London, April to September 1822
BEFORE going on with these literary investigations, I must interrupt them a moment to take leave of my uncle de Bedée. Alas! It is to take leave of one of the first joys of my life: freno non remorante dies, “no rein can curb the flight of days.”[17] See the old sepulchers in the old crypts. Conquered by time, decrepit and without memory, having lost their epitaphs, they have forgotten even the names of the men they contain.
I had written to my uncle on the subject of my mother’s death. He had written back a long letter, in which there were mingled some moving words of grief; but three-quarters of those double folio sheets were dedicated to my genealogy. He especially recommended that, when I returned to France, I look into the titles of the “Bedée quartering” which had been conferred on my brother. Neither exile, nor ruin, nor the massacre of his closest friends, nor the murder of Louis XVI, could alert this venerable émigré to the Revolution. For him, nothing had happened and nothing had changed; he was still in the Estates of Brittany and the Assembly of Nobles. This fixity of ideas in a man’s mind is quite striking in the midst and, as it were, in the presence of the decay of his body, the flight of his years, and the loss of his relatives and friends.
On returning from exile, my uncle de Bedée retired to Dinan, where he died, six leagues from Monchoix, without having seen it again. My cousin Caroline, the eldest of my three cousins, is still alive. She was endowed with lovely dark brown eyes and a pretty waist; she could dance like La Camargo, and she believes she remembers me being secretly in love with her. She has stayed an old maid, despite the respectable proposals she received in her bygone youth. She writes me misspelled letters in which she addresses me as tu, calls me Chevalier, and reminisces about the good old days: in illo tempore. I reply to her in the same tone, setting aside, as she does, my age, my honors, and my fame: “Yes, dear Caroline, your Chevalier,” and so on. At least thirty years have gone by since last we met, and Heaven be praised for that! If we ever did come to embrace each other, God knows what a figure we would cut!
Sweet, patriarchal, innocent, honorable family friendship, your century has passed! We no longer hold to the soil by a multitude of flowers, reeds, and roots; we are born and we die now one by one. The living are in a hurry to cast the dead into Eternity and free themselves from the burden of a corpse. Of the dead man’s friends, a few sit by the coffin at the church, grumbling about the inconvenient interruption of their daily habits; a few others carry their devotion so far as to follow the convoy to the cemetery; but once the grave is filled, all memory is effaced. You shall never return, days of religion and tenderness, when the son died in the same house, in the same armchair beside the same hearth where his father and grandfather had died before him, surrounded, as they were, by tearful children and grandchildren gathered to receive one last paternal blessing.
Goodbye, my dear uncle! Goodbye to my mother’s family, disappearing now like all the rest! Goodbye, my cousin of old—you who still love me as you loved me when we listened together to our great-aunt Boisteilleul sing about “the sparrow hawk,” or when you were there in the Abbey of Nazareth to see the lifting of my nurse’s vow! If you outlive me, please accept the share of gratitude and affection I bequeath you here. Do not believe the false smile forming on my lips as I speak of you. My eyes, I assure you, are filled with tears.