he, when a broken old man, make his accustomed visit to her modest apartments in the Convent of St. Joseph, and give vent to his melancholy and morbid feelings.  He regarded himself as the most injured man in France.  He became discontented with the Crown, 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 was attached to its members.  He himself had discovered the virtues and disinterestedness of his minister Decazes, and when his family and ministers drove away this favorite, the king was devoted to him even in disgrace, and made him his companion.  Still later he found