BOOK X[399]

Conclusion--Historical antecedents from the Regency to 1793--The

Past--The old European order expiring--Inequality of fortunes--Danger

of the expansion of intellectual nature and material nature--The

downfall of the monarchies--The decline of society and the progress of

the individual--The future--The difficulty of understanding it--The

Christian idea is the future of the world--Recapitulation of my

life--Summary of the changes that have happened on the globe during my

life--End of the _Mémoires d'Outre-tombe_.

25 _September_ 1841.

I began to write these Memoirs, at the Vallée-aux-Loups, on the 4th

of October 1811; I am about to finish reading and correcting them,

in Paris, on the 20th of September 1841: I have, therefore, for

thirty years, eleven months and twenty-one days[400], been secretly

holding the pen while writing my public books, in the midst of all

the revolutions and all the vicissitudes of my existence. My hand is

tired: may it not have weighed upon my ideas, which have never wavered

and which I feel to be as lively as when I started on my career! I had

the intention of adding a general conclusion to my thirty years' work:

I meant to say, as I have often mentioned, what the world was like

when I entered it, what it is like now that I am leaving it. But the

hour-glass is before me; I observe the hand which the sailors used to

think that they saw come forth from the waves at the hour of shipwreck:

that hand beckons to me to be brief; I will therefore reduce the scale

of the picture, without omitting anything essential.

Louis XIV. died[401]. The Duc d'Orléans was Regent during the

minority of Louis XV. A war with Spain broke out as the result

of Cellamare's[402] conspiracy: peace was restored by the fall of

Alberoni[403]. Louis XV. attained his majority on the 15th of February

1723. The Regent succumbed ten months later. He had communicated his

gangrene to France; he had seated Dubois[404] in Fénelon's pulpit and

raised Law[405] to power. The Duc de Bourbon[406] became Prime Minister

to Louis XV., and he had as his successor the Cardinal de Fleury[407],

whose genius lay in his years. In 1734, the war[408] broke out in

which my father was wounded outside Dantzig[409]. In 1745 was fought

the Battle of Fontenoy; one of the least warlike of our kings made us

triumph in the only great pitched battle that we have won over the

English: and the conqueror of the world has, at Waterloo, added one

more disaster to the disasters of Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt. The

church at Waterloo is decorated with the names of the English officers

who fell in 1815; in the church at Fontenoy we find only a stone with

these words:

NEAR THIS SPOT LIES THE BODY OF MESSIRE PHILIPPE DE VITRY,

WHO, AGED 27 YEARS, WAS KILLED AT THE BATTLE OF

FONTENOY ON THE 11TH OF MAY 1715

No mark indicates the place of the action; but skeletons are taken from

the ground with bullets flattened into their skulls. The French carry

their victories written on their foreheads.

Later, the Comte de Gisors, son of the Maréchal de Belle-Isle[410] fell

at Crefeld[411]. With him died out the name and the direct descent of

Fouquet[412]. Things had passed from Mademoiselle de La Vallière to

Madame de Châteauroux. There is something sad in seeing names come to

their end, from century to century, from beauty to beauty, from glory

to glory.

[Sidenote: Historical antecedents.]

In the month of June 1745, the second Stuart Pretender had begun his

adventures: misfortunes on which I was brought up pending the time when

Henry V. should replace the English Pretender in exile.

The end of those wars was the harbinger of our disasters in our

colonies. La Bourdonnais[413] avenged the French flag in Asia; his

dissensions with Dupleix[414], after the capture of Madras, undid

all. The peace of 1748 suspended those misfortunes; hostilities broke

out again in 1755; they opened with the earthquake of Lisbon[415], in

which Racine's grandson perished. Under the pretext of a few plots of

land at issue on the frontier of Acadia, England, without declaring

war, seized upon three hundred of our merchant-ships; we lost Canada:

facts immense in their consequences, above which floats the death of

Wolfe and Montcalm. We were stripped of our possessions in Africa and

India, and Lord Clive[416] began the conquest of Bengal. Now, during

this time, the Jansenist quarrels were taking place: Damiens[417] had

struck at Louis XV.; Poland had been partitioned, the expulsion of the

Jesuits effected, the Court had descended to the Parc-aux-Cerfs. The

author of the Family Compact[418] retired to Chanteloup, while the

intellectual revolution was being completed under Voltaire. Maupeou's

Plenary Court[419] was installed: Louis XV. left the scaffold to the

favourite[420] who had degraded him, after sending Garat[421] and

Sanson to Louis XVI., one to read, the other to execute the sentence.

This last monarch had married, on the 16th of May 1770, the daughter of

Maria Theresa of Austria: we know what became of her. Next passed the

ministers: Machault, old Maurepas, Turgot the economist, Malesherbes,

with his ancient virtues and modern opinions, Saint-Germain[422], who

destroyed the King's Household and gave a baleful order; Calonne and

Necker lastly.

Louis XVI. recalled the parliaments, abolished forced labour, repealed

the power of inflicting torture before the verdict had been given,

restored Protestants to the enjoyment of civil rights and recognised

their marriages as legal. The American War of 1779, although impolitic

for France, the dupe, as always, of her generosity, was useful to the

human race; it restored throughout the world the esteem in which our

arms were held and the honour of our flag.

The Revolution sprang up, ready to give birth to the warlike generation

which eight centuries of heroism had laid in its womb. The personal

merits of Louis XVI. did not redeem the faults which his ancestors

had left to him to expiate; but the blows of Providence fall on the

evil, never on the man: God shortens virtue's days upon earth only to

lengthen them in Heaven. Under the star of 1793, the sources of the

great abyss were broken; all our glories of former days next united and

made their last explosion under Bonaparte: he sends them back to us in

his coffin.

[Sidenote: When I was born.]

I was born while these facts were being accomplished[423]. Two new

empires, Prussia[424] and Russia[425], preceded me by scarcely

half a century on the earth; Corsica became French at the moment

when I appeared[426]; I arrived in the world twenty days before

Bonaparte[427]. He brought me with him. I was about to enter the navy,

in 1783, when the fleet of Louis XVI. put in to Brest[428]: it carried

the birth certificate of a nation[429] that had been hatched under the

wings of France. My birth is connected with the birth of a man and a

people, pale reflection that I was of an immense light.

If we fix our eyes on the actual world, we see it, following the

movement communicated by a great revolution, shaken from the East to

China, which seemed closed for ever: so that our past subversions

would be nothing and the noise of Napoleon's fame be hardly audible

in the general topsy-turviness of the nations, even as he, Napoleon,

drowned all the noises of our ancient globe.

The Emperor left us in a condition of prophetic agitation. We, the

ripest and most advanced State, display numerous symptoms of decadence.

Just as a sick man in danger becomes preoccupied with what awaits him

in his grave, a nation which feels itself decaying grows restless as

to its future fate. Hence the political heresies which succeed one

another. The old European order is expiring; our present contests will

appear puerile struggles in the eyes of posterity. Nothing more exists;

authority of experience and age, birth or genius, talent or virtue:

all are denied; a few individuals clamber to the top of the ruins,

proclaim themselves giants and roll down to the bottom as pygmies. With

the exception of a score of men who will survive and who were destined

to hold the torch across the murky steppes upon which we are entering,

with the exception of those few men, a generation which bore within

it an abundant intelligence, acquired knowledge, germs of success of

all kinds has stifled these in a restlessness as unproductive as its

arrogance is barren. Nameless multitudes are agitated without knowing

why, like the popular associations of the middle-ages: famished flocks

which recognise no shepherd, which rush from the plain to the mountain

and from the mountain to the plain, disdaining the experience of the

herdsmen hardened to the wind and sun. In the life of that city, all

is transitory: religion and morals cease to be admitted, or else each

interprets them after his own fashion. Among things of an inferior

nature, even in power of conviction and existence, a man's renown

throbs for barely an hour, a book grows old in a day, writers kill

themselves to attract attention: one more vanity; no one hears even

their last breath.

From this predisposition of men's minds it results that we imagine no

other means of touching people than scenes of the scaffold and tainted

manners: we forget that the real tears are those which flow at the

bidding of a beautiful poem and with which as much admiration as sorrow

is blended; but at present, when talents feed upon the Regency and the

Terror, what need was there of subjects for our tongues destined so

soon to die? No more will fall from man's genius some of those thoughts

which become the patrimony of the universe.

