Chapter X: Book V: 218 (1)

Stay in Brittany--In garrison at Dieppe--I return to Paris with Lucile and Julie--Delisle de Sales--Men of letters--Portraits--The Rosanbo family--M. de Malesherbes--His predilection for Lucile--Appearance and change of my sylph--Early political disturbances in Brittany--A glance at the history of the monarchy--Constitution of the States of Brittany--The holding of the States--The King's revenue in Brittany--Private revenue of the province--Hearth-money--I am present for the first time at a political meeting--A scene--My mother moves to Saint-Malo--I receive the tonsure--The country round Saint-Malo--The ghost--The sick man--The States of Brittany in 1789--Riots--Saint-Riveul, my schoolfellow, is killed--The year 1789--Journey from Brittany to Paris--Movement on the road--Appearance of Paris--Dismissal of M. Necker--Versailles--Delight of the Royal Family--General insurrection--Capture of the Bastille--Effect of the capture of the Bastille on the Court--The heads of Foullon and Bertier--Recall of M. Necker--Sitting of the 4th of August 1789--The day's work of the 5th of October--The King is taken to Paris--The Constituent Assembly--Mirabeau--Sittings of the National Assembly--Robespierre--Society-Aspect of Paris--What I did amidst all this turmoil--My solitary days--Mademoiselle Monet--I draw up with M. de Malesherbes the plan of my journey in America--Bonaparte and I both unknown subalterns--The Marquis de La Rouërie--I embark at Saint-Malo--Last thoughts on leaving my native land.

All that has been read in the previous chapter was written in Berlin. I have returned to Paris for the christening of the Duc de Bordeaux[219], and have resigned my embassy through political fidelity to M. de Villèle[220], who has left the Cabinet. Restored to leisure, let me write. The more these Memoirs become filled with my years that have passed, the more do they remind me of the lower bulb of an hour-glass which marks what has fallen from my life: when all the sand shall have passed through, I would not turn over my glass clock, if God gave me power to do so.

*

The new solitude into which I entered in Brittany, after my presentation, was no longer that of Combourg; it was not so entire, nor so serious, nor, to tell the truth, so forced: I was free to leave it; it lost its value. An old armorial lady of the castle, an old escutcheoned baron, watching over their last son and their last daughter in a feudal manor, presented what the English call "characters:" there was nothing provincial, nothing narrow in that life, because it was not the common life.

With my sisters, provincial life went on as usual amid the fields: neighbours danced at each other's houses or acted plays, in which I performed occasionally and very badly. In the winter one had, at Fougères, to submit to the society of a small town, with its balls, assemblies, and dinners, and I could not live forgotten, as in Paris.

On the other hand, I had not seen the army, the Court, without undergoing a certain change in my ideas. In spite of my natural inclinations, an indefinite something struggled within me against obscurity, and besought me to emerge from the shadow. Julie detested country life, and the instinct of genius and beauty impelled Lucile towards a wider stage.

I thus felt a discomfort in my existence which warned me that that existence was not my destiny.

[Sidenote: Garrison life at Dieppe.]

Nevertheless, I continued, to love the country, and round about Marigny it was charming[221]. My regiment had moved its quarters: the first battalion was garrisoned at the Havre, the second at Dieppe. I joined the latter; my presentation at Court made a personage of me. I acquired a taste for my profession; I worked hard at my training; I was placed in charge of recruits, whom I drilled on the pebbly beach: the sea has been the background of almost all the scenes of my life.

La Martinière did not concern himself at Dieppe with his homonym of Lamartinière[222], nor with the Père Simon[223], who wrote against Bossuet, Port-Royal, and the Benedictines, nor with Pecquet[224] the anatomist, whom Madame de Sévigné[225] calls "little Pecquet;" but La Martinière was in love at Dieppe as at Cambrai: he pined away at the feet of a lusty woman of Caux[226], whose cap and head-dress were half a fathom high. She was not young: by an odd chance, her name was Cauchie, and she was apparently the grand-daughter of that other native of Dieppe, Anne Cauchie, who, in 1645, was one hundred and fifty years old.

In 1647, Anne of Austria, like myself watching the sea from the windows of her chamber, amused herself by seeing the fire-ships bum for her diversion. She allowed the nations which had been faithful to Henry IV. to guard young Louis XIV., and gave endless benisons to those nations "in spite of their villainous Norman speech."

At Dieppe there still prevailed some of the feudal fines which I had seen paid at Combourg: there were due to the burgess Vauquelin three pigs' heads, each with an orange between its teeth, and three marked sous of the oldest known coinage.

I went to spend a week at Fougères. There reigned a noble spinster, called Mademoiselle de La Belinaye[227], aunt to the Comtesse de Tronjoli of whom I have spoken. An agreeable, but ugly, sister of an officer in the Condé Regiment attracted my admiration: I was not bold enough to raise my eyes to beauty; I dared to risk a respectful tribute only by favour of a woman's imperfections.

Madame de Farcy, continuing in ill-health, at last resolved to leave Brittany. She persuaded Lucile to accompany her; Lucile, in her turn, overcame my repugnance: we set out for Paris; it was the sweet partnership of the three youngest birds of the brood. My brother was married; he lived with his father-in-law, the President de Rosanbo, in the Rue de Bondy. We agreed to settle in his neighbourhood: through the good offices of M. Delisle de Sales[228], who lived in the Pavilions de Saint-Lazare, at the top of the Faubourg Saint-Denis, we secured an apartment in these same "pavilions[229]."

