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СКАЧАТЬ a family circle composed of intelligent persons, and in which education was always going on. I can not believe that my grandmother did not early foresee and acquiesce in that which was destined to happen, even supposing there was not at that time anything to read in the heart of her daughter. It is certain, for my mother says so in several of her letters, that, although she was then only a child, her prematurely serious turn of mind, her sensitive and emotional nature, her vivid imagination, and finally, the combined influences of intimacy, solitude, and misfortune, all united to inspire her with an interest in my father, which had from the first all the characteristics of a lofty and abiding sentiment, I do not think I have ever met a woman in whom so much moral strictness was combined with so much romantic sensibility as in my mother. Her youth, her extreme youth, was, as it were, steadied by those fortunate circumstances which bound her to duty by ties of passion, and procured for her that rare combination, peace of soul and the delightful agitation of the heart.

      “She was not tall, but her figure was elegant and well proportioned. She was fair and plump; indeed, it used to be feared that she would grow too fat. Her eyes were fine and expressive, black, like her hair; her features were regular, but rather too large. Her countenance was grave, almost imposing; but the intelligent kindliness of her glance tempered the gravity of her features very pleasantly. Her strong, well-trained, fertile intellect, had certain virile qualities, with which the extreme vividness of her imagination frequently clashed. She possessed sound judgment and keen powers of observation, and she was entirely unaffected in her manners and in her modes of expression, although she was not without a certain subtlety of ideas. In reality, she was profoundly reasonable, but she was headstrong; her intellect was more reasonable than herself. In her youth she lacked gayety and probably ease, may have appeared to be pedantic because she was serious, affected because she was silent, absent-minded, and indifferent to almost all the small things of every-day life. But, with her mother, whose cheerful moods she sometimes crossed, with her husband, whose simple tastes and easy temper she never crossed, she was not wanting in richness and freedom. She had even a kind of gayety of her own, which developed as she grew older, when, having been very absent and absorbed in her own thoughts while she was very young, she became more like her mother. I have often thought that, if she had lived long enough to share the house in which I am writing to-day, she would have been the merriest of us all.”

      My father wrote these lines in 1857, at Laffitte (Haute-Garonne), where all those whom he loved were assembled, and we were gay and happy. In quoting them I am somewhat outrunning my narrative, for he speaks here of his mother as of a woman and not as of a young girl, and Claire de Vergennes, when she married, early in the year 1796, was hardly sixteen years old.

      M. and Mme. de Rémusat—for thus I shall designate them henceforth, for the sake of clearness in my story—lived sometimes in Paris, and sometimes in a modest country house at Saint Gratien, a residence which had two strong recommendations—the beauty of the landscape and the attraction of the neighborhood.

      Nearest and pleasantest of neighbors were the owners of Sannois, with whom Madame de Vergennes was very intimate. Jean Jacques Rousseau’s “Confessions,” Madame d’Epinay’s “Mémoires,” and a hundred works of the last century as well, have made the place and the persons known to the world. Madame d’Houdetot (Sophie de Lalive) had lived peacefully, in her old age, throughout the troublous time of the Revolution in that country house, in the society of her husband and of M. de Saint Lambert. Between the famous trio and the young couple at Saint Gratien so close an intimacy was formed that, when the house at Saint Gratien was sold, my grandparents hired one within a shorter distance of the residence of their friends, and a way of communication was made between the gardens of their respective abodes. By degrees, however, M. de Rémusat got into the habit of going to Paris more and more frequently; and, as the times became quieter, he began to think of emerging from obscurity, and from the narrow circumstances to which he was reduced by the confiscation of the property of his wife’s father and the loss of his own place in the magistracy. As is always the case in France, it was of employment in some public function that he thought. He had no relations with the Government, or even with M. de Talleyrand, who was then Foreign Minister, but he directed his efforts toward that department, and obtained, if not exactly a place, at least an occupation, which was likely to lead to a place, in the office of the solicitors to the Ministry.

      Besides the agreeable and intellectual relations which they maintained with Sannois, M. and Mme. de Rémusat had formed an intimacy no less close, but which was destined to exercise a much greater influence over their fortunes, with Madame de Beauharnais, who, in 1796, became the wife of Bonaparte. When her friend had acquired power through her all-powerful husband, Madame de Vergennes applied to her on behalf of her son-in-law, who wished to enter the Council of State or the Administration. The First Consul, however, or his wife, had a different idea of what ought to be done. The consideration and respect in which Madame de Vergennes was held, her social station, her name—which was allied both to the old régime and to the new ideas—gave a certain value to the relations of her family with the consular palace, which at that time had but little intercourse with Parisian society. Quite unexpectedly, M. de Rémusat was appointed Prefect of the Palace, in 1802; and shortly afterward Madame de Rémusat became Lady-in-Waiting (Dame pour Accompagner) to Madame Bonaparte, a title which was soon changed into the better sounding one of Lady of the Palace (Dame du Palais).

      III

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      Persons of the way of thinking of M. and Mme. de Rémusat had no sacrifice to make in casting in their lot with the new régime. They had neither the extravagant sentiments of the Royalists, nor the austerity of the Republicans. No doubt their attitude of mind approached more nearly to that of the Royalists than to that of the Republicans, but their royalism reduced itself to pious veneration for Louis XVI. The misfortunes of that unhappy prince rendered his memory sacred, and his person had always been regarded in the family of M. de Vergennes with peculiar respect; but “Legitimacy” had not yet been invented, and those persons who most deeply deplored the fall of the old régime, or rather that of the ancient dynasty, did not hold themselves under any obligation to believe that everything done in France in the absence of the Bourbons was null and void. Pure and unalloyed admiration was inspired by the young general who was reëstablishing material, if not moral order, with such brilliant success, in a society which was disturbed after a fashion very different from that of those successive later times, in which so many worthless “saviours” have turned up.

      Public functionaries in those days adhered to the opinion which was very natural under the old régime, that an official is responsible only for what he does, and not for either the acts or the origin of the Government. The sense of “solidarity” does not exist in absolute monarchies. The parliamentary régime has happily rendered us more sensitive, and all honest people now admit the collective responsibility of all the agents of a power. One could not nowadays serve a government whose tendency and general policy one did not approve; but it was otherwise in former times. My father—who had more right than any one else to be strict in these matters, and who, perhaps, owed somewhat of his extreme political scrupulousness to the difficult position in which he had seen his parents placed during his own childhood, between their private impressions and their official duties—explains these shades of difference in an unpublished letter to M. Sainte Beuve, to whom he had communicated certain biographical details for an article in the “Revue des Deux Mondes.”

      “It was not a pis aller, from necessity, weakness, or as a temporary expedient, that my parents attached themselves to the new régime. Of their free will and with entire confidence they united themselves with its fortunes. If you add to that all the pleasures of an easy and prominent position to be stepped into from one of poverty and obscurity, the curiosity which a court of so novel a kind inspired, the incomparable interest of the spectacle of a man like the Emperor at an epoch when he was irreproachable, young, and still amiable, you can easily conceive the attraction which induced my parents СКАЧАТЬ