de Chateaubriand read a
historic fragment. It was the first time since leaving the
ministry that the celebrated writer had appeared in public, and he
chose to do so to adorn the triumph of him whose rival he had
been.
The Duke Mathieu de Montmorency died six months before he was to
enter upon his functions as governor to the Duke of Bordeaux. It
was Good Friday of the year 1826, at three o'clock in the
afternoon. Before the tomb in the Church of Saint Thomas Aquinas,
his parish, the Duke was praying like a saint, when suddenly he
was seen to waver, and then to fall. Those near him ran to him,
raised him; he was dead. The news had hardly spread when the
church was filled with a crowd of poor people, who wept hot tears
over the loss of their benefactor. On the morrow the Duchess of
Broglie wrote to Madame REcamier, for whom the deceased had had an
almost mystic tenderness:--
"Holy Saturday. Oh, my God! my God! dear friend, what an event! I
think of you with anguish. All the past comes up before me. I
thought I could see the grief of my poor mother, and I think of
yours, my dear friend, which must be terrible. But what a
beautiful death! Thus he would have chosen it--the place, the day,
the hour! The hand of God, of that saviour God, whose sacrifice he
was celebrating, is here!"
Father Macarthy said, in a sermon preached in the Chapel of the
Tuileries:--
"Happy he, O God, who comes before Thy altar, on the day of Thy
death, at the very hour when Thou didst expire for the salvation
of the world, to breathe out his soul at Thy feet, and be laid in
Thy tomb!"
Lastly, the Duke de Laval-Montmorency wrote to Madame Recamier:--
"I say it to you, my dear friend, I avow it without false modesty,
I never have had any merit or any honor in life, save from action
in common with my angelic friend.
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