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

TH HE existence of the Memoirs of the Duchesse de Gontaut has long been one of the open secrets of French society. Copies of her manuscripts have circulated from time to time. in the hands of her friends, and quite lately the industrious M. Imbert de Saint-Amand was allowed access to a document really indispensable for the historian of the Duchesse de Berry. The extracts published by him served but to whet the appetite of all who had not been able to judge of Madame de Gontaut for themselves, and the publication of her book has given great pleasure. It has done so in France, in a country rich beyond others in this delightful form of literature, in family papers and historical documents of the deepest interest. Nor will the book be without attraction for English readers. Notices are to be found in it of the Duke of Wellington, of Mr. Pitt, of the Duke of Portland, and of the families of Villiers and Greville; 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 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.

Madame de Gontaut has been dead for many years, and dead, too, are all the personages of the first rank in that gigantic drama with which the eighteenth century closed. After their passion and their day dreams, their fever and

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their chills, they all sleep well. But it is a truism to declare that total extinction does not come with the actual closing of a coffin-lid. Not only do the good and the evil deeds of a man live after him, but his personality does not perish at the moment of his funeral. Death has still something left to destroy. In truth, we die many times. The old-world imprecation, Let his memory perish,' expresses admirably the fact that a secondary existence is generally secured to us through the faithfulness of other men's recollection. So long as any child survives to mourn for us, so long as our name can evoke a distinct image in any human mind, so long as anyone can recognise our portrait, our handwriting, or our tour de phrase, we have not absolutely left the world. Obliteration only comes with the passing away of our generation, and it is the coming in of the new generation that inevitably and remorselessly 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 Marquis 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 propose to review at some length the autobiography of the Duchesse de Gontaut.

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There is a rage in France at the present moment for the inédit, and no other literature can compare with that of France in the number of documents which are yearly exhumed for the benefit of the public. This appetite is a feature in French society. Does it take its rise in the realistic taste of the present school of art, or is it a form of regret for 'the grace of a day' that is not only dead,' but that can 'never come back' either to Paris or to history ? Are these books merely monuments to the extinct noblesse of the eighteenth century and to the soldiers of the Grande Armée, or do the documentary records of the past become more attractive in proportion to the nausea produced by the incessant and kaleidoscopic succession of new things? It is certain that the hurry and triviality of our fin de siècle prevent the completion of any literary work of sufficient merit to stand the test of time, and that in the absence 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.

Commenced in 1853, this record of a useful and chequered life was originally drawn up for the benefit of one of the grandchildren of the Duchesse de Gontaut, the Comtesse Georges Esterhazy (née Louise de Chabot), and it is evident from the date, as well as from the pretty and affectionate dedication, that the gouvernante des Enfants de France did not commence to write her memoirs until she was quite an old woman. It must have been a laborious task, for the writer was not only eighty years of age, but she had also some infirmities. Eyes that had grown dim in watching for any pilot stars in the murky heaven of French politics might well, after fourscore years, refuse to do her bidding, and her hand having grown tired, she was obliged to employ an amanuensis. But apart from any mere question of fatigue, how sad must have been the memories evoked! Living to such a ripe old age, the autobiographer had survived her parents, her husband, and her eldest daughter, the beautiful Duchesse de Rohan. Those losses befell her, so to speak, in the course of nature, but during the period when the barbarities of the Jacobins turned France into one vast prison, both Madame de Gontaut and her husband lost relations by the guillotine. Then in the royal family she had seen the deaths by violence of the Princesse de Lamballe, of Louis XVI., of Marie Antoinette, of Madame Elisabeth, of Louis XVII., of the Duc d'Orléans, of the Duc d'Enghien, of the Duc de Berry, and of the Duc de Bourbon. As her ties to the Court were even from early childhood of the closest description, she felt all those shocks acutely. Her father, one of the menins 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 in friendly eyes. He was sure of the fidelity of Madame de Gontaut, and in due time he appointed her as governess to the infant daughter of the Duc de Berry. Another pupil in the person of the Duc de Bordeaux was

