T.... She was a sister of the unfortunate Prince Poniatowski who was
drowned while directing the retreat at the battle of Leipsic. Lamartine
did not know her and the letter was not addressed to him but to M.
Alain, his friend and physician. M. Alain had been for six years the
physician and friend of M. de Talleyrand, and during Lamartine’s illness
he had cared for him like a mother rather than as a medical attendant.
He is depicted as being as tender as learned. Lamartine describes him as
most true, good, and generous.
The letter of the princess had been written and despatched before
daybreak, and was as follows:—“The Prince de Talleyrand sent me at my
waking this note. I address it for your friend, in order that the
pleasure which this impression of the great judge will bring you shall
be doubled. Communicate this note of the Prince to the young man[2] and
thank me for the pleasure which I am giving you, for I know that your
sole delight is in the joy of those whom you love.”
Lamartine opened the second note. It was written upon a scrap of paper
about five fingers in dimension, spotted with ink, and in a hand
evidently hurried and showing signs of fatigue from want of sleep. It
began as follows:—“I send you, princess, before I go to sleep the little
volume which you lent me last night. Let it suffice you to know that I
have not slept, and that I have been reading till four o’clock in the
morning so as to read it over again.”
The rest of the note was a prediction of Lamartine’s success, in terms
of the most fulsome character. Talleyrand was often oracular, and his
foreknowledge seemed almost infallible.[3] “The soul of the old man has
been said to be of ice,” Lamartine remarks, “but it glowed all one night
with the enthusiasm of twenty years, and this fire had been kindled by
certain pages of verses which were by no means complete but which were
verses of love.”
“I read the letter of Prince Talleyrand twenty times over,” says
Lamartine. “The young girl meanwhile was waiting and watching me as I
read and read again, and she blushed with emotion as she beheld it in my
face. ‘Come, my little Lucy, and let me kiss you,’ said I. ‘You will
never bring me a message equal to this. In the lottery of glory children
draw the successful lots. Tell your mother that you have brought me a
_quine_.’”[4]
Lamartine’s book was thus placed in the lottery of fortune, and the name
of Talleyrand had been called. The great statesman was not in public
life at that time, but he was far-seeing, and his scent of public
matters was well-nigh infallible. He had no interest to flatter the
unknown writer, and Lamartine accepted his assurances as a favorable
augury.
Surely enough, little Lucy, a quarter of an hour later, brought another
letter in a large official envelope. Lamartine’s friends had been
successful in their pleadings, and this was his nomination, signed by M.
Pasquier, to the post which he desired on the Legation to Florence.
At the reading of this document, Lamartine was for a time unable to
restrain his emotions. He leaped down from the bed, he tells us, and in
other ways exhibited his delight. He was not content, however, to exult
in his actual good fortune, but immediately began to extend his
imagination further.
“I experienced what the shackled courser does when the course is
opened,” says he. “I had little mind for the glory of verses, but I did
have an unbounded passion for political activity. Already I began to
look beyond the long years that separated me from the tribune and field
of higher statesmanship.
“This was my true and entire vocation, although my friends think and my
enemies say otherwise. I felt that mine was not the powerful creative
organization that constitutes great poets; all my talent was of the
heart only. But I did feel in me an accuracy of view, an effective power
of reasoning, an energy of honest principle, which make statesmen. I had
somewhat of the quality of Mirabeau in the reserved mental forces of my
being. Fortune and France have since decided otherwise. But Nature knows
more than Fortune and France; the one is blind, the other is jealous.”
Nevertheless, Lamartine continued to write verses, and his prose
publications are more or less interspersed with poetic productions. He
praised his friends, he commemorated those whom he loved in poems. Years
afterward in his story of his journey to the Holy Land, he made this
declaration: “Life for my mind has always been a great poem, as for my
heart it has been love. GOD, LOVE and POESIE, are the three words which
I shall desire to be engraved alone upon my monument if I ever deserve a
monument.”
While he was sitting in a mystic reverie one evening at Florence, he
heard a melodious voice murmur in his ear some lines from the
_Meditations_, which are rendered as follows:
“Perchance the future may reserve for me
A happiness whose hope I now resign:
Perchance amid the busy world may be
Some soul responsive still to mine.”
