embroil us with Europe.
"'The Duc d'Orléans is a Prince devoted to the cause of the
Revolution.
"'The Duc d'Orléans has never fought against us.
"'The Duc d'Orléans was at Jemmapes.
"'The Duc d'Orléans has worn the national colours, the Duc
d'Orléans alone can wear them still.
"'The Duc d'Orléans has declared himself: he accepts the Charter as
we have always desired and understood it.
"'He will hold his crown at the hands of the French People.'
"This last phrase was immediately modified as follows on a second
placard:
"'The Duc d'Orléans makes no declaration: he awaits our will; let
us proclaim that will: he will accept the Charter as we have always
desired and understood it.'"
The Duc de Broglie adds:
"Whence did these placards proceed? We know to-day that they were
the work of Messieurs Thiers and Mignet, and that Paulin the
bookseller, strong in the support of his friends, gave attention to
the printing and the posting. Was M. Laffitte in the secret? There
is reason to presume so."(_Souvenirs du feu Duc de Broglie_,
vol. III.)--B.]
[Footnote 273: Ary Scheffer (1785-1858), the Dutch painter. He
was appointed painting-master to the Orleans children, in 1821,
and remained on a very intimate footing with the Orleans Family
throughout.--T.]
[Footnote 274: Madame Adélaïde (1777-1847), younger sister of
Louis-Philippe. She exercised a great ascendant over that Monarch's
mind, was his adviser during the whole of his reign, and her death
plunged him into a state of dejection which facilitated the Revolution
of 1848. She accumulated a large fortune, which she bequeathed to her
nephews.--T.]
[Footnote 275: The Duc d'Orléans occupied a royal residence at Neuilly
which was demolished in 1848.--T.]
[Footnote 276: The Marquis de Sémonville, as Grand Referendary, had a
set of official apartments at the Luxembourg.--T.]
[Footnote 277: Epicurus (342 B.C.--270 B.C.), the Greek
philosopher.--T.]
[Footnote 278: Captain Le Motha is the original of the officer
immortalized by Alfred de Vigny in the last and admirable episode of
his _Servitude et grandeur militaires_, entitled, _La Vie et la mort du
capitaine Renaud._--B.]
[Footnote 279: Antoine Louis Marie de Gramont, Duc de Guiche
(1755-1836), emigrated to England during the Revolution and, as
"Captain Gramont," served in the 10th Hussars. He returned to France
with the Duc d'Angoulême as first aide-de-camp, and was created a peer
of France in June 1814. He took the oath of allegiance to the new
Government after the Revolution of July, and remained a peer till his
death.--B.]
[Footnote 280: M. de Guernon-Rainville, who was at Saint-Cloud at that
time, thus describes this deplorable scene in his Journal:
"The Prince and the marshal were alone in the green drawing-room at
Saint-Cloud; the explanations of the Duc de Raguse did not satisfy
the Dauphin, who exclaimed:
"'Do you mean to betray us too?'
"At these words, the marshal laid his hand on the hilt of his
sword. The Prince saw the movement, rushed forwards and, trying
to snatch the sword from its scabbard, wounded his hand slightly;
then, flinging the sword on the floor, he seized the marshal by
the collar, threw him on a sofa, and called to the guards who were
in the next room. At that moment, the officer on duty, hearing the
noise, opened the door of the drawing-room; the Prince ordered him
to place the marshal under arrest in his room.
"The King, hearing of this strange scene, reproached the Dauphin
for it, and asked him to become reconciled with the marshal, who
was at once sent for. He made some excuse to the Prince, who
answered:
"'I myself have been in the wrong; but your sword has drawn my
blood, so we are quits....'
"And he offered him his hand."--B.]
[Footnote 281: Charles de Lorraine, Duc de Guise (1571-1640), son of
Henri I. Duc de Guise, the second duke who bore the surname of the
Balafré.--T.]
[Footnote 282: Antoine Montbreton, Maréchal de Saint-Pol (_circa_
1550-1593), one of the heads of the League, was assassinated by the
Duc de Guise at Rheims, where he had gone to maintain order among the
Spanish garrison.--T.]
[Footnote 283: Marcus Junius Brutus (85 B.C.--42 B.C.), one of Cæsar's
assassins.--T.]
[Footnote 284: Lucius Junius Brutus, Roman Consul in 509 B.C., after
bringing about the expulsion of the Tarquins.--T.]
[Footnote 285: Marie-Amélie Duchesse d'Orléans, later Queen of the
French (1782-1866), daughter of Ferdinand I. King of the Two Sicilies,
and married to the Duc d'Orléans in 1809.--T.]
[Footnote 286: Ambroise Anatole Augustin Comte, later Marquis de
Montesquiou-Fézensac (1788-1878), entered the service as a private in
1806, became a colonel and aide-de-camp to the Emperor in 1814 and, in
1816, aide-de-camp to the Duc d'Orléans. In 1823, he was appointed a
lord-in-waiting to the Duchess. He was promoted to brigadier-general in
1831, was a deputy from 1834 to 1841 and, in 1841, was created a peer
of France, and a grandee of Spain and a marquis in 1847.--B.]
[Footnote 287: Auguste Marie Baron de Berthois (1787-1870) had served
in all the campaigns from 1809 to 1814. He became aide-de-camp to the
Duc d'Orléans under the Restoration, and was with him throughout the
Days of July. He was promoted to colonel, in 1831, and, later, to
brigadier-general. Berthois sat in the Chamber of Deputies from 1832 to
1848.--B.]
[Footnote 288: I give below the text of the two proclamations issued by
the Duc d'Orléans and the Chamber of Deputies respectively:
"Inhabitants of Paris!
"The Deputies of France at this moment assembled in Paris have
expressed to me the desire that I should repair to this capital to
exercise the functions of Lieutenant-general of the Kingdom.
"I have not hesitated to come and share your dangers, to place
myself in the midst of your heroic population, and to exert all
my efforts to preserve you from the calamities of civil war and
anarchy.
"On returning to the City of Paris, I wear with pride those
glorious colours which you have resumed and which I myself long
wore.
"The Chambers are going to assemble; they will consider of the
means of securing the reign of the laws and the maintenance of the
rights of the nation.
"The Charter will henceforward be a reality.
"LOUIS-PHILIPPE D'ORLÉANS."
"Frenchmen!
"France is free. Absolute power raised its standard: the heroic
population of Paris has overthrown it. Paris, attacked, has made
the sacred cause triumph, by means which had triumphed in vain in
the elections. A power which usurped our rights and disturbed our
repose threatened at once both liberty and order. We return to the
possession of order and liberty. There is no more fear for acquired
rights, no further barrier between us and the rights which we still
require. A government which may, without delay, secure to us these
advantages is now the first want of our country. Frenchmen, those
of your Deputies who are already in Paris have assembled and, till
the Chambers can regularly intervene, they have invited a Frenchman
who has never fought but for France--the Duc d'Orléans--to exercise
the functions of Lieutenant-general of the Kingdom. This is, in
their opinion, the surest means promptly to accomplish, by peace,
the success of the most legitimate defense.
"The Duc d'Orléans is devoted to the national and constitutional
cause. He has always defended its interests and professed its
principles. He will respect our rights, for he will derive his own
from us. We shall secure to ourselves, by laws, all the guarantees
necessary to strong and durable liberty:
"The re-establishment of the National Guard, with the intervention
of the National Guards in the choice of their officers;
"The intervention of the citizens in the formation of the
departmental and municipal administrations;
"The jury for the transgressions of the press; the legally
organized responsibility of the ministers and of the secondary
agents of the administration;
"The situation and rank of the military legally secured; and
"The re-election of deputies in the place of those appointed
to public offices. Such guarantees will, at length, give to
our institutions, in concert with the head of the state, the
developments of which they have need.
"Frenchmen, the Duc d'Orléans himself has already spoken, and his
language is that which is suitable to a free country:
"'The Chambers,' he says, 'are going to assemble; they will
consider of means to insure the reign of the laws, and the
maintenance of the rights of the nation.
"'The Charter will henceforward be a reality.'"--T.]
[Footnote 289: Louis Philippe, fourth Duc d'Orléans (1725-1785),
married, in 1743, to the Princesse Louise de Conti, who died in 1759.
In 1773, he married Madame de Montesson, secretly, as his second wife,
and passed the last years of his life at Bagnolet in protecting men of
letters and artists.--T.]
[Footnote 290: Louis, third Duc d'Orléans (1703-1752), the only quite
respectable head of the House of Orléans. He led a life distinguished
for its erudition and piety: so much so that he was at one time,
although on insufficient grounds, suspected of Jansenism. Louis was
married, in 1724, to the Princess Augusta of Baden, who died two years
later.--T.]
[Footnote 291: Philip II., second Duc d'Orléans (1674-1723), nephew
to Louis XIV. and married in 1692, to his legitimatized daughter,
Mademoiselle de Blois, was Regent of France during the minority of
Louis XV. ( 1715-1723). The Regent was one of the greatest statesmen
that France has seen: his private life was scandalous.--T.]
[Footnote 292: Philip I., first Duc d'Orléans of the second creation
(1640-1701), married first, in 1661, to his cousin, the Princess
Henrietta of England, who died in 1670, daughter of King Charles I.;
secondly, in 1671, to the Princess Charlotte Elizabeth of Bavaria,
who died in 1722. It will be seen that, as the descendants of Henry
IV., who was the grandfather of Philip I. of Orleans, the Orleans
Princes were a younger branch of the House of Bourbon, and that the
"Valois" pretensions were utter nonsense. The exact relationship of
Louis-Philippe to Charles X. was that of a sixth cousin. The Orleans
Princes were Princes of the Blood, but not of France, and were Serene
Highnesses down to Louis-Philippe, who was created a Royal Highness by
Charles X.--T.]
[Footnote 293: Consisting of a certain number of Republicans who met,
musket in hand at a restaurant kept by one Lointier. The principal
members of this gathering, including Trélat, Guinard, Charles Teste,
Bastide, Poubelle, Charles Hingray, Chevalier and Hubert formed the
first rank of the enemies of the Monarchy of July.--B.]
[Footnote 294: Alexandre Edme Baron Méchin (1772-1849), one of the
bitterest speakers in the Liberal Opposition during the Restoration.
The Government of July made him Prefect of the Nord and a councillor of
State.--B.]
[Footnote 295: Jean Pons Guillaume Viennet (1777-1868), a deputy from
1820 to 1837, a peer of France from 1839 to 1848, and a member of the
French Academy (1830). He was an indefatigable rhymester; he became
the butt of the press, thanks to his ultra-classical and (after 1830)
ultra-conservative ideas, and retorted with infinite wit, giving
the papers a Roland for their Oliver throughout the duration of the
Monarchy of July, from 1830 to 1848.--B.]
[Footnote 296: BLANC: _Histoire de dix ans_, Vol. I.--B.]
[Footnote 297: Pierre Victoire Palma-Cayet (1525-1610), author of the
_Chronologie novennaire_, the _Chronologie septennaire_, etc.--T.]
[Footnote 298: This Joubert was the man who, with his friend Dugied,
introduced the _Carbonari_ into France. They were both implicated in
the so-called Military Conspiracy of the Bazaar, in 1820, and took
refuge in Naples. In 1822, Joubert was one of the principal agents of
the Belfort Plot. He succeeded in escaping for the second time, to
Spain, where he fought against the French and was taken prisoner at
the battle of Llers. As he had been twice wounded, he was taken to the
Perpignan Hospital, whence Dugied, by means of bribery, procured his
escape. He reached Belgium, where he remained till 1830.--B.]
[Footnote 299: Eléonore Louis Godefroy Cavaignac (1801-1845), son of
the Conventional, Jean Baptiste Cavaignac, and elder brother to General
Eugène Cavaignac. For fifteen years he remained a formidable adversary
of the Monarchy of July, fighting it with every weapon and on every
ground, in the streets, in the press, in the law-courts, in prison and
in exile. He died in harness on the 5th of May 1845.--B.]
[Footnote 300: Marie Anne Joseph Degousée (1795-1862) conspired under
the Restoration and under Louis-Philippe, and fought at the barricades
in February 1848. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly and
supported General Cavaignac's candidature for the Presidency. He failed
to secure re-election to the Legislative Assembly and withdrew into
private life, resuming his work as a civil engineer.--B.]
[Footnote 301: Gustav Karl Frederik Count Lœwenhielm (1771-1856), the
Swedish Minister Plenipotentiary, had been in Paris since 1818.--B.]
[Footnote 302: Sir Charles Stuart, the British Ambassador, had been
raised to the peerage as Lord Stuart de Rothesay in 1828. He was
Ambassador to the Court of France from 1815 to 1824 and from 1828 to
1830.--T.]
[Footnote 303: This is very nearly what I wrote to Mr. Canning in 1823
(_Cf._ the _Congrès de Vérone_).--_Author's Note._]
[Footnote 304: Russian Ambassador from 1814 to 1835. Pozzo was devoted
to Paris, and returned there after his retirement from the London
Embassy and diplomatic life in 1839.--T.]
