Death of my mother--I return to religion--The _Génie du
Christianisme_--Letter from the Chevalier de Panat--My uncle, M. de
Bedée: his eldest daughter--English literature--Decline of the old
school--Historians--Poets--Publicists--Shakespeare--Old novels--New
novels--Richardson--Sir Walter Scott--New poetry--Beattie--Lord
Byron--England from Richmond to Greenwich--A trip with
Peltier--Blenheim--Stowe--Hampton Court--Oxford--Eton College--Private
manners--Political manners--Fox--Pitt--Burke--George III.--Return
of the emigrants to France--The Prussian Minister gives me a false
passport in the name of La Sagne, a resident of Neuchâtel in
Switzerland--Death of Lord Londonderry--End of my career as a soldier
and traveller--I land at Calais.
Alloquar? audiero nunquam tua facta loquentem?
Nunquam ego te, vita frater amabilior,
Aspiciam posthac? At certe semper amabo[248].
I have just taken leave of a friend, I am about to take leave of
a mother: one has constantly to repeat the verses which Catullus
addressed to his brother. In our vale of tears, as in Hell, there
is a strange, eternal wailing, which forms the accompaniment or the
prevailing note of human lamentations; it is heard unceasingly, and it
would continue when all other created sorrows had come to be silent.
A letter from Julie, which I received soon after that from Fontanes,
confirmed my sad remark on my gradual isolation: Fontanes urged me
to "work, to become illustrious;" my sister begged me to "give up
writing:" one put glory before me, the other oblivion. This train of
thought is described in the story of Madame de Farcy; she had grown to
hate literature, because she regarded it as one of the temptations of
her life.
"SAINT-SERVAN, 1 _July_ 1798.
"Dear, we have just lost the best of mothers: I grieve to
inform you of this fatal blow. When you cease to be the
object of our solicitude, we shall have ceased to live. If
you knew how many tears your errors had caused our venerable
mother to shed; how deplorable they appear to all who think
and profess not only piety, but reason: if you knew this,
perhaps it would help to open your eyes, to induce you
to give up writing; and if Heaven, moved by our prayers,
permitted us to meet again, you would find in the midst of us
all the happiness one is allowed on earth; you would give us
that happiness, for there is none for us so long as you are
not with us and we have cause to be anxious as to your fate."
Ah, why did I not follow my sister's advice? Why did I continue to
write? Had my age remained without my writings, would anything have
been changed in the events and spirit of that age?
And so I had lost my mother; and so I had distressed the last hour
of her life! While she was drawing her last breath far from her last
son, and praying for him, what was I doing in London? Perhaps I was
strolling in the cool morning air at the moment when the sweat of death
covered my mother's forehead without having my hand to wipe it away!
[Sidenote: The _Génie du Christianisme._]
The filial affection which I preserved for Madame de Chateaubriand was
deep. My childhood and youth were intimately linked with the memory
of my mother. The idea that I had poisoned the old days of the woman
who bore me in her womb filled me with despair: I flung copies of the
_Essai_ into the fire with horror, as the instrument of my crime;
had it been possible for me to destroy the whole work, I should have
done so without hesitation. I did not recover from my distress until
the thought occurred to me of expiating my first work by means of a
religious work: this was the origin of the _Génie du Christianisme._
*
"My mother," I said, in the first preface to that work, "after being
flung, at the age of seventy-two years, into dungeons where she saw
part of her children die, expired at last on a pallet to which her
misfortunes had reduced her. The recollection of my errors cast a
great bitterness over her last days; when dying, she charged one of
my sisters to call me back to the religion in which I was brought up.
My sister acquainted me with my mother's last wish. When the letter
reached me across the sea, my sister herself was no more; she too had
died from the effects of her imprisonment. Those two voices from the
tomb, that death which acted as death's interpreter impressed me. I
became a Christian. I did not yield, I admit, to great supernatural
enlightenment: my conviction came from the heart; I wept and I
believed."
*
I exaggerated my fault: the _Essai_ was not an impious book, but a book
of doubt, of sorrow. Through the darkness of that book glides a ray
of the Christian light that shone upon my cradle. It needed no great
effort to return from the scepticism of the _Essai_ to the certainty of
the _Génie du Christianisme._
*
When, after receiving the sad news of Madame de Chateaubriand's death,
I resolved suddenly to change my course, the title of _Génie du
Christianisme_, which I found on the spot, inspired me: I set to work;
I toiled with the ardour of a son building a mausoleum to his mother.
My materials were since long collected and rough-hewn by my previous
studies. I knew the works of the Fathers better than they are known in
our times; I had even studied them in order to oppugn them, and having
entered upon that road with bad intentions, instead of leaving it as a
victor, I left it vanquished.
As to history properly so-called, I had occupied myself with it
specially in composing the _Essai sur les Révolutions._ The Camden
originals which I had lately examined had made me familiar with the
manners and institutions of the Middle Ages. Lastly, my terrible
manuscript of the _Natchez_, in 2393 pages folio, contained all that I
needed for the _Génie du Christianisme_ in the way of descriptions of
nature; I was able to draw largely upon that source, as I had done for
the _Essai_.
I wrote the first part of the _Génie du Christianisme._ Messrs.
Dulau[249], who had become the booksellers of the French emigrant
clergy, undertook the publication. The first sheets of the first volume
were printed. The work thus begun in London in 1799 was completed
only in Paris in 1802: see the different prefaces to the _Génie du
Christianisme._ I was devoured by a sort of fever during the whole
time of writing: no one will ever know what it means to carry at the
same time in one's brain, in one's blood, and in one's soul, _Atala_
and _René_, and to combine with the painful child-birth of those fiery
twins the labour of conception attending the other parts of the _Génie
du Christianisme._ The memory of Charlotte penetrated and warmed all
that, and to give me the finishing stroke, the first longing for fame
inflamed my exalted imagination.
This longing came to me from filial affection: I wanted a great renown,
so that it might rise till it reached my mother's dwelling-place, and
that the angels might carry her my solemn expiation.
As one study leads to another, I could not occupy myself with my French
scholia without taking note of the literature and men of the country
in which I lived: I was drawn into these fresh researches. My days and
nights were spent in reading, in writing, in taking lessons in Hebrew
from a learned priest, the Abbé Capelan, in consulting libraries and
men of attainments, in roaming about the fields with my everlasting
reveries, in paying and receiving visits. If such things exist as
retroactive and symptomatic effects of future events, I might have
foreseen the bustle and uproar created by the book which was to make my
name from the seething of my mind and the throbbing of my inner muse.
Reading aloud to others my first rough drafts helped to enlighten
me. Reading aloud is an excellent form of instruction, when one does
not take the necessary compliments for gospel. Provided an author
be in earnest, he will soon feel, through the impression which he
instinctively receives from the others, which are the weak places in
his work, and especially whether that work is too long or too short,
whether he keeps, does not reach, or exceeds the right dimensions.
[Sidenote: A letter from Panat.]
I have discovered a letter from the Chevalier de Panat on the readings
from a work at that time so unknown. The letter is charming: the dirty
chevalier's positive and scoffing spirit did not seem susceptible of
thus rubbing itself with poetry. I have no hesitation in giving this
letter, a document of my history, although it is stained from end to
end with my praises, as though the sly author had taken pleasure in
emptying his ink-pot over his epistle:
"_Monday._
"Heavens, what an interesting reading I owed to your extreme
kindness this morning! Our religion had numbered among
its defenders great geniuses, illustrious Fathers of the
Church: those athletes had wielded with vigour all the arms
of reasoning; incredulity was vanquished; but that was not
enough: it was still necessary to show all the charms of
that admirable religion; it was necessary to show how suited
it is to the human heart and what magnificent pictures it
offers to the imagination. It is no longer a theologian in
the school, it is the great painter and the man sensitive to
impressions who open up a new horizon for themselves. Your
work was wanted, and you were called upon to write it. Nature
has eminently endowed you with the great qualities which this
work requires: you belong to another age....
"Ah, if the truths of sentiment rank first in the order of
nature, none will have proved better than yourself those of
our religion; you will have confounded the unbelievers at the
gate of the Temple and introduced delicate minds and sensible
hearts into the sanctuaries. You bring back to me those
ancient philosophers who gave their lessons with their heads
crowned with flowers, their hands filled with sweet perfumes.
This is a very feeble image of your suave, pure and classic
mind.
"I congratulate myself daily on the happy circumstance which
made me acquainted with you; I can never forget that it was
Fontanes who did me that kindness; I shall love him for it
the more, and my heart will never separate two names whom the
same glory is bound to unite, if Providence re-opens to us
the doors of our native land.
"CHEV. DE PANAT."
The Abbé Delille also heard some fragments of the _Génie du
Christianisme_ read. He seemed surprised, and did me the honour,
soon after, to put into verse the prose which had pleased him. He
naturalized my wild American flowers in his various French gardens, and
put my somewhat hot wine to cool in the frigid water from his clear
spring.
The unfinished edition of the _Génie du Christianisme_, commenced in
London, was a little different, in the order of the contents, from the
edition published in France. The consular censure, which soon became
imperial, showed itself very touchy on the subject of kings: their
persons, their honour and their virtue were dear to it beforehand.
Already Fouché's police saw the white pigeon, the symbol of Bonaparte's
candour and revolutionary innocence, descend from Heaven with the
sacred phial. The true believers who had taken part in the Republican
processions of Lyons compelled me to cut out a chapter entitled the
_Rois athées_, and to distribute paragraphs from it here and there in
the body of the work.
*
Before continuing these literary investigations I must interrupt
them for a moment to take leave of my uncle de Bedée; alas, that
means taking leave of the first joy of my life: _freno non remorante
dies_[250]! See the old sepulchres in the old crypts: themselves
overcome by age, decrepit and without memory, having lost their
epitaphs, they have forgotten the very names of those whose ashes they
contain.
I had written to my uncle on the subject of my mother's death: he
replied with a long letter containing some touching words of regret;
but three-quarters of his double folio sheet were devoted to my
genealogy. He begged me above all, when I should return to France,
to look up the title-deeds of the "Bedée quartering," entrusted to
my brother. And so, to this venerable Emigrant, exile, ruin, the
destruction of his kin, the sacrifice of Louis XVI. alike failed to
make the fact of the Revolution clear to him; nothing had happened,
nothing come to pass; he had gone no farther than the States of
Brittany and the Assembly of the Nobles. This fixity of ideas in man is
very striking in the midst and as it were in presence of the alteration
of his body, the flight of his years, the loss of his relations and
friends.
[Sidenote: Death of my uncle de Bedée.]
On his return from the Emigration, my uncle de Bedée went to live at
Dinan, where he died, six leagues from Monchoix, without having seen it
again. My cousin Caroline[251], the oldest of my three cousins, still
lives. She has remained an old maid in spite of the formal requests
for her hand made in her former youth. She writes me letters, badly
spelt, in which she addresses me in the second person singular, calls
me "chevalier," and talks to me of our good time: _in illo tempore._
She was endowed with a pair of fine dark eyes and a comely figure; she
danced like the Camargo[252], and she seems to recollect that I bore
a fierce passion for her in secret. I reply in the same tone, laying
aside, in imitation of her, my years, my honours and my reputation:
"Yes, dear Caroline, your chevalier," etc.
It must be some six or seven lustres since we met: Heaven be praised
for it, for God alone knows, if we came to embracing, what kind of
figure we should cut in each other's eyes!
Sweet, patriarchal, innocent, creditable family friendship, your age
is past! We no longer cling to the soil by a multitude of blossoms,
sprouts and roots; we are born and die singly nowadays. The living
are in haste to fling the deceased to Eternity, and to be rid of his
corpse. Of his friends, some go and await the coffin at the church,
grumbling the while at being put out and disturbed in their habits;
others carry their devotion so far as to follow the funeral to the
cemetery: the grave once filled up, all recollection is obliterated.
You will never return, O days of religion and affection, in which the
son died in the same house, in the same arm-chair, by the same fireside
where died his father and his grandfather before him, surrounded, as
they had been, by weeping children and grandchildren, upon whom fell
the last paternal blessing!
