I did not finish telling all that concerns Charlotte in the preceding pages of these Memoirs: she came with a part of her family to see me in France,çoisRené when I was a minister, in 1823. Through one of those inexplicable miseries of mankind, preoccupied as I was with a war on which depended the fate of the French Monarchy, something must no doubt have been lacking in my voice, for Charlotte, returning to England, left me a letter in which she shows herself hurt at the coldness of my reception. I have dared neither to write to her nor to send back to her some literary fragments which she had restored to me and which I had promised to return to her augmented. If it were true that she had had a genuine reason to complain, I would fling into the fire all that I have told of my first sojourn across the sea.
Often the thought has come to me to go to solve my doubts; but could I return to England, I, who am weak enough not to dare to visit the paternal rock on which I have marked out my tomb? I am afraid nowadays of my sensations: time, removing my young years, has made me like those soldiers whose limbs have been left on the battle-field; my blood, having a less long road to travel, rushes into my heart with so rapid a flow that that old organ of my joys and sorrows throbs as though ready to burst. The wish to burn all that concerns Charlotte, although she is treated with religious respect, is mingled in my mind with the longing to destroy these Memoirs: if they still belonged to me, or if I could buy them back, I should succumb to the temptation. I have so great a distaste for everything, so great a contempt for the present and for the immediate future, so firm a conviction that men, henceforth, taken all together as a public (and that for several centuries), will be pitiable, that I blush to consume my last moments in the relating of past things, in the depicting of a finished world, of which the language and the name will no more be understood.
Man is as much deceived by the success of his wishes as by their disappointment: I had desired, contrary to my natural instinct, to go to the Congress; taking advantage of a prejudice of M. de Villèle's, I had induced him to force M. de Montmorency's hand. Well, my real inclination was not for that which I had obtained; I should doubtless have felt some spite, if I had been compelled to remain in England; but soon the idea of going to see Lady Sutton, of making a journey through the three kingdoms would have mastered the impulse of a superadded ambition which is not inherent in my nature. God ordained differently, and I left for Verona: thence the change in my life, thence my ministry, the Spanish War, my triumph, my fall, soon followed by that of the Monarchy.