[Sidenote: Delisle de Sales.]

Madame de Farcy had become acquainted, I know not how, with Delisle de Sales, who had formerly been sent to Vincennes for some philosophical nonsense or other. At that time, one became a celebrity if he had scribbled a few lines of prose or published a quatrain in the _Almanack des Muses._ Delisle de Sales, a very worthy man, most decidedly under the average, suffered from a serious relaxation of the intellect, and allowed his years to slip from under him. The old man had got together a handsome library consisting of his own works, which he dealt in abroad, and which nobody read in Paris. Every year, in spring, he went to Germany to renew his stock of ideas. He wore a greasy, unbuttoned coat, and carried a roll of dirty paper which one saw protruding from his pocket: on this he would jot down his thoughts of the moment at the street-corners. On the pedestal of his own bust in marble he had himself placed the following inscription, borrowed from the bust of Buffon: "God, man and nature: he explained them all." Delisle de Sales explaining everything! These boasts are very pleasant, but very discouraging. Who is in a position to flatter himself that he possesses real talent? May we not all, such as we are, be under the sway of an illusion similar to that of Delisle de Sales? I would wager that some author will read this phrase who believes himself a genius and is none the less a blockhead.

If I have expatiated at too great length on the subject of the worthy man of the Pavilions de Saint-Lazare, the reason is that he was the first man of letters I met. He introduced me to the company of others. The presence of my two sisters made life in Paris less unbearable to me; my love of study still further overcame my distaste. Delisle de Sales I considered an eagle. I met at his rooms Carbon Flins des Oliviers[230], who fell in love with Madame de Farcy. She laughed at him; he put a good face upon it, for he prided himself upon being a man of breeding. Flins introduced me to his friend Fontanes, who became mine.

Flins was the son of an administrator of woods and forests at Rheims, and had received a neglected education; he was for all that a man of sense, and sometimes of talent. It was impossible to imagine anything uglier than he: short and bloated, with large, prominent eyes, bristling hair, dirty teeth, and yet a not over-vulgar air. His manner of life, which was that of nearly all the men of letters in Paris at that time, deserves to be told. Flins occupied a lodging in the Rue Mazarine, pretty near La Harpe, who lived in the Rue Guénégaud. He was waited upon by two Savoyards, disguised as flunkeys by means of livery cloaks; they followed him at night, and opened the door to his visitors in the day-time. Flins went regularly to the Théâtre Français, which at that time was situate in the Odéon and excelled particularly in comedy. Brizard[231] had only just retired; Talma[232] was commencing; Larive[233], Saint-Phal, Fleury[234], Molé[235], Dazincourt, Dugazon[236], Grandmesnil[237], Mesdames Contat[238], Saint-Val[239], Desgarcins, Olivier[240] were in the full vigor of their talent, pending the arrival of Mademoiselle Mars[241], daughter of Monvel[242], who was preparing to make her first appearance at the Théâtre Montansier[243]. The actresses protected the authors, and sometimes became the occasion of their fortune.

Flins, who had only a small allowance from his family, lived on credit. When Parliament was not sitting, he pawned his Savoyards' liveries, his two watches, his rings and underclothing, paid his debts with the amount thus raised, went to Rheims, spent three months there, returned to Paris, redeemed, with the money his father had given him, the articles which he had pledged at the pawnshops, and resumed his round of life, ever gay and popular.

*

[Sidenote: The Chevalier de Parny.]

In the course of the two years that elapsed between my settling in Paris and the opening of the States-General, the circle in which I moved increased. I knew the elegies of the Chevalier de Parny by heart, as I know them still I wrote to him to ask leave to set eyes upon a poet whose works delighted me; I received a civil reply, and called upon him in the Rue de Cléry. I found a man still fairly young in years, of very pleasant manners, tall, spare, with a face pitted with the small-pox. He returned my visit; I introduced him to my sisters. He cared little for society, and was soon driven from it on account of his politics: at that time he belonged to the old party. I have never known a writer who more closely resembled his works: poet and Creole[244] as he was, all he needed was the Indian sky, a fountain, a palm-tree, and a woman by his side. He dreaded noise, tried to glide unnoticed through life, sacrificed everything to his idleness, and, amid the obscurity in which he dwelt, was betrayed only by his pleasures, which played upon his lyre as they passed[245].

It was this inability to escape from his indolence which turned the Chevalier de Parny from the furious aristocrat that he was into a wretched revolutionary, insulting persecuted religion and priests on the scaffold, purchasing repose at all costs, and foisting upon the muse that had sung Éléonore the language of the houses where Camille Desmoulins went to haggle for the pleasures of love.

The author of the _Histoire de la literature italienne_, who crept into the Revolution in Chamfort's wake, came to visit us, thanks to the cousinship that exists among all Bretons. Ginguené lived in society upon a reputation acquired through a rather graceful set of verses, the _Confession de Zulmé_, which obtained for him a paltry place in M. de Necker's[246] offices: hence his article upon his admission to the office of the Controller-General. Somebody disputed Ginguené's claim to the authorship of the _Confession de Zulmé_ upon which his fame was based; but it was, as a matter of fact, his own.

The Rennes poet was a good musician and wrote ballads. Humble as he began by being, we saw his pride grow as he succeeded in hanging upon the skirts of some well-known man. About the time of the summoning of the States-General, Chamfort employed him to scribble articles for the newspapers and speeches for the clubs: he then became arrogant. At the first Federation he said: "There's a fine entertainment! In order to light it better, we ought to burn an aristocrat at each of the four corners of the altar!" There was nothing original in this aspiration; long before him, Louis Dorléans, the Leaguer, had written in his _Banquet du Comte d'Arète_ that "one ought to fasten the Protestant ministers by way of faggots to the stake of the Midsummer's Night bonfires, and put King Henry IV. into the barrel where one put the cats."

