The noise which I have made in this world dates from the publication

of _Atala._[385] I ceased to live for myself and my public career

commenced. After so many military successes, a literary success seemed

a prodigy: people were hungering for it. The uncommon nature of the

work added to the surprise of the crowd. _Atala_, falling into the

midst of the literature of the Empire, of that classic school whose

very sight, like that of a rejuvenated old woman, inspired boredom, was

a sort of production of an unknown kind. People did not know whether

to class it among the "monstrosities" or among the "beauties:" was it

a Gorgon or a Venus? The assembled academicians discoursed learnedly

upon its sex and its nature, in the same way as they made reports

upon the _Génie du Christianisme._ The old century rejected, the new

welcomed it.

[Illustration: Napoléon.]

[Sidenote: I publish _Atala._]

_Atala_ became so popular that, with the Brinvilliers[386] she went

to swell Curtius' collection[387]. The wagoners' inns were decorated

with red, green and blue prints representing Chactas, Father Aubry,

and the daughter of Simaghan. My characters were displayed in wax, in

wooden boxes, on the quays, as images of the Virgin and the saints

are displayed at the fair. In a boulevard theatre, I saw my savage

woman, in a headdress of cock's feathers, talking to a savage of her

own kind of "the soul of solitude," in a way that brought the sweat to

my brow with confusion. At the Variétés, they played a piece in which

a little girl and a little boy, leaving their boarding-school, went

off by track-boat to get married in a small town; as, on landing, they

spoke with a wild look of nothing but crocodiles, storks and forests,

their parents thought that they had gone mad. I was overwhelmed with

parodies, caricatures and ridicule. The Abbé Morellet, in order to

confound me, took his maid-servant on his knees and was unable to

hold the young virgin's feet in his hands, as Chactas held Atala's

feet during the storm: if the Chactas of the Rue d'Anjou had had his

portrait painted in this attitude, I would have forgiven him his

criticism.

All this bustle served to increase the fuss attendant upon my

appearance. I became the fashion. My head was turned: I was

unaccustomed to the delights of self-love and became intoxicated with

it I loved fame like a woman, like a first love. And yet, coward that I

was, my affright equalled my passion: I was a conscript and stood the

fire badly. My natural timidity, the doubts I have always had of my

talent, made me humble in the midst of my triumphs. I shrank from my

splendour; I wandered in lonely places, trying to extinguish the halo

with which my head was crowned. In the evenings, with my hat thrust

down over my eyes, lest the great man should be recognised, I went

to a public smoking-room to read my praises in secret, in some small,

unknown paper. Alone with my renown, I prolonged my walks as far as the

steam-pump at Chaillot[388], on the same road where I had suffered so

much on going to Court: I was no more at my ease with my new honours.

When my superiority dined for thirty sous in the Latin Quarter it

swallowed its food the wrong way, troubled as it was by the staring of

which it thought itself the object. I watched myself, I said to myself:

"And yet it is you, extraordinary being, eating like any one else!"

In the Champs-Élysées was a café which I liked because of some

nightingales which hung in a cage inside the coffee-room; Madame

Rousseau, who kept the place, knew me by sight, without knowing who

I was. At ten o'clock in the evening, they used to bring me a cup of

coffee, and I looked for _Atala_ in the _Petites-Affiches_, to the

sound of the voices of my half-dozen Philomelas. Alas! I soon saw poor

Madame Rousseau die; our society of the nightingales and of the fair

Indian who sang, "Sweet habit of loving, so needful to life!" lasted

but a moment.

If success had no power to prolong in me this stupid infatuation of

vanity, or to pervert my reason, it was attended with dangers of

another kind: those dangers increased on the appearance of the _Génie

du Christianisme_ and on my resignation after the death of the Duc

d'Enghien. Then came thronging around me, together with the young

women who cry over novels, the crowd of Christian women, and those

other noble enthusiasts whose breast beats high at the sight of an

honourable action. The young girls of thirteen or fourteen were the

most dangerous; for, knowing neither what they want nor what they want

with you, they enticingly mingle your image with a multitude of fables,

ribbons and flowers. Jean Jacques Rousseau speaks of the declarations

which he received on the publication of the _Nouvelle Héloïse_[389] and

of the conquests which were offered him: I do not know if empires would

have been thus yielded to me, but I do know that I was buried beneath a

heap of scented notes; if those notes were not, to-day, notes from so

many grand-mothers, I should be puzzled how to relate, with becoming

modesty, how they fought for a line in my hand, how they picked up an

envelope addressed by me, and how, blushing and with lowered head,

they hid it beneath a flowing veil of long tresses. If I have not been

spoilt, it must be because my nature is good.

[Sidenote: And become the fashion.]

Whether from genuine politeness or inquisitive weakness, I sometimes

went so far as to think myself obliged to call and thank the unknown

ladies who signed the flattery they addressed to me with their names.

One day, I found a bewitching creature under her mother's wing, on a

fourth floor, where I have never set foot since. A fair Pole received

me in silk-hung rooms; half-odalisk, half-Valkyrie, she looked like

a snowdrop with its white flowers, or like one of those graceful

heather-blooms which replace the other daughters of Flora when the

season of the latter has not yet come or has passed: that female

chorus, varied in age and beauty, was the realisation of my former

sylph. The two-fold effect upon my vanity and my feelings was so much

the more to be dreaded inasmuch as, until then, excepting one serious

attachment, I had been neither sought out nor distinguished by the

crowd. At the same time I am bound to say that, even though it were

easy for me to take advantage of a passing illusion, my sincerity

revolted against the idea of a voluptuousness that would have come to

me by the chaste paths of religion: to be loved through the _Génie du

Christianisme_, loved for the _Extrème Onction_, loved for the _Fête

des Morts!_ I could never have been so shameful a Tartuffe.

I knew a Provençal physician, Dr. Vigaroux[390]; he had arrived at an

age when every pleasure means the loss of a day, and he said "that

he had no regret for the time thus lost; without troubling himself

whether he gave the happiness which he received, he went towards the

death of which he hoped to make his last delight." Nevertheless, I was

a witness of his poor tears when he breathed his last; he could not

hide his affliction from me; it was too late: his white hairs were

not long enough to conceal and wipe away his tears. The only one to

be really unhappy on leaving the earth is the unbeliever: for the man

without faith, existence is terrible in this, that it carries a sense

of annihilation; if one had not been born, he would not experience

the horror of ceasing to be: the life of the atheist is a frightful

lightning-flash, which serves but to reveal an abyss.

O great and merciful God, Thou hast not cast us upon earth for unworthy

troubles and a miserable happiness! Our inevitable disenchantment

admonishes us that our destinies are more sublime. Whatever may have

been our errors, if we have preserved a serious spirit and thought of

Thee in the midst of our weaknesses, we shall, whenever Thy goodness

sets us free, be carried to that region where attachments endure for

ever!

*

It was not long before I received the punishment of my literary

vanity, the most detestable of all, if not the most foolish: I had

thought that I should be able to relish in _petto_ the satisfaction

of being a sublime genius, not by wearing, as they do to-day, a beard

and an eccentric coat, but by remaining dressed like decent people,

distinguished only by superiority. Useless hope! My pride was to be

chastened; the correction was administered by the political persons

whom I was obliged to know: celebrity is a benefice with the cure of

souls.

M. de Fontanes was acquainted with Madame Bacciochi[391]; he introduced

me to Bonaparte's sister, and soon after to the First Consul's brother

Lucien[392]. The latter had a country-place near Senlis le Plessis,

where I was coerced to go and dine; the château had once belonged to

the Cardinal de Bernis[393]. Lucien had in his garden the tomb of his

first wife[394], a lady half German and half Spanish, and the memory of

the poet-cardinal. The nutrient nymph of a stream dug with the spade

was a mule which drew water from a well: that was the commencement of

all the rivers which Bonaparte was to cause to flow in his Empire.

Efforts were being made to have my name struck off the lists; I was

already called, and called myself aloud, Chateaubriand, forgetting

that I ought to call myself Lassagne. Emigrants came to see me: among

others, Messrs, de Bonald[395] and de Chênedollé[396]. Christian de

Lamoignon, my companion in exile in London, took me to Madame Récamier:

the curtain fell suddenly between her and me.

[Sidenote: The Comtesse de Beaumont.]

The person who filled the largest place in my existence, on my

return from the Emigration, was Madame la Comtesse de Beaumont[397].

She lived during a part of the year at the Château de Passy, near

Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, which M. Joubert inhabited during the summer.

Madame de Beaumont returned to Paris, and expressed a wish to meet me.

So that my life might be one long chain of regrets, Providence willed

it that the first person who received me kindly at the outset of my

public career should also be the first to disappear. Madame de Beaumont

opens the funeral procession of those women who have passed away before

me. My most distant memories rest upon ashes, and they have continued

to fall from grave to grave: like the Indian pundit, I recite the

prayers for the dead until the flowers of my chaplet are faded.

Madame de Beaumont was the daughter of Armand Marc de Saint-Hérem,

Comte de Montmorin, French Ambassador in Madrid, commandant in

Brittany, member of the Assembly of Notables in 1787, and Foreign

Minister under Louis XVI., by whom he was much liked: he perished on

the scaffold, where he was followed by a portion of his family[398].

Madame de Beaumont was ill rather than well-favoured, and very like

her portrait by Madame Lebrun[399]. Her face was thin and pale; her

eyes were almond-shaped and would have perhaps been too brilliant, if

an extraordinary suavity of expression had not half extinguished her

glances and caused them to shine languidly, as a ray of light becomes

mellowed by passing through crystal water. Her character had a sort of

rigidity and impatience, which arose from the strength of her feelings

and from the inward suffering which she experienced. Endowed with

loftiness of soul and great courage, she was born for the world, from

which her spirit had withdrawn through choice and unhappiness; but when

a friendly voice evoked that secluded intelligence, it came and spoke

to you in words from Heaven. Madame de Beaumont's extreme weakness

made her slow of expression, and this slowness was touching. I knew

this afflicted woman only at the moment of her flight; she was already

stricken with death, and I devoted myself to her sufferings. I had

taken a lodging in the Rue Saint-Honoré, at the Hôtel d'Étampes, near

the Rue Neuve-du-Luxembourg. In this latter street, Madame de Beaumont

occupied an apartment looking out upon the gardens of the Ministry

of Justice. I called to see her every evening, with her friends

and mine, M. Joubert, M. de Fontanes, M. de Bonald, M. Molé[400],

M. Pasquier[401], M. de Chênedollé, men who have filled a place in

literature and public life.

[Sidenote: Joseph Joubert.]

Full of oddities and eccentricities, M. Joubert will be an eternal

loss to those who knew him. He had an extraordinary grip upon one's

mind and heart; and, when once he had seized hold of you, his image

was there, like a fixed thought, like an obsession that refused to be

driven away. He made great pretensions to calmness, and no one was

so easily perturbed as he: he watched himself in order to stop those

emotions of the mind, which he thought injurious to his health, and

constantly his friends came and disturbed the precautions which he

had taken to keep well, for he could not prevent himself from being

affected by their sadness or joy: he was an egoist who troubled himself

only about others. In order to recover his strength, he often thought

himself obliged to close his eyes and refrain from speaking for hours

at a time. Heaven knows what noise and movement passed inwardly within

him during this repose and silence which he laid upon himself. M.

Joubert at every moment changed his diet and regimen, living one day

on milk, another on minced meat, causing himself to be jolted at full

speed over the roughest roads, or drawn at a snail's pace along the

smoothest alleys. When he read, he tore out of his books the leaves

which displeased him, thus forming a library for his own use, composed

of scooped-out works, contained in bindings too large for them.

A profound metaphysician, his philosophy, thanks to an elaboration

peculiar to himself, became painting or poetry; a Plato with the heart

of a La Fontaine, he had formed an idea of perfection which prevented

him from finishing anything. In manuscripts found after his death, he

said:

"I am like an Æolian harp, which gives forth a few beautiful sounds

and plays no tune."

Madame Victorine de Chastenay[402] maintained that "he had the

appearance of a soul which had met with a body by accident, and put up

with it as best it could:" a definition both charming and true.

We laughed at the enemies of M. de Fontanes, who tried to pass him off

for a deep and dissembling politician: he was simply an irascible poet,

frank to the pitch of anger, with a mind hedged in by contrariety, and

as little able to conceal its opinion as to accept that of others. The

literary principles of his friend Joubert were not his: the latter

found some good everywhere and in every writer; Fontanes, on the

contrary, held such and such a doctrine in abhorrence, and could not

hear the names mentioned of certain authors. He was the sworn enemy of

the principles of modern composition: to place before the reader's

eyes material action, the crime at work or the gibbet with its rope,

seemed to him so many enormities; he maintained that objects should

never be seen except amid poetic surroundings, as though under a

crystal globe. Sorrow spending itself mechanically through the eyes

seemed to him a sensation fit only for the Cirque or the Grève; he

understood the tragic sentiment only as ennobled by admiration and

changed, through the medium of art, into "a charming pity." I quoted

the Greek vases to him: in the arabesques of those vases one sees

Hector's body drawn behind the car of Achilles, while a little figure,

flying in the air, represents the shade of Patrocles, consoled by the

vengeance of the son of Thetis.

