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What consoles me is that the statue of the future will issue from it. It required such a brazier to melt such a bronze. July 5, 1848. Chateaubriand is dead. One of the splendours of this century has passed away. He was seventy-nine years old according to his own reckoning; according to the calculation of his old friend M. Bertin, senior, he was eighty years of age.
Hereward and his men, for their part, were not inclined to deny the theory. That they had miraculously escaped, from the accident of the tide being high, they knew full well; and that St. Bertin should have done them the service was probable enough. He, of course, was lord and master in his own country, and very probably a few miles out to sea likewise.
"No; I should like better to have it this very evening, so that I may admire it while I am going to bed," said Musadieu. Nothing could keep him, and Olivier Bertin found himself again alone in his house, that prison of his memories and his painful agitation.
"Oh, how lovely they are!" exclaimed Annette; "who can have sent them?" "Olivier Bertin, no doubt," replied her mother. She had been thinking of him since his departure.
Through continually meeting, the two men, becoming accustomed to each other, finally became excellent friends. When Bertin entered, on Friday evening, the house of his friend, where he was to dine in honor of the return of Antoinette de Guilleroy, he found in the little Louis XV salon only Monsieur de Musadieu, who had just arrived.
Their long evening talks, the tender confidences, the discussions, the dreams ... for in those days Bertin too was a dreamer, and even his common-sense, his precocious irony did not protect him from impossible hopes and generous schemes for the renovation of the human race. How fair the future had appeared to their youthful eyes!
She walked slowly, chatting to Bertin, giving him her reflections on the children, the nurses, and the mothers. The larger children drew from her little exclamations of joy, while the little pale ones touched her sympathy.
In earnest labor, in unrelieved care and business, the queen's days now passed; she sang, she laughed no more; dress had no longer charms for her; she had no more conferences with Mademoiselle Bertin, her milliner; her hairdresser, M. Leonard, had no more calls upon his genius for new coiffures for her fair hair; a simple, dark dress, that was the toilet of the queen, a lace handkerchief round the neck, and a feather was her only head-dress.
At once the regiment was on horse, sabres in their hands. The sentinels by the river and the string of horsemen stretched across the plain passed from man to man, in low voices, the orders to come back. Two of the boldest sous-officiers, Prud'homme and Graft, went with Lieutenant Bertin to see what the enemy was doing.
One evening, while I was reading, she was informed that M. Bertin, 'ministre des parties casuelles', desired to speak with her; she went out abruptly, returned, resumed her silks and embroidery, and made me resume my book; when I retired she commanded me to be in her closet the next morning at eleven o'clock.
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