That is what everybody says and what everybody deplores, and yet

illusions superabound, and the nearer a man is to his end the longer

he thinks that he will live. We see monarchs who imagine that they

are monarchs, ministers who believe that they are ministers, deputies

who take their speeches seriously, landlords who, possessing property

to-day, are persuaded that they will possess it to-night. Private

interests, personal ambitions hide the gravity of the moment from the

vulgar: notwithstanding the oscillations of the affairs of the day,

they are but a wrinkle on the surface of the deep; they do not decrease

the depth of the waters. Beside the paltry contingent lotteries,

the human race is playing the great game; the kings still hold the

cards and hold them for the nations: will the latter do better than

the monarchs? A side issue, which does not alter the principal fact.

What importance have children's amusements, shades gliding over the

whiteness of a shroud? The invasion of ideas has succeeded on the

invasion of the Barbarians; our actual decomposing civilization is

becoming lost in itself; the vessel that contains it has not poured

the liquid over into another vessel: it is the vessel that has been

shattered.

At what period will society disappear? What accidents will be able to

suspend its movements? In Rome, the reign of man was substituted for

the reign of law: they passed from the Republic to the Empire; our

revolution is being accomplished in a contrary sense; we are inclined

to pass from the Royalty to the Republic, or, not to specify any form,

to Democracy: this will not be effected without difficulty.

[Sidenote: Property.]

To touch upon only one point in a thousand: will property, for

instance, remain distributed as it is? The Royalty born at Rheims was

able to keep that property going by tempering its severity by the

diffusion of moral laws, even as it changed humanity into charity.

Given a political state of things in which individuals have so many

millions a year, while other individuals are dying of hunger: can that

state of things subsist, when religion is no longer there with its

hopes beyond this world to explain the sacrifice? There are children to

whom their mothers give suck at their withered breasts for want of a

mouthful of bread to feed their dying babes; there are families whose

members are reduced to huddle together at night, for want of blankets

to warm them. That man sees his many furrows ripen; this one will

possess only the six feet of earth lent to his tomb by his native land.

Now with how many ears of corn can six feet of earth supply a dead man?

As instruction comes down to those lower classes, the latter discover

the secret sore which gnaws at the irreligious social order. The too

great disproportion of conditions and fortunes was endurable so long as

it remained concealed; but, so soon as this disproportion was generally

perceived, it received its death-blow. Recompose the aristocratic

fictions, if you can; try to persuade the poor man, when he shall have

learnt to read correctly and ceased to believe, when he shall be as

well-informed as yourself, try to persuade him that he must submit to

every sort of privation, while his neighbour possesses superfluity a

thousand times told: as a last resource, you will have to kill him.

When steam shall be perfected, when, joined to the telegraph and

railways, it shall have caused distances to disappear, we shall see not

only merchandise travel, but also ideas, restored to the use of their

wings. When fiscal and commercial barriers shall have been abolished

between the various States, as they already are between the provinces

of the same State; when different countries entertaining daily

relations shall tend to promote the unity of the peoples: how will you

resuscitate the old manner of separation?

Society, on the other hand, is no less threatened by the spread of

intellect than it is by the development of brute nature: suppose labour

to be condemned to idleness by reason of the multiplication and variety

of machinery; admit that one only and general mercenary, matter,

replaces the mercenaries of the farm and the household: what will you

do with the unemployed human race? What will you do with passions that

are idle at the same time as, the intellect? The vigour of the body

is maintained by physical occupation; when labour ceases, strength

disappears; we shall become like those nations of Asia which fall a

prey to the first invader and which are unable to defend themselves

against a hand that bears the sword. Thus liberty is preserved only by

work, because work produces strength; withdraw the curse pronounced

against the sons of Adam, "In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat

bread[430]," and they will die in servitude. The divine curse therefore

enters into the mystery of our lot; man is less the slave of his sweat

than of his thought: that is how, after making the circuit of society,

after passing through the different civilizations, after supposing

unknown perfections, we find ourselves once more at the starting-point,

in the presence of the truths of Scripture.

[Sidenote: The Monarchy.]

At the time of our Monarchy of eight centuries, Europe had in France

the centre of its intelligence, its perpetuity, its repose; when

deprived of that Monarchy, Europe at once inclined towards democracy.

The human race, for good or ill, has become its own master; the

princes have enjoyed its property during its minority; now that the

nations have come of age, they contend that they have no more need of

guardians. From David to our time, the kings have been called: the

vocation of the peoples is commencing. The brief and small exceptions

of the Greek, Carthaginian, Roman Republics, with slaves, do not take

away the fact that, in antiquity, the monarchic state was the normal

state of the globe. The whole of modern society, since the banner of

the French kings has ceased to exist, is laying aside the monarchy.

God, to hasten the degradation of the royal power, has delivered the

sceptres in different countries to infirm kings, to little girls in

long-clothes[431] or in the white veils of their weddings[432]: those

are the toothless lions, the clawless lionesses, the sucking babes, the

marrying babes, whom grown men are to follow in this era of unbelief.

The boldest opinions are proclaimed in the face of the monarchs, who

pretend to feel safe behind the three-fold hedge of a suspected guard.

The flood of democracy is overtaking them; they climb from storey to

storey, from the ground-floor to the attic roof of their palace, whence

they will leap into the water through the dormer windows.

In the midst of this, observe a phenomenal contradiction: material

conditions are improving, intellectual progress increases, and the

nations, instead of profiting, are diminishing. Whence comes this

contradiction?

It is because we have lost in the moral order of things. There have

been crimes at all periods; but they were never committed in cold

blood, as they are nowadays, because of the loss of the religious

sentiment. At this hour, they no longer revolt us, they seem a

consequence of the march of time; if formerly we judged them in a

different manner, it was because we were not yet, as we dare to

assert, sufficiently advanced in the knowledge of man; we analyze

them at the present moment; we test them in the crucible, in order

to see what useful thing we can obtain from them, even as chemistry

finds ingredients in the sewers. The corruption of the mind, which is

very much more destructive than that of the senses, is accepted as a

necessary result; it no longer belongs to a few wayward individuals: it

has become public property.

Many men would feel humiliated if it were proved to them that they have

a soul, that beyond this life they will find another life; they would

think that they were wanting in firmness and strength and genius, if

they did not rise superior to the pusillanimity of our fathers; they

admit annihilation, or, if you like, doubt, as a disagreeable fact

perhaps, but as a truth which it is impossible to deny. Admire the

stultification of our pride!

That is how the decline of society and the increase of the individual

are explained. If the moral sense were developed in proportion to

the development of the intellect, there would be a counterpoise,

and humanity would grow up without danger; but the exact opposite

is happening: our perception of good and evil becomes dimmer as our

intellect becomes more enlightened; our conscience shrinks as our

ideas expand. Yes, society will perish: liberty, which could save the

world, will not make progress, for want of leaning on religion; order,

which could maintain the observance of rules, will not be solidly

established, because it is combated by the anarchy of men's ideas. The

purple, which used formerly to confer power, will henceforth serve as

a bed only for misfortune: none will be saved unless he be born on the

straw, like Christ. When the monarchs were disinterred at Saint-Denis,

at the moment when the trumpet sounded for the popular resurrection;

when, taken from their crumbling tombs, they lay awaiting plebeian

burial, the ragmen came to this Last Judgment of the centuries: they

looked with their lanterns into the eternal night; they rummaged among

the remains that had escaped the first pillage. Already the Kings were

there no more, but the Royalty was there still: they snatched it from

the womb of time and flung it into the rubbish-basket.

[Sidenote: Old and young Europe.]

So much for old Europe: it will never revive. Does young Europe offer

better prospects? The present world, the world without consecrated

authority, seems placed between two impossibilities, the impossibility

of the past and the impossibility of the future. And do not go to

think, as some imagine, that, if we are badly off at present, good will

come out of evil: human nature, when disordered at its source, does not

proceed with such correctness. For instance, the excesses of liberty

lead to despotism; but the excesses of tyranny lead only to tyranny;

the latter, in degrading us, makes us incapable of independence:

Tiberius did not cause Rome to go back to the Republic; he left only

Caligula to follow him.

To avoid explanations, we are satisfied to declare that the times may

have hidden in their womb a political constitution which we do not

perceive. Did the whole of antiquity, did the finest geniuses of that

antiquity conceive a society without slaves? Yet we see it existing.

We assert that, in this civilization as yet unborn, the human race

will grow greater; I have advanced this theory myself: is it not to

be feared, however, that the individual will grow less? We may become

industrious bees occupied in common with the manufacture of our honey.

In the _material_ world, men unite for purposes of labour; a multitude

attains sooner and by different roads the thing after which it strives;

masses of individuals will raise pyramids; by dint of study, each on

his own side, those individuals will light upon scientific discoveries

and explore every corner of physical creation. But are things the same

in the _moral_ world? It will be vain for a thousand brains to combine:

never will they compose the master-piece that issues from the head of a

Homer.