"Well, Joubert," cried Fontanes, "what do you say to that metamorphosis

of the muse? How those Greeks respected the soul!"

Joubert thought himself attacked, and placed Fontanes in contradiction

with himself by reproaching him with his indulgence for me.

These discussions, highly comical as they often were, never came to an

end: one evening, at half-past eleven, when I lived on the Place Louis

XV., in the attic floor of Madame de Coislin's house, Fontanes climbed

up my eighty-four stairs again to come furiously, with many raps of his

cane, to finish an argument which he had left interrupted: it concerned

Picard[403], whom at that moment he placed far above Molière; he would

have taken good care not to have written a single word of what he said:

Fontanes talking and Fontanes pen in hand were two different men.

It was M. de Fontanes, I like to repeat, who encouraged my first

attempts: it was he who announced the publication of the _Génie du

Christianisme_; it was his muse which, full of astonished devotion,

directed mine in the new paths along which it had precipitated itself:

he taught me to conceal the deformity of objects by the manner of

throwing light upon them; to put classic language into the mouths of my

romantic characters as far as in me lay.

In former days there were men who were guardians of taste, like the

dragons who watched over the golden apples in the garden of the

Hesperides; they did not allow youth to enter until it was able to

touch the fruit without spoiling it.

[Sidenote: And other literary friends.]

My friend's writings take you by a happy road: the mind experiences

a sense of well-being, and finds itself in an harmonious situation

where everything charms and nothing wounds. M. de Fontanes incessantly

revised his productions; none was more convinced than that master of

the old days of the excellence of the maxim, "Hasten slowly." What,

then, would he say to-day when, both morally and physically, we exert

ourselves to do away with distances, and when we think we can never

go fast enough. M. de Fontanes preferred to travel at the will of a

delicious measure. You have read what I said of him when I found him

in London; the regrets which I expressed then I must repeat now: life

obliges us ever to weep in anticipation or in remembrance.

M. de Bonald had a shrewd intelligence; his ingenuity was mistaken for

genius; he had dreamt out his political metaphysics with the Army of

Condé, in the Black Forest, in the same way as those Jena and Göttingen

professors who have since marched at the head of their pupils and let

themselves be killed for the liberty of Germany. An innovator, although

he had been a musketeer under Louis XVI., he looked upon the ancients

as children in politics and literature; and he maintained, while he was

the first to employ the fatuousness of the language now in use, that

the Grand-master of the University was "not yet sufficiently advanced

to understand that."

Chênedollé, with knowledge and talent, not native but acquired, was so

sad that he nicknamed himself the "Crow[404]:" he went freebooting in

my works. We had made a compact: I yielded him my skies, my mists,

my clouds; but it was arranged that he should leave me my zephyrs, my

waves, and my forests.

I am now speaking only of my literary friends; as to my political

friends, I do not know whether I shall tell you about them: principles

and speeches have sunk abysses between us!

Madame Hocquart[405] and Madame de Vintimille[406] came to the meetings

in the Rue Neuve-du-Luxembourg. Madame de Vintimille, one of the women

of olden time, of whom few remain, went into the world and brought us

news of what was going on: I asked her if people were "still building

cities." The descriptions of little scandals upon which she entered

with a poignant but inoffensive raillery made us the more heartily

appreciate our own security. Madame de Vintimille had been sung,

together with her sister, by M. de La Harpe. Her language was guarded,

her character restrained, her wit acquired; she had lived with Mesdames

de Chevreuse[407], de Longueville, de La Vallière, de Maintenon[408],

with Madame Geoffrin[409] and Madame du Defiant[410]. She blended well

with a company whose charm depended upon the variety of its wits and

the combination of their different values. Madame Hocquart had been

fondly loved by Madame de Beaumont's brother[411], who had occupied

himself with the lady of his thoughts to the very scaffold, as Aubiac

had gone to the gallows kissing a sleeve of soft blue velvet which

remained to him from the favours of Margaret of Valois[412].

[Sidenote: Who are no more.]

Never again will there assemble under the same roof so many

distinguished persons belonging to different ranks and of different

destinies, able to talk of the commonest as of the loftiest things: a

simplicity of speech which came not from poverty but from choice. It

is perhaps the last company in which the French genius of olden time

has appeared. Among the new French will not be found that urbanity

which is the fruit of education, and which was transformed by long

usage into aptness of character. What has become of that company? Make

plans, bring friends together: you but prepare for yourself an eternal

mourning! Madame de Beaumont is no more, Joubert is no more, Chênedollé

is no more, Madame de Vintimille is no more. I used to visit M. Joubert

at Villeneuve during the vintage; I walked with him on the Yonne Hills;

he picked mushrooms in the copses, and I yellow saffron in the fields.

We talked of everything, and particularly of our friend Madame de

Beaumont, for ever absent; we recalled the memory of our former hopes.

At night we returned to Villeneuve, a town surrounded by broken-down

walls, of the time of Philip Augustus[413], and by half-razed towers,

from above which rose the smoke from the vintagers' hearths. Joubert

showed me, in the distance from the hill, a sandy path among the woods

which he used to take when going to see his neighbour, who hid herself

at the Château de Passy during the Terror.

I have passed four or five times through the Senonais since the death

of my dear host. I saw the hills from the high-road: Joubert walked

there no longer; I recognised the trees, the fields, the vines, the

little heaps of stones on which we used to rest ourselves. Driving

through Villeneuve, I have cast a glance on the deserted street and

the closed house of my friend. The last time when that happened, I was

going on an embassy to Rome: ah, if he had been at home, I would have

taken him with me to Madame de Beaumont's grave! It has pleased God to

open a celestial Rome to M. Joubert, even better suited to his soul,

which abandoned Platonism for Christianity. I shall not meet him again

here below:

"I shall go to him rather: but he shall not return to me[414]."

The success of _Atala_ having decided me to start afresh on the _Génie

du Christianisme_, of which two volumes were already in print, Madame

de Beaumont offered to give me a room in the country, in a house which

she had hired at Savigny[415]. I spent six months with her in this

retreat, with M. Joubert and our other friends.

The house stood at the entrance to the village, on the Paris side,

near an old high-road known in that part as the Chemin de Henri IV.:

it leant against a vine-clad slope, and faced Savigny Park, ending in

a wooded screen, and crossed by the little River Orge. On the left,

the plain of Viry spread out as far as the springs of Juvisy. In every

direction, in this part of the country, lie valleys, where we used to

go in the evenings in search of new walks.

In the morning, we breakfasted together; after breakfast, I withdrew to

my work; Madame de Beaumont had the goodness to copy out the quotations

which I marked for her. This noble woman offered me a shelter when I

had none: without the peace which she gave me, I should perhaps never

have finished a work which I had been unable to complete during my

misfortunes.

I shall evermore remember certain evenings passed in this refuge of

friendship: on returning from walking we gathered near a fresh-water

basin, which stood in the middle of a grass-plot in the kitchen-garden.

Madame Joubert, Madame de Beaumont and I sat down on a bench; Madame

Joubert's son rolled on the grass at our feet; that child has already

disappeared. M. Joubert walked alone on a gravel path; two watch-dogs

and a cat played around us, while pigeons cooed on the edge of the

roof. What happiness for a man newly landed from exile, after spending

eight years in profound abandonment, excepting a few days quickly

lapsed! It was generally on these evenings that my friends made me

talk of my travels: I have never described the desert of the New

World so well as at that time. At night, when the windows of our

rustic drawing-room were opened, Madame de Beaumont noted different

constellations, telling me that I should remember one day that she had

taught me to know them: since I have lost her, I have several times,

not far from her grave in Rome, in the midst of the Campagna, looked

in the firmament for the stars whose names she told me: I have seen

them shining above the Sabine Hills; the protracted rays of those

stars shot down and struck the surface of the Tiber. The spot where I

saw them over the woods of Savigny, the spots where I have seen them

since, the fitfulness of my destinies, that sign which a woman had left

for me in the sky to remind me of her: all this broke my heart. By

what miracle does man consent to do what he does upon earth, he who is

doomed to die?

One day, in our retreat, we saw a man enter stealthily by one window

and go out by another: it was M. de Laborie[416]; he was escaping from

Bonaparte's claws. Shortly after appeared one of those souls in pain

which are of a different species from other souls and which, on their

passage, mingle their unknown misfortune with the vulgar sufferings of

mankind: it was Lucile, my sister.

[Sidenote: I meet my sisters.]

After my arrival in France, I had written to my family to inform them

of my return. Madame la Comtesse de Marigny, my eldest sister, was the

first to come to me, went to the wrong street, and met five Messieurs

Lassagne, of whom the last climbed up through a cobbler's trap-door to

answer to his name. Madame de Chateaubriand came in her turn: she was

charming, and full of the qualities calculated to give me the happiness

which I found with her after we came together again. Madame la Comtess

de Caud, Lucile, came next. M. Joubert and Madame de Beaumont became

smitten with a passionate fondness and a tender pity for her. Then

commenced between them a correspondence which ended only with the death

of the two women who had bent over towards one another like two flowers

of the same species on the point of fading away. Madame Lucile having

stopped at Versailles on the 30th of September 1802, I received this

note from her:

"I write to beg you to thank Madame de Beaumont on my behalf

for the invitation she has sent me to go to Savigny. I hope

to have that pleasure in about a fortnight, unless there be

any objection on Madame de Beaumont's side."

Madame de Caud came to Savigny as she had promised.

I have told you how, in my youth, my sister, a canoness of the Chapter

of the Argentière, and destined for that of Remiremont, cherished an

attachment for M. de Malfilâtre, a counsellor to the Parliament of

Brittany, which, remaining locked within her breast, had increased

her natural melancholy. During the Revolution she married M. le Comte

de Caud, and lost him after fifteen months of marriage. The death of

Madame la Comtesse de Farcy, a sister whom she fondly loved, added

to Madame de Caud's sadness. She next attached herself to Madame de

Chateaubriand, my wife, and gained an empire over the latter which

became painful, for Lucile was violent, masterful, unreasonable, and

Madame de Chateaubriand, subject to her caprices, hid from her in order

to render her the services which a richer shows to a susceptible and

less happy friend.

Lucile's genius and character had almost reached the pitch of madness

of Jean Jacques Rousseau; she thought herself exposed to secret

enemies: she gave Madame de Beaumont, M. Joubert, myself, false

addresses at which to write to her; she examined the seals, seeking to

discover whether they had not been broken; she wandered from one home

to the other, unable to remain either with my sisters or my wife; she

had taken an antipathy to them, and Madame de Chateaubriand, after

showing her a devotion surpassing all that one could imagine, had ended

by breaking down under the burden of so cruel an affection.

Another fatality had struck Lucile: M. de Chênedollé, then living

near Vire, had gone to see her at Fougères; soon there was talk of a

marriage, which fell through. Everything failed my sister at once, and,

thrown back upon herself, she no longer had the strength to bear up.

This plaintive spectre rested for a moment on a stone, in the smiling

solitude of Savigny: there were so many hearts there which would have

joyfully received her! They would so gladly have restored her to a

sweet reality of existence! But Lucile's heart could beat only in

an atmosphere made expressly for her and never breathed by others.

She swiftly devoured the days of the world apart in which Heaven had

placed her. Why had God created a being only to suffer? What mysterious

relation can there be between a long-suffering nature and an eternal

principle?

My sister had not changed in any way; she had only taken the fixed

expression of her ills: her head had sunk a little, like a head on

which the hours had weighed heavily. She reminded me of my parents:

those first family memories, evoked from the grave, surrounded me like

wraiths which had gathered round at night to warm themselves at the

dying flame of a funeral pile. As I watched her, I seemed to see in

Lucile my whole childhood, looking out at me from behind her somewhat

wild eyes.

The vision of pain faded away: that woman, borne down by life, seemed

to have come to fetch the other dejected woman whom she was to take

with her.

*

[Sidenote: Talma.]

The summer passed: according to custom, I promised myself to begin it

again next year; but the hand of the clock does not return to the hour

which we would wish to call back. During the winter, in Paris, I made

some new acquaintances. M. Jullien, a rich man, obliging, and a jovial

table-companion, although belonging to a family in which they killed

themselves, had a box at the Français; he used to lend it to Madame de

Beaumont: I went four or five times to the play with M. de Fontanes

and M. Joubert. When I entered the world, old-fashioned comedy was in

all its glory; I found it again in a state of complete decomposition.

Tragedy still kept up, thanks to Mademoiselle Duchesnois[417] and,

above all, to Talma, who had attained the highest level of dramatic

talent. I had seen him when he made his first appearances; he was less

handsome and, so to speak, less young than at the age when I saw him

again: he had acquired the distinction, the nobility, and the gravity

of years.

