The lists of military ambition then being closed, if not permanently,
at least for a time, my mind took a new bias; and, without dismissing
its most cherished and darling passion, pursued a path in the present
emergency, to which the accidents of my youth had also guided me. If my
mother had survived, she would probably either not have consented to
my serving at the siege of Pavia, or at least would have recalled me
to the obscurity of my paternal château as soon as the campaign was at
an end. I had not fully completed the twentieth year of my age, at the
period of the memorable battle in which my sovereign was made prisoner.
I was left without adviser or guide; even the Marquis de Villeroy, my
mother’s brother, of whatever consequence his admonitions to me might
have proved, was taken from me in this fatal engagement. The king
himself, perhaps, had it not been for the dreadful calamities in which
he was now involved, might have condescended to interest himself in
some degree in my welfare. By the course of events, I was left, yet a
minor, and with an ample revenue at my disposition, to be wholly guided
by the suggestions of my own mind.
In the portion of his reign already elapsed, the splendid and
interesting qualities of Francis had given a new spring to the
sentiments of the nation. He was the most accomplished and amiable
prince of the time in which he lived. There was but one of all the
sovereigns of Christendom that could cope with him in power,--the
Emperor Charles; and as Charles’s peculiarities were of a sort that
Frenchmen were accustomed to regard with aversion and contempt, so
there had not been a doubt among my compatriots, of the side upon which
the superiority would ultimately rest. By the events of the day of
Pavia they were confounded and overwhelmed. They did not despair of
their country; they soon felt, and felt to its utmost extent, the rank
which France held among the European states. But the chain of their
ideas was interrupted; they could not but be conscious that the fortune
of the kingdom had received a grievous check. The illustrious career
which they had in fancy already traversed, was postponed to a distant
period.
The consequences which flow from a suppressed ambition may easily be
imagined. The nobility of France exchanged the activity of the field
for the indulgences of the table: that concentrated spirit which had
sought to expand itself upon the widest stage, now found vent in the
exhibition of individual expense: and, above all, the sordid and
inglorious passion for gaming, a vice eminently characteristic of the
age, now especially gained strength, and drew multitudes into its
destructive vortex. It was, perhaps, impossible for a young man to have
entered the theatre of the world under less favourable auspices.
In what I have already written, I felt myself prompted to enlarge with
complacency upon the sentiments and scenes of my youth; and I have
yielded to the suggestion. The same internal admonition makes me shrink
from entering with minuteness into the detail of my ruin. I recollect
my infatuation with abhorrence; I fly from the memory with sensations
inexpressibly painful; I regard it as a cloud that overshadowed and
blackened for ever the fair prospects of my earlier years.
I shall not enumerate all my youthful companions, or all my youthful
follies. I committed a mistake obvious enough, at this immature
period of my existence, when I mistook profusion and extravagance
for splendour and dignity; and the prudent economy which my mother
had practised, served, in the present instance, as the pander to my
vices. The whole tendency of my education had been to inspire me with
a proud and restless desire of distinction; and I was not content to
play a second part in the career of my vices, as I should not have been
content to play a second part in the genuine theatre of honour and
fame. In all that was thoughtlessly spirited and gaily profligate, I
led the way to my compeers, and was constantly held up by them as an
example. By this conduct I incurred the censure of the rigorous and the
old; but the voice of censure reached me much seldomer than that of
adulation. My person and demeanour were the topics of general applause.
I was tall and well-proportioned; my frame was slender and agile, but
with an appearance of the fullest health; my countenance was open,
commanding, and animated: my rank and situation in the world gave me
confidence; the fire and impetuosity of my temper rendered my gestures
easy, rapid, expressive, and graceful. The consequence of all this was,
to confirm me in a plan of life which I early laid down to myself, and
from which I never in any instance deviated. I put aside those rules,
as splenetic and hypercritical, which confessors preach, and with which
the preceptors of young men are accustomed to weary and alienate the
minds of their pupils. The charge of being disorderly and unthinking
I despised; that of imprudence, even when meant for blame, sounded in
my ear like the voice of encomium. But, accustomed from education to
sentiments of honour, and from habit to the language of eulogy, it is
difficult for any man to be more firmly bent than I was to incur no
breath of dishonour, or to draw the line more peremptorily between the
follies of youth and the aberrations of a gross and unprincipled spirit.