[Footnote 305: Wilhelm Baron von Werther (_d._ 1859), Prussian
Minister to Paris from 1824 to 1837 and Prussian Minister of Foreign
Affairs from 1837 to 1841. He was the father of Karl Anton Philipp
Baron von Werther, who was Ambassador of Prussia and the North
German Confederation to Paris from October 1869 until the rupture of
diplomatic relations in July 1870.--B.]
[Footnote 306: Henry V. King of France and Navarre (1820-1883), son
of the Duc de Berry, was, to the time of his _de jure_ accession, in
August 1830, known as Henri Charles Ferdinand Marie Dieudonné d'Artois,
Duc de Bordeaux. Later, he assumed the title of Comte de Chambord, by
which he was known till his death. He married, in 1846, Maria Teresa
Gaetana, daughter of Francis IV. Duke of Modena. Queen Marie-Thérèse
died in 1886.--T.]
[Footnote 307: The context would lead the reader to think that Prince
Esterhazy was Ambassador to Paris at the time of the Revolution of
July. This is not so. The Austrian Ambassador to Paris in 1830 was
Count Apponyi.--B.]
[Footnote 308: Pozzo di Borgo was a native of Ajaccio in Corsica. The
Blue Ribbon mentioned above was the ribbon of the Order of the Holy
Ghost.--T.]
[Footnote 309: Étienne Tardif de Pommeroux, Comte de Bordesoulle
(1771-1837), took part in all the wars of the Revolution and the
Empire, and rallied to the Bourbons in 1814, accompanying Louis XVIII.
to Ghent. He distinguished himself greatly in the Spanish War of 1823
and, on his return, was raised to the peerage. He took the oath of
allegiance to Louis-Philippe's Government, and remained a member of the
House of Peers till his death.--B.]
[Footnote 310: The sentences here omitted by Chateaubriand ran as
follows:
"I charge Lieutenant-general the Vicomte de Foissac-Latour with
this letter to you. He has orders to consult with you as to the
arrangements to be made in favour of those persons who have
accompanied me, as well as those which may be suitable for myself
and the rest of my family.
"We shall afterwards regulate the other measures which may become
necessary in consequence of the change of reign."--T.]
[Footnote 311: Jean François Jacqueminot, later Vicomte de Ham
(1787-1865), a colonel of the Empire, and a deputy at the time of
the Revolution of July. Louis-Philippe appointed him to various high
commands in the National Guard and created him a viscount.--B.]
[Footnote 312: "General Pajol told me, shortly before his death, that,
in the course of his long military career, he had never thought himself
so near defeat." (MARCELLUS: _Chateaubriand et son temps_, p. 302).--B.]
[Footnote 313: The Duchesse d'Orléans, later Queen of the French, was
the sister, the Duchesse de Berry the daughter of Francis I. King of
the Two Sicilies.--T.]
[Footnote 314: Saint Hilary Bishop of Poitiers (_d._ 368), honoured on
the 14th of January. His chief works are _De Trinitate, De Synodis_ and
commentaries.--T.]
[Footnote 315: Louis Clair Comte de Beaupoil de Sainte-Aulaire
(1778-1854), brother-in-law to M. Decazes. He sat in the Chamber of
Deputies from 1815 to 1829, when, on the death of his father, he
entered the Chamber of Peers. He was away from Paris at the time of the
Revolution of July, hurried back to Paris, and, after some hesitation,
adhered to the new Government and received the Roman Embassy, followed,
in 1833, by the Embassy in Vienna and, lastly, by that in London,
which he occupied from 1841 to 1847. He was the author of a remarkable
Histoire de la Fronde (1827) and, in 1841, was elected a member of the
French Academy.--B.]
[Footnote 316: Auxonne Marie Théodose Comte de Thiard de Bissy
(1772-1852) was the son of Claude VIII. de Thiard, Comte de Bissy,
Lieutenant-general of the King's Armies, Governor of the Town and
Castle of Auxonne, Governor of the Palais-Royal and the Tuileries, in
Paris, and one of the forty of the French Academy; and nephew of the
Comte de Thiard, the King's Commandant in Brittany in 1789, guillotined
in 1794, who has been more than once mentioned in Vol. I. of the
Memoirs. Auxonne Marie Théodose emigrated in 1791 and served in Condé's
Army until 1799. Under the Empire, after being employed by Napoleon in
his armies and in diplomacy, he was disgraced, in 1807, and lived in
retirement until 1814. He was a representative during the Hundred Days
and a deputy from 1820 to 1834 and from 1837 to 1848. Ex-Emigrant and
born at the Tuileries though he were, he always sat with the Extreme
Left, both under the Restoration and the Government of July.--B.]
[Footnote 317: François Duris-Dufresne (1769-1837) was also an
ex-officer. After forming part of the Legislative Body from the Year
XII. to 1809, he entered the Chamber of Deputies in 1827 and voted with
the Left. He adhered to the Revolution of July and the usurpation of
Louis-Philippe; but events soon drove him into the Dynastic Opposition.
From 1831 to 1834, he sat with the Extreme Left.--B.]
[Footnote 318: Some editions have "peerage" instead of "country."--T.]
[Footnote 319: The Baron Pasquier had been President of the House of
Peers since the 4th of August.--B.]
[Footnote 320: The Baron Louis was Minister of Finance.--B.]
[Footnote 321: The Marquis de Sémonville continued Grand Refendary.--B.]
[Footnote 322: Dupont de l'Eure (1767-1855) had been President of
the Imperial Court at Rouen. He became Minister of Justice after the
Revolution of 1830, but soon went over to the Opposition, where he
won an enormous popularity. In 1848, he was elected, by acclamation,
President of the Provisional Government, a position which, owing to his
great age, he held only nominally.--T.]
[Footnote 323: Edward III. landed near Cherbourg in 1346, besieged the
city and laid waste the surrounding country.--T.]
[Footnote 324: Anne Hilarion de Contentin, Comte de Tourville
(1642-1701), was defeated off the Hogue in 1692 by the combined Dutch
and English fleets; his own fleet was destroyed.--T.]
[Footnote 325: The famous dyke of Cherbourg, which turned that harbour
into a first-class port, was built under Louis XVI.--T.]
[Footnote 326: William I. King of England (1027-1087), surnamed the
Conqueror, landed at Pevensey on the 28th of September 1066; Charles X.
landed, on the 17th of August 1830, at Spithead.--T.]
[Footnote 327: Holyrood Palace had been the residence of Charles X.
during the First Emigration.--T.]
[Footnote 328: Paris, 3 December 1840.--_Author's Note._]
[Footnote 329: _Cf._ the letters and dispatches of the different
Courts, quoted in the _Congrès de Vérone_; consult also the _Ambassade
de Rome.--Author's Note._]
PART THE FOURTH
1830-1841
BOOK I[330]
Introduction--Trial of the ministers-Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois--Pillage
of the Archbishop's Palace--My pamphlet on the _Restauration et
la Monarchie élective_--_Études historiques_--Letters to Madame
Récamier--Geneva--Lord Byron--Ferney and Voltaire--Useless
journey to Paris--M. Armand Carrel--M. de Béranger--The Baude and
Briqueville proposition for the banishment of the Elder Branch of the
Bourbons--Letter to the author of the _Némésis_--Conspiracy of the Rue
des Prouvaires--Letter to Madame la Duchesse de Berry--Epidemics--The
cholera--Madame La Duchesse de Berry's 12,000 francs--General
Lamarque's funeral--Madame La Duchesse de Berry lands in Provence and
arrives in the Vendée.
INFIRMERIE DE MARIE-THÉRÈSE.
PARIS, _October_ 1830.
Out of the turmoil of the Three Days, I am quite surprised to find
myself opening the fourth part of this work amid a profound calm; it
seems to me that I have doubled the Cape of Storms and penetrated into
a region of peace and silence. If I had died on the 7th of August of
this year, the last words of my speech in the House of Peers would have
been the last lines of my history; my catastrophe, being that of a past
of twelve centuries, would have augmented my memory. My drama would
have ended magnificently.
But I did not fall under the blow, I was not struck to the ground.
Pierre de L'Estoile wrote this page of his Journal on the day following
the assassination of Henry IV.:
"And here I end with the life of my King the second register of
my melancholic pastimes and my vain and curious researches, both
public and private, interrupted often since the past month by
the watches of the sad and irksome nights which I have suffered,
similarly this last, for the death of my King.
"I had proposed to close my ephemerides with this register; but so
many new and curious occurrences have presented themselves through
this signal mutation, that I pass to another which also will go
before God pleases: and I doubt 'twill not be very long."
L'Estoile saw the death of the first Bourbon; I have just seen the fall
of the last: ought I not to "close here the register of my melancholic
pastimes and of my vain and curious researches?" Perhaps; "but so many
new and curious researches have presented themselves through this
signal mutation, that I pass to another register."
Like L'Estoile, I lament the adversities of the Dynasty of St. Louis;
nevertheless, I am obliged to admit, there mingles with my sorrow a
certain inward satisfaction: I reproach myself with it, but I cannot
prevent it; this satisfaction is that of the slave delivered from his
chains. When I abandoned the career of a soldier and a traveller, I
felt a certain sadness; now I feel joy, freed convict that I am of
the galleys of the world and the Court Faithful to my principles and
my oaths, I have betrayed neither liberty nor the King, I carry away
neither wealth nor honours; I go as poor as I came. Happy to end a
career which was hateful to me, I lovingly return to repose.
Blessed be thou, O my native and dear independence, soul of my life!
Come, bring me my Memoirs, that _alter ego_ whose confidant, idol
and muse you are. The hours of leisure are fit for story-telling: a
shipwrecked mariner, I shall continue to relate my shipwreck to the
fishermen on shore. Returning to my primitive instincts, I become a
free man and a traveller once again; I end my course as I began it. The
closing circle of my days brings me back to the starting-point. On the
road which I once took as a careless conscript, I am going to travel
as an experienced veteran, with my furlough in my shako, the stripes
of time upon my arm, a knapsack full of years upon my back. Who knows?
Perhaps I shall, stage by stage, recover the reveries of my youth. I
shall call many dreams to my help, to defend me against that horde of
truths which are begotten in old days even as dragons hide themselves
in ruins. It will depend but on myself to knot together again the two
ends of my existence, to blend far-distant periods, to mingle illusions
of different ages, since the Prince whom I met in exile on leaving my
paternal home I now meet in banishment on my way to my last abode.
I rapidly wrote the little introduction to this part of my Memoirs in
the month of October of last year[331]; but I was unable to continue
this labour, because I had another on my hands: this was the work[332]
which concluded the edition of my Complete Works. From this work again
I was diverted, first, by the trial of the ministers and, next, by the
sack of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois.
[Sidenote: Trial of the ministers.]
The trial of the ministers[333] and the flurry in Paris made no great
impression on me: after the trial of Louis XVI. and the revolutionary
insurrections, all is small in the matter of trials and insurrections.
The ministers, when coming from Vincennes to the Luxembourg and
returning to Vincennes while sentence was being passed, went through
the Rue d'Enfer: I could hear the wheels of their carriage from the
back of my retreat. How many events have passed before my door!
The defenders of those men did not rise to the level of their task.
None took a high enough view of the matter: the advocate predominated
too greatly in the speeches. If my friend the Prince de Polignac had
chosen me for his second, with what an eye should I have looked upon
those perjurers setting themselves up for judges of a perjurer!
"What!" I should have said to them. "It is you who dare to be my
client's judges; it is you who, all sullied with your oaths, dare to
impute it as a crime to him that he ruined his master when he thought
he was serving him: you, the instigators; you who urged him to issue
the Ordinances! Change places with him whom you claim the right to
judge: he who was accused becomes the accuser. If we have deserved to
be struck, it is not by you; if we are guilty, it is not towards you,
but towards the people: they are waiting for us in the yard of your
palace, and we shall take our heads to them."
After the trial of the ministers, came the scandal of
Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois[334]. The Royalists, full of excellent
qualities, but sometimes stupid and often aggravating, never
calculating the range of their measures, always thinking that they
would restore the Legitimacy by affecting a colour in their cravats
or a flower in their button-holes, occasioned deplorable scenes. It
was evident that the Revolutionary Party would profit by the service
held in commemoration of the Duc de Berry to make a noise. Now, the
Legitimists were not strong enough to oppose this, and the Government
was not settled enough to maintain order; and so the church was
pillaged. A Voltairean and progressive apothecary[335] triumphed
fearlessly over a steeple of the year 1300 and a cross already
overthrown by other Barbarians at the end of the ninth century.
Consequently upon the exploits of these enlightened pharmaceutics
come the devastation of the Archbishop's Palace, the profanation of
the sacred things, and the processions copied from those of Lyons.