The portrait of Talma which Madame de Staël has drawn in her work on

Germany is only half true: the brilliant writer saw the great actor

through a woman's imagination, and attributed to him what he lacked.

Of the intermediate world Talma did not know what to make: he did

not understand the man of gentle birth; he did not know our old-time

society; he had not sat at the table of high-born ladies, in the Gothic

tower enshrined in the wood; he knew nothing of the flexibility, the

variety of expression, the gallantry, the light charm of manner, the

ingenuousness, the tenderness, the heroism based upon honour, the

Christian devotion of chivalry: he was not Tancred, or Coucy, or at

least he turned them into heroes of a middle-age of his own creation;

his Othello was placed in the heart of Vendôme.

Then what was Talma? Himself, his century and antiquity. He had the

deep and concentrated passions of love and of patriotism; they burst

from his breast with the force of an explosion. He had the baleful

inspiration, the deranged genius of the Revolution through which he

had passed. The terrible spectacles with which he was once surrounded

were renewed in his talent with the lamentable and distant accents

of the choruses of Sophocles and Euripides. His grace, which was not

conventional grace, took hold of you like misfortune. Dark ambition,

remorse, jealousy, melancholy of soul, physical pain, madness produced

by the gods and adversity, human affliction: those were what he knew.

His mere entrance upon the stage, the mere sound of his voice were

mightily tragic. Suffering and thought were mingled on his brow,

breathed in his immovability, in his poses, his gestures, his steps.

As a Greek, he would arrive, panting and ominous, from the ruins

of Argos, an immortal Orestes, tormented for three thousand years

by the Eumenides; as a Frenchman, he would come from the solitudes

of Saint-Denis, where the Parcæ of 1793 had cut the thread of the

sepulchral life of the Kings. The very picture of sorrow awaiting

something unknown, but decreed by an unjust Heaven, he went his way,

the galley-slave of fate, inexorably chained between fatality and

terror.

Time casts an inevitable obscurity over the older dramatic

masterpieces: its projected shadow changes the purest Raphaëls into

Rembrandts[418]; but for Talma, a part of the marvels of Corneille

and Racine would have remained unknown. Dramatic talent is a torch:

it fires other half-extinguished torches and revives geniuses which

enrapture you with their renewed splendour.

We owe to Talma the perfection of the actor's dress. But are stage

realism and rigour of costume so necessary to art as is supposed?

Racine's characters derive nothing from the cut of their clothes: in

the pictures of the first painters, the back-grounds are neglected and

the costumes incorrect. The "furies" of Orestes, or the "prophecies" of

Joad, read in a drawing-room by Talma in a dress-coat, made as great an

impression as when declaimed upon the stage by Talma in a Greek mantle

or a Jewish robe. Iphigenia was attired like Madame de Sévigné, when

Boileau addressed those fine verses to his friend:

Jamais Iphigénie en Aulide immolée

N'a coûté tant de pleurs à la Grèce assemblée

Que, dans l'heureux spectacle à nos yeux étalé,

N'en a fait sous son nom verser la Champmeslé[419].

This correctness in the representation of inanimate objects is the

spirit of the arts of our time: it points to the decadence of lofty

poetry and of the true drama; we are content with lesser beauties, when

we are impotent to achieve the greater; we imitate armchairs and velvet

to perfection, when we are no longer able to paint the expression of

the man seated on that velvet and in those armchairs. Nevertheless,

once one has descended to that truthfulness of material forms, one

finds one's self obliged to reproduce it; for the public, itself

materialized, demands it.

[Sidenote: Comments on the _Génie._]

Meanwhile I was finishing the _Génie du Christianisme_: Lucien asked

to see some of the proofs; I sent them to him; he added some rather

common-place notes in the margins.

Although the success of my big book was as brilliant as that of my

little _Atala_, it was nevertheless more widely contested: this was a

serious work, in which I no longer fought the principles of the old

literature and of philosophy with a novel, but attacked them directly

with arguments and facts. The Voltairean empire uttered a cry and flew

to arms. Madame de Staël was mistaken as to the future of my religious

studies: they brought her the work uncut; she pushed her fingers

between the pages, came upon the chapter headed the _Virginité_, and

said to M. Adrien de Montmorency[420], who was with her:

"Oh Heavens! Our poor Chateaubriand! That will fall to the ground!"

The Abbé de Boulogne[421], who was shown some portions of my work

before it was sent to press, said to the bookseller who asked his

opinion:

"If you want to ruin yourself, print that."

And the Abbé de Boulogne has since written an all too splendid eulogy

of my book.

Everything, in fact, seemed to prophesy failure. What hope could I

have, I with no name and no extollers, of destroying the influence

of Voltaire, which had prevailed for more than half a century,

of Voltaire, who had raised the huge edifice completed by the

Encyclopædists and consolidated by all the famous men in Europe?

What! were the Diderots, the d'Alemberts, the Duclos[422], the

Dupuis[423], the Helvétius[424], the Condorcets[425] minds that carried

no authority? What! was the world to return, to the Golden Legend, to

renounce the admiration it had acquired for masterpieces of science and

reason? How could I ever win a case which Rome armed with its thunders,

the clergy with its might, had been unable to save: a case defended

in vain by the Archbishop of Paris, Christophe de Beaumont[426],

supported by the decrees of the Parliament and the armed force and

name of the King? Was it not as ridiculous as it was rash on the part

of an unknown man to set himself against a philosophical movement so

irresistible as to have produced the Revolution? It was curious to see

a pygmy "toughen his little arms" to stifle the progress of a century,

stop civilization, and thrust back the human race! Thank God, a word

would be enough to pulverize the madman: wherefore M. Ginguené, when

trouncing the _Génie du Christianisme_ in the _Décade_[427] declared

that the criticism came too late, since my tautologous production

was already forgotten. He said this five or six months after the

publication of a work which the attack of the whole French Academy, on

the occasion of the decennial prizes, was not able to kill.

[Sidenote: I publish my chief work.]

It was amid the ruins of our temples that I published the _Génie du

Christianisme._[428] The faithful thought themselves saved: men at that

time felt a need of faith, a thirsting for religious consolations,

which arose from the want of those consolations experienced since

long years. What supernatural strength was required to bear all the

adversities undergone! How many mutilated families had to go to the

Father of mankind in search of the children they had lost! How many

broken hearts, how many solitary souls, were calling for a divine

hand to cure them! One threw one's self into the house of God, as one

enters a doctor's house on the outbreak of an infection. The victims

of our disturbances (and how many different kinds of victims!) saved

themselves at the altar: shipwrecked men clinging to the rock on which

they seek for salvation.

Bonaparte, at that time hoping to found his power on the first basis

of society, had just made arrangements with the Court of Rome: he at

first raised no obstacle against the publication of a work calculated

to enhance the popularity of his schemes; he had to struggle against

the men about him and against the declared enemies of religion; he was

glad therefore to be defended from the outside by the opinion called up

by the _Génie du Christianisme._ Later, he repented him of his mistake;

ideas of regular monarchy had sprung into being together with ideas of

religion.

An episode in the _Génie du Christianisme_, which at the time caused

less stir than _Atala_, fixed one of the characters of modern

literature; but I may say that, if _René_ did not exist, I should not

now write it: if it were possible for me to destroy it, I would do so.

A family of Renés, poets and prose-writers, has swarmed into being:

we have heard nothing but mournful and desultory phrases; it has been

a question of nothing but winds and storms, of unknown words directed

to the clouds and the night. No scribbler fresh from college but has

imagined himself the unhappiest of men; no babe of sixteen but has

believed himself to have exhausted life and to be tormented by his

genius, but has, in the abyss of his thoughts, abandoned himself to

the "wave of his passions," struck his pale and dishevelled brow, and

astonished stupefied mankind with a misfortune of which he did not know

the name, nor they either.

In _René_ I had laid bare one of the infirmities of my century; but

it was a different madness in the novelists to try to make universal

such transcendental afflictions. The general sentiments which compose

the basis of humanity, paternal and maternal affection, filial

piety, friendship, love, are inexhaustible; but particular ways of

feeling, idiosyncrasies of mind and character, cannot be spread out

and multiplied over wide and numerous scenes. The small undiscovered

corners of the human heart are a narrow field; there is nothing left to

gather in that field after the hand which has been the first to mow it.

A malady of the soul is not a permanent nor natural state: one cannot

reproduce it, make a literature of it, make use of it as of a general

passion constantly modified at the will of the artists who handle it

and change its form.

Be that as it may, literature became tinged with the colours of

my religious paintings, even as public affairs have retained the

phraseology of my writings on citizenship: the _Monarchy according to

the Charter_ has been the rudiment of our representative government,

and my article in the _Conservateur_, on "Moral Interests and Material

Interests," has bequeathed those two designations to politics.

Writers did me the honour of imitating _Atala_ and _René_, in the

same way that the pulpit borrowed my accounts of the missions and

advantages of Christianity. The passages in which I show that, by

driving the pagan divinities from the woods, our broader religion has

restored nature to its solitudes; the paragraphs where I discuss the

influence of our religion upon our manner of seeing a painting, where

I examine the changes wrought in poetry and eloquence; the chapters

which I devote to inquiries into the foreign sentiments introduced

into the dramatic characters of antiquity contain the germ of the new

criticism. Racine's characters, as I have said, both are and are not

Greek characters: they are Christian characters; that is what no one

had understood.

[Sidenote: Effects of the publication.]

If the effect of the _Génie du Christianisme_ had been only a

reaction against doctrines to which the revolutionary misfortunes

were attributed, that effect would have ceased so soon as the cause

was removed; it would not have been prolonged to the time at which

I am writing. But the action of the _Génie du Christianisme_ upon

public opinion was not confined to the momentary resurrection of a

religion supposed to be in its grave: a more lasting metamorphosis was

operated. If the work contained innovations of style, it also contained

changes of doctrine; not only the manner, but the matter, was altered;

atheism and materialism were no longer the basis of the belief or

unbelief of young minds; the idea of God and of the immortality of

the soul resumed its empire: whence came an alteration in the chain

of ideas linked one to the other. A man was no longer riveted to his

place by an anti-religious prejudice; he no longer thought himself

obliged to remain a mummy of annihilation, wrapped in philosophical

swathing-bands; he permitted himself to examine any system, however

absurd it might seem to him, _even though it were Christian._

Besides the faithful who returned at the sound of their shepherd's

voice, there were formed, by this right of free examination, other

_à priori_ faithful. Lay down God as a principle, and the Word will

follow. The Son proceeds necessarily from the Father.

The various abstract combinations succeed only in substituting for

the Christian mysteries other mysteries still more difficult of

comprehension. Pantheism, which, besides, exists in three or four

shapes, and which it is the fashion nowadays to ascribe to enlightened

intelligences, is the absurdest of Eastern dreams brought back to

light by Spinoza[429]. One has but to read the article by the sceptic

Bayle[430] on that Jew of Amsterdam. The positive tone in which

certain people speak of all these things would be revolting, were

it not that it arises from want of study; they take up words which

they do not understand, and imagine themselves to be transcendental

geniuses. Be assured that Abélard, that St. Bernard, that St.

Thomas Aquinas and their fellows brought to bear upon the study of

metaphysics a superiority of judgment which we do not approach;

that the Saint-Simonian[431], Phalansterian, Fourieristic[432],

Humanitarian[433] systems were discovered and practised by the

different heresies; that what is placed before us as progress and

discovery is so much old lumber hawked about for fifteen centuries

in the schools of Greece and the colleges of the Middle Ages.

The misfortune is that the first sectaries could not succeed in

founding their Neo-Platonic Republic, when Gallienus[434] permitted

Plotinus[435] to make the experiment in Campania; later, people made

the great mistake of burning the sectaries when they proposed to

establish the community of goods and to pronounce prostitution holy, by

urging that a woman cannot, without sin, refuse a man who asks of her a

transient union in the name of Jesus Christ: all that was needed, said

they, to accomplish this union was to annihilate one's soul and deposit

it for a moment in the bosom of God.

The shock which the _Génie du Christianisme_ gave to men's minds caused

the eighteenth century to emerge from the old road and flung it for

ever out of its path. People began again, or rather they began for the

first time to study the sources of Christianity; on re-reading the

Fathers (presuming that they had read them before) they were struck at

meeting with so many curious facts, so much philosophical science, so

many beauties of style of every kind, so many ideas which, by a more

or less perceptible gradation, produced the transition from ancient

to modern society: an unique and memorable era of humanity, in which

Heaven communicates with earth through the medium of souls set in men

of genius.