Ginguené knew of the revolutionary murders before they took place. Madame Ginguené warned my sisters and my wife of the massacre planned at the Carmelites, and gave them shelter: she lived in the Cul-de-sac Férou, near the place where throats were to be cut.

After the Terror, Ginguené became a sort of head of the department of Public Instruction; it was then that he sang the _Arbre de la liberté_ at the Cadran-Bleu, to the air of _Je l'ai planté, je l'ai vu naître._ He was considered sufficiently pious, philosophically, for an embassy to the Court of one of the kings who were being discrowned. He wrote from Turin to M. de Talleyrand that he had "overcome a prejudice:" he had caused his wife to be received at Court in a _pet-en-l'air?_[247] After falling from mediocrity to importance, from importance to silliness, and from silliness to absurdity, he ended his days as a distinguished critic, and what is better, as an independent writer in the _Décade_[248]: nature had restored him to the place whence Society had to such ill purpose taken him. His information is second-hand, his prose dull, his verse correct and sometimes agreeable.

[Sidenote: Guinguené and Le Brun.]

Ginguené had a friend, the poet Le Brun[249]. Ginguené protected Le Brun, in the way in which a man of talent, who knows the world, protects the simplicity of a man of genius; Le Brun in his turn cast his radiancy over Ginguené's eminence. Nothing more comical was seen than the part played by these two cronies who, by a gentle commerce, did each other all the services which two men excelling in different spheres are able to render one to the other.

Le Brun was simply a mock gentleman of the Empyrean; his poetic spirit was as cold as his transports were icy. His Parnassus was a top room in the Rue Montmartre, furnished with a pile of books heaped pell-mell on the floor, a trestle-bed, the curtains of which consisted of two dirty towels dangling from a rusty iron rod, and the half of an ewer propped up against a bottomless chair. It was not that Le Brun was in needy circumstances; but he was a miser and addicted to loose women.

At M. de Vaudreuil's "classical supper[250]," he impersonated Pindar. Among his lyrical poems are to be found energetic or elegant stanzas, as in the ode on the ship _Vengeur_ or the ode on the _Environs de Paris._ His elegies issued from his head, rarely from his soul; his was a labored, not a natural, originality; he created only by sheer force of art: he toiled to distort the meanings of words and to unite them in monstrous alliances. Le Brun had only one real talent, that of satire; his epistle on _La bonne et la mauvaise plaisanterie_ enjoyed a well-deserved renown. Some of his epigrams are worthy of mention with J. B. Rousseau's; La Harpe above all inspired him. One more justice should be done him: he retained his independence under Bonaparte, and has left trenchant verses directed against the oppressor of our liberties[251].

But unquestionably the most atrabiliary of the men of letters whom I knew in Paris at that time was Chamfort. Attacked with the disorder that produced the Jacobins, he was unable to forgive mankind for the accident of his birth[252]. He betrayed the houses to which he was admitted; he took the cynicism of his language for a picture of the manners of the Court. It would not be possible to deny that he had wit and talent, but wit and talent of the kind which does not reach posterity. When he saw that he was unable to attain to any position under the Revolution, he turned against himself the hands which he had raised against society. No longer to his vanity did the Phrygian cap appear as but another kind of crown, sans-culottism as a sort of nobility, of which Marat and Robespierre were the grandees. Furious at finding inequality of rank in the very world of sorrow and of tears, condemned to remain no more than a "villein" in the feudality of executioners, he tried to kill himself in order to escape from superiority in crime; he failed in his attempt: death laughs at those who summon it and who mistake it for annihilation.

I did not meet the Abbé Delille[253] until 1798, in London, and I never saw Rulhière[254], who lives through Madame d'Egmont[255] and makes her live, nor Palissot[256], nor Beaumarchais[257], nor Marmontel[258]. The same with Chénier[259], whom I never met, who has often attacked me, to whom I never replied, and whose place at the Institute was to be the cause of one of the crises of my life.

[Sidenote: Eighteenth-century writers.]

When I read over again the majority of the writers of the eighteenth century, I am amazed to think of the renown which they achieved and of my former admiration for them. Whether it be that the language has made progress, or that it has gone backward, or that we have advanced in civilization or retreated towards barbarism, it is certain that I find something threadbare, antiquated, grizzled, cold, and lifeless in the authors who were the delight of my youth. I find even in the greatest writers of the Voltairean age things that are poor in sentiment, thought, and style.

Whom am I to blame for my disappointment? I fear the chief guilt lies with myself; born innovator that I am, I may perhaps have communicated to younger generations the malady with which I was seized. Terror-stricken, in vain I cry to my children, "Do not forget your French!" They reply in the words of the Limosin to Pantagruel, that they come "from alme, inclyte and celebrate academy, which is vocitated Lutetia[260]."

This habit of latinizing and hellenizing our language is not new, as we see: Rabelais cured it, it reappeared in Ronsard[261]; Boileau attacked it. In our time it has been revived by science; our revolutionaries, great Greeks by nature, have compelled our merchants and farmers to calculate in hectares, hectolitres, kilometers, millimeters, decagrams: politics have "ronsardized" everything.

