General politics of the moment--Louis-Philippe--M. Thiers--M. de La
Fayette--Armand Carrel--Of some women: the lady from Louisiana--Madame
Tastu--Madame Sand--M. de Talleyrand--Death of Charles X.
When, passing from the politics of the Legitimacy to general politics,
I re-read what I wrote on those politics in the years 1831, 1832 and
1833, I find that my previsions were fairly correct
Louis-Philippe is a man of intelligence whose tongue is set in movement
by a torrent of commonplaces. He pleases Europe, which reproaches us
with not knowing his worth; England is glad to see that, like herself,
we have dethroned a king; the other sovereigns forsake the Legitimacy,
which they did not find obedient. Philip has lorded it over the men
who have come closer to him; he has made game of his ministers; he has
employed them, dismissed them, reemployed them, dismissed them afresh,
after compromising them, if anything can compromise one nowadays.
Philip's superiority is real, but it is only relative; place him in
a period when society still retains some life, and his mediocrity
shall come to the surface. Two passions spoil his good qualities:
his exclusive love for his children and his insatiable eagerness to
increase his fortune; on those two points his eyes will always be
dazzled.
Philip has not that feeling for the honour of France which the elder
Bourbons had; he has no occasion for honour: he fears nothing except
popular risings, even as the nearest relations of Louis XVI. feared it.
He is sheltered by his father's crime; the hatred of what is good does
not weigh heavy on him: he is an accomplice, not a victim.
Having realized the lassitude of the times and the vileness of men's
souls, Philip has made himself at home. Laws of intimidation have
come to suppress our liberties, as I foretold at the time of my
farewell speech in the House of Peers, and not a thing has stirred; the
Government has resorted to arbitrary measures; it has murdered people
in the Rue Transnonain, shot them down in Lyons, instituted numerous
newspaper prosecutions; it has arrested private citizens, has kept them
for months and years in prison without trial, and has been applauded
for doing so. The exhausted country, which no longer understands what
is happening, has suffered all. There is hardly a man whom it is not
possible to face with his own past. From year to year, from month
to month, we have written, said and done the exact opposite of what
we used to write, say and do. By dint of having cause for blushing,
we have ceased to blush; our inconsistencies escape our memory, so
numerous have they become. To have done with it, we adopt the course
of declaring that we have never changed, or that we have changed only
through the progressive transformation of our ideas and our enlightened
apprehension of the times. Events so rapid have aged us so speedily
that, when men remind us of our doings of a past period, it seems to us
that they are talking of some other man than ourselves: and besides, to
have changed is to have done what everybody does.
[Sidenote: Louis-Philippe.]
Philip did not think it necessary, as did the Restored Branch, to be
the master in every village in order to reign; he considered that it
was enough to hold sway in Paris: therefore, if ever he could turn the
Capital into a warlike town, with an annual roll of sixty thousand
pretorians, he would think himself safe. Europe would let him alone,
because he would persuade the sovereigns that he was acting with a
view to stifling the revolution in its old cradle, while leaving the
liberties, independence and honour of France as a pledge in the hands
of the foreigners. Philip is a policeman: Europe can spit in his
face; he wipes himself, gives thanks and shows his patent as a king.
Moreover, he is the only Prince whom the French would, at present, be
capable of supporting. The degradation of the elected Head constitutes
his strength; we momentarily find in his person enough to satisfy
our monarchical habits and our democratic leanings; we obey a power
which we believe ourselves to have the right to insult; that is all
the liberty that we require: on our knees as a nation, we slap our
master's face, re-establishing privilege at his feet, equality on his
cheek. Crafty and guileful, a Louis XI. of the age of philosophy, the
monarch of our choice dexterously steers his ship over a liquid mire.
The Elder Branch of the Bourbons is dried up, save one bud alone; the
Younger Branch is rotten. The Head inaugurated at the town-hall has
never thought of any one but himself: he sacrifices Frenchmen to what
he believes to be his security. When men argue about what would be
fitting for the greatness of the country, they forget the nature of the
Sovereign: he is persuaded that he would be undone by methods which
would be the saving of France; according to him, that which would give
life to the Royalty would be the death of the King. For the rest, none
has the right to despise him, for every one is on the same contemptible
level. But, whatever may be the prosperity that forms the object of
his dreams, in the last result, either he or his children will fail to
prosper, because he abandons the people, from whom he holds all. On the
other hand, the legitimate kings, abandoning the legitimate kings, will
fall: principles are not denied with impunity. Though the revolutions
may, for a moment, have been diverted from their course, they will none
the less come to swell the torrent which is under-mining the ancient
edifice: none has played his part, none shall be saved.
Since no power among us is inviolable, since the hereditary sceptre has
fallen four times within thirty-eight years, since the royal diadem
fastened by victory has twice slipped from the head of Napoleon, since
the Sovereignty of July has been incessantly attacked, we must conclude
from this that it is not the Republic which is impossible, but the
Monarchy.
France is under the dominion of an idea hostile to the throne: a diadem
of which men at first recognised the authority, which they next trod
under foot, then picked up, only to tread it under foot again, is
merely a useless temptation and a symbol of disorder. A master is set
over men who seem to call for him by their memories and who no longer
support him by their manners; he is set over generations which, having
lost the sense of moderation and social decency, know only how to
insult the royal person or to replace respect by servility.
Philip has within him the wherewithal to delay the march of destiny,
but not to stop it. The Democratic Party alone is progressing, because
it is advancing towards the world of the future. Those who refuse to
admit the general causes of destruction where monarchical principles
are concerned in vain look to be delivered from the present yoke by
a motion of the Chambers; the latter will never consent to reform,
because reform would be their death. The Opposition, on its side, which
has become an industrial Opposition, will never give the death-thrust
to the King of its own making, as it gave it to Charles X.: it makes
a disturbance in order to obtain places, it complains, it is peevish;
but, when it finds itself face to face with Philip, it draws back; for,
though it wishes to have the handling of affairs, it does not wish to
overthrow that which it has created nor that by which it lives. Two
fears stop it: the fear of the return of the Legitimacy, the fear of
the reign of the people; it clings to Philip, whom it does not love,
but whom it looks upon as a safeguard. Stuffed full of offices and
money, abdicating its own will, the Opposition obeys what it knows to
be fatal and goes to sleep in the mire, which is the down invented by
the industry of the age: it is not so pleasant as the other, but it is
cheaper.
[Sidenote: Philip's turpitude.]
All these things notwithstanding, a sovereignty of a few months, of a
few years, even, if you wish, will not change the irrevocable future.
There is hardly any one now but confesses the Legitimacy to have been
preferable to the Usurpation, in so far as security, liberty, property
were concerned, and also our relations with foreign Powers, for the
principle of our present Sovereignty is hostile to that of the European
sovereignties. Since he was pleased to receive the investiture of the
Throne at the good pleasure and with the certain knowledge of the
democracy, Philip missed his opportunity at the start: he ought to
have leapt on horseback and galloped to the Rhine; or rather, he ought
to have resisted a movement which was carrying him without conditions
towards a crown: more durable and more suitable institutions would have
arisen from that resistance.
It has been said that "M. le Duc d'Orléans could not have refused the
crown without plunging us into dreadful troubles:" this is the argument
of cowards, dupes and cheats. No doubt, conflicts would have ensued;
but they would have been swiftly followed by a return to law and order.