Beside the crumbling world of paganism there arose, in former times,

as though outside society, another world, looking on at those great

spectacles, poor, retiring, secluded, taking no part in the business

of life except when its lessons or its succour were needed. It was a

marvellous thing to see those early bishops, almost all honoured with

the name of saints and martyrs, those simple priests watching over the

relics and cemeteries; those monks and hermits in their convents or

in their caves, laying down laws of peace, morals, charity, when all

was war, corruption, barbarism; going between the tyrants of Rome and

the leaders of the Tartars and Goths, to prevent the injustice of the

former and the cruelty of the latter; stopping armies with a wooden

cross and a peaceful word; the weakest of men, and protecting the world

against Attila[436]; placed between two universes to be the link that

joined them, to console the last moments of an expiring society and

support the first steps of a society in its cradle.

*

[Sidenote: My own criticism.]

It was impossible but that the truths unfolded in the _Génie du

Christianisme_ should contribute to a change of ideas. Again, it is to

this work that the present love for the buildings of the Middle Ages

is due: it is I who have called upon the young century to admire the

old temples. If my opinion has been misused; if it is not true that

our cathedrals approach the Parthenon in beauty; if it is false that

those churches teach us unknown facts in their documents of stone; if

it is madness to maintain that those granite memories reveal to us

things that escaped the learned Benedictines; if by dint of eternally

repeating the word Gothic people grow wearied to death of it: that

is not my fault. For the rest, with respect to the arts, I know the

shortcomings of the _Génie du Christianisme_; that portion of my work

is faulty, because, in 1800, I was not acquainted with the arts:

I had not seen Italy, nor Greece, nor Egypt. Also, I did not make

sufficient use of the lives of the saints and of the legends, although

they offered me a number of marvellous instances: by selecting with

taste, one could there reap a plentiful harvest. This field of the

wealth of mediæval imagination surpasses the _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid

and the Milesian fables in fruitfulness. My work, moreover, contains

some scanty or false judgments, such as that which I pronounce upon

Dante, to whom I have since paid a brilliant tribute. In the serious

respect, I have completed the _Génie du Christianisme_ in my _Études

historiques_, one of my writings that has been least spoken of and most

plundered.

The success of _Atala_ had delighted me, because my soul was still

fresh; that of the _Génie du Christianisme_ was painful to me: I was

obliged to sacrifice my time to a more or less useless correspondence

and to irrelevant civilities. A so-called admiration did not atone to

me for the vexations that await a man whose name the crowd remembers.

What good can supply the place of the peace which you have lost by

admitting the public to your intimacy? Add to that the restlessness

with which the Muses love to afflict those who attach themselves

to their cult, the worries attendant upon a compliant character,

inaptitude for fortune, loss of leisure, an uncertain temper, livelier

affections, unreasonable melancholy, groundless joys: who, if he had

the choice, would purchase on those conditions the uncertain advantages

of a reputation which you are not sure of obtaining, which will be

contested during your life, which posterity will refuse to confirm, and

which your death will snatch from you for ever?

The literary controversy on innovations of style which _Atala_

had aroused was renewed upon the publication of the _Génie du

Christianisme._

A characteristic feature of the imperial school, and even of the

republican school, must be noted: while society advanced for better or

for worse, literature remained stationary; foreign to the change of

the ideas, it did not belong to its own time. In comedy, the squires

of the village, the Colins, the Babets, or else the intrigues of the

drawing-rooms, which were no longer known, were played, as I have

already remarked, before coarse and blood-thirsty men, themselves the

destroyers of the manners whose picture was presented to them; in

tragedy, a plebeian pit interested itself in the families of nobles and

kings.

Two things kept literature at the date of the eighteenth century: the

impiety which it derived from Voltaire and the Revolution, and the

despotism with which Bonaparte struck it. The head of the State found a

profit in those subordinate letters which he had put in barracks, which

presented arms to him, which sallied forth at the command of "Turn

out, the guard!" which marched in rank, and which went through their

evolutions like soldiers. Any form of independence seemed a rebellion

against his power; he would no more consent to a riot of words and

ideas than he suffered insurrection. He suspended the Habeas Corpus for

thought as well as for individual liberty. Let us also recognise that

the public, weary of anarchy, was glad to submit again to the yoke of

law and order.

[Sidenote: New forms in literature.]

The literature which expresses the new era did not commence to reign

until forty or fifty years after the time of which it was the idiom.

During that half-century, it was employed only by the opposition.

It was Madame de Staël, it was Benjamin Constant[437], it was

Lemercier[438], it was Bonald, it was myself, in short, who were the

first to speak that language. The alteration in literature of which

the nineteenth century boasts came to it from the Emigration and from

exile: it was M. de Fontanes who brooded on those birds of a different

species from himself, because, by going back to the seventeenth

century, he had gained the strength of that fertile period and lost the

barrenness of the eighteenth. One portion of the human intelligence,

that which treats of transcendental matters, alone advanced with an

even step with civilisation; unfortunately, the glory of knowledge

was not without stain: the Laplaces[439], the Lagranges[440], the

Monges[441], the Chaptals[442], the Berthollets[443], all the

prodigies, once haughty democrats, became Napoleon's most obsequious

servants. Let it be said to the honour of Letters: the new literature

was free, science was servile; character did not correspond with

genius, and they whose thought had sped to the uppermost sky were not

able to raise their souls above the feet of Bonaparte: they pretended

to have no need of God, that was why they needed a tyrant.

The Napoleonic classic was the genius of the nineteenth century dressed

up in the periwig of Louis XIV., or curled as in the days of Louis

XV. Bonaparte had ordained that the men of the Revolution should not

appear at Court save in full dress, sword at side. One saw nothing

of the France of the moment; it was not order, it was discipline.

Nor could anything be more tiresome than that pale resuscitation of

the literature of former days. That cold copy, that unproductive

anachronism, disappeared when the new literature broke in noisily with

the _Génie du Christianisme._ The death of the Duc d'Enghien had for

me this advantage that, by causing me to step aside, it left me free

in my solitude to follow my own inspiration, and prevented me from

enlisting in the regular infantry of old Pindus: I owed my moral to my

intellectual liberty.

In the last chapter of the _Génie du Christianisme_, I discuss what

would have become of the world if the Faith had not been preached at

the time of the invasion of the Barbarians; in another paragraph,

I speak of an important work to be undertaken on the changes

which Christianity introduced in the laws after the conversion of

Constantine[444].

Supposing religious opinion to exist in its present form, if the _Génie

du Christianisme_ were yet to be written, I would compose it quite

differently: instead of recalling the benefits and the institutions

of our religion in the past, I would show that Christianity is the

thought of the future and of human liberty; that that redeeming and

Messianic thought is the only basis of social equality; that it alone

can establish the latter, because it places by the side of that

equality the necessity of duty, the corrective and regulator of the

democratic instinct. Legality is no sufficient restraint, because

it is not permanent; it derives its strength from the law: now, the

law is the work of men who pass away and differ. A law is not always

obligatory; it can always be changed by another law: as opposed to

that, morals are constant; they have their force within themselves,

because they spring from the immutable order: they alone, therefore,

can ensure permanency.

I would show that, wherever Christianity has prevailed, it has changed

ideas, rectified notions of justice and injustice, substituted

assertion for doubt, embraced the whole of humanity in its doctrines

and precepts. I would try to conjecture the distance at which we still

are from the total accomplishment of the Gospel, by calculating the

number of evils that have been destroyed and of improvements that have

been effected in the eighteen centuries which have elapsed on this side

of the Cross. Christianity acts slowly, because it acts everywhere; it

does not cling to the reform of any particular society, it works upon

society in general; its philanthropy is extended to all the sons of

Adam: that is what it expresses with a marvellous simplicity in its

commonest petitions, in its daily prayers, when it says to the crowd in

the temple:

"Let us pray for every suffering thing upon earth."

What religion has ever spoken in this way? The Word was not made flesh

in the man of pleasure, it became incarnate in the man of sorrow, with

a view to the enfranchisement of all, to an universal brotherhood and

an infinite salvation.

If the _Génie du Christianisme_ had only given rise to such

investigations, I should congratulate myself on having published it.

It remains to be seen whether, at the time of the appearance of the

book, a different _Génie du Christianisme_, raised on the new plan the

outline of which I have barely indicated, would have obtained the same

success. In 1803, when nothing was granted to the old religion, when it

was the object of scorn, when none knew the first word of the question,

would one have done well to speak of future liberty as descending from

Calvary, at a time when people were still bruised from the excesses of

the liberty of the passions? Would Bonaparte have suffered such a work

to appear? It was perhaps useful to stimulate regrets, to interest the

imagination in a cause so misjudged, to call attention to the despised

object, to render it endearing before showing how serious it was, how

mighty and how salutary.

Now, supposing that my name leaves some trace behind it, I shall owe

this to the _Génie du Christianisme_: with no illusion as to the

intrinsic value of the work, I admit that it possesses an accidental

value; it came just at the right moment. For this reason it caused me

to take my place in one of those historic periods which, mixing an

individual with things, compel him to be remembered. If the influence

of my work was not limited to the change which, in the past forty

years, it has produced among the living generations; if it still served

to resuscitate among late-comers a spark of the civilizing truths of

the earth; if the slight symptom of life which one seems to perceive

was there sustained in the generations to come, I should depart full of

hope in the divine mercy. O reconciled Christian, do not forget me in

thy prayers, when I am gone; my faults, perhaps, will stop me outside

those gates where my charity cried on thy behalf:

"Be ye lifted up, O eternal gates[445]!"

[361] This book was begun at Dieppe in 1836 and finished in Paris in

1837. It was revised in December 1846.--T.

[362] Anne Geneviève de Bourbon-Condé, Duchesse de Longueville

(1619-1679), sister of the great Condé, had intrigued against the

Court, and played a great part in the war of the Fronde (1648-1652).

The escape took place in 1650. Eventually, Mazarin defeating all her

intrigues, the Duchesse de Longueville withdrew into retirement and a

convent--T.

[363] Queen Anne of Austria (1602-1666), daughter of King Philip III.

of Spain, and wife of Louis XIII. of France, whom she married in 1615.

She gave birth to Louis XIV. in 1638, after twenty-three years of

marriage, and became Regent of the Kingdom on the death of Louis XIII.

in 1643.--T.

[364] Henri de La Tour d'Auvergne, Maréchal Vicomte de Turenne

(1611-1688), joined the Fronde on Madame de Longueville's persuasion,

but returned to his allegiance the next year (1651). He was born a

Protestant, was converted by Bossuet, but abjured the Catholic Faith in

1678.--T.

[365] François Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1605 or 1613-1680). He played

a small part in the Fronde through his infatuation for Madame de

Longueville. The _Maxims_ were published in 1665, under the title of

_Réflexions et sentences, ou Maximes morales._ He spent his old age in

the society of Madame de La Fayette and Madame de Sévigné.--T.

[366] Marie Madeleine Comtesse de La Fayette (1634-1693), _née_ Pioche

de La Vergne, author of a number of successful novels and a History of

Henrietta of England.--T.

[367] Charlotte Marguerite Princesse de Condé (1594-1650), _née_ de

Montmorency, and married in 1609 to Henry II. Prince de Condé, who

removed her to Brussels out of the reach of King Henry IV. "That poor

wretch," the Duchesse de Longueville, was her daughter.--T.

[368] Madame de Brienne was the wife of Henri Auguste Comte de Loménie

de Brienne, author of the curious Memoirs.--T.

[369] BÉRANGER, _Le Vieux Caporal_, 49, 50:

"Who is sobbing and weeping down yonder?

Ah, 'tis the drummer's widow so sad."--T.

[370] BÉRANGER, _Le Vieux Caporal_, chorus:

"Conscripts, keep step; do not weep;

. . . Keep step, the step keep."

--T.

[371] Jules Cardinal Mazarin (1602-1661), Prime Minister to the Regent

Anne of Austria, and eventual victor over the Fronde.--T.

[372] The Duc de La Rochefoucauld left _Mémoires sur la règne d'Anne

d'Autriche_, in addition to the _Maximes._--T.

[373] Marie Caroline Ferdinande Louise Duchesse de Berry (1798-1870),

daughter of King Ferdinand I. of Naples, and married to the Duc de

Berry in 1816.--T.

[374] The Duchesse de Berry brought Dieppe into fashion in the later

years of the Restoration; she visited it yearly, with her children,

during the bathing season.--B.

[375] RABELAIS.--_Author's Note._

[376] Now the Place de la Concorde.--T.

[377] Migneret's book-shop was at No. 1186, Rue Jacob. The houses were

at that time numbered by districts, not by streets.--B.

[378]

"Both through his virtues and his charms

To be their father he deserved."

--T.

[379] Étienne Gaspard Robertson (1762-1837), a professor of physics who

perfected or improved the Archimedean mirror, the magic-lantern, and

the parachute.--T.

[380] Now the Quai Malaquais.--T.

[381] The Theatines, or "Regular Clerks," a very strict congregation,

founded in 1524 by St. Cajetan and Giovanni Pietro Caraffa, Bishop of

Chieti, or Theate, from which the Order takes its name.--T.

