From this period Lamartine spent much of his time abroad. He never forgot that he was a citizen of France, but he entertained a strong dislike for the Orleans dynasty. Yet his mother had been educated in the family with the King, and this somewhat increased his perplexity.
He writes of her death pathetically, as the saddest event of his life. He had been loved and cherished by her with a devotion made sublime by its absolute self-abnegation. His first lessons in books and knowledge had been given by her, and he was endowed personally with her most prominent characteristics. She had seemed to know instinctively when and why he suffered, and she possessed a power of divination to foresee his career. Her death, the result of a terrible accident, was to him like the rending violently away of a vital part of his body.
“I hardly thought that I could survive the shock,” he wrote in the _Souvenirs_. “I was absent from home when the accident occurred which cut short her days. I came back in haste, arriving in time to follow the coffin in which her remains were enshrouded, to the cemetery of the village where we had lived during our infancy.”
The weather was bitterly cold, but this he did not feel. He returned to the house at Milly, now empty for the winter and a thousand times more empty since she who had given it life and soul was sleeping the eternal sleep. Overcome by his grief, he made his way to the little room where the papers of the family were kept, and threw himself down on the floor. There he lay for hours in an ecstasy of woe. The moaning of the wind and the ticking of the clock seemed to be repeating the funeral hymn.
One desire that the mother of Lamartine had instilled into him was that of visiting the East. As she read to him, a boy of eight years, from the Bible about the places where wonderful events had taken place, he resolved that he would some time behold them with his own eyes. Now that he was disengaged from public life there was an opportunity. There was much, however, to persuade him to remain at home; his father and sisters, and besides, he had a beautiful residence at Saint-Point with a wife and daughter to whom he was fondly attached. But he felt that imagination had likewise its necessities and passions.