What has Philip done for the country after all? Would there have been
more blood shed by his refusing the sceptre than flowed because of the
acceptance of that same sceptre in Paris, Lyons, Antwerp, the Vendée,
without reckoning those streams of blood spilt, as a consequence of our
Elective Monarchy, in Poland, Italy, Portugal, Spain? Has Philip, in
compensation for these misfortunes, given us liberty? Has he given us
glory? He has spent his time in begging for his legitimation among the
potentates, in degrading France by making her the handmaid of England,
by giving her as a hostage; he has tried to make the age come to him,
to make it old with his House, not wishing to become young himself with
the age.
Why did he not marry his eldest son[284] to some fair commoner of his
country? That would have meant wedding France: those nuptials of the
people and the Royalty would have made the Kings repent; for those
Kings, who have already taken advantage of Philip's submissiveness,
will not be content with what they have obtained: the might of the
populace which appears through our Municipal Monarchy terrifies them.
The Potentate of the Barricades, to become completely agreeable to the
absolute potentates, ought above all to destroy the liberty of the
press and abolish our constitutional institutions. At the bottom of
his soul, he detests them as much as they, but he has to keep within
bounds. All this remissness offends the other sovereigns; the only way
to make them have patience is to sacrifice everything to them abroad:
in order to accustom us to becoming Philip's liegemen at home, we are
commencing by making ourselves the vassals of Europe.
I have said a hundred times and I repeat again, the old society is
dying. I am not easy-going enough, nor quack enough, nor sufficiently
deceived by my hopes to take the smallest interest in that which
exists. France, the ripest of the present nations, will probably be
the first to go. It is likely that the Elder Bourbons, to whom I shall
die attached, would not even to-day find a lasting shelter in the Old
Monarchy. Never have the successors of an immolated monarch worn his
torn mantle long after him: there is distrust on both sides; the prince
dares not rely upon the nation, the nation refuses to believe that
the reinstated family is capable of forgiving it. A scaffold raised
between a people and a king prevents them from seeing each other: there
are tombs that never close. Capet's head was so high that the little
executioners were obliged to strike it off to take its crown, even as
the Caribbees used to cut down the palm-tree in order to gather its
fruit. The stem of the Bourbons had propagated itself in the different
trunks which, bending down, took root and rose again as haughty shoots;
that family, after being the pride of the other royal Houses, seems to
have become their fatality.
[Illustration: Louis Philippe.]
[Sidenote: Prospects of the Usurpation.]
But would it be more reasonable to think that the descendants of Philip
would have more chances of reigning than the young heir of Henry IV.?
It is vain to contrive different combinations of political ideas: the
moral verities remain unchangeable. There are inevitable reactions,
instructive, magisterial, avenging. The Monarch who initiated us
into liberty, Louis XVI., was made to expiate in his own person the
despotism of Louis XIV. and the corruption of Louis XV.: and shall it
be said that Louis-Philippe, he or his line, shall not pay the debt of
the depravity, of the Regency? Was that debt not contracted anew by
"Égalité" at the scaffold of Louis XVI., and did Philip his son not
increase the paternal contract when, a faithless guardian, he dethroned
his ward? "Égalité" redeemed nothing by losing his life; the tears
shed with the last breath redeem nobody: they only wet the breast and
do not fall upon the conscience. If the Orleans Branch were able to
reign by the right of the vices and crimes of its ancestors, where,
then, would Providence be? Never would a more terrible temptation have
disquieted the good man. What deludes us is that we measure the designs
of Eternity by the scale of our short life. We pass away so quickly
that God's punishment cannot always fall within the short moment of our
existence: the punishment descends when the time comes; it no longer
finds the original culprit, but it finds his House, which leaves room
for action.
Rising up in the universal order of things, this reign of
Louis-Philippe's, however long it last, will never be anything but an
anomaly, a momentary breach of the permanent laws of justice: those
laws are violated in a restricted and relative sense; they are followed
in an unlimited and general sense. From an enormity that has received
the apparent consent of Heaven, we must draw a loftier conclusion: we
must deduce from it the Christian proof of the abolition of the Royalty
itself. It is this abolition, and not any individual chastisement,
that will become the expiation of the death of Louis XVI.; none will
be admitted to gird on the diadem, after that just man: as witness
Napoleon the Great and Charles X. the Pious. To render the crown
completely hateful, it will have been permitted to the son of the
regicide to stretch himself for a moment, as a false king, in the
blood-stained bed of the martyr.
For the rest, all these arguments, just though they be, will never
shake my loyalty to my young King: were none but myself to remain in
France, I shall always be proud to have been the last subject of him
who was to be the last king.
The Revolution of July has found its King: has it found its
representative? I have, at different times, described the men who,
from 1789 to this day, have appeared upon the scene. Those men were
more or less connected with the old race of mankind: we had a scale of
proportion to measure them by. We have now come to generations that
no longer belong to the past; studied under the microscope, they do
not seem capable of life, and yet they combine with elements in which
they move; they are able to breathe an air which we cannot breathe.
The future will perhaps discover formulas to calculate the laws of
existence of those beings; but the present has no means of appreciating
them.
Without, therefore, being able to explain the changed species, we
notice, here and there, a few individuals whom we are able to grasp,
because of their peculiar failings or distinctive qualities which make
them stand out from among the crowd. M. Thiers, for instance, is the
only man that the Revolution of July has produced. He has founded the
school that admires the Terror, a school to which he himself belongs.
If the men of the Terror, those deniers and denied of God, were such
great men, the authority of their judgment ought to carry weight; but
those men, reviling one another, declare that the party whose throats
they are cutting is a party of rascals. See what Madame Roland says
of Condorcet, what Barbaroux[285], the principal actor of the 10th
of August, thinks of Marat, what Camille Desmoulins writes against
Saint-Just[286] Are we to appreciate Danton according to Robespierre's
opinion, or Robespierre according to Danton's? When the Conventionals
have so poor a notion of one another, how can we, without failing in
the respect which we owe them, entertain an opinion different from
theirs?
With its material mind, Jacobinism does not perceive that the Terror
failed from not being capable of fulfilling the conditions of its
continuance. It was unable to achieve its aim, because it was unable
to cut off enough heads: it would have needed four or five hundred
thousand more; now time was wanting for those long massacres; nothing
remains but unfinished crimes whose fruit cannot be gathered, because
the last sun of the storm did not ripen it sufficiently.
[Sidenote: The French revolutionaries.]
The secret of the inconsistencies of the men of the day lies in the
privation of moral sense, the absence of any fixed principle and the
worship of force: whoever goes to the wall is guilty and without merit,
at least without that merit which assimilates with events. Behind
the liberal phrases of the devotees of the Terror, you must see only
what lies hidden there: the deification of success. Do not adore the
Convention except in the manner in which one adores a tyrant. When
the Convention is upset, go over with your baggage of liberties to
the Directory, then to Bonaparte, and that without having a suspicion
of your metamorphosis, without thinking that you have changed. Sworn
dramatist that you are, while looking upon the Girondins as poor
wretches because they have been "beaten," nevertheless draw a fantastic
picture of their death: they are beautiful young men marching, crowned
with flowers, to the sacrifice. The Girondins, a cowardly faction,
who spoke in favour of Louis XVI. and voted for his execution, did
wonderfully, it is true, on the scaffold; but who did not, in those
days, run full butt at death? The women were distinguished for their
heroism: the young girls of Verdun climbed the steps of the altar
like Iphigenia; the artisans, about whom we are prudently silent,
those plebeians of whom the Convention reaped so large a crop, braved
the steel of the executioner as resolutely as our grenadiers braved
the steel of the enemy. For one priest and one noble, the Convention
offered up thousands of workmen taken from the lowest classes of the
population[287]: this is what we always refuse to remember.