Farewell, my beloved uncle! Farewell, family of my mother, which are
disappearing like the other portion of my family! Farewell, my cousin
of days long past, who love me still as you loved me when we listened
together to our kind aunt de Boistelleul's ballad of the Sparrow-hawk,
or when you assisted at my release from my nurse's vow at the Abbey
of Nazareth! If you survive me, accept the share of gratitude and
affection which I here bequeath to you. Attach no belief to the false
smile outlined on my lips in speaking of you: my eyes, I assure you,
are full of tears.
*
My studies correlative to the _Génie du Christianisme_ had gradually,
as I have said, led me to make a more thorough examination of English
literature. When I took refuge in England in 1793, it became necessary
for me to redress most of the judgments which I had drawn from the
criticisms. As regards the historians, Hume[253] was reputed a Tory
and reactionary writer: he was accused, as was Gibbon, of over-loading
the English language with gallicisms; people preferred his continuer,
Smollett[254]. Gibbon[255], a philosopher during his lifetime, became a
Christian on his death-bed, and in that capacity was duly convicted of
being a sorry individual. Robertson[256] was still spoken of, because
he was dry.
[Sidenote: English literature.]
Where the poets were concerned, the "elegant extracts" served as a
place of banishment for a few pieces by Dryden[257]; people refused to
forgive Pope[258] for his verse, although they visited his house at
Twickenham and cut chips from the weeping-willow planted by him and
withered like his fame.
Blair[259] was looked upon as a tedious critic with a French style; he
was placed far below Johnson[260]. As to the old _Spectator_[261], it
was relegated to the lumber-room.
English political works have little interest for us. The economic
treatises are less stinted in their scope: their calculations on the
wealth of nations, the employment of capital, the balance of trade,
are applicable in part to the different European societies. Burke[262]
emerged from the national political individuality: by declaring himself
opposed to the French Revolution, he dragged his country into the long
road of hostilities which ended in the plains of Waterloo.
However, great figures remained. One met with Milton and Shakespeare
on every hand. Did Montmorency[263], Byron[264], Sully[265], by turns
French Ambassadors to the Courts of Elizabeth[266] and James I.[267],
ever hear speak of a merry-andrew who acted in his own and other
writers' farces? Did they ever pronounce the name, so outlandish in
French, of Shakespeare? Did they suspect that there was here a glory
before which their honours, pomps and ranks would become as nothing?
Well, the comedian who undertook the part of the Ghost in _Hamlet_ was
the great spectre, the shade of the Middle Ages which rose over the
world like the evening star, at the moment when the Middle Ages were at
last descending among the dead: giant centuries which Dante[268] opened
and Shakespeare closed.
In the Memorials of Whitelock[269], the contemporary of the singer of
Paradise Lost, we read of "one Mr. Milton, a blind man, parliamentary
secretary for Latin despatches."
Molière[270], the "stage-player," performed his Pourceaugnac in the
same way that Shakespeare, the "buffoon," clowned his Falstaff.
Those veiled travellers, who come from time to time to sit at our
board, are treated by us as ordinary guests; we remain unaware of their
nature until the day of their disappearance. On leaving the earth, they
become transfigured, and say to us, as the angel from heaven said to
Tobias:
"I am one of the seven who stand before the Lord[271]."
But, though misunderstood by men on their passage, those divinities do
not fail to recognise one another. Milton asks:
What needs my Shakespeare, for his honour'd bones,
The labour of an age in piled stones[272]?
Michael Angelo[273], envying Dante's lot and genius, exclaims:
Pur fuss'io tal...
Per l'aspro esilio suo con sua virtute
Darci del mondo più felice stato.
Tasso celebrates Camoëns, as yet almost unknown, and acts as his
"Fame." Is there anything more admirable than the society of
illustrious people revealing themselves, one to the other, by means of
signs, greeting one another and communing with each other in a language
understood by themselves alone?
[Sidenote: Shakespeare.]
Was Shakespeare lame, like Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott[274], and the
Prayers, the daughters of Jupiter? If he was so in fact, the "Boy"
of Stratford, far from being ashamed of his infirmity, as was Childe
Harold, is not afraid to remind one of his mistresses of it:
So I, made lame by fortune's dearest spite[275].
Shakespeare must have had many loves, if we were to count one for each
sonnet. The creator of Desdemona and Juliet grew old without ceasing
to be in love. Was the unknown woman to whom he addresses his charming
verses proud and happy to be the object of Shakespeare's Sonnets? It
may be doubted: glory is to an old man what diamonds are to an old
woman; they adorn, but cannot make her beautiful. Says the English
tragic poet to his mistress:
No longer mourn for me when I am dead
. . . . . .
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if, I say, you look upon this verse
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love even with my life decay[276].
Shakespeare loved, but believed no more in love than he believed in
other things: a woman to him was a bird, a zephyr, a flower, a thing
that charms and passes. Through his indifference to, or ignorance of,
his fame, through his condition, which set him without the pale of
society and of a position to which he could not hope to attain, he
seemed to have taken life as a light, unoccupied hour, a swift and
gentle leisure.
Shakespeare, in his youth, met old monks driven from their cloister,
who had seen Henry VIII., his reforms, his destructions of monasteries,
his "fools," his wives, his mistresses, his headsmen. When the poet
departed from life, Charles I. was sixteen years of age. Thus, with one
hand, Shakespeare was able to touch the whitened heads once threatened
by the sword of the second of the Tudors and, with the other, the
brown head of the second of the Stuarts, destined to be laid low by
the axe of the Parliamentarians. Leaning upon those tragic brows, the
great tragedian sank into the tomb; he filled the interval of the days
in which he lived with his ghosts, his blind kings, his ambitious
men punished, his unfortunate women, so as to join together, through
analogous fictions, the realities of the past and of the future.
Shakespeare is of the number of the five or six writers who have
sufficed for the needs and nutriment of thought: those parent
geniuses seem to have brought forth and suckled all the others. Homer
impregnated antiquity: Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes,
Horace, Virgil are his sons. Dante engendered Modern Italy, from
Petrarch to Tasso. Rabelais created French literature: Montaigne, La
Fontaine, Molière descend from him. England is all Shakespeare, and in
these later days he has lent his language to Byron, his dialogue to
Walter Scott.
Men often disown these supreme masters; they rebel against them; they
reckon up their faults: they accuse them of tediousness, of length,
of extravagance, of bad taste, what time they plunder them and deck
themselves in their spoils; but they struggle in vain against their
yoke. Everything wears their colours; they have left their traces
everywhere; they invent words and names which go to swell the general
vocabulary of the nations; their expressions become proverbs, their
fictitious characters change into real characters, with heirs and a
lineage. They open out horizons whence burst forth sheaves of light;
they sow ideas, the germs of a thousand others; they supply all the
arts with imaginations, subjects, styles: their works are the mines or
the bowels of the human mind.
These geniuses occupy the first rank; their vastness, their variety,
their fruitfulness, their originality cause them to be accepted from
the very first as laws, models, moulds, types of the various forms of
intellect, even as there are four or five races of men issuing from one
single stock, of which the others are only branches. Let us take care
how we insult the disorders into which these mighty beings sometimes
fall: let us not imitate Ham, the accursed; let us not laugh if we see
the sole and solitary mariner of the deep lying naked and asleep, in
the shadow of the Ark resting upon the mountains of Armenia. Let us
respect that diluvial navigator, who recommenced the Creation after the
flood-gates of Heaven were shut up: let us, as pious children, blessed
by our father, modestly cover him with our cloak.
Shakespeare, in his lifetime, never thought of living after his life:
what signifies to him to-day my hymn of admiration? Admitting every
supposition, reasoning from the truths or falsehoods with which the
human mind is penetrated or imbued, what cares Shakespeare for a renown
of which the sound cannot rise to where he is? A Christian? In the
midst of eternal bliss, does he think of the nothingness of the world?
A deist? Freed from the shades of matter, lost in the splendours of
God, does he cast down a look upon the grain of sand over which he
passed? An atheist? He sleeps the sleep without breathing or awakening
which we call death. Nothing therefore is vainer than glory beyond the
tomb, unless it have kept friendship alive, unless it have been useful
to virtue, helpful to misfortune, unless it be granted to us to rejoice
in Heaven in a consoling, generous, liberating idea left behind by us
upon earth.
*
[Sidenote: Samuel Richardson.]
Novels, at the end of the last century, had been included in
the general proscription. Richardson[277] slept forgotten: his
fellow-countrymen discovered in his style traces of the inferior
society in which he had spent his life. Fielding[278] maintained his
success; Sterne[279], the purveyor of eccentricity, was out of date.
The _Vicar of Wakefield_ was still read[280].
If Richardson has no style, a question of which we foreigners are
unable to judge, he will not live, because one lives only by style. It
is vain to rebel against this truth: the best-composed work, adorned
with life-like portraits, filled with a thousand other perfections, is
still-born if the style be wanting. Style, and there are a thousand
kinds, is not learnt; it is the gift of Heaven, it is talent. But,
if Richardson has only been forsaken because of certain homely turns
of expression, insufferable to an elegant society, he may revive:
the revolution which is being worked, in lowering the aristocracy
and raising the middle classes, will render less apparent, or cause
entirely to disappear, the traces of homespun habits and of an inferior
language.
From _Clarissa_ and _Tom Jones_ sprang the two principal branches of
the family of modern English novels: the novels of family pictures and
domestic dramas, and the novels of adventure and pictures of general
society. After Richardson, the manners of the West End invaded the
domain of fiction: the novels became filled with country-houses, lords
and ladies, scenes at the waters, adventures at the races, the ball,
the opera, Ranelagh, with a never-ending chit-chat and tittle-tattle.
The scene was rapidly changed to Italy; the lovers crossed the Alps
amid terrible dangers and sorrows of the soul calculated to move lions:
"the lion shed tears!" A jargon of good company was adopted.
Of the thousands of novels which have flooded England since the last
fifty years, two have kept their places: _Caleb Williams_[281] and the
_Monk._ I did not see Godwin during my stay in London; but I twice
met Lewis[282]. He was a young member of the House of Commons, very
pleasant, with the air and manners of a Frenchman. The works of Ann
Radcliffe[283] are of a class apart Those of Mrs. Barbauld[284], Miss
Edgeworth[285], Miss Burney[286], etc., have a chance of living.
*
"There should," says Montaigne, "be some correction appointed by the
laws against foolish and unprofitable writers, as there is against
vagabonds and loiterers; so should both my selfe and a hundred others
of our people be banished.... Scribbling seemeth to be a symptome or
passion of an irregular and licentious age[287]."
*
[Sidenote: Sir Walter Scott.]
But these different schools of sedentary novelists, of novelists
travelling by diligence or calash, of novelists of lakes and mountains,
ruins and ghosts, of novelists of cities and drawing-rooms, have
come to be lost in the new school of Walter Scott, even as poetry
has precipitated itself in the steps of Lord Byron. The illustrious
painter of Scotland started his career in literature during my exile
in London with his translation of Goethe's _Berlichingen._[288] He
continued to make himself known by poetry, and ultimately the bent of
his genius led him towards the novel. He seems to me to have created a
false manner: the romancer set himself to write historical romances,
and the historian romantic histories. If, in reading Walter Scott, I
am sometimes obliged to skip interminable conversations, the fault is
doubtless mine; but one of Walter Scott's great merits, in my eyes, is
that he can be placed in the hands of everybody. It requires greater
efforts of talent to interest while keeping within the limits of
decency than to please when exceeding all bounds; it is less easy to
rule the heart than to disturb it.
Burke kept the politics of England in the past. Walter Scott
drove back the English to the Middle Ages; all that they wrote,
manufactured, built, became Gothic: books, furniture, houses,
churches, country-seats. But the barons of Magna Charta are to-day the
fashionables of Bond Street, a frivolous race camping in the ancient
manor-houses while awaiting the arrival of the new generations which
are preparing to drive them out.
*
At the same time that the novel was passing into the "romantic" stage,
poetry was undergoing a similar transformation. Cowper[289] abandoned
the French in order to revive the national school; Burns[290] commenced
the same revolution in Scotland. After them came the restorers of the
ballads. Several of those poets of 1792 to 1800 belonged to what was
called the "Lake school," a name which survived, because the romantic
poets lived on the shores of the Cumberland and Westmoreland lakes,
which they sometimes sang.