It has been said that a city whose members enjoy an equal division

of goods and education will present to the gaze of the Divinity a

spectacle surpassing the spectacle of the city of our fathers. The

madness of the moment tends to achieve the unity of peoples and to make

but one man of the whole race: well and good; but, in acquiring general

faculties, will not a whole series of private sentiments perish?

Good-bye to the delights of the home; good-bye to the charms of the

family: among all those beings, white, yellow and black, reputed as

your fellow-countrymen, you would not be able to throw yourself on a

brother's neck! Was there nothing in the life of old, nothing in that

limited space upon which you looked out from your ivy-framed casement?

Beyond your horizon, you suspected the existence of unknown lands of

which the bird of passage, the only traveller that you had seen in

autumn, scarce spoke to you. It was happiness to think that the hills

which surrounded you would not disappear from before your eyes; that

they contained your friendships and your loves; that the moaning of the

night around your dwelling would be the only sound to which you would

fall asleep; that never would your soul's solitude be disturbed; that

you would always meet there the thoughts that await you to resume their

familiar intercourse with you. You knew where you were born, you knew

where your tomb lay; as you entered the forest, you were able to say:

Beaux arbres qui m'avez vu naître,

Bientôt vous me verrez mourir[433]!

Man does not need to travel in order to grow greater: he carries

immensity with him. The accents that escape from your bosom are not

measured, they find an echo in thousands of souls: he who has not that

melody within himself will ask it in vain of the universe. Sit down

on the trunk of the tree felled in the depths of the wood: if in your

profound forgetfulness of self, in your immobility, in your silence you

do not find the infinite, it is useless for you to wander on the banks

of the Ganges.

What would an universal society be that should have no particular

country, that should not be French, nor English, nor German, nor

Spanish, nor Portuguese, nor Italian, nor Russian, nor Tartar, nor

Turkish, nor Persian, nor Indian, nor Chinese, nor American, or rather

that should be all these societies at once? What would be the outcome

for its manners, its science, its arts, its poetry? How would passions

be expressed felt at the same time in the manner of different peoples

in different climates? How would the language entertain that confusion

of needs and images produced by the various suns that should have cast

their light upon a common youth, manhood and old age? And what would

that language be? Would an universal idiom result from this fusion of

societies, or would there be a dialect of compromise, employed for

daily use, while each nation would talk its own language, or else would

the different languages be understood by all? Under what like rule,

under what one law would this society have its being? How would one

find one's place on an earth enlarged by the power of ubiquitousness

and narrowed by the petty proportions of a globe tainted on every hand?

There would be nothing for it but to apply to science for means to

change one's planet.

Are you weary of private ownership and do you wish to turn the

government into a sole proprietor, distributing to what will have

become a mendicant community a share commensurate with the merit of

each individual? Who shall judge of the merits? Who will have the

strength and the authority to compel the execution of your decrees? Who

will keep and make the most of that bank of living real estate?

[Sidenote: Socialism.]

Will you seek to bring about the association of labour? What will the

weak, the sick, the unintelligent bring to the community left burdened

with their unfitness?

Here is another contrivance: one might form, in place of wages, a

sort of limited company or partnership between manufacturers and

workmen, between mind and matter, to which the one would bring his

capital and his idea, the others their industry and their labour; the

eventual profits to be shared in common. That would be very good,

admitting complete perfection among men; very good, if you meet with

no quarrelling, avarice, nor envy: but, if a single partner protests,

the whole crumbles to the ground; divisions and law-suits begin. This

method, which seems a little more possible in theory, is quite as

impossible in practice.

Would you, having modified your opinion, seek to build a city in which

every man shall possess a roof, a fire, clothes and sufficient to eat?

When you have succeeded in endowing every citizen, the good and bad

qualities of each will disturb your division and make it an unjust one:

this one requires more to eat than that; that one is unable to work as

much as this: the economical and industrious will become rich men, the

spendthrifts, the idlers, the cripples will relapse into poverty; for

you cannot give all men the same temperament: natural inequalities will

reappear in spite of your efforts.

And do not think that we should allow ourselves to be tied by the

complicated legal precautions demanded by the organization of the

family, patrimonial rights, wardships, recaptions by heirs and

assigns, and so on, and so on. Marriage is notoriously an absurd

oppression: we abolish all that. If the son kills the father, it is not

the son, as is easily proved, who commits parricide but the father who,

by living, sacrifices the son. Do not therefore let us go confusing our

brains with the labyrinth of an edifice which we put down level with

the ground; it is unnecessary to linger over those crazy trifles of our

grandfathers.

This notwithstanding, there are some among the modern sectarians who,

half seeing the impossibility of their doctrines, mix with them, to

obtain sufferance for them, words of morality and religion; they think

that, pending better things, we might first be brought up to the ideal

mediocrity of the Americans; they close their eyes and are good enough

to forget that the Americans are landlords and ardent landlords, which

alters the question somewhat.

Others, still more obliging, who admit a sort of elegance of

civilization, would be content to transform us into "Constitutional"

Chinese, all but atheists, free and enlightened old men, sitting in

yellow robes for centuries in our flowery seed-plots, spending our

days in a state of comfort acquired to the multitude, having invented

everything, discovered everything, vegetating peacefully in the midst

of our accomplished progress and only going on board a railway-train,

like a bale of merchandise, in order to travel from Canton to the Great

Wall to chat about a marsh that wants draining or a canal that wants

cutting with some other manufacturer of the Celestial Empire. In either

supposition, American or Chinese, I shall be glad to have departed

before so great a felicity happened to me.

Lastly, one solution remains: it might be that, in consequence of the

complete degradation of the human character, the peoples would put up

with what they have; they would lose the love of independence, replaced

by the love of money, at the same time that the kings lost the love of

power, bartered for the love of the Civil List. Hence would result a

compromise between monarchs and subjects charmed to crawl promiscuously

in a bastard political order of things; they would display their

infirmities to one another at their ease, as in the old leper-hospitals

or in those mud-baths in which sick people soak nowadays to obtain

relief: one would dabble in a common mire like a peaceful reptile.

We misconstrue our times, however, when we desire, in the present

condition of society, to replace the pleasures of our intellectual

nature by the joys of our physical nature. The latter, we can

understand, were able to occupy the life of the old aristocratic

nations: masters of the world, they owned palaces, troops of slaves;

they absorbed whole regions of Africa in their private possessions. But

under what portico would you now air your paltry leisure? In what vast

and decorated baths would you shut up the perfumes, the flowers, the

flute-players, the courtezans of Ionia? One is not Heliogabalus[434]

for the asking. Where will you find the wealth indispensable to those

material delights? The soul is thrifty; but the body is extravagant.

[Sidenote: Communism.]

And now, a few words of a more serious character touching absolute

equality. That equality would bring back not only the servitude of

bodies, but the slavery of souls; it would be a question of nothing

less than destroying the moral and physical inequality of the

individual. Our will, administered under the general eye, would see

our faculties falling into disuse. The infinite, for instance, is part

of our nature: forbid our intellect, or even our passions to think

of endless blessings, and you reduce man to the life of the snail,

you transform him into a machine. For make no mistake: without the

possibility of attaining all, without the idea of living eternally,

you have nothingness everywhere; without individual property, none is

free; whosoever has no property cannot be independent; he becomes a

proletarian or a salaried servant, whether he live under the present

condition of separate ownerships or in the midst of a common ownership.

Common ownership would make society resemble one of those monasteries

at whose door stewards used to stand distributing bread. Hereditary and

inviolable property is our personal defense; property is nothing else

than liberty. Absolute equality, which presupposes complete submission

to that equality, would reproduce the harshest form of servitude; it

would turn the human individual into a beast of burden subjected to

the action which would constrain him and obliged to walk endlessly in

the same path.

While I was arguing thus, M. de Lamennais[435], behind the bolts of

his gaol, was attacking the same systems with his logical power, which

is enlightened by the brilliancy of the poet. A passage borrowed from

his pamphlet entitled, _Du Passé et de l'avenir du peuple_[436] will

complete my arguments; listen to him, it is he now who speaks:

"Of those who put before them this object of strict, absolute

equality, the most consistent, in order to establish it and

maintain it, agree upon the use of force, despotism, dictatorship,

under one form or another.

