At the conclusion of the General Preface to my Works,çoisRené 1826, vol. I., I address France in these words:
"O France, 'my dear country and my first love,' one of thy sons, at the end of his career, is collecting beneath thy eyes the claims which he may have to thy good-will. If he can do no more for thee, thou canst do all for him, by declaring that his attachment for thy religion, for thy King, for thy liberties has been pleasing to thee. Fair and illustrious mother-land, I would have desired a little glory only to augment thine own."
Madame de Chateaubriand, being ill, made a journey in the South of France, derived no benefit from it, and returned to Lyons, where Dr. Prunelle[276] condemned her. I went to join her; I took her to Lausanne, where she proved M. Prunelle in the wrong. At Lausanne I stayed in turn with M. de Sivry and with Madame de Cottens, a warm-hearted, witty and unhappy woman. I saw Madame de Montolieu[277]: she was living in retirement on a high hill; she died in the illusions of romance, like Madame de Genlis, her contemporary. Gibbon[278] had composed his History of the Roman Empire:
"It was ... as I sat musing among the ruins of the Capitol," he writes at Lausanne, on the 27th of June 1787, "while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind."
Madame de Staël had appeared at Lausanne with Madame Récamier. The whole Emigration, a whole finished world had stopped for some short moments in that sad and smiling town, a sort of false city of Granada. Madame de Duras has recalled its memory in her Memoirs, and the following note reached me there to tell me of the new loss which I was condemned to suffer:
"It is all over, monsieur, your friend[279] exists no more; she gave up her soul to God, without pain, at a quarter to eleven this morning. She was out driving as late as yesterday evening. Nothing announced her end to be so near; what am I saying? we did not think that her illness was to end in this way. M. de Custine[280], whose sorrow does not permit him to write to you himself, had been on one of the mountains around Bex only yesterday morning, to order mountain-milk to be sent down every morning for the dear sufferer.