met wandering about on the banks of the Cocytus; they complete the varied dreams of my life, and are now to be inscribed on the tablets of my posthumous memoirs.

London, from April till September, 1822.

M. DE MALESHERBES' OPINION ON THE EMIGRATION.

Ir was a great gratification to me again to meet M. de Malesherbes, and to talk to him about my former plans. I entered into the details of a journey which I intended should Occupy nine years; previously, however, I would make a hurried visit to Germany; I would hasten to the army of the Princes; then return to crush the revolution; all this was to be accomplished in two or three months, and I would then hoist my sail and return to the New World, freed from a revolution and having got a wife.

And yet, my zeal outran my faith; I felt persuaded that emigration was a great folly; "like Pelaudé every way," says Montaigne, "with the Ghibelins I was Guelph, with the Guelphs, Ghibelin." My slight attachment to absolute monarchy prevented me from acting under any illusion in the determination to which I came; I had some scruples; and although I was resolved to sacrifice myself for what I looked upon as a point of honour, yet I wished to have the opinion of M. de Malesherbes on the emigration question. I found him very much excited the crimes perpetrated before his eyes had destroyed the political toleration of this friend of Rousseau; between the executioners and their victims he did not hesitate which side to take. He thought that any thing would be better than the then existing state of affairs; and in my particular case, he said that no man wearing a sword could dispense with joining the brothers of his king, oppressed and delivered up to his enemies. He quite approved of my return from America, and urged my brother to set out with me.

I stated the usual objections about the alliance with foreigners, the interests of one's native country, &c., &c.: he answered

them; and passing from general reasons to particular details, cited several embarrassing examples. He recalled to my memory the Guelphs and Ghibelins strengthening their several parties by the troops of the emperor and the pope; and in England, the barons taking up arms against John Lackland; and to conclude, he instanced, in our own times, the Republic of the United States imploring the assistance of France.

"Thus we see," continued M. de Malesherbes, "that men the most devoted friends of liberty and philosophy, who were republicans and Protestants, saw no culpability in borrowing such aid as might give the victory to their party. Without our gold, our ships, and soldiers, would the New World be now emancipated? I myself, who now address you, did I not, in 1776, receive Franklin, who came to renew the negotiations begun by Silas Deane, and yet Franklin was no traitor! Was the liberation of America less honourable because it had been aided and assisted by Lafayette and French grenadiers? Every government which, instead of guaranteeing the fundamental laws of society, transgresses itself the laws of equity, and the rules of justice, by so doing ceases to exist, and restores man to the state of nature. Self-defence is, then, allowable: it is lawful to have recourse to such means as seem most proper for the overthrow of tyranny, and re-establishing the rights of each and of all."

The principles of natural justice, advanced by the greatest civilians, developed by such a man as M. de Malesherbes, and supported by numerous historical examples, struck my mind, but without convincing me: in yielding to them, I in reality was guided merely by the feelings natural to my age, and the punctilios of honour. To these instances given by M. de Malesherbes, I shall add a few of more recent date: during the war in Spain, in 1823, the republican French party embraced the cause of the Cortes, and felt no scruple about bearing arms against their country; in 1830 and 1831, the Poles and the Italian constitutional party solicited assistance from France; and the Portuguese of the charte invaded their native land with the money and troops of the foreigner. We have two standards of weight and measure we approve, in relation to one idea, one system, one interest, one man, what we blame in relation to another idea, another system, another interest, another

man.

London, from April till September, 1822.

I PLAY AND LOSE-ADVENTURE OF THE HACKNEY COACH-MADAME ROLAND-BARRERE AT ROUSSEAU'S HERMITAGE-SECOND FEDERATION OF THE 14TH OF JULY-PREPARATIONS FOR EMIGRATION.

THESE Conversations, between the illustrious adherent of the king and myself, took place at the house of my sister-in-law; her second son had just been born; M. de Malesherbes stood godfather to him, and gave him his own name, Christian. I was present at the baptism of this child, whose only sight of his parents was destined to be at an age when life leaves no trace on the memory, but appears in after years like the distant shadow of a dream. The preparations for my emigration in the meantime proceeded; my friends had thought to secure me a good fortune by my marriage; but it was now found that my wife's fortune was in church property, which the nation undertook to pay after its own fashion. Madame de Chateaubriand had, besides, with the consent of her guardians, lent the title to a great proportion of her income to her sister, the Countess du Plessis-Parscau, now an émigrée. There was still, then, a deficiency of money, and it was found necessary to borrow

some.

