Constant wrote his book on religion in the house of his friend, Madame de Charrière, Chateaubriand wrote his in the companionship of his devoted and intimate friend, Madame de Beaumont, who assisted him by searching for the quotations he required. His mind does not seem to have been taken up with his work to the exclusion of all mundane thoughts.
We know how grandiloquently Chateaubriand inveighed during Louis XVIII.'s reign against the married priests, in what a bitter spirit he stirred up the royalist and church party against them, how determined he was that they should be deprived of every sou of their pay, to punish them for having taken advantage of the laws of the Republic to marry like other citizens. Yet was not he himself, as the author of _Le Génie du Christianisme_ (in the preface to which he writes of himself as "the humble Lévite"), a kind of priest, nay, more than a common priest? And was not he married, and that, too, without the aid of a priest? I draw attention to this because it is one of the thousand signs of something that is to be detected everywhere throughout this religious reaction, something to which I believe we are justified in applying, ugly as it is, the word "hypocrisy."
Such, then, is Chateaubriand's book, and such are the circumstances in which it came into being. To its unprecedented success and enormous influence it owes an importance greater than its proper due. It was the book of the moment; it smuggled in, well packed in sentimentality, that principle of authority which was soon to ascend the throne.
The ascension was brought about by a man of a very different stamp.
Count Joseph de Maistre was born at Chambéry in Savoy in 1754. The De Maistre family, which belonged to the highest class of the bureaucracy, had immigrated from France at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In the boy's home his father's severe, imperious spirit, with its strong tone of old-fashioned piety, ruled supreme. Joseph, who was the eldest of ten children, was trained in such absolute obedience that even when he was at the University of Turin he never allowed himself to read a book without first writing to ask his father's permission. From a very early age he was devoted to serious study. He learned seven languages, which is an uncommon thing for a Frenchman to do even now, and was more uncommon then. He entered the civil service, became, like his father before him, a magistrate in his native town and a senator, and married at the age of thirty-two.