"Adieu,çoisRené monsieur le vicomte: if the relations which I have had the good fortune to have with you have been able to give you a correct idea of my character, you must know that it is not changes of position that can alter my sentiments, nor will you ever doubt the attachment and devotion of one who, in the actual circumstances, considers himself the most fortunate of men to be placed by public opinion among the number of your friends.
"Messieurs de Fontenay[238] and de Pontcarré[239] are keenly alive to the value of the remembrance in which you are good enough to bear them: witnesses, like myself, of the increase of consideration which France had gained since your entrance into the ministry, it is quite simple that they should share my sentiments and my regrets."
I began the contest of my new opposition immediately after my fall; but it was interrupted by the death of Louis XVIII.[240] and was not actively resumed until after the coronation of Charles X.[241] In the month of July, I joined Madame de Chateaubriand at Neuchâtel; she had gone there to wait for me, and had hired a cottage beside the lake. The chain of the Alps unfolded itself north and south to a great distance before us; we had our backs to the Jura, whose flanks, black with pine-trees, rose perpendicularly over our heads. The lake was deserted; a wooden gallery served me as an exercise-ground. I thought of _Milord Maréchal._[242] When I climbed to the top of the Jura, I saw the Lake of Bienne, to whose breezes and waters Jean Jacques Rousseau owes one of his happiest inspirations. Madame de Chateaubriand went to visit Fribourg and a country-house which they had described to us as charming, and which she found icy-cold, although it was called the _Petite Provence._ A lean black cat, half wild, which caught little fish by dipping its paw into a large pail filled with water from the lake, was my only distraction. A quiet old woman, who was always knitting, prepared our banquet in an _huguenote._[243] had not lost the habit of the collation of the country-mouse.
Neuchâtel had had its good days; it had belonged to the Duchesse de Longueville[244]; Jean Jacques Rousseau had walked in an Armenian dress on its mountains, and Madame de Charrière[245], so daintily observed by M. de Sainte-Beuve[246], had described its society in the _Lettres Neuchâteloises_; but Juliane, Mademoiselle de La Prise, Henri Meyer[247] were no longer there; I saw only poor Fauche-Borel[248], of the old Emigration; he threw himself soon after from his window. The kept gardens of M. de Pourtalès[249] charmed me no more than did an English rockery raised by man's hands in a neighbouring vineyard facing the Jura. Berthier, last Prince of Neuchâtel, in the name of Bonaparte, was forgotten, in spite of his little Simplon of the Val-de-Travers, and although he smashed his skull in the same way as Fauche-Borel.