and even with the
aristocracy. On the day of his retirement from the ministry the
intelligence of the Royalist party followed him in opposition to the
government, whose faults he had encouraged and shared. The "Journal des
Debats," the most influential newspaper in France, deserted Villele; and
from this defection may be dated, says Lamartine, "all those enmities
against the government of the Restoration which collected in one work of
aggression the most contradictory ideas, which alienated public opinion,
which exasperated the government and pushed it on from excesses to
insanity, irritated the tribune, blindfolded the elections, and finished
by changing, five years afterward, the opposition of nineteen votes
hostile to the Bourbons into a heterogeneous but formidable majority, in
presence of which the monarchy had only the choice left between a
humiliating resignation and a mortal _coup d'etat_."

Chateaubriand now disappears from the field of history as one of its
great figures. He lived henceforth in retirement, but bitter in his
opposition to the government of which he had been the virtual head,
contributing largely to the "Journal des Debats," of which he was the
life, and by which he was supported. In the next reign he refused the
office of Minister of Public Instruction as derogatory to his dignity,
but accepted the post of ambassador to Rome,--a sort of honorable exile.
But he was an unhappy and disappointed man; he had taken the wrong side
in politics, and probably saw his errors. His genius, if it had been
directed to secure constitutional liberty, would have made him a
national idol, for he lived to see the dethronement of Louis Philippe in
1848; but like Castlereagh in England, he threw his superb talents in
with the sinking cause of absolutism, and was after all a political
failure. He lives only as a literary man,--one of the most eloquent
poets of his day, one of the lights of that splendid constellation of
literary geniuses that arose on the fall of Napoleon.

Soon after the retirement of Chateaubriand, Louis XVIII. himself died,
at an advanced age, having contrived to preserve his throne by
moderation and honesty. In his latter days he was exceedingly infirm in
body, but preserved his intellectual faculties to the last. He was a
lonely old man, even while surrounded by a splendid court. He wanted
somebody to love, at least to cheer him in his isolation; for he had no
peace in his family, deeply as he