He was also a member of the Legation to England and afterward became
Secretary to the French Embassy at Naples. In 1824 he was appointed
Chargé d’Affaires to Tuscany, and remained in that position five years.
He made the acquaintance of Louis Bonaparte, the former King of Holland,
who was a scientist and philosopher rather than a statesman. Queen
Hortense also attempted to have an interview with him, but this he
carefully evaded. His mother, however, was a relative of the wife of
Lucien Bonaparte and he met several members of that family under
circumstances somewhat romantic. Pierre Bonaparte was with him at Paris
in the Revolution of 1848.
His older uncle died in 1823, and he became heir of the estates. This
uncle was known as M. de Lamartine de Monceau and was by seniority the
head of the family. He had never married because his parents opposed the
choice he had made. He was thrifty and had increased the value of his
property. Lamartine now took his uncle’s designation.
The marriage of Lamartine took place during this period. The bride was
Miss Marianne Birch, an English lady of beauty and fortune. She was of
amiable disposition and Lamartine’s mother became warmly attached to
her.
Neither the accession of wealth, his aristocratic rank, nor diplomatic
engagements deterred him from literary composition. In 1823 the
_Nouvelles Meditations_ were published, and two years later, _The Last
Canto of Childe Harold_. Lamartine afterward described this latter work
as a servile imitation in which his enthusiasm as a copyist and its
success were alike “mediocre”—a punishment for feigning an admiration
which was not altogether sincere. He had, likewise, another penalty to
encounter. Two lines in it are versified in English as follows:
“I seek elsewhere (forgive, O Roman shade!)
For men, and not the dust of which they’re made.”
For this apparent slur he was involved in a controversy leading to a
duel and dangerously wounded. At his solicitation to the Grand Duke of
Tuscany, his antagonist, Colonel Pepé, was not prosecuted.
Louis XVIII. was succeeded in 1824 by the Count d’Artois as Charles X.
The attempt was now made to reinstate the Government as it existed
before the Revolution.
In 1829, at the instance of Chateaubriand, then a member of the
Coalition Ministry, Lamartine was recalled. He never ascertained the
reason, but attributed it to the influence of Madame Recamier, with whom
Chateaubriand was intimate. That lady, however, took an early
opportunity to set the matter right by visiting the mother and sisters
of Lamartine and inviting him and them to a drawing-room entertainment.
The reactionist Ministry under M. de Polignac was formed in the autumn
of that year. It was the final separation of the men of the former
century from the men of the time. A portfolio was offered to Lamartine
but declined. He was attached to the dynasty, but he had the prescience
of its overthrow. “I had seen it coming from afar,” says he. “Nine
months before the fatal day, the fall of the new monarchy had been
written for me in the names of the men whom it had commissioned to carry
it on.”
He was sent on a special mission to Prince Leopold, then Duke of
Saxe-Cobourg, and afterward King of Greece;[5] and had received the
appointment of ambassador to that country when the Revolution of July
overthrew the dynasty. The ministry of Louis-Philippe then offered him
his choice of the embassies to Vienna and London. The King visited him
to solicit his acceptance, but he was inexorable. The title of
Louis-Philippe was legally defective; he was not the next heir to the
throne, and he had not been placed on it by the choice of the people of
France. For these reasons it was important to him that the supporters of
Charles X. should accept places under him and thus strengthen his
pretensions. But says Lamartine: “One should not take part gratuitously
in a fault which he did not himself commit.”
M. de St. Aulaire was at that time Minister at Vienna, but greatly
desired to be transferred to England. He also waited upon Lamartine,
anxious to find out which place he was going to accept. Lamartine
quickly assured him.
“If,” said he, “I had the ambition to be ambassador to London, I would
instantly sacrifice it without hesitation, in remembrance of the good
offices which you did to me at the time of my entrance into the great
world. But you can go to London without any indebtedness to me, except
good will.”
The same year Lamartine was elected one of the “Immortals,” in the
French Academy.