The executioner and the victims were lacking; but there were plenty
of buffoons, masks and diverse carnival delights. The burlesque
sacrilegious procession marched on one side of the Seine, while the
National Guard, pretending to hasten in aid, defiled on the other. The
river separated order and anarchy. It is stated that a man of talent
was there as an onlooker and that he said, on seeing the chasubles and
books floating on the Seine:
"What a pity they did not throw the Archbishop in!"
A profound utterance, for indeed a drowned archbishop must be a
pleasant sight; that makes liberty and enlightenment take so great a
step forward! We old witnesses of old deeds are obliged to tell you
that you see here but pale and wretched copies. You still possess the
revolutionary instinct, but you no longer have its energy; you can be
criminal only in imagination; you would like to do evil, but your
heart lacks courage and your arm strength; you would like to see fresh
massacres, but you would no longer set to work to commit them. If you
want the Revolution of July to be great and to remain great, do not
let M. Cadet de Gassicourt be its real hero and "Mayeux" its ideal
personage[336].
[Sidenote: My new pamphlet.]
PARIS, _end of March_ 1831.
I was out of my reckoning when, after the Days of July were over,
I thought that I was entering a region of peace. The fall of the
three Sovereigns had obliged me to explain myself in the House of
Peers. The proscription of those Kings forbade me to remain dumb.
On the other hand, Philip's newspapers were asking me why I refused
to serve a revolution which consecrated the principles which I
had defended and diffused. I had needs to speak on behalf of the
general truths and to explain my personal conduct. An extract from
a little pamphlet which will be forgotten, _De la Restauration et
de la Monarchie élective_[337], will continue the thread of my
narrative and that of the history of my times:
"Despoiled of the present, possessing but an uncertain future
beyond the tomb, I feel a need that my memory should not be injured
by my silence. I must not hold my peace touching a Restoration in
which I have taken so much part, which is being daily outraged
and which is at length being proscribed before my eyes.... In the
middle-ages, at times of calamity, men used to take a religious and
lock him in a tower, where he fasted on bread and water for the
salvation of the world. I am not unlike this twelfth-century monk:
through the dormer-window of my expiatory jail, I have preached my
last sermon to the passers-by..."
Here is the epitome of that sermon:
"As I predicted in my last speech in the tribune of the Peers, the
Monarchy of July is in an absolute condition of glory or of laws
of exception; it lives by the press, and the press is killing it;
devoid of glory, it will be devoured by liberty; if it attack that
liberty, it will perish. It would be a fine thing if, after driving
out three Kings with barricades, on behalf of the liberty of the
press, we were to be seen erecting new barricades against that
liberty! And yet, what is to be done? Will the redoubled action
of the tribunals and the laws suffice to restrain the writers? A
new government is a child that can walk only in leading-strings.
Are we to put back the nation into swaddling-clothes? Will that
terrible nursling, which has sucked blood in the arms of victory
at so many bivouacs, not burst its bandages? There was but one old
stock, deeply rooted in the past, which could have withstood with
impunity the gales blowing from the liberty of the press. . . .
. . . . . . . . "To listen to the declamations of the moment, it
seems that the exiles of Edinburgh are the poorest fellows living
and that they are nowhere missed. The present, to-day, lacks
nothing but the past: a small thing! As though the centuries did
not make use of each other as pedestals, and as though the last
comer could support itself in mid-air!... It is useless for our
vanity to take offense at memories, to erase the fleurs-de-lys, to
proscribe names and persons: that family, the heir of a thousand
years, has left an immense void by its withdrawal; one feels it
everywhere. Those individuals, so paltry in our eyes, have shaken
Europe in their fall. To however small a degree events produce
their natural effects and bring about their rigorous consequences,
Charles X., in abdicating, will have made all those Gothic kings,
the grand vassals of the past under the suzerainty of the Capets,
abdicate with him. . . . . . . . . . . . "We are marching towards a
general revolution. If the transformation which is being effected
follows its inclination and meets with no obstacles, if popular
reason continues its progressive development, if the education
of the middle classes suffers no interruption, the nations will
become levelled in a uniform liberty; if that transformation is
stayed, the nations will become levelled in a uniform despotism.
This despotism will not last long, because of the advanced age of
intelligence, but it will be harsh, and a long social dissolution
will follow it. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
[Sidenote: Extracts from my pamphlet.]
"Preoccupied as I am with these ideas, it is clear why I was;
bound, as an individual, to remain true to what seemed to me; the
best safeguard of the public liberties, the least perilous road by
which to attain the complement of those liberties.
"It is not that I have the pretension to be a tearful preacher
of sentimental politics, an eternal repeater of white plumes and
commonplaces à la Henry IV. Casting my eyes over the space that
separates the tower of the Temple from the palace in Edinburgh,
I should doubtless find as many calamities heaped up as there
are centuries accumulated on a noble race. A woman of sorrow,
above all, has been loaded with the heaviest burden, as being the
strongest; there is not a heart but breaks at the thought of her:
her sufferings have risen so high that they have become one of the
grandeurs of the Revolution. But, when all is said and done, no
one is obliged to be king: Providence sends particular afflictions
to whom it pleases, always brief ones, because life is short;
and those afflictions are not counted in the general destinies
of the peoples. . . . . . . . . . . . . "Even if the proposition
which for ever banishes the deposed Family from French territory
be a corollary of the deposition of that Family, that corollary
carries no conviction for me.... I should in vain seek my place in
the several categories of persons who have become attached to the
actual order of things. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . "There are
men who, after taking the oath to the Republic One and Indivisible,
to the Directory of five persons, to the Consulate of three, to the
Empire of one alone, to the First Restoration, to the Additional
Act to the Constitutions of the Empire, to the Second Restoration,
have something left to swear to Louis-Philippe: I am not so rich.
"There are men who flung their word on the Place de Grève, in July,
like those Roman goat-herds who play at odd or even among ruins.
Those men... treat as a fool and simpleton whosoever does not
reduce politics to a question of private interests: I am a fool and
a simpleton.
"There are timorous people who would have much preferred not to
swear, but who saw themselves being butchered, together with their
grand-parents, their grandchildren, and all the landlords, if they
had not trembled out their oaths: this is a physical effect which I
have not yet experienced; I shall wait for the infirmity and, if it
comes to me, I shall consider.
"There! are great lords of the Empire linked to their pensions by
sacred and indissoluble bonds, whatever be the hand they fall from:
a pension is in their eyes a sacrament; it stamps a character, like
orders or marriage; no pensioned head can ever cease to be so:
pensions being charged to the Treasury, they remain charged to the
same Treasury. As for me, I have the habit of divorce from Fortune:
I am too old for her and abandon her, lest she should leave me.
"There are high barons of the Throne and the Altar who have not
betrayed the Ordinances: no! But the insufficiency of the means
employed to carry out the Ordinances has excited their spleen:
indignant to find shortcomings in despotism, they have gone to
seek another antechamber. It is impossible for me to share their
indignation and their abode.
"There are men of conscience who are perjurers only to be
perjurers; who, while yielding to force, are none the less for
the right: they weep over that poor Charles X., whom they first
dragged to his ruin by their advice and then put to death by their
oaths; but, if ever he or his House revive, they will be very
thunder-bolts of legitimacy. As for me, I have always been devoted
to death, and I am the funeral procession of the Old Monarchy, like
the poor man's dog.
"Lastly, there are trusty knights who have dispensations from
honour and permits of disloyalty in their pocket: I have none.
"I was the man of the _possible_ Restoration, of the Restoration
accompanied by every kind of liberty. That Restoration took me for
an enemy; it is ruined: I must undergo its fate. Shall I go to
attach the few years that remain to me to a new fortune, like the
hems of dresses which women drag from court to court for all the
world to tread upon? At the head of the young generations, I should
be suspect; following them, is not my place. I am fully aware that
none of my faculties has aged; I understand my century better than
ever; I penetrate more boldly into the future than anybody; but
necessity has pronounced its decree; to end his life opportunely is
a necessary condition for the public man."
[Sidenote: The _Études historiques._]
Lastly, the _Études historiques_[338] have just appeared; I will quote
the Introduction, which is a real page of my Memoirs, and contains my
history at the very moment at which I am writing:
INTRODUCTION
"Remember, so as not to lose sight of the pace of the world, that
at that time[339]... there were citizens engaged, like myself, in
ransacking the archives of the past amid the ruins of the present,
in writing the annals of the old revolutions to the uproar of the
new revolutions; they and I taking as our table, in the crumbling
edifice, the stone that had fallen at our feet, while awaiting that
which was to crush our heads" (_Études historiques_).
"I would not, for the sake of the days that remain for me to live,
begin again the eighteen months that have just elapsed. None will
ever have an idea of the violence which I have done on myself; I
have been forced to abstract my mind, for ten, twelve and fifteen
hours a day, from what was passing around me, in order childishly
to abandon myself to the composition of a work of which no one
will read a line. Who would peruse four stout volumes, when it is
already so difficult to read the _feuilleton_ of a newspaper? I
was writing ancient history, and modern history was knocking at my
door; in vain I cried, 'Wait, I am coming to you:' it passed on,
to the sound of the cannon, carrying with it three generations of
kings.
"And how marvellously the times agree with the very nature of
these _Études!_ Men are overthrowing the Cross and persecuting the
priests, and the Cross and the priests occur on every page of my
narrative; they are banishing the Capets, and I am publishing a
history in which the Capets occupy eight centuries. The longest and
the last work of my life, that which has cost me most research,
care and years, that in which I have perhaps stirred up most ideas
and facts, appears at a time when it can find no readers; it is as
though I flung it into a pit, where it will sink down under the
mass of the rubbish that will follow it. When a society is being
composed and decomposed, when the existence of each and all is at
stake, when one is not sure of a future of an hour's duration, who
cares what his neighbour does, says, or thinks? Men have something
else to trouble their heads about than Nero, Constantine, Julian,
the Apostles, the Martyrs, the Fathers of the Church, the Goths,
the Huns, the Vandals, the Franks, Clovis, Charlemagne, Hugh Capet
and Henry IV.; they have something else to think of than the
shipwreck of the old world at a time when we are all involved in
the shipwreck of the new world! Does it not argue a sort of dotage,
a kind of feeble-mindedness, to busy one's self with literature at
such a time? That is true; but this dotage has nothing to do with
my brain, it comes from the antecedents of my spiteful fortune. If
I had not made so many sacrifices to the liberties of my country, I
should not have been obliged to contract engagements which are now
being fulfilled under circumstances doubly deplorable to myself.
No author has ever been put to such a proof; thank God, it is
nearly at an end: I have nothing left to do but to sit on ruins and
despise that life which I scorned in my youth.
"After these very natural complaints, which have involuntarily
escaped me, one thought comes to console me: I began my literary
career with a work in which I considered Christianity in its
poetic and moral aspects; I end it with a work in which I regard
the same religion in its philosophical and historical aspects: I
began my political career under the Restoration, I end it with the
Restoration. It is not without a secret satisfaction that I observe
this consistency with myself."
PARIS, _May_ 1831.
I have not abandoned the resolution which I conceived at the moment
of the catastrophe of July. I have been considering the ways and
means of living abroad: difficult ways and means, because I have
nothing; the purchaser of my works has all but made me a bankrupt,
and my debts prevent me from finding anyone willing to lend me
money.
[Sidenote: I leave for Geneva.]
Be this as it may, I shall go to Geneva[340] with the sum that
has accrued to me from the sale of my last pamphlet[341]. I am
leaving a procuration to sell the house in which I write this page
for the sake of the order of dates. If I find a customer for my
bed, I can find another bed outside France. In these uncertainties
and movements, it will be impossible for me, until I am settled
somewhere, to resume the sequence of my Memoirs at the place where
I interrupted them[342]. I shall continue, therefore, to write down
the things of the actual moment of my life; I shall communicate
these things by means of the letters which I may happen to write
on the road or during my different stoppages; I shall afterwards
join the intermediary facts by a "journal" which will fill up the
intervals between the dates of those letters.
[Sidenote: I leave for Geneva.]
TO MADAME RÉCAMIER[343]
"LYONS, _Wednesday_ 18 _May_ 1831.
"Here I am, too far away from you. I have never made so sad a
journey: wonderful weather, nature all arrayed, the nightingale
singing, a starry night; and all this for whom? I shall indeed have
to return to where you are, unless you be willing to come to my
aid[344]."
TO MADAME RÉCAMIER
"LYONS, _Friday_ 20 _May._
"I spent the day, yesterday, in wandering beside the Rhone; I
contemplated the town where you were born, the hill upon which rose
the convent where you were chosen as the fairest: an expectation
which you did not disappoint; and you are not here, and years have
elapsed, and you have since been exiled to your birth-place, and
Madame de Staël is no more, and I am leaving France! One singular
personage[345] belonging to those old days has appeared before
me: I send you his note, because of its unexpectedness and its
surprise. This personage, whom I had never seen, is planting pines
in the mountains of Lyonnais. It is a long cry from there to the
Rue Feydeau and the _Maison à vendre_: what different parts men
play on earth!