It may be alleged, indeed, and with considerable justice, that the
habit of gaming is an exception to this statement. It was with
hesitation and reluctance that I entered into this habit. I saw it as
it was, and as every ingenuous and undebauched mind must see it, base
and sordid. The possession of some degree of wealth I regarded, indeed,
as indispensable to a man who would fill a lofty and respectable
character in the world; a character that, by uniting the advantages
of exterior appearance with the actions of a hero, should extort the
homage of his species. But, in the picture I drew of this man in my
mind, I considered wealth as an accident, the attendant on his birth,
to be dispensed with dignity, not to be adverted to with minuteness
of attention. Deep play is certainly sufficiently inconsistent with
this character. The direct purpose of the gamester is to transfer
money from the pocket of his neighbour into his own. He rouses his
sleepy and wearied attention by the most sordid of all motives. The
fear of losing pierces his heart with anguish; and to gain--to obtain
an advantage for himself which can scarcely exceed, and which seldom
equals, the injury his competitor suffers,--is the circumstance which
most transports his heart with delight. For this he watches; for this
he calculates. An honourable gamester does not seize with premeditation
the moment when his adversary is deprived, by wine or any other cause,
of his usual self-possession. He does not seek with sober malice to
play upon his passions. He does not enter with avidity into the contest
with an unpractised but presuming rival: but he cannot avoid rejoicing,
when he finds that accident has given him an unusual advantage. I have
often thought that I could better understand how a man of honour could
reconcile himself to the accursed and murderous trade of war, than to
the system of the gaming table. In war, he fights with a stranger,
a man with whom he has no habits of kindness, and who is fairly
apprised that he comes against him with ruinous intent. But in play,
he robs, perhaps, his brother, his friend, the partner of his bosom;
or, in every event, a man seduced into the snare with all the arts of
courtesy, and whom he smiles upon, even while he stabs.
I am talking here the mere reason and common sense of the question
as it relates to mankind in general. But it is with other feelings
that I reflect upon the concern I have myself individually in the
subject. Years roll on in vain; ages themselves are useless here;
looking forward, as I do, to an existence that shall endure till time
shall be no more; no time can wipe away the remembrance of the bitter
anguish that I have endured, the consequence of gaming. It is torture!
It is madness! Poverty, I have drained thy cup to the dregs! I have
seen my wife and my children looking to me in vain for bread! Which
is the most intolerable distress?--that of the period, in which all
the comforts of life gradually left me; in which I caught at every
fragment of promise, and every fragment failed; in which I rose every
morning to pamper myself with empty delusions; in which I ate the
apples of purgatory, fair without, but within bitterness and ashes; in
which I tossed, through endless, sightless nights, upon the couch of
disappointment and despair?--or the period, when at length all my hopes
were at an end; when I fled with horror to a foreign climate; when my
family, that should have been my comfort, gave me my most poignant
agony; when I looked upon them, naked, destitute, and exiles, with the
tremendous thought, what and who it was that had caused their ruin?
Adversity, without consolation,--adversity, when its sting is remorse,
self-abhorrence and self-contempt,--hell has no misery by which it can
be thrown into shade or exceeded!
Why do I dwell upon, or at least why do I anticipate, this detested
circumstance of my story? Let me add one remark in this place, and
pass on to the other particulars of this epoch of my prodigality. It
is true, I must take this shameful appellation to myself--I was a
gamester. But, in the beginning, I took no concern in that species of
science which is often implied in the appellation. My games were games
of hazard, not of skill. It appeared to my distempered apprehension
to be only a mode in which for a man to display his fortitude and
philosophy; I was flattered with the practice of gaming, because I saw
in it, when gracefully pursued, the magnanimity of the stoic, combined
with the manners of a man of the world; a magnanimity that no success
is able to intoxicate, and no vicissitude to subvert. I committed my
property to the hazard of the die; and I placed my ambition in laughing
alike at the favours of fortune and her frowns. In the sequel, however,
I found myself deceived. The fickle goddess sufficiently proved that
she had the power of making me serious. But in her most tremendous
reverses, I was never influenced to do any thing that the most
scrupulous gamester regards as dishonourable. I say not this for the
purpose of giving colour and speciousness to my tale. I say it, because
I have laid it down to myself in this narrative as a sacred principle,
to relate the simple, unaltered truth.