[382] The Requisition was a sort of levy in mass decreed by the

Committee of Public Safety on the 23rd of August 1793, and produced

1,400,000 men. It was the immediate forerunner of the Conscription.--T.

[383] The title of this letter was _Lettre à M. de Fontanes sur la

deuxième édition de l'ouvrage de Mme. de Staël_ (_De la littérature

considérée dans ses rapports avec la morale_, etc.), and it was signed,

l'_Auteur du Génie du Christianisme._ It was printed in the _Mercure_

of 1 Nivoise Year IX. (22 December 1800), and now figures in all the

editions of the _Génie du Christianisme._ It is one of Chateaubriand's

most eloquent writings.--B.

[384] The letter appeared in the _Journal des Débats_ of 10 Germinal

Year IX. (31 March 1801).--B.

[385] The volume is announced as "just out" in the _Journal des Débats_

of 27 Germinal (17 April). It was a small duodecimo, of XXIV. +210

pages, with the title _Atala, ou les Amours de deux sauvages dans le

désert._--B.

[386] Marie Marguerite Marquise de Brinvilliers (1630-1676), _née_

Dreux d'Avray, a famous poisoner, who with her lover, Gaudin de

Sainte-Croix, poisoned the marquise's father, sister, and two brothers.

The crimes were discovered on the death of Sainte-Croix in 1670. The

Brinvilliers took to flight, but was captured at Liège, brought back to

Paris, and tried and executed in 1676.--T.

[387] A waxwork show established in the Palais-Royal and on the

Boulevard du Temple in 1770 by a German who called himself Curtius. The

establishment on the Boulevard du Temple remained open until the end of

the reign of Louis-Philippe. The figures are still sometimes met with

at village fairs.--B.

[388] Chaillot, which now forms part of Paris, was at that time a

village at the gates, to the west, on the road to Versailles.--T.

[389] The _Nouvelle Héloïse_, Rousseau's most popular work, was

published in 1759--T.

[390] Dr. Joseph Marie Joachim Vigaroux (1759-1829), a native of

Montpellier, in Provence, and author of some medical works of no

special value.--T.

[391] Marie Anne Elisa Bacciochi (1774-1820), Bonaparte's eldest

sister, married Felix Pascal Prince Bacciochi in 1797. Her husband

became Prince of Lucca and Piombino in 1805, Elisa exercising the real

power; and in 1808 Napoleon made her Grand-duchess of Tuscany. She was

dethroned in 1814, and assumed the title of Countess of Compignano.

Prince Bacciochi died in Rome in 1841.--T.

[392] Lucien Bonaparte (1775-1840), Napoleon's second brother, created

Prince of Canino in 1804, a prisoner in England from 1810 to 1814. He

was twice married to ladies of middle-class family (_vide infra_), by

whom he had eleven children.--T.

[393] François Joachim Cardinal de Pierres de Bernis (1715-1794),

Anacreontic poet and religious controversialist. He had been Madame de

Pompadour's lover, and owed his advancement to her. Voltaire called him

Babet la Bouquetière, owing to the profusion of flowers of rhetoric

which he employed in his verses.--T.

[394] Madame Lucien Bonaparte (_d._ 1800), _née_ Christine Éléonore

Boyer, married Lucien in 1794, and was the sister of the woman who kept

the inn at Saint-Maximin, where Lucien, then under age, was staying.

The marriage took place without the consent of Madame Bonaparte, the

mother, and was invalid by French law. Lucien's second wife, whom he

married in 1802, was Marie Alexandrine Charlotte Louise Laurence de

Bleschamp (1778-1855), the divorced wife of Jean François Hippolyte

Jouberthon, a retired stockbroker.--B.

[395] Louis Gabriel Amboise, Vicomte de Bonald (1753-1840), a

distinguished monarchical writer, created a peer of France in 1823, and

a member of the French Academy.--T.

[396] Charles Lioult de Chênedollé (1769-1833), author of the _Génie de

l'homme_ and other poems.--T.

[397] Pauline Marie Michelle Frédérique Ulrique de

Montmorin-Saint-Hérem, Comtesse de Beaumont (1768-1803).--T.

[398] The Comte de Montmorin did not die on the scaffold, but was

butchered at the Abbaye on the 2nd of September 1792. On the next day

his cousin, Louis Victor Hippolyte Luce de Montmorin, had his throat

cut at the Conciergerie, where he had been taken after his acquittal

by the Criminal Tribunal on the 17th of August. Madame de Montmorin,

Madame de Beaumont's mother, was guillotined on the 10th of May 1794;

her second son was guillotined with her. Her daughter, wife of the

Comte de La Luzerne, died on the 10th of July 1794, at the Archbishop's

Palace, which had been turned into the prison hospital.--B.

[399] Madame Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1756-1842), _née_ Vigée, the

famous French portrait painter. She left nearly 700 portraits, in

addition to some historical pictures and a crowd of landscapes.--T.

[400] Matthieu Louis Molé (1781-1855), created a Count of the Empire

in 1813, when he became Minister of Justice, and held successive

ministries under the Restoration and Louis-Philippe. He was a moderate

statesman of much dignity of character and of great distinction of

person, manners, and speech. He was elected a member of the French

Academy in 1840.--T.

[401] Étienne Duc Pasquier (1767-1862), appointed Prefect of Police in

1810. After holding various ministerial offices under the Restoration,

he was made President of the Chamber of Peers by Louis-Philippe in

1830, Chancellor in 1837, and a duke in 1844. Elected to the French

Academy in 1842.--T.

[402] Louise Marie Victorine Comtesse de Chastenay-Lanty (1771-1855)

was never married. Her title of madame is due to the fact that

she became a canoness at an early age (1785). Her observation to

Chateaubriand on the subject of Joubert will be found repeated

in almost precisely the same words in Madame de Chastenay's

recently-published Memoirs (1896), vol. II. p. 82.--T.

[403] Louis Bénoît Picard (1769-1828), an actor, theatrical manager,

and author of some eighty stage-plays of varying merit. He was received

into the French Academy in 1807.--T.

[404] In the "small company" which, at the beginning of the

century, met in the drawing-room of Madame de Beaumont, in the Rue

Neuve-du-Luxembourg, or at Chateaubriand's, in his little apartment in

the Hôtel Coislin, on the Place Louis XV., or again, in the summer,

at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, under M. Joubert's roof, each one, according

to an ancient fashion, had his nickname. Chateaubriand was called _le

chat_, the "Cat," by way of abbreviation of his name, or possibly

because of his illegible handwriting; Madame de Chateaubriand, who

had claws, was the "She-cat." Chênedollé and Gueneau de Mussy, more

melancholy than René, had received the names of the "Big" and the

"Little Crow;" sometimes also Chateaubriand was called the "Illustrious

Crow of the Cordilleras," by allusion to his travels in America.

Fontanes was thickset, and had something athletic in his short stature.

His friends jestingly compared him to the boar of Erymanthus, and

called him the "Boar." Thin and slender, skimming over the earth which

she was soon to leave, Madame de Beaumont had received the nickname

of the "Swallow." Joubert, a lover of the woods, and at that time a

great walker, was the "Stag;" while his wife, who was goodness and

wit personified, but of a somewhat fierce humour, laughed when she

was called the "She-wolf." Never was so intellectual a collection of

"animals" seen before.--B.

[405] Madame Hocquart was a lady possessed of many charms of beauty and

mind. She was the daughter of Pourrat and the sister of Madame Laurent

Lecoulteux.--B.

[406] The Comtesse de Vintimille du Luc, _née_ de La Live de Jully, was

niece to Madame Hocquart.--B.

[407] Marie Duchesse de Chevreuse (1600-1679), _née_ de

Rohan-Montbazon, married in 1617 to Albert Duc de Luynes, Constable

of France, and in 1622 to Claude de Lorraine, Duc de Chevreuse. The

Duchesse de Chevreuse was a favourite of Anne of Austria, and is famed

for her beauty and her wit.--T.

[408] Françoise d'Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon (1635-1719), the last

mistress and eventual wife (1684-1685) of Louis XIV.--T.

[409] Madame Geoffrin (1699-1777), _née_ Rodet, head of the famous

literary _salon_ in the Rue Saint-Honoré.--T.

[410] Marie Marquise du Deffant (1697-1780), _née_ de Vichy-Chamroud,

a celebrated leader of eighteenth-century society in France. Her

correspondence with Walpole, Voltaire, d'Alembert, etc., was published

in 1809 to 1811.--T.

[411] Antoine Hugues Calixte de Montmorin (1772-1794), guillotined 10th

May 1794.--B.

[412] Margaret of Valois (1552-1615), Queen of France and Navarre,

daughter of King Henry II. of France. She married in 1672 the Prince

of Béarn, afterwards King of Navarre and of France (Henry IV.), who

imprisoned her at Usson, in Auvergne, and eventually divorced her

(1599). She left Memoirs of the period from 1565 to 1587, first

published in 1658.--T.

[413] Philip II. (Augustus), King of France (1165-1223).--T.

[414] Kings XII. 23.--T.

[415] Chateaubriand and Madame de Beaumont took up their abode at

Savigny on the 22nd of May 1801.--B.

[416] Antoine Athanase Roux de Laborie (1769-1840), a protégé of

Talleyrand's, who attained to some distinction as a politician. He had

been compromised in a Royalist conspiracy with the two brothers Bertin,

with whom he afterwards founded the _Journal des Débats._--T.

[417] Catherine Joséphine Rafin (1777-1835), known as Mademoiselle

Duchesnois, made her first appearance in 1802 as Phèdre. She was an

ugly woman, but a fine actress. She continued to play until 1830.--T.

[418] Paul Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1674); the allusion being to

Rembrandt's famous distribution of light and shade.--T.

[419]

"Ne'er did Iphigenia in Aulis laid dead

Cause so many tears in all Greece to be shed

As, in the fine spectacle shown us to-day,

We have wept at the bidding of our Champmeslé."

Marie Desmare (1644-1698), known as Mademoiselle Champmeslé, made

her first appearance in 1669, and created the title-rôle in Racine's

_Iphigénie_ in 1674, under the poet's directions.--T.

[420] Anne Pierre Adrien Prince de Montmorency, later Duc de Laval

(1767-1837), French Ambassador successively in Madrid (1814), Rome

(1821), Vienna (1828), and London (1829). He became a member of the

Chamber of Peers in 1820, in succession to his father, deceased, and

resigned his peerage, together with his diplomatic functions, in

1830.--B.

[421] Étienne Antoine de Boulogne (1747-1825) was made Bishop of Troyes

by Napoleon in 1808. In 1811, Bonaparte imprisoned him at Vincennes,

until 1814, for protesting against the arrest of Pope Pius VII. He

resumed his see under the Restoration, became Archbishop of Vienne in

1817, and was raised to the peerage in 1822.--T.

[422] Charles Pineau Duclos (1704-1772), admitted to the French Academy

in 1747, and appointed its perpetual secretary in 1755, was author of

the _Considérations sur le Mœurs_, etc., and took the leading part in

the editing of the Dictionary.--T.

[423] Charles François Dupuis (1742-1809), member of the Institute and

of the Academy of Inscriptions, and author of the _Origine de tous les

cultes, ou la Religion universelle._--T.

[424] Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715-1771), one of the leaders of the

French philosophy of the eighteenth century, and author of the book

_De l'Esprit_ (1758), condemned by the Sorbonne, the Pope, and the

Parliament of Paris, and burned by the public hangman in 1759.--T.

[425] Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet

(1743-1794), perpetual secretary of the Academy of Science, and a

principal contributor to the Encyclopædia. The best known of his

voluminous works is the _Esquisse des progrès de l'esprit humain._ He

was arrested as a Girondin, and poisoned himself in prison (28 March

1794).--T.

[426] Christophe de Beaumont (1703-1781), successively Bishop of

Bayonne, Archbishop of Vienne, and Archbishop of Paris (1746), the

redoubtable adversary of both the Jansenists and Philosophers.--T.

[427] In Nos. 27, 28, and 29 of the Year X. (1802) of the _Décade

philosophique, littéraire et politique._ The articles were subsequently

collected into a pamphlet.--B.

[428] It was published on the 24th of Germinal Year X. (14 April

1802), by Migneret, 28, rue du Sépulcre, Faubourg Saint-Germain and Le

Normant, 43, rue des Prêtres-Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, in five volumes

8vo (the fifth volume consisting entirely of notes and elucidations),

with the title, _Génie du Christianisme, ou Beautés de la religion

chrétienne_, by François Auguste Chateaubriand. The first page of each

volume bore the following epigraph, suppressed in the later editions:

"Chose admirable! la religion chrétienne, qui ne semble avoir

d'objet que la félicité de l'autre vie, fait encore notre

bonheur dans celle-ci."

MONTESQUIEU, _Esprit des Lois_, XXIV., iii.--B.

