Chapter XVI: Book VI: 427 (3)

The guide continued to hold me back, for I felt, so to speak, drawn on by the stream, and I had an involuntary longing to fling myself in. At one time, I would turn my eyes up the river, to the banks; at another, down to the island which divided the waters. Here the waters suddenly failed, as though cut off in the sky.

After a quarter of an hour of vague and perplexed admiration, I went on to the falls. The reader will find in the _Essai sur les révolutions_[487] and in _Atala_[488] the two descriptions which I have written of the scene. Today, high-roads run to the cataract; there are inns on the American side and on the English side, and mills and factories overhang the chasm.

I was unable to utter the thoughts that stirred me at the sight of so sublime a disorder. In the desert of my early life, I was obliged to invent persons to adorn it; I drew from my own substance beings whom I did not find elsewhere and whom I carried within myself. In the same way, I have placed memories of Atala and René on the edge of the cataract of Niagara, as the expression of its sadness. What meaning has a cascade which falls eternally in the unfeeling sight of heaven and earth, if human nature be not there, with its destinies and its misfortunes? To be steeped in this solitude of water and mountains and not to know with whom to speak of that great spectacle! To have the waves, the rocks, the woods, the torrents to one's self alone! Give the soul a companion, and the smiling verdure of the hill-slopes, the cool breath of the water, will all turn into charm: the journey by day, the sweetest repose at the end of the day's march, the gliding over the billows, the sleeping upon the moss, will call forth from the heart its deepest tenderness. I have seated Velléda upon the shores of Armorica, Cymodocea beneath the porticoes of Athens, Blanca in the halls of the Alhambra. Alexander created towns wheresoever he hastened: I have left dreams behind me wherever I have dragged my life.

I have seen the cascades of the Alps with their chamois and those of the Pyrenees with their izards; I did not go sufficiently high up the Nile to meet its cataracts, which are reduced to rapids; I will not speak of the azure zones of Terni or of Tivoli, graceful fragments of ruins or subjects for the poet's song:

Et præceps Anio ac Tiburni lucus[489].

Niagara eclipses everything. I gazed upon the cataract the existence of which was revealed to the old world, not by puny travellers like myself, but by missionaries who, seeking solitude for the love of God, flung themselves upon their knees at the sight of some marvel of nature and received martyrdom while completing their hymn of admiration. Our priests greeted the fine sites of America and consecrated them with their blood; our soldiers clapped their hands at the ruins of Thebes and presented arms to Andalusia: the whole genius of France lies in the double army of our camps and of our altars.

[Sidenote: Two hair-breadth escapes.]

I was holding my horse's bridle twisted round my arm; a rattlesnake came and rustled in the bushes. The startled horse reared and backed towards the falls. I was unable to release my arm from the reins; the horse, still more terrified, was dragging me after it. Already its fore-feet were off the ground; cowering over the edge of the abyss, it maintained its position only by the strength of its loins. It was all up with me, when the animal, itself astonished at its fresh peril, gave a sudden turn and vaulted inwards. Had my soul left my body amidst the Canadian woods, would it have carried to the Supreme Tribunal the sacrifices, the good works, the virtues of the Pères Jogues[490] and Lallemant[491], or empty days and wretched idle fancies?

This was not the only danger I encountered at Niagara. A ladder of creepers was used by the savages to climb down to the lower basin; it was at that time broken. Wishing to see the falls from below, I ventured, in the face of my guide's representations, down the side of an almost perpendicular rock. In spite of the roar of the water which seethed below me, I kept my head and climbed down to within forty feet of the bottom. When I had reached so far, the bare and vertical rock gave me nothing to lay hold of; I was left hanging by one hand to the last root, feeling my fingers open beneath the weight of my body: few men have spent two such minutes, as I counted them. My tired hand let go; I fell. By an unparalleled stroke of good fortune, I found myself upon the pointed back of a rock upon which I ought to have been smashed into a thousand pieces, and yet I felt no great hurt; I was at half a foot from the abyss and had not rolled into it; but when the cold and the damp began to penetrate me, I saw that I had not come off so cheaply: my left arm was broken above the elbow. The guide, who was watching me from above and saw my signals of distress, ran off to fetch some savages. They hoisted me with ropes along an otter's path, and carried me to their village. I had only a simple fracture: two splints, a bandage and a sling were enough to effect my cure.

*

I stayed twelve days with my surgeons, the Niagara Indians. I saw tribes pass which had come down from Detroit or from the districts lying south and east of Lake Erie. I inquired into their usages; in return for small presents, I was given representations of their former customs, for the customs themselves no longer exist. Nevertheless, at the commencement of the War of American Independence, the savages still ate the prisoners, or rather the killed: an English captain, helping himself to soup with a ladle from an Indian stew-pot, drew out a hand.

The practices attendant upon birth and death have lost least, because these do not pass lightly like the life which divides them; they are not things of fashion that come and go. The Indians still bestow upon the new-born, in order to do him honour, the name of the oldest person under his roof: his grandmother, for instance; for the names are always taken in the maternal line. From that time forward, the child fills the place of the woman whose name it has taken; in speaking to it, they give it the degree of relationship which the name revives; thus an uncle might address his nephew by the title of "grandmother." This apparently ludicrous custom is nevertheless touching. It restores the old dead to life; it reproduces the weakness of the last in the weakness of the earliest years; it brings closer the two extremities of life, the commencement and the end of the family; it confers a kind of immortality upon the ancestors and implies that they are present in the midst of their posterity.

