received two pairs of pigeons, an experiment on the flight of which had been made; so that, unless the bridges of the isle of Potsdam were raised, I acted with certainty....

"After considering, I did not find we were rich enough to throw a hundred guineas away; I therefore renounced all my fine projects, which had cost me some thought, some trouble, and some louis; and I let fly my pigeons to my man with the word 'Return.' Have I done well or ill? Of this I am ignorant; but I had no express orders, and sometimes works of supererogation gain but little applause."

The ambassadors were charged, during their residence abroad, to draw up a memorandum on the condition of the peoples and the governments to which they were accredited. This series of memoranda might be useful to the historian. To-day the same injunctions are issued, but scarcely one diplomatic agent complies with it. I had too little time in my embassies to finish off long studies; nevertheless, I made drafts for them; my patience for work was not entirely unfruitful. I find this commencement of a sketch of my investigations on Germany:

"After the fall of Napoleon, the introduction of the representative governments into the Germanic Confederation reawakened in Germany those first ideas of innovation which the Revolution had originally called forth there. They fomented for some time with great violence: the youth of the country had been called to its defense by a promise of liberty; this promise had been greedily received by scholars who found in their masters the inclination which science has shown, in this century, to second liberal theories. Under the sky of Germany, this love of liberty becomes a sort of sombre and mysterious fanaticism, which is propagated by means of secret societies. Sand came to strike terror into Europe. That man, for the rest, who revealed the existence of a powerful sect, was no more than a vulgar enthusiast; he deceived himself and took a common mind for a transcendental mind: his crime went to waste itself upon a writer whose genius could not aspire to empire and had not enough of the conqueror and the king to merit a dagger-thrust.

"A sort of tribunal of political inquisition and the suppression of the liberty of the press have stopped this movement of men's minds; but it must not be believed that they have broken its main-spring. Germany, like Italy, to-day desires political unity, and with this idea, which will remain dormant for a greater or lesser length of time according to events and men, one can always be sure, by arousing it, to stir the Germanic peoples. The princes or ministers who may appear in the ranks of the Confederation of the German States will hasten or delay the revolution in this country, but they will not prevent the human race from developing: every century has its dynasty. To-day there is no one left in Germany, nor even in Europe: we have passed from the giants to the dwarfs and fallen from the immense into the narrow and limited. Bavaria, by means of the bureaus formed by M. de Montgelas, still pushes on towards new ideas, although she has receded in the race, while the Landgraviate of Hesse would not even admit that there was a revolution in Europe. The Prince who has just died wanted his soldiers, who had formerly been soldiers of Jerome Bonaparte, to wear powder and pig-tails: he mistook old fashions for old manners, forgetting that one can copy the first, but that one can never restore the second."

In Berlin and in the North, the monuments are fortresses; the sight of them alone oppresses the heart. If you see these places in populous and fertile countries, they give rise to the idea of a legitimate defense; the women and children, sitting and playing at some distance from the sentries, form a rather agreeable contrast; but a fortress on heaths, in a desert, only recalls human anger: against whom are those ramparts raised, if not against poverty and independence? You have to be myself to find a pleasure in prowling at the foot of those bastions, in hearing the wind whistle through those trenches, in seeing those breastworks raised in prevision of enemies who perhaps will never appear. Those military labyrinths, those guns mute in face of one another on salient and gazoned angles, those stone watch-towers, where you see nobody and whence no eye observes you, are of an incredible grimness. If, in the dual solitude of nature and war, you come across a daisy sheltered under the redan of a glacis, that floral amenity relieves you. When, in the castles in Italy, I saw goats suspended to the ruins and the goat-girl sitting under a parasol pine; when, on the mediæval walls with which Jerusalem is surrounded, my eyes plunged into the Valley of Cedron upon some Arab women climbing up steeps among pebble-stones, the sight was a sad one doubtless, but history was there, and the silence of the present allowed the sounds of the past to be heard all the more clearly.