I might have spoken here of M. de La Harpe, whom I knew at that time, and to whom I will return; I might have added M. de Fontanes' portrait to my gallery; but although my acquaintance with that excellent man began in 1789, it was not until we met in England that I became united to him in a friendship which ever increased with bad, and never diminished with good fortune: I will tell you of him later in all the effusion of my heart. I shall have no talents to depict but those which no longer console the earth. The death of my friend has occurred at the moment when my recollections were leading me to trace the commencement of his life[262]. So great a flight is our existence that, if we do not write down in the evening what has happened in the morning, our work obstructs us, and we no longer have the time to keep it posted up. This does not prevent us from wasting our years, from flinging to the winds the hours which are for men the seeds of eternity.

*

While my inclination and that of my two sisters threw me into this literary society, our position obliged us to frequent another set; the family of my brother's wife was naturally the centre for us of this second circle.

The Président Le Peletier de Rosanbo, who since died with such great courage[263], was at the time of my arrival in Paris a model of frivolity. At that period, men's minds and manners were in every way unsettled, a symptom of a coming revolution. Magistrates were ashamed to wear the robe, and mocked at the gravity of their fathers. The Lamoignons, the Molés, the Séguiers, the d'Aguesseaus[264] wished to fight instead of judging. The Presidents' wives ceased to be respectable mothers of families and left their gloomy mansions in order to seek brilliant adventures[265]. The priest in the pulpit avoided pronouncing the name of Jesus Christ and spoke only of the "Law-giver of the Christians;" the ministers were falling pell-mell; power slipped through each one's fingers. The height of fashion was to be American in town, English at Court, Prussian in the army; to be anything except French. All that was said, all that was done, was one long series of inconsistencies. They wished to keep up the commendatory clergy, and would have none of religion; none could be an officer who was not of gentle birth, whereas the nobility was railed at; equality was introduced into the drawing-rooms together with flogging into the camps.

[Sidenote: M. de Malesherbes.]

M. de Malesherbes had three daughters[266], Mesdames de Rosanbo, d'Aulnay, and de Montboissier; he loved Madame de Rosanbo the best, because her opinions resembled his own. The Président de Rosanbo[267] also had three daughters, Mesdames de Chateaubriand, d'Aulnay[268], and de Tocqueville, and one son, whose brilliant mind clothed itself in Christian perfection. M. de Malesherbes was happy in the midst of his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Time after time I have seen him, in the early days of the Revolution, arrive at Madame de Rosanbo's, all heated with politics, fling off his wig, lie down upon the carpet of my sister's room, and submit to the uproarious teasing of the rebellious children. His manners would have been considered almost vulgar, if he had not possessed a certain brusqueness which saved him from being commonplace: at the first words he uttered, one recognized the bearer of an old name and the superior magistrate. His natural virtues were somewhat tainted with affectation, thanks to the philosophy which he mingled with them. He was full of knowledge, honesty, and courage, but impetuous and passionate to such an extent that he once said to me, speaking of Condorcet:

"That man was once my friend; today I would not scruple to kill him like a dog."

The tide of the Revolution overwhelmed him, and his death established his glory. This great man would have remained hidden beneath his merits, if misfortune had not revealed him to the world. A noble Venetian lost his life at the moment when he discovered his title-deeds amid the falling ruins of an old palace.

M. de Malesherbes' free ways removed all my constraint. He found that I was not without information; this first point gave us something in common: we spoke of botany and geography, two of his favourite subjects. It was in the course of my conversations with him that I first conceived the idea of making a journey in North America, with the object of discovering the ocean seen by Hearne and later by Mackenzie[269]. We also held views in common on politics: the generous sentiments which were at the root of our earlier troubles appealed to the independence of my character; my natural antipathy to the Court gave strength to this inclination. I was on the side of M. de Malesherbes and of Madame de Rosanbo as against M. de Rosanbo and my brother, who was nicknamed "the raving Chateaubriand." The Revolution would have carried me away, had it not started in crime: I saw the first head carried on the end of a pike, and I drew back. Murder will never to my eyes be an object of admiration or an argument in favour of liberty; I know nothing more servile, more contemptible, more cowardly, more shallow than a Terrorist. Have I not in France seen the whole of this race of Brutus take service with Cæsar and his police? The levellers, regenerators, cut-throats had been transformed into lackeys, spies, sycophants, and even less naturally into dukes, counts, and barons: such a medievalism!

[Sidenote: My great liking for him.]

Lastly, what attached me still more to the illustrious old man was his predilection for my sister: in spite of the Comtesse Lucile's shyness, we succeeded, with the aid of a glass of champagne, in inducing her to take a part in a little play on the occasion of M. de Malesherbes' birthday; her performance was so touching that it turned that good and great man's head. He was even more eager than my brother in urging her translation from the Chapter of the Argentière to that of Remiremont, which insisted upon the rigorous and difficult proofs of the "sixteen quarterings." For all his philosophy, M. de Malesherbes possessed principles of birth in an eminent degree.

This picture of men and society at the time of my entrance into the world must be spread over a space of about two years, from 25 May 1787, the date of the closing of the first Assembly of Notables, to 5 May 1789, that of the opening of the States-General. During these two years, my sisters and I did not continually live in Paris, nor in the same part of Paris. I will now go back and carry my readers to Brittany.

I must add that I was still infatuated with my illusions; now that I no longer had my woods, I had discovered a new solitude in remote times instead of places. In old Paris, in the enclosures of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in the cloisters of the convents, in the vaults of Saint-Denis, in the Sainte Chapelle, in Notre Dame, in the little streets of the Cité, at the modest door of Héloïse, I again met my enchantress; but beneath the Gothic arches and among the tombs she had assumed a deathlike aspect: she was pale, she looked at me with sad eyes; she was but the shadow or the manes of the dream which I had loved.

*

My political education commenced with my different visits to Brittany in 1787 and 1788. The Provincial States furnished the model of the States-General; also the local troubles which heralded those of the nation broke out in two districts possessing States, Brittany and Dauphiné.

The transformation that had been developing for two centuries was nearing its termination. France had passed from feudal monarchy to the monarchy of States-General, from the monarchy of States-General to the monarchy of parliaments, from the monarchy of parliaments to absolute monarchy, and was now tending towards representative monarchy, across the struggle between the magistracy and the royal power.

The Maupeou Parliament[270], the establishment of provincial assemblies, coupled with individual voting-power, the first and second Assemblies of Notables, the Plenary Court, the formation of grand bailiwicks, the reinstatement of the Protestants in their civil rights, the partial abolition of torture and of forced labour, the equal division of taxation were so many successive proofs of the revolution which was at work. But at that time these facts were not seen as a whole: each event appeared in the light of an isolated accident. At every period of history, there exists a guiding thought. Looking only at one point, one fails to see the rays converging at the centre of all the other points; one does not go back as far as the secret agency which gives life and movement to the whole, like water and fire in machinery: that is why, at the outset of revolutions, so many people believe that it is enough to break this wheel or that to prevent the torrent from rushing or the steam from exploding.

The eighteenth century, a century of intellectual action, not of material action, would not have succeeded in so promptly altering the laws, had it not found its vehicle: the parliaments, and notably the Parliament of Paris, became the instruments of the philosophical system. Every opinion dies an impotent or distracted death, if it be not lodged in an assembly which turns it into a power, supplies it with a will, furnishes it with a tongue and a pair of arms. Revolutions succeed, and always will succeed, only by means of corporate assemblies, lawful or unlawful.

The parliaments had their cause to avenge: absolute monarchy had stolen from them the authority which they had usurped from the States-General. Enforced registrations[271], beds of justice, sentences of exile, while making the magistrates popular, drove them to demand liberties of which, in their hearts, they were not the sincere upholders. They called for the restoration of the States-General, not daring to admit that they wished to secure the legislative and political power for themselves; and thus they hastened on the resurrection of a body of which they had gathered the inheritance, a body which, on returning to life, would at once reduce them to their own department. Men are almost invariably deceived as to their true interests, whether moved by wisdom or passion: Louis XVI. restored the parliaments which forced him to summon the States-General; the States-General, converted into a National Assembly and soon into a Convention, destroyed the throne and the parliaments, and sent to their deaths both the judges and the monarch from whom justice emanated. But Louis XVI. and the parliaments acted in this manner because they were the unconscious instruments of a social revolution.

[Sidenote: State-General.]

The idea of the States-General was, therefore, in all men's heads; only they did not see whither it would lead them. It was the question, for the crowd, how to make up a deficit which the smallest banker of today would undertake to remove. The application of so violent a remedy to so small an evil proves that the public was being carried towards unknown political regions. For the year 1786, the only year of which the financial state has been affirmed, the revenue amounted to 412,924,000, the expenditure to 593,542,000 livres, leaving a deficit of 180,618,000 livres, which was reduced to 140 millions through economies amounting to 40,618,000 livres. In this budget, the Royal Household figures for the immense sum of 37,200,000 livres: the Princes' debts, the purchase of country-seats, and the Court malversations were the cause of this additional burden.

It was desired to have the States-General in the form they assumed in 1614. The historians always quote this form as though one had never heard speak of States-General or of a demand for their convocation since 1614. And yet in 1651 the orders of the nobility and the clergy, meeting in Paris, demanded States-General. A bulky collection of acts passed and speeches delivered on that occasion exists. The Parliament of Paris, which was then all-powerful, far from seconding the wishes of the two upper orders, quashed their meetings as illegal: as indeed they were.

And since I am treating of this subject, I wish to note another serious fact which has escaped those who have concerned, and are still concerning, themselves with writing the history of France, without knowing it. People talk of "the three orders" as being essential to the constitution of the States known as States-General. Well, it often happened that bailiwicks appointed deputies for only one or two orders. In 1614, the bailiwick of Amboise appointed none for either the clergy or the nobility; the bailiwick of Châteauneuf-en-Thimerais sent none for the clergy nor for the third estate; the Puy, the Rochelle, the Lauraguais, Calais, the Haute-Marche, Châtellerault sent none for the clergy, and Montdidier and Roye none for the nobility. Nevertheless, the States of 1614 were called States-General. Thus the ancient chronicles express themselves more correctly when they say, in speaking of our national assemblies, "the three estates," or "the burgess notables," or "the barons and bishops" as the case may be, and they attribute the same legislative power to the assemblies thus composed. In the different provinces, the third estate, even though convoked, often refrained from deputing representatives, and this for an unheeded but very natural reason. The third estate had taken possession of the magistracy, from which it had driven out the men-at-arms; it held absolute sway, except in a few parliaments, in the offices of judge, advocate, procurator, registrar, clerk, and so forth; it made civil and criminal laws, and, thanks to its parliamentary usurpation, it exercised even the political power. The fortune, honour, and lives of the citizens depended upon the third estate: all obeyed its decrees, every head fell beneath the sword of its justices. Seeing, therefore, that it enjoyed unlimited power, to the exclusion of the other estates, what need had it to go begging for a portion of that power in assemblies in which it appeared upon its knees?

The people, metamorphosed into monks, had resorted to the cloisters, and governed society through the power of religious opinion; the people, metamorphosed into tax-gatherers and bankers, had resorted to finance, and governed society through the power of money; the people, metamorphosed into magistrates, had resorted to the tribunals, and governed society through the power of the law. This great Realm of France, so aristocratic in its parties and in its provinces, was democratic when taken as a whole, under the direction of its King, with whom it acted in admirable concert and nearly always went hand in hand. This is the explanation of its long existence. There is an entirely new history of France to be written, or rather, the history of France has not yet been written.

All the above-mentioned important questions were especially vexed in the years 1786, 1787, and 1788. The heads of my fellow-Bretons found abundant cause for excitement in their natural vivacity, in the privileges of the province, the clergy, and the nobles, in the collisions between the Parliament and the States. M. de Calonne[272], for a short while Intendant of Brittany, had increased the internal strife by favouring the cause of the third estate. M. de Montmorin[273] and M. de Thiard were not sufficiently strong leaders to ensure the ascendency of the Court party. The nobility entered into a coalition with the Parliament, which was itself noble; now it opposed M. Necker, M. de Calonne, the Archbishop of Sens[274]; now it thrust back the popular movement, which its own early resistance had favoured. It assembled, deliberated, and protested; the communes or municipalities assembled, deliberated and protested in opposition. The private question of hearth-money was mixed up with the general questions and increased the reigning ill-will. To understand this, it is necessary to explain the constitution of the Duchy of Brittany.

[Sidenote: The States of Brittany.]

The States of Brittany varied more or less in their formation, in common with all the States of Feudal Europe, which they resembled. The Kings of France were established into the rights of the Dukes of Brittany. The marriage-contract of the Duchess Anne[275], in 1491, not only brought Brittany by way of dower to the crown of Charles VIII. and Louis XII., but contained a covenant by virtue of which an end was put to a contention which traced its origin to Charles of Blois[276] and the Count of Montfort[277]. Brittany contended that daughters were entitled to inherit the Duchy; France maintained that the succession could take place only in the main line, and that when this line came to be extinguished, Brittany, as a great feud, returned to the Crown. Charles VIII. and Anne, and subsequently Anne and Louis XII., mutually surrendered their rights or claims to each other. Claudia, daughter of Anne and Louis XII., who became the wife of François I., on her death left the Duchy of Brittany to François I., her husband, upon the petition of the States assembled at Vannes, and by an edict published at Nantes in 1532 united the Duchy to the Crown of France, guaranteeing the Duchy's rights and privileges.

At that time the States of Brittany were summoned every year; but in 1630 the sittings became biennial. The Governor proclaimed the opening of the States. The three orders sat, according to the place, in a church or in the halls of a convent. Each order deliberated apart: they formed three separate assemblies with their various tempests, which turned into a general hurricane when the clergy, the nobles, and the third estate came to meet together. The Court breathed discord, and talents, vanities and ambitions came into play in this restricted field as in any more extended arena.

The Père Grégoire de Rostrenen, a Capuchin friar, in the dedication to his _Dictionnaire françois-breton_, addresses Their Lordships the States of Brittany as follows:

"If it was meet for none save the Roman orator worthily to
praise the august assembly of the Roman Senate, was it meet
for me to venture upon the praise of your august assembly,
which so worthily recalls to us the image of all that ancient
and modern Rome possessed that was majestic and venerable?"

Rostrenen proves that Celtic is one of those primitive languages which Gomer, the eldest son of Japhet, brought to Europe, and that the Lower Bretons, despite their short stature, descend from the giants. Unfortunately, Gomer's Breton children, long separated from France, allowed part of their old title-deeds to perish: their charters, to which they did not attach sufficient importance as linking them to general history, too often lack the authenticity to which the decipherers of diplomas, on their side, attach too high a price.

The time of the holding of the States in Brittany was a time of balls and festivals: one dined with M. le Commandant, dined with M. le Président de la Noblesse, dined with M. le Président du Clergé, dined with M. le Trésorier des États, dined with M. l'Intendant de la Province, dined with M. le Président du Parlement; one dined everywhere: and drank! At long refectory tables sat Du Guesclins who were husbandmen, Duguay-Trouins who were seamen, wearing at their side their iron swords with old-fashioned guards or their short cutlasses. All the gentlemen assisting at the States in person bore no slight resemblance to a Diet of Poland, of Poland on foot, not on horseback, a diet of Scythians, not of Sarmatians.

[Sidenote: Madame de Sévigné.]