[Sidenote: The Niagara indians.]

In what regards the dead, it is easy to find motives for the savage's attachment to sacred relics. Civilized nations are able to preserve the memory of their country by means of the mnemonics of literature and the arts: they have cities, palaces, towers, columns, obelisks; they have the track of the plough in fields once cultivated; their names are carved in marble and brass, their actions recorded in the chronicles.

The desert peoples have none of these advantages: their names are not written upon the trees; their huts, built in a few hours, disappear in a few moments; the butt of their ploughing only grazes the ground, and is not able even to raise a furrow. Their traditional songs perish with the last memory which retains them, and die away with the last voice which repeats them. The tribes of the New World, therefore, have but one monument: the tomb. Take away from savages the bones of their fathers, and you take away their history, their laws, and their very gods; you rob those men, in the future generations, of the proofs both of their existence and of their annihilation.

I wished to hear my hosts' songs. A little Indian girl of fourteen, called Mila and very pretty (the Indian women are pretty only at that age) sang something very pleasant. Was it not perchance the canzonet quoted by Montaigne? "Adder stay, stay good adder, that my sister may by the patterne of thy partie-coloured coat drawe the fashion and worke of a rich lace, for me to give unto my love; so may thy beautie, thy nimblenesse or disposition be ever preferred before all other serpents[492]."

The author of the _Essaies_ saw Iroquois at Rouen, who, according to him, were "not verie ill; but what," he adds, "of that? They weare no kinde of breeches nor hosen[493]!"

If ever I publish the Στρωματεὶς or patchwork of my youth, to talk like St. Clement of Alexandria[494] you shall there see Mila[495].

The Canadians are no longer the same as when they were described by Cartier, Champlain[496], La Hontan[497], Lescarbot[498], Lafitau[499], Charlevoix[500], and the _Lettres édifiantes_; the sixteenth century and the commencement of the seventeenth were still the time of a boundless imagination and ingenuous customs: the marvel of the first reflected a virgin nature, and the candour of the second reproduced the simplicity of the savage. Champlain tells us at the end of his first journey to Canada, in 1603, that "near Chaleur Bay, verging to the south, there is an island where dwells a frightful monster which the savages call Gougou."

Canada had its giant as well as the Cape of Storms. Homer is the true father of all these inventions; it is always the Cyclopes, Scylla and Charybdis, ogres or _gougous._

The savage population of North America, not including the Mexicans and Esquimaux, does not today amount to four hundred thousand souls on either side of the Rocky Mountains; there are travellers who put it so low as one hundred and fifty thousand. The degradation of Indian manners has kept pace with the depopulation of the tribes. Their religious traditions have become confused; the instruction spread by the Canadian Jesuits has mixed foreign ideas with the inborn ideas of the natives: through their rude fables, one sees the Christian beliefs disfigured; the majority of the savages wear crosses by way of ornaments, and the Protestant traders sell them what the Catholic missionaries give them. Let us say at once, to the honour of our country and to the glory of our religion, that the Indians had become greatly attached to us; that they never cease to regret us; and that a "black robe," or missionary, is still an object of veneration in the forests of America. The savage continues to love us under the tree where we were his first guests, on the soil which we have trod, where we have left tombs in his care.

When the Indian was naked or clad in skins, he had something great and noble about him; at present, rags of European clothing, without covering his nakedness, bear witness to his destitution: he is a beggar at the door of a counting-house, he is no longer the savage in his forest

Lastly, a kind of hybrid people has been formed, born of colonial fathers and Indian mothers. These men, called "Burnt-woods," because of the colour of their skin, act as brokers between the authors of their dual origin. They speak the language of their fathers and of their mothers, and have the vices of both races. These bastards of civilized and of savage nature sell themselves to the Americans and the English by turns, to hand over to them the monopoly of the fur-trade; they keep alive the rivalry between the English companies, the Hudson's Bay Company and the North-West Fur Company, and the American companies, the Columbian American Fur Company, the Missouri Fur Company and others: they themselves go hunting for account of the traders and with hunters paid by the companies.

[Sidenote: The Wars of the Companies.]

The great war of American Independence is the only one which people know of. They are ignorant of the fact that blood has been shed on behalf of the paltry interests of a handful of merchants. The Hudson's Bay Company in 1811 sold to Lord Selkirk[501] a tract of land on the bank of the Red River. The North-West or Canadian Company took umbrage at this transaction. The two companies, allied to various Indian tribes and seconded by the "Burnt-woods," came to blows. This domestic conflict, so horrible in its details, took place on the frozen wastes of Hudson's Bay. Lord Selkirk's colony was destroyed in the month of June 1815[502], at the exact period of the Battle of Waterloo. Upon those two theatres, one so brilliant, the other so obscure, the misfortunes of the human species were the same.

Seek no longer in America the skillfully constructed political constitutions of which Charlevoix has written the history: the monarchy of the Hurons, the republic of the Iroquois. A somewhat similar destruction has been accomplished and is still being accomplished in Europe under our very eyes; a Prussian poet, at a banquet of the Teutonic Order, held about the year 1400, sang in old Prussian the heroic deeds of the ancient warriors of his country: no one present understood him, and he received one hundred empty walnuts by way of recompense. Today, the language of Lower Brittany, the Basque and Gaelic languages, are dying out from cottage to cottage, keeping pace with the deaths of the goatherds and husbandmen.

