The De Maistres belonged to the _haute noblesse_ de Savoy. Count Xavier, as well as his brothers, became an exile during the first French Revolution. He went to Russia, where he married. After an absence of twenty-five years he returned to his own country.
Lamartine addressed him one of his _Harmonies Poëtiques_ after his return, saluting him thus:
“Voyageur fatigué qui reviens sur nos plages Demander à tes champs leurs antiques ombrages, A ton cœur ses premiers amours!”
He also calls Count Xavier the Sterne of Savoy, but without his affectation, and declares him equal to Rousseau, but without his declamatory style. “He is a familiar _genie_, a fireside talker, a cricket chirping on the rural hearth.”
The writings of Xavier de Maistre were among the favorite volumes that composed Eugénie de Guérin’s library, and we can imagine a certain sympathy in their intellectual natures. The _Lépreux_ in particular appealed to her sympathetic nature, and the thought of meeting its author filled her with delight. When this meeting took place at Paris, Count Xavier had just lost his children, and was so depressed in consequence that it was not equal to her expectations.
But Lamartine speaks of seeing him a few years after, and describes him as “an old man of fourscore years, gracious in manner, and with no signs of decay of body or feebleness of mind. Airiness of sentiment, a mild sensibility, a half-serious, half-indulgent smile at human affairs, a tolerance--the result of his intelligence--of all human opinions: such was the man.
“His sonorous voice had a far-off sound like an echo of the past, and was well adapted to the reminiscenses of his previous life, which he loved to tell.
“His _Leper of the City of Aosta_ is, in the literature of the heart, equal to Paul and Virginia; the _Journey around my Room_ is only a pleasantry. The _Leper_ is a tear, but a tear that flows for ever!”
Lamartine, in his _Confidences_, gives a pleasing picture of the De Maistre family, and likens a summer passed among its illustrious members in Savoy to the conversations of Boccaccio at his country-seat near Florence. They used to assemble beneath a clump of pines at the foot of Mont du Chat, overlooking the Arcadian valley of Chambery, so redolent of St. Francis de Sales, another genius not less poetical, and with no less delicacy of sentiment, but loftier than Xavier de Maistre; and sometimes they came together on a terrace over-arched by vine-hung elms before the Château de Servolex, the residence of Madame de Vigny, De Maistre’s sister.