[429] Baruch, or Benedict, Spinoza (1632-1677), the Portuguese-Jewish

philosopher of Amsterdam. His system of pantheism is set forth in his

_Ethica_ and other works.--T.

[430] Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) was born a Protestant, became a

Catholic, and then a professional sceptic. His reputation rests upon

his famous _Dictionnaire historique et critique_ (1697), with which he

paved the way for Voltaire and his friends.--T.

[431] Claude Henri Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) was the founder of

a sect, based upon more or less Socialistic principles, extinguished

by ridicule, and finally dissolved by the Courts for its attacks upon

public morals in 1833. Its author attempted suicide in 1823, but

escaped with the loss of an eye.--T.

[432] Charles Fourier (1768-1837) was the author of the Phalansterian

movement, based upon the Communistic principle.--T.

[433] The system maintaining the simple humanity of Christ, and denying

His divinity.--T.

[434] Publius Licinius Gallienus, Roman Emperor (233-268), gave leave

to Plotinus to build a town in Campania, to be recalled Platonopolis;

but the project fell through.--T.

[435] Plotinus (_circa_ 205--_circa_ 270) opened his school of

Neo-Platonic philosophy in Rome about the year 245.--T.

[436] Attila, King of the Huns (_d._ 453), when descending into Italy

in 452 after his defeat in France, was stopped outside Rome by Pope

St. Leo the Great, who persuaded him to return back after exacting a

tribute from the Emperor Valentinian III.--T.

[437] Henri Benjamin Constant de Rebecque (1767-1830), the well-known

publicist and Liberal politician.--T.

[438] Népomucène Louis Lemercier (1772-1840), a member of the French

Academy, and author of a number of plays and poems all of a remarkable

character. The finest is his tragedy of Agamemnon. He was one of the

first to break through Boileau's rule of the three unities in dramatic

literature.--T.

[439] Pierre Simon Marquis de Laplace (1749-1827), a profound

geometrician and a _protégé_ of d'Alembert, was Minister of the

Interior for six weeks after the 18 Brumaire, entered the Senate in

1799, and became President of that body. He was a member of the French

Academy, and was created a marquis and a peer by Louis XVIII. on

becoming its President (1817).--T.

[440] Joseph Louis Comte Lagrange (1736-1813), another famous

mathematician. He was for twenty years President of the Berlin Academy

(1766-1786). Napoleon made him a Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour,

a count, and a senator. He and Laplace may be said to have completed

Newton's work.--T.

[441] Gaspard Monge, Comte de Péluse (1746-1818), a member of the

Academy of Science, was for a month Minister of Marine under the

Revolution (1792). During the wars of the Republic he devoted his

knowledge to elaborating the national means of defense, was one of the

founders of the Polytechnic School, accompanied Bonaparte to Egypt, and

became President of the Cairo Institute. Napoleon gave him his title,

created him a senator, and loaded him with honours, all of which he

lost at the Restoration.--T.

[442] Jean Antoine Chaptal, Comte de Chanteloup (1756-1832), a

distinguished chemist and statesman. He was placed at the head of

the gunpowder factory at Grenelle in 1793, and there displayed an

incredible activity. In 1798 he became one of the original members of

the Institute, Minister of the Interior in 1800, a senator in 1805, and

a peer of France under the Restoration (1819).--T.

[443] Claude Louis Comte Berthollet (1748-1822), another celebrated

chemist, worked with Monge and Chaptal in the fabrication of gunpowder

and the multiplication of the means of defense during the Republican

wars. He also accompanied Bonaparte to Egypt, where he made many

important researches. The Emperor made him a senator in 1805, and he

received his peerage under the Restoration.--T.

[444] Constantine I. Emperor of the West (274-337), known as

Constantine the Great, was converted, by a sign of the Cross in the

sky, in the year 312.--T.

[445] Ps. XXIII. 7, 9.--T.

BOOK II[446]

The years 1802 and 1803--Country-houses--Madame de Custine--M. de

Saint-Martin--Madame de Houdetot and Saint-Lambert--Journey to

the south of France--M. de la Harpe--His death--Interview with

Bonaparte--I am appointed First Secretary of Embassy in Rome--Journey

from Paris to the Savoy Alps--From Mont Cenis to Rome--Milan to

Rome--Cardinal Fesch's palace--My occupations--Madame de Beaumont's

manuscripts--Letters from Madame de Caud--Madame de Beaumont's arrival

in Rome--Letters from my sister--Letter from Madame de Krüdener--Death

of Madame de Beaumont--Her funeral--Letters from M. de Chênedollé,

M. de Fontanes, M. Necker, and Madame de Staël--The years 1803 and

1804--First idea of my Memoirs--I am appointed French Minister to the

Valais--Departure from Rome--The year 1804--The Valais Republic--A

visit to the Tuileries--The Hôtel de Montmorin--I hear the death cried

of the Duc d'Enghien--I give in my resignation.

My life became quite disturbed so soon as it ceased to belong to

myself. I had a crowd of acquaintances outside my customary circle. I

was invited to the country-houses which were being restored. One did as

best he could in those half-unfurnished, half-furnished manor-houses,

in which old arm-chairs and new stood side by side. Nevertheless, some

of these manor-houses had remained intact, such as the Marais[447],

which had come into the possession of Madame de La Briche[448], an

excellent woman, whom happiness could never succeed in shaking off. I

remember that my immortality went to the Rue Saint-Dominique d'Enfer

to take a seat for the Marais in a wretched hired coach, where I met

Madame de Vintimille and Madame de Fezensac[449]. At Champlâtreux[450]

M. Molé was having some small rooms on the second floor rebuilt.

His father[451], who had been killed in the revolutionary style, was

replaced, in a dilapidated drawing-room, by a picture in which Matthieu

Molé was represented stopping a riot with his square cap: a picture

which brought home the difference in the times. A splendid intersection

of roads lined with lime-trees had been cut down; but one of the

avenues still remained in all the magnificence of its old shade; new

plantations have since been mixed with it: this is the age of poplars.

On returning from the Emigration, there was no exile so poor but

laid out the winding walks of an English garden in the ten feet of

land or court-yard which he had recovered: did I myself, in days

past, not plant the Vallée-aux-Loups? Was it not there that I began

these Memoirs? Did I not continue them in Montboissier Park, whose

appearance, disfigured by neglect, its owners were then trying to

revive? Did I not lengthen them in the park at Maintenon[452], quite

recently restored, a new prey for the returning democracy? The castles

burnt in 1789 ought to have warned what remained of the castles to

remain hidden in their ruins: but the steeples of engulfed villages

which pierce through the lava of Vesuvius do not prevent new steeples

and new hamlets from being planted on the surface of that same lava.

[Sidenote: The Marquise de Custine.]

Among the bees adjusting their hive was the Marquise de Custine[453],

the heiress of the long tresses of Margaret of Provence[454], wife of

St. Louis, whose blood flowed in her veins. I was present when she took

possession of Fervacques[455], and I had the honour of sleeping in the

bed of the Bearnese, as I had of sleeping in Queen Christina's[456]

bed at Combourg. The journey was no trifling matter: we had to take

on board the carriage Astolphe de Custine[457], then a child, M.

Berstoecher, his tutor, an old Alsatian nurse, who spoke only German,

Jenny, the lady's maid, and Trim, a famous dog which ate up the

provisions for the journey. Would one not have thought that this colony

was going to Fervacques for good? And yet the furnishing of the house

was not quite finished when the signal for removal was given. I saw her

who faced the scaffold with such great courage[458], I saw her, whiter

than one of the Fates, dressed in black, her figure made thin by death,

her head adorned only with her silken tresses; I saw her smile to me

with her pale lips and her beautiful teeth when she left Sécherons,

near Geneva, to breathe her last at Bex, at the entrance to the Valais;

I heard her coffin pass at night along the deserted streets of Lausanne

to take up its eternal place at Fervacques: she was hastening to hide

herself in a property which she had possessed for but a moment, like

her life. I had read on the corner of a chimney-piece in the _château_

those bad rhymes attributed to the lover of Gabrielle:

La dame de Fervacques

Mérite de vives attacques[459].

The soldier-king had said as much to many others: passing declarations

of men, soon effaced and descending from beauty to beauty down to

Madame de Custine. Fervacques has been sold.

I also met the Duchesse de Châtillon[460], who adorned my valley

at Aulnay during my absence in the Hundred Days. Mrs. Lindsay,

whom I continued to see, introduced me to Julie Talma[461]. Madame

de Clermont-Tonnerre invited me. We had a common grandmother, and

she was good enough to call me cousin. The widow of the Comte de

Clermont-Tonnerre[462], she was married again, later, to the Marquis

de Talaru[463]. She had converted M. de La Harpe in prison. It was

through her that I knew Neveu, the painter, who was enrolled among the

number of her _cicisbei_: Neveu brought me into momentary connection

with Saint-Martin[464].

M. de Saint-Martin thought he had discovered in _Atala_ a certain

cant which was far from my thoughts, but which to his mind proved an

affinity of doctrine between us. Neveu, in order to bring two brothers

together, asked us to dinner in a top room which he occupied in the

out-houses of the Palais-Bourbon. I reached the trysting-place at six

o'clock; the heavenly philosopher was at his post. At seven o'clock, a

discreet man-servant placed a tureen of soup upon the table, withdrew,

and closed the door. We sat down and began to eat in silence. M. de

Saint-Martin, who, for the rest, had a very fine manner, pronounced

only a few oracular phrases. Neveu replied with exclamations, uttered

with a painter's attitudes and grimaces. I said not a word.

After half an hour, the necromancer returned, removed the soup, and

placed another dish on the table. The courses succeeded each other

in this way, one by one, and at long intervals. M. de Saint-Martin,

becoming gradually more excited, began to talk after the manner of

an archangel; the more he talked, the more obscure did his language

become. Neveu had hinted to me, squeezing my hand, that we should see

extraordinary things, that we should hear sounds. For six mortal hours

I listened and discovered nothing. At midnight, the man of visions

suddenly rose to his feet. I thought that the spirit of darkness or the

heavenly spirit was descending, that the bells were about to ring out

through the mysterious passages; but M. de Saint-Martin declared that

he was exhausted, and that we would resume the conversation another

time: he put on his hat and went away. Unhappily for himself, he was

stopped at the door and obliged to come back by an unexpected visit:

nevertheless he was not long in disappearing. I never saw him again: he

went off to die in the garden of M. Lenoir-Laroche[465], my neighbour

at Aulnay.

[Sidenote: Swedenborgian nonsense.]

I am a refractory subject for Swedenborgianism; the Abbé Faria[466], at

a dinner at Madame de Custine's, boasted of being able to kill a canary

by magnetizing it; the canary was the stronger of the two, and the

abbé, beside himself, was obliged to leave the party for fear of being

killed by the canary. The sole presence of myself, the Christian, had

rendered the tripod powerless.

Another time, the celebrated Gall[467], again at Madame de Custine's,

dined next to me, without knowing me, mistook my facial angle,

took me for a frog, and tried, when he knew who I was, to patch up

his science in a way which made me blush for him. The shape of the

head can assist one in distinguishing the sex in individuals, in

indicating what belongs to the beast, to the animal passions; as to

the intellectual faculties, phrenology will never know them. If one

could collect the different skulls of the great men who have died since

the commencement of the world, and were to place them before the eyes

of the phrenologists without telling them to whom they belonged, they

would not forward one brain to its right address: the examination of

the "bumps" would produce the most comical mistakes.

I feel conscience-smitten: I spoke of M. de Saint-Martin a trifle

scoffingly; I am sorry for it. That love of scoffing, which I am

constantly thrusting back and which incessantly returns to me, is a

cause of suffering to me; for I hate the satirical spirit as being the

pettiest, commonest, and easiest of all: of course, I am bringing no

charge against high comedy. M. de Saint-Martin was, when all is said

and done, a man of great merit, of noble and independent character. His

ideas, when they were explicable, were lofty and of a superior nature.

Ought I not to sacrifice the two foregoing pages to the generous and

much too flattering declaration of the author of the _Portrait de M.

de Saint-Martin fait par lui-même[468]?_ I should not hesitate to

suppress them, if what I say were able to do the smallest hurt to

the serious reputation of M. de Saint-Martin and to the esteem which

will always cling to his memory. I am glad, for the rest, to see that

my recollection has not deceived me: M. de Saint-Martin may not have

received quite the same impressions as myself at the dinner of which I

speak; but you will see that I have not invented the scene, and that M.

de Saint-Martin's account resembles mine at bottom:

"On the 27th of January 1803," he says, "I had an interview

with M. de Chateaubriand at a dinner arranged for the purpose

at M. Neveu's, in the Polytechnic School[469]. It would have

been a great advantage to me to have known him earlier: he

is the only irreproachable man of letters with whom I have

come into contact in my existence, and even then I enjoyed

his conversation only during the meal. For, immediately

afterwards, there came a visit which made him dumb for the

rest of the evening, and I do not know when the occasion will

return, because the king of this world takes great care to

put a spoke in the wheel of my cart. For the rest, of whom do

I stand in need except God?"