Thomas Moore[291], Campbell[292], Rogers[293], Crabbe[294],
Wordsworth[295], Southey[296], Hunt[297], Knowles[298], Lord
Holland[299], Canning[300], Croker[301] are still living to do honour
to English literature; but one must be of English birth to appreciate
the full merit of an intimate class of composition which appeals
specially to men born on the soil.
None is a competent judge, in living literature, of other than works
written in his own tongue. It is in vain that you believe yourself
thoroughly acquainted with a foreign idiom: you lack the nurse's milk,
together with the first words which she teaches you at her breast and
in your swaddling-clothes; certain accents belong to the mother country
alone. The English and Germans have the strangest notions concerning
our men of letters: they worship what we despise, and despise what
we worship; they do not understand Racine nor La Fontaine, nor even
Molière completely. It is ludicrous to know who are considered our
great writers in London, Vienna, Berlin, St Petersburg, Munich,
Leipzig, Göttingen, Cologne, to know what is read there with avidity
and what not at all.
When an author's merit lies especially in his diction, no foreigner
will ever understand that merit. The more intimate, individual,
rational a talent is, the more do its mysteries escape the mind which
is not, so to speak, that talent's fellow-countryman. We admire the
Greeks and Romans on trust; our admiration comes to us by tradition,
and the Greeks and Romans are not there to laugh at our barbarian
judgments. Which of us has an idea of the harmony of the prose of
Demosthenes and Cicero, of the cadence of the verses of Alcæus and
Horace, as they were caught by a Greek or Latin ear? Men maintain that
real beauties are of all times, all countries: yes, beauties of feeling
and of thought; not beauties of style. Style is not cosmopolitan like
thought: it has a native land, a sky, a sun of its own.
Burns, Mason[302], Cowper died during my emigration, before 1800 and
in 1800: they ended the century; I commenced it. Darwin[303] and
Beattie[304] died two years after my return from exile.
[Sidenote: James Beattie.]
Beattie had announced the new era of the lyre. The _Minstrel, or the
Progress of Genius_ is the picture of the first effects of the muse
upon a young bard who is as yet unaware of the inspiration with which
he is tossed. Now the future poet goes and sits by the sea-shore during
a tempest; again he leaves the village sports to listen in some lonely
spot to the distant sound of the pipes. Beattie has run through the
entire series of reveries and melancholy ideas of which a hundred other
poets have believed themselves the discoverers. Beattie proposed to
continue his poem; he did, in fact, write the second canto: Edwin one
evening hears a grave voice ascend from the bottom of the valley; it
is the voice of a solitary who, after tasting the illusions of the
world, has buried himself in that retreat, there to collect his soul
and to sing the marvels of the Creator. This hermit instructs the young
minstrel and reveals to him the secret of his genius. Beattie was
destined to shed tears; the death of his son broke his paternal heart:
like Ossian, after the loss of his son Oscar, he hung his harp on the
branches of an oak. Perhaps Beattie's son was the young minstrel whom a
father had sung and whose footsteps he no longer saw on the mountain.
*
Lord Byron's verses contain striking imitations of the Minstrel. At the
time of my exile in England, Lord Byron was living at Harrow School,
in a village ten miles from London. He was a child, I was young and
as unknown as he; he had been brought up on the heaths of Scotland,
by the sea-side, as I in the marshes of Brittany, by the sea-side; he
first loved the Bible and Ossian, as I loved them; he sang the memories
of his childhood in Newstead Abbey, as I sang mine in Combourg Castle:
When I roved a young Highlander o'er the dark heath.
And climb'd thy steep summit, O Morven of snow!
To gaze on the torrent that thunder'd beneath,
Or the mist of the tempest that gather'd below[305].
In my wanderings in the neighbourhood of London, when I was so unhappy,
I passed through the village of Harrow a score of times, without
suspecting the genius it contained. I have sat in the churchyard at the
foot of the elm beneath which, in 1807, Lord Byron wrote these verses,
at the time when I was returning from Palestine:
Spot of my youth! whose hoary branches sigh,
Swept by the breeze that fans thy cloudless sky;
Where now alone I muse, who oft have trod,
With those I loved, thy soft and verdant sod.
. . . . . . . .
When fate shall chill, at length, this fever'd breast,
And calm its cares and passions into rest,
. . . . . . . .
. . . . here my heart might lie;
Here might I sleep where all my hopes arose,
. . . . . . . .
Mix'd with the earth o'er which my footsteps moved;
. . . . . . . .
Deplored by those in early days allied,
And unremembered by the world beside[306].
And I shall say: Hail, ancient elm, at whose foot the child Byron
indulged in the fancies of his age, while I was dreaming of _René_
beneath thy shade, the same shade beneath which later, in his turn, the
poet came to dream of _Childe Harold!_ Byron asked of the churchyard,
which witnessed the first sports of his life, an unknown grave: a
useless prayer, which fame will not grant. Nevertheless, Byron is no
longer what he has been; I had come across him in all directions living
at Venice: at the end of a few years, in the same town where I had
met with his name on every hand, I found him everywhere eclipsed and
unknown. The echoes of the Lido no longer repeat his name and, if you
ask after him of the Venetians, they no longer know of whom you speak.
Lord Byron is entirely dead for them; they no longer hear the neighing
of his horse: it is the same thing in London, where his memory is
fading. That is what we become.
If I have passed by Harrow without knowing that the child Byron was
drawing breath there, Englishmen have passed by Combourg without
suspecting that a little vagabond, brought up in those woods, would
leave any trace. Arthur Young[307], the traveller, when passing through
Combourg, wrote:
"To Combourg [from Pontorson] the country has a savage
aspect; husbandry has not much further advanced, at least in
skill, than among the Hurons, which appears incredible amidst
inclosures; the people almost as wild as their country, and
their town of Combourg one of the most brutal filthy places
that can be seen; mud houses, no windows, and a pavement so
broken as to impede all passengers, but ease none-yet here is
a chateau, and inhabited; who is this Mons. de Chateaubriand,
the owner, that has nerves strung for a residence amidst such
filth and poverty? Below this hideous heap of wretchedness is
a fine lake, surrounded by well-wooded inclosures[308]."
That M. de Chateaubriand was my father; the residence which seemed so
hideous to the ill-humoured agriculturist is none the less a fine and
stately home, sombre and grave though it may be. As for me, a feeble
ivy-shoot commencing to climb at the foot of those fierce towers, would
Mr. Young have noticed me, he who was interested only in inspecting our
harvests?
[Sidenote: Lord Byron.]
Give me leave to add to the above pages, written in England in 1822,
the following written in 1824 and 1840: they will complete the portion
relating to Lord Byron; this portion will be more particularly
perfected when the reader has perused what I shall have to say of the
great poet on passing to Venice.
There may perhaps be some interest in the future in remarking the
coincidence of the two leaders of the new French and English schools
having a common fund of nearly parallel ideas and destinies, if not of
morals: one a peer of England, the other a peer of France; both Eastern
travellers, not infrequently near each other, yet never seeing one
another: only, the life of the English poet has been connected with
events less great than mine.
Lord Byron visited the ruins of Greece after me: in _Childe Harold_
he seems to embellish with his own pigments the descriptions in the
_Itinéraire._ At the commencement of my pilgrimage I gave the Sire de
Joinville's farewell to his castle: Byron bids a similar farewell to
his Gothic home.
In the _Martyrs_, Eudore sets out from Messenia to go to Rome:
"Our voyage was long," he says; "... we saw all those
promontories marked by temples or tombstones.... My young
companions had heard speak of nought save the metamorphoses
of Jupiter, and they understood nothing of the remains they
saw before them; I myself had already sat, with the prophet,
on the ruins of devastated cities, and Babylon taught me to
know Corinth[309]."
The English poet is like the French prose-writer, following the letter
of Sulpicius to Cicero[310]: a coincidence so perfect is a singularly
proud one for me, because I anticipated the immortal singer on the
shore where we gathered the same memories and celebrated the same ruins.
I have again the honour of being connected with Lord Byron in our
descriptions of Rome: the _Martyrs_ and my _Lettre sur la campagne
romaine_ possess, for me, the inestimable advantage of having divined
the aspirations of a fine genius.
The early translators, commentators and admirers of Lord Byron were
careful not to point out that some pages of my works might have
lingered for a moment in the memory of the painter of _Childe Harold_;
they would have thought that they were depreciating his genius. Now
that the enthusiasm has grown a little calmer this honour is not so
consistently refused to me. Our immortal song-writer[311], in the last
volume of his Chansons, says:
"In one of the foregoing stanzas I speak of the 'lyres' which
France owes to M. de Chateaubriand. I do not fear that that
verse will be contradicted by the new poetic school, which,
born beneath the eagle's wings, has often and rightly prided
itself on that origin. The influence of the author of the
_Génie du Christianisme_ has also made itself felt abroad,
and it would perhaps be just to recognise that the singer of
_Childe Harold_ belongs to the family of _René._"
In an excellent article on Lord Byron, M. Villemain[312] re-echoes M.
de Béranger's remark:
"Some incomparable pages in _René_" he says, "had, it is
true, exhausted that poetic character. I do not know whether
Byron imitated them or revived them with his genius."
[Sidenote: Literary affinity.]
What I have just said as to the affinity of imagination and destiny
between the chronicles of _René_ and the singer of _Childe Harold_
does not detract in the smallest degree from the fame of the immortal
bard. What harm can my pedestrian and luteless muse do to the muse of
the Dee[313], furnished with a lyre and wings? Lord Byron will live
whether, a child of his century like myself, he gave utterance, like
myself and like Goethe before us, to its passion and misfortune, or
whether my circumnavigation and the lantern of my Gallic bark showed
the vessel of Albion the track across unexplored waters.
Besides, two minds of an analogous nature may easily have similar
conceptions without being reproached with slavishly following the same
road. It is permitted to take advantage of ideas and images expressed
in a foreign language, in order with them to enrich one's own: that has
occurred in all ages and at all times. I recognise without hesitation
that, in my early youth, Ossian[314], _Werther_[315], the _Rêveries du
promeneur solitaire_[316] and the _Études de la nature_[317] may have
allied themselves to my ideas; but I have hidden or dissimulated none
of the pleasure caused me by works in which I delighted.
If it were true that _René_ entered to some extent into the groundwork
of the one person represented under different names in _Childe-Harold,
Conrad, Lara, Manfred_, the _Giaour_; if, by chance, Lord Byron had
made me live in his own life, would he then have had the weakness never
to mention me[318]? Was I then one of those fathers whom men deny
when they have attained to power? Can Lord Byron have been completely
ignorant of me when he quotes almost all the French authors who are his
contemporaries? Did he never hear speak of me, when the English papers,
like the French papers, have resounded a score of times in his hearing
with controversies on my works, when the _New Times_ drew a parallel
between the author of the _Génie du Christianisme_ and the author of
_Childe-Harold?_
No intelligence, however favoured it be, but has its susceptibilities,
its distrusts: one wishes to keep the sceptre, fears to share it,
resents comparisons. In the same way, another superior talent has
avoided the mention of my name in a work on Literature[319]. Thank God,
rating myself at my just value, I have never aimed at empire; since
I believe in nothing except the religious truth, of which liberty is
a form, I have no more faith in myself than in any other thing here
below. But I have never felt a need to be silent, where I have admired;
that is why I proclaim my enthusiasm for Madame de Staël and Lord
Byron. What is sweeter than admiration? It is love in Heaven, affection
raised to a cult; we feel ourselves thrilled with gratitude for the
divinity which extends the bases of our faculties, opens out new views
to our souls, gives us a happiness so great and so pure, with no
admixture of fear or envy.
For the rest, the little cavil which I have raised in these Memoirs
against the greatest poet whom England has possessed since Milton
proves only one thing: the high value which I would have attached to
the recollection of his muse.
[Sidenote: The real Byron.]
Lord Byron started a deplorable school: I presume he has been as much
distressed at the Childe-Harolds to whom he gave birth as I am at the
Renés who rave around me.