"Hyacinthe has told me of the regrets and the newspaper articles:
I am not worth all that You know that I sincerely think so for
twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four; the twenty-fourth is
dedicated to vanity, which, however, is of slight duration and soon
passes. I wanted to see nobody here; M. Thiers, who was on his way
to the South, forced my door."
NOTE ENCLOSED IN THE ABOVE LETTER
"A neighbour, your fellow-countryman, who has no other claim upon
you than a profound admiration for your glorious talent and your
admirable character, would like to have the honour of seeing
you and offering you the homage of his respect. This next-door
neighbour at your hotel, this fellow-countryman is called
"ELLEVIOU."
TO MADAME RÉCAMIER
"LYONS, _Sunday_ 22 _May._
"We leave to-morrow for Geneva, when I shall find more memories of
you. Shall I ever see France again, after I have once crossed the
frontier? Yes, if you will, that is to say, if you remain there.
I do not wish for the events which might offer me another chance
of returning; I shall never allow the misfortunes of my country
to enter among the number of my hopes. I shall write to you on
Tuesday, the 24th, from Geneva. When shall I again see your little
hand-writing, the younger sister of mine[346]?"
[Sidenote: Letters to Madame Récamier.]
"GENEVA, _Tuesday_ 24 _May._
"We arrived here yesterday and are looking at houses. We shall
probably make shift with a little summer-house on the edge of the
lake. I cannot tell you how sad I feel as I busy myself with these
arrangements. Again another future! Again to begin anew a life
which I thought I had ended! I mean to write you a long letter
when I am a little at rest: I dread that rest, for then I shall be
contemplating without distraction those dim years upon which I am
entering with a heart so much oppressed."
9 _June_ 1831.
"You know that a 'reformed' sect has been established in the midst
of the Protestants. One of the new pastors of the new church has
been to see me and has written me two letters worthy of the first
Apostles. He wants to convert me to his faith, and I want to turn
him into a 'Papist.' We argue as though living in Calvin's[347]
day, but loving each other in Christian brotherhood and without
burning one another. I do not despair of his salvation; he is quite
shaken by my arguments in favour of the Popes. You cannot conceive
the pitch of exaltation to which he has risen, and his candour
is admirable. If you come to me, accompanied by my old friend
Ballanche, we shall do wonders. In one of the Geneva newspapers,
a Protestant controversial book is advertised, and the authors
are urged to 'stand firm' because 'the author of the _Génie du
Christianisme_ is close at hand.'
"There is a certain consolation in finding a little free people,
administered by the most distinguished men, among which religious
ideas form the basis of liberty and the chief occupation of life.
"I lunched at M. de Constant's[348], beside Madame Necker[349],
who is unfortunately deaf, but a woman of rare qualities and the
greatest distinction: we spoke only of yourself. I had received
your letter and I told M. de Sismondi the amiable things you had
said for his benefit. You see I am taking your lessons.
"Lastly, here are some verses. You are my 'star' and I am waiting
for you to go to that enchanted island.
"Delphine[350] married: O Muses! I have told you in my last letter
why I could write neither on the peerage nor on the war: I should
be attacking a contemptible body to which I have belonged and
preaching honour to those who no longer possess it.
"It needs a sailor to read the verses and understand them. I put
myself in M. Lenormant's hands. Your intelligence will suffice
for the last three stanzas, and the key to the riddle is at the
foot[351]."
"GENEVA, 18 _June_ 1831.
"You have received all my letters. I am constantly expecting a
few words from you; I can see that there will be nothing for me,
but still I am always surprised when the post brings me only
newspapers. Not a soul writes to me, except yourself; not a soul
remembers me, except yourself, and that is a great charm. I love
your solitary letter, which does not arrive as it used to arrive in
the days of my magnificence, in the midst of packets of dispatches
and of all those letters of attachment, admiration and meanness
which vanish with fortune. After your little letters, I shall
see your fair self, if I do not go to join you. You shall be my
testamentary executrix; you shall sell my poor retreat; the price
will enable you to travel towards the sun. At this moment, the
weather is admirable: as I write to you I can see Mont Blanc in
its splendour; from the top of Mont Blanc one sees the Apennines:
it seems to me as though I have but three steps to take to arrive
in Rome, where we shall go, for all will get settled in France.
"Our glorious country lacked but one thing in order to have passed
through every form of wretchedness: to have a government of
cowards; she has it now, and her youth is about to be swallowed up
in doctrine, literature and debauch, according to the particular
character of the individual. The chapter of accidents remains;
but, when a man drags along life's road, as I do, the most likely
accident is the end of the journey.
"I do no work, I can do nothing more: I am bored; it is my nature,
and I am like a fish in water: nevertheless, if the water were a
little less deep, perhaps I should be better pleased in it"
[Sidenote: Geneva.]
JOURNAL FROM THE 12TH OF JULY TO THE 1ST OF SEPTEMBER 1831
THE PÂQUIS, NEAR GENEVA.
I am settled at the Pâquis[352] with Madame de Chateaubriand; I have
made the acquaintance of M. Rigaud, Chief Syndic of Geneva: above
his house, by the edge of the lake, going up the Lausanne Road, you
find the villa of two clerks of M. de Lapanouze[353], who have spent
1,500,000 francs in building it and laying out their gardens. When I
pass on foot before their dwelling-house, I wonder at Providence, which
has placed witnesses of the Restoration at Geneva in them and in me.
What a fool I am! What a fool! The Sieur de Lapanouze went through
royalism and misery with me: see to what his clerks have risen for
having favoured the Conversion of the Funds, which I had the simplicity
to oppose and by virtue of which I was turned out Here are the
gentlemen: they drive up in an elegant tilbury, hat on ear, and I am
obliged to step into a ditch lest the wheel should carry off a skirt
of my old frock-coat. And yet I have been a peer of France, a minister,
an ambassador, and in a cardboard box I have all the principal Orders
of Christendom, including the Holy Ghost and the Golden Fleece. If the
clerks of the Sieur César de Lapanouze, now millionaires, cared to buy
my box of ribbons for their wives, they would do me a lively pleasure.
Nevertheless all is not roses for the Messieurs B---: they are not yet
Genevese nobles, that is to say, they have not yet reached the second
generation; their mother still lives in the lower part of the town and
has not risen to the Saint-Pierre quarter, the Faubourg Saint-Germain
of Geneva; but, with God's help, nobility will follow on money.
It was in 1805 that I saw Geneva for the first time. If two thousand
years had elapsed between the dates of my two journeys, would they be
further separated from each other than they are? Geneva belonged to
France; Bonaparte was shining in all his glory, Madame de Staël in all
hers; there was no more question of the Bourbons than if they had never
existed. And Bonaparte, and Madame de Staël, and the Bourbons: what has
become of them? And I, I am still there!
M. de Constant, a cousin of Benjamin Constant, and Mademoiselle de
Constant, an old maid full of wit, virtue and talent, live in their
cottage of "Souterre" on the bank of the Rhone; they are overlooked
by another country-house, which was formerly M. de Constant's: he
sold it to the Princesse Belgiojoso[354], a Milanese exile, whom I
saw pass like a flower through the fête which I gave in Rome for the
Grand-duchess Helen.
During my boating excursions, an old oarsman tells me of the deeds of
Lord Byron, whose house we see standing on the Savoyard side of the
lake. The noble peer would wait for a tempest to rise before setting
sail; from the deck of his felucca, he leapt into the waves and swam
in the midst of the gale to land at the feudal prisons of Bonivard: he
was always the actor and the poet. I am not so eccentric: I also love
the storms; but my loves with them are secret, and I do not confide
them to the boatmen.
I have discovered, behind Ferney[355], a narrow valley, in which runs
a tiny stream some seven or eight inches deep; this rivulet waters
the roots of a few willows, hides itself here and there under patches
of water-cress and shakes rushes on whose tips perch blue-winged
dragon-flies. Did the man of trumpets ever see this refuge of silence
right up against his resounding house? No, without a doubt: well, the
water is there; it still flows; I do not know its name; perhaps it has
none: Voltaire's days are spent; only his fame still makes a little
noise in a little corner of our little world, even as that streamlet
can be heard at a dozen paces from its banks.
Men differ from one another: I am charmed with this deserted
water-furrow; within sight of the Alps, the palm-leaf of a fern which
I gather delights me; the murmuring of a ripple over pebbles makes
me quite happy; an imperceptible insect, seen only by myself, which
plunges into the moss, as into a vast solitude, occupies my gaze and
makes me dream. These are intimate trifles, unknown to the fine genius
who, disguised as Orosmane[356], played his tragedies, wrote to the
princes of the earth and forced Europe to come to admire him in the
hamlet of Ferney. But were not those trifles too? The transitions of
the world are not equal to the passing of those waters; and, as for
kings, I prefer my ant.
[Sidenote: Memoires of Voltaire.]
One thing always astonishes me, when I think of Voltaire: although
gifted with a superior, rational, enlightened mind, he remained
completely foreign to Christianity; he never saw what every one
sees: that the institution of the Gospel, to consider only the human
aspect of it, is the greatest revolution that ever took place on
earth. It is true to say that, in the age of Voltaire, this idea had
come into the head of nobody. The theologians defended Christianity
as an accomplished fact, as a verity based upon laws emanating from
spiritual and temporal authority; the philosophers attacked it as an
abuse springing from priests and kings: they went no further. I have
no doubt that, if one could suddenly have presented the other side
of the question to Voltaire, his quick and lucid intelligence would
have been struck with it: one blushes to think of the mean and limited
manner in which he treated a subject which embraces nothing less than
the transformation of peoples, the introduction of morality, a new
principle of society, another law of nations, another order of ideas,
the total change of humanity. Unfortunately, the great writer who ruins
himself in spreading baleful ideas drags many minds of lesser capacity
with him in his fall: he is like those old Eastern despots on whose
tombs men immolated slaves.
There, to Ferney, which no one visits now, to that Ferney around which
I come to roam alone, how many celebrated personages at one time
hastened! They sleep, gathered together for all time at the bottom of
Voltaire's letters, their hypogæan Temple: the breath of one century
grows weaker by degrees and dies away in the eternal silence, as one
begins to hear the respiration of a new century.
THE PÂQUIS, NEAR GENEVA, 15 _September_ 1831.
O gold, which I have so long despised and which I cannot love whatever
I may do, I am nevertheless forced to admit thy merit: the source of
liberty, thou arrangest a thousand things in our existence, in which
all is difficult without thee! Excepting glory, what is there that
thou canst not procure? With thee, one is handsome, young, adored; one
enjoys consideration, honours, qualities, virtues. You tell me that
with gold one has but the appearance of all that: what matter, if I
believe what is false to be true? Deceive me well, and I will release
you from the rest: is life other than a lie? When one has no money,
one is dependent upon everything and everybody. Two creatures who do
not suit one another could go each his own way; well, for want of a
few pistoles, they must remain face to face, sulking, fuming, souring,
bored to extinction, devouring each other's souls and the whites of
their eyes, furiously sacrificing to one another their tastes, their
inclinations, their natural methods of life: poverty presses them
close together, and, in those beggars' bonds, instead of embracing,
they bite each other, but not in the way in which Flora bit Pompey.
Without money, there is no means of escape; one cannot go in search of
another sun, and, with a proud soul, one wears chains without ceasing.
O happy Jews, dealers in crucifixes, who to-day govern Christendom, who
decide peace or war, who eat pig after selling old hats, who are the
favourites of kings and beauties, ugly and dirty though you be: ah, if
you would but change skins with me! If I could at least creep into your
iron chests, to rob you of that which you have stolen from young men
under age, I should be the happiest man in the world!
True, I might have a means of existence: I could apply to the monarchs;
as I have lost all for the sake of their crown, it would be only fair
that they should feed me. But this idea, which ought to occur to them,
does not; and to me it occurs still less. Rather than sit at the
banquets of kings, I should even prefer once more to begin the regimen
which I kept in the old days, in London, with my poor friend Hingant.
However, the happy times of garrets are past: not that I was not most
comfortable there, but I should be ill at ease, I should take up too
much room with the flounces of my reputation; I should no longer be
there with my one shirt and the slender figure of an unknown person
who has not dined. My cousin de La Boüétardais is there no more to
play the violin on my truckle-bed in his red robes as a counsellor to
the Parliament of Brittany, and to keep himself warm at night, covered
with a chair by way of counterpane; Peltier is there no more to give us
dinner with King Christophe's money; and, above all, the witch is there
no more, Youth, who, with a smile, changes penury into a treasure, who
brings you her younger sister, Hope, for a mistress: the latter also
as deceptive as her elder, though she still returns when the other has
fled for ever.
I had forgotten the distress of my first emigration and imagined that
it was enough to leave France in order peacefully to preserve one's
honour in exile: the larks fall ready roasted into the mouths only of
those who reap the harvest, not of those who have sown it If I alone
were concerned, I should do marvellously well in an alms-house: but
Madame de Chateaubriand? And so I have no sooner become settled than,
as I cast my eyes upon the future, anxiety seizes hold of me.