In the English County of Cornwall, the language of the natives became extinct about the year 1676. A fisherman said to some travellers:

"I know hardly more than four or five persons who speak Cornish, and they are old folk like myself, between sixty and eighty years of age; none of the young people know a word of it."

Whole tribes of the Orinoco have ceased to exist; of their dialect there remain but a dozen words articulated in the tree-tops by parrots that have regained their freedom, like Agrippina's thrush, which warbled Greek words upon the balustrades of the Roman palaces. This, sooner or later, will be the fate of our modern jargons, the remains of Latin and Greek. Some raven escaped from the cage of the last Franco-Gallic curate will say, from the top of a ruined steeple, to peoples that shall be foreign to our successors:

"Accept these last strains of a voice once known to you; you will put an end to all this talk."

It is well worth while to be Bossuet, so that, in the ultimate event, your masterpiece may survive, in the recollection of a bird, your language and your memory among men!

*

When speaking of Canada and Louisiana, when considering on the old maps the extent of the former French colonies in America, I asked myself how the government of my country could have suffered the loss of those colonies, which would be an inexhaustible source of prosperity for us at this day.

From Arcadia[503] and Canada to Louisiana, from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi, the territory of "New France" surrounded what formed the confederation of the first thirteen United States: the eleven others[504], together with the District of Columbia, the North-Western Territory, the Territories of Michigan, Missouri, Oregon, and Arkansas either belonged to us or would now belong to us, as they belong to the United States by the cessions of the English and Spaniards, our successors in Canada and Louisiana[505]. The country enclosed by the Atlantic on the north-east, the Arctic Ocean on the north, the Pacific Ocean and the Russian possessions on the north-west, and the Gulf of Mexico on the south, in other words more than two-thirds of North America, would now be recognizing the laws of France.

[Sidenote: Former French possessions.]

I fear that the Restoration will ruin itself through holding ideas contrary to those which I have here expressed: the mania for adhering to the past, a mania which I never cease impugning, would be in no sense fatal if it subverted only myself, by robbing me of the Sovereign's favour; but it may yet subvert the Throne. Political stagnation is impossible; it is absolutely necessary to keep pace with human intelligence. Let us respect the majesty of time; let us reverentially contemplate past centuries, rendered sacred by the memory and the footsteps of our fathers: but let us not try to go back to them, for they no longer possess a vestige of our real nature, and if we endeavoured to seize hold of them, they would fade away. The Chapter of Our Lady of Aix-la-Chapelle caused the tomb of Charlemagne[506] to be opened, we are told, about the year 1450. The Emperor was found seated in a gilt chair, holding in his skeleton hands the Book of the Gospels written in letters of gold; before him were laid his sceptre and his golden buckler; by his side hung his sword "Joyeuse," sheathed in a golden scabbard. He was clad in the imperial robes. On his head, which was held erect by a golden chain, was a winding-sheet covering what had been his face and surmounted by a crown. They touched the phantom: it crumbled into dust.

We once possessed vast countries beyond the seas: they offered a refuge for our surplus population, markets for our commerce, stations for our navy. We are now excluded from the new world in which the human race is beginning life afresh: in Africa, Asia, Oceania, in the South Sea Islands, on the continent of North and South America, the English, Portuguese, and Spanish languages serve to interpret the thoughts of many millions of men; and we, disinherited of the conquests of our valour and our genius, scarce hear the tongue of Colbert and Louis XIV. spoken in some petty market-town of Louisiana or Canada, under a foreign government: it lingers there only as a witness to the reverses of our fortune and the errors of our policy.

And who is the king whose dominion now succeeds the dominion of the King of France in the forests of Canada? He who yesterday caused this note to be sent to me:

"Royal Lodge, Windsor,

"4 _June_ 1822.

"Monsieur le Vicomte,

"I am commanded by the King to invite Your Excellency to dine
and sleep here on Thursday the 6th instant.

"Your Excellency's most humble and obedient servant,

"Francis Conyngham[507]."

It was fated that I should be plagued by princes. I lay down my pen; I recross the Atlantic; I mend my arm broken at Niagara; I take off my bearskin; I resume my gold-laced coat; I leave the wigwam of an Iroquois to repair to the Royal Lodge of His Britannic Majesty, King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and Lord of the Indies; I leave my hosts with the exposed ears and my little girl-savage with her bead: wishing Lady Conyngham[508] the charm of Mila, together with the age which as yet belongs only to the earliest spring-time, to the days which precede the month of May and which our Gallic poets called the _avrillée_, the April shower.

*

The tribe of the little girl with the bead departed; my guide, the Dutchman, refused to accompany me beyond the cataract; I paid him and joined a party of traders who were leaving to go down the Ohio; before setting out, I took a glance at the Canadian lakes. There is nothing so mournful as the aspect of these lakes. The liquid plains of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean open highways to the nations, and their shores are, or were, inhabited by civilized, numerous, and powerful peoples; the lakes of Canada display only the nakedness of their waters, which, in its turn, is joined to a bare soil: they are deserts dividing other deserts. Shores devoid of inhabitants look upon seas devoid of ships; you alight from the unfrequented waves upon unfrequented coasts.