I had asked for leave of absence on the occasion of the baptism of the Duc de Bordeaux. Being granted this leave, I prepared to start: Voltaire, in a letter to his niece, says that he sees the Spree flow, that the Spree empties itself into the Elbe, the Elbe into the sea, and that the sea receives the Seine; he thus came down to Paris. Before leaving Berlin, I went to pay a last visit to Charlottenburg; it was not Windsor, nor Aranjuez, nor Caserta, nor Fontainebleau: the villa, supported by a hamlet, is surrounded by an English park, of small extent, from which waste land can be seen outside. The Queen of Prussia here enjoys a peace which Bonaparte's memory will no longer be able to disturb. What an uproar the conqueror made, in the old days, in this refuge of silence, when he arrived there with his flourishing trumpets and his legions blooded at Jena! It was from Berlin, after wiping the kingdom of Frederic the Great from the map, that he announced the continental blockade and prepared the Moscow campaign in his mind; his words had already carried death to the heart of an accomplished sovereign: she now sleeps at Charlottenburg, in a monumental vault; a statue, a fine portrait in marble, represents her. I wrote some verses on the tomb for which the Duchess of Cumberland asked me.

I arrived in Paris at the time of the celebration for the baptism of M. le Duc de Bordeaux. The cradle of the descendant of Louis XIV., of which I had had the honour to pay the carriage, has disappeared like that of the King of Rome. In a time different from the present, Louvel's outrage would have ensured the sceptre to Henry V.; but crime no longer constitutes a right, except for the man who commits it.

After the baptism of M. le Duc de Bordeaux, I was at last reinstated in my ministry of State: M. de Richelieu had taken it from me, M. de Richelieu restored it to me; the reparation gave me no more pleasure than the wrong had given me offense.

While I was looking forward to returning to see my crows, the cards were being shuffled: M. de Villèle resigned. Loyal to my friendship and my political principles, I thought it my duty to retire into private life with him. I wrote to M. Pasquier:

"PARIS, 30 July 1821.

"MONSIEUR LE BARON,

"When you were good enough to invite me to call on you, on the 14th of this month, it was to tell me that my presence was necessary in Berlin. I had the honour to reply that, as Messieurs de Corbière and de Villèle appeared to be retiring from office, it was my duty to follow them. In the practice of representative government, it is the usage that men of the same opinion should share the same fortune. What usage demands, monsieur le baron, honour commands of me, since it is a question, not of a favour, but of a disgrace. In consequence, I now repeat to you in writing the offer which I made to you verbally of my resignation as Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of Berlin. I hope, monsieur le baron, that you will kindly lay it at the King's feet. I entreat His Majesty to accept its motives and to believe in my profound and respectful gratitude for the kindness with which he has deigned to honour me.

"I have the honour to be, etc.,

"CHATEAUBRIAND."

I announced to M. le Comte de Bernstorff the event which was breaking off our diplomatic relations; he wrote in reply:

"MONSIEUR LE VICOMTE,

"Although I ought long to have expected the intelligence which you have been good enough to send me, I am none the less painfully affected by it. I know and respect the motives which, in this delicate circumstance, have determined your resolutions; but, while adding new claims to those which have in this country won for you an universal esteem, they also add to the regrets which are here felt at the certainty of a loss long dreaded and for ever irreparable. These sentiments are keenly shared by the King and the Royal Family, and I am only awaiting the moment of your recall to tell you so officially.

"Bear me kindly in your remembrance, I pray you, and accept the renewed expression of my inviolable devotion and of the high regard with which I have the honour to be, etc., etc.

"BERNSTORFF."

"BERLIN, 25 August 1821.

I had hastened to express my friendship and my regrets to M. Ancillon: his very beautiful reply (leaving my praises on one side) deserves to be recorded here:

"BERLIN, 22 September 1821.

"And so, monsieur and illustrious friend, you are irrevocably lost to us? I foresaw this misfortune, and yet it has affected me as though it had been unexpected. We deserved to keep you and to possess you, because at least we had the feeble merit of feeling, recognizing, admiring all your superiority. To tell you that the King, the Princes, the Court and the Town regret you is to sound their praises rather than yours; to tell you that I rejoice in these regrets, that I am proud of them for the sake of my country and that I acutely share them would be to fall far short of the truth and to give you a very imperfect idea of what I feel. Permit me to believe that you know me well enough to read my heart. If that heart accuses you, my mind not only absolves you, but more, does homage to your noble proceeding and to the principles which dictated it. You owed France a great lesson and a fine example; you have given her both by refusing to serve a ministry which is unable to judge its situation and which has not the mental courage necessary to extricate itself from it. In a representative monarchy, the ministers and those whom they employ in the first places must form an homogeneous whole, all the parts of which are jointly and severally responsible one to the other. There, less than anywhere else, should a man separate himself from his friends; he maintains himself and rises with them, he descends and falls in the same way. You have proved the truth of this maxim to France by resigning with Messieurs de Villèle and Corbière. You have taught her at the same time that fortune does not enter into consideration where principles are concerned; and certainly, if yours had not had reason, conscience and the experience of all the centuries on their side, the sacrifice which they dictate to a man like yourself would be sufficient to establish a powerful presumption in their favour in the eyes of all who know anything of dignity.