"The partisans of absolute equality are, at the out-set, compelled

to attack the natural inequalities, in order to extenuate and, if

possible, destroy them. Unable to affect the primary conditions of

organization and development, their work begins at the moment when

man is born or when the child leaves its mother's womb. The State

then seizes upon it: behold it the absolute master of the spiritual

as of the organic being. Mind and conscience, all depends upon

the State, all is subject to the State. No more family, no more

paternity, no more marriage henceforth; a male, a female, children

whom the State handles, with which it does as it pleases, morally,

physically: an universal servitude and so profound that nothing

escapes it, that it penetrates to the very soul.

"Where material things are concerned, equality can never be

established in ever so little a lasting manner by a simple

partition. If it be a question of land only, one can understand

that it can be divided into as many portions as there are

individuals; but, as the number of individuals varies perpetually,

it would also be necessary perpetually to vary that primitive

division. All individual property being abolished, there is no

lawful owner except the State. This mode of ownership, if it be

voluntary, is that of the monk bound down by his vows to poverty

as to obedience; if it be not voluntary, it is that of the slave,

where nothing modifies the harshness of his condition. All human

ties, sympathetic relations, mutual devotion, exchange of services,

free gift of self, all that constitutes the charm of life and its

greatness, all, all has disappeared, disappeared for ever.

"The methods hitherto proposed to solve the problem of the future

of the people end in the negation of all the indispensable

conditions of existence, destroy, either directly or by

implication, duty, right, the family and would produce, if they

could be applied to society, instead of the liberty in which all

real progress is summarized, only a servitude with which history,

however far we go back into the past, can offer nothing to compare."

There is nothing to be added to this logic.

[Sidenote: The Abbé de Lamennais.]

I do not go to see prisoners, like Tartuffe, to distribute alms to

them, but to enrich my intelligence by contact with men who are worth

more than I. If their opinions differ from mine, I am not afraid:

stubborn Christian that I am, all the fine geniuses in the world would

not shake my faith; I am sorry for them, and my charity protects

me against seduction. If I sin through excess, they sin through

deficiency; I understand what they understand, they do not understand

what I understand. In the same prison where I used to visit the noble

and unfortunate Carrel, I now visit the Abbé de Lamennais[437].

The Revolution of July has relegated to the darkness of a gaol the

remnant of the superior men of whom it can neither appraise the merit

nor endure the effulgency. In the last room as one goes up, under

a slooping roof which we can touch with our heads[438], we silly

believers in liberty, François[439] de Lamennais and François de

Chateaubriand, talk of serious things. Struggle as he please, his

ideas have remained in the religious mould; their form has remained

Christian, even when their substance is furthest removed from dogma:

his speech has retained the sound of Heaven.

A true believer professing heresy, the author of the _Essai sur

l'indifférence_[440] talks my language with ideas that are not my

ideas. If, after having embraced the popular evangelical teaching,

he had remained attached to the priesthood, he would have preserved

the authority which variations have destroyed. The parish priests,

the new members of the clergy (and the most distinguished among those

ecclesiastics) were going towards him; the bishops would have found

themselves involved in his cause if he had clung to the Gallican

liberties, while continuing to venerate the successor of St. Peter and

defending unity.

In France, the youth of the country would have gathered round the

missionary, in whom it found the ideas which it loves and the progress

to which it aspires; in Europe, the attentive dissenters would have

raised no obstacle; great Catholic nations, the Poles, the Irish,

the Spaniards, would have blessed the preacher who had risen up.

Rome herself would have ended by seeing that the new evangelist was

causing the dominion of the Church to take new birth and supplying

the oppressed Pontiff with the means of resisting the influence of

the absolute kings. What power of life! Intellect, religion, liberty

represented in a priest!

God did not wish it: the light suddenly failed him who was the

light; the guide, stealing away, left his flock in darkness. But my

fellow-countryman, though his public career has been interrupted,

will always have his private superiority left and his pre-eminence in

natural gifts. In the order of time, he ought to survive me; I summon

him to my death-bed to agitate our great conquests at those gates

through which there is no returning. I should like to see his genius

shed upon me the absolution which once his hand had the right to call

down upon my head. We were lulled at our birth by the same waves[441];

may my ardent faith and my sincere admiration be permitted to hope

that I shall meet my reconciled friend once more on the same shore of

eternal things[442].

On the upshot, my investigations lead me to conclude that the old

society is giving way beneath itself, that it is impossible for

whosoever is not a Christian to understand the future society pursuing

its career and satisfying at one time either the purely republican or

the moderate monarchical idea. In any hypothesis, you can derive the

improvements which you desire only from the Gospel.

At the bottom of the actual sectarians, what we find is always the

plagiarism, the parody of the Gospel, always the apostolic principle:

that principle has entered into us so deeply that we use it as though

it belongs to us; we presume it to be natural, even though it be not so

to us; it has come to us from our old faith, to take the latter two or

three steps in the ascending line above us. Many a man of independent

mind occupied with the perfecting of his fellows would never have

thought of it if the right of the peoples had not been laid down by the

Son of Man. Every act of philanthropy in which we indulge, every system

of which we dream in the interests of humanity, is but the Christian

idea turned over, changed in name and too often disfigured: it is

always the Word made Flesh[443]!

[Sidenote: The Christian idea.]

Do you say that the Christian idea is only the human idea in

progression? I agree; but open the different cosmogonies, and you

shall learn that a traditional Christianity preceded revealed

Christianity upon earth. If the Messiah "had not come" and if He "had

not spoken[444]," as He says of Himself, the idea would not have

been disengaged, the truths would have remained confused, such as

we see them in the writings of the ancients. However you interpret

it, therefore, it is from the Revealer, or from Christ that you hold

everything; it is from the Saviour, _Salvator_, from the Comforter,

_Paracletus_, that you must always start; it is from Him that you have

received the germs of civilization and philosophy.

You see, therefore, that I find no solution for the future except in

Christianity and in Catholic Christianity; the religion of the Word is

the manifestation of truth, even as the Creation is God made visible.

I do not pretend that a general renovation will absolutely take place,

for I admit that whole nations are vowed to destruction; I admit also

that the faith is drying up in certain countries: but, if a single

grain of it remain, if it fall upon a little earth, were it but in the

remnants of a vase, that grain will spring up and a second incarnation

of the Catholic spirit will revive society.

Christianity is the most philosophical and rational appreciation of God

and the Creation; it contains the three great laws of the universe,

divine law, moral law, political law: divine law, the unity of God in

three Persons; moral law, charity; political law, that is, liberty,

equality, fraternity.

The two first principles are fully developed; the third, political law,

has not received its complements, because it could not flourish so long

as the intelligent belief in the infinite being and universal morality

were not firmly established. Now Christianity had first to clear away

the absurdities and abominations with which idolatry and slavery had

encumbered the human race.

Enlightened persons cannot understand how a Catholic like myself can

persist in sitting in the shadow of what they call ruins; according to

those persons, it is a wager on my part, an obstinate determination.

But tell me, for pity's sake, where shall I find a family and a God in

the individual and philosophical society which you offer me? Tell me

that, and I follow you; if not, do not find it amiss that I lie down in

the tomb of Christ, the only shelter which you have left to me while

abandoning me.

No, I have made no wager with myself: I am sincere; see here what has

happened to me: of my plans, my studies, my experiments, all that has

remained to me is a complete disillusionment touching all the things

which this world pursues. My religious conviction, as it grew greater,

has swallowed up all my other convictions; there is no more believing

Christian and no more incredulous man here below than I. Far from

drawing near its end, the religion of the Deliverer has hardly entered

upon its political period: liberty, equality, fraternity. The Gospel,

the sentence of acquittal, has not yet been read to all; we have not

gone beyond the curses pronounced by Christ:

"Wo to you ... because you load men with burdens which they cannot

bear, and you yourselves touch not the packs with one of your

fingers[445]."

Christianity is stable in its dogma and mobile in its enlightenment;

its transformation involves the universal transformation. When it

has reached its highest point, the darkness will become completely

lightened; liberty, crucified on Calvary with the Messiah, will

descend from it with Him; it will hand to the nations that new

Testament written in its favour and hitherto trammelled in its clauses.

Governments will pass away, moral evil will disappear, rehabilitation

will proclaim the consummation of the centuries of death and oppression

born of the Fall.

When will that longed-for day arrive? When will society reconstruct

itself after the secret methods of the generating principle? None can

say; it is impossible to calculate the resistance of the passions.

[Sidenote: Christian liberty.]

More than once will death enervate races of men and shed silence upon

events even as snow falling during the night deadens the noise of the

traffic. Nations do not grow up so rapidly as the individuals of whom

they are composed, nor do they disappear so quickly. How long does it

not take to attain a single thing sought after! The death-agony of the

Lower Empire threatened to be endless; the Christian Era, already so

extensive, has not sufficed to abolish servitude. These calculations, I

know, do not suit the French temper; in our revolutions, we have never

admitted the element of time: that is why we are always wonder-struck

at results contrary to our impatience. Full of generous courage, young

men rush onwards; they make straight for a lofty region which they

see dimly and which they strive to reach: nothing could be worthier

of admiration; but they will wear out their lives in those efforts

and, coming to the end, after disappointment upon disappointment, they

will consign the weight of the years of deception to other deluded

generations, which will carry it on to the next tombs; and so on. The

time of the desert has returned; Christianity is beginning over again,

in the barrenness of the Thebaid, amid a formidable idolatry, the

idolatry of man for himself.

There are two kinds of consequences in history: one is immediate and

instantly known; the other distant and not seen at once. Those two

consequences are often contradictory: the first come from our short

wisdom, the others from long-continued wisdom. The providential event

appears after the human event. God rises behind men. Deny the Supreme

Counsel as much as you please; do not consent to its action; dispute

about words; call what the vulgar call Providence the force of things

or reason; but look at the end of an accomplished fact, and you shall

see that it has always produced the contrary of what was expected of

it, when it was not first established on morals and justice.

If Heaven has not pronounced Its last decree; if there is to be a

future, a free and mighty future, that future is still far away, far

beyond the visible horizon: we can reach it only with the aid of that

Christian hope whose wings grow in proportion as all things seem to

betray it, that hope which is longer than time and more powerful than

misfortune.

Will the work inspired by my ashes and destined for my ashes be extant

after me? It is possible that my work may be bad; it is possible that

these Memoirs may fade into nothing on seeing the light: at least the

things which I have told myself will have served to beguile the tedium

of those last hours which no one wishes and which we know not how to

employ. At the end of life is a bitter age: nothing pleases, because

one is worthy of nothing; useful to none, a burden on all, near to our

last resting-place, we have but a step to take to reach it: what would

be the good of musing on a deserted shore? What pleasing shadows would

one see in the future? Fie upon the clouds that now hover over my head!

One idea comes back to me and troubles me: my conscience is not

reassured as to the innocence of my vigils; I dread my blindness and

man's complacency towards his faults. Is what I am writing really in

keeping with justice? Are morality and charity rigorously observed?

Have I had the right to speak of others? What would it avail me to

repent, if these Memoirs did any harm? O you unknown and hidden of the

earth, you whose life, pleasing to the altars, works miracles, all hail

to your secret virtues!

This or that poor man, destitute of knowledge, about whom none will

ever trouble, has, by the mere doctrine of his manners, exercised upon

his companions in suffering the divine influence which emanated from

the virtues of Christ. The greatest book on earth is not worth so much

as an unknown act of those nameless martyrs "whose blood Herod had

mingled with their sacrifices[446]."

You have seen me born; you have seen my childhood, my idolatry of my

singular creation in Combourg Castle, my presentation at Versailles,

my attendance, in Paris, at the first spectacle of the Revolution.

In the New World, I met Washington; I penetrated into the backwoods;

shipwreck brought me back to the coast of my Brittany. Came my

sufferings as a soldier, my wretchedness as an Emigrant. Returning

to France, I became the author of the _Génie du Christianisme._ In a

changed society, I counted and lost friends. Bonaparte stopped me and

flung himself, with the blood-stained body of the Duc d'Enghien, across

my path; I stopped myself in my turn and brought the great man from

his cradle, in Corsica, to his tomb, in St. Helena. I shared in the

Restoration and saw its end.

Thus I have known public and private life. I have four times crossed

the sea; I have followed the sun in the East, touched upon the ruins

of Memphis, Carthage, Sparta and Athens; I have prayed at the tomb of

St. Peter and worshipped on Golgotha. Poor and rich, powerful and weak,

happy and miserable, a man of action, a man of thought, I have placed

my hand in the century, my mind in the desert; effective existence has

shown itself to me in the midst of illusions, even as the land appears

to sailors in the midst of mists. If those facts spread over my dreams,

like the varnish that preserves fragile paintings, do not disappear,

they will mark the place through which my life passed.

[Sidenote: My several careers.]

In each of my three careers, I placed an important object before

myself: as a traveller, I aimed at discovering the polar world; as a

man of letters, I have striven to reconstruct religion from its ruins;

as a statesman, I have endeavoured to give the nations the system of

balanced monarchy, to restore France to her rank in Europe, to give

back to her the strength which the Treaties of Vienna had taken from

her; I have at least assisted in winning that one of our liberties

which is worth all the others: the liberty of the press. In the divine

order of things, religion and liberty; in the human order, honour and

glory (which are the human generation of religion and liberty): that is

what I have desired for my country.

Of the French authors of my own period, I may be said to be the only

one who resembles his works: a traveller, soldier, publicist, minister,

it is amid forests that I have sung the forests, aboard ship that I

have depicted the Ocean, in camp that I have spoken of arms, in exile

that I have learnt to know exile, in Courts, in affairs of State, in

Parliament that I have studied princes, politics and laws.

The orators of Greece and Rome played their part in the republic and

shared its fate; in Italy and Spain, at the end of the Middle Ages

and under the Renascence, the leading intellects in letters and the

arts took part in the social movement. How stormy and how fine were

the lives of Dante, of Tasso, of Camoens, of Ercilla, of Cervantes! In

France, of old, our songs and stories came to us from our pilgrimages

and battles; but, commencing from the reign of Louis XIV., our writers

have too often been men leading detached lives, and their talents have

perchance expressed the spirit, but not the deeds of their age.

I, as luck would have it, after camping in Iroquois shelters and

Arab tents, after wearing the cloak of the savage and the caftan of

the mameluke, have sat at the tables of kings only to relapse into

indigence. I have meddled with peace and war; I have signed treaties

and protocols; I have taken part in sieges, congresses and conclaves,

in the restoration and overturning of thrones; I have made history and

I could write it: and my solitary and silent life went on through the

tumult and uproar in the company of the daughters of my imagination,

Atala, Amélie, Bianca, Velléda, without speaking of what I might call

the realities of my days, if they had not themselves been the seduction

of chimeras. I am afraid lest I should have a soul of the nature of

that which an ancient philosopher called a sacred sickness[447].

I have found myself caught between two ages, as in the conflux of two

rivers, and I have plunged into their waters, turning regretfully from

the old bank upon which I was born, yet swimming hopefully towards an

unknown shore[448].

The whole of geography has changed since, according to the expression

of our old customs, I was able to look at the sky from my bed. If

I compare the two terrestrial globes, the one at the commencement,

the other at the end of my life, I no longer recognise them. A fifth

part of the world, Australia, has been discovered and populated[449];

French sails have recently caught sight of a sixth continent amid the

ice-fields of the Antarctic Pole[450], and the Parrys, Rosses and

Franklins have turned the coasts, on our own pole, that mark the

limits of North America; Africa has opened its mysterious solitudes; in

short, there is not a corner of our abode that is at present unknown.

We are attacking all the necks of land that separate the world; soon,

no doubt, we shall see ships pass through the Isthmus of Panama and,

perhaps, the Isthmus of Suez[451].

[Sidenote: The world of the future.]

History has made parallel discoveries in the depths of time; the

sacred languages have allowed us to read their lost vocabulary; on

the very granite-blocks of Mezraim, Champollion[452] has deciphered

those hieroglyphics which seemed to be a seal set upon the lips of

the desert that answered for their eternal discretion[453]. If new

revolutions have struck off the map Poland, Holland[454], Genoa and

Venice, other republics occupy a part of the shores of the Pacific and

Atlantic. In those countries, a perfected civilization would be able to

lend assistance to a vigorous nature: steam-boats would ascend those

rivers destined to become easy means of communication after having been

invincible obstacles; the banks of those rivers would become covered

with towns and villages, even as we have seen new American States

spring from the deserts of Kentucky. Through those forests once reputed

impenetrable would fly horseless chariots, transporting enormous

weights and thousands of travellers. Along those rivers, along those

roads, would descend, together with the trees for the construction of

the ships, the wealth of the mines which would serve to pay for them;

and the Isthmus of Panama would burst its barrier to give passage to

those ships from one sea to the other.

The shipping which borrows movement from fire is not restricted to the

navigation of rivers: it crosses the Ocean; distances are shortening:

no more currents, monsoons, contrary winds, blockades, close-ports.

