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From The Edinburgh Review.

MEMOIRS OF MADAME DE GONTAUT.1

longer would have been to run the risk of a chilly welcome for a book of which the interest is personal as well as historical.

THE existence of the memoirs of the Duchesse de Gontaut has long been one of the open secrets of French soci- Madame de Gontaut has been dead ety. Copies of her manuscripts have for many years, and dead, too, are all the circulated from time to time in the hands personages of the first rank in that giganof her friends, and quite lately the in- tic drama with which the eighteenth dustrious M. Imbert de Saint-Amand century closed. After their passion and was allowed access to a document really their day dreams, their fever and their indispensable for the historian of the chills, they all sleep well. But it is a Duchesse de Berry. The extracts pub- truism to declare that total extinction lished by him served but to whet the does not come with the actual closing of appetite of all who had not been able to a coffin-lid. Not only do the good and judge of Madame de Gontaut for them- the evil deeds of a man live after him, selves, and the publication of her book but his personality does not perish at has given great pleasure. It has done the moment of his funeral. Death has so in France, in a country rich beyond still something left to destroy. In truth, others in this delightful form of litera- we die many times. The old-world imture, in family papers and historical precation, "Let his memory perish," documents of the deepest interest. Nor expresses admirably the fact that a will the book be without attraction for secondary existence is generally secured English readers. Notices are to be to us through the faithfulness of other found in it of the Duke of Wellington, men's recollection. So long as any child of Mr. Pitt, of the Duke of Portland, survives to mourn for us, so long as our and of the families of Villiers and Gre-name can evoke a distinct image in any ville; while the writer twice spent some months in Edinburgh, and in the society of which Sir Walter Scott and Mr. Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe have left such attractive records.

We think the present moment well timed for the appearance of this charming autobiography. The manuscript is the joint property of the Duc de Rohan and of the Comte de Bourbon-Busset, who represent the families of the two daughters of the Duchesse de Gontaut. It is on their joint action, and with their permission, that the book now sees the light. To have published it sooner that is to say, so long as Henri V. lived, as any hope of "fusion" between the two branches of the royal house of France mocked loyal eyes with a perpetual mirage, might have been injudicious. It could but have served to widen the breach between the Legitimist party, designated by its enemies as les blancs d'Espagne, and the supporters of the Orleans dynasty. On the other hand, to have delayed its appearance much

1 Mémoires de Madame la Duchesse de Gontaut, Gouvernante des Enfants de France pendant la Restauration. 1773-1836. 8vo. Paris: 1892.

human mind, so long as any one can
recognize our portrait, our handwriting,
or our tour de phrase, we have not abso-
lutely left the world. Obliteration only
comes with the passing away of our gen-
eration, and it is the coming in of the
new generation that inevitably and re-
morselessly brings about the last of our
successive and partial annihilations.

|
Now annihilation is not yet by any
means the case with the Duchesse de
Gontaut. Both her daughters have left
descendants bearing the proudest names
in France and Austria, and they are
glad to remember her worth. Packets
of her letters are preserved, not only in
French but in English charter-rooms
(as, for example, in the case of the Mar-
quis of Bristol, at Ickworth), while in
all the country houses round Edinburgh
legends still linger about the governess
of Henri V. For these reasons we pro-
pose to review at some length the auto-
biography of the Duchesse de Gontaut.

There is a rage in France at the present moment for the inédit, and no other France in the number of documents literature can compare with that of which are yearly exhumed for the ben

efit of the public. This appetite is a fea- | survived her parents, her husband, and ture in French society. Does it take its her eldest daughter, the beautiful Durise in the realistic taste of the present chesse de Rohan. Those losses befell school of art, or is it a form of regret for her, so to speak, in the course of nature, "the grace of a day" that is not only but during the period when the barbar"dead," but that "can never come ities of the Jacobins turned France into back" either to Paris or to history? one vast prison, both Madame de GonAre these books merely monuments to taut and her husband lost relations by the extinct noblesse of the eighteenth the guillotine. Then in the royal famcentury and to the soldiers of the Grande | ily she had seen the deaths by violence Armée, or do the documentary records of the Princesse de Lamballe, of Louis of the past become more attractive in XVI., of Marie Antoinette, of Madame proportion to the nausea produced by Elisabeth, of Louis XVII., of the Duc the incessant and kaleidoscopic succes-d'Orléans, of the Duc d'Enghien, of the sion of new things? It is certain that Duc de Berry, and of the Duc de Bourthe hurry and triviality of our fin de bon. As her ties to the court were even siècle prevent the completion of any lit- from early childhood of the closest deerary work of sufficient merit to stand scription, she felt all those shocks the test of time, and that in the absence acutely. Her father, one of the menins of original matter the public are glad to ransack old papers. We think that some of the matter which in Paris is yearly regilt to please this craving hardly deserves preservation; but here, at least, we have a book which more than justifies publication—a book so impregnated with the temper and the loyal prejudices of the writer that it leaves on our minds a pleasing impression of unity which cannot be obtained by any known process of book-making.

of Louis XVI., was brought up along with the king and his brothers. She was herself the godchild of the Comte de Provence; her fortune was in girlhood sacrificed to pay for the flight to Varennes, and when, at the Restoration, she left her mother and one of her daughters in England, and returned to Paris with the king, she did so at his command.