[Sidenote: The value of money.]
They wrote to me from Paris that there was no means of selling my house
in the Rue d'Enfer save at a price which was not sufficient to pay off
the mortgages with which that hermitage is loaded; that something might
nevertheless be arranged if I were there. Acting on this communication,
I have taken a useless journey to Paris, for I found neither goodwill
nor a purchaser; but I saw the Abbaye-aux-Bois again and a few of my
new friends. On the eve of my return here, I dined at the Café de Paris
with Messieurs Arago, Pouqueville[357], Carrel and Béranger, all more
or less dissatisfied and deceived by "the best of republics."
THE PÂQUIS, NEAR GENEVA, 26 _September_ 1831.
My _Études historiques_ brought me into relations with M. Carrel, even
as they made me acquainted with Messieurs Thiers and Mignet. I had
copied into the Preface of those Studies a fairly long passage from the
_Guerre de Catalogne_[358], by M. Carrel, and especially the following:
"Things, in their continual and fatal transformations, do not
always carry every intelligence with them; they do not master every
character with equal facility; they do not take the same care
of all interests: this is what we must understand and make some
allowance for the protests raised on behalf of the past. When a
particular period is finished, the mould is shattered, and it is
enough for Providence that it can not be made over again; but of
the fragments left upon the ground, there are occasionally some
that are beautiful to look upon."
After these fine lines, I myself added this summary:
"The man who was able to write those words has reasons for sympathy
with those who have faith in Providence, who respect the religion
of the past and who also have their eyes fixed upon fragments."
M. Carrel came to thank me. He represented both the courage and the
talent of the _National_, on which he worked with Messieurs Thiers and
Mignet. M. Carrel belongs to a pious and royalist family of Rouen:
the blind Legitimacy, which rarely distinguished merit, misjudged M.
Carrel. Proud and alive to his worth, he had resort to dangerous
opinions, in which one finds a compensation for the sacrifices one lays
upon one's self: there happened to him what happens to all characters
fit for great movements. When unforeseen circumstances oblige them
to restrict themselves within a narrow circle, they consume their
super-abundant faculties in efforts which go beyond the opinions and
events of the day. Before revolutions, superior men die unknown: their
public has not yet come; after revolutions, superior men die neglected:
their public has disappeared.
M. Carrel is not happy: there is nothing more material than his ideas,
nothing more romantic than his life. After being a republican volunteer
in Spain, in 1823, being captured on the battle-field, condemned to
death by the French authorities, and escaping a thousand dangers, he
finds love mingled with the pleasures of his private existence. He
has to protect a passion[359] which is the mainstay of his existence;
and this large-hearted man, ever ready to face a sword's point by
day-light, sets wicket-gates before him, and the shades of night: he
walks in the silent fields with a beloved woman at that first dawn at
which the reveille used to call him to the attack of the enemy's tents.
I leave M. Armand Carrel in order to write a few words on our famous
song-writer. You will find my story too short, reader, but I have a
claim on your indulgence: his name and his songs must be engraved on
your memory.
M. de Béranger is not, like M. Carrel, obliged to conceal his
love-affairs. After singing the praises of liberty and the popular
virtues, while defying the gaols of the kings, he puts his _amours_
into a couplet, and behold Lisette immortalized.
[Sidenote: A flying visit to Paris.]
Near the Barrière des Martyrs, below Montmartre, you see the Rue de la
Tour-d'Auvergne. In this half-built, half-paved street, in a little
house hiding behind a little garden and calculated upon the modesty of
present-day fortunes, you will find the illustrious song-writer. A bald
head, a somewhat rustic, but keen and voluptuous air announce the poet.
I love to rest my eyes on that plebeian countenance, after looking at
so many royal faces; I compare those so greatly different types: on
the monarchical brows one sees something of an exalted nature, but
blighted, impotent, effaced; on the democratic brows appears a common
physical nature, but one recognises a lofty intellectual nature: the
monarchical brow has lost a crown; the popular brow awaits one.
One day I asked Béranger (I beg him to forgive me for becoming as
familiar as his fame), I asked him to show me some of his unknown works:
"Do you know," he said, "that I began by being your disciple? I was mad
on the _Génie du Christianisme_, and I wrote Christian idylls: scenes
in the life of a country priest, pictures of religious worship in the
villages and in the midst of the harvest."
M. Augustin Thierry has told me that the Battle of the Franks in the
_Martyrs_ suggested to him a new manner of writing history: nothing
has flattered me more than to find my memory occupying a place at
the commencement of the talent of the historian Thierry and the poet
Béranger.
Our song-writer has the several qualities upon which Voltaire insists
for the ballad:
"To succeed well in these little works," says the author of so many
graceful poems, "one needs refinement and sentiment of intellect,
to have harmony in one's head, not to lower one's self over much,
and to know how not to be too long."
Béranger has many muses, all of them charming; and, when those muses
are women, he loves them all. When they betray him, he does not turn to
elegiacs; and nevertheless there is a feeling of sadness at the bottom
of his gaiety: his is a serious face that smiles; it is philosophy
saying its prayers.
My friendship for Béranger earned me many expressions of astonishment
on the part of what was called my party. An old knight of St. Louis,
personally unknown to me, wrote to me from his distant turret:
"Rejoice, sir, at being praised by one who has slapped the face of your
King and your God."
Well said, my gallant nobleman! You are a poet too.
[Sidenote: Béranger.]
At the end of a dinner at the Café de Paris which I gave to Messieurs
de Béranger and Armand Carrel before my departure for Switzerland, M.
Béranger sang us his admirable printed song:
Chateaubriand, pourquoi fuir ta patrie,
Fuir son amour, notre encens et nos soins[360]?
In it occurred this stanza on the Bourbons:
Et tu voudras t'attacher à leur chute!
Connais donc mieux leur folle vanité:
Au rang des maux qu'au ciel même elle impute,
Leur cœur ingrat met ta fidélité[361].
To this song, which belongs to the history of my time, I replied from
Switzerland by a letter which is printed at the head of my pamphlet on
the Briqueville[362] Motion. I said to M. de Béranger:
"From the place whence I wrote to you, monsieur, I can see the
country-house where Lord Byron lived and the roofs of Madame de
Staël's château. Where is the bard of Childe-Harold? Where is the
author of Corinne? My too long life is like those Roman roads
bordered with funeral monuments[363]."
I returned to Geneva; I next took Madame de Chateaubriand to Paris and
brought back the manuscript directed against the Briqueville Motion
for the banishment of the Bourbons, a motion which was taken into
consideration in the sitting of the Deputies of the 17th of September
of this year 1831: some attach their lives to success, others to
misfortune.
PARIS, RUE D'ENFER, _end of November_ 1831.
Returning to Paris on the 11th of October, I published my pamphlet at
the end of the same month; it is entitled, _De la nouvelle proposition
relative au banissement de Charles X. et de sa famille, ou suite de mon
dernier écrit: De la Restauration et de la Monarchie élective._
When these posthumous Memoirs appear, will the daily polemics, the
events of which men are enamoured at this present hour of my life,
the adversaries against whom I am fighting, will even the act of
banishment of Charles X. and his Family count for anything? There you
have the drawback of all diaries: you find in them ardent discussions
of subjects that have become indifferent; the reader sees pass, like
shadows, a host of persons whose very names he does not remember:
silent supernumeraries, who fill the back of the stage. Yet it is
in these dryasdust portions of the chronicles that one gathers the
observations and facts of the history of mankind and men.
I placed first at the commencement of the pamphlet the decree brought
forward successively by Messieurs Baude and Briqueville. After
examining the five courses that lay open after the Revolution of July,
I said:
"The worst of the periods through which we have passed seems to
be that in which we are, because anarchy reigns in men's reasons,
morals and intellects. The existence of nations is longer than that
of individuals: a paralytic man often remains stretched on his
couch for many years before disappearing; an infirm nation lies
long on its bed before expiring. What the new Royalty needed was
buoyancy, youth, intrepidity, to turn its back upon the past, to
march with France to meet the future.
"All this it neglects: it appeared before us reduced and
debilitated by the doctors who were physicking it. It arrived
piteous, empty-handed, having nothing to give, everything to
receive, playing the poor thing, begging everybody's pardon, and
yet snappish, declaiming against the Legitimacy and aping the
Legitimacy, against republicanism and trembling before it. This
abdominous 'system' beholds enemies only in two forms of opposition
which it threatens. To support itself it has built itself a phalanx
of re-enlisted veterans: if they bore as many stripes as they have
taken oaths, their sleeves would be more motley than the livery of
the Montmorencys.
"I doubt whether liberty will long be content with this stew-pot
of a domestic monarchy. The Franks placed liberty in a camp; in
their descendants it has retained the taste and love of its first
cradle; like the old Royalty, it wants to be raised on the shield
and its deputies are soldiers."
[Illustration: Charles X.]
From this general argument I pass on to the details of the system
followed in our foreign relations. The immense mistake of the Congress
of Vienna is that it placed a military nation like France in a
condition of forced hostility with the neighbouring peoples. I point to
all that the foreigners have gained in territory and power, all that
we could have taken back in July. A mighty lesson! A striking proof of
the vanity of military glory and of the work of conquerors! If one were
to draw up a list of the Princes who have increased the possessions of
France, Bonaparte would not figure on it; but Charles X. would occupy a
remarkable place!
[Sidenote: Yet another pamphlet.]
Passing from argument to argument, I come to Louis-Philippe:
"Louis-Philippe is King," I say; "he wields the sceptre of the
child whose immediate heir he is, of the ward whom Charles X.
placed in the hands of the Lieutenant-general of the Kingdom as
into those of a tried guardian, a faithful trustee, a generous
protector. In that Palace of the Tuileries, instead of an innocent
couch, free from insomnia, free from remorse, free from ghosts,
what has the Prince found? An empty throne presented to him by a
headless spectre bearing, in its blood-stained hand, the head of
another spectre....
"Must we, to finish the business, put a handle to Louvel's blade
in the shape of a law, in order to strike a last blow at the
proscribed Family? If it were driven to these shores by the
tempest; if Henry, too young as yet, had not attained the years
requisite for the scaffold, well then, do you, the masters, give
him a dispensation of age to die!"
After speaking to the French Government, I turn to Holyrood and add:
"Dare I, in conclusion, take the respectful liberty of addressing
a few words to the men of exile? They have returned to sorrow as
into their mother's womb: misfortune, a seduction from which it is
difficult for me to defend myself, seems to me to be always in the
right; I fear to offend its sacred authority and the majesty which
it adds to insulted grandeurs, which henceforth have none but me to
flatter them. But I will overcome my weakness, I will strive to
voice words which, in a day of ill-fortune, might give grounds for
hope to my country.
"The education of a prince should be analogous to the form of
government and the manners of his native land. Now, there are
in France neither chivalry nor knights, neither soldiers of the
Oriflamme nor nobles barbed in steel, ready to march behind the
White Flag. There is a people which is no longer the people of
other days, a people which, changed by the centuries, has lost
the old habits and the ancient manners of our fathers. Whether we
deplore the social transformations that have arisen or glorify
them, we must take the nation as it is, facts as they are, enter
into the spirit of our time, in order to exercise an action over
that spirit.
"All is in God's hand, except the past, which, once fallen from
that hand, does not return to it.
"The moment will doubtless arrive when the orphan will leave that
palace of the Stuarts, the ill-omened refuge which seems to spread
the shadow of its fatality over his youth: the last-born of the
Bearnese must mix with children of his own age, attend the public
schools, learn all that is known to-day. Let him become the most
enlightened young man of his time; let him be acquainted with the
knowledge of the period; let him add to the virtues of a Christian
of the age of St. Louis the sagacity of a Christian of our age.
Let travel be his instructor in manners and laws; let him cross
the seas, compare institutions and governments, free peoples and
enthralled peoples; let him, if he find the occasion while abroad,
expose himself, as a simple soldier, to the dangers of war, for
none is fit to reign over Frenchmen who has not heard the hiss of
the cannon-ball. Then you will have done for him all that, humanly
speaking, you can do. But, above all, beware of fostering him in
ideas of invincible right: far from flattering him with the thought
of reascending the throne of his fathers, prepare him never to
reascend it; bring him up to be a man, not to be a king: those are
his best chances.
"Enough: whatever God's counsel may provide, there will remain to
the candidate of my fond and pious loyalty a majesty of the ages
which men cannot take from him. A thousand years attached to his
young head will always deck him with a pomp exceeding that of all
monarchs. If, in a private condition, he bear bravely this diadem
of days, of memory and of glory, if his hand raise without effort
this sceptre of time which his ancestors have bequeathed to him,
what empire will he be able to regret?"
[Sidenote: The Comte de Briqueville.]
M. le Comte de Briqueville, whose motion I thus contested, printed some
reflections on my pamphlet; he sent them to me with the following note:
"MONSIEUR,
"I have yielded to the need, to the duty, to publish the
reflections brought to my mind by your eloquent words on my motion.