Does M. Thiers set store by his principles? Not in the least: he has
cried up massacre and he would preach humanity in quite as edifying
a manner; he gave himself out as a bigot for liberty, and he has
oppressed Lyons, shot people down in the Rue Transnonain, and upheld
the September Laws against all men: if he ever reads this, he will take
it for a panegyric.
Since he became President of the Council and Minister for Foreign
Affairs[288], M. Thiers is enraptured with the diplomatic intrigues
of the Talleyrand School; he runs the risk of being taken for a
buffoon-in-waiting, for lack of equilibrium, gravity and silence. One
can turn up one's nose at earnestness and greatness of soul: but it
does not do to say so, before one has brought the subjugated world to
take its seat at the orgies of Grand-Vaux[289].
For the rest, M. Thiers combines with inferior manners an instinct for
higher things; while the feudal survivors have become misers and turned
themselves into stewards of their own land, he, M. Thiers, a great lord
by second birth, travels like a new Atticus[290], purchases works of
art on the roads and revives the prodigality of the old aristocracy:
this is a distinction; but, if he sows as easily as he reaps, he ought
to be more cautious of the intimacy of his old habits: consideration is
one of the ingredients that go to make the public man.
[Sidenote: Adolphe Thiers.]
Stirred by his mercurial nature, M. Thiers has pretended that he was
going to kill, in Madrid, the anarchy which I had overthrown there in
1823: a project all the bolder inasmuch as M. Thiers was struggling
with the opinions of Louis-Philippe. He may suppose himself to be a
Bonaparte; he may think that his pen-cutter is but an elongation of the
Napoleonic sword; he may be persuaded that he is a great general, he
may dream of the conquest of Europe, by reason that he has constituted
himself its historian[291] and that he is very inconsiderately bringing
back the ashes of Napoleon[292]. I acquiesce in all these pretensions;
I will only say, as for Spain, that, when M. Thiers thought of invading
her, he was deceived in his calculations; he would have ruined his
King in 1836, and I saved mine in 1823. The essential thing, then,
is to do in the nick of time what one wants to do; there are two
forces, the force of men and the force of things: when these two are
in opposition to one another, nothing is accomplished. At the present
moment, Mirabeau would rouse nobody, even though his corruption would
do him no harm; for, just now, none is cried down because of his vices:
one is slandered only for his virtues. M. Thiers must make up his mind
to one of three courses: to declare himself the representative of the
republican future[293], or perch himself upon the counterfeit Monarchy
of July like a monkey on a camel's back, or revive the imperial order
of things. This last would be to M. Thiers's taste; but the Empire
without an emperor: is that possible? It is more natural to believe
that the author of the _Histoire de la Révolution_ will allow himself
to be absorbed by a vulgar ambition: he will want to remain in power
or return to it; in order to keep or recover his place, he will recant
anything that the moment or his own interest will seem to him to
require[294]; to strip one's self before the public, there is audacity:
but is M. Thiers young enough for his beauty to serve him as a veil?
Putting Deutz[295] and Judas on one side, I recognise in M. Thiers a
supple, prompt, shrewd and malleable mind, perhaps the heir to the
future, capable of comprehending everything, except the greatness that
comes from moral order. Free from jealousy, pettiness and prejudice, he
stands out against the tame and obscure background of the mediocrities
of the time. His excessive pride is not yet odious, because it does not
consist in despising others. M. Thiers possesses resources, variety,
fortunate gifts; he troubles little about differences of opinion,
bears no malice, is not afraid of compromising himself, does justice
to a man, not for his probity or for what he thinks, but for what he
is worth: which would not prevent him from having us all strangled, in
case of need. M. Thiers is not what he is able to be: years will modify
him, unless the elation of self-love should place obstacles in the way.
If his brain stands firm and he is not carried away by some headstrong
act, public life will reveal unheeded superior qualities in him. He
must soon rise or fall; the chances are that M. Thiers will either
become a great minister or remain a marplot.
[Sidenote: Lost opportunities.]
M. Thiers has already been wanting in resolution at a time when he
held the fate of the world in his hands: if he had given the order
to attack the English Fleet, with the superior force that we had in
the Mediterranean, our success was assured; the Turkish and Egyptian
Fleets, lying together in the harbour of Alexandria, would have come to
swell our fleet; a success obtained over England would have electrified
France. We should have at once found 150,000 men to enter Bavaria and
fling themselves upon some point in Italy, where nothing was prepared
in prevision of an attack. The whole world might once more have changed
its aspect. Would our aggression have been a just one? That is another
affair; but we could have asked Europe whether it had acted loyally
towards us in the treaties, or whether, abusing their victory, Russia
and Germany had enlarged their territory beyond measure, while France
had been reduced to her old clipped frontiers. Be this as it may, M.
Thiers did not dare play his last card; looking upon his life, he did
not think himself sufficiently supported, and yet it was because he
was staking nothing that he might have played for all. We have fallen
under the feet of Europe; such an opportunity to recover ourselves will
perhaps not occur for long.
[Illustration: M. Thiers.]
In the last result, M. Thiers, in order to save his system, has reduced
France to a space of fifteen leagues which he has made to bristle with
fortresses; we shall soon see if Europe is right in laughing at this
piece of child's play on the part of the great thinker.
And this is how, allowing my pen to run away with me, I have devoted
more pages to a man of uncertain future than I have given to persons
whose memory is assured. It is a misfortune to live too long; I
have come to a period of sterility in which France sees only lean
generations run: _Lupa carca nella sua magrezza._[296] These Memoirs
diminish in interest with the days that have supervened, diminish by
what they were able to borrow from the greatness of events: they will
end, I fear me, like the daughters of Achelous[297]. The Roman Empire,
so magnificently proclaimed by Livy, contracts and goes out dimly in
the accounts of Cassiodorus. You were more fortunate, O Thucydides
and Plutarch, Sallust and Tacitus, when you told of the parties that
divided Athens and Rome! You were certain, at least, of animating them,
not only with your genius, but also with the splendour of the Greek
and the gravity of the Latin language! What could we relate of our
expiring society, we Welshmen, in our jargon confined to narrow and
barbarous limits? If these later pages reproduced our parliamentary
tautology, those eternal definitions of our rights, our ministerial
prize-fights, would they, fifty years hence, be anything more than
the unintelligible columns of an old newspaper? Of a thousand and one
conjectures, would a single one prove to be true? Who would foresee
the strange leaps and bounds of the inconstancy of the French spirit?
Who could understand how its execrations and infatuations, its curses
and blessings become transformed without apparent reason? Who would
be able to guess and explain how, by turns, it adores and detests,
how it springs from a political system, how, with liberty on its lips
and bondage in its heart, it believes in one truth in the morning
and is persuaded of a contrary truth at night? Throw us a few grains
of dust: like Virgil's bees, we shall cease our conflict to fly away
elsewhither[298].
If, by chance, anything great should still be stirring here below, our
country will remain supine. The womb of a society that is becoming
discomposed is barren; the very crimes which it begets are still-born
crimes, smitten as they are with the barrenness of their origin. The
period upon which we are entering is the tow-path along which fatally
condemned generations will draw the old world towards a world unknown.
In this year 1834, M. de La Fayette has just died[299]. I think I must
have been unjust in speaking of him in former days; I think I must
have represented him as a sort of double-faced, double-famed ninny:
a hero on the other side of the Atlantic, a Giles on this side[300].
