278 M. DE CHATEAUBRIAND. 



When he was nominated a member of the Institute, in 1811, he 

 made himself amends for the praise that he had thought fit to bestow 

 on Napoleon, by making a very violent attack on the memory of his 

 predecessor, Joseph Chenier.* At the birth of the king of Rome, in 

 the same year, he saluted, by a panegyric address, " le berceau 

 charge des destinees de I'avenir.' 1 At length the restoration of 1814 

 drew the courtier poet from his false position; he threw himself 

 a corps perdu into legitimacy, and he was in all places and un- 

 ceasingly the panegyrist par excellence of the Bourbons and their 

 cause. He discharged against the usurper (who by the way was very 

 far from, after having heroically handled the pike, wrapping himself 

 nobly in the purple) all the thunders of his eloquent philippics. 



On Bonaparte's return from Elba, in 1815, he fled to Ghent 

 with Louis XVIII., and was there minister to a king without a king- 

 dom. In the midst of these important diplomatic avocations some 

 booksellers at Ghent insulted him most infamously, by reminding 

 him that he was an author, and that too of the first class in his own 

 country. His answer was very different from that of a certain illus- 

 trious painter, sent as ambassador, who acted the diplomatist for 

 amusement, whilst painting formed his occupation. It was as fol- 

 lows : " That he was the minister of his king, and forgot that for- 

 merly he had written something as a sort of recreation.'' On his re- 

 entrance into France in July 1815 with the Bourbons, he was so incon- 

 ceivably weak as to seek to justify the political massacres made in the 

 south, particularly at Nismes and at Paris, in the name of the clemency 

 of" the charitable children of St. Louis." This condescension secured 

 to him the title of Peer of France in addition to the honour of being the 

 king's minister. Nevertheless, in 1816, he had the hardiesse to admit 

 into his work, " De la Monarchic selon la Charte," some propositions 

 which, not being deemed orthodox by his legitimate master, involved 

 him in complete disgrace. The Faubourg St. Germain were in- 

 dignant at it, and Chateaubriand in vexation hid himself in retreat, 

 hoping by this act to alter the movements of that great and newly re- 

 stored monarchical machine of which he believed himself to be the 

 main spring. As the case proved eventually to be otherwise, he wrote 

 again; and, in June 1818, he quarrelled with the Times newspaper, 

 then the organ of the liberal party, and in this dispute he received a 

 formal dementi, the injustice of which, notwithstanding all his elo- 

 quence, he could never satisfactorily prove. Under the influence of 

 the stinging blow that had so recently been dealt to him by the English 

 press, he began to attack the press of his own country. These lances 

 broken against the latter in favour of the lots d" 1 exceptions, which 

 were destroying it, contributed more than his biography of the unfor- 

 tunate Due de Berry to his restoration to court favour. 



* Joseph Chenier was a celebrated revolutionary poet. Chateaubriand imagined, 

 as was long generally believed in France, though without foundation, that he caused 

 the death of his brother, Andre Chenier, a celebrated elegiac poet, by not employing 

 his favourable influence with Robespierre ; but it is now known that he refrained only 

 in the hope that the republican tiger, before whom it was impossible to speak in favour 

 of a living being without being put to death, would forget his interesting victim on the 

 eve of the very day that was to witness the fall of the tyrant. 