It is a far cry from this romance of industry to the hamlet of

Plancoët[455]: in those days, the ladies used to play at old-time games

by their fireside; the peasant-women spun the hemp for their clothes;

the meagre resin-torch lit up the village evenings; chemistry had not

worked its wonders; machinery had not set all the waters and all the

irons in motion to weave the wools or embroider the silks; gas, left to

the fire-balls, did not yet supply the lighting for our theatres and

streets.

Those transformations are not confined to our abodes: obeying the

instinct of his immortality, man has sent his intellect on high;

at each step that he has taken in the firmament, he has recognised

miracles of the Unspeakable Power. That star, which seemed single to

our fathers, is double and treble to our eyes; suns interposed before

suns eclipse one another and lack space for their multitude. In the

centre of the Infinite, God sees passing around Him those magnificent

theories, proofs added to the proofs of the Supreme Being.

Let us picture, according to our enlarged knowledge, our paltry planet

swimming in an ocean whose waves are suns, in that milky way, the raw

matter of light, the molten metal of worlds which the hand of the

Creator will shape. The distance of certain stars is so prodigious that

their brightness will not be able to reach the eye that watches them

until those stars are extinct: the focus before the ray. How small is

man on the atom where he moves! But how great he is as an intellect!

He knows when the face of luminaries is to be overcast with shadow, at

what hour comets will return after thousands of years: he who lives but

an instant! Microscopic insect though he be, lying unperceived in a

fold of the robe of the sky, the globes cannot hide from him a single

one of their movements in the depth of space. What destinies will those

stars, new to us, shine upon? Is the revelation of those stars linked

with some new phase of humanity? You will know, O races yet to be born;

I do not know, and I am going.

Thanks to the exorbitancy of my years, my monument is finished. It is a

great relief to me; I felt some one urging me: the skipper of the bark

in which my seat is taken was warning me that I had but a moment left

to go on board. If I had been the master of Rome, I should say, like

Sulla, that I am ending my Memoirs on the very eve of my death; but I

should not conclude my story with those words with which he concludes

his:

"I have seen, in a dream, one of my children who showed me Metella,

his mother, and exhorted me to come to enjoy repose in the breast

of eternal happiness."

If I had been Sulla, glory could never have given me repose and

happiness.

[Sidenote: End of my Memoirs.]

New storms will arise; men seem to have a presentiment of calamities

that will surpass the afflictions with which we have been overwhelmed;

already they are thinking of binding up their old wounds again in order

to return to the field of battle. Still, I do not believe in the early

outbreak of misfortunes; peoples and kings alike are tired out; no

unforeseen catastrophe will fall upon France: what comes after me will

be only the effect of the general transformation. No doubt, there will

be painful stations; the world cannot change its aspect without causing

suffering. But, once more, there will be no separate revolutions;

it will be the great revolution approaching its end. The scenes of

to-morrow do not concern me; they call for other painters: it is your

turn, gentlemen!

As I write these last words, on the 16th of November 1841, my window,

which looks west over the gardens of the Foreign Missions, is open: it

is six o'clock in the morning; I see the pale and spreading moon; it is

sinking over the spire of the Invalides scarce revealed by the first

gold ray from the East: one would say that the old world was ending

and the new commencing. I behold the reflections of a dawn of which I

shall not see the sun rise. It but remains for me to sit down by the

edge of my grave; and then I shall descend boldly, crucifix in hand, to

Eternity.

[399] This book was written partly in 1834 and partly in 1841, from the

25th of September to the 16th of November.--T.

[400] Chateaubriand is a year out in his calculation; but, as has

been said before and as he himself has stated, he was an indifferent

arithmetician.--T.

[401] 1 September 1715.--T.

[402] Antonio Giudice, Duca di Giovenazza, Principe di Cellamare

(1657-1733), of Neapolitan birth, was Spanish Ambassador to the Court

of France in 1715. He became the soul of a conspiracy directed against

the Duc D'Orléans and having for its object the transfer of the Regency

to Philip V. King of Spain. But the plot was discovered and Cellamare

made to leave the Kingdom in 1718.--T.

[403] _Cf._ Vol. V., p. 15, n. 5. Alberoni's fall occurred in 1719.--T.

[404] Guillaume Cardinal Dubois, Archbishop of Cambrai (1656-1723),

became Foreign Minister in 1717, was useful to the Regent in

discovering Cellamare's conspiracy and received the See of Cambrai, as

his reward, in 1718. He became Prime Minister in 1722. Dubois added to

the Court of the Regency such depravity as there was room for.--T.

[405] John Law (1671-1729), the Scotch financier, became French

Controller-general of Finance in May 1720. He was the inventor of a

marvellous "System," which collapsed in May of the same year, and Law

with it. He was driven from France and his estates confiscated.--T.

[406] Louis Henri Duc de Bourbon (1692-1740), known as M. le Duc, was

Prime Minister from 1723 to 1726, when Fleury obtained his banishment

to Chantilly.

[407] André Hercule Cardinal de Fleury, Bishop of Fréjus (1653-1743),

was seventy-three years old, when he became Prime Minister, and

remained in power till his death, at the age of ninety.--T.

[408] The War of the Polish Succession.--B.

[409] 29 May 1734 (_Cf._ Vol. I., p. 13).--T.

[410] Charles Louis Auguste Fouquet, Maréchal Duc de Belle-Isle

(1684-1761), father of the Comte de Gisors and grandson of Fouquet

(_vide infra_), created a marshal of France, after meritorious

services, in 1700. His finest feat of arms was his masterly retreat

from Prague in 1742. He was Minister for War from 1757 till his

death.--T.

[411] The French were defeated by the Brunswickers, at Crefeld, on the

23rd of June 1758.--T.

[412] Nicolas Fouquet, Marquis de Belle-Isle (1615-1680),

Superintendent of Finance from 1652 to 1661, is more celebrated

for the disgrace that followed on his administration than for that

administration itself. He was arrested and condemned for peculation in

1661 and imprisoned at Pignerol, in Piedmont, where he died in 1680,

after nineteen years' captivity. He retained many good friends during

his reverses of fortune, notably La Fontaine, who sang his sufferings,

and Madame de Sévigné.--T.

[413] La Bourdonnais (_Cf._ Vol. I., p. 26, n. 6) was Governor-General

of the Isles of France and Bourbon when, in 1743, he went to the

assistance of Dupleix, Governor of French India, who was threatened

by the English. La Bourdonnais laid siege to Madras and compelled it

to capitulate (1746). By the terms of the capitulation, Madras was to

be restored to the English on payment of a ransom. Dupleix quashed

this capitulation and a collision arose between him and La Bourdonnais

which was fatal to the latter. Furious at Dupleix's want of faith, La

Bourdonnais evacuated Madras and went back as a private individual to

the Isle of France, where he had been replaced in the command by the

instructions of the masterful Dupleix. He returned to France, in 1748,

to reply to the accusations levelled against him at the instance of

his persecutor, was imprisoned in the Bastille and remained there for

several years without receiving an opportunity of justifying himself.

At last, in 1752, his innocence was established and he released; but he

was a ruined man and he died in 1753 of a long and painful illness.--T.

[414] Joseph François Marquis Dupleix (1697-1764) was Governor of the

French East Indies from 1742 to 1754. In the war which ensued on his

breach of faith (_vide supra_), he displayed a courage and capacity

that went far to atone for the wrong he had undoubtedly committed. For

forty-two days, he defended Pondicherry against a formidable English

fleet and an army on land, and he added a great tract of country to the

French dominions. Puffed out by his successes, he ended by struggling

against the French East India Company itself, whose agent he was, when

it tried to oppose his enterprises. Ruined at last by all these wars,

he strove for a time to conceal the real state of things: the truth

became known, and he was recalled (1754). He spent the rest of his life

in bringing actions against the Company for sundry millions of francs

advanced to them and died in poverty and humiliation, in Paris, in

1764.--T.

[415] 1 November 1755.--T.

[416] Robert first Lord Clive of Plassey (1725-1774) started on his

first expedition against Bengal in 1756. He won the Battle of Plassey

on the 23rd of June 1757 and was Governor of Bengal from 1758 to 1760

and from 1765 to 1767. Clive committed suicide in London on the 22nd of

November 1774.--T.

[417] Robert François Damiens (1715-1757) made an unsuccessful attempt

on the life of King Louis XV. on the 5th of January 1757. He succeeded

in stabbing him. The punishment inflicted on Damiens was one of the

most serious known in history: his right hand was burnt in a slow fire;

his flesh was torn with pincers and burnt with melted lead; resin, wax

and oil were poured upon the wounds; and he was torn to pieces by four

horses.--T.