It has needed more than forty years to recognise in M. de La Fayette
qualities that had been persistently denied him. He expressed himself
in the Tribune with ease and in the tone of a well-bred man. His life
was unblemished; he was affable, obliging and generous. Under the
Empire, he behaved nobly and lived a life apart; under the Restoration,
he was less dignified: he stooped so far as to allow himself to be
called the "grand old man" of the auction-rooms of Carbonarism and
the ring-leader of petty conspiracies, glad as he was to escape from
justice at Belfort[301], like a vulgar adventurer. In the early stages
of the Revolution, he did not mix with the cut-throats; he fought them
by force of arms and tried to save Louis XVI.; but, though abhorring
the massacres, obliged though he were to fly from them, he found words
of praise for scenes in which some heads were carried at the ends of
pikes.
[Sidenote: La Fayette.]
M. de La Fayette became exalted because he lived: there is a reputation
which bursts forth spontaneously from talent and of which death
increases the splendour by arresting the talent in youth; there is
another sort of reputation which is the offspring of age, the backward
daughter of time: without being great of itself, it is great through
the revolutions in whose midst chance has placed it. The bearer of
that reputation, by the mere fact of his existence, is mixed up with
everything; his name becomes the sign or the banner of everything: M.
de La Fayette[302] will be the "National Guard" to the end of time.
By an extraordinary effect, the result of his actions was often in
contradiction with his thoughts: as a Royalist, he overthrew, in 1789,
a Royalty eight centuries old; as a Republican, he created, in 1830,
the Royalty of the Barricades: he went away giving Philip the crown
which he had taken from Louis XVI. Moulded as he was with events, when
the alluvium of our misfortunes shall have become consolidated, his
image will be found encrusted in the revolutionary dough.
The ovation which he received in the United States enhanced his fame to
a singular degree: a nation, rising to greet him, covered him with the
effulgence of its gratitude. Everett[303] apostrophized him as follows
in the peroration to the speech which he delivered in 1824:
"Welcome, friend of our fathers, to our shores!... Enjoy a triumph such
as never conqueror or monarch enjoyed.... The friend of your youth,
the more than friend of his country, rests in the bosom of the soil he
redeemed. On the banks of his Potomac he lies in glory and peace. You
will revisit the hospitable shades of Mount Vernon, but him whom you
venerated as we did, you will not meet at its door.... But the grateful
children of America will bid you welcome, in his name. Welcome, thrice
welcome to our shores; and whithersoever throughout the limits of the
continent your course shall take you, the ear that hears you shall
bless you, the eye that sees you shall bear witness to you, and every
tongue exclaim, with heartfelt joy:
"'Welcome, welcome, La Fayette[304]!'"
In the New World, M. de La Fayette contributed to the formation of a
new society; in the Old World, to the destruction of an old society:
liberty invokes him in Washington, anarchy in Paris.
M. de La Fayette had only one idea, and, unfortunately for him, it was
that of his century; the fixity of that idea constituted his empire: it
served him as a blinker, prevented him from looking to right or left
of him; he walked with a firm step along a single line; he marched on
without falling into precipices, not because he saw them, but because
he did not see them; blindness stood him in the stead of genius: all
that is fixed is fatal, and that which is fatal is powerful.
[Sidenote: La Fayette's funeral.]
I still see M. de La Fayette, at the head of the National Guard,
passing along the boulevards, in 1790, on his way to the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine; on the 22nd of May 1834, I saw him lying in his coffin,
following the same boulevards. In the funeral procession one remarked
a troop of Americans, each with a yellow flower in his button-hole. M.
de La Fayette had sent to the United States for a quantity of earth
sufficient to cover him in his grave; but his intentions were not
carried out[305]: when the fatal moment came, forgetting both his
political dreams and the romance of his life, he expressed the wish to
lie at Picpus beside his virtuous wife[306]: death restores order to
all things.
At Picpus are buried the victims of the Revolution[307] commenced by
M. de La Fayette; there stands a chapel where perpetual prayers are
said in honour of those victims. I accompanied M. le Duc Matthieu de
Montmorency to Picpus[308]; he had been M. de La Fayette's colleague in
the Constituent Assembly: on touching the bottom of the grave, the rope
turned that Christian's coffin on one side, as though he had raised
himself on his hip to say a last prayer.
I stood in the crowd, at the entrance to the Rue Grange-Batelière, when
M. de La Fayette's funeral passed by: at the top of the ascent to the
boulevard, the hearse stopped; I saw it, all gilded by a fleeting ray
of the sun, gleam above the helmets and arms: then the shadow returned,
and it disappeared from sight.
The multitude dispersed; sellers of "goodies" cried their
_oublies_[309], vendors of trifles hawked about paper mills, which
twirled round in the same wind whose breath had shaken the plumes of
the funeral car.
In the sitting of the Chamber of Deputies of the 20th of May 1834, the
President[310] spoke:
"General La Fayette's name," he said, "will remain famous in our
history.... While expressing to you the sentiments of condolence of
the Chamber, I join to these, sir and dear colleague[311], the private
assurance of my attachment."
After these words, the reporter of the sitting adds, in brackets, the
word, "(Laughter)."
That is what one of the most serious lives is reduced to. What remains
of the death of the greatest men? A grey mantle and a straw cross, as
on the corpse of the Duc de Guise, assassinated at Blois.
Within earshot of the public crier who was selling for a son, at the
gate of the Tuileries Palace, the news of the death of Napoleon, I
heard two quacks shouting the praises of their antidotes; and, in the
_Moniteur_ of the 21st of January 1793, I read the following words
below the account of the execution of Louis XVI.:
"Two hours after the execution, nothing remained to show that he
who had once been the head of the nation had just undergone the
punishment of criminals."
Following on those words came this notice:
"_Ambroise_, comic opera[312]."
The last actor in the drama played fifty years ago, M. de La Fayette
remained upon the scene; the last chorus of the Greek tragedy delivers
the moral of the play:
"Learn, O blind mortals, to turn your eyes upon the last day of life."
And I, a spectator seated in an empty play-house, amid deserted boxes
and extinguished lights, remain alone, of my time, before the lowered
curtain, alone with the silence and the night.
[Sidenote: Armand Carrel.]
Armand Carrel threatened Philip's future even as General La Fayette
beset his past You know how I came to be acquainted with M.
Carrel[313]; since 1832, I did not cease to keep up relations with him
until the day when I followed him to the Cemetery of Saint-Mandé.
Armand Carrel was melancholy; he began to fear that the French were
incapable of a rational feeling of liberty; he had a vague presentiment
of the shortness of his life: as though it were a thing upon which he
did not rely and to which he attached no value, he was always willing
to risk it on a cast of the die. If he had fallen in his duel with
young Laborie[314], about Henry V., his death would at least have had
a great cause and a great stage; probably his funeral would have been
honoured by a great display of bloodshed: he left us for a miserable
quarrel which was not worth a hair of his head.
He was suffering from one of his native attacks of gloom, when he
inserted an article on myself, in the _National_, to which I replied by
the following note:
"PARIS, 5 _May_ 1834.
"Your article, monsieur, is full of that exquisite feeling for
situations and proprieties which places you above all the political
writers of the day. I say nothing to you of your exceptional
talent; you know that I did it ample justice before I had the
honour of knowing you. I do not thank you for your praises: I like
to owe them to what I look upon now as an old friendship. You are
rising very high, monsieur; you are beginning to stand alone, like
all men made for a great fame: gradually the crowd, unable to
follow them, leaves them, and we see them the better because they
hold themselves aloof.