The life of Lord Byron is the object of much investigation and calumny:
young men have taken magic words seriously; women have felt disposed
to allow themselves affrightedly to be seduced by that "monster," to
console that solitary and unhappy Satan. Who knows? He had perhaps
not found the woman he sought, a woman fair enough, a heart as big as
his own. Byron, according to the phantasmagorial opinion, is the old
serpent of seduction and corruption, because he sees the corruption
of the human race; he is a fatal and suffering genius, placed between
the mysteries of matter and mind, who is unable to solve the enigma of
the universe, who looks upon life as a frightful and causeless irony,
as a perverse smile of evil; he is the son of despair, who despises
and denies, who, bearing an incurable wound within himself, seeks his
revenge by leading through voluptuousness to sorrow all who approach
him; he is a man who has not passed through the age of innocence, who
has never had the advantage of being rejected and cursed by God: a
man who, issuing reprobate from nature's womb, is the damned soul of
nihility.
This is the Byron of heated imaginations: it is by no means, to my
mind, the Byron of truth. Two different men are united in Lord Byron,
as in the majority of men: the man of _nature_ and the man of _system._
The poet, perceiving the part which the public made him play, accepted
it and began to curse the world which at first he had only viewed
dreamily: this progress can be traced in the chronological order of his
works. His _genius_, far from having the extent attributed to it, is
fairly reserved; his poetic thought is no more than a moan, a plaint,
an imprecation; in that quality it is admirable: one must not ask the
lyre what it thinks, but what it sings. His _mind_ is sarcastic and
diversified, but of an exciting nature and a baneful influence: the
writer had read Voltaire to good purpose, and imitates him.
Gifted with every advantage, Lord Byron had little with which to
reproach his birth; the very accident which made him unhappy and which
allied his superiority to the infirmity of mankind ought not to have
vexed him, since it did not prevent him from being loved. The immortal
singer knew from his own case the truth of Zeno's maxim: "The voice is
the flower of beauty."
A deplorable thing is the rapidity with which, nowadays, reputations
pass away. At the end of a few years-what am I saying?--of a few
months, the infatuation disappears and disparagement follows upon
it. Already Lord Byron's glory is seen to pale; his genius is better
understood by ourselves; he will have altars longer in France than
in England. Since _Childe-Harold_ excels mainly in the depicting
of sentiments peculiar to the individual, the English, who prefer
sentiments common to all, will end by disowning the poet whose cry is
so deep and so sad. Let them look to it: if they shatter the image of
the man who has brought them to life again, what will they have left?
*
When, during my sojourn in London, in 1822, I wrote my opinion of
Lord Byron, he had no more than two years to live upon earth: he died
in 1824, at the moment when disenchantment and disgust were about to
commence for him. I preceded him in life; he preceded me in death; he
was called before his turn: my number was higher than his, and yet
his was drawn first. Childe-Harold should have remained; the world
could lose me without noticing my disappearance. On continuing my road
through life, I met Madame Guiccioli[320] in Rome, Lady Byron[321] in
Paris. Frailty and virtue thus appeared to me: the former had perhaps
too many realities, the latter too few dreams.
*
Now, after having talked to you of the English writers, at the period
when England served me as an asylum, it but remains for me to tell you
of England herself at that period, of her appearance, her sites, her
country-seats, her private and political manners.
The whole of England may be seen in the space of four leagues, from
Richmond, above London, down to Greenwich and below.
Below London lies industrial and commercial England, with her docks,
her warehouses, her custom-houses, her arsenals, her breweries, her
factories, her foundries, her ships; the latter, at each high tide,
ascend the Thames in three divisions: first, the smallest; then, the
middle-sized; lastly, the great vessels which graze with their sails
the columns of the Old Sailors' Hospital and the windows of the tavern
where the visitors dine.
Above London lies agricultural and pastoral England, with her
meadows, her flocks and herds, her country-houses, her parks, whose
shrubs and lawns are bathed twice a day by the rising waters of the
Thames. Between these two opposite points, Richmond and Greenwich,
London blends all the characteristics of this two-fold England: the
aristocracy in the West End, the democracy in the East; the Tower of
London and Westminster Abbey are landmarks between which is laid the
whole history of Great Britain.
[Sidenote: Richmond.]
I passed a portion of the summer of 1799 at Richmond with Christian
de Lamoignon, occupying myself with the _Génie du Christianisme._ I
went on the Thames in a rowing-boat, or walked in Richmond Park. I
could have wished that Richmond by London had been the Richmond of
the treaty _Honor Richemundiæ_, for then I should have found myself
in my own country, and for this reason: William the Bastard made a
grant to Alan[322] Duke of Brittany, his son-in-law, of 442 English
feudal estates, which since formed the County of Richmond[323]: the
Dukes of Brittany, Alan's successors, enfeoffed these domains to Breton
knights, cadets of the families of Rohan, Tinténiac, Chateaubriand,
Goyon, Montboucher. But, in spite of my inclinations, I must look in
Yorkshire for the County of Richmond, raised to a duchy by Charles
II.[324] in favour of a bastard[325]: the Richmond on the Thames is
the Old Sheen of Edward III. There, in 1377, died Edward III., that
famous King robbed by his mistress, Alice Perrers[326], who was not
the same as the Alice or Catharine of Salisbury of the early days of
the life of the victor of Crecy: you should only love at the age when
you can be loved. Henry VIII. and Elizabeth also died at Richmond:
where does one not die? Henry VIII. took pleasure in this residence.
The English historians are greatly embarrassed by that abominable man:
on the one hand, they are unable to conceal the tyranny and servitude
to which the Parliament was subjected; on the other hand, if they too
heartily anathematized the Head of the Reformation, they would condemn
themselves in condemning him:
Plus l'oppresseur est vil, plus l'esclave est infâme[327].
In Richmond Park is shown the mound which served Henry VIII. as an
observatory from which to spy for the news of the execution of Anne
Boleyn[328]. Henry leapt for joy when the signal shot up from the Tower
of London. What delight! The steel had cut through the slender neck,
and covered with blood the beautiful tresses to which the poet-King had
fastened his fatal kisses.
In the deserted park at Richmond I awaited no murderous signal, I would
not even have wished the slightest harm to any who might have betrayed
me. I strolled among the peaceful deer: accustomed to run before a
pack of hounds, they stopped when they were tired; they were carried
back, very gay and quite amused with this game, in a cart filled with
straw. I went at Kew to see the kangaroos, ridiculous animals, the
exact opposite to the giraffe: these innocent four-footed grass hoppers
peopled Australia better than the old Duke of Queensberry's[329]
prostitutes peopled the lanes of Richmond. The Thames bathed the
lawn of a cottage half-hidden beneath a cedar of Lebanon and amidst
weeping-willows: a newly married couple had come to spend the honeymoon
in that paradise.
One evening, as I was strolling over the swards of Twickenham, Peltier
appeared, holding his handkerchief to his mouth:
"What an everlasting deuce of a fog!" he cried, so soon as he was
within earshot. "How the devil can you remain here? I have made out my
list: Stowe, Blenheim, Hampton Court, Oxford; with your dreamy ways,
you might live with John Bull _in vitam æternam_ and not see a thing!"
[Sidenote: A journey with Peltier.]
I asked in vain to be excused, I had to go. In the carriage, Peltier
enumerated his hopes to me; he had relays of them; no sooner had
one croaked beneath him than he straddled another, and on he would
go, a leg on either side, to his journey's end. One of his hopes,
the robustest, eventually led him to Bonaparte, whom he took by the
coat-collar: Napoleon had the simplicity to hit back[330]. Peltier
took Sir James Mackintosh[331] as his second; he was condemned by the
courts, and made a new fortune (which he incontinently ran through) by
selling the documents relating to his trial.
Blenheim[332] was distasteful to me; I suffered so much the more from
an ancient reverse of my country in that I had had to endure the
insult of a recent affront: a boat going up the Thames caught sight
of me on the bank; seeing a Frenchman, the oarsmen gave cheers; the
news had just been received of the naval battle of Aboukir: these
successes of the foreigner, which might open the gates of France to me,
were hateful to me. Nelson[333], whom I had often met in Hyde Park,
wrapped his victories in Lady Hamilton's[334] shawl at Naples, while
the _lazzaroni_ played at ball with human heads. The admiral died
gloriously at Trafalgar[335], and his mistress wretchedly at Calais,
after losing beauty, youth and fortune. And I, taunted on the Thames
with the victory of Aboukir, have seen the palm-trees of Libya edging
the calm and deserted sea which was reddened with the blood of my
fellow-countrymen.
Stowe Park[336] is famous for its ornamental buildings: I prefer its
shades. The cicerone of the place showed us, in a gloomy ravine, the
copy of a temple of which I was to admire the original in the dazzling
valley of the Cephisus. Beautiful pictures of the Italian school pined
in the darkness of some uninhabited rooms, whose shutters were kept
closed: poor Raphael, imprisoned in a castle of the ancient Britons,
far from the skies of the Farnesina[337]!
At Hampton Court was preserved the collection of portraits of the
mistresses of Charles II.: you see how that Prince took things on
emerging from a revolution which cut off his father's head, and which
was to drive out his House.
At Slough we saw Herschel[338], with his learned sister[339] and his
great forty-foot telescope; he was looking for new planets: this made
Peltier laugh, who kept to the seven old ones.
We stopped for two days at Oxford. I took pleasure in this republic of
Alfred the Great[340]; it represented the privileged liberties and the
manners of the literary institutions of the Middle Ages. We hurried
through the twenty colleges, the libraries, the pictures, the museum,
the botanic garden. I turned over with extreme pleasure, among the
manuscripts of Worcester College, a life of the Black Prince, written
in French verse by the Prince's herald-at-arms.
Oxford, without resembling them, recalled to my memory the modest
Colleges of Dol, Rennes and Dinan. I had translated Gray's[341] _Elegy
written in a Country Church-yard_:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day[342],
which is imitated from Dante's
Squilla di lontano
Che paja'l giorno pianger che si musre[343].
[Sidenote: Oxford.]
Peltier had hastened to trumpet my translation in his paper. At sight
of Oxford I remembered the same poet's _Ode on a distant Prospect of
Eton College_:
Ah, happy hills! ah, pleasing shade!
Ah, fields beloved in vain!
Where once my careless childhood strayed,
A stranger yet to pain!
I feel the gales that from ye blow,
. . . . . .
My weary soul they seem to soothe,
And redolent of joy and youth,
To breathe a second spring.
Say, Father Thames,...
. . . . . .
What idle progeny succeed
To chase the rolling circle's speed
Or urge the flying ball?
Alas! regardless of their doom
The little victims play!
No sense have they of ills to come,
Nor care beyond to-day[344].
Who has not experienced the feelings and regrets here expressed with
all the sweetness of the muse? Who has not softened at the recollection
of the games, the studies, the loves of his early years? But can they
be revived? The pleasures of youth reproduced by the memory are ruins
seen by torchlight.
*
Separated from the Continent by a long war, the English at the end
of the last century preserved their national manners and character.
There was still but one people, in whose name the sovereign power was
wielded by an aristocratic government; only two great friendly classes
existed, bound by a common interest: the patrons and the dependents.
That jealous class called the bourgeoisie in France, which is beginning
to arise in England, was then not known: nothing came between the rich
land-owners and the men occupied with their trades. Everything had not
yet become machinery in the manufacturing professions, folly in the
privileged classes. Along the same pavements where one now sees dirty
faces and men in surtouts, passed little girls in white cloaks, with
straw-hats fastened under the chin with a ribbon, a basket on their
arm, containing fruit or a book; all kept their eyes lowered, all
blushed when one looked at them:
"Britain," says Shakespeare, is "in a great pool, a swan's nest[345]."
Surtouts without coats beneath were so little worn in London in 1793
that a woman who was weeping bitterly over the death of Louis XVI. said
to me:
"But, my dear sir, is it true that the poor King was dressed in a
surtout when they cut off his head?"
The "gentlemen farmers" had not yet sold their patrimony in order to
come and live in London; in the House of Commons they still formed the
independent fraction which, acting in opposition to the Ministry, kept
up ideas of liberty, order and property. They hunted the fox or shot
pheasants in autumn, ate fat geese at Christmas, shouted "Hurrah" for
roast beef, grumbled at the present, praised the past, cursed Pitt and
the war, which sent up the price of port, and went to bed drunk to
begin the same life over again next day. They were firmly convinced
that the glory of Great Britain would never fade so long as they sang
_God save the King_, maintained the rotten boroughs, kept the game laws
in vigour, and sent hares and partridges to market by stealth under the
name of "lions" and "ostriches."
The Anglican clergy was learned, hospitable, and generous; it had
received the French clergy with true Christian charity. The University
of Oxford printed at its own cost and distributed gratis among the
curés a New Testament, according to the Latin Vulgate, with the
imprint, "_In usum cleri Gallicani in Anglia exulantis._" As to the
life of the English upper classes, I, a poor exile, saw nothing of
it but the outside. On the occasion of receptions at Court or at the
Princess of Wales's[346], ladies went by seated sideways in Sedan
chairs; their great hoop-petticoats protruded through the door of the
chair like altar-hangings. They themselves, on those altars of their
waists, resembled madonnas or pagodas. Those fine ladies were the
daughters whose mothers the Duc de Guiche and the Duc de Lauzun had
adored; those daughters are, in 1822, the mothers and grandmothers of
the little girls who now come to my house to dance in short frocks to
the sound of Collinet's clarinet, swift generations of flowers.
[Illustration: William Pitt.]
[Sidenote: English statesmen.]
The England of 1688 was, at the end of the last century, at the apogee
of its glory. As a poor emigrant in London, from 1793 to 1800, I heard
Pitt, Fox[347], Sheridan[348], Wilberforce[349], Grenville[350],
Whitbread[351], Lauderdale[352], Erskine[353]; as a magnificent
ambassador in London to-day, in 1822, I could not say how far I am
impressed when, instead of the great orators whom I used to admire, I
see those get up who were their seconds at the time of my first visit,
the pupils in the place of the masters. General ideas have penetrated
into that particular society. But the enlightened aristocracy placed at
the head of this country since one hundred and forty years will have
shown to the world one of the finest and greatest societies that have
done honour to mankind since the Roman patricians. Perhaps some old
family, seated in the depths of its county, will recognise the society
which I have depicted and regret the time whose loss I here deplore.
In 1792[354] Mr. Burke parted from Mr. Fox. The question at issue was
the French Revolution, which Mr. Burke attacked and Mr. Fox defended.
Never had the two orators, who till then had been friends, displayed
such eloquence. The whole House was moved, and Mr. Fox's eyes were
filled with tears when Mr. Burke concluded his speech with these words:
"The right honourable gentleman in the speech he has just
made has treated me in every sentence with uncommon harshness
... by declaring a censure upon my whole life, conduct, and
opinions. Notwithstanding this great and serious, though
on my part unmerited, attack.... I shall not be dismayed;
I am not yet afraid to state my sentiments in this House
or anywhere else.... I will tell all the world that the
Constitution is in danger.... It certainly is indiscretion
at any period, but especially at my time of life, to provoke
enemies, or to give my friends occasion to desert me; yet
if my firm and steady adherence to the British Constitution
places me in such a dilemma, I will risk all; and as public
duty and public prudence teach me, with my last words
exclaim, 'Fly from the French Constitution!'"
Mr. Fox having said that there was "no loss of friends," Mr. Burke
exclaimed:
"Yes, there is a loss of friends! I know the price of my
conduct; I have done my duty at the price of my friend; our
friendship is at an end.... I warn the two right honourable
gentlemen who are the great rivals in this House, that
whether they hereafter move in the political atmosphere as
two flaming meteors, or walk together like brethren hand in
hand, to preserve and cherish the British Constitution, to
guard against innovation, and to save it from the danger of
these new theories[355]."
A memorable time in the world's history!
[Illustration: Edmund Burke.]
Mr. Burke, whom I knew towards the close of his life, crushed by the
death of his only son, had founded a school for the benefit of the
children of the poor Emigrants. I went to see what he called his
"nursery." He was amused at the vivacity of the foreign race which was
growing up under his paternal genius. Looking at the careless little
exiles hopping, he said to me:
"Our boys could not do that."
And his eyes filled with tears. He thought of his son who had set out
for a longer exile.
[Sidenote: William Pitt.]
Pitt, Fox, and Burke are no more, and the British Constitution has
undergone the influence of the "new theories." One must have witnessed
the gravity of the parliamentary debates of that time, one must have
heard those orators whose prophetic voices seemed to announce a coming
revolution, to form an idea of the scene which I am recalling. Liberty,
confined within the limits of order, seemed to struggle, at Westminster
under the influence of anarchical liberty, which spoke from the still
blood-stained rostrum of the Convention.
Mr. Pitt was tall and thin, and wore a sad and mocking look.
His utterance was cold, his intonation monotonous, his gestures
imperceptible; nevertheless, the lucidity and fluency of his thought,
the logic of his arguments, suddenly lighted with flashes of eloquence,
raised his talent to something out of the common. I used often to see
Mr. Pitt, when he went from his house on foot across St. James's Park,
to wait upon the King. George III.[356], on his side, arrived from
Windsor after drinking beer out of a pewter pot with the neighbouring
farmers; he drove through the ugly court-yards of his ugly palace in
a dowdy carriage followed by a few Horse-guards. That was the master
of the Kings of Europe, as five or six City merchants are the masters
of India. Mr. Pitt, in a black coat, a steel-hilted sword at his side,
his hat under his arm, climbed the stairs, taking two or three steps at
a time. On his way he found only three or four unemployed Emigrants:
casting a scornful look in their direction, he went on, with his nose
in the air, and his pale face.
The great financier maintained no order in his own affairs, had no
regular hours for his meals or his sleep. Over head and ears in debt,
he paid nobody, and could not bring himself to add up a bill. A footman
kept house for him. Badly dressed, with no pleasures, no passions,
greedy only for power, he scorned honours, and refused to be more than
plain William Pitt.
Lord Liverpool, in the month of June last, 1822, took me to dine at
his country-place: when we were crossing Putney Heath, he showed me
the little house in which died, a poor man, the son of Lord Chatham,
the statesman who had taken Europe into his pay and with his own hand
distributed all the millions in the world[357].
George III. survived Mr. Pitt, but he had lost his reason and his
sight. Every session, at the opening of Parliament, the ministers read
to the silent and moved Houses the bulletin of the King's health. One
day I had gone to visit Windsor: a few shillings persuaded an obliging
door-keeper to hide me so that I might see the King. The monarch,
white-haired and blind, appeared, wandering like King Lear through his
palace and groping with his hands along the walls of the apartments.
He sat down to a piano, of which he knew the position, and played some
portions of a sonata by Handel[358]: a fine ending for Old England!
I began to turn my eyes towards my native land. A great revolution had
been operated. Bonaparte had become First Consul and was restoring
order by means of despotism; many exiles were returning; the upper
Emigration, especially, hastened to go and collect the remnants of its
fortune: loyalty was dying at the head, while its heart still beat in
the breasts of a few half-naked country-gentlemen. Mrs. Lindsay had
left; she wrote to Messrs, de Lamoignon to return; she also invited
Madame d'Aguesseau[359], sister of Messrs, de Lamoignon, to cross the
Channel. Fontaines wrote to me to finish the printing of the _Génie
du Christianisme_ in Paris. While remembering my country, I felt no
desire to see it again; gods more powerful than the paternal lares
kept me back; I had neither goods nor refuge in France; my motherland
had become to me a bosom of stone, a breast without milk: I should not
find my mother there, nor my brother, nor my sister Julie. Lucile still
lived, but she had married M. de Caud and no longer bore my name; my
young "widow" knew me only through a union of a few months, through
misfortune and through an absence of eight years.
[Illustration: George III.]
Had I been left to myself, I do not know that I should have had
the strength to leave; but I saw my little circle dissolving; Madame
d'Aguesseau proposed to take me to Paris: I let myself go. The
Prussian Minister procured me a passport in the name of La Sagne, an
inhabitant of Neuchâtel. Messrs. Dulau stopped the printing of the
_Génie du Christianisme_, and gave me the sheets that had been set up.
I separated the sketches of _Atala_ and _René_ from the _Natchez_; the
remainder of the manuscript I locked into a trunk, of which I entrusted
the deposit to my hosts in London, and I set out for Dover with Madame
d'Aguesseau: Mrs. Lindsay was awaiting us at Calais.
[Sidenote: I return to France.]
It was thus that I quitted England in 1800; my heart was differently
occupied from the manner in which it is at the time of writing, in
1822. I brought back from the land of exile only dreams and regrets;
to-day my head is filled with scenes of ambition, of politics, of
grandeurs and Courts, so ill suited to my nature. How many events are
heaped up in my present existence! Pass, men, pass; my turn will come.
I have unrolled only one-third of my days before your eyes; if the
sufferings which I have borne have weighed upon my vernal serenity,
now, entering upon a more fruitful age, the germ of _René_ is about
to develop, and bitterness of another kind will be blended with my
narrative! What shall I not have to tell in speaking of my country;
of her revolutions, of which I have already shown the fore-ground;
of the Empire and of the gigantic man whom I have seen fall; of the
Restoration in which I played so great a part, that Restoration
glorious to-day, in 1822, although nevertheless I am able to see it
only through I know not what ill-omened mist?
I end this book, which touches the spring of 1800. Arriving at the
close of my first career, I see opening before me the writer's career;
from a private individual I am about to become a public man; I leave
the virginal and silent retreat of solitude to enter the dusty and
noisy cross-roads of the world; broad day is about to light up my
dreamy life, light to penetrate my kingdom of shadows. I cast a melting
glance upon those books which contain my unremembered hours; I seem to
be bidding a last farewell to the paternal house; I take leave of the
thoughts and illusions of my youth as of sisters, of loving women, whom
I leave by the family hearth and whom I shall see no more.
We took four hours to cross from Dover to Calais. I stole into my
country under the shelter of a foreign name: doubly hidden beneath the
obscurity of the Swiss La Sagne and my own, I entered France with the
century[360].
[247] This book was written in London between April and September 1822,
and revised in February 1845.--T.
[248] Cat. LXV. 9-11.--T.
[249] M. A. Dulau was a Frenchman, and had been a Benedictine at Sorèze
College. He emigrated and opened a shop in Wardour Street, London.--B.
[250] OV., _Fasti_, VI. 772.--T.
[251] Charlotte Suzanne Marie de Bedée (1762-1849), whom Chateaubriand
called Caroline, survived him, and died at Dinan on the 28th of April
1849.--B.
[252] Marie Anne Cuppi (1710-1770), known as the Camargo, and a famous
dancer, was born in Brussels of a reputed noble Spanish family. She
made her first appearance at the Opera in Pans in 1734, and continued
to dance there until 1751, when she retired from her profession.
Voltaire addressed a piece of verse to her.--T.
[253] David Hume (1711-1776). His History of England, published from
1754 to 1761, goes down to 1688, whence it is continued by Smollett.--T.
[254] Tobias George Smollett (1721-1771). That portion of his complete
_History of England_ which embraces the period from the Revolution to
the death of George II. is generally treated as carrying on Hume's
History, and is printed as a continuation of that work.--T.
[255] Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), author of the _Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire._--T.
[256] William Robertson (1721-1793), a "moderate" historian, author
of a History of Scotland, a History of Charles V., and a History of
America.--T.
[257] John Dryden (1631-1700), Poet-Laureate.--T.
[258] Alexander Pope (1688-1744). His house at Twickenham stood on
the site of the modern Pope's Villa, now the property of Mr. Henry
Labouchere, M.P. The willow became rotten and was cut down.--T.
[259] The Rev. Hugh Blair ( 1718-1800), Professor of Rhetoric at
Edinburgh University, and author of the _Lectures on Rhetoric_ and a
collection of famous Sermons.--T.
[260] Dr. Samuel Johnson ( 1709-1783), author of the Dictionary and the
_Lives of the English Poets._--T.
[261] Addison and Steele's _Spectator_ ran for nearly two years, from
January 1711 to December 1712.--T.
[262] Edmund Burke (1729-1797), the great statesman. His _Reflections
on the Revolution in France_ appeared in 1790.--T.
[263] François Duc de Montmorency (_circa_ 1530-1579) was Ambassador to
England in 1572, when Shakespeare was still a child.--T.
[264] Charles de Gontaut, Duc de Biron (_circa_ 1562-1602), was
Ambassador from Henry IV. to Elizabeth at the close of the sixteenth
century. He was beheaded, 31 July 1602, at the Bastille, for conspiring
against the King.--T.