The same year he visited England. He there made the acquaintance of
Talleyrand. The old statesman received him cordially, and in one
interview predicted his career. Lamartine, he remarked, was reserving
himself for something more sound and grand than the substituting of an
uncle for a nephew upon a throne that had no stable foundation. “You
will succeed in it,” he added. “Nature has made you a poet; poetry will
make you an orator; tact and thinking will make you a statesman. I know
men somewhat; I am eighty years old. I see farther than the objects in
sight. You are to have a grand part to perform in the events which will
succeed to the present state of affairs. I have witnessed the intrigues
of Courts; you will see the movements of the people deceptive in other
ways. Let verses go; you know that I adore yours. They are not for the
age in which you are now living. Improve yourself in the grand eloquence
of Athens and Rome. France will yet have scenes like those of Rome and
Athens in her public places.”
From this period Lamartine spent much of his time abroad. He never
forgot that he was a citizen of France, but he entertained a strong
dislike for the Orleans dynasty. Yet his mother had been educated in the
family with the King, and this somewhat increased his perplexity.
He writes of her death pathetically, as the saddest event of his life.
He had been loved and cherished by her with a devotion made sublime by
its absolute self-abnegation. His first lessons in books and knowledge
had been given by her, and he was endowed personally with her most
prominent characteristics. She had seemed to know instinctively when and
why he suffered, and she possessed a power of divination to foresee his
career. Her death, the result of a terrible accident, was to him like
the rending violently away of a vital part of his body.
“I hardly thought that I could survive the shock,” he wrote in the
_Souvenirs_. “I was absent from home when the accident occurred which
cut short her days. I came back in haste, arriving in time to follow the
coffin in which her remains were enshrouded, to the cemetery of the
village where we had lived during our infancy.”
The weather was bitterly cold, but this he did not feel. He returned to
the house at Milly, now empty for the winter and a thousand times more
empty since she who had given it life and soul was sleeping the eternal
sleep. Overcome by his grief, he made his way to the little room where
the papers of the family were kept, and threw himself down on the floor.
There he lay for hours in an ecstasy of woe. The moaning of the wind and
the ticking of the clock seemed to be repeating the funeral hymn.
JOURNEY TO THE EAST.
One desire that the mother of Lamartine had instilled into him was that
of visiting the East. As she read to him, a boy of eight years, from the
Bible about the places where wonderful events had taken place, he
resolved that he would some time behold them with his own eyes. Now that
he was disengaged from public life there was an opportunity. There was
much, however, to persuade him to remain at home; his father and
sisters, and besides, he had a beautiful residence at Saint-Point with a
wife and daughter to whom he was fondly attached. But he felt that
imagination had likewise its necessities and passions.
“I was born a poet,” he pleads. “When young, I had heard the word of
Nature, the speech which is formed of images and not of sounds. I had
even translated into written language some of those accents that had
stirred me, and that had in their turn stirred other souls. But these
accents did not now satisfy me.”
“Besides, I was, I had almost always been, a Christian in heart and in
imagination; my mother had made me such.” This pilgrimage though not as
of the Christian, at least of the man and the poet, would delight her in
the celestial abode where he saw her, and she would be to them as a
second Providence between them and dangers.
His duty to his country was likewise considered. He had sacrificed to it
this dream of his for sixteen years. There was need for heaven to raise
up new men; the present politics made man ashamed and angels weep.
“Destiny gives an hour in a century for humanity to be regenerated; that
hour is a revolution; and men let it pass to tear one another to pieces:
thus they give to revenge the hour given by God for their regeneration
and progress.”
All was duly made ready for the journey. He set sail from Marseilles, in
the brig _Alceste_, on the eleventh of July, 1832, expecting to be
absent two years. His wife and daughter and three friends, one of them a
physician, composed the party. The voyage was full of incident, and his
journal abounds with adventures and predictions. Lamartine was what
imaginative persons term a visionary. He was really oriental and
tropical in temperament, and ready to catch the spirit of the region to
which he was sailing; for Syria, Arabia and Palestine have always been
renowned for mystics, seers and prophets.