I obey a feeling no less sincere when I deplore that I should
find myself in opposition to you, monsieur, who add to the power
of genius so many claims to public consideration. The country is
in danger, and from that moment I cease to believe in a serious
dissension between us: this France of ours invites us to unite to
save her; assist her with your genius; we shall work, we shall
assist her with our strong arms. On that field, monsieur, is it not
true that we shall not be long in coming to an understanding? You
shall be the Tyrtæus[364] of a people of which we are the soldiers,
and it will be with the greatest happiness that I shall then
proclaim myself the most ardent of your political adherents, as I
am already the sincerest of your admirers.
"Your most humble and obedient servant,
"The Comte Armand de BRIQUEVILLE.
"PARIS, 15 _November_ 1831."
I was not slow in answering, and I broke a second still-born lance
against the champion:
"PARIS, 15 _November_ 1831.
"MONSIEUR,
"Your letter is worthy of a gentleman: forgive me for using this
old word, which becomes your name, your courage, your love of
France. Like you, I detest the foreign yoke: if the question were
that of defending my country, I should not ask to wear the lyre
of the poet, but the sword of the veteran, in the ranks of your
soldiers.
"I have not yet read your reflections, monsieur; but, if the state
of politics led you to withdraw the motion which has so strangely
saddened me, how happy I should be to find myself by your side,
with no obstacle between us, on the field of liberty, of honour, of
the glory of our country!
"I have the honour to be, monsieur, with the most distinguished
regard,
"Your most humble and most obedient servant,
"CHATEAUBRIAND."
PARIS, INFIRMERIE DE MARIE-THÉRÈSE, RUE D'ENFER,
_December_ 1831.
A poet[365], mingling the proscriptions of the Muses with those of the
laws, attacked the widow and the orphan in a vigorous improvisation.
As these verses were by a writer of talent, they acquired a sort of
authority which forbade me to let them pass in silence; I faced about
to meet another enemy[366].
The reader would not understand my reply if he did not read the poet's
lampoon; I invite you, therefore to cast your eyes over those verses:
they are very fine and are to be found everywhere. My reply has not
been published: it appears for the first time in these Memoirs.
Wretched contentions in which revolutions end! See to what a struggle
we come, the feeble successors of those men who, arms in hand, treated
great questions of glory and liberty by shaking the universe! Pygmies
to-day utter their little cry among the tombs of the giants buried
beneath the mountains which they have overturned upon themselves.
"PARIS, _Wednesday evening_, 9 _November_ 1831.
"SIR,
"I received this morning the last number of _Némésis_ which you
have done me the honour to send me. To protect myself against the
seduction of those praises awarded with so much brilliancy, grace
and charm, I need to recall the obstacles that exist between us.
We live in two worlds apart; our hopes and fears are not the same;
you burn what I adore, and I burn what you adore. You, sir, have
grown up amid a crowd of abortions of July; but, even as all the
influence which you attribute to my prose will not, according to
you, raise up a fallen House, so, according to me, will all the
might of your poetry fail to abase that noble House. Can it be that
both you and I are thus placed in two impossible positions?
"You are young, sir, like the future which you dream of and which
will trick you; I am old, like time, which I dream of and which
escapes me. If you were to come to sit by my fireside, you
obligingly say, you would reproduce my features with your graver:
I should strive to make you a Christian and a Royalist. Since your
lyre, at the first chord of its harmony, sang my Martyrs and my
Pilgrimage, why should not you complete the course? Enter the holy
place; time has stripped me only of my hair, as it strips a tree of
its leaves in winter, but the sap remains in my heart: my hand is
still firm enough to hold the torch which would guide your steps
under the vaults of the sanctuary.
[Sidenote: Letter to Barthélemy.]
"You declare, sir, that it would need a people of poets to
understand my contradictions of 'extinct kingdoms and young
republics:' is it likely that you too have not celebrated liberty
and yet found some magnificent words for the tyrants who oppressed
it? You quote the Du Barrys, the Montespans, the Fontanges, the La
Vallières: you recall royal weaknesses; but did those weaknesses
cost France what the debauches of Danton and Camille Desmoulins
cost her? The morals of those plebeian Catalines were reflected
even in their speech: they borrowed their metaphors from the
piggeries of infamous persons and prostitutes. Did the frailties
of Louis XIV. and Louis XV. send the fathers and husbands to the
gallows, after dishonouring the daughters and wives? Did his
blood-baths do more to render chaste a revolutionary's lewdness
than did her milk-baths to render virginal a Poppæa's pollution?
If Robespierre's hucksters had retailed to the people of Paris
the blood from Danton's bathing-tub, as Nero's slaves sold to the
inhabitants of Rome the milk from his courtesan's _thermæ_, do
you think that any virtue would have been found in the rinsings of
the obscene headsmen of the Terror?
"The swiftness and the height of the flight of your muse have
deceived you, sir: the sun, which laughs at all misery, must have
struck the garments of a widow; they must have seemed 'gilded' to
you: I have seen those garments, they were of mourning; they knew
nothing of pleasure; the child, in the entrails which bore him, was
rocked only to the sound of tears; if he had 'danced nine months in
his mother's womb,' as you say, he would then have known joy only
before being born, between conception and delivery, between the
assassination and the proscription! 'The pallor of fearsome omen'
which you remarked on Henry's face is the result of his father's
blood-letting, and not of a ball of two hundred and seventy nights.
The old curse was kept up for the daughter of Henry IV.: _In dolore
paries filios._ I know none save the Goddess of Reason whose
confinements, hastened by adultery, took place amid the dances of
Death. From her public flanks fell unclean reptiles which, at that
very instant, began to jig in the ring with the knitting-women
around the scaffold, to the sound of the rise and fall of the
knife, the refrain of that devils' dance.
"Ah sir, I entreat you, in the name of your rare talent, cease to
reward crime and to punish misfortune by the sentences improvised
by your muse; do not condemn the first to Heaven, the second to
Hell. If, while remaining attached to the cause of liberty and
enlightenment, you were to afford an asylum to religion, humanity,
innocence, you would see another sort of Nemesis appear before
you in your waking hours, one worthy of all the earth's homage.
And, while waiting to pour over virtue, better than I know how,
'the whole ocean of your fresh ideas,' continue, in the spirit of
vengeance which you have adopted, to drag our turpitude to the
_gemoniæ_; overthrow the false monuments of a revolution which
has not built the temple fit for its cult; turn up their ruins with
the plough-share of your satire; sow salt in that field to make it
barren, so that no new vileness can shoot there. I recommend above
all, sir, to your attention, that Government which has fallen so
low that it trembles before the pride of the obedience, the victory
of the defeats, and the glory of the humiliations of the country.
"CHATEAUBRIAND."
PARIS, RUE D'ENFER, _end of March_ 1832.
Those travels and those contests came to an end for me in the year
1831; at the beginning of the year 1832, a new annoyance.
The Paris Revolution had left on the streets of Paris a host of Swiss,
of Body-guards, of men of all conditions kept by the Court, who were
now starving and whom certain monarchical dunderheads, young and
foolish under their grey hairs, thought of enlisting for a surprise.
In this formidable plot there was no lack of serious, pale, lean,
diaphanous, bent persons, with noble faces, eyes still bright, white
heads; that past suggested honour resuscitated, coming to try, with
its shadowy hands, to restore the Family which it had been unable to
maintain with its living hands. Often men on crutches pretend to prop
crumbling monarchies; but, at this period of society, the restoration
of a mediæval monument has become impossible, because the genius which
quickened that architecture is dead: what we take for Gothic is merely
antiquated.
On the other hand, the heroes of July, whom the _juste-milieu_ had
swindled out of the Republic, desired nothing more than to come to
an understanding with the Carlists to revenge themselves on a common
enemy, remaining free to cut each other's throats after the victory.
M. Thiers having extolled the system of 1793 as the work of liberty,
victory and genius, young imaginations became kindled at the flame of
a conflagration of which they saw only the distant reverberation; they
have got no further than the poetry of the Terror: a mad and hideous
parody which sets back the hour of liberty. This is to disregard at
once time, history and humanity; it is to oblige the world to recoil
under the whip of the convict-keeper in order to escape those fanatics
of the scaffold.
Money was needed to feed all those malcontents, dismissed heroes of
July, or servants out of place: people clubbed together. Carlist and
republican cabals were held in every comer of Paris, and the police,
informed of all that went on, sent its spies from club to garret to
preach equality and liberty. I was told of these proceedings, which
I opposed. The two parties wanted to declare me their leader at the
assured moment of triumph: a Republican club asked me if I would accept
the Presidency of the Republic; I answered:
"Yes, most certainly; but after M. de La Fayette."
[Sidenote: The Marquis de La Fayette.]
This was thought modest and proper. General La Fayette used sometimes
to come to Madame Récamier's; I used to make fun of his "best of
republics;" I asked him if he would not have done better to proclaim
Henry V. and to be the real President of France during the minority of
the royal infant. He agreed and took the jest in good part, for he was
a well-bred man. Each time we met, he would say:
"Ah, you are going to pick your quarrel again!"
I used to make him admit that no one had been more caught than himself
by his good friend Philip.
In the midst of this excitement and these extravagant plottings,
arrived a man in disguise. He landed at my door with a tow wig on his
pate and a pair of green spectacles on his nose, hiding his eyes,
which could see quite well without spectacles. He had his pockets
stuffed with bills of exchange, which he displayed; and, suddenly
aware that I wanted to sell my house and settle my affairs, he offered
me his services. I could not help laughing at this gentleman (a man,
otherwise, of intelligence and resource) who thought himself obliged to
buy me for the Legitimacy. When his offers became too pressing, he saw
on my lips a certain scornfulness which obliged him to beat a retreat,
and he wrote to my secretary this little note, which I have kept:
"SIR,
"Yesterday evening I had the honour to see M. le Vicomte de
Chateaubriand, who received me with his customary kindness;
nevertheless, I seem to have perceived that he no longer showed his
usual geniality. Tell me, I beg of you, what can have caused me
to lose his confidence, which I valued more highly than anything
else. If he has been told 'stories' about me, I am not afraid to
expose my conduct to the light of day, and I am prepared to reply
to anything that he may have been told: he knows too well the
spitefulness of intriguing people to condemn me unheard. There are
timid persons too who make others so; but we must hope that the day
will come when we shall see people who are really devoted. Well,
he told me that it was of no use for me to meddle in his business;
I am sorry for that, because I flatter myself that it would have
been arranged according to his wishes. I have little doubt as to
the person who has wrought this change in him; if I had been less
discreet at the time, this person would not have been in a position
to injure me with your excellent 'patron.' However, I am none
the less devoted to him, as you may assure him once more with my
respectful homage. I venture to hope that a day will come when he
will be able to know me and to judge of me.
"Pray accept, sir, etc."
Hyacinthe answered this note with the following reply at my dictation:
"My patron has nothing whatever in particular against the person
who has written to me; but he wishes to live outside everything,
and does not wish to accept any service."
Shortly afterwards, the catastrophe came.
[Sidenote: A Royalist conspiracy.]
Do you know the Rue des Prouvaires[367], a narrow, dirty, populous
street, near Saint-Eustache and the markets? It was there that the
famous supper of the Third Restoration was held. The guests were armed
with pistols, daggers and keys; after drinking, they were to make their
way into the gallery of the Louvre and, passing at midnight through
a double row of master-pieces, go to strike the usurping monster in
the midst of a fête. The conception was a romantic one: the sixteenth
century had returned; one might have believed one's self in the times
of the Borgias, the Florentine Medicis and the Parisian Medicis: only
the men were different.
On the 1st of February, at nine o'clock in the evening, I was going to
bed, when a zealous man and the individual of the bills of exchange
forced my door in the Rue d'Enfer to tell me that all was ready, that
in two hours Louis-Philippe would have disappeared; they came to
enquire if they might declare me the principal chief of the Provisional
Government and if I would consent to take the reins of the Provisional
Government, in the name of Henry V., with a council of Regency. They
admitted that the thing was dangerous, but said that I should reap all
the greater glory, and that, as I was acceptable to all parties, I was
the only man in France in a position to play such a part.
This was pressing me very hard: two hours to decide upon my crown! Two
hours in which to sharpen the big mameluke's sabre which I had bought
in Cairo in 1806! However, I felt no embarrassment and I said to them:
"Gentlemen, you know that I have never approved of your enterprise,
which seems to me a mad one. If I were disposed to meddle in it, I
would have shared your dangers and would not have waited for your
victory to accept the prize of your risks. You know that I have a
serious love of liberty, and it is clear to me, to judge by the
leaders of all this business, that they do not want liberty and that,
if they remained masters of the field of battle, they would begin by
establishing the reign of arbitrariness. They would have no one, they
would have me least of all, to support them in these plans; their
success would bring about complete anarchy, and other countries,
profiting by our discords, would come to dismember France. I cannot
therefore enter into all this. I admire your devotion, but mine is not
of the same character. I am going to bed; I advise you to do the same;
and I am very much afraid that I shall hear to-morrow morning of the
misfortune of your friends."