In the sudden joy of his restoration Louis XVIII. needed to see it reflected Commenced in 1853, this record of a in friendly eyes. He was sure of the useful and chequered life was originally fidelity of Madame de Gontaut, and in drawn up for the benefit of one of the due time he appointed her as governess grandchildren of the Duchesse de Gon- to the infant daughter of the Duc de taut, the Comtesse Georges Esterhazy Berry. Another pupil in the person of (née Louise de Chabot), and it is evident the Duc de Bordeaux was afterwards from the date, as well as from the pretty confided to her, and to the posthumous and affectionate dedication, that the son of that murdered sire she vowed an gouvernante des Enfants de France did unalterable attachment. From the hours not commence to write her memoirs of his birth and of his baptism her post until she was quite an old woman. It at his side was full of danger. It may must have been a laborious task, for the be argued that, difficult as it was, it was writer was not only eighty years of age, rendered needlessly so by the exploits but she had also some infirmities. Eyes of the Duchesse de Berry, and that it that had grown dim in watching for any could not bear comparison with the pilot stars in the murky heaven of tragically onerous duties of the DuFrench politics might well, after four- chesse de Tourzel. It is true that there score years, refuse to do her bidding, never was in the case of Henri V. any and her hand having grown tired, she arrested flight to Varennes, to be folwas obliged to employ an amanuensis. lowed by months in a prison which was But apart from any mere question of but an anteroom to the grave. Nor fatigue, how sad must have been the was there during the girlhood of Madememories evoked! Living to such a moiselle any incarceration in the Temripe old age, the autobiographer had ple to cast a shadow over a lifetime.

But when Charles X. lost his throne, | Gontaut lays no claim to over-moderaand by his abdication at Rambouillet tion. Her birth and her relationships, bequeathed his rights to the Duc de like her ways of thinking, were all Bordeaux, the child became, by that those of the Bourbon court, and she very act, a homeless and proscribed pre- probably was shrewd enough to guess tender to the crown of France. Then that by le noblesse vilaine, that new arisfor Madame de Gontaut herself there tocracy which Napoleon created, she were years of exile, steep stairs to be never could be loved. She had to bear climbed in foreign countries, in sunless calumny as well as sorrows, and both Holyrood and joyless Kirchberg, in the were sad themes for the pen of an old stately Hradschin and in the shabbier woman of eighty; but, fortunately for exile of Goritz. Saddest part of all, herself and for her daughters, this there was bitter bread to be eaten at woman always had what the French scantily furnished tables, where the describe as la cœur haut placé - a heart monotony of the ceremonial was broken in the right place. Neither danger, nor only by the quarrels of those courtiers injustice, nor grief could long prey upon whose self-love and rivalries had man- her. She possessed one of those healthy aged to survive the power for which and exceptionally endowed organizathey once scrambled. Those unfortu- tions in which wounds do not fester but nate fugitives, all persons of honorable heal, where gratitude and good sense birth and training, all exiles from the help to retune the shattered nerves; same country, who ought to have been and it may be inferred that her motives united by their equality of privations as must have been pure, since she was able well as by their absolute devotion to a to make light of all personal losses. lost cause, dragged over Europe, along Enemies a woman so distinguished at with the ruins of a royal race, a phan-court was certain to have, but she seems tom court, and in that court all the jeal- not to have made them by intrigues, ousies which ought to be reserved as and for those who offended her she a scourge for princes in prosperity. knew how to make charitable allowance Needless to say that in such contests it for their conduct. Writing as she did is the old, the intelligent, and the de- for her grandchildren, it stands to reavoted servants who have to give place, son that she should ignore that the and so, after four years of service in Duchesse d'Abrantès first sought to exile, and after having finished the edu- give an odious color to her friendship cation of Mademoiselle, the gouvernante with Charles X., and then, after the des Enfants de France abandoned the king's morality was above suspicion, post which she had filled with much stigmatized her as a bégueule. Perhaps, labor and self-denial. too, the warm-hearted Frenchwoman To write an account of such a career, never was aware how slander, having of such advancements and such losses, crossed the Channel, found an historian to describe both triumphal entries and in the late Mr. Charles Kirkpatrick hurried flights, and to place on her can- Sharpe. He disliked her cordially. vas so many royal persons at once sinned Well acquainted with her during both against and sinning, required a firm her visits to Holyrood, he often exhand. The writer in such a case gener-pressed his astonishment at her popually starts by declaring himself or her- larity, and still more at her influence self to be without partiality, but the with Charles X., who, he said, was least trustworthy autobiographers are likely to take as his second wife the assuredly those who, like Madame de governess of the royal children. Even Genlis and the Duchesse d'Abrantès, if aware of this rumor, Madame de Gon"protest too much." Their assevera- taut could, in her old age, afford to tions only serve to throw into higher smile at it. She knew the spirit of relief the sympathies of the one with the Orleanist party, and of the other with the imperial régime. Madame de

envy that generally animates a court, and she had long lived in an atmosphere where liaisons existed. Some of