Unfortunately, they played too much. The balls never ended. The Bretons are noted for their dances and dance-tunes. Madame de Sévigné has described our political festivals in the midst of the waste-lands, like the revels of fairies and goblins which were held at night on the moors:

"You shall now," she writes[278]," have news about our
States for your pains of being a Breton. M. de Chaulnes made
his entry on Sunday evening, with all the noise that Vitré
could afford: on Monday morning he sent me a letter, which I
answered by going to dine with him. They dine at two tables
in the same room; there are fourteen covers at each table;
Monsieur presides at one, and Madame at the other. The good
cheer is excessive, whole dishes of roast meat are carried
away uncut; and the pyramids of fruit are so tall, that the
doorways have to be made higher. Our forefathers did not
foresee this kind of machines, seeing that they did not even
understand that a door ought to be higher than themselves....
After dinner, Messieurs de Lomaria and Coëtlogon danced some
marvelous jigs with two Breton ladies, and minuets with
an air which our courtiers cannot approach: they execute
Gipsy and Lower Breton steps with charming daintiness and
precision.... Night and day there reign such play, good
cheer, and freedom as will attract all the world. I had
never seen the States before; it is a pretty thing enough.
I doubt if there is a province whose assembly has so grand
an air as this; it must be very full, I fancy, for there
is not one of the members at the war nor at Court; except
the little cornet[279], who perhaps may return here one day
like the rest.... A multitude of presents, pensions, repairs
of highways and towns, fifteen or twenty large tables, a
continual round of dancing and gaming, plays three times a
week, and a great deal of show and splendor: there you have
the States. I have forgot three or four hundred pipes of wine
which are drank out here."

The Bretons find it difficult to forgive Madame de Sévigné for her raillery. I am less severe; but I do not like to hear her say, "You speak very pleasantly of our miseries; we are no longer so _roué_[280]: _one_ in eight days only, to keep justice going. 'Tis true that a hanging now comes refreshingly to me." This is carrying the agreeable language of the Court to excess: Barère[281] spoke with the same grace of the guillotine. In 1793, the drownings at Nantes were called "republican marriages:" the popular despotism reproduced the amenities of style of the royal despotism.

The Paris fops, who accompanied messieurs the King's company to the States, related that we country squires had our pockets lined with tin so that we might take home M. le Commandant's fricassees of chicken to our wives. These jests were dearly paid for. A Comte de Sabran had erewhile lost his life in return for his idle talk. This descendant of the troubadours and of the Provencal kings, as big as a Swiss[282], allowed himself to be killed by a little hare-hunter of Morbihan, no taller than a Laplander[283]. This "Ker[284]" was not a whit second to his adversary in pedigree: if St. Elzear of Sabran was a near kinsman of St. Louis, St. Corentin[285], collateral ancestor of the most noble Ker, was Bishop of Quimper under King Gallon II., three centuries before Christ.

*

The King's revenue, in Brittany, consisted of the benevolences, which varied according to needs; the income from the Crown domains, which might amount to three or four hundred thousand francs; the stamp-duty, &c.

Brittany had her own revenues, which served to meet her expenditure: the "great due" and the "petty due," which were laid on liquor and the liquor traffic, produced two millions a year; and then there were the sums raised by hearth-money. One little suspects the important part played by hearth-money in our history; yet it was to the French Revolution what the stamp-duties were to the Revolution in America.

Hearth-money or _fouage_ (_census pro singulis focis exactus_) was a quit-rent, or a sort of villain tax, charged upon the goods of the commonalty for each hearth. This hearth-money, which was gradually increased, went to pay the debts of the province. In time of war, the expenditure amounted to more than seven millions from one session to the next, a sum which exceeded the receipts. A plan had been proposed to create a capital out of the funds provided by hearth-money and to turn it into stock for the benefit of the payers of hearth-money: in this way the tax became only a loan. The injustice (although it was an injustice made legal by the wording of the customary law) lay in making it bear upon the property of the commonalty alone. The commons never ceased protesting; the nobles, who set less store by their money than by their privileges, would not hear of a duty which would have made them liable to a villain-tax. This was the question when the States of Brittany, that were to prove so bloody, came together in December 1788.

Men's minds were at that time excited by various causes: the assembly of the Notables, the territorial impost, the traffic in corn, the approaching sittings of the States-General and the affair of the Necklace, the Plenary Court and the _Mariage de Figaro_, the grand bailiwicks and Cagliostro[286] and Mesmer[287], a thousand other serious and trivial matters formed subjects of controversy in every family.

[Sidenote: The Breton nobles.]

The Breton nobility had, at its own instance, assembled at Rennes to protest against the establishment of the Plenary Court. I went to this diet: it was the first political meeting I ever attended. I was bewildered and amused by the cries I heard. The members climbed on the tables and chairs; they gesticulated, and all spoke at one time. The Marquis de Trémargat[288], who had a wooden leg, shouted in stentorian tones:

"Let us all go to the Commandant, M. de Thiard[289]; we will say to him, 'The nobles of Brittany are at your door; they ask to speak to you; the King himself would not deny them!'"

At this outburst of eloquence, the cheers shook the rafters. He commenced again:

"The King himself would not deny them!"

The shouts and stamping redoubled. We went to M. le Comte de Thiard, a man of the Court, an erotic poet, a gentle and frivolous spirit, mortally bored by our uproar; he looked upon us as so many _hou-hous_, wild-boars, wild beasts; he was burning to be gone from our Armorica, and had not the slightest desire to deny us the entrance to his house. Our spokesman told him what he wanted, after which we went back and drew up the following declaration:

"We declare infamous those who are capable of accepting any places, whether in the new administration of justice, or in the administration of the States, which shall not be approved by the constitutional laws of Brittany."

Twelve gentlemen were chosen to carry this document to the King: upon their arrival in Paris, they were locked up in the Bastille, whence they soon emerged in the quality of heroes[290]; they were received with laurel-branches on their return.

We wore coats with large buttons of mother-of-pearl bedecked with ermine, round which buttons was inscribed in Latin the motto, "Death before dishonor." We triumphed over the Court, over which all the world was triumphing, and we fell with it into the same abyss.