The supper took place; the proprietor of the tavern, who had prepared
it only with the authorization of the police, knew what he was about.
The police-spies, at table, touched glasses to the health of Henry V.
with the best of them; the officers arrived, seized the guests, and
once more upset the cup of the Legitimate Royalty. The Renaud of the
royalist adventurers was a cobbler in the Rue de Seine[368], a hero of
July, who had fought valiantly during the Three Days and who seriously
wounded one of Louis-Philippe's policemen, even as he had killed
soldiers of the Guard to drive out Henry V. and the two old Kings.
During this business, I had received a note from Madame la Duchesse de
Berry appointing me a "member of a secret government," which she was
establishing in her quality as Regent of France. I took advantage of
this occasion to write the following letter to the Princess[369]:
[Sidenote: My letter.]
"MADAME,
"I have received with the deepest gratitude the mark of confidence
and esteem with which you have consented to honour me; it lays upon
my loyalty the duty of doubling my zeal, while not refraining from
placing before the eyes of Your Royal Highness what appears to me
to be the truth.
"I will speak first of the so-called conspiracies, the rumour of
which will perhaps have reached Your Royal Highness. It is asserted
that these have been concocted or provoked by the police. Leaving
the fact on one side, and without insisting upon the intrinsically
reprehensible nature of conspiracies, be they true or false, I
will content myself with observing that our national character is
at once too light and too frank to succeed in such tasks. And so,
during the last forty years, this sort of guilty enterprise has
invariably failed. Nothing is more common than to hear a Frenchman
publicly boast of being in a plot: he tells the whole details of
it, without forgetting the day, place and hour, to some spy whom
he takes for a brother; he says aloud, or rather exclaims to the
passers-by:
"'We have forty thousand men all told, we have sixty thousand
cartridges, in such a street, number so-and-so, the corner-house.'
"And then our Cataline goes off to dance and laugh.
"Secret societies have a long range only because they proceed
by revolutions and not by conspiracies; they aim at changing
doctrines, ideas and manners, before changing men and things;
their progress is slow, but their results certain. Publicity of
thought will destroy the influence of secret societies; it is
public opinion which will now effect in France that which occult
congregations accomplish among unemancipated nations.
"The departments in the West and South, which they seem to wish to
drive to extremities by means of arbitrary measures and violence,
retain the spirit of loyalty for which our old manners were
distinguished; but that half of France will never conspire, in the
narrow sense of the word: it forms a sort of camp standing at ease
under arms. Admirable as a reserve force of the Legitimacy, it
would be insufficient as an advance-guard and would never assume
the offensive successfully. Civilization has made too much progress
to allow of the outburst of one of those intestine wars, leading to
great results, which were the outlet and the scourge of centuries
at once more Christian and less enlightened than our own.
"What exists in France is not a monarchy; it is a republic: one,
truly, of the worst quality. This republic is plastroned with a
royalty which receives the blows and prevents them from striking on
the Government itself.
"Besides, if the Legitimacy is a considerable force, the right
of election is also a preponderating power, even when it is only
fictitious, especially in this country where men live only on
vanity: the French passion for equality is flattered by the right
of election.
"Louis-Philippe's Government abandons itself to a double excess of
arbitrariness and obsequiousness which the Government of Charles X.
had never dreamt of. This excess is endured; and why? Because the
people more easily endure the tyranny of a government which they
have created than the lawful strictness of the institutions which
are not their work.
"Forty years of storms have shattered the strongest souls: apathy
is great, egoism almost general; men shrivel up to escape danger,
to keep what they possess, to make shift to live in peace. After a
revolution, there remain also cankered men who communicate their
contamination to everything even as, after a battle, there remain
corpses which pollute the air. If, by a mere wish, Henry V. could
be transported to the Tuileries without trouble, without a shock,
without compromising the slightest interest, we should be very near
a restoration; but, in order to effect it, if one had to spend as
much as one sleepless night, the chances would decrease.
"The results of the Days of July have not turned to the profit of
the people, nor to the honour of the army, nor to the advantage of
literature, art, commerce or industry. The State has fallen a prey
to the professional ministerialists and to the class which sees the
country in its stew-pot, public affairs in its domestic economy.
It is difficult, Madame, for you at your distance to know what is
here called the _juste-milieu_: Your Royal Highness must imagine
a complete absence of elevation of soul, of nobility of heart, of
dignity of character; you must picture to yourself people swelled
up with their importance, bewitched with their employs, doting on
their money, determined to die for their pensions: nothing will
part them from those; it is a question of life or death to them;
they are wedded to them as were the Gauls to their swords, the
knights to the Oriflamme, the Huguenots to the white plume of Henry
IV., the soldiers of Napoleon to the tricolour; they will die only
when they are exhausted of oaths to every form of government,
after shedding the last drop of those oaths on their last place.
These eunuchs of the sham Legitimacy dogmatize about independence
while having the citizens bludgeoned in the streets and the
writers crowded into prison; they strike up songs of triumph
while evacuating Belgium at the bidding of an English minister
and, soon after, Ancona by order of an Austrian corporal. Between
the threshold of Sainte-Pélagie and the doors of the Cabinets of
Europe, they strut all puffed out with liberty and soiled with
glory.
[Sidenote: To the Duchesse de Berry.]
"What I have said concerning the temper of the French must not
discourage Your Royal Highness; but I wish that the road that leads
to the throne of Henry V. were better known.
"You know my way of thinking as regards the education of my young
King: my opinions are expressed at the end of the pamphlet which I
have laid at Your Royal Highness' feet; I could only repeat myself.
Let Henry V. be brought up for his century, with and by the men
of his century: my whole system is summed up in those two words.
Let him, above all, be brought up not to be King. He may reign
tomorrow, he may reign only in ten years, he may never reign: for,
if the Legitimacy has the different chances of returning which I
will presently set out, nevertheless the present edifice might
crumble to pieces without the formers rising from its ruins. You
have a firm enough soul, Madame, to be able, without allowing
yourself to be cast down, to suppose a judgment of God which would
thrust back your illustrious House into the popular sources, even
as you have a large enough heart to cherish just hopes without
allowing them to intoxicate you. I must now place this other side
of the picture before you.
"Your Royal Highness can defy, can dare everything at your age;
you have more years left to run than have elapsed since the
commencement of the Revolution. Now, what have these latter years
not seen? When the Republic, the Empire, the Legitimacy have
passed, shall the amphibious thing known as the _juste-milieu_
not pass? What! Was it to arrive at the wretchedness of the men
and things of the present moment that we have gone through and
expended so many crimes, so much misfortune, talent, liberty and
glory? What! Europe overturned, thrones tumbling one over the
other, generations hurled into the common ditch with the steel in
their breasts, the world labouring for half a century, and all this
to bring forth the sham Legitimacy? One could conceive a great
republic emerging from this social cataclysm: it would at least
be fitted to inherit the conquests of the Revolution, that is,
political liberty, liberty and publicity of thought, the levelling
of ranks, the admission to all offices, the equality of all before
the law, popular election and sovereignty. But how can we suppose
a troop of sordid mediocrities, saved from shipwreck, to be able
to employ those principles? To what a proportion have they not
already reduced them! They detest them, they hanker only after laws
of exception; they would like to catch all those liberties in the
crown which they have forged, as in a trap; after which they would
fiddle-faddle sanctimoniously with canals, railways, a mish-mash
of arts, literary arrangements: a world of machinery, loquacity
and self-sufficiency denominated 'a model society.' Woe to any
superiority, to any man of genius ambitious of preferment, of glory
and pleasure, of sacrifice and renown, aspiring to the triumph of
the tribune, the lyre or arms, who should rise up some day in that
universe of boredom!
"There is but one chance, Madame, for the sham Legitimacy to
continue to vegetate: that is, if the actual state of society were
the natural state of that very society at the period in which we
live. If the people, grown old, found itself in sympathy with its
decrepit government; if there were a harmony of infirmity and
weakness between the governors and the governed, then, Madame,
all would be over for Your Royal Highness and for the rest of the
French. But, if we have not come to the age of national dotage
and if the immediate Republic be impossible, then the Legitimacy
seems called to be born again. Live your youth, Madame, and you
shall have the royal tatters of the poor thing known as the
Monarchy of July. Say to your enemies what your ancestress, Queen
Blanche[370], said to hers during the minority of St. Louis:
"'No matter; I can wait.'
"Life's beautiful hours have been given you in compensation for
your sufferings, and the future will give you as many occasions of
happiness as the present has robbed you of days.
"The first reason which militates in your favour, Madame, is the
justice of your cause and the innocence of your son. All the
eventualities are not against the good right."
[Sidenote: On the prospects.]
After setting forth in detail the reasons for hope which I hardly
entertained, but which I endeavoured to amplify in order to console the
Princess, I continued:
"There, Madame, you see the precarious state of the
sham Legitimacy at home; abroad its position is no more
assured. If Louis-Philippe's Government had felt that the
Revolution of July cancelled the earlier transactions, that
a new national constitution entailed a new political right
and changed social interests; if it had shown judgment and
courage at the outset of its career, it could, without firing a
single cartridge, have endowed France with the frontier
which has been taken from her, so keen was the assent of
the peoples, so great the stupefaction of the kings. The
sham Legitimacy would have paid ready money for its
crown with an increase of territory and would have entrenched
itself behind that bulwark. Instead of profiting
by its republican element to go fast, it has been afraid of
its own principles; it has dragged itself on its belly; it
has abandoned the nations which have risen for it and
through it; it has turned them from the clients that they
were into adversaries; it has extinguished warlike enthusiasm;
it has changed into a pusillanimous wish for peace an
enlightened desire to restore the balance of power between
ourselves and the neighbouring States, or at least to claim
from those States, enlarged out of all proportion, the shreds
tom from our old country. Thanks to his faint-heartedness
and lack of genius, Louis-Philippe has recognised treaties
which are not connatural with the Revolution, treaties with
which it cannot live and which the foreigners themselves
have violated.
"The _juste-milieu_ has left the foreign Cabinets time to
recover themselves and to form their armies. And, as the
existence of a democratic monarchy is incompatible with
the existence of the continental monarchies, a state of hostilities
might issue from this incompatibility in spite of
protocols, financial embarrassments, mutual fears, prolonged
armistices, gracious dispatches and demonstrations of friendship.
If our _bourgeois_ Royalty has resigned itself to accept
insult?, if men dream of peace, still the state of things may
become such as to necessitate war.
"But whether war shatter the sham Legitimacy or not, I
know, Madame, that you will never fix your hopes in the
foreigner; you would rather that Henry V. should never
reign than see him triumph under the patronage of an
European coalition: you place your hopes in yourself and
in your son. In whatever manner we might argue about
the Ordinances, they could never affect Henry V.; innocent
of all, he has the election of the ages and his native misfortunes
in his favour. If unhappiness touches us in the solitude
of a tomb, it moves us still more when it keeps watch beside
a cradle: for then it is no longer the memory of a thing that
is past, of a being who is miserable but who has ceased to
suffer; it is a painful reality; it saddens an age which
ought to know only joy; it threatens a whole life which has
done nothing to deserve its rigours.
"For you, Madame, your adversities provide a powerful
authority. Bathed in your husband's blood, you have carried
in your womb the son whom politics named "the child of
Europe" and religion "the child of miracle." What influence
do you not exercise over public opinion when you are seen
to be keeping unaided, for the exiled orphan, the heavy
crown which Charles X. shook from his whitened head
and from whose weight two other brows escaped, sufficiently
laden with sorrow to permit them to reject this new
burden! Your image presents itself to our memory with
those feminine graces which seem to occupy their natural
place, when seated on the throne. The people entertain no
prejudice against you; they pity your sorrows, they admire
your courage; they remember your days of mourning; they
are grateful to you for mingling later in their pleasures, for
sharing their tastes and their festivals; they find a charm in
the vivacity of this foreign Frenchwoman, who has come
from a land endeared to our glory by the days of Fornovo[371],
of Marignano[372], of Areola[373] and of Marengo[374]. The Muses
regret their protectress, born under that fair sky of Italy
which inspired her with the love of the arts and which
turned a daughter of Henry IV. into a daughter of Francis I.
"France, since the Revolution, has often changed leaders,
and has not yet seen a woman at the helm of the State.
God wills, perhaps, that the reins of this unmanageable
people, which slipped from the devouring hands of the
Convention, broke in the victorious hands of Bonaparte,
and were taken up in vain by Louis XVIII. and Charles X.,
should be fastened again by a young Princess, who would
know how to make them at once less fragile and less light."
[Sidenote: On the legitimacy.]
Lastly reminding Madame that she had been good enough to think of me as
a member of the secret government, I concluded my letter as follows:
"In Lisbon there stands a magnificent monument on which one reads
this epitaph:
HERE LIES BASCO FUGUERA AGAINST HIS WILL.
My mausoleum shall be a modest one, and I shall not rest there
unwillingly.
"You know, Madame, the order of ideas in which I perceive the
possibility of a restoration: the other combinations would be
beyond the range of my mind; I should confess my insufficiency. It
would be overtly, by proclaiming myself the man of your consent,
of your confidence, that I should find some strength; but I should
feel no aptitude to act as a nocturnal minister plenipotentiary,
a _chargé d'affaires_ to the darkness. If Your Royal Highness
were patently to appoint me your ambassador to the people of 'New
France' I should inscribe in large letters over my door:
LEGATION OF OLD FRANCE.
Things would happen as God pleased; but I would have nothing to do
with secret devotions; I know how to be guilty of loyalty only in
_flagrante delicto._
"Madame, without refusing Your Royal Highness the services which
you have the right to command of me, I entreat you to allow the
plan which I have formed of ending my days in retirement. My ideas
cannot be acceptable to the persons who enjoy the confidence of the
noble exiles of Holyrood: once misfortune were past, the natural
antipathy to my principles and person would revive with prosperity.
I have beheld the rejection of the plans which I had put forward
for the greatness of my country, to give France frontiers within
which she could exist safe from invasion, to remove from her
the disgrace of the Treaties of Vienna and Paris. I have heard
myself treated as a renegade, when I was defending religion; as a
revolutionary, when I was striving to establish the throne on the
basis of the public liberties. I should find the same obstacles
increased by the hatred which the faithful of the Court, the town
and the country would have conceived from the lesson inflicted
upon them by my conduct on the day of trial. I have too little
ambition, too great a longing for repose to make my attachment a
burden to the Crown and to thrust upon it my importunate presence.
I have done my duty without thinking for a moment that it gave me a
right to the favour of an august Family: happy in being permitted
to embrace its adversity, I see nothing higher than that honour;
it will find no more zealous servant than myself; but it will
find those who are younger and abler. I do not believe myself a
necessary man, and I think that there are no necessary men left at
this day: useless henceforth, I am going to retire into solitude
to busy myself with the past. I hope, Madame, still to live long
enough to add to the history of the Restoration the glorious page
which your future destinies promise to France.
"I am, Madame,
"with the most profound respect,
"Your Royal Highness' most humble and most "obedient servant,
"CHATEAUBRIAND."
The letter was obliged to await a safe messenger; time went on, and I
added the following postscript to my dispatch:
[Sidenote: The cholera.]
"PARIS, 12 _April_, 1832.
"MADAME,
"All things grow old early in France; each day opens out new
chances for politics and commences a series of events. We now have
M. Périer's illness[375] and the plague sent by God. I have sent
to M. the Prefect of the Seine the sum of 12,000 francs which the
outlawed daughter of St. Louis and Henry IV. has destined for the
relief of the unfortunate: a worthy use of her noble indigence!
I shall strive, Madame, to be the faithful interpreter of your
sentiments. I have never in my life received a mission with which I
felt myself more honoured.
"I am, with the most profound respect, etc."
Before speaking of the affair of the 12,000 francs for the
cholera-stricken sufferers mentioned in the above postscript, I must
speak of the cholera. I had not met with the plague during my journey
in the East: it came to visit me at home; the fortune which I had run
after awaited me seated at my door.
At the time of the plague of Athens, in the year 431 before our era,
already twenty-two great plagues had ravaged the world. The Athenians
imagined that their wells had been poisoned: a popular fancy renewed
in all contagions. Thucydides has left us a description of the Attic
scourge which has been copied, among the ancients, by Lucretius,
Virgil, Ovid, Lucan[376]; among the moderns, by Boccaccio[377] and
Manzoni. It is a remarkable thing that, when writing of the plague of
Athens, Thucydides does not say a word of Hippocrates[378], in the
same way as he does not name Socrates in connection with Alcibiades.
This pestilence first attacked the head, descended to the stomach,
thence to the bowels, lastly to the legs; if it went out by the feet,
after passing through the whole body, like a long serpent, the patient
recovered. Hippocrates called it the "divine evil" and Thucydides the
"sacred fire:" they both regarded it as the fire of the heavenly wrath.
One of the most dreadful plagues was that of Constantinople, in the
fifth century, under the reign of Justinian: Christianity had already
modified the imagination of the peoples and given a new character to a
calamity, even as it had changed poetry; the sick seemed to see ghosts
hover around them and to hear threatening voices.
The black plague of the fourteenth century, known by the name of the
Black Death, took rise in China: it was imagined that it moved rapidly
in the shape of a fiery vapour, while spreading a noxious smell. It
carried off four-fifths of the inhabitants of Europe.
In 1575, descended upon Milan the contagion which immortalized the
charity of St Charles Borromeo. Fifty-four years later, in 1629,
that unfortunate city was again exposed to the calamities of which
Manzoni[379] has made a painting far superior to the celebrated picture
by Boccaccio.
In 1660, the scourge was renewed in Europe and, in those two
pestilences of 1629 and 1660, were reproduced the same symptoms of
delirium as in the plague of Constantinople.
"Marseilles," says M. Lemontey[380], "was in 1720 concluding the
festivals which had signalized the passage of Mademoiselle de
Valois[381], married to the Duke of Modena[382]. Beside the galleys
still decorated with garlands and filled with musicians lay some
vessels which brought from the ports of Syria the most terrible
calamity."
The fatal ship of which M. Lemontey speaks, having exhibited a clean
bill, was for a moment admitted to pratique. That moment was enough to
poison the air: a storm increased the evil, and the plague spread to
the crash of thunder.
The gates of the city and the windows of the houses were closed. In the
midst of the general silence, sometimes a window was heard to open and
a corpse to fall. The walls streamed with its cankered blood, and dogs
without a master waited below to devour it. In one quarter, all of
whose inhabitants had died, they had been walled up at home, as though
to prevent death from leaving the house. From these avenues of great
family-tombs, one came to open places in which the pavement was covered
with sick and dying persons stretched on mattresses and abandoned
without aid. Carcases lay half rotten with old clothes mixed with mud;
other corpses stood upright against the walls, in the attitude in which
they had expired.
All had fled, even the doctors; the bishop, M. de Belsunce[383], wrote:
"They ought to abolish the doctors, or at least to give us abler
and less timorous ones. I have had great difficulty in having one
hundred and fifty half-rotten corpses, which were lying around my
house, removed."
[Sidenote: Earlier plagues.]
One day, the galley-slaves hesitated to fulfil their funeral functions:
the apostle climbed into one of the tumbrils, sat down on a heap of
corpses and ordered the convicts to proceed; death and virtue went
off to the cemetery, drawn by vice and crime filled with dread and
admiration. On the Esplanade de la Tourette, beside the sea, bodies had
been lying for three weeks; and these, exposed to the sun and melted by
its rays, offered merely an infected lake to the sight On this surface
of liquefied flesh, only the worms imparted some movement to crushed,
vague forms which might possess human shape.
When the contagion began to relax, M. de Belsunce, at the head of
his clergy, repaired to the church of the _Accoules_; mounting on an
esplanade commanding a view of Marseilles, the harbours and the sea, he
gave the benediction, even as the Pope, in Rome, blesses the city and
the world: what braver and purer hand could there be to bring down the
blessings of Heaven upon so many misfortunes?
It was thus that the plague devastated Marseilles and, five years
after these calamities, the following inscription was placed upon the
frontage of the Town Hall, resembling the pompous epitaphs which we
read on a sepulchre:
MASSILIA PHOCENSIUM FILIA, ROMÆ SOROR, CARTHAGINIS TERROR,
ATHENARUM ÆMULA.
PARIS, RUE D'ENFER, _May_ 1832.
The cholera, starting from the delta of the Ganges in 1817, has spread
over a space measuring 2,200 leagues from north to south and 3,500
leagues from east to west; it has wasted 1,400 towns and mowed down
40,000,000 inhabitants. We have a chart tracing the conqueror's march.
It has taken fifteen years to come from India to Paris: this means
going as fast as Bonaparte; the latter occupied almost the same number
of years in passing from Cadiz to Moscow, and he caused the death of
only two or three millions of men.
What is the cholera? Is it a mortal wind? Is it insects which we
swallow and which devour us? What is this great black death armed with
its scythe which, crossing mountains and seas, has come, like one of
those terrible pagodas worshipped on the shores of the Ganges, to crush
us under its chariot-wheels on the banks of the Seine? If this scourge
had fallen in the midst of us in a religious age, if it had spread amid
the poetry of manners and of popular beliefs, it would have left a
striking picture behind it. Imagine a pall waving by way of a flag from
the top of the towers of Notre-Dame; the cannon firing single shots
at intervals to warn the imprudent traveller to turn back; a cordon
of troops surrounding the city and allowing none to enter or leave;
the churches filled with a growing multitude; the priests, by day and
night, chanting the prayers of a perpetual agony; the Viaticum carried
from house to house with bell and candle; the church-bells incessantly
tolling the funeral knell; the monks, crucifix in hand, in the open
places, summoning the people to repentance, preaching the wrath and
judgment of God, made manifest by the corpses already blackened by
Hell's fires.
Then the closed shops; the pontiff, surrounded by his clergy, going,
with each rector at the head of his parish, to fetch the shrine of
St. Geneviève; the sacred relics carried round the town, preceded by
the long procession of the different religious orders, brotherhoods,
corporations, congregations of penitents, associations of veiled women,
scholars of the University, ministers of the alms-houses, soldiers
marching without arms or with pikes reversed; the Miserere chanted by
the priests mingling with the hymns of girls and children: all, at
certain signals, prostrating themselves in silence and rising to utter
fresh complaints.
There was none of all this with us: the cholera came to us in an
age of philanthropy, of incredulity, of newspapers, of material
administration[384]. This scourge devoid of imagination came upon no
old cloisters, nor monks, nor cellars, nor Gothic tombs: like the
Terror of 1793, it stalked abroad with a mocking air, in the light of
day, in a quite new world, accompanied by its bulletin, which recited
the remedies that had been employed against it, the number of victims
that it had made, how matters stood, the hopes that were entertained
of seeing it come to an end, the precautions that had to be taken to
ensure one's self against it, what one should eat, how one ought to
dress. And every one continued to attend to his business, and the
theatres were filled. I have seen drunkards at the barrier, seated
outside the pot-house door, drinking, at a little wooden table, and
saying, as they raised their glasses:
"Here's your health, Morbus!"
[Sidenote: The visitation of 1832.]
Morbus, out of gratitude, came running up, and they fell dead under the
table. The children played at cholera, calling it "Nicholas Morbus"
and "Morbus the Rascal." And yet the cholera had its terrible side:
the brilliant sunshine, the indifference of the crowd, the ordinary
course of life, which was continued everywhere, gave a new character
and a different sort of frightfulness to those days of pestilence.
You felt uncomfortable in every limb; you were parched by a cold, dry
north wind; the atmosphere had a certain metallic flavour which hurt
the throat. In the Rue du Cherche-Midi, wagons of the artillery-depot
were used to cart away the dead bodies. In the Rue de Sèvres, which was
completely devastated, especially on one side, the hearses came and
went from door to door; there were not enough of them to satisfy the
demand; a voice would shout from the window:
"Here, hearse, this way!"
The driver answered that he was full up and could not attend to
everybody. One of my friends, M. Pouqueville, on his way to dine at my
house on Easter Sunday, was stopped at the Boulevard du Mont-Parnasse
by a succession of biers, nearly all of which were carried by bearers.
He saw, in this procession, the coffin of a young girl, on which was
laid a wreath of white roses. A smell of chlorine spread a tainted
atmosphere in the wake of this floral ambulance.
On the Place de la Bourse, where processions of workmen used to meet,
singing the Parisienne, one often saw funerals pass by towards the
Montmartre Cemetery as late as eleven o'clock at night, by the light
of pitch torches. The Pont-Neuf was blocked with litters laden with
patients for the hospitals or dead who had expired on the road. The
toll ceased for some days on the Pont des Arts. The booths disappeared
and, as the north-east wind was blowing, all the stall-holders and
all the shopkeepers on the quays closed their doors. One met tilted
conveyances preceded by a "crow," or mute, with a registrar of births,
deaths and marriages walking in front, dressed in mourning, and
carrying a list in his hand. There was a dearth of these tabellions, or
registrars; they had to send for more from Saint-Germain, the Villette,
Saint-Cloud. For the rest, the hearses were piled up with five or six
coffins, kept in place with ropes. Omnibuses and hackney-coaches were
employed for the same purpose: it was not uncommon to see a cab adorned
with a dead body stretched across the apron. A few of the dead were
laid out in the churches: a priest sprinkled holy water over those
collected faithful of Eternity.
In Athens, the people believed that the wells near the Piræus had been
poisoned; in Paris, the tradesmen were accused of poisoning their wine,
spirits, sugar-plums and provisions. Several individuals had their
clothes torn from their backs, were dragged in the gutter, flung into
the Seine. The authorities were to blame for these stupid or guilty
opinions.