Another characteristic of the reign of Francis the First, is its
gallantries. It is well known how much the king was himself occupied
with attachments of this sort; his government was rather the government
of women than of politicians; and the manners of the sovereign strongly
tended to fix the habits of his subjects. A very young man rather
takes the tone of his passions from those about him, than forms one
that is properly his own; and this was my case in the present instance
as well as in the preceding. Originally of an amorous constitution, I
should perhaps have quieted the restlessness of my appetites without
ostentation and éclat, had not the conduct of my youthful associates in
general led me to regard gallantry as an accomplishment indispensably
necessary in a young man of rank. It must be confessed, indeed, that
this offence against the rigour of discipline has a thousand advantages
over that of gaming. Few women of regular and reputable lives have that
ease of manners, that flow of fancy, and that graceful intrepidity
of thinking and expressing themselves, that is sometimes to be found
among those who have discharged themselves from the tyranny of custom.
There is something irresistibly captivating in that voluptuousness
which, while it assumes a certain air of freedom, uniformly and
with preference conforms itself to the dictates of unsophisticated
delicacy. A judicious and limited voluptuousness is necessary to the
cultivation of the mind, to the polishing of the manners, to the
refining of sentiment and the developement of the understanding; and
a woman deficient in this respect may be of use for the government
of our families, but can neither add to the enjoyments, nor fix the
partiality, of a man of animation and taste.
But whatever there may be in these considerations, certain it is that
the conduct I pursued in matters of gallantry led me into great and
serious expenses. The mistresses with whom I chanced to associate had
neither the inexpressible captivation of madame de Chateaubriant,
nor the aspiring and impressive manners of the duchess d’Etampes[7].
They had, however, beauty and vivacity, frolic without rudeness,
and softness without timidity. They had paid some regard to points
of knowledge and taste, considering these as additional means for
fixing the partiality of their paramours, and knowing that they had
no security for the permanence of their prosperity but in the variety
of their attractions. In their society I was led into new trains of
reflection, a nicer consideration of human passion and the varieties of
human character, and, above all, into a greater quickness and delicacy
in matters of intellectual taste. My hours, for the most part, rolled
swiftly and easily away, sometimes in the society of the young, the gay
and the ambitious of my own sex, and sometimes in the softer and more
delicious intercourse of the fair. I lived in the midst of all that
Paris could at that time furnish of splendid and luxurious. This system
of living was calculated to lull me in pleasing dreams, and to waste
away existence in delirious softness. It sufficiently accorded with
the sad period of our sovereign’s captivity, when my young compatriots
sought to drown the sense of public and patriotic considerations in
copious draughts of pleasure; nor did the monarch’s return immediately
restore to France her former haughtiness and pride.
The course of sensuality in which I was now engaged, though it did not
absolutely sink into grossness, may well be supposed to have trodden
upon the very edge of licence. I and my companions were young; we
were made fearless and presuming by fortune and by rank; we had laid
aside those more rigorous restraints which render the soberer part of
mankind plausible and decent, by making them timid and trite. I will
not contaminate the minds of my innocent and inexperienced readers by
entering into the detail of the follies in which I engaged.
One thing it is necessary to remark, as essential to the main
thread of my story. My expenses of all kinds, during this period of
self-desertion, drained my resources, but did not tarnish my good
name. My excesses were regarded by some as ornamental and becoming,
but by all were admitted as venial. The laurels I had won in the field
of military honour were not obscured by my subsequent conduct. I was
universally ranked among the most promising and honourable of the
young noblemen of France. I had some rivals; I did not pass through
this turbulent and diversified scene without disputes; but no one
cast a reflection upon my name, no one ventured to speak of me with
superciliousness and opprobrium. Nor was my temper more injured than
my reputation. From every dispute I extricated myself with grace
and propriety; I studied the pleasure and ease of all with whom I
associated; and no man enjoyed more extensively than I did the sweets
of friendship, as far as the sweets of friendship can be extensively
enjoyed.