[Sidenote: Lake Erie.]

Lake Erie is over one hundred leagues in circumference. The nations of the water-side were exterminated by the Iroquois two centuries ago. It is an appalling thing to see the Indians venturing in their birch-bark wherries upon this lake famed for its tempests, in which myriads of serpents swarmed in former days. These Indians hang their manitous upon the prow of their canoes and dart into the midst of the eddies among the heaving waves. The waves, level with the aperture of the canoes, seem ready to swallow them up. The hunters' dogs, with their front-paws resting on the side, utter loud barks, while their masters, preserving a profound silence, beat the waves in cadence with their paddles. The canoes proceed in Indian file: in the prow of the first stands a chief who repeats the diphthong _oah_: _o_ in a long, dull note, _ah_ in a short, sharp tone. In the last canoe is another chief, who also stands up, and works an oar by way of rudder. The other braves squat upon their heels at the bottom of the well. Across the mist and the winds one perceives nothing save the plumes adorning the Indians' heads, the outstretched necks of the baying dogs, and the shoulders of the two sachems, the pilot and the augur: as it were the gods of these lakes.

The rivers of Canada play no part in the history of the world of antiquity: how different from the destiny of the Ganges, the Euphrates, the Nile, the Danube, and the Rhine! What changes have not these beheld upon their banks! How much sweat and blood has been poured forth by conquerors to cross, in their current, waters over which, at their source, a goatherd passes with a single step!

*

Leaving the lakes of Canada, we came to Pittsburg at the confluence of the Kentucky and Ohio rivers; here the landscape unfolds an extraordinary stateliness. Nevertheless, this magnificent country is called Kentucky after its river, whose name means "river of blood." It owes this name to its beauty: for more than two centuries the nations on the side of the Cherokees and of the Iroquois nations fought for the possession of its hunting-fields.

Will the European generations be more virtuous and more free upon those banks than were the exterminated American generations? Shall slaves not till the soil beneath the lash of their masters, in these deserts of man's primeval independence? Shall prisons and gallows not fill the places of the open hut and the tall tulip-tree where the bird builds its nest? Shall the richness of the soil not cause new wars to burst forth? Shall Kentucky cease to be the "Land of Blood," and shall the monuments of the arts beautify the banks of the Ohio to better purpose than the monuments of nature?

After passing the Wabash, the Cypress, the Cumberland, the Cherokee, or Tennessee, the Yellowbank, one comes to a tongue of land often submerged beneath the mighty waters: here is formed the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi in latitude 36° 51'. The two rivers oppose an equal resistance to one another and relax the force of their currents; for some miles they sleep side by side without mingling in the same bed, like two great peoples at first of different origins and then combining to form but one race; like two illustrious combatants sharing the same couch after a battle; like a husband and wife born of hostile blood, who at first have but little inclination to mingle their destinies in the nuptial bed.

And I, too, even as the mighty urns of the rivers, have poured forth my life's small current, now on this, now on that side of the mountain; capricious in my straying, but never malignant; preferring the poor glens to the rich plains, stopping at the flowers rather than at the palaces. For that matter, I was so charmed with my rambles that I gave scarce a further thought to the Pole. A party of traders, who had come from among the Creeks, in Florida, gave me leave to accompany them.

We set out for the countries known at that time by the general name of the Floridas, today divided into the States of Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee. We followed, more or less closely, paths now connected by the high-road which runs from Natchez to Nashville, through Jackson and Florence, and which enters Virginia by way of Knoxville and Salem: a country very little frequented at that time, although Bartram[509] had explored its lakes and sites. The planters of Georgia and Florida proper went to the various tribes of the Creeks to buy horses and half-wild cattle, which multiplied indefinitely in the savannahs pierced by the wells at whose edges I placed Atala and Chactas. They even extended their journey as far as Ohio.

[Sidenote: I sail up the Ohio River.]

We ran before a stiff breeze. The Ohio, swollen by a hundred rivers, passed now through the lakes which opened out before us, now through the woods. Islands stood out in the middle of the lakes. We made sail for one of the largest of these: we came alongside at eight in the morning.

I crossed a meadow strewn with ragwort with its yellow flowers, hollyhocks with their pink plumes, and obelarias with purple egrets. An Indian ruin struck my eyes. The contrast between this ruin and the youth of nature, this monument of men in a desert, caused a great emotion. What people dwelt upon this island? Its name, its race, the time of its passing? Did it live at the time when the world in whose midst it lay hidden was as yet unknown to the three other quarters of the globe? The silence of this people was perhaps contemporaneous with the fame of some great nations that have in their turn lapsed into silence[510].

Sandy anfractuosities, ruins or _tumuli_ issued from amid poppies with red flowers hanging at the end of bent, pale-green stalks. The stem and the flower have an aroma which clings to the fingers when one touches the plant. The perfume which outlives the flower is an image of the memory of a life spent in solitude.

I observed the nymphæa: it was preparing to hide its white lily beneath the surface at the close of day; the "tree of sadness[511]" was awaiting the night before unfolding its own: the wife retires to bed at the hour when the courtesan rises.