M. de Saint-Martin is worth a thousand of me: the dignity of his last

sentence crushes my harmless banter with all the weight of a serious

nature.

I had seen M. de Saint-Lambert[470] and Madame de Houdetot[471] at the

Marais. Both represented the opinions and the freedom of days gone

by, carefully packed up and preserved: it was the eighteenth century

dying and married after its own fashion. One need but hold on to life

for unlawfulness to become lawful. Men feel an infinite esteem for

immorality because it has not ceased to exist and because time has

adorned it with wrinkles. In truth, a virtuous husband and wife, who

are not husband and wife, but who remain together out of consideration

for their fellow-creatures, suffer a little from their venerable

condition; they bore and detest each other cordially with all the

ill-humour of old age; that is God's justice:

Malheur à qui le ciel accorde de longs jours[472]!

[Sidenote: Madame de Houdetot.]

It became difficult to understand certain pages of the _Confessions_

when one had seen the object of Rousseau's transports. Had Madame de

Houdetot kept the letters which Jean Jacques wrote to her, and which he

says were more brilliant than those in the _Nouvelle Héloïse?_ It is

believed that she made a sacrifice of them to Saint-Lambert.

When nearly eighty years of age, Madame de Houdetot still cried in

agreeable verses:

Et l'amour me console!

Rien ne pourra me consoler de lui[473].

She never went to bed without striking the floor three times with her

slipper and saying, "Good-night, dear!" to the late author of the

_Saisons._ That was what the philosophy of the eighteenth century

amounted to in 1803.

The society of Madame de Houdetot, Diderot, Saint-Lambert, Rousseau,

Grimm[474], and Madame d'Épinay rendered the Valley of Montmorency

insupportable to me, and though, with regard to facts, I am very glad

that a relic of the Voltairean times should have come under my notice,

I do not regret those times. I have lately again seen the house in

which Madame de Houdetot used to live at Sannois; it is now a mere

empty shell, reduced to the four walls. A deserted hearth is always

interesting; but what can we gather from hearth-stones by whose side

beauty has never sat, nor the mother of a family, nor religion, and

whose ashes, if they were not dispersed, would carry back the memory

only to days which were capable of nought save destruction?

*

A piracy of the _Génie du Christianisme_ at Avignon took me to the

south of France in the month of October 1802. I knew only my poor

Brittany and the northern provinces through which I had passed when

leaving my country. I was about to see the sun of Provence, the sky

which was to give me a fore-taste of Italy and Greece, towards

which my instinct and my muse alike urged me. I was in a happy mood;

my reputation made life seem light to me: there are many dreams

in the first intoxication of fame, and one's eyes at first become

rapturously filled with the rising light; but should that light become

extinguished, it leaves you in the dark: if it last, the habit of

seeing it soon renders you unmindful of it.

Lyons pleased me extremely. I renewed my acquaintance with those works

of the Romans which I had not seen since the day when I read some

sheets of _Atala_ out of my knapsack in the amphitheatre at Trèves.

Sailing-boats crossed from one bank of the Saône to the other, carrying

a light at night; they were steered by women; a sailor lass of eighteen

who took me on board, at each turn of the helm, adjusted a nosegay

of flowers badly fastened to her hat. I was awakened in the morning

by the sound of bells. The convents poised upon the slopes seemed to

have recovered their solitary inmates. The son of M. Ballanche[475],

the owner, after M. Migneret, of the _Génie du Christianisme_, had

become my host: he has become my friend. Who does not know to-day the

Christian philosopher whose writings glow with that placid clearness on

which one loves to fix his eyes, as on the ray of a friendly star in

the sky?

On the 27th of October the post-barge which was taking me to Avignon

was obliged to stop at Tain, owing to a storm. I thought myself

in America: the Rhone reminded me of my great wild rivers. I was

put into a little river-side inn; a conscript was standing at the

chimney-corner; he had his sack on his back, and was on his way to join

the Army of Italy. I wrote with the bellows of the chimney for a table,

opposite the landlady, who sat silently before me and showed her regard

for the traveller by preventing the dog and cat from making a noise.

What I was writing was an article which I had almost finished while

going down the Rhone, and which related to M. de Bonald's _Législation

primitive._ I foresaw what has since come to pass:

"French literature," I said, "is about to change its aspect;

with the Revolution new thoughts will come into being, new

views of men and things. It is easy to foresee that our

writers will become divided. Some will strive to leave the

beaten paths; others will try to copy the old models, while

nevertheless displaying them in a new light. It is very

probable that the latter will end by getting the better

of their adversaries, because, in leaning upon the great

traditions and the great men, they will have surer guides and

more fruitful documents."

The lines ending my travelling criticism are history; my mind was

beginning to move with my century:

"The author of this article," I said, "cannot resist an

image drawn from the circumstances in which he finds himself

placed. At the very moment at which he is writing these

concluding words he is descending one of the greatest rivers

of France. On two opposite mountains stand two ruined towers;

at the top of those towers are fastened little bells,

which the mountaineers ring as we pass. This river, those

mountains, those sounds, those Gothic monuments, divert the

eyes of the spectators for a moment; but not one stops to go

whither the bell-tower calls him. Thus the men who to-day

preach morality and religion in vain give the signal from

the top of their ruins to those whom the torrent of the age

carries with it; the traveller is amazed at the grandeur of

the ruins, at the sweetness of the sounds that issue from

them, at the majesty of the memories that rise above them,

but he does not interrupt his journey, and at the first turn

in the stream all is forgotten[476]."

[Sidenote: Avignon.]

When I arrived at Avignon, on the eve of All Saints' Day, a child

hawking books offered them to me: I then and there bought three

different pirated editions of a little novel called _Atala_. By going

from one bookseller to the other, I unearthed the pirate, to whom I was

not known. He sold me the four volumes of the _Génie du Christianisme_

at the reasonable price of nine francs per copy, and praised both book

and author highly to me. He lived in a fine house standing in its own

grounds. I thought I had made a great discovery: after four-and-twenty

hours, I grew weary of following fortune, and made terms for next to

nothing with the robber.

I saw Madame de Janson, a little wizened, white-haired, determined

woman, who struggled with the Rhone for her estate, exchanged

musket-shots with the inhabitants of the banks, and defended herself

against the years.

Avignon reminded me of my fellow-countryman. Du Guesclin was good for

more than Bonaparte, because he rescued France from her conquerors. On

reaching the city of the Popes with the adventurers whom his glory was

leading to Spain, he said to the provost sent by the Pontiff to meet

him:

*

"'Brother, do not deceive me: whence comes that treasure? Has the Pope

taken it from his treasure?'

"And he answered no, and that the commons of Avignon had paid it, each

his portion.

"'Then, provost,' said Bertrand, 'I promise you that we will not take

a farthing of it as we live, and wish that this money got together

be restored to them that paid it, and tell the Pope that he have it

restored to them; for if I knew that any other were done, it would lie

heavy on me; and had I crossed the sea, yet would I return thence.'

"Thus was Bertrand paid with the Pope's money, and his folk absolved

again, and the said first absolution again confirmed."

*

In former days Avignon was considered the commencement of a Transalpine

journey: it was the entrance to Italy. The geographies say:

"The Rhone belongs to the King, but the City of Avignon is watered by a

branch of the river, the Sorgue, which belongs to the Pope."

Is the Pope very certain of long preserving the ownership of the Tiber?

At Avignon they used to visit the Celestine[477] monastery. Good King

René[478], who reduced the taxes when the tramontane wind blew, had

painted a skeleton in one of the halls of the Celestine monastery: it

was that of a woman of great beauty whom he had loved[479].

*

I looked for the Palace of the Popes and was shown the _ice-house_:

the Revolution has done away with celebrated places; the memories

of the past are obliged to shoot up through it and to reblossom over

dead bones[480]. Alas, the groans of the victims die soon after them!

They scarcely reach some echo that causes them to survive a little

while after the voice from which they issued is extinguished for ever.

But, while the cry of sorrow was expiring on the banks of the Rhone,

one heard in the distance the sound of Petrarch's lute: a solitary

_canzone_, escaping from the tomb, continued to charm Vaucluse[481]

with an immortal melancholy and the love sorrows of olden time.

Alain Chartier[482] had come from Bayeux to be buried at Avignon in the

Church of St. Anthony. He had written the _Belle Dame sans mercy_, and

the kiss of Margaret of Scotland[483] made him live.

[Sidenote: Marseilles.]

From Avignon I went to Marseilles. What is left to be desired by a town

to which Cicero addressed these words, of which the oratorical manner

was imitated by Bossuet:

"Nor will I forget thee, O Massilia, who in virtue and dignity shouldst

rank not only before Greece, but for aught I know before the whole

world[484]!"

Tacitus, in the Life of Agricola, also praises Marseilles as combining

the Greek urbanity with the economy of the Latin provinces. Daughter of

Hellas, foundress of Gaul, celebrated by Cicero, captured by Cæsar, is

not that sufficient glory united? I hastened to climb to _Notre Dame de

la Garde_, to admire the sea which the smiling coasts of all the famous

countries of antiquity line with their ruins. The sea, which does not

move, is the source of mythology, even as the ocean, which rises twice

a day, is the abyss to which Jehovah said:

"Thou shalt go no farther[485]."

In this same year, 1838, I climbed again to that summit; I saw again

that sea which I now know so well, and at the end of which rose the

Cross and the Tomb victorious. The mistral was blowing; I went into

the fort built by Francis I., where no longer a veteran of the army of

Egypt kept guard, but where stood a conscript destined for Algiers and

lost under the gloomy vaults. Silence reigned in the restored chapel,

while the wind moaned without. The hymn of the Breton sailors to Our

Lady of Succour returned to my mind; you know when and how I have

already quoted that plaint of my early ocean days:

Je mets ma confiance,

Vierge, en votre secours.

How many events it had needed to bring me back to the feet of the "Star

of the Sea," to whom I had been vowed in my childhood! When I gazed at

those votive offerings, those paintings of ship-wrecks hung all around

me, it was as though I were reading the story of my life. Virgil places

the Trojan hero beneath the Porches of Carthage, moved at the sight

of a picture representing the burning of Troy, and the genius of the

singer of Hamlet has made use of the soul of the singer of Dido.

I no longer recognised Marseilles at the foot of that rock once covered

with a forest sung by Lucan: I could no longer lose my way in its long,

wide, straight streets. The harbour was crowded with ships; thirty-six

years ago I should with difficulty have found a "boat," steered by a

descendant of Pytheas[486], to carry me to Cyprus like Joinville[487]:

time rejuvenates cities, reversing its action upon men. I preferred my

old Marseilles, with its memories of the Bérengers[488], the Duke of

Anjou[489], King René, Guise and d'Épernon[490], with the monuments of

Louis XIV. and the virtues of Belsunce[491]: the wrinkles on its brow

pleased me. Perhaps, in regretting the years which it has lost, I but

bewail those which I have found. Marseilles received me graciously, it

is true; but the rival of Athens has grown too young for me.

If the _Memoirs_ of Alfieri[492] had been published in 1802 I should

not have left Marseilles without visiting the rock from which the poet

used to bathe. That rugged man once succeeded in attaining the charm of

reverie and of expression:

"After the performance," he writes, "one of my amusements,

at Marseilles, was to bathe almost every evening in the

sea; I had found a very agreeable spot, on a neck of land

situated to the right of the harbour, where, seated on the

sand, with my back leaning against a rock, which prevented

me from being seen from the land side, I could behold

the sky and sea without interruption. Between those two

immensities, embellished by the rays of the setting sun, I

passed delicious hours dreaming of future delights; and there

I might unquestionably have become a poet, could I have given

any language whatever to my thoughts and feelings[493]."

[Sidenote: Jean Reboul.]

I returned through Languedoc and Gascony. At Nîmes, the Arena[494] and

the Maison Carrée[495] had not yet been extricated: in the present

year, 1838, I have seen them exhumed. I have also looked up Jean

Reboul[496]. I had my doubts concerning those workmen poets, who are

generally neither poets nor workmen: I owe M. Reboul a reparation. I

found him in his bakery; I spoke to him without knowing whom I was

addressing, failing to distinguish him from his fellow-worshippers of

Ceres. He took my name and said he would go and see if the person for

whom I was asking was there. He returned soon after and introduced

himself: he took me into his shop; we wended our way through a

labyrinth of flour-sacks, and clambered up a sort of ladder into a

little closet resembling the upper room of a wind-mill. There we sat

down and talked. I was as happy as in my garret in London, and happier

than in my ministerial armchair in Paris. M. Reboul drew a manuscript

from a chest of drawers, and read me some powerful verses from a poem

which he is writing on the _Dernier Jour._ I congratulated him on his

religion and his talent[497].