"CHATEAUBRIAND."
I tried to console him by another letter, on the 31st of August, when
he was condemned for a newspaper offense. I received the following
reply from him; it shows forth the opinions of the man, his regrets and
his hopes:
TO MONSIEUR LE VICOMTE DE CHATEAUBRIAND
"MONSIEUR,
"Your letter of the 31st of August was handed to me only on my
arrival in Paris. I would come to thank you for it, at once, if
I were not obliged to devote the short time which can still be
left to me by the police, who are informed of my return, to a
few preparations for entering prison. Yes, monsieur, here am I
condemned by the bench to six months' imprisonment for a fanciful
offense and by virtue of an equally fanciful piece of legislation;
for the jury wittingly let me go unpunished upon the best-founded
charge, and that in spite of a defense which, so far from
extenuating my crime of telling the truth to the person of King
Louis-Philippe, had aggravated that crime by setting it up as an
established right for the whole of the opposition press. I am glad
that the difficulties of so bold a thesis, as times go, appeared to
you to be almost surmounted by the defense which you read and in
which it was so great an advantage to me to be able to invoke the
authority of the book in which, eighteen years ago, you instructed
your own party in the principles of constitutional responsibility.
"I often ask myself with a heavy heart what purpose will have
been served by writings such as yours, monsieur, such as those
of the most eminent men of the opinion to which I myself belong,
if, from this agreement between the highest intellects of the
country for the constant defense of the rights of discussion, there
did not at last result, for the bulk of French minds, a resolve
thenceforth to insist upon, under every form of government, to
exact from all victorious systems, whatever they may be, liberty
of thought, speech and writing, as the first condition of all
lawfully exercised authority. Is it not true, monsieur, that when,
under the last government, you asked for the most complete liberty
of discussion, it was not for the momentary service which your
political friends might derive from it in opposition to adversaries
who had forced their way into power by intrigue? There were some
who made use of the press in this way, as they have since proved;
but you, monsieur, asked for liberty of discussion as essential
to the public welfare, as the weapon and general protection of
all ideas, young or old; that is what earned for you, monsieur,
the gratitude and respect of opinions to which the Revolution of
July has opened the lists again. That is why our work is incident
on yours, and, when we quote your writings, we do so less from
admiration of the incomparable talent which produced them than
as aspiring to continue the same task at a great distance, young
soldiers as we are of a cause of which you are the most glorious
veteran.
"What you have wished for thirty years, monsieur, what I would
wish, if I be permitted to mention myself after you, is to secure
to the interests that divide our beautiful France a law of combat
that shall be more humane, more civilized, more brotherly, more
conclusive than civil war. When shall we succeed in bringing
ideas face to face, instead of parties, and lawful and avowable
interests, instead of disguises, egoism and cupidity? When shall
we see speech and persuasion cause those inevitable transactions
which the contest of parties and the shedding of blood also bring
to pass by exhaustion, but too late for the dead in both camps
and, too often, without profit for the wounded and survivors? As
you so sorrowfully say, monsieur, it seems that many lessons have
been wasted and that men no longer know in France what it costs to
take refuge in a despotism that promises silence and repose. We
must none the less continue to speak, write and print; resources
most unforeseen sometimes issue from constancy. And so, of all the
splendid examples which you, monsieur, have set, that which I have
most constantly before my eyes is expressed in one word: Persevere.
"Accept, monsieur, the sentiments of unalterable affection with
which I am glad to call myself
"Your most devoted servant,
"A. CARREL.
"PUTEAUX, near NEUILLY, 4 _October_ 1834."
[Sidenote: Armand Carrel in prison.]
M. Carrel was locked up at Sainte-Pélagie; I used to go to see him two
or three times a week: I found him standing behind his window-grating.
He reminded me of his neighbour, a young African lion in the Jardin
des Plantes: motionless at the bars of its cage, the son of the desert
turned its vague and sad look upon the objects outside; one could
see that he would not live. Then M. Carrel and I used to go down the
stairs; the servant of Henry V. walked with the enemy of the Kings in a
damp, dark, narrow yard, surrounded by high walls, like a well. There
were other Republicans also taking exercise in this yard: those young
and ardent Revolutionaries, with their mustachios, beards, long hairs,
Greek or German caps, pale faces, fierce looks, threatening aspect,
were like those pre-existent souls in Tartarus that had not yet reached
the light; they were preparing to break into life. Their dress acted
upon them as the uniform upon the soldier, as Nessus' blood-stained
shirt upon Hercules: they were an avenging world, which lay hidden
behind the society of the present and which made one shudder.
In the evening, they met in the room of their leader, Armand Carrel;
they spoke of what would have to be accomplished when they came into
power and of the necessity for bloodshed. Discussions arose on the
"great citizens of the Terror:" some, who were partisans of Marat, were
atheists and materialists; others, who admired Robespierre, adored that
new Christ. Had not St. Robespierre said, in his speech on the Supreme
Being, that belief in God "gives strength to defy misfortune" and that
"innocence on the scaffold made the tyrant turn pale in his triumphal
car?" The hocus-pocus of an executioner who talks meltingly of God,
misfortune, tyranny, scaffolds, in order to persuade men that he kills
only the guilty, and even then in consequence of virtue; the foresight
of evil-doers who, feeling the punishment draw nigh, pose in advance as
Socrates before the judge and try to frighten the blade by threatening
it with their innocence!
The stay at Sainte-Pélagie did M. Carrel harm: shut up with hot-heads,
he fought against their ideas, blamed them, defied them, nobly refusing
to illuminate his room on the 21st of January; but, at the same time,
he chafed at his sufferings, and his reason was disturbed by the
murderous sophistry that resounded in his ears.
The mothers, sisters and wives of those young men came to look after
them in the mornings and to do their rooms. One day, as I was passing
along the dark corridor which led to M. Carrel's room, I heard a
bewitching voice issue from a neighbouring den: a beautiful woman,
hatless, with her hair hanging loose, was sitting on the edge of a
pallet-bed, mending the tattered clothes of a kneeling prisoner, who
seemed less the captive of Philip than of the woman at whose feet he
was chained.
M. Carrel, delivered from his captivity, came, in his turn, to see me.
A few days before his fatal hour had struck, he came to bring me the
number of the _National_ in which he had taken the trouble to insert an
article on my _Essais sur la littérature anglaise_, in which article he
had, with too much praise, quoted the concluding pages of those Essays.
After his death, they gave me that article written entirely in his own
hand, and I keep it as a token of his friendship. "After his death:"
what words I have just written without noticing it!
[Sidenote: Armand Carrel's duel.]
Though forming a necessary supplement to laws which take no cognizance
of offenses against honour, the duel is a horrible thing, especially
when it destroys a life full of hopes and robs society of one of
those rare men who came only after the labour of a century, in the
concatenation of certain ideas and certain events. Carrel fell in the
wood that saw the Duc d'Enghien fall: the shade of the grandson of the
Great Condé served as a witness to the illustrious plebeian and took
him with it. That fatal wood has twice made me weep: at least I cannot
reproach myself for having, in those two catastrophes, failed in what I
owed to my sympathies and my grief.
M. Carrel, who, in his other meetings, had never dreamt of death,
thought of it before this one: he employed the night in writing his
last wishes, as though he had been warned of the result of the combat.
At eight o'clock in the morning, on the 22nd of July 1836, he went with
a quick, light step to those shadows where the roebuck gambols at that
hour.
