His older uncle died in 1823, and he became heir of the estates. This uncle was known as M. de Lamartine de Monceau and was by seniority the head of the family. He had never married because his parents opposed the choice he had made. He was thrifty and had increased the value of his property. Lamartine now took his uncle’s designation.
The marriage of Lamartine took place during this period. The bride was Miss Marianne Birch, an English lady of beauty and fortune. She was of amiable disposition and Lamartine’s mother became warmly attached to her.
Neither the accession of wealth, his aristocratic rank, nor diplomatic engagements deterred him from literary composition. In 1823 the _Nouvelles Meditations_ were published, and two years later, _The Last Canto of Childe Harold_. Lamartine afterward described this latter work as a servile imitation in which his enthusiasm as a copyist and its success were alike “mediocre”—a punishment for feigning an admiration which was not altogether sincere. He had, likewise, another penalty to encounter. Two lines in it are versified in English as follows:
“I seek elsewhere (forgive, O Roman shade!) For men, and not the dust of which they’re made.”
For this apparent slur he was involved in a controversy leading to a duel and dangerously wounded. At his solicitation to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, his antagonist, Colonel Pepé, was not prosecuted.
Louis XVIII. was succeeded in 1824 by the Count d’Artois as Charles X. The attempt was now made to reinstate the Government as it existed before the Revolution.
In 1829, at the instance of Chateaubriand, then a member of the Coalition Ministry, Lamartine was recalled. He never ascertained the reason, but attributed it to the influence of Madame Recamier, with whom Chateaubriand was intimate. That lady, however, took an early opportunity to set the matter right by visiting the mother and sisters of Lamartine and inviting him and them to a drawing-room entertainment.
The reactionist Ministry under M. de Polignac was formed in the autumn of that year. It was the final separation of the men of the former century from the men of the time. A portfolio was offered to Lamartine but declined. He was attached to the dynasty, but he had the prescience of its overthrow. “I had seen it coming from afar,” says he. “Nine months before the fatal day, the fall of the new monarchy had been written for me in the names of the men whom it had commissioned to carry it on.”