I had to take leave of my host, not without wishing him the gardens

of Horace. I would have better loved to see him dream beside the

Cascade at Tivoli than gather the wheat crushed by the wheel above that

cascade. It is true that Sophocles was perhaps a blacksmith in Athens,

and that Plautus, in Rome, was a harbinger of Reboul at Nîmes[498].

Between Nîmes and Montpellier, I passed, on my left, Aigues-Mortes,

which I have visited in 1838. This town is still quite intact, with its

towers and its surrounding rampart; it resembles a large ship stranded

on the sands where St. Louis, time and the sea have left it. The

Saint-king gave "usages" and statutes to the town of Aigues-Mortes:

"He wills that the prison be such that it serve not for the

extermination of the person, but for its safe-keeping; that no

information be granted for mere injurious words; that adultery itself

be not enquired into, except in certain cases; and that he who violates

a maid, _volente vel nolente_, shall not lose his life, nor any of his

members, _sed alio modo puniatur._"

At Montpellier I again saw the sea, to which I would gladly have

written in the words of the Most Christian King to the Swiss

Confederation: "My trusty ally and well-beloved friend." Scaliger[499]

would have liked to make Montpellier "the nest of his old age." It

received its name from two virgin saints, _Mons puellarum_: hence the

beauty of its women. Montpellier[500], falling before the Cardinal de

Richelieu, witnessed the death of the aristocratic constitution of

France.

On the road from Montpellier to Narbonne, I had a return to my native

disposition, an attack of my dreaminess. I should have forgotten that

attack if, like certain imaginary invalids, I had not entered the day

of my crisis on a tiny bulletin, the only note of that time which I

have found to aid my memory. This time it was an arid space covered

with fox-gloves that made me forget the world: my eyes glided over

that sea of purple stalks, and encountered at the distance only the

blue chain of the Cantal Mountains. In nature, with the exception

of the sky, the sea and the sun, it is not the immense objects that

inspire me; they give me only a sensation of greatness, which flings

my own littleness distraught and disconsolate at the feet of God. But a

flower which I pick, a stream of water hiding among the rushes, a bird

alternately flying and resting before my eyes lead me on towards all

kinds of dreams. Is it not better to be moved for no definite reason

than to go through life seeking blunted interests, chilled by their

repetition and their number? All is worn out nowadays, even misfortune.

At Narbonne I reached the Canal des Deux-Mers[501]. Corneille, singing

this work, adds his own greatness to that of Louis XIV.[502]

[Sidenote: Toulouse.]

At Toulouse, from the bridge over the Garonne, I could see the line of

the Pyrenees; I was to cross it four years later: our horizons succeed

one another like our days. They offered to show me, in a cave, the

dried body of Fair Paule[503]: blessed are they that have not seen and

have believed! Montmorency[504] had been beheaded in the courtyard of

the town-hall: that head struck off must have been very important,

since they still speak of it after so many other heads have been taken

off? I do not know if, in the history of criminal proceedings, there

exists an eye-witness' evidence which has more clearly established a

man's identity:

"The fire and smoke which covered him," said Guitaut,

"prevented me from recognising him; but seeing a man who,

after breaking six of our ranks, was still killing soldiers

in the seventh, I thought that it could be only M. de

Montmorency; I knew it for certain when I saw him thrown to

the ground under his dead horse."

The deserted Church of St. Sernin impressed me by its architecture.

This church is connected with the history of the Albigenses, which the

poem so well translated by M. Fauriel[505] revives:

"The gallant young count, his father's heir and the light of

his eyes, with the cross and the sword, enter together by

one of the doors. Not a single young girl remains in chamber

or on landing; the inhabitants of the town, great and small,

all come out to gaze upon the count as on a fair and blooming

rose."

It is to the time of Simon de Montfort[506] that the loss of the

_langue d'Oc_ dates back:

"Simon, seeing himself lord of so many lands, bestowed them among the

gentle men, both French and others, _atque loci leges dedimus_," say

the eight signatory archbishops and bishops.

I should have liked to have had time to inquire at Toulouse after one

of my great admirations, Cujas[507], writing, flat on the ground, with

his books spread around him. I do not know whether the memory has

been preserved of his twice-married daughter Suzanne. Constancy had

no great attractions for Suzanne, she set it at naught; but she kept

one of her husbands alive with the same infidelities which caused the

other's death. Cujas was protected by the daughter of Francis I.[508],

Pibrac by the daughter of Henry II.[509]: two Margarets of the blood

of the Valois, the true blood of the Muses. Pibrac[510] is famous

through his quatrains, which have been translated into Persian. I was

perhaps lodged in the house of the president his father. That "good

Lord of Pibrac," according to Montaigne, was "a man of so quaint and

rare wit, of so sound judgment, and of so mild and affable behaviour."

His mind was "so dissonant and different in proportion from our

deplorable corruption, and so farre from agreeing with our tumultuous

stormes[511]." And Pibrac wrote the apology of St. Bartholomew's Night!

I hurried on without being able to stop: fate threw me back to 1838

to admire in detail the city of Raimond de Saint-Gilles[512], and to

speak of the new acquaintances I made there: M. de Lavergne[513], a

man of talent, wit, and sense; Mademoiselle Honorine Gasc[514], the

Malibran of the future. The latter reminded me, in my new quality of a

follower of Clémence Isaure[515], of those verses which Chapelle and

Bachaumont[516] wrote in the isle of Ambijoux, near Toulouse:

Hélas! que l'on serait heureux

Dans ce beau lieu digne d'envie,

Si, toujours aimé de Sylvie,

On pouvait, toujours amoureux,

Avec elle passer sa vie[517]!

Let Mademoiselle Honorine be on her guard against her beautiful voice!

Talents are "gold of Toulouse:" they bring misfortune.

[Sidenote: Bordeaux.]

Bordeaux was as yet scarce rid of its scaffolds and its dastardly

Girondins. All the towns which I saw had the appearance of beautiful

women lately risen from a violent malady, and hardly commencing to

breathe again. In Bordeaux, Louis XIV. had caused the Palais des

Tutelles to be razed, in order to build the Chateau Trompette[518];

Spon[519] and the lovers of antiquity groaned:

Pourquoi démolit-on ces colonnes des dieux,

Ouvrage des Césars, monument tutélaire[520]?

There were but a few remains of the Arena to be seen. Were we to offer

a token of regret to all that falls, life would be too short for our

tears.

I took ship for Blaye. I saw the castle, then unknown, to which in 1833

I addressed these words:

"O captive of Blaye[521], I am sorrow-stricken to be able to do nothing

to forward your present destinies!"

I travelled towards Rochefort, and went on to Nantes through the Vendée.

This district bore the mutilations and scars due to its valour, like an

old warrior. Bones bleached by time and ruins blackened by fire met the

gaze. When the Vendeans were on the point of attacking the enemy, they

knelt down to receive the blessing of a priest. Prayers uttered under

arms were not reckoned as weakness, for the Vendean who raised his

sword towards Heaven asked for victory, not for life.

The diligence in which I found myself interred was full of travellers

who related the rapes and murders with which they had glorified their

lives in the wars of the Vendée. My heart throbbed when, after crossing

the Loire at Nantes, we entered Brittany. I passed by the College of

Rennes, which witnessed the last years of my childhood. I was able to

remain for only four-and-twenty hours with my wife and sisters, and I

returned to Paris.

*

I arrived in time for the death of a man who belonged to those superior

names of the second rank in the eighteenth century which, forming a

solid rear-line in society, gave it a certain fulness and consistency.

I had known M. de La Harpe in 1789: like Flins, he had become smitten

with a great passion for my sister, Madame la Comtesse de Farcy.

He used to come up with three large volumes of his works under his

little arms, quite astounded to find that his glory did not triumph

over the most rebellious hearts. Loud-voiced, and eager in manner,

he thundered against every abuse, ordered an omelette to be made

for him at the ministers' houses when the dinner had not been to his

taste, eating with his fingers, dragging his cuffs in the dishes,

talking philosophical scurrilities to the greatest lords, who doted

on his impertinences; but, when all was said, his was an upright

and enlightened mind, impartial amid all its passions, with a quick

sense for talent, capable of admiration, of shedding tears over fine

poetry or a fine action, and possessing a foundation fit to support

repentance. He was not wanting at the end; I saw him die the death

of a brave Christian, with his taste enlarged by religion, and

retaining no pride except as against impiety, no hatred except that of

"Revolutionary language[522]."

[Sidenote: Death of M. de La Harpe.]

On my return from the Emigration, religion had disposed M. de La Harpe

in favour of my works: the illness which attacked him did not prevent

him from working himself; he read me passages from a poem which he was

writing on the Revolution[523]; in it occurred notably some pithy lines

directed against the crimes of the age and the "worthy men" who had

permitted them:

Mais s'ils ont tout osé, vous avez tout permis:

Plus l'oppresseur est vil, plus l'esclave est infâme[524].

Forgetting that he was ill, dressed in a wadded spencer, with a white

cotton night-cap on his head, he recited with all his might; then,

dropping his copy-book, he said in a voice that hardly reached the ear:

"I can't go on; I feel a grip of iron in my side."

And if, unfortunately, a maid-servant should happen to pass by, he

would resume his stentorian voice and roar:

"Go away! Shut the door!"

I said to him one day:

"You will live for the good of religion."

"Ah, yes," he replied, "it would certainly be for God; but He does not

wish it, and I shall die within these few days."

Falling back into his chair, and drawing his night-cap over his ears,

he expiated his former pride by his present resignation and humility.

At a dinner at Migneret's, I had heard him speak of himself with

the greatest modesty, declaring that he had done nothing out of

the common, but that he believed that art and the language had not

degenerated in his hands.

M. de La Harpe quitted this life on the 11th of February 1803; the

author of the _Saisons_ died almost at the same time, fortified with

all the consolations of philosophy, as M. de La Harpe died fortified

with all the consolations of religion: the one was visited by men, the

other by God.

M. de La Harpe was buried on the 12th of February 1803 in the cemetery

at the Barrière de Vaugirard. The coffin was placed beside the grave

on the little mound of earth that was soon to cover it, and M. de

Fontanes delivered a funeral oration. It was a dismal scene: whirling

snow-flakes fell from the clouds and covered the pall with white, while

the wind blew it upwards, to allow the last words of friendship to

reach the ears of death. The cemetery has been destroyed and M. de La

Harpe disinterred: there was hardly anything left of his poor ashes.

M. de La Harpe had been married under the Directory, and had not been

happy with his beautiful wife; she had been seized with loathing at the

sight of him, and had persisted in refusing him any of his rights[525].

For the rest, M. de La Harpe, like everything else, had diminished

by the side of the Revolution, which was ever growing in dimensions:

reputations hastily shrank away before the representative of that

Revolution, even as dangers lost their power before him.

*

While we were engrossed with vulgar life and death, the gigantic

progress of the world was being realized; the Man of the Time was

taking the head of the table at the banquet of the human race. Amid

vast commotions, precursors of the universal displacement, I had landed

at Calais to bear my part in the general action, within the limits set

to each soldier. I arrived, in the first year of the century, at the

camp where Bonaparte was beating the destinies to arms: soon after, he

became First Consul for life.

After the adoption of the Concordat by the Legislative Body in 1802,

Lucien, then Minister of the Interior, gave an entertainment to his

brother; I was invited, as having rallied the Christian forces and led

them back to the charge. I was in the gallery when Napoleon entered:

he struck me pleasantly; I had never seen him except at a distance.

His smile was beautiful and caressing; his eyes were admirable, owing

especially to the manner in which they were placed beneath his forehead

and framed in his eyebrows. There was as yet no charlatanism in his

glance, nothing theatrical or affected. The _Génie du Christianisme_,

which was then making a great stir, had worked upon Napoleon. A

prodigious imagination animated that so frigid politician: he would

not have been what he was, if the Muse had not been there; reason

but carried out the poet's ideas. All those men who lead the large

life are always a compound of two natures, for they must be capable

of inspiration and of action: one conceives the plan, the other

accomplishes it.

[Sidenote: The First Consul.]

Bonaparte saw me and recognised me, I know not by what. When he turned

in my direction no one knew whom he was making for; the ranks opened

successively; each hoped that the Consul would stop at him; he appeared

to feel a certain impatience with those misconceptions. I hid behind my

neighbours; suddenly Bonaparte raised his voice and said:

"Monsieur de Chateaubriand!"

I then remained standing out alone, for the crowd withdrew, and soon

formed again in a circle around the speakers. Bonaparte addressed

me with simplicity: without paying me any compliments, without idle

questions, without preamble, he spoke to me at once of Egypt and the

Arabs, as though I had been one of his intimates, and as though he were

only continuing a conversation already commenced between us.

"I was always much impressed," he said, "when I saw the sheiks fall on

their knees in the middle of the desert, turn towards the East, and

touch the sand with their foreheads. What was that unknown thing which

they worshipped in the East?"

Bonaparte interrupted himself and broached another idea without any

transition: