émigrés were proud to number him in their ranks; he sang our misfortunes, another reason for loving his muse. He worked very hard; indeed, he was obliged to do so, for Madame Délille shut him up, and did not set him at liberty till he had done his daily work of a certain number of verses. One day I went to see him, he kept me waiting a long time, and when he did make his appearance, his cheeks were very red people said that Madame Délille used to box his ears: of that I know nothing; I only say what I saw. Who has not heard the Abbé Délille repeat his verses? He recited them very well; his countenance, ugly, wrinkled, and animated by his imagination, was wonderfully suited to the coquettish nature of his delivery, to the character of his talents, and to his profession of abbé. The Abbé Délille's chef-d'œuvre is his translation of the Georgics, always excepting the pieces of sentiment; but it is like reading Racine translated into the language of Louis XV. The literature of the eighteenth century, putting a few bright stars of genius out of the question, standing, as it were, half-way between the classic literature of the seventeenth century and the romantic literature of the nineteenth, though not without what is natural, is wanting in nature; devoted to the arrangement of words, it is neither sufficiently original as a new school, nor sufficiently pure as an antique school. The Abbé Délille was the poet of modern châteaux, as the troubadour was the poet of ancient ones; the verses of the one and the ballads of the other, give evidence of the difference which existed between aristocracy in its prime and aristocracy in its decrepitude: the abbé describes readings and chess parties in the manor-houses where the troubadours sang of crusades and tournaments. The distinguished personages of our church militant were then in England: the Abbé Carron, of whom I have spoken, when borrowing the life of my sister Julie from him; the Bishop of St. Pol-de-Leon, a stern and narrow-minded prelate, who contributed to make the Count d'Artois more and more a stranger to his contemporaries; the Archbishop of Aix, calumniated perhaps because of his success in the world; and another learned and pious bishop, but so avaricious, that if he had had the misfortune to lose his soul, he would never have repurchased it. Almost all avaricious men are men of talent; I must therefore be very stupid. Amongst the Frenchwomen of the West end was Madame de Boignes; amiable, spirituelle, full of talent, extremely pretty, and very young; she has since, in conjunction with her father, the Marquis d'Osmond, represented the court of France in England, much better than such a savage as I. She writes now, and her talents will reproduce what she has seen with great cleverness. Mesdames de Caumont, de Gontaut, and du Cluzel, were also inhabitants of the quarter of fortunate emigrants; though I may perhaps be making a confusion with regard to Madame de Caumont and Madame du Cluzel, whom I had seen for a short time at Brussels. Certain it is that the Duchess de Duras was in London at this time, but it was not my fortune to become acquainted with her till ten years later. How many times in life do we pass by some object that would constitute its charm, as the navigator glides unconsciously over the waters which lave the shores of a land favoured by Heaven, and which he has only missed by a few miles or by one day's sail! I write this on the banks of the Thames, and to-morrow a letter will go to Madame Duras, on the banks of the Seine, to tell her that I have met with the first souvenir of her. London, from April to September, 1822. FONTANES-CLÉRY. FROM time to time, the tide of emigration carried over to us companions of a new species and new opinions; and different strata of exiles were formed; the earth contains beds of sand and clay deposited by the waves of the flood. One of these waves brought me a man-whose loss I still at this time deplore, a man who was my guide in literature, and whose friendship constituted one of the honours as well as one of the consolations of my life. In a previous part of these Memoirs, it has been mentioned that I had become acquainted with M. de Fontanes in 1789; it was only last year, in Berlin, I received news of his death. He was born at Niort, of a noble, Protestant family; his father had had the misfortune to kill his brother-in-law in a duel. Young Fontanes, having been brought up by a very deserving brother, came to Paris. He saw Voltaire die, and this great representative of the eighteenth century inspired his first verses; his poetical attempts were noticed by Laharpe. He undertook the composition of some pieces for the theatre, and formed a connexion with Mademoiselle Desgarcins, a delightful actress. He lodged near the Odéon, and wandering around the Chartreuse, he celebrated its solitude. He had met with a friend destined to become one of mine-M. Joubert. On the occurrence of the Revolution, the poet embraced one of those stationary parties, which always perish, torn in pieces by the party in favour of progress which pulls it forward, or the retrograde which draws it back. The Monarchists engaged M. de Fontanes as an editor of the Modérateur. When the evil days came, he took refuge in Lyons, and there married. His wife was confined of a son; during the siege of the city, which the revolutionists called Commune affranchie, as Louis XI., by banishing all the citizens, had called Arras Ville franchise, Madame de Fontanes was obliged to