Placed at the distance measured out, he moved swiftly forwards,
fired without turning sideways, as was his custom: it would seem as
though there were never enough danger for him. Wounded to the death
and supported in the arms of his friends, as he passed before his
adversary[315], who was himself wounded, he said to him:
"Are you in great pain, sir?"
Armand Carrel was as gentle as he was fearless.
On the 22nd, I heard of the accident too late; on the morning of the
23rd, I went to Saint-Mandé: M. Carrel's friends were most exceedingly
anxious. I wanted to go in, but the surgeon observed that my presence
might over-excite the patient and dissipate the faint glimmer of hope
that still remained. I went away in consternation. The next day, the
24th, when I was making ready to return to Saint-Mandé, Hyacinthe, whom
I had sent ahead of me, came to tell me that the unfortunate young man
had expired at half-past five, after suffering atrocious pain: life in
all its force had waged a desperate fight with death.
The funeral took place on Tuesday the 26th. M. Carrel's father and
brother had arrived from Rouen. I found them gathered in a little room
with three or four of the most intimate companions of the man whose
loss we were mourning. They embraced me and M. Carrel's father said to
me:
"Armand would have been a Christian like his father, his mother, his
brothers, his sisters; the hand of the clock had but a few hours to
travel over in order to reach the same point on its face."
I shall eternally regret that I was not able to see Carrel on his
death-bed: I should not have despaired, at the last moment, of making
the hand "travel over" the space beyond which it would have stopped at
the hour of the Christian.
Armand Carrel was not so irreligious as has been supposed; he had
doubts: when from fixed incredulity a man passes to indecision, he is
very near to arriving at certainty. A few days before his death, he
said:
"I would give the whole of this life to believe in the other."
When reporting the suicide of M. Sautelet[316], he wrote this powerful
passage:
"I have been able to carry my life, in thought, to that instant,
swift as lightning, in which the sight of objects, the power of
movement, speech and perception will escape me and the last forces
of my mind will gather to form the one idea, 'I am dying;' but of
the minute, the second that will immediately follow I have always
had an undefinable dread; my imagination has always refused to
guess at any part of it. The depths of hell are a thousand times
less terrible to measure than that universal uncertainty:
. . . . To die; to sleep;
To sleep! Perchance to dream[317]!
"I have seen in all men, whatever their strength of character
or belief, that same inability to go beyond their last earthly
impression. There we lose our heads, as though, on reaching that
boundary, we found ourselves suspended over a precipice of ten
thousand feet. We drive away that terrifying sight to go to fight
a duel, deliver an assault on a redoubt or face a stormy sea; we
even seem to sneer at life; we display a bold, contented, serene
countenance; but that is because our imagination reveals success
rather than death, because our minds are much less exercised upon
the dangers than upon the means of escaping them[318]."
[Sidenote: Armand Carrel's funeral.]
These words are remarkable in the mouth of a man fated to be killed in
a duel.
In 1800, when I returned to France, I did not know that a friend was
being born to me on the shore where I was landing[319]. In 1836, I
saw that friend lowered into the grave without those consolations of
religion of which I brought back the memory to my country in the first
year of the century.
I followed the coffin from the residence of the deceased to the place
of burial; I walked beside M. Carrel's father and gave my arm to M.
Arago: M. Arago has measured the Heaven which I have sung. On reaching
the gate of the little rural cemetery, the procession stopped; speeches
were delivered. The absence of the cross informed me that the emblem of
my affliction was to remain enclosed in the depths of my soul.
Six years before, during the Days of July, passing in front of the
colonnade of the Louvre, near an open grave, I met young men who
carried me back to the Luxembourg, when I was going to make my protest
in favour of a Royalty which they had just overthrown[320]; after six
years, I was returning, on the anniversaries of the July festivals,
to associate myself with the regrets of those young Republicans, even
as they had associated themselves with my fidelity. How strange is
destiny! Armand Carrel breathed his last in the house of an officer of
the Royal Guard[321] who did not take the oath to Philip; I, a Royalist
and a Christian, have had the honour of bearing a corner of the pall
which covered noble ashes, but which will not hide them.
Many kings, princes, ministers, men who thought themselves powerful,
have gone off before me: I have not condescended to raise my hat to
their coffin or devote a word to their memory. I have found more to
study and depict in the intermediary ranks of society than in those
which make men wear their livery; a gold-laced cloak is not worth the
morsel of flannel which the bullet drove into Carrel's body.
Carrel, who remembers you? The mediocrities and poltroons whom your
death delivered from your superiority and their fears and I, who was
not of your views. Who thinks of you? Who remembers you? I congratulate
you on having, at one step, finished a journey whose prolonged passage
becomes so disgusting and so lonely, on having brought the end of your
march within the range of a pistol, a distance which to you appeared
still too great and which you hastened to reduce to a sword's length.
I envy those who have departed before me: like Cæsar's soldiers at
Brundusium, from the top of the rocks on shore I cast my eyes upon the
main sea and gaze towards Epirus to look if I can see the ships which
have taken over the first legions come back to carry me across in my
turn.
After reading the above lines again, in 1839, I will add that, having,
in 1837, visited M. Carrel's grave, I found it much neglected, but
I saw a black wooden cross which the dead man's sister Nathalie had
planted near him. I paid Vaudran, the grave-digger, eighteen francs
that remained owing for trellis-work; I instructed him to tend the
grave, to sow grass on it and keep it adorned with flowers. At each
new season, I go to Saint-Mandé to discharge what is due and to make
sure that my intentions have been faithfully fulfilled[322].
As I am preparing to end my recollections and taking a last look round,
I perceive women whom I have involuntarily forgotten; like angels
grouped at the bottom of my picture, they stand leaning against the
frame to watch the end of my life.
In former days, I met women who were known or celebrated in different
ways. Women have changed their manner of being to-day: are they worth
more, are they worth less? It is only natural that I should incline
towards the past; but the past is surrounded by a mist through which
objects assume an agreeable and often deceptive complexion. My youth,
to which I can never go back again, produces the effect upon me of a
grandmother; I hardly remember it and I should be charmed to see it
once more.
[Sidenote: A Lady from Louisiana.]
A Louisianan lady came to see me from the Mississippi: I thought that
I was setting eyes upon the virgin of the last loves. Célestine wrote
me several letters: they might have been dated from the "Moon of the
Flowers;" she showed me fragments of Memoirs which she had composed in
the savannahs of Alabama. Some time after, Célestine wrote to me that
she was busy with a dress for her presentation at the Court of Philip:
I resumed my bear's skin. Célestine has changed into an alligator from
the water of the Floridas: may Heaven grant her peace and love, for as
long as those things last!
There are persons who, by thrusting themselves between you and the
past, prevent your memories from coming to your recollection; there
are others who become mingled from the first with what you have been.
Madame Tastu[323] produces this latter effect. She has a natural turn
of expression; she has left the Gallic jargon to those who believe that
they make themselves younger by disguising themselves in the cloaks of
our ancestors. Favorinus[324] said to a Roman who affected to talk the
language of the Twelve Tables[325]:
"You want to speak with the mother[326] of Evander."
Since I have touched upon antiquity, I will say a few words on the
women of its peoples and descend the ladder down to our own time. The
Greek women sometimes celebrated philosophy; more often they followed
another divinity: Sappho[327] has remained the immortal sibyl of
Cnidus; we know very little now of what Corinna[328] did after she had
conquered Pindar[329]. Aspasia taught Socrates to know Venus:
"Socrates, observe my lessons. Fill thyself with poetic enthusiasm:
by its potent charm thou shalt know how to win the object that thou
lovest; thou shalt enchain her to the sound of the lyre, by carrying
the finished image of thy passion through her ear to her heart."