[418] The Family Compact was a treaty signed on the 15th of August 1761

between the Kings of France, Spain and the Two Sicilies and the Duke

of Parma, and so-called because all the contracting parties belonged

to the Bourbon Family. The object of this treaty, of which the Duc de

Choiseul was the chief author, was to counteract the superiority of the

British Navy by the union of the French, Spanish and Italian forces.--T.

[419] _Cf._ Vol. I., p. 139, n. 1.--T.

[420] Madame Du Barry was guillotined on the 6th of December 1793--T.

[421] Dominique Joseph Garat (_Cf._ Vol. II., p. 106, n. 6) was sent,

as Minister of Justice under the Convention, on the 20th of January

1793, to notify Louis XVI.'s condemnation to him.--T.

[422] Claude Louis Comte de Saint-Germain (1707-1778) became Minister

for War to Louis XVI., in 1775, on the advice of Turgot. He effected

many useful reforms, especially in the King's Military Household, but

displeased the army by attempting to introduce the Austrian discipline

and corporal punishment. He resigned office in 1777 and died in the

course of the following year.--T.

[423] Chateaubriand was born on the 4th of September 1768.--T.

[424] Prussia declared herself a kingdom in 1701.--T.

[425] Russia underwent her greatest development under Peter the Great,

whose reign lasted from 1682 to 1725.--T.

[426] Corsica was annexed to France on the 15th of August 1768.--T.

[427] Napoleon I. was born on the 15th of August 1768.--T.

[428] _Cf._ Vol. I., pp. 68-69.--T.

[429] American Independence was recognised by Great Britain in 1783.--T.

[430] _Gen._, IV., 19.--T.

[431] Isabella II. Queen of Spain (_b._ 1830 and still living) was made

to usurp the throne, in 1833, on the death of Ferdinand VII., when a

child of three, by the machinations of her mother, Maria Christina

(_cf._ Vol. III., p. 221, n. 2 and Vol. V., p. 74, n. 4). Queen

Isabella was deposed and driven from Spain in 1868, since which time

she has resided in Paris.--T.

[432] Victoria Queen of Great Britain and Ireland (_cf._ Vol. IV., p.

47, n. 2) married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha on the 10th of

February 1840, when in her twenty-first year.--T.

[433] GUILLAUME ANFRIE, ABBÉ DE CHAULIEU, _Les Louanges de la vie

champêtre, à Fontenay, en_ 1707, 71-72:

"O beautiful trees that presided

O'er my birth, you shall soon see me die!"--T.

[434] Varius Avitus Bassianus, known as Heliogabalus, Roman Emperor

(205-222) was proclaimed Emperor in 218 and gave himself up to the

most extravagant licentiousness. He was killed, in the eighteenth year

of his age, by his soldiers, whom his rapacity and debaucheries had

irritated.--T.

[435] Lamennais (_cf._ Vol. I., p. 27, n. 1) had been prosecuted for

one of his political writings, the _Pays et le Gouvernement_, and

sentenced, on the 26th of December 1840, to twelve months' imprisonment

and a tine of 2,000 francs.--B.

[436] Lamennais' pamphlet had just been published when Chateaubriand

was writing these last pages of the Memoirs in the autumn of 1841.--B.

[437] Lamennais was locked up at Sainte-Pélagie from January to

December 1841. He here composed his _Voix de prison_, an admirable

little volume containing, beside the furious rage of the pamphleteer,

pages of exquisite poetic feeling.--B.

[438] It is interesting in this connection to note that Lamennais was a

dwarf in stature and Chateaubriand himself only five feet four inches

high.--T.

[439] Lamennais' name was not François, but Félicité Robert.--T.

[440] 1817-1823.--T.

[441] Lamennais was born at Saint-Malo on the 19th of June 1782,

fourteen years after Chateaubriand.--T.

[442] Lamennais died in Paris on the 27th of February 1854, six years

after Chateaubriand. His funeral was held almost by stealth, on the 1st

of March. The hour of the funeral was accelerated by the authorities,

who were afraid of disturbances; six or eight persons followed the

hearse, from which the crowd was kept off by an armed force.

"The coffin," says M. Blaize, in his _Essai biographique sur M. F. de

La Mennais_, "was lowered into one of those long and hideous trenches

in which the common people are buried. When it was covered with earth,

the grave-digger asked:

"'Is there to be a cross?'"

M. Barbet answered:

"'No. M. de La Mennais said, "They must put nothing on my grave.'"

"Not a word was spoken over the tomb."--B.

[443] JOHN, I., 14.--T.

[444] JOHN, XV., 22.--T.

[445] LUKE, XI., 46.--T.

[446] _Cf._ LUKE, XIII., 1: "And there were present at that very time

some that told him of the Galileans, whose blood _Pilate_ had mingled

with their sacrifices." An earlier edition gives _Herodotus!_ I have

little doubt that the misquotation was a slip on the part of the

author's pen.--T.

[447] Epilepsy.--T.

[448] _Cf._ Vol. I., pp. XXI.-XXIV.: _The Author's Preface._--T.

[449] Australia was explored by Cook in 1770-1777. The first settlement

was at Port Jackson in 1788.--T.

[450] Jules Sébastien César Dumont d'Urville (1790-1842) visited the

Antarctic Ocean in the _Coquille_, in 1839. He was killed in the

burning of a railway train between Paris and Versailles on the 8th of

May 1842.--T.

[451] Ferdinand Vicomte de Lesseps (1805-1894) made his first

investigation of the Isthmus of Suez in 1849. The Canal was thrown open

for navigation in 1869. Work on the Panama Canal began in 1881.--T.

[452] Jean François Champollion (1791-1831) discovered the key to the

Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions in 1822, with the aid of the famous

Rosetta Stone.--T.

[453] M. Charles Lenormant, Champollion's learned travelling-companion,

has preserved the grammar of the obelisks which M. Ampère has gone to

study to-day on the ruins of Thebes and Memphis.--_Author's Note._

[454] _Sic_, in all the editions!--T.

[455] _Cf._ Vol. I., pp. 21-22.--T.

THE END.

APPENDICES

I. THE MORGANATIC MARRIAGE OF THE DUCHESSE DE BERRY

II. UNPUBLISHED FRAGMENTS OF THE _MÉMOIRES D'OUTRE-TOMBE_

III. THE LAST YEARS OF CHATEAUBRIAND

IV. THE TRANSLATOR'S SECOND NOTE

APPENDIX I

(BY M. EDMOND BIRÉ)

THE MORGANATIC MARRIAGE OF THE DUCHESSE DE BERRY

The Comte de La Ferronnays, in the course of his interviews with King

Charles X. at Hradschin Castle[456], brought himself to say:

"If Madame has not yet complied with Your Majesty's wish, if she has

hitherto refused to furnish the proof which is asked of her, it is

because her advisers in Paris, M. Hennequin[457] among others, have

frightened her as to the consequences that might ensue to her from the

publicity which it may perhaps be intended to give to her marriage.

She has been told that Your Majesty would not be satisfied until you

had the original instrument in your hands. Now Madame, I fear, will

never part with that document. But, if there were any other means of

obtaining the certainty which Your Majesty desires to have, if a man

honoured with all the King's confidence, such as M. de Montbel, for

instance, could, on his word of honour, vouch for the existence and the

perfect regularity of the marriage-deed, would the King then declare

himself satisfied?"

Since the Emigration, Charles X. had the habit of addressing M. de La

Ferronnays in the second person singular. He replied eagerly:

"Yes, certainly, I only ask to be convinced."

It was then arranged that M. de La Ferronnays and M. de Montbel should

go to Florence to the Duchesse de Berry. The Comte de La Ferronnays

continues his narrative in the following words:

"On returning to Prague, I found M. de Montbel's carriage standing

ready harnessed before my door. He was waiting for my return to set

out for Florence, where we were to join the Duchess. He purposed to

pass through Vienna, where he had to supply himself with certain

papers which he thought useful. I intended to go straight to

Tuscany. Nevertheless, in spite of all the haste that I made, I did

not arrive until twenty-four hours after him.

"I immediately called at his hotel; it was six o'clock in the

morning. Soon, Montbel joined me in a little sitting-room next to

his bed-room:

"'We have made an useless journey,' he said to me at once; 'I much

regret having undertaken it. I saw the Duchesse de Berry yesterday,

one hour after my arrival. I found her more excited, more irritated

against the King than ever. She is firmly decided to yield on no

point and to risk all the consequences of a rupture by arriving in

Prague, in spite of the measures taken to close the road to her.

