[Footnote 487: Lieutenant-General Robert Baron Fagel (1771-1856),çoisRené Netherlands Envoy to the several Courts of France from 1814 to 1854.--T.]
[Footnote 488: DUCHESSE D'ABRANTÈS, _Histoire des Salons de Paris. Tableaux et portraits du grande monde, sous Louis XVI., le Directoire, le Consulat et l'Empire, la Restauration et le règne de Louis-Philippe Ier,_ Vol. VII.--B.]
[Footnote 489: Ex-Lieutenant (not Captain) Roger had taken part with Caron in the Colmar plot. He was condemned to death on the 23rd of February 1823. The penalty was commuted to one of twenty years' penal servitude. He was sent to the convict prison at Toulon and obtained a full pardon at the end of two years.--B.]
[Footnote 490: Lieutenant-Colonel Augustin Joseph Caron (1774-1822), the ringleader of the plot, was sentenced to death, in September 1822, and executed before the Court of Cassation had rejected his appeal.--T.]
[Footnote 491: Gustavus II. Adolphus King of Sweden (1594-1632), the great antagonist of Austria, at that time France's foremost rival.--T.]
[Footnote 492: _Purg._, Canto VIII., 6.--T.]
[Footnote 493: Daniel Steibelt (1765-1823), a Prussian pianist and composer, came to Paris in 1790. His _Romeo and Juliet_ was performed at the Théâtre de l'Opera-Comique National on the 10th of September 1793, in the midst of the Terror.--B.]
THE CONGRESS OF VERONA AND THE SPANISH WAR
The Memoirs present a voluntary and compulsory gap. Nothing is said of the twenty months (October 1822 to June 1824) during which Chateaubriand was, first, French Ambassador at the Congress of Verona and, later, Minister of Foreign Affairs in Paris; nothing of the Spanish War, which was nevertheless his work. Certainly he had no intention of placing in the shade the very events to which the honour of his name as a statesman is attached. He wished, on the contrary, to speak of them at his ease. Of all the various periods of his life, it is this which assumed the greatest development under his pen: a development so great that this narrative at first formed four volumes, reduced later to two, under circumstances which I will presently relate. Those two volumes in reality form an integral portion of the Mémoires d'Outre-tombe. That they do not figure there is due to the fact that the author feared, by giving them a place in his Memoirs, to disturb the fine ordering of his book, in which the proportions are so well preserved, in which all the parts of the work harmonize among themselves with an art so perfect. For this reason, and also in order publicly to revenge the Restoration for the calumnies of which it was then the daily object, he decided, in 1838, to publish as a separate work all that he had written on the Congress of Verona and the Spanish War.