The breath of the Muses, passing over the women of Rome without
inspiring them, came to quicken the nation of Clovis, still in its
cradle. The _langue d'Oyl_ had Marie de France[330]; the _langue d'Oc_
the Dame de Die[331], who, in her castle of Vaucluse, complained of a
cruel friend:
"I would know, my gentle and fair friend, why you treat me so fiercely
and so harshly:"
Per que vos m'etz tan fers, ni tan salvatges.
The middle-ages handed those ballads on to the Renascence. Loyse
Labé[332] said:
Oh! si j'étois en ce beau sein ravie
De celui-là pour lequel vais mourant[333]!
[Sidenote: Mediæval poetesses.]
Clémence de Bourges[334], surnamed the Oriental Pearl, who was buried
with her face uncovered and her head crowned with flowers because of
her beauty; the two Margarets[335] and Mary Stuart[336], all three
Queens, expressed ingenuous frailties in ingenuous language.
I had an aunt at about that period of our Parnassus: Madame Claude de
Chateaubriand; but I am more embarrassed with Madame Claude than with
Mademoiselle de Boistelleul. Madame Claude, disguising herself under
the name of the Lover, addresses her seventy sonnets to her mistress.
Reader, forgive my Aunt Claude's two-and-twenty years: _parcendum
teneris._ If my Aunt de Boistelleul was more discreet, she reckoned
fifteen lustres and a half when she was singing, and the traitor
Trémigon no longer appeared before her old Warbler's thought save as a
Sparrow-hawk[337].
When the language was settled, liberty of sentiment and thought
contracted. One remembers hardly any one, under Louis XIV., expect
Madame Deshoulières[338], by turns too much extolled and too much
depreciated. Elegy extended, through woman's sorrow, under the reign
of Louis XV. to the reign of Louis XVI., when the great elegies
of the people commence; the old school came to die with Madame de
Bourdic[339], who is but little known to-day, although she left a
remarkable Ode on Silence.
The new school has thrown its thoughts into another mould: Madame
Tastu walks in the midst of the modern choir of poetesses in prose
or verse, the Allarts[340], the Waldors[341], the Valmores[342], the
Ségalas[343], the Révoils[344], the Mercœurs[345], and so on, and
so on: _Castalidum turba._ Must we regret that, following the example
of the Aonides, she has not celebrated the passion which, according to
antiquity, smooths the brow of Cocytus and makes it smile at Orpheus'
sighing? At Madame Tastu's concerts, love recites only hymns borrowed
from foreign voices. This reminds me of what is related of Madame
Malibran[346]: when she wanted to tell of a bird whose name she had
forgotten, she used to imitate its song.
[Sidenote: Gorge Sand.]
George Sand[347], otherwise Madame Dudevant, having spoken of _René_
in the _Revue des Deux-Mondes_[348], I thanked her; she did not reply.
Some time after, she sent me _Lélia_: I did not reply. Soon a short
explanation took place between us:
"I venture to hope that you will forgive me for not having answered
the flattering letter which you were good enough to send me when
I spoke of _René_ in writing on _Obermann._ I did not know how to
thank you for all the kind expressions which you have used towards
my books.
"I have sent you _Lélia_, and I anxiously desire that it may
obtain the same protection from you. The fairest privilege of
an universally accepted glory like your own is to welcome and
encourage at their start those inexperienced writers for whom there
can be no lasting success without your patronage.
"Accept the assurance of my high admiration and believe me,
monsieur,
"One of your most faithful believers,
"GEORGE SAND."
At the end of October[349], Madame Sand gave me her new novel,
_Jacques_: I accepted the present.
"30 _October_ 1834.
"I hasten, madame, to offer you my sincere thanks. I am going to
read _Jacques_ in Fontainebleau Forest or at the sea-side. Were
I younger, I should be less brave; but my years will defend me
against solitude, without taking anything from the passionate
admiration which I profess for your talent and which I hide from
nobody. You have attached a new enchantment, madame, to that city
of dreams whence I set out, in former days, for Greece with a
whole world of illusions: returning to his starting-point, René
lately aired his memories and his regrets on the Lido, between
Childe-Harold, who had vanished, and Lelia about to appear.
"CHATEAUBRIAND."
Madame Sand possesses a talent of the first order; her descriptions
have the truth of those of Rousseau in his _Rêveries_[350] and of
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre in his _Études._[351] Her frank style is
tainted with none of the faults of the day. _Lélia_, though painful
to read and offering none of the delicious scenes of _Indiana_ and
_Valentine_, is nevertheless a master-piece of its kind: of the nature
of an orgy, it is without passion, but perturbing like passion; it
lacks soul, and yet it weighs upon the heart; the depravity of its
maxims, its insults thrown at rectitude of life could go no further
than they do; but over that abyss the author sends down her talent In
the Valley of Gomorrah, the dew falls at night upon the Dead Sea.
The works of Madame Sand, her novels, the poetry of matter, are born
of the time. In spite of her superiority, it is to be feared that the
author has, by the very nature of her works, narrowed the circle of her
readers. George Sand will never belong to every age. Of two men of
equal genius, of whom one preaches order, the other disorder, the first
will attract the greater number of admirers: the human race refuses
to accord unanimous applause to that which offends, morality, the
pillow on which the weak and the just sleep; we can hardly associate
with all the memories of our life books which caused our first blush,
books whose pages we did not learn by heart on leaving the cradle,
books which we have read only by stealth, which have not been our
acknowledged and cherished companions, which are connected with neither
the purity of our sentiments nor the integrity of our innocence.
Providence has confined successes that do not take their origin in good
within strait limits and has given universal glory as an encouragement
to virtue.
[Sidenote: Her particular talent.]
I am arguing here, I know, like a man whose restricted sight does not
embrace the immense "humanitarian" horizon, like a reactionary attached
to a ridiculous moral system, a decrepit moral system of olden time,
good at most for unenlightened minds, in the infancy of society. A
new Gospel is about to take birth forthwith, placed far above the
commonplaces of that conventional wisdom which arrests the progress
of mankind and the rehabilitation of that poor body of ours, so sadly
slandered by the soul. When the women will be running about the
streets, when it will be sufficient, in order to get married, to open a
window and summon God to the wedding as witness, priest and guest: then
all prudery will be destroyed; there will be nuptials everywhere and
we shall rise, like the doves, to nature's level. My criticism of the
taste of Madame Sand's works would, therefore, possess a certain value
only in the vulgar order of past things; wherefore I hope that she will
not be offended by it: the admiration which I profess for her must make
her excuse remarks which owe their origin to the infelicity of my age.
In former days, I should have been more carried away by the Muses;
those daughters of the olden sky were my fair mistresses: they keep me
company in the evening in the chimney-corner, but they soon leave me,
for I go to bed early, and they go to sit up by Madame Sand's fire-side.
No doubt Madame Sand will in this way prove her intellectual
omnipotence, and yet she will please less, because she will be less
original: she will believe herself to be increasing her power by
sounding the depths of those reveries under which she buries us vulgar
men, and she will be mistaken; for she stands far above that pit, that
watery hollow, that proud balderdash. While we have to put a rare, but
too flexible faculty on its guard against the follies of superiority,
we must also warn it that fantastic writings, intimate descriptions, to
employ the jargon of the day, are limited, that their source lies in
youth, that each moment of time dries up a few drops of it and that,
after a certain number of productions, we end with feeble repetitions.