[265] Maximilien de Béthune, Duc de Sully (1560-1641), Henry IV.'s
great minister.--T.
[266] Elizabeth, Queen of England (1533-1603), reigned from 1558 to
1603, and the plays produced by Shakespeare during her reign include
_Love's Labours Lost_, the _Comedy of Errors_, _King Henry VI._, the
_Two Gentlemen of Verona_, the _Midsummer Alight's Dream_, the _Life
and Death of King Richard III._, _Romeo and Juliet_, the _Life and
Death of King Richard II._, _King John_, the _Merchant of Venice_,
_King Henry IV._, _King Henry V._, the _Taming of the Shrew_, the
_Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It,
Twelfth Night, or, What You Will, Julius Cæsar, All's Well that Ends
Well_, and _Hamlet Prince of Denmark._--T.
[267] James I. King of England and VI. of Scotland (1566-1625). In
his reign were produced _Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida,
Othello, the Moor of Venice, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra,
Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, Pericles Prince of Tyre, Cymbeline_, the
_Tempest_, the _Winters Tale_, and _King Henry VIII._--T.
[268] Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) flourished exactly three centuries
before Shakespeare.--T.
[269] Bulstrode Whitelock (1605-1675), a prominent member of the Long
Parliament, and author of the _Memorials of the English Affairs_,
in which mention is made of the fact that the Swedish Ambassador
complains, in 1656, of the delay caused in the translation of certain
articles into Latin through their being entrusted to a blind man.--T.
[270] Jean Baptiste Poquelin (1622-1673), known as Molière, played the
principal part in his own comedies. _Monsieur de Pourceaugnac_, one of
the most farcical of these, was produced in 1669.--T.
[271] JOB. XIII. 15.--T.
[272] _An Epitaph on the admirable Dramatic Poet William Shakespeare_,
1-2.--T.
[273] Michael Angelo Buonarotti (1474-1563) left a number of slight
poems in addition to his vast works of sculpture, painting, and
architecture.--T.
[274] Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) lost the use of his right leg when
eighteen months old.--T.
[275] _Sonnets_, XXXVII. 3.--T.
[276] _Sonnets_, LXXI, I, 5-12.--T.
[277] Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), the voluminous author of _Pamela,
Clarissa Harlowe_, and the _History of Sir Charles Grandison. Clarissa
Harlowe_ was published in 1748.--T.
[278] Henry Fielding (1707-1754), author of _Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones_
(1749), etc.--T.
[279] Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), author of _Tristram Shandy_
(1759-1767), etc.--T.
[280] Goldsmith's _Vicar of Wakefield_ had appeared in 1766.--T.
[281] Godwin's _Caleb Williams_ was published in 1794.--T.
[282] Matthew Gregory Lewis (1773-1818), familiarly known as Monk Lewis
from the _Monk_, his principal novel, published in 1795.--T.
[283] Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), _née_ Ward, author of the
_Mysteries of Udolpho_ (1794)--T.
[284] Mrs. Anna Lætitia Barbauld (1743-1825), _née_ Aiken, author of
_Evenings at Horne_, etc.--T.
[285] Maria Edgeworth (1766-1849), author of _Moral Tales, Castle
Rackrent, Tales of Fashionable Life_, etc., etc.--T.
[286] Madame Fanny d'Arblay (1752-1840), _née_ Burney, author of
_Evelina_ (1778), _Cecilia_, and an interesting Diary and Letters.--T.
[287] Florio's MONTAIGNE, Booke III. chap. IX.: _Of Vanitie._--T.
[288] Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) published his tragedy of
_Goetz von Berlichingen_ in 1773; Sir Walter Scott's translation
appeared in 1799.--T.
[289] William Cowper (1731-1800), author of the _Task._--T.
[290] Robert Burns (1759-1796), the Ayrshire ploughman-poet.--T.
[291] Thomas Moore (1779-1852), the popular Irish poet, had published
his translation of Anacreon at the time of which Chateaubriand writes.
His Irish Melodies began to appear in 1807, and _Lalla Rookh_ was
published in 1817.--T.
[292] Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) had published his _Pleasures of Hope_
in 1799.--T.
[293] Samuel Rogers (1763-1855), the banker-poet, was known at this
time by the _Pleasures of Memory_, published in 1792.--T.
[294] George Crabbe (1754-1832) had published the _Library_ and the
_Village._--T.
[295] William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Poet-Laureate (1843). The Lyrical
Ballads, composed with Coleridge, whom Chateaubriand omits to mention,
were published in 1798.--T.
[296] Robert Southey (1774-1843), Poet-Laureate (1813). _Wat Tyler_
and _Joan of Arc_ both appeared before the close of the eighteenth
century.--T.
[297] James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) had not begun to write at this
time.--T.
[298] James Sheridan Knowles (1784-1862), author of the _Hunchback_ and
other once much admired plays.--T.
[299] Henry Richard Vassall Fox, third Lord Holland (1773-1840), Lord
Privy Seal in the ministry of his nephew Charles James Fox (1806), and
author of some translations from the Spanish poets.--T.
[300] Canning was the author of a number of satirical poems, many of
which appeared in the _Anti-Jacobin._--T.
[301] John Wilson Croker (1780-1857), Secretary to the Admiralty from
1809 to 1829, and one of the founders of the _Quarterly Review_ (1809)
and of the Athenæum Club (1824). He published occasional poems on
British victories, such as Trafalgar and Talavera.--T.
[302] William Mason (1724-1797), a minor poet, author of the _English
Garden_ and of two tragedies, _Elfrida_ and _Caractacus._--T.
[303] Dr. Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), grandfather of Charles Darwin,
and author of the _Botanic Garden_ and the _Zoonomia, or the Laws of
Organic Life._--T.
[304] James Beattie (1735-1803). The _Minstrel_ appeared in 1774 to
1777.--T.
[305] _Hours of Idleness_, "When I roved a young Highlander," 1-4.--T.
[306] _Hours of Idleness_, "Lines written beneath the Elm in the
Churchyard of Harrow," 1-4, 17-18, 24-25, 30, 33-34--T.
[307] Arthur Young (1741-1820), a famous writer on agriculture, and
Secretary to the Board of Agriculture on its establishment in 1793.--T.
[308] Arthur Young, _Travels in France during the Years_ 1787, 1788,
1789. The author passed by Combourg Castle on the 1st of September
1788.--T.
[309] _Martyrs_, book IV.--T.
[310] _Ad Familiares_, IV. 5: "In my return out of Asia, as I was
sailing from Ægina towards Megara, I amused myself with contemplating
the circumjacent countries. Behind me lay Ægina, before me Megara; on
my right I saw Piræus, and on my left Corinth. These cities, once so
flourishing and magnificent, now presented nothing to my view but a sad
spectacle of desolation" (MELMOTH's translation).--T.
[311] Pierre Jean de Béranger (1780-1857), the national French
song-writer. The extract quoted occurs in the notes to Béranger's song,
_À M. de Chateaubriand_ (September 1831), which is quoted in a later
volume.--T.
[312] Abel François Villemain (1790-1870), perpetual secretary of the
French Academy from 1835, and author of the notice of Lord Byron in the
_Biographie universelle_, from which the above sentences are quoted.--T.
[313] Byron spent his childhood at Aberdeen.--T.
[314] MACPHERSON's _Ossian_ was published in 1760.--T.
[315] GOETHE's _Sorrows of Werther_ appeared in 1774.--T.
[316] Rousseau's posthumous work, published in 1782.--T.
[317] By Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1784).--T.
[318] Chateaubriand cannot have read the _Age of Bronze_: it is true
that this poem was written in 1823, at Genoa, a year later than the
earlier portion of these remarks. In Stanza XVI. of the _Age of Bronze,
or Carmen Seculare et Annus haud Mirabilis_, treating of the Congress
of Verona (1822), occur the following lines:
There Metternich, power's foremost parasite,
Cajoles; there Wellington forgets to fight;
There Chateaubriand forms new books of martyrs;
And subtle Greeks intrigue for stupid Tartars.
And Byron appends the following note:
"Monsieur de Chateaubriand, who has not forgotten the author in the
minister, receives a handsome compliment at Verona from a literary
sovereign: 'Ah! Monsieur C., are you related to that Chateaubriand
who-who-who has written _something?_' (_écrit quelque chose!_). It
is said that the author of _Atala_ repented him for a moment of his
legitimacy."--T.
[319] _De la Littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec l'état moral
et politique des nations_, by Madame de Staël. As this book appeared in
1800, before _Atala_ and the _Génie du Christianisme_, Madame de Staël
may well be excused for not mentioning Chateaubriand's name in it.--B.
[320] Teresa Contessa Guiccioli (1799-1873), _née_ Gamba, who became
famous by her _liaison_ with Lord Byron. In 1831, widowed of both her
husband and Lord Byron, she married the Marquis de Boissy, who had been
an attache to Chateaubriand's embassy in Rome. The Countess Guiccioli
published her Recollections of Lord Byron in 1863.--B.
[321] Anne Isabella Lady Byron (1792-1860), _née_ Milbanke, daughter
of Sir Ralph Milbanke-Noel, and heiress of her mother, Judith Noel,
Viscountess Wentworth. She married Lord Byron on the 2nd of January
1815, and left him in January 1816, soon after the birth of their
daughter Augusta Ada.--T.
[322] Alan IV. Duke of Brittany (_d._ 1112), known as Alan Rufus,
son-in-law and nephew of William the Conqueror, was created Earl of
Richmond and founded the borough of Richmond or Rich Mount.--T.
[323] See _Domesday Book.--Author's Note._
[324] Charles II. King of England (1630-1685) created the Duchy of
Richmond in favour of...
[325] Charles Lennox, first Duke of Richmond (peerage of England) and
Lennox (peerage of Scotland) in 1675. He was the illegitimate son
of the King and of Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth and
Duchesse d'Aubigny. This last title of Aubigny was re-confirmed to the
fifth duke by King Louis XVIII. in 1816.--T.
[326] Alice Perrers (d. 1400), married later to William de Windsor,
became Edward III.'s mistress in 1366. She stole the rings from off his
fingers when he was dying.--T.
[327] LA HARPE, _Le Triomphe de la Religion, ou le Roi martyr_:
"The viler the oppressor, the more infamous the slave."--T.
[328] Queen Anne Boleyn (1507-1536), second wife of Henry VIII.,
executed on Tower Hill for adultery.--T.
[329] William Douglas, fourth Duke of Queensberry, K.T. (1724-1810),
known as "Old Q.," the notorious veteran debauchee.--T.
[330] Peltier attacked Bonaparte in the _Ambigu_, which he published
in London at the end of 1802. The First Consul, then at peace with
England, asked for his expulsion, or at least his indictment before a
British jury. Peltier was brought before the Court of King's Bench, was
brilliantly defended by Sir James Mackintosh, and was sentenced to pay
a trifling fine (21 February 1803).--B.
[331] Sir James Mackintosh (1765-1832) abandoned medicine for the
law. He received an Indian judgeship in 1804, and in 1811 returned
to England, entering Parliament in 1812. He was the author of some
masterly writings, including the famous _Dissertation on Ethics in the
Encyclopædia Britannica._--T.
[332] Blenheim was founded in 1704 and bestowed by Parliament on John
Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, in recognition of his military
and diplomatic services. It was named after the signal victory at
Blenheim over the French and Bavarian troops (2 August 1704).--T.
[333] Admiral Horatio Viscount Nelson (1758-1805) destroyed the French
fleet in the battle known indifferently as the Battle of Aboukir or the
Nile (1 August 1798). For this he was created Baron Nelson by the King
of England and Duke of Bronte by the King of Naples.--T.
[334] Emma Lady Hamilton (1763-1815), _née_ Lyon or Hart, the beautiful
mistress of Charles Greville and of his uncle, Sir William Hamilton,
foster-brother to George IV., and Minister at Naples from 1764 to 1800.
Sir William Hamilton married Emma Hart in 1791. Her intimacy with
Nelson began in 1793, and their daughter Horatia was born in 1801.--T.
[335] 21 October 1805.--T.
[336] At that time the residence of the Duke of Buckingham and
Chandos.--T.