All my arguments, all my entreaties were useless. She ended by

flying out against what she calls the partiality of my conduct. I

can do no more. As for you, she expects you with impatience. She

is persuaded that the letter which you are bringing her from the

Emperor will give her the liberty to continue her journey. That

letter, so different from what she expects, will increase her

irritation two-fold. You will have a painful scene and it appears

to me impossible that you should succeed in making her listen to

reason.'"

As the Duchesse de Berry was not to receive M. de La Ferronnays until

eleven o'clock, the latter, on leaving M. de Montbel, went to the Comte

de Saint-Priest. M. de Saint-Priest was the Princess's most authorized

adviser. The reception was perfect, but nevertheless wrapped up in

every imaginable kind of reserve.

"At bottom, the question remains the same," said M. de Saint-Priest.

"However affectionate the letter which M. de Montbel brought from

the King may be, it makes no alteration in the first demands, nor,

consequently, in the reasons which the Duchess has for rejecting them.

The mere fact," concluded M. de Saint-Priest, "of handing over the

marriage-deed, as Madame is asked to do, would be enough to deprive

her of her rights as a mother, a princess of the Blood and Regent She

refuses and will always refuse to hand it over."

This was brusquely broaching a question which M. de La Ferronnays

meant to discuss only with the Duchess herself. He therefore left M.

de Saint-Priest, not, however, without obtaining from him a promise of

complete neutrality.

"At the appointed hour," he continues, in his narrative, "I called

at the Poggio Imperiale, where Madame was staying. When I was

announced, she was alone, in a small drawing-room, with Count

Lucchesi, who at once withdrew.

"Her Royal Highness' first sentence was one of thanks. The

second was to ask me for the Emperor's letter. She read it with

ever-increasing excitement:

"'I see,' she at last said, angrily, 'that the party against me is

firmly united. This letter of the Emperor's is evidently dictated

by the King. They want to drive me to extremities. They want to be

able to say to France and to my children that there is no Duchesse

de Berry now, that there is only a foreigner entitled to neither

protection nor pity! They are erecting a pillory and they want me

to fasten myself to it.... They know me very little, if they think

me capable of so mean-spirited an act. They who employ such lofty

language to me have a false appreciation of their position and

mine. They do not know the strength which public opinion can give

me against them. They shall learn to know, for, as they want war, I

accept it. I shall have everything printed, everything published. I

shall prove that it is for me to impose conditions and not for me

to accept any. I shall force the King to respect my rights and at

last to give me back my children.'

"Madame la Duchesse de Berry's utterance was loud and short, her

gestures abrupt; and, but for her extreme agitation, I might have

thought that she was repeating a part which she had studied. I

expected this outburst; I was also prepared with the language which

I should have to hold; but I did not hurry to reply.

"Astonished at my silence:

"'But, after all,' she asked, 'don't you think that I am right?'

"'I shall dare to tell you everything, Madame, because my reasons

for being absolutely sincere will justify the harshness of my

words. All that Your Highness has just told me makes me fear that

you are ill-informed, ill-advised or ill-inspired. I have listened

to Madame with great attention and I am obliged to tell her that

she is mistaken as to the King's intentions, but that she is also

unfortunately mistaken as to her own position. The King, Madame,

does not believe in Your Highness' marriage. He does not believe

in it, because you refuse to give him the proof of it and because

your friends continue to protest against the reality of this

marriage. And yet it is important that the truth about this should

be known. Too much has been said about it, or not enough. M. le

Comte Lucchesi's presence about Your Highness is no longer to be

explained. As long as this remains so, I am not afraid to say that

the King, having his grand-children with him, cannot admit you into

the interior of his family. Right, justice and reason are on His

Majesty's side.'

"Here the Duchesse de Berry, whose agitation was extreme, was

unable to contain herself any longer and cried:

"'But, monsieur, I give you my word of honour that I am married.

The marriage-deed, which is perfectly regular, exists. It is

deposited in safe hands, and I shall certainly not take it from

them to place it in those of Charles X. and M. de Metternich.'

"'I beg Your Highness to observe that this is the first time

that you have deigned to speak to me with such confidence. One

declaration of this kind made to me in Naples with that accent

of truth would, I dare to think, have been enough to enable me

to fulfil in an entirely satisfactory manner the mission with

which Your Royal Highness was pleased to entrust me. But what

had I to oppose to the King's doubts? What could I tell him to

reassure his conscience? Nothing, Madame, for you had told me

nothing. My personal conviction could carry no weight Your friends,

moreover, reproached me with it. To admit that one believed in

Your Highness' marriage seemed to them almost an act of treachery.

I could therefore say nothing and I was obliged to leave the King

in the fulness of his doubts. Do not believe, Madame, that it is

to Charles X.'s interest to stigmatize the widow of his son and

the mother of his grandson. No, he shows himself only jealous of

your honour as a widow and a mother, believe me. The King may have

disapproved of a marriage contracted without his knowledge, he

may even have become irritated at it; but to-day he asks only to

set his conscience at rest and to shelter your honour. Your Royal

Highness speaks of the strength which public opinion will give you.

You seem to threaten the King and the Powers with your anger.

Alas, all those outbursts would only be new and great misfortunes.

It is very painful for me to be reduced to give utterance only to

cruel words. But it is necessary that Madame should at last know

the truth, so that she may resolve upon a necessary sacrifice.

No, Madame is no longer in a situation to dictate terms or impose

conditions: she still judges her position from the height of the

pedestal upon which public opinion for some time placed her. No

doubt, if Your Royal Highness had remained there; if, after the

admiration inspired by her sublime courage, constancy, devotion,

we had had to bemoan only her reverses and her captivity, not only

would Madame have lost none of her spell, but she would have left

Blaye even greater than when she entered it. She would not have had

to dictate conditions, for she would have found none but submissive

wills before her. But, unhappily for Madame and for France, the

declaration made in the month of February has completely and

cruelly changed all that. Believe, Madame, the voice of a friend

who will never be able to give you a greater proof of his devotion

than he is doing at this moment; or rather, listen only to your

reason. It will make you understand why and to what extent your

position is changed. You will admit how guilty is the want of

reflection of those who advise you to resort to resistance and even

threats. Everyone pities you, Madame, but no one is any longer

afraid of you. The struggle which you are being urged to maintain

is henceforth too unequal. Its prolongation can henceforth have

fatal consequences for you alone.'

"While speaking, I saw the unhappy Princess turn red, then pale;

tears poured down her cheeks, but she did not try to interrupt me.

I was able to fulfil my sad duty to the end. She then looked at me

with an indefinable expression of face:

"'If all that you have just told me is true, they are deceiving

me and I am very unhappy. What do you want me to do? Can I send

that original document which, before the courts, would be my

condemnation?'

"'No, Madame, I am the first to tell Your Highness that you must

in no case part with it. Only, the King's conscience desires to

be reassured; there is no other motive in his demand. If the King

could obtain the certainty of Your Highness' marriage, without

your parting with the original, without your even giving a copy of

it, should you see any danger, for yourself or your interests, in

satisfying Charles X.?'

"The Princess tried to guess my thought.

"'But what means can you contrive that would satisfy the King,

since he refuses to believe my word?'

"'The King does not believe it, because you have not given it him.'

"'But I tell you again that I am married. The deed is in Rome, in

the Pope's hands.'

"'Well then, Madame, if a man honoured by your confidence and the

King's, if M. de Montbel were to go to Rome, would you refuse to

allow the holder of your marriage-deed to give him cognizance of

it, or at least to certify its existence to him? I am certain

that M. de Montbel's declaration would be immediately followed by

the dispatch of the passports which Your Highness so impatiently

desires.'

"Madame la Duchesse de Berry, at last conquered, came up to me and

said, with a sad smile:

"'I see no harm in trying the method which you propose, but you

understand that I cannot decide alone. Count Lucchesi's consent is

as necessary as my own.'

"M. le Comte Lucchesi was in a neighbouring room, with Messieurs

de Montbel and de Saint-Priest; I called him in. Madame herself

repeated to him the proposal which I had just made. He did not

hesitate to accept.

"I then asked that the two other gentlemen might be brought in. We

all sat round a little table before which Madame la Duchesse de

Berry was herself seated and, at her bidding, I gave an account of

the explanation which I had just had with her. As I was finishing,

I addressed the Comte de Montbel:

"'And now, monsieur, it is for you alone, who know the King's mind

and who, so to speak, represent him here, to judge and declare if

the method which I propose will be able to satisfy His Majesty and

put an end to his opposition to Madame's journey to Prague.'