"I impatiently await the result of the coming elections to draw the horoscope of France. They will decide her future.

"Farewell, my illustrious friend; sometimes, from the heights on which you dwell, shed a few drops of dew on a heart which will cease to admire and love you only when it ceases to beat.

"ANCILLON."

Mindful of France's welfare, without occupying myself further with myself or my friends, I at that period submitted the following note to Monsieur:

"If the King did me the honour to consult me, this is what I should propose for the good of his service and the repose of France.

"The Left Centre of the Elective Chamber is gratified at the nomination of M. Royer-Collard: still, I should think peace more assured, if they brought into the Council a man of merit taken from that side and chosen from among the members of the Chamber of Peers or the Chamber of Deputies.

"To place in addition in the Council a deputy from the side of the Independent Right.

"To complete the distribution of offices in that spirit.

"As to things:

"To bring forward at a suitable time a complete law on the liberty of the press, said law to abolish constructional prosecutions and the optional censorship; to prepare a communal law; to complete the Septennial Act, carrying the eligible age to thirty years; in one word, to proceed, Charter in hand, courageously to defend religion against impiety, but at the same time to protect it against fanaticism and the indiscretions of a zeal that do it great harm.

"As to foreign affairs, three things must guide the King's ministers: the honour, the independence and the interest of France.

"New France is wholly Royalist; she may become wholly Revolutionary: let them follow the institutions, and I would answer with my head for a future of many centuries; let them violate or molest those institutions, and I would not answer for a future of a few months.

"I and my friends are ready to support with all our strength an administration formed on the bases as suggested above.

"CHATEAUBRIAND."

A voice in which the woman prevailed over the princess came to give consolation to what was only the affliction of a life incessantly varying. The handwriting of H.R.H. the Duchess of Cumberland was so greatly altered that I had some difficulty in recognising it. The letter bore the date of the 28th of September 1821: it is the last which I received from that royal hand. Alas, the other noble friends who at that time supported me in Paris have quitted this earth! Shall I, then, remain with such stubbornness here below that none of the persons to whom I have attached myself can survive me? Happy they on whom age has the effect of wine and who lose their memory when they have had their fill of days!

The resignations of Messieurs de Villèle and de Corbière were not long in bringing about the dissolution of the Cabinet and the return of my friends to the Council, as I had foreseen: M. le Vicomte de Montmorency was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs, M. de Villèle Minister of Finance, M. de Corbière Minister of the Interior. I had played too great a part in recent political movements and exercised too great an influence on public opinion to be left on one side. It was resolved that I should replace M. le Duc Decazes at the London Embassy. Louis XVIII. always consented to send me away. I went to thank him; he spoke to me of his favourite with a constancy of attachment rare in kings; he "begged" me to remove from the mind of George IV. the prejudice which that sovereign had conceived against M. Decazes, and myself to forget the differences which had existed between me and the former Minister of Police. That monarch, from whom so many misfortunes had been unable to draw a tear, was moved by a few sufferings which may have afflicted the man whom he had honoured with his friendship.

My nomination reawoke my memories: Charlotte returned to my thoughts; my youth, my emigration appeared before me, with their sorrows and their joys. Human weakness also made it a pleasure to me to reappear, well-known and powerful, there where I had been unknown and powerless. Madame de Chateaubriand, fearing the sea, dared not cross the Channel, and I set out alone. The secretaries of the Embassy had gone before me.

"Le bon roi Dagobert Portrait sa culotte à l'envers," etc.:

"Our good King Dagobert Wore his breeches front to rear," etc.--T.

"I commend to my brothers M. de Chamisso, one of my faithful servants; he has often exposed his life for me.

"LOUIS."--T. ]