[337] The Farnesina Palace, in Rome, where Raphael Sanzio (1483-1520)
died.--T.
[338] Sir William Herschel (1738-1822), the famous astronomer, had
discovered the planet Uranus in 1781.--T.
[339] Caroline Herschel (1750-1848), Sir William's sister, assisted him
in recording his observations.--T.
[340] King Alfred (849-901), known as the Great, is said to have
founded the University of Oxford in 872.--T.
[341] Thomas Gray (1716-1771).--T.
[342] _Elegy_, I.--T.
[343] _Purgatorio_, VIII. 5.--B.
[344] _Ode_, 11-15, 18-21, 28-30, 51-55.--T.
[345] _Cymbeline_, III. 4.--T.
[346] Queen Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1768-1821) married the
Prince of Wales, afterwards King George IV., in 1795. The Prince and
Princess of Wales separated by mutual consent in 1796, after the birth
of Princess Charlotte.--T.
[347] Charles James Fox (1749-1806) entered Parliament for Midhurst in
1768; held office under North, but left him and joined Burke in his
opposition to the American War; was Foreign Secretary in the Rockingham
Ministry; joined North's short-lived Coalition Ministry of 1783; and
during the next fourteen years distinguished himself as the great and
eloquent opponent of Pitt's Government. On Pitt's death, in 1806, he
again came into office as Foreign Secretary, but himself died shortly
after.--T.
[348] Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan (1751-1816) had produced all his
plays and was owner of Drury Lane Theatre when he entered Parliament
in 1780 under Fox's patronage. In 1782 he became Under Secretary for
Foreign Affairs in Rockingham's Ministry. His two most famous speeches
were those impeaching Warren Hastings in 1787 and supporting the French
Revolution in 1794.--T.
[349] William Wilberforce (1759-1833), the antagonist of the
slave-trade, entered Parliament as Member for Hull in 1780. He first
introduced his Abolition Bill in 1789; it was passed by the House of
Commons in 1801 and by the House of Lords in 1807.--T.
[350] William Wyndham, first Lord Grenville (1759-1834), entered
Parliament in 1782. In 1789 he was Speaker of the House of Commons. In
1790 Pitt made him Home Secretary and a peer; in 1791 he was Foreign
Secretary, and Premier from 1806 to 1807.--T.
[351] Samuel Whitbread (1758-1815) entered Parliament in 1790 as Member
for Bedford, and attached himself to Fox, to the maintenance of peace,
and to the cause of the Princess of Wales. He cut his throat on the 6th
of July 1815.--T.
[352] James Maitland, eighth Earl of Lauderdale, K.T. (1759-1839),
entered the House of Commons in 1780 for Newport, and supported
Fox. In 1789 he succeeded to the Scottish peerage and was elected
a representative peer in 1790, and in 1806 created a peer of Great
Britain and Ireland. He veered from Whig to Tory over the Queen
Caroline question, and received the Thistle in reward.--T.
[353] Thomas first Lord Erskine (1750-1823) was Attorney-General to the
Prince of Wales (1783), Chancellor of the Duchy of Cornwall (1802), and
in 1806 became Lord Chancellor and a peer.--T.
[354] This should be 1791. _Vide note infra._--T.
[355] 21 April 1791, in the course of an excursion on the French
Revolution during the debate on the Quebec Government Bill.--T.
[356] George III., King of England (1738-1820). His frequent fits of
insanity began in 1810.--T.
[357] Pitt died at his house at Putney on the 23rd of January 1806.--T.
[358] George Frederick Handel (1684-1759), a German musician who
attained and still maintains great vogue in England.--T.
[359] Marie Catherine Marouise d'Aguesseau (1759-1849), _née_ de
Lamoignon, married to the Marquis d'Aguesseau, who became a senator of
the Empire (1805) and a peer of the Restoration (1814).--B.
[360] 8 May 1800.--B.
PART THE SECOND
1800-1814
BOOK I[361]
My stay at Dieppe--Two phases of society--The position of my
Memoirs--The year 1800--Aspect of France--I arrive in Paris--Changes in
society--The year 1801--The _Mercure_--_Atala_--Madame de Beaumont and
her circle--Summer at Savigny--The year 1802--Talma--The year 1803--The
_Génie du Christianisme_--Failure prophesied--Cause of its final
success--Defects in the work.
You know that I have often moved from spot to spot while writing
these Memoirs; that I have often described those spots, spoken of the
feelings with which they inspired me, and recalled my memories, thus
mingling the history of my thoughts and of my wandering habitations
with the history of my life.
You see where I am living now. Walking this morning on the cliffs
behind Dieppe Castle, I saw the postern which communicates with
the cliffs by means of a bridge thrown over a ditch: Madame de
Longueville[362] escaped by that way from Queen Anne of Austria[363];
embarking secretly at the Havre, she landed at Rotterdam, and joined
the Maréchal de Turenne[364] at Stenay. The great captain's laurels
were no longer innocent, and the fair but caustic outlaw treated the
culprit none too well.
Madame de Longueville, who had recovered from the Hôtel de Rambouillet,
the Throne of Versailles, and the Municipality of Paris, became smitten
with the author of the _Maximes_[365], and was as faithful to him as
she was able. The latter lives less by his "thoughts" than by the
friendship of Madame de La Fayette[366], Madame de Sévigné, the verses
of La Fontaine, and the love of Madame de Longueville: see whither
illustrious attachments lead.
The Princesse de Condé[367], when on the point of death, said to Madame
de Brienne[368]:
"My dear friend, acquaint that poor wretch who is at Stenay
of the state in which you see me, and let her learn how to
die."
Fine words; but the Princess forgot that she herself had been loved by
Henry IV., and that, when her husband carried her to Brussels, she had
wanted to rejoin the Bearnese, "to escape at night by a window, and
then to do thirty or forty leagues on horse-back;" she was at that time
a "poor wretch" of seventeen.
Descending the cliff, I found myself on the high-road to Paris; it
ascends swiftly on leaving Dieppe. On the right, on the rising slope
of a bank, stands the wall of a cemetery; by the side of that wall was
fixed the wheel of a rope-walk. Two rope-spinners, walking backwards
in line, and swinging from leg to leg, were softly singing together. I
listened: they had come to that couplet of the _Vieux caporal_, a fine
poetic lie, which has brought us to our present state:
Qui là-bas sanglote et regarde?
Eh! c'est la veuve du tambour, etc[369].
Those men uttered the refrain:
Conscrits au pas; ne pleurez pas
. . . Marchez au pas, au pas[370],
in a voice so manly and so pathetic that the tears came to my eyes.
Whilst themselves keeping step and twisting their hemp, they appeared
to be spinning out the old corporal's dying moments: there was
something, I cannot say what, in that glory peculiar to Béranger, thus
lonesomely revealed by two sailors singing a soldier's death within
view of the sea.
[Sidenote: Dieppe.]
The cliff reminded me of a monarchical greatness, the road of
a plebeian celebrity: I compared in thought the men at the two
extremities of society, and I asked myself to which of those eras
I should have preferred to belong. When the present shall have
disappeared like the past, which of those two renowns will the most
attract the notice of posterity?
And yet, if facts were all, if, in history, the value of names did
not counterbalance the value of events, what a difference between my
time and the time which elapsed between the deaths of Henry IV. and
Mazarin[371]! What are the troubles of 1648 compared to that Revolution
which has devoured the old world, of which it, the Revolution, will die
perhaps, leaving behind it neither an old nor a new state of society?
Had not I to paint in my Memoirs pictures of incomparably higher
importance than the scenes related by the Duc de La Rochefoucauld[372]?
At Dieppe itself, what was the careless and voluptuous idol of seduced
and rebellious Paris by the side of Madame la Duchesse de Berry[373]?
The salvoes of artillery which announced to the sea the presence of the
royal widow resound no longer[374]; the flattery of powder and smoke
has left nothing upon the shore save the moaning of the waves.
The two daughters of Bourbon, Anne Geneviève and Marie Caroline, have
departed; the two sailors singing the song of the plebeian poet will
plunge into the abyss; Dieppe no longer contains myself: it was another
"I," an "I" of my early days, now past, that formerly inhabited these
regions, and that "I" has succumbed, for our days die before ourselves.
Here you have seen me, a sub-lieutenant in the Navarre Regiment,
drilling recruits on the pebbles; you have seen me here again, exiled
under Bonaparte; you shall find me here again when the days of July
surprise me in this place. Behold me here once more; I here resume my
pen to continue my confessions.
In order that we may understand one another, it is well to cast a
glance at the present state of my Memoirs.
*
What happens to every contractor working on a large scale has happened
to me: I have, in the first place, built the outer wings of my
edifice, and then, removing and restoring my scaffoldings in different
positions, I have raised the stone and the mortar for the intermediate
structures: it used to take several centuries to complete a Gothic
cathedral. If Heaven grant me life, the work will be finished by
stages of my various years; the architect, always the same, will have
changed only in age. For the rest, it is a punishment to preserve one's
intellectual being intact, imprisoned in a worn-out material covering.
St Augustine, feeling that his clay was falling from him, said to God,
"Be Thou a tabernacle unto my soul," and to men he said, "When you
shall have known me in this book, pray for me."
Thirty-six years must be reckoned between the things which commence
my Memoirs and those upon which I am now engaged. How shall I resume
with any spirit the narration of a subject formerly replete for me
with passion and fire, when it is no longer with living beings that I
am about to converse, when it becomes a question of arousing lifeless
effigies from the depths of Eternity, of descending into a funeral
vault there to play at life? Am I not myself almost dead? Have my
opinions not changed? Do I see objects from the same point of view?
Have not the general and prodigious events which have accompanied or
followed the personal events that so greatly perturbed me diminished
their importance in the eyes of the world, as well as in my own eyes?
Whosoever prolongs his career feels his hours grow cold; he no longer
finds on the morrow the interest which he felt on the eve. When I
seek in my thoughts, there are names and even persons that escape my
memory, and yet they may have caused my heart to throb: vanity of man
forgetting and forgotten! It is not enough to say to one's dreams, to
love, "Revive!" for them to come to life again: the realm of shadows
can be opened only with the golden bough, and it needs a young hand to
pluck it.
_Aucuns venants des Lares patries_[375].
[Sidenote: Aspect of France in 1800.]
Imprisoned for eight years in Great Britain, I had seen only the
English world, so different, especially at that time, from the European
world. As the Dover packet approached Calais, in the spring of 1800,
my gaze preceded me on shore. I was struck by the needy aspect of the
country: scarce a few masts were to be seen in the harbour; inhabitants
in carmagnole jackets and cotton caps came along the jetty to meet
us: the conquerors of the Continent made themselves known to me by a
clatter of wooden shoes. When we came alongside, the gendarmes and
custom-house officers leapt on deck to inspect our luggage and our
passports: in France a man is always suspected, and the first thing we
perceive in our business, as well as in our amusements, is a cocked hat
or a bayonet.
Mrs. Lindsay was waiting for us at the inn; the next day we set out
with her for Paris: Madame d'Aguesseau, a young kinswoman of hers, and
I. On the road one saw hardly any men; blackened and sun-burnt women,
bare-footed, their heads bare or covered with a kerchief, were tilling
the fields: one would have taken them for slaves. I ought rather to
have been struck by the independence and virility of that land where
the women wielded the mattock while the men wielded the musket. The
villages looked as though a conflagration had passed over them; they
were wretched and half demolished: mud or dust on every hand, dunghills
and rubbish-heaps.
To the right and left of the road appeared overthrown country mansions;
of their levelled thickets there remained only some squared trunks,
upon which children played. One saw battered enclosure walls, deserted
churches, from which the dead had been expelled, steeples without
bells, cemeteries without crosses, headless saints that had been
stoned in their niches. The walls were smeared with those Republican
inscriptions that had already grown old: LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY,
OR DEATH. Sometimes they had attempted to efface the word DEATH, but
the red or black letters showed through the coating of lime. This
nation, which seemed on the point of extinction, was commencing a new
world, like those peoples which issued from the dusk of the savagery
and destruction of the Middle Ages.