remove her nursling's cradle, in order to shelter it from the shells. Being again in Paris on the 9th Thermidor, M. de Fontanes joined M. de Laharpe and the Abbé de Vauxelles in establishing the Mémorial. Proscribed on the 18th Fructidor, England became his harbour of refuge. His M. de Fontanes was, with Chénier, the last writer of the classical school of the elder branch; his prose and his poetry resemble each other, and have merits of the same kind. thoughts and images exhibit a melancholy unknown to the age of Louis XIV., which knew nothing but the austere and holy sadness of religious eloquence. This melancholy was found mingled in the works of the author of the Jour des Morts,* as the impress of the period in which he lived; it fixes the date of his advent, and proves that he was born after J. J. Rousseau, and attached by taste to Fenelon. Were any one to reduce M. de Fontanes' writings to two very small volumes—one of prose and one of verse-it would constitute one of the most appropriate funereal monuments which could be raised over the tomb of the classical school.† This was a poetical version of "Gray's Elegy."-(Tr.) This has been done by the filial piety of Madame Christine de Fontanes; with an interesting introduction by M. de Sainte-Beuve. -(Paris, note of 1839.) In the papers which my friend left were several cantos of a poem called La Grèce Sauvée, some odes, and various other poetical pieces. He never, however, published any thing; for this critic, so acute, enlightened, and when not influenced by political opinions, so impartial, had himself an extreme terror of criticism. He was supremely unjust towards Madame de Staël. An envious article of Garat's, upon the Forêt de Navarre, was intended to stop her short at the very commencement of her poetical career. Fontanes, on his appearance, destroyed the affected school of Dorat, but he was unable to re-establish the classical school, which drew near its close with the language of Racine. Among the posthumous odes of M. de Fontanes, there is one upon the Anniversaire de sa Naissance (a birthday ode); it possesses all the charm of the Jour des Morts, with a deeper and more individual feeling. I remember only two stanzas: "La vieillesse déja vient avec sec souffrances: Que m'offre l'avenir? De courtes espérances. Que m'offre le passé ? Des fautes, des regrets. Tel est le sort de l'homme; il s'instruit avec l'age; Mais que sont d'être sage, Quand le terme est si prés? Le passé, le present, l'avenir, tout m'afflige; Et ne l'insultez pas !" Could M. de Fontanes have felt an antipathy to any thing, it must have been to my manner of writing. In me, there began a complete revolution in French literature, with the school called the romantic: my friend, however, instead of rising in rebellion against my barbarism, became a passionate admirer. I noticed great admiration in his face, when I read to him portions of my "Natchez," "Atala," and "René." He found it impossible to reduce these productions to the common rules of criticism, but he felt that he was entering into a new world; he saw a new nature, and comprehended a language which he was unable to speak. I received excellent advice from him, and to him I am indebted for all that is correct in my style; he taught me to respect the ear; he prevented me from falling into the extravagance of invention, and the harshness of execution of my imitators. It was a great pleasure to me to see him again in London, feted by the émigrés; he was asked for cantos from La Grèce Sauvée, and they pressed round in order to listen to him. He took a lodging near me, and we never quitted each other more. We were present together at a scene worthy of those times of misfortune: Cléry, just lately landed, read us his manuscript Memoirs. Judge of the emotions of an auditory of exiles, listening to Louis XVI.'s valet-de-chambre relating, as an eye-witness, the sufferings and death of the prisoner of the Temple! The Directory, afraid of the effects of Cléry's Memoirs, published an interpolated edition of them, in which the author was made to speak like a lacquey, and Louis XVI. like a porter; among all the examples of revolutionary baseness, this, perhaps, is one of the foulest. A VENDEAN PEASANT. M. DU THEIL, the Count d'Artois' agent in London, hastened to inquire for M. de Fontanes: the latter begged me to take him to the agent's house. We found him surrounded by all the defenders of the throne and the altar, who lounged about in Piccadilly; by a crowd of spies and pickpockets who had escaped from Paris under different names and different disguises, and with a host of Belgian, German, and Irish traders in the counter-revolution. In a corner of the crowd stood a man about thirty or thirty-two years of age, to whom no one paid attention, and who himself paid attention to nothing except an engraving of the death of General Wolfe. Struck with his appearance, I made some inquiries concerning him; one of my neighbours replied, "He is nothing-merely a Vendean peasant-the bearer of a letter from his chiefs." This man who was nothing, had seen the death of Cathelineau, the first general of La Vendée, and a peasant like himself; of Bonchamp, the revived image of Bayard; of Lescure, armed with hair-cloth, not proof against balls; of D'Elbée, shot in his arm-chair, his wounds preventing him from embracing death standing; of Larochejaquelin, the identification of whose dead body was ordered by the patriots, in order to calm the fears of the Convention in the midst of their |