The pyramidal œnothera, which is seven or eight feet high, with pale leaves dentated with dark green, has other habits and another destiny: its yellow flower begins to half-open in the evening, during the space of time which Venus occupies in descending below the horizon; it continues to expand by the light of the stars; the dawn discovers it in all its brilliancy; midway through the morning it fades; it falls at noonday. It lives for but a few hours; but it despatches those hours beneath a placid sky, between the breaths of Venus and Aurora: what matters, then, the shortness of life?

A streamlet trickled through a garland of dionæas; a multitude of day-flies buzzed all around. There were also humming-birds and butterflies which, decked in their brightest gauds, rivalled the motley flowers in splendour.

In the midst of these walks and studies, I was often struck by their futility. What! Did the Revolution, which already weighed down upon me and drove me into the woods, inspire me with no graver thoughts than these? What! Was the time of my country's confusion that which I chose to occupy myself with descriptions of plants, and butterflies, and flowers? The individuality of mankind serves as a measure of the littleness of great events. How many men are indifferent to those events! To how many others do they remain unknown! The aggregate population of the globe is estimated at from eleven to twelve hundred millions; a man dies every second: thus in each minute of our existence, of our smiles, of our joys, sixty men expire, sixty families moan and weep. Life is a permanent pestilence. The chain of mourning and funerals that winds us about is never broken, grows ever longer: we ourselves form one of its links. And then tell us to magnify the importance of the catastrophes of which seven-eighths of the world will never hear speak! To pant for a fame which will spread its wings at but a few leagues from our tomb! To plunge into the ocean of a felicity of which each minute slips away between sixty graves incessantly renewed!

Nam nox Nulla diem, neque noctem aurora sequuta est Quæ non
audierit mixtos vagitibus ægris Ploratus, mortis comites et
funeris atri.

The savages of Florida tell of an island in the middle of a lake where live the most beautiful women in the world. The Muskhogulges have repeatedly attempted its conquest; but this Eden flees before the canoes, a natural image of the chimeras which retreat before our desires. The country also contained a fountain of youth: who would wish to rise from the dead?

But little was wanting to make these fables assume a semblance of reality in my eyes. At a moment when we least expected it, we saw a flotilla of canoes come out of a bay, some with oars, others with sails. They landed at our island. They were two families of Creeks, of which one consisted of Seminoles, the other of Muskhogulges, including some Cherokees and Burnt-woods. I was struck with the grace of these savages, who in no respect resemble those of Canada.

[Sidenote: Two fair Floridans.]

The Seminoles and Muskhogulges are fairly tall, and, by an unusual contrast, their mothers, wives, and daughters are the smallest race of women known in America. The Indian women who landed near us, born of mixed Cherokee and Castilian blood, were tall in stature. Two of them were like the creoles of San Domingo and Mauritius, but yellow and delicate as the women of the Ganges. These two Floridan women, cousins on the father's side, served as my models, one for Atala, the other for Céluta: they excelled the portraits I drew of them only by that variable and fugitive truth of nature, that physiognomy of race and climate which I was not able to express. There was something indefinable in that oval visage, in that shaded complexion, which one seemed to see through a light, orange-tinted smoke, in that hair so black and soft, those eyes so long, half-hidden beneath the veil of two satiny eyelids that opened indolently; in short, in the two-fold seduction of the Indian and the Spanish woman.

The meeting with our hosts occasioned a certain alteration in our movements: our trading agents began to inquire about horses; it was decided that we should go to fix ourselves in the neighbourhood of the studs. The plain in which our camp stood was covered with bulls, cows, horses, bisons, buffaloes, cranes, turkeys, pelicans: these birds mottled the green background of our savannah with white, black, and pink stains.

Our traders and hunters were stirred by many passions: not passions of race, education, or prejudice, but natural passions, full and absolute, making straight for their object, having for witnesses a tree fallen in the depths of an unknown forest, a nameless stream. The relations between the Spaniards and the Creek women formed the ground-work of the adventures; the "Burnt-woods" played the principal part in those romances. One story was famous: that of a trader in strong waters seduced and ruined by a "painted woman" or courtesan. This story, put into Seminole verse with the title of _Tabamica_, was sung in passing through the woods[512]. Carried off in their turn by the colonists, the Indian women soon died forsaken at Pensacola[513]: their misfortunes went to swell the _Romanceros_ and to be numbered among the ballads of Ximenes.

*

The earth is a charming mother; we issue from her womb: in childhood, she holds us to her breasts swollen with milk and honey; in youth and old age, she lavishes upon us her refreshing waters, her harvests and her fruits; she offers us, wherever we may go, a shade, a bath, a table and a bed; she opens her entrails again to receive us after death, and throws a coverlet of herbs and flowers over our remains, while she secretly transforms us into her own substance, to reproduce us under some graceful shape. That is what I said to myself on waking, when my first look fell upon the sky, the canopy of my bed.

The hunters had set out for the work of the day; I remained behind with the women and children. I never left the side of my two sylvan goddesses: one was proud, the other sad. I did not understand a word of what they said to me, and they did not understand me; but I went to fetch water for their cup, shoots for their fire, mosses for their bed. They wore the petticoat and the wide, slashed sleeves of the Spanish women, the body and cloak of the Indian women. Their bare legs were cross-gartered with a lace-work of birch. They plaited their hair with posies or filaments of rushes; they mailed themselves in chains and necklaces of glass beads. From their ears hung purple berries; they had a fine talking paroquet: the bird of Armida; they fastened it on their shoulder like an emerald, or carried it hooded on their hand, as the great ladies of the tenth century carried their hawks. To harden their breasts and arms, they rubbed themselves with the apoya, or American gallingale. In Bengal the nautch-girls chew the betel-nut, and in the Levant the almes suck the mastic of Chio: the Floridan maidens pounded, between their teeth of a bluey whiteness, tears of liquid-amber and roots of _libanis_, which blended the fragrance of angelica, cedrat, and vanilla. They lived in an atmosphere of perfumes emanating from themselves, like orange-trees and flowers living in the pure exhalations from their leaves and chalices. I amused myself by placing a little ornament upon their heads: they submitted, gently dismayed; witches themselves, they thought I was working a charm upon them. One of them, the "proud" one, often prayed; she seemed to me half a Christian. The other sang in a voice of velvet, uttering at the end of each phrase a note that troubled one. Sometimes they spoke hastily to each other: I thought I could recognize the accents of jealousy, but the "sad" one wept, and silence was restored.

Weak as I was, I sought examples of weakness, in order to encourage myself. Had not Camoëns in the Indies loved a black Barbary slave, and might not I in America do homage to two young jonquil sultanas? Had Camoëns not addressed _endechas_, or stanzas, to his _Barbaru escrava?_[514]

*

A fishing-party was arranged. The sun was nearing its setting. In the foreground appeared sassafras, tulip-trees, catalpas, and oaks, from whose boughs hung skeins of white moss. Behind this foreground rose the most charming of trees, the papaw, which might have been taken for a chased silver style, surmounted by a Corinthian urn. In the background reigned balsam-trees, magnolias, and liquid-ambers.

[Sidenote: An exquisite landscape.]

The sun dropped behind that curtain: a ray piercing through the crown of a thicket sparkled like a carbuncle set in the sombre foliage; the light diverging between the trunks and branches projected heightening columns and mobile arabesques upon the sward. Below were lilacs, azaleas, annulated creepers with gigantic sheaves; above, the clouds, some fixed, like promontories or old towers, others fleeting, like rosy vapours or carded silk. By means of successive transformations, one saw the mouths of furnaces opening up in those clouds, heaps of embers piling themselves up, streams of lava flowing: all was dazzling, radiant, gilded, opulent, saturated with light.

After the Morean insurrection in 1770, some Greek families took refuge in Florida; they could still believe themselves in that Ionian climate which seems to have relented, together with men's passions: at Smyrna, in the evening, nature sleeps like a courtesan wearied with love.

On our right were ruins belonging to the great fortifications that were found on the Ohio, on our left an old savage camp. The island on which we were, pictured in the water and reproduced by a mirage, poised its double perspective before us. In the east, the moon rested upon distant hills; in the west, the vault of the sky was melted into a sea of diamonds and sapphires, in which the sun, half-immersed, appeared to be dissolving. The animals of creation were keeping watch; the earth, in adoration, seemed to offer incense to the sky, and the amber exhaled from its bosom fell back upon it in the form of dew, as prayers fall back upon those who pray.

Abandoned by my companions, I lay resting by the edge of a clump of trees: its darkness, glazed with light, formed the penumbra in which I sat. Fire-flies gleamed among the crape-covered shrubs and became obscured when they passed through the irradiations of the moon. I heard the sounds made by the rise and fall of the lake, the leap of the gold-fish, and the rare cry of the diver. My eyes were fixed upon the water; I gradually lapsed into the state of drowsiness known to men who travel the world's highways: I lost all clearness of recollection; I felt myself living and vegetating with nature in a kind of pantheism. I leant back against the trunk of a magnolia-tree and fell asleep; my slumbers floated upon a vague surface of hope.

When I emerged from this Lethe, I found myself between two women: the odalisks had returned; they did not wish to arouse me; they had sat down silently by my side; whether they had feigned sleep or had really slumbered, their heads had fallen on my shoulders.

A breeze blew through the grove and deluged us in a shower of rose-leaves from the magnolia. Then the younger of the Seminoles began to sing: let whomsoever is not sure of his life beware of ever thus exposing himself! No one knows the strength of the passion that glides with melody into a man's breast. A rude and jealous voice replied: a " Burnt-wood" was calling the two cousins; they started and rose: the dawn was beginning to break.

In the absence of Aspasia alone, I have since repeated this scene on the shores of Greece: ascending to the columns of the Parthenon with the dawn, I saw the Cithæron, Mount Hymettus, the Acropolis of Corinth, the tombs, the ruins, bathed in a dew of golden, transparent, shimmering light, reflected by the seas and wafted like a perfume by the zephyrs from Salamis and Delos.

We finished on the bank our voyage without words. At noon, we broke up the camp to inspect the horses which the Creeks wished to sell and the traders to buy. Women and children, all were summoned as witnesses, according to the custom in solemn bargains. Stallions of every age and colour, foals and mares, with bulls, cows and heifers, began to scamper and gallop around us. Amid this confusion, I became separated from the Creeks. A thick group of men and horses gathered on the skirt of a wood. Suddenly, in the distance, I perceived my two fair Floridans; vigorous hands seated them upon the cruppers of two barbs ridden bare-backed by a "Burnt-wood" and a Seminole. O Cid, why had not I thy swift Babieça that I might overtake them! The mares galloped off, the immense squadron followed them. The horses rushed, jumped, bounded, neighed, amid the horns of the bulls and buffaloes, their hoofs clashed in mid-air, their tails and manes flew blood-stained. A whirlwind of voracious insects swarmed about this wild cavalry. My Floridans disappeared from sight like Ceres' daughter, snatched by the god of the nether world.