Approaching the capital, between Écouen and Paris, the elms had not
been cut down; I was struck by those fine roadside avenues, unknown on
English soil. France was as new to me, as in former days, the forests
of America. Saint-Denis was laid bare, its windows were broken; the
rain penetrated into its grass-grown naves, and there were no more
tombs: I have since seen there the bones of Louis XVI., the Cossacks,
the coffin of the Duc de Berry, and the catafalque of Louis XVIII.
Auguste de Lamoignon came to meet Mrs. Lindsay. His well-appointed
carriage formed a contrast with the clumsy carts, the dirty,
broken-down diligences, drawn by hacks harnessed with ropes, which I
had met since leaving Calais. Mrs. Lindsay lived at the Ternes. I was
put down on the Chemin de la Révolte, and made my way to my hostess'
house across the fields. I stayed with her for four-and-twenty hours; I
there met a great fat Monsieur Lasalle, whom she employed in arranging
emigrant business. She sent to inform M. de Fontanes of my arrival; in
eight-and-forty hours he came to fetch me in a little room which Mrs.
Lindsay had hired for me at an inn almost at her door.
[Sidenote: Paris once more.]
It was a Sunday: we entered Paris on foot by the Barrière de l'Étoile
at about three o'clock in the afternoon. We have no idea to-day of
the impression which the excesses of the Revolution had made on men's
minds in Europe, and chiefly among those absent from France during the
Terror: I felt literally as though I were about to descend into Hell.
I had, it is true, witnessed the beginnings of the Revolution; but the
great crimes had then not yet been accomplished, and I had remained
under the yoke of subsequent events as these had been related in the
midst of the peaceful and orderly society of England.
Proceeding under my false name, and convinced that I was compromising
my friend Fontanes, to my great astonishment, on entering the
Champs-Élysées, I heard the sound of violins, horns, clarionets and
drums. I saw public balls, at which men and women were dancing; farther
on, the Tuileries Palace appeared to my eyes, against the background
of its two great clumps of chestnut-trees. As for the Place Louis
XV.[376], it was bare: it had the decay, the melancholy and deserted
look of an old amphitheatre; one crossed it quickly; I was quite
surprised to hear no moans; I was afraid of stepping in the blood of
which not a trace remained; my eyes could not tear themselves from
the place in the sky where the instrument of death had raised its
head; I thought I saw my brother and my sister-in-law in their shirts,
standing, bound, beside the blood-stained machine: it was there that
the head of Louis XVI. had fallen. In spite of the gaiety in the
streets the church-steeples were dumb; it seemed to me as though I had
returned on the day of infinite sorrow, on Good Friday.
M. de Fontanes lived in the Rue Saint-Honoré, near Saint-Roch. He took
me home with him, introduced me to his wife, and then took me to his
friend, M. Joubert, where I found a temporary shelter: I was received
like a traveller of whom one has heard speak.
The next day I went to the police, under the name of La Sagne, to
lodge my foreign passport and to receive in exchange a permit to
remain in Paris, which was renewed from month to month. In a few days
I hired an _entre-sol_ in the Rue de Lille, on the side of the Rue des
Saints-Pères.
I had brought with me the _Génie du Christianisme_ and the first sheets
of the work, printed in London. I was directed to M. Migneret[377], a
worthy man, who consented to recommence the interrupted printing, and
to advance me something to live on. Not a soul knew of my _Essai sur
les révolutions_, notwithstanding what M. Lemierre had written to me. I
unearthed the old philosopher, Delisle de Sales, who had just published
his _Mémoire en faveur de Dieu_, and went to call on Ginguené. He
lodged in the Rue de Grenelle-Saint-Germain, near the Hôtel du Bon La
Fontaine. His porter's box still bore this inscription:
"Here we honour each other with the title of citizen and say
thee and thou. Shut the door behind thee, if you please."
I went up: M. Ginguené, who hardly recognised me, spoke to me from
the height of the grandeur of all that he was and had been. I humbly
retired, and did not endeavour to renew such disproportionate relations.
I continued at the bottom of my heart to cherish regretful memories
of England; I had lived so long in that country that I had adopted
its habits: I could not reconcile myself to the dirt of our houses,
our staircases, our tables, to our uncleanliness, our noisiness, our
familiarity, the indiscretion of our loquacity; I was English in
manners, in taste, and to a certain degree in thought; for, if, as it
is said, Lord Byron sometimes drew inspiration for his _Childe-Harold_
from _René_ it is also true to say that my eight years' residence
in Great Britain, preceded by a journey in America, together with
my long habit of talking, writing, and even thinking in English,
had necessarily influenced the turn and expression of my ideas. But
gradually I came to relish the good-fellowship for which we are
distinguished, that charming, swift, easy commerce of thought, that
utter absence of arrogance and prejudice, that heedlessness of fortune
and names, that natural level of all ranks, that equality of mind which
makes French society incomparable and redeems our faults: after a few
months' residence among us, one feels that he can no longer live except
in Paris.
*
I locked myself into my _entre-sol_ and gave myself up entirely to
work. In my intervals of rest, I went and reconnoitred in various
directions. The Circus in the middle of the Palais-Royal had been
filled up; Camille Desmoulins no longer held forth in the open air; one
no longer saw bands of prostitutes going round, virginal attendants of
the goddess Reason, and walking under the conduct of David, costumier
and corybant. At the outlet of each alley, in the galleries, one met
men crying sights: "galanty shows," "peep-shows," "physical cabinets,"
"strange animals;" in spite of all the heads that had been cut off,
idlers still remained. From the cellars of the Palais-Marchand came
bursts of music, accompanied by the double diapason of the big
drums: it was perhaps there that dwelt the giants whom I sought, and
whom immense events must necessarily have produced. I went down: an
underground ball was jigging amidst seated spectators drinking beer.
A little hunchback, perched on a table, played the violin and sang a
hymn to Bonaparte, which ended with these lines:
Par ses vertus, par ses attraits.
Il méritait d'être leur père[378]!
He was given a sou after the _ritornello._ Such is the ground-work of
the human society which bore Alexander and was then bearing Napoleon.
[Sidenote: Changes in Paris.]
I visited the places where I had taken the reveries of my early years.
In my old-time convents, the club-men had been driven out after
the monks. Wandering behind the Luxembourg, my footsteps led me to
the Chartreuse: its demolition was being completed. The Place des
Victoires and the Place Vendôme mourned the missing effigies of the
Great King; the community-house of the Capuchins was sacked: the inner
cloisters served as a retreat for Robertson's[379] dissolving views.
At the Cordeliers, I inquired in vain for the Gothic nave where I had
seen Marat and Danton in their prime. On the Quai des Théatins[380],
the church of that Order[381] had been turned into a café and a
rope-dancers' theatre. At the door was a coloured poster representing
acrobats dancing on the tight-rope, with, in big letters, ADMISSION
FREE. I elbowed my way among the crowd into that perfidious cave: I had
no sooner taken my seat than waiters entered, napkin in hand, shouting
like mad-men--
"Give your orders, gentlemen, give your orders!"
I did not wait to be told a second time, and I pitiably made my
escape amid the jeering cries of the assembly, because I had no money
wherewith to "give my orders."
*
The Revolution has become divided into three parts which have nothing
in common between them: the Republic, the Empire, and the Restoration;
those three different worlds, each as completely finished as the
others, seem separated by centuries. Each of these three worlds has had
its fixed principle: the principle of the Republic was equality, that
of the Empire force, that of the Restoration liberty. The Republican
era is the most original, and has made the deepest impression because
it has been unique in history: never had there been seen, nor ever will
be again, physical order produced by moral disorder, unity issuing from
the government of the multitude, the scaffold substituted for the law
and obeyed in the name of humanity.
In 1801, I assisted at the second social transformation. The jumble was
a strange one: by an agreed travesty, a host of people became persons
who they were not; each carried his assumed or borrowed name hung
round his neck, as the Venetians at the carnival carry a little mask
in their hand to show that they are masked. One was reputed an Italian
or a Spaniard, another a Prussian or a Dutchman: I was a Swiss. The
mother passed for her son's aunt, the father for his daughter's uncle;
the owner of an estate was only its steward. This movement reminded
me, in an opposite sense, of the movement of 1789, when the monks and
religious issued from their cloisters and the old society was invaded
by the new: the latter, after supplanting the former, was supplanted in
its turn.
Nevertheless, the orderly world commenced to spring up again; people
left the cafés and the streets to return to their houses; they gathered
together the remains of their family; they readjusted their inheritance
by collecting its remnants, as, after a battle, the troop is beaten
and the losses counted. Such churches as remained whole were opened:
I had the happiness to sound the trumpet at the gate of the Temple.
One distinguished the old republican generations which were retiring,
imperial generations which were coming to the front Generals of the
Requisition[382], poor, rude of speech, stern of mien, who, from all
their campaigns, had brought back nothing save wounds and ragged
coats, passed officers glittering with the gold lace of the Consular
Army. The returned Emigrant chatted quietly with the assassins of some
of his kindred. The porters, all great partisans of the late M. de
Robespierre, regretted the sights on the Place Louis XV., where they
cut off the heads of "women who," my own _concierge_ in the Rue de
Lille told me, "had necks white as chicken's flesh."
The men of September, changing their names and their districts, sold
baked potatoes at the street-corners; but they were often obliged to
pack off, because the people, recognising them, upset their stalls
and tried to kill them. The Revolutionaries who had waxed rich began
to move into the great mansions of the Faubourg Saint-Germain that
had been sold. On the road to become barons and counts, the Jacobins
spoke only of the horrors of 1793, of the necessity for chastising the
proletarians and putting down the excesses of the populace. Bonaparte,
placing the Brutuses and Scævolas in his police, was preparing to
bedizen them with ribands, to befoul them with titles, to force them
to betray their opinions and dishonour their crimes. Amid all this,
sprang up a vigorous generation sown in blood and growing up to shed
none save that of the foreigner: from day to day, the metamorphosis was
accomplished which turned Republicans into Imperialists and the tyranny
of all into the despotism of one.
*
[Sidenote: My letter to Madame de Staël.]
While occupied in curtailing, expanding, altering the sheets of the
_Génie du Christianisme_, I was driven by necessity to busy myself with
other work. M. de Fontanes was then editing the _Mercure de France_:
he suggested that I should write in that paper. These combats were not
without a certain danger: the only way to touch politics was through
literature, and half a word was enough for Bonaparte's police. A
singular circumstance, which prevented me from sleeping, lengthened my
hours and gave me more leisure. I had bought two turtle-doves; they
cooed a great deal: I enclosed them in vain at night in my little
travelling-trunk; they only cooed the more. In one of the moments of
sleeplessness which they caused me, I bethought myself of writing for
the _Mercure_ a letter to Madame de Staël[383]. This freak caused me
suddenly to emerge from the shade; a few pages in a newspaper did what
my two thick volumes on the Revolution had been unable to do. My head
showed a little above obscurity.
This first success seemed to foretell that which was to follow. I was
engaged in correcting the proofs of _Atala_ (an episode contained, as
was _René_, in the _Génie du Christianisme_), when I perceived that
some sheets were missing. I was seized with fright: I thought they had
stolen my novel, assuredly a very ill-founded dread, for no one thought
that I was worth robbing. Be this as it may, I determined to publish
_Atala_ separately, and I declared my resolution in a letter addressed
to the _Journal des Débats_[384] and the _Publiciste._
Before venturing to expose the work to the light of day, I showed it to
M. de Fontanes: he had already read fragments of it in manuscript in
London. When he came to Father Aubry's speech beside Atala's deathbed,
he said brusquely, in a rough voice:
"That's not right; it's bad: write that over again!"
I went away disconsolate; I did not feel capable of doing better. I
wanted to throw the whole thing into the fire; I spent from eight till
eleven o'clock in the evening in my entresol, seated at my table, with
my forehead resting on the back of my hands opened and spread out over
my paper. I was angry with Fontanes; I was angry with myself; I did not
even try to write, so great was my despair of self. Towards midnight, I
heard the voice of my turtle-doves, softened by distance and rendered
more plaintive by the prison in which I kept them confined: inspiration
returned to me; I then and there wrote the speech of the missionary,
without a single interlineation, without erasing a word, just as it
remained and as it stands to-day. With a beating heart, I took it in
the morning to Fontanes, who exclaimed:
"That's it, that's right! I told you you could do better!"