afterwards confided to her, and to the posthumous son of that murdered sire she vowed an unalterable attachment. From the hours of his birth and of his baptism her post at his side was full of danger. It may be argued that, difficult as it was, it was rendered needlessly so by the exploits of the Duchesse de Berry, and that it could not bear comparison with the tragically onerous duties of the Duchesse de Tourzel. It is true that there never was in the case of Henri V. any arrested flight to Varennes, to be followed by months in a prison which was but an anteroom to the grave. Nor was there during the girlhood of Mademoiselle any incarceration in the Temple to cast a shadow over a lifetime. But when Charles X. lost his throne, and by his abdication at Rambouillet bequeathed his rights to the Duc de Bordeaux, the child became, by that very act, a homeless and proscribed pretender to the crown of France. Then for Madame de Gontaut herself there were years of exile, steep stairs to be climbed in foreign countries, in sunless Holyrood and joyless Kirchberg, in the stately Hradschin and in the shabbier exile of Goritz. Saddest part of all, there was bitter bread to be eaten at scantily furnished tables, where the monotony of the ceremonial was broken only by the quarrels of those courtiers whose self-love and rivalries had managed to survive the power for which they once scrambled. Those unfortunate fugitives, all persons of honourable birth and training, all exiles from the same country, who ought to have been united by their equality of privations as well as by their absolute devotion to a lost cause, dragged over Europe, along with the ruins of a royal race, a phantom court, and in that court all the jealousies which ought to be reserved as a scourge for princes in prosperity. Needless to say that in such contests it is the old, the intelligent, and the devoted servants who have to give place, and so, after four years of service in exile, and after having finished the education of Mademoiselle, the gouvernante des Enfants de France abandoned the post which she had filled with much labour and self-denial.

To write an account of such a career, of such advancements and such losses, to describe both triumphal entries and hurried flights, and to place on her canvas so many royal persons at once sinned against and sinning, required a firm hand. The writer in such a case generally starts by declaring himself or herself to be without partiality, but the least trustworthy autobiographers are assuredly those who, like Madame de Genlis and the Duchesse d'Abrantès,

'protest too much.' Their asseverations only serve to throw into higher relief the sympathies of the one with the Orleanist party, and of the other with the Imperial régime. Madame de Gontaut lays no claim to overmoderation. Her birth and her relationships, like her ways of thinking, were all those of the Bourbon court, and she probably was shrewd enough to guess that by la noblesse vilaine, that new aristocracy which Napoleon created, she never could be loved. She had to bear calumny as well as sorrows, and both were sad themes for the pen of an old woman of eighty; but, fortunately for herself and for her daughters, this woman always had what the French describe as le cœur haut placé-a heart in the right place. Neither danger, nor injustice, nor grief could long prey upon her. She possessed one of those healthy and exceptionally endowed organisations in which wounds do not fester but heal, where gratitude and good sense help to retune the shattered nerves; and it may be inferred that her motives must have been pure, since she was able to make light of all personal losses. Enemies a woman so distinguished at court was certain to have, but she seems not to have made them by intrigues, and for those who offended her she knew how to make charitable allowance for their conduct. Writing as she did for her grandchildren, it stands to reason that she should ignore that the Duchesse d'Abrantès first sought to give an odious colour to her friendship with Charles X., and then, after the King's morality was above suspicion, stigmatised her as a bégueule. Perhaps, too, the warmhearted Frenchwoman never was aware how slander, having crossed the Channel, found an historian in the late Mr. Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. He disliked her cordially. Well acquainted with her during both her visits to Holyrood, he often expressed his astonishment at her popularity, and still more at her influence with Charles X., who, he said, was likely to take as his second wife the governess of the royal children. Even if aware of this rumour, Madame de Gontaut could, in her old age, afford to smile at it. She knew the spirit of envy that generally animates a court, and she had long lived in an atmosphere where liaisons existed. Some of those she had seen were of the most daringly immoral nature, and others were but phases of that amitié décente by which the luckless and ill-mated émigrés strove to give themselves an illusion of conjugal happiness. It was the fashion of the day for political enemies to bring the darkest accusations against each other, and to throw fire