[Sidenote: End of my Floridan romance.]

Thus does everything prove abortive in my life, thus is nought left me save pictures of what has passed so quickly: I shall descend to the Elysian Fields with more shades than mortal man has ever taken with him. The fault lies with my organization: I am never able to take advantage of any piece of good fortune; I can never take an interest in anything whatever that interests others. Putting religion aside, I have no beliefs. Shepherd or king, what should I have done with my sceptre or my crook? I should have wearied equally of glory or genius, work or leisure, prosperity or misfortune. Everything tires me: laboriously I tow my weariness after my days, and, wherever I go, I yawn away my life.

*

Ronsard[515] shows us Mary Stuart[516] ready to set out for Scotland after the death of François II[517]. Was I like Mary Stuart wandering through Fontainebleau, when I wandered about my savannah after my widowerhood? One thing is certain, that my mind, if not my person, was wrapped in "a long crape, subtil and flowing," as Ronsard also says, that old poet of the new school.

The devil having flown away with the Muskhogulge damsels, I was told by the guide that a "Burnt-wood," who was in love with one of the two women, was jealous of me and had resolved with a Seminole, the brother of the other cousin, to carry Atala and Céluta off from me. The guides spoke of them bluntly as "painted girls," which shocked my vanity. I felt the more humiliated in that the "Burnt-wood," my favoured rival, was a lean, ugly, dark-skinned mosquito, possessing all the characteristics of the insects which, according to the entomologists of the Grand Lama, are animals whose flesh is inside their bones. Solitude appeared empty to me after my misadventure. I gave the cold shoulder to my sylph, who generously hastened to console her faithless lover, like Julie when she forgave Saint-Preux his Parisian Floridans[518]. I lost no time in quitting the desert in which I have since resuscitated the drowsy companions of my night. I know not whether I gave back to them the life they gave me: at least I made a virgin of one, a virtuous spouse of the other, by way of expiation.

We again crossed the Blue Mountains, and approached the European clearings in the neighbourhood of Chillicothe. I had gathered no light upon the principal object of my enterprise; but I was escorted by a world of poetry:

Comme une jeune abeille aux roses engagée
Ma muse revenait de son butin chargée[519].

On the bank of a stream I saw an American house: at one end a farm-house, at the other a mill. I went in, asked for food and shelter, and was well received.

My hostess led me by a ladder to a room above the shaft of the hydraulic apparatus. My little casement-window, festooned with ivy and cobæas with iris bells, opened above the stream which flowed, narrow and solitary, between two thick borders of willows, elms, sassafras, tamarinds, and Carolina poplars. The moss-grown mill-wheel turned beneath their shade and let fall long ribands of water. Perch and trout leapt in the foam of the eddy; water-wagtails flew from bank to bank, and various kinds of kingfishers fluttered their blue wings above the current.

How happy should I have been there with the "sad" one, had she been faithful to me, seated dreaming at her feet, my head laid upon her knees, listening to the noise of the weir, the rotations of the wheel, the rolling of the mill-stone, the sifting of the bolter, the even beating of the clapper, breathing the freshness of the water and the scent from the husks of the pearl-barley.

Night came. I went down to the sitting-room of the farm-house. It was lighted only by maize-straw and husks of beans blazing in the hearth. The fire-arms of the master of the house, lying horizontally in the gun-rack, gleamed in the reflections from the fireplace. I sat down upon a stool in the chimney-corner, near a squirrel, which jumped from the back of a large dog to the shelf of a spinning-wheel and back again. A kitten installed itself upon my knee to watch this sport. The miller's wife put a large stew-pot on the fire, the flames of which played round the pot's black bottom like a radiant golden crown. While I watched the sweet potatoes boiling for my supper, I amused myself by reading by the firelight, with lowered head, an English newspaper which had fallen on the floor between my legs. Printed in large letters I read the words:

FLIGHT OF THE KING.

It was the story of the flight of Louis XVI., and the arrest of the unfortunate monarch at Varennes[520]. The paper also described the progress of the emigration and the gathering of the officers of the army around the flag of the French Princes.

A sudden conversion took place within my mind. Rinaldo beheld his weakness in the mirror of honour in Armida's gardens; I was not Tasso's hero, but the same looking-glass showed me my image in the midst of an American orchard. The clash of arms, the world's tumult resounded in my ears under the thatch of a mill hidden in unknown woods. I abruptly interrupted my travels, and said to myself:

"Go back to France."

Thus it happened that my sense of duty upset my early plans, and occasioned the first of the revolutions that have marked my career. The Bourbons no more needed that a cadet of Brittany should return from across the seas to offer them his obscure devotion than they have needed his services since he has emerged from his obscurity. Had I lit my pipe with the newspaper which changed the course of my life, and continued my journey, no one would have remarked my absence; my life was at that time as unknown and weighed as little as the smoke from my calumet. A simple contest between myself and my conscience flung me upon the world's stage. I could have acted as I pleased, since I alone was a witness of the struggle; but, of all witnesses, that is the one before whose eyes I should most fear to blush.