Is it quite sure that Madame Sand will always find the same charm in
what she is writing to-day? Will not the merit and allurement of the
passions of twenty years depreciate in her mind, even as the works
of my early days have lost their value in mine? It is only the works
of the Ancient Muse that do not change, supported as they are by the
nobility of manners, the beauty of language and the majesty of those
sentiments bestowed upon the whole human race. The fourth book of the
_Æneid_ remains for ever exposed to the admiration of men, because
it is hung up in the sky. The fleet carrying the founder of the Roman
Empire; Dido, the foundress of Carthage, stabbing herself after
foretelling the coming of Hannibal:
Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor[352];
Love causing the rivalry of Rome and Carthage to blaze forth from its
torch, setting fire to the funeral pile whose flame the flying Æneas
sees on the waves: these are very different from the walk of a dreamer
in a wood or the disappearance of a libertine who drowns himself in a
pond. Madame Sand will, I hope, link her talent with subjects worthy of
her genius.
Madame Sand can be converted only by the preaching of that missionary
with the bald forehead and the white beard whose name is Time. At
present, a less austere voice enchains the poet's captive ear. Now
I am convinced that Madame Sand's talent is in some way rooted in
corruption; she would become commonplace if she became timorous. The
case would be different if she had always remained within the sanctuary
unfrequented by men; her power of love, restrained and hidden under the
virginal fillet, would have drawn from her bosom those decent melodies
which suggest the woman and the angel. Be this as it may, boldness
of doctrine and voluptuousness of manners are a field which had not
yet been cleared by a daughter of Adam and which, delivered to female
cultivation, has produced a harvest of unknown flowers. Let us leave
Madame Sand to bring forth perilous marvels till the winter; she will
sing no more "when the cold winds blow:" meantime let us permit her,
less improvident than the grasshopper, to make a provision of glory for
the time when there shall be a dearth of pleasure. Musarion's mother
used to say to her:
"Thou wilt not always be sixteen.... Will Chæreas always remember
his oaths, his tears and his kisses[353]?"
For the rest, many women have been seduced and as it were carried
off by their young years: when the autumn days come, brought back to
the maternal hearth, they have added to their cithern the grave or
plaintive string on which religion or misfortune is expressed. Old age
is a nocturnal traveller: the earth is hidden to her and she no longer
discerns aught save the sky shining over her head.
[Sidenote: Her eccentricities.]
I have not seen Madame Sand dressed as a man or wearing the smock-frock
and the ferruled stick of the mountaineer; I have not seen her drink
of the bacchantes' cup or smoke, seated indolently on a sofa, like a
sultana: these are natural or affected singularities that would add
nothing, in my eyes, to her charm or her genius.
Is she more inspired when she sends a cloud from her mouth to mount
up around her hair? Did Lélia escape from her mother's brain through
a burning puff of smoke, even as Sin, according to Milton, issued
from the head of the beautiful, guilty archangel amid a whirl of
flame[354]? I do not know what happens in the Heavens; but, here below,
Néméade[355], Phila[356], Lais[357], the witty Gnathæna[358],
Phryne[359], the despair of Apelles'[360] pencil and Praxiteles'[361]
chisel, Lesena[362], who was loved by Harmodius[363], the two sisters
surnamed Aphyes, because they were slender and had large eyes, Dorica,
whose head-band and perfumed robe were dedicated in the temple of
Venus: all these enchantresses, in fine, knew none but the perfumes of
Araby. Madame Sand, it is true, has on her side the authority of the
Odalisks and the young Mexican girls who dance with a cigar between
their lips.
After a few superior women and so many charming women whom I have met,
after those daughters of the earth who said, like Madame Sand, with
Sappho, "Come, in our delicious banquets, O mother of Eros, to fill
our goblets with the nectar of the roses," what effect did the sight
of Madame Sand have on me? Placing myself alternately in the domain of
fiction and truth, I find the author of _Valentine_ making two very
different impressions upon me. In the domain of fiction: I will not
speak of that, for I must have ceased to understand its language. In
that of reality: as a man of a serious age, entertaining notions of
seemliness, attaching, as a Christian, the highest price to the timid
virtues of woman, I could not say how unhappy I was made at the sight
of so many fine qualities abandoned to those prodigal and fickle hours
which consume and fly.
PARIS, 1838.
In the spring of this year 1838, I busied myself with the _Congrès
de Vérone_[364], which I was obliged to publish by the terms of my
literary engagements: I have told you of it in its proper place in
these Memoirs.
A man has gone[365]: that guard of the aristocracy escorts to the rear
the mighty plebeians who have already departed. When M. de Talleyrand
first appeared in my political career, I said a few words about
him[366]. Now his whole existence has become known to me through his
last hour, to use the fine expression of one of the ancients.
[Sidenote: Talleyrand.]
I have had relations with M. de Talleyrand: as a man of honour, I have
been faithful to him, as the reader will have observed, especially
in the matter of the disagreement at Mons, when I most gratuitously
ruined myself for him[367]. I was too simple; I shared in anything
that happened to him of a disagreeable character; I pitied him when
Maubreuil slapped his face[368]. There was a time when he ran after
me in a coquettish manner; he wrote to me at Ghent, as you have read,
that I was a "strong man[369];" when I was staying in the Rue des
Capucines, he sent me, with perfect gallantry, a seal of the Foreign
Office, a talisman doubtless engraved under his constellation. It is,
perhaps, because I did not abuse his generosity that he became my enemy
without any provocation on my part, if it was not because of a few
successes which I obtained and which were not his handiwork. His tattle
ran through society and did not offend, for M. de Talleyrand could not
offend any one; but his intemperance of language has released me and,
since he permitted himself to judge me, he left me free to make use of
the same right in respect to him.
M. de Talleyrand's vanity duped him: he mistook the part which he
played for his genius; he thought himself a prophet, while deceiving
himself in all things; his authority had no value in matters concerning
the future; he was quite unable to see ahead: he saw only behind him.
Deprived of the strength of the outlook and light of conscience, he
discovered nothing like superior intelligence, he appreciated nothing
like uprightness. He made much of the accidents of fortune, when those
accidents, which he never foresaw, had taken place, but only for
himself personally. He knew nothing of that large ambition in which the
interests of public glory are wrapped as the most profitable treasure
for private interests. M. de Talleyrand, therefore, does not belong
to the class of beings calculated to become one of those fantastic
creatures to whom men's opinions, whether forced or deceived, are
constantly adding fanciful attributes. Nevertheless it is certain that
several sentiments, agreeing with one another for different reasons,
concur to form an imaginary Talleyrand.
In the first place, the kings, the Cabinets, the former Foreign
Ministers, the ambassadors who were once that man's dupes and who were
always incapable of fathoming him are anxious to prove that they bowed
only before a real superiority: they would have taken off their hats
to Bonaparte's scullion. Then again, the members of the old French
aristocracy who are connected with M. de Talleyrand are proud to
number in their ranks a man who had the kindness to assure them of his
greatness. Lastly, the Revolutionaries and the immoral generations,
while railing against names, have a sneaking fondness for the
aristocracy: those singular neophytes eagerly aspire to its baptism and
think that they will learn fine manners from it. The prince's double
apostasy at the same time charms another side of the young Democrats'
self-love: for they conclude from it that their cause is the right one
and that a noble and a priest are very contemptible persons.