*

It was at this period that my brother, continuing to prosecute his plans, resolved to have me admitted to the Order of Malta. In order to effect this, it was necessary that I should receive the tonsure: this could be given me by M. Cortois de Pressigny[291], Bishop of Saint-Malo. I therefore went to my native city, where my good mother was living: she no longer had her children with her; she spent her days at church, her evenings knitting. Her absent-mindedness was incredible: I met her one day in the street, carrying one of her slippers under her arm by way of a prayer-book. From time to time some old friends would find their way to her retreat and talk of the good times that were past. When she and I were alone, she would improvise beautiful stories for me in verse. In one of these stories the devil carried off a chimney with an evil-doer in it, and the poet exclaimed:

Le diable en l'avenue
Chemina tant et tant,
Qu'on en perdit la vue
En moins d'une heur' de temps[292].

"I cannot help thinking," said I, "that the devil does not go very fast."

But Madame de Chateaubriand proved to me that I did not know what I was talking about: my mother was charming.

[Sidenote: My mother's ballads.]

She had a long and plaintive ballad on the subject of the _Récit veritable d'une cane sauvage en la ville de Montfort-la-Cane-lez-Saint-Malo._ A certain lord had imprisoned a young and very beautiful girl in the Castle of Montfort, with the intention of ravishing her. Through a dormer-window she could see the church of St. Nicholas; she prayed to the saint with eyes full of tears, and was miraculously wafted outside the castle. But she fell into the hands of the traitor's servants, who proposed to do by her as they presumed their master had done. The poor girl, distraught, looking to every side in search of help, saw only the wild-duck upon the pond of the castle. Renewing her prayers to St. Nicholas, she besought him to allow these birds to be the witnesses of her innocence, so that, if she was doomed to lose her life, and was unable to accomplish the vows which she had taken to St. Nicholas, the birds themselves would fulfill them in their own way, in her name and on her behalf.

The girl died within the year: and behold, on the Feast of the Translation of the Bones of St. Nicholas, 9 May, a wild-duck, accompanied by its brood of ducklings, came to St. Nicholas' Church. She entered the building, fluttered before the statue of the Blessed Liberator, and acclaimed him by flapping her wings; after which she returned to the pond, leaving one of her little ones as an offering. Some time afterwards, the duckling disappeared unobserved. For two hundred years and more, the duck, always the same duck, returned, on a fixed day, with her hatch, to the church of the great St. Nicholas at Montfort.

The story was written and printed in 1652: the author very justly observes that "a poor wild-duck is not a very considerable thing in the eyes of God; that nevertheless she acts her part in doing homage to His greatness; that St. François' grasshopper was of even less account, and that nevertheless its trill charmed a seraph's heart."

But Madame de Chateaubriand followed a false legend: in her ballad, the maiden imprisoned at Montfort was a princess, who succeeded in being changed into a duck in order to escape her captor's violence. I remember only the following lines of one stanza of my mother's ballad:

Cane la belle est devenue,
Cane la belle est devenue,
Et s'envola par une grille,
Dans un étang plein de lentilles[293].

As Madame de Chateaubriand was a real saint, she obtained the Bishop of Saint-Malo's promise to give me the tonsure, although he had a scruple on the subject: to bestow the mark of an ecclesiastic upon a layman and a soldier appeared to him to be a profanation not far removed from simony. M. Cortois de Pressigny, now Archbishop of Besançon and a peer of France, is a worthy and deserving man. He was young at that time, protected by the Queen, and on the high-road to fortune, which he attained later by a better road: persecution.

Dressed in uniform, and wearing my sword, I went down on my knees at the prelate's feet; he cut two or three hairs from the crown of my head: this was called the tonsure, of which I received a formal certificate. With this certificate, it was possible for an income of 200,000 livres to fall to me, when my proofs of nobility had been admitted in Malta: an abuse, no doubt, in the ecclesiastical order, but a useful thing in the political order of the old constitution. Was it not better that a kind of military benefice should be attached to the sword of a soldier than to the cloak of an Abbé who would have spent the revenues of his fat living on the pavement of Paris?

The fact that the tonsure was conferred on me for the foregoing reasons has caused ill-informed biographers to state that I had at one time entered the Church.

This happened in 1788. I kept horses, I rode all over the country, or galloped beside the waves, the moaning friends of my youth: I alighted from my horse and frolicked with them; the whole barking family of Scylla sprang to my knees to fondle me: _Nunc vada latrantis Scyllæ._ I have travelled very far to admire the scenes of nature: I might have contented myself with those which my native land offered to my eyes.

Nothing could be more charming than the country for five or six leagues round Saint-Malo. The banks of the Rance alone, as one ascends the river from its mouth to Dinan, ought to attract the traveller, forming a constant medley of rocks and verdure, of strands and forests, of creeks and hamlets, of the ancient manors of feudal Brittany and the modern habitations of commercial Brittany. The latter were built at a time when the merchants of Saint-Malo were so rich that, on days of merry-making, they heated piastres and flung them red-hot to the people through the windows. These dwellings are very luxurious. Bonnaban, the country-seat of Messieurs de La Saudre[294], is in part built of marble brought from Genoa, a magnificence of which we in Paris have no idea. The Briantais[295], the Bosq, the Montmarin[296], the Balue[297], the Colombier[298] are, or were, adorned with orangeries, fountains, and statues. In some cases the gardens slope down to the shore behind the arcade formed by a screen of lime-trees, through a colonnade of pine-trees, to the end of a lawn; across a bed of tulips, the sea displays its ships, its calms, and its tempests.

[Sidenote: Country round Saint-Malo.]