"I am too much overcome with grief to be çoisRenéable to enter into longer details. We are getting ready to return to France with the precious remains of the best of mothers and friends. Enguerrand[281] will lie at rest between his two mothers.
"We shall pass through Lausanne, where M. de Custine will come to see you so soon as we arrive.
"Receive, monsieur, the assurance of the respectful attachment with which I am, etc.,
See above and below what I have had the happiness and the unhappiness to recall touching the memory of Madame de Custine.
Madame de Charrière's work, the _Lettres écrites de Lausanne_, well describes the scene which I had daily before my eyes, and the feelings of grandeur which it inspires:
"I am sitting alone," says the mother of Cécile, "opposite to a window which looks upon the lake. I am grateful to you, ye mountains, snow, and sun, for the pleasure which you afford me. Above all, I am grateful to Thee, Thou Author of all the things which I contemplate, for having created objects so lovely to the sight.... O ye amiable and affecting beauties of nature! My eyes are daily employed in contemplating you, and ye fill my heart with perpetual rapture[283]."
At Lausanne I commenced the _Remarques_ on the first work of my life, the _Essai sur les révolutions anciennes et modernes._ From my windows I saw the rocks of Meillerie:
"Rousseau," I wrote in one of those _Remarques_, "is decidedly not above the authors of his time, except in some sixty letters of the _Nouvelle Héloïse_ and in a few pages of his _Rêveries_ and of his _Confessions._ There, placed in the real nature of his talent, he attains an eloquence of passion unknown before him. Voltaire and Montesquieu found models of style in the writers of the age of Louis XIV.; Rousseau, and even Buffon to some extent, in another manner, created a language which was unknown to the Grand Century[284]."
On my return to Paris, my life was occupied between my installation in the Rue d'Enfer, my renewed combats, in the House of Peers and in my pamphlets, against the different Bills opposed to the public liberties, my speeches and writings in favour of the Greeks, and my labours in connection with the complete edition of my Works. The Emperor of Russia died[285], and with him died the only royal friendship remaining to me. The Duc de Montmorency had become governor to the Duc de Bordeaux. He did not long enjoy that weighty honour: he expired on Good Friday 1826[286], in the Church of Saint-Thomas d'Aquin; at the hour when Jesus expired on the Cross, he went with Christ's last sigh to God.