A notary procured us 10,000 francs. I was carrying them home with me, in assignats, when I met, in the Rue de Richelieu, one of my former comrades in the regiment of Navarre, Count Achard. He was a great gambler: he proposed that we should go together to the M- Rooms, where we could talk more comfortably: my evil genius urged me on; I went, played, and lost all except 1500 francs, with which, full of remorse and shame, I flung myself into the first vehicle I met. I had never gambled; play produced a sort of painful intoxication in me; and if the passion for it had once seized me, it would certainly have turned my brain. In a state of half-distraction I got out of the carriage at St. Sulpice, and left behind me the pocket-book containing the poor fragment of my treasure. I hastened home, and told that I had left the 10,000 francs in a hackney coach.

I went out again, down the Rue Dauphine, and over the t Neuf, not without an inclination to throw myself into the

river, as far as the square of the Palais Royal, where I had taken the unlucky conveyance. There I questioned the Savoyards who watered the horses, and described the carriage; they indicated a number at a guess. The police commissary of the quarter informed me that the vehicle bearing that number belonged to a letter-out of conveyances at the far-end of the Faubourg St. Denis; I set off, and stayed all night in the stables, awaiting the return of the vehicles; first came a great number, none of which was the one I wanted; but at length, at two in the morning, came my equipage. I had scarcely time to recognise the two white horses, when the poor beasts, broken-down, stiff, and wearied, fell down on the straw with their legs stretched out as if they were dead.

The driver remembered my having hired him. After me, he had driven a citizen who had been set down at the Jacobin club; after the citizen, a lady, whom he had set down in the Rue de Cléry, no. 13; after this lady, a gentleman, whom he had taken to the Franciscan convent, Rue St. Martin. I promised a trifling reward to the driver, and under his guidance, set out, as soon as it was day, to track my 1500 francs, something in the way I had gone to discover the north-west passage. It appeared plain to me that the citizen of the Jacobin club had confiscated them in right of his sovereignty. The lady in the Rue de Cléry assured me she had seen nothing in the coach. I now reached the third and last station, entirely hopeless of success; the driver described the gentleman as well as he could to the porter of the convent: "Oh! that is Father so-and-so!" cried he. He then led me through the deserted galleries and rooms, into one where I found a Franciscan, the only inhabitant of that large building, and he merely remaining to make an inventory of the furniture of his convent. This monk, seated on a heap of ruins, in a dusty garment, listened attentively to my tale:

"Are you," said he, "the Chevalier de Chateaubriand ?" I answered in the affirmative.

"Here," replied he, "is your pocket-book; I had found your address in it, and should have brought it to you after I had finished my work."

Thus, it was a despoiled and persecuted monk, driven from his home, and yet occupied in conscientiously making an inventory of what remained in his cloister, for his proscribers, who

restored to me, in these 1500 francs, the means of proceeding into exile. Had I never recovered this little sum, I should not have emigrated: what would have become of me? My life's course would have been entirely changed; now, I would not go one step out of my way to pick up a million.

This adventure occurred on the 16th of June, 1792.

Faithful to my instincts, I had returned from America to offer my sword to Louis XVI., not to involve myself in party intrigues. The disbanding of the king's new guard, in which was Murat; the successive ministries of Roland, Dumouriez, and Duport du Tertre; the petty court conspiracies, or great popular movements, only filled me with ennui and contempt. I heard Madame Roland much talked of, but did not see her; her memoirs give evidence that she possessed extraordinary strength of mind. She was said to be very agreeable,—whether sufficiently so to make the cynicism of unnatural virtues tolerable is doubtful. Certain it is that the woman who, at the very foot of the guillotine, called for ink, pen, and paper, to set down the discoveries which she made on her way from the Conciergerie to the Place de la Revolution, showed a pre-occupation of mind and a disdain of life of which we have few examples. Madame Roland possessed character rather than genius; the former may give the latter, the latter cannot give the former.

On the 19th of June, I had gone to the valley of Montmorency to visit J. J. Rousseau's Hermitage; not that I found any pleasure in recollections of Madame d'Epinay and the factitious and depraved circle around her; but I desired to bid adieu to the retreat of a man whose manners and mind were in strong opposition to my own, although he was gifted with a genius whose voice had powerfully moved my youthful mind. The next day, the 20th, I was still at the Hermitage, and there met with two men, wandering like myself in these deserted haunts during the day which tolled the knell of monarchy, indifferent as they were, or as I thought they would be, to the affairs of the world: the one was M. Maret, of the Empire, the other M. Barrère, of the Republic. The gentle Barrère had retired thither from the noise and tumult, in his sentimental philosophy, to address sweet little revolutionary sonnets to the shade of Julie. The troubadour of the guillotine, in reference to whom the convention decreed that la terreur était à l'ordre du jour, only escaped the murderous grasp of this same terror by hiding