As the vessel passed the coast of Tunis, he wrote his impressions. He
had never loved the Romans nor taken the least interest in behalf of
Carthage; but he sympathized with Hannibal. “I love or I abhor, in the
physical sense of the word,” says he. “At first sight, in the twinkling
of an eye, I have formed my judgment of a man or woman for always.” He
adds that “this is the characteristic of individuals with whom instinct
is quick, active, instantaneous, inflexible. What, it will be asked,
what is instinct? It is to be cognized as the highest reason—the innate
reason, the reason that does not argue, the reason such as God has made
and not what man finds out. It strikes us like the lightning without
which the eye would have difficulty of searching it out. It illuminates
everything at the first flash. The inspiration in all the arts, as upon
the field of battle, is as this instinct, this reason that divines.
Genius also is instinct and not logic and labor.”
Nevertheless he sets aside much that is often regarded as original, or
inspired. This utterance is fit for the book of _Ecclesiastes_: “There
is nothing new in nature and in the arts. Everything that is now being
done has been done before; everything that is said has been said
already; everything that is thought has been thought. Every century is
the plagiarist of another century; for all that we are so much, artists
or thinkers, perishable or fugitive, we copy in different ways from one
immutable and eternal model,—nature, the thought, one and diverse, of
the Creator.”
He had little to say in favor of the Greeks. “For me,” says he, “Greece
is like a book the beauties of which are tarnished, because we have been
made to read it before we were able to understand it. Nevertheless, the
enchantment is not off from everything. There is still an echo of all
those great names remaining in my heart. Something holy, sweet,
fragrant, mounts up with the horizons in my soul. I thank God for having
seen, while passing by this land, the country of the Doers of Great
Deeds, as Epaminondas called his fatherland.”
He felt keenly a sense of isolation that he had no one to participate in
these sentiments. “Always,” says he, “when a strong impression stirs my
soul I feel the necessity to speak or to write to some one of what I am
experiencing, to find in some degree a joy from my joy, an echoing of
that which has impressed me. Isolated feeling is not complete: man has
been created double. Ah! when I look around me, there is yet a void.
Julia and Marianne fill everything for themselves alone; but Julia is
still so young that I tell her only what is suited to her age. It is all
future; it will soon be all present for us; but the past, where is it
now?
“The person who would have most enjoyed my happiness at this moment, is
my Mother. In everything that happened to me, pleasant or sad, my
thought turns involuntarily to her. I believe I see her, hear her, talk
to her, write to her. One who is remembered so much is not absent;
whoever lives so completely, so powerfully in ourselves is not dead for
us.”
“Empty dream! She is there no more; she is dwelling in the world of
realities; our vagrant dreams are no more anything to her; but her
spirit is with us, it visits us, it follows with us, it protects us:
_our conversation is with her in the eternal regions_.”
He goes on to describe his condition.
“Before I had reached the age of maturity I had lost the greater part of
those here below whom I most loved, or who most loved me. My love-life
had become concentrated; my heart had only a few other hearts to take
voyage with. My memory had little more than graves where it might rest
here in the earth; I lived more with the dead than with the living. If
God were to strike two or three of his blows around me, I feel that I
would be detached entirely by myself, for I would contemplate myself no
more. I would love myself only in the others; and it is only there that
I can love.”
“One begins to feel the emptiness of existence from the day when he is
no more necessary to anybody, from the hour when he can no more be
dearly loved. The sole reality here below, I have always felt, is love,
love under all its forms.”
“To us poets, beauty is evident and perceptible; we are not beings of
abstraction, but men of nature and instinct; so I have travelled many
times through Rome; so I have visited the seas and the mountains; so I
have read the sages, the historians and the poets; so have I visited
Athens.”
On the fifth of September the brig arrived at Bayreuth. Lamartine
engaged a house for the season and established his family there while he
travelled over the country. He had for a long time entertained grave
doubts of his daughter’s health, and had brought her with him in the
hope that a residence in Syria would restore her.
Ibrahim Pacha was at this time making his conquests, and at his orders,
the French travellers were everywhere received with courtesy and the
most generous hospitality.
