Chapter 21

CHATEAUBRIAND.

July 5, 1848.

Chateaubriand is dead. One of the splendours of this
century has passed away.

He was seventy-nine years old according to his own
reckoning; according to the calculation of his old friend
M. Bertin, senior, he was eighty years of age. But he had
a weakness, said M. Bertin, and that was that he insisted
that he was born not in 1768, but in 1769, because that
was the year of Napoleon's birth.

He died yesterday, July 4, at 8 o'clock in the morning. For
five or six months he had been suffering from
paralysis which had almost destroyed his brain, and for
five days from inflammation of the lungs, which abruptly
snuffed out his life.

M. Ampere announced the news to the Academy, which
thereupon decided to adjourn.

I quitted the National Assembly, where a questor to succeed
General Négrier, who was killed in June, was being
nominated, and went to M. de Chateaubriand's house, No.
110, Rue du Bac.

I was received by M. de Preuille, son-in-law of his
nephew. I entered Chateaubriand's chamber.

He was lying upon his bed, a little iron bedstead with
white curtains round it and surmounted by an iron curtain
ring of somewhat doubtful taste. The face was uncovered;
the brow, the nose, the closed eyes, bore that expression
of nobleness which had marked him in life, and which was
enhanced by the grave majesty of death. The mouth and
chin were hidden by a cambric handkerchief. On his head
was a white cotton nightcap which, however, allowed the
grey hair on his temples to be seen. A white cravat rose
to his ears. His tawny visage appeared more severe amid
all this whiteness. Beneath the sheet his narrow, hollow
chest and his thin legs could be discerned.

The shutters of the windows giving on to the garden were
closed. A little daylight entered through the half-opened
door of the salon. The chamber and the face were illumined
by four tapers which burned at the corners of a table
placed near the bed. On this table were a silver crucifix,
a vase filled with holy water, and an aspergillum. Beside
it a priest was praying.

Behind the priest a large brown-coloured screen hid the
fireplace, above which the mantel-glass and a few engravings
of churches and cathedrals were visible.

At Chateaubriand's feet, in the angle formed by the bed
and the wall of the room, were two wooden boxes, placed
one upon the other. The largest I was told contained the
complete manuscript of his Memoirs, in forty-eight
copybooks. Towards the last there had been such disorder in
the house that one of the copybooks had been found that
very morning by M. de Preuille in a dark and dirty closet
where the lamps