Why is it that the solitudes of Erie and Ontario present themselves to my thoughts today with a charm which the brilliant spectacle of the Bosphorus is not able to possess in my memory? It is because, at the time of my journey in the United States, I was full of illusions: the troubles of France commenced at the same time as the commencement of my existence; nothing was complete in myself or in the land of my birth. Those days are dear to me because they recall to me the innocence of sentiments inspired by the family and the pleasures of youth.

Fifteen years later, after my journey in the Levant, the Republic, swollen with ruins and tears, had discharged itself like a torrent from the deluge into despotism. I no longer deluded myself with chimeras; my recollections, thenceforth taking their source in society and passions, lacked candour. Deceived in both my pilgrimages to the West and to the East, I had failed to discover the passage to the Pole, I had failed to snatch glory on the banks of Niagara, where I had gone in search of it, and I had left it seated on the ruins of Athens.

After setting out to be a traveller in America and returning to be a soldier in Europe, I did not go the whole length of either of those careers: an evil genius snatched the staff and the sword from my hand, and put the pen there in its stead. Fifteen more years have elapsed since, finding myself at Sparta, and contemplating the sky during the night, I recalled the countries that had already witnessed my peaceful or troubled sleep: on the commons of England, in the plains of Italy, upon the high-seas, in the Canadian forests, I had already saluted the same stars which I saw shine upon the land of Helen and Menelaus. But what would it avail me to complain to the stars, the fixed witnesses of my vagrant destinies? One day their gaze will cease to tire itself by pursuing me; meantime, indifferent to my fate, I will not ask those stars to move it with a gentler influence nor to restore to me that portion of life which the traveller leaves behind in the places at which he touches.

Were I to revisit the United States today, I should no longer recognize them: there where I left forests, I should find tilled fields; there where I traced a path for myself across the thickets, I should travel on the high-roads; at Natchez, instead of Céluta's hut, stands a town of some five thousand inhabitants; Chactas might today be sent to Congress. I have lately received a pamphlet printed among the Cherokees and addressed to myself, in the interests of those savages, as "the defender of the liberty of the press."

In the land of the Muskhogulges, the Seminoles, the Chickasaws, we find a city of Athens, another of Marathon, another of Carthage, another of Memphis, another of Sparta, another of Florence; there is a County of Columbia and a County of Marengo: the glory of every country has placed a name in the same wastes where I met Father Aubry and the obscure Atala. Kentucky exhibits a Versailles; a territory called Bourbon has a Paris for its capital.

All the exiles, all the fugitives from oppression who have taken refuge in America have carried there the memory of their country.

Falsi Simoentis ad undam
Libabat cineri Andromache[521].

The United States offer in their bosom, under the protection of liberty, an image and a memory of the greater part of the famous spots of antiquity and of modern Europe: the Emperor Hadrian caused copies of the monuments of his empire to be placed in his garden in the Roman Campagna.

[Sidenote: American progress.]

Thirty-three high-roads run out of Washington, as formerly the Roman roads started from the Capitol; spreading asunder, they end at the circumference of the United States and trace a circulation of 25,747 miles. Posting-stations are established on a large number of these roads. One now takes the coach for the Ohio or Niagara as in my time one took a guide or an Indian interpreter. The means of transport are two-fold: lakes and rivers abound, and are connected by canals; you can travel alongside of the high-roads in rowing or sailing-boats, barges or steamers. Fuel is inexhaustible, since immense forests cover coal-mines level with the surface.

The population of the United States has increased in every decade from 1790 to 1820 at the rate of 35 per cent. It is calculated that in 1830 the population will amount to 12,875,000 souls. Continuing to double every twenty-five years, it should amount in 1855 to 25,750,000 souls, and twenty-five years later, in 1880, it should exceed fifty millions[522].

This human sap causes the wilderness to thrive on every side. The Canadian lakes, on which lately no sail was to be seen, now resemble docks in which frigates, corvettes, cutters and barks pass Indian pirogues and canoes, in the same way in which the big ships and galleys mix with the pinks, sloops and caiques in the waters of Constantinople. The Mississippi, the Missouri, the Ohio no longer pursue a solitary course: three-masters ascend their currents; over two hundred steam-boats enliven their banks. This immense inland navigation, which alone would ensure the prosperity of the United States, does not lessen their distant expeditions. Their vessels sail all the seas, engage in all forms of enterprise, carry the Stars and Stripes from the horizon of the setting sun to the shores where the sun rises, shores that have never known aught but slavery.

To complete this surprising scene, one must picture to one's self cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans, lighted at night, filled with horses and carriages, adorned with coffee-houses, museums, libraries, ball-rooms, theatres, displaying all the enjoyments of luxury.

At the same time, the United States must not be searched for that which distinguishes man above the other beings of creation, for that which constitutes his certificate of immortality and the ornament of his days: literature is unknown in the new republic, although called for by a multitude of institutions. The American has replaced intellectual by positive operations. Do not impute to him as an inferiority his mediocrity in the arts, for it is not in that direction that he has turned his attention. Cast through various causes upon a desert soil, he made agriculture and commerce the first objects of his cares: before thinking, one must live; before planting trees, one must fell them, in order to till the ground.