The heat was too great for setting out at once, so Lamartine addressed a
letter to Lady Hester Stanhope, asking permission to visit her. This
lady had been the confidential secretary of her uncle, William Pitt, the
famous minister, and was supposed to be betrothed to Sir John Moore.
After their deaths she left Europe and made her home in the East. She
had gained a certain authority over many of the Arabian chiefs who
venerated her as an inspired person. She received Lamartine cordially,
saying that their stars were friendly and in concurrence. He declined
her offer to cast his horoscope or to have any discussion on matters of
religion. “God alone possesses the truth,” said he, “we have only
faith.”
“Believe what you please,” said she. “You are one of those men
nevertheless that I expected, whom Providence has sent to me, and who
have a grand part to perform in the work which is preparing. You will
shortly go back to Europe; Europe is finished. France alone has as yet a
grand mission to fulfill, and you will participate in it, I know not
how.”
She added that he had four or five stars, and explained further: “You
ought to be a poet; that is legible in your eyes and the upper part of
your countenance. Lower down you are under the influence of different
stars that are almost in opposition; there is an influence of energy and
activity.”
She asked his name; she had never heard it before. She predicted that he
would soon return to Europe, but would come back to the East, insisting
that it was his fatherland. He acknowledged that it was the fatherland
of his imagination.
Lamartine and his friends were hospitably entertained but she would not
regard his departure as being more than for a season.
Forming a caravan at Bayreuth he set out on the eighth of October. At
Jaffa or “Yaffa,” the governor had received letters from Mehemet Ali and
Ibrahim Pacha, then masters in the East, commanding all the officials to
aid him in his journey, to furnish escorts, and to supply him with every
convenience that he required. When the caravan reached the “village of
Jeremiah” it was met by Abu Gosh, the brigand chief. He demanded of
Lamartine whether he was the Frank Emir, whom his friend, Lady Stanhope,
the Queen of Palmyra, had placed under his protection, and in whose name
had sent him the magnificent garment of cloth of gold in which he was
then arrayed. Lamartine knew nothing of the gift but assured the chief
that he was the man.
Abu Gosh at that time had the whole region of Southern Palestine in
subjection clear to Jericho. He now provided a strong guard for the
caravan.
Lamartine found no difficulty in identifying the places around
Jerusalem. “Almost never,” says he, “did I encounter a place or object
the first sight of which was not to me as what I remembered. Have we
lived twice or a thousand times? Is our memory simply an impression that
has been obscured, which the breath of God brings out again vividly? Or
have we a faculty in our imagination to anticipate and perceive in
advance before we actually do behold?”
The monks of the Convent of St. John the Baptist, in the wilderness of
that name, received the travellers with sincere cordiality. Lamartine
left there a part of his caravan, going on only with the Arabian and
Egyptian guard. They confined their movements to visiting places in the
suburbs, made historic by traditions of the New Testament.
He pays a deserved tribute to the Turks for their management of the
“Holy Sepulchre.” Instead of destroying it, they had preserved
everything, maintaining strict police regulations, and a silent
reverence for the place which the Christians were far from manifesting.
While the intolerance of the various sects would lead the triumphant
party to exclude its rivals from the place, the Turks are impartial to
them all.
The Mussulmans are the only tolerant people, he stoutly affirms. Let
Christians ask what they would have done if the fortunes of war had
delivered to them the City of Mecca and the Kaaba.
On the thirtieth of October, the caravan set out for the river Jordan
and the Dead Sea. On returning to the neighborhood of Jerusalem,
Lamartine received a letter from his wife that determined him to forego
the extending of his journey into Egypt. He went back to Bayreuth,
arriving the fifth of November.
Autumn in that country has the warmth, the renewing of vegetation and
other conditions, like spring in the northerly climates of the temperate
zone. Lamartine had purchased Arab horses of superb quality while in
Palestine, and one for his daughter. It was at the end of November that
he took her out for her first excursion with the animal. The air was
exhilarating and the mountain scenery in its most attractive guise. In
an ecstasy of excitement the young girl declared it the longest, most
beautiful, most delightful ride that she had ever taken.