Chapter XI: Book I: 361 (1)

My stay at Dieppe--Two phases of society--The position of my Memoirs--The year 1800--Aspect of France--I arrive in Paris--Changes in society--The year 1801--The _Mercure_--_Atala_--Madame de Beaumont and her circle--Summer at Savigny--The year 1802--Talma--The year 1803--The _Génie du Christianisme_--Failure prophesied--Cause of its final success--Defects in the work.

You know that I have often moved from spot to spot while writing these Memoirs; that I have often described those spots, spoken of the feelings with which they inspired me, and recalled my memories, thus mingling the history of my thoughts and of my wandering habitations with the history of my life.

You see where I am living now. Walking this morning on the cliffs behind Dieppe Castle, I saw the postern which communicates with the cliffs by means of a bridge thrown over a ditch: Madame de Longueville[362] escaped by that way from Queen Anne of Austria[363]; embarking secretly at the Havre, she landed at Rotterdam, and joined the Maréchal de Turenne[364] at Stenay. The great captain's laurels were no longer innocent, and the fair but caustic outlaw treated the culprit none too well.

Madame de Longueville, who had recovered from the Hôtel de Rambouillet, the Throne of Versailles, and the Municipality of Paris, became smitten with the author of the _Maximes_[365], and was as faithful to him as she was able. The latter lives less by his "thoughts" than by the friendship of Madame de La Fayette[366], Madame de Sévigné, the verses of La Fontaine, and the love of Madame de Longueville: see whither illustrious attachments lead.

The Princesse de Condé[367], when on the point of death, said to Madame de Brienne[368]:

"My dear friend, acquaint that poor wretch who is at Stenay
of the state in which you see me, and let her learn how to
die."

Fine words; but the Princess forgot that she herself had been loved by Henry IV., and that, when her husband carried her to Brussels, she had wanted to rejoin the Bearnese, "to escape at night by a window, and then to do thirty or forty leagues on horse-back;" she was at that time a "poor wretch" of seventeen.

Descending the cliff, I found myself on the high-road to Paris; it ascends swiftly on leaving Dieppe. On the right, on the rising slope of a bank, stands the wall of a cemetery; by the side of that wall was fixed the wheel of a rope-walk. Two rope-spinners, walking backwards in line, and swinging from leg to leg, were softly singing together. I listened: they had come to that couplet of the _Vieux caporal_, a fine poetic lie, which has brought us to our present state:

Qui là-bas sanglote et regarde?
Eh! c'est la veuve du tambour, etc[369].

Those men uttered the refrain:

Conscrits au pas; ne pleurez pas
. . . Marchez au pas, au pas[370],

in a voice so manly and so pathetic that the tears came to my eyes. Whilst themselves keeping step and twisting their hemp, they appeared to be spinning out the old corporal's dying moments: there was something, I cannot say what, in that glory peculiar to Béranger, thus lonesomely revealed by two sailors singing a soldier's death within view of the sea.

[Sidenote: Dieppe.]

The cliff reminded me of a monarchical greatness, the road of a plebeian celebrity: I compared in thought the men at the two extremities of society, and I asked myself to which of those eras I should have preferred to belong. When the present shall have disappeared like the past, which of those two renowns will the most attract the notice of posterity?

And yet, if facts were all, if, in history, the value of names did not counterbalance the value of events, what a difference between my time and the time which elapsed between the deaths of Henry IV. and Mazarin[371]! What are the troubles of 1648 compared to that Revolution which has devoured the old world, of which it, the Revolution, will die perhaps, leaving behind it neither an old nor a new state of society? Had not I to paint in my Memoirs pictures of incomparably higher importance than the scenes related by the Duc de La Rochefoucauld[372]? At Dieppe itself, what was the careless and voluptuous idol of seduced and rebellious Paris by the side of Madame la Duchesse de Berry[373]? The salvoes of artillery which announced to the sea the presence of the royal widow resound no longer[374]; the flattery of powder and smoke has left nothing upon the shore save the moaning of the waves.

The two daughters of Bourbon, Anne Geneviève and Marie Caroline, have departed; the two sailors singing the song of the plebeian poet will plunge into the abyss; Dieppe no longer contains myself: it was another "I," an "I" of my early days, now past, that formerly inhabited these regions, and that "I" has succumbed, for our days die before ourselves. Here you have seen me, a sub-lieutenant in the Navarre Regiment, drilling recruits on the pebbles; you have seen me here again, exiled under Bonaparte; you shall find me here again when the days of July surprise me in this place. Behold me here once more; I here resume my pen to continue my confessions.

In order that we may understand one another, it is well to cast a glance at the present state of my Memoirs.

*

What happens to every contractor working on a large scale has happened to me: I have, in the first place, built the outer wings of my edifice, and then, removing and restoring my scaffoldings in different positions, I have raised the stone and the mortar for the intermediate structures: it used to take several centuries to complete a Gothic cathedral. If Heaven grant me life, the work will be finished by stages of my various years; the architect, always the same, will have changed only in age. For the rest, it is a punishment to preserve one's intellectual being intact, imprisoned in a worn-out material covering. St Augustine, feeling that his clay was falling from him, said to God, "Be Thou a tabernacle unto my soul," and to men he said, "When you shall have known me in this book, pray for me."

Thirty-six years must be reckoned between the things which commence my Memoirs and those upon which I am now engaged. How shall I resume with any spirit the narration of a subject formerly replete for me with passion and fire, when it is no longer with living beings that I am about to converse, when it becomes a question of arousing lifeless effigies from the depths of Eternity, of descending into a funeral vault there to play at life? Am I not myself almost dead? Have my opinions not changed? Do I see objects from the same point of view? Have not the general and prodigious events which have accompanied or followed the personal events that so greatly perturbed me diminished their importance in the eyes of the world, as well as in my own eyes? Whosoever prolongs his career feels his hours grow cold; he no longer finds on the morrow the interest which he felt on the eve. When I seek in my thoughts, there are names and even persons that escape my memory, and yet they may have caused my heart to throb: vanity of man forgetting and forgotten! It is not enough to say to one's dreams, to love, "Revive!" for them to come to life again: the realm of shadows can be opened only with the golden bough, and it needs a young hand to pluck it.

_Aucuns venants des Lares patries_[375].

[Sidenote: Aspect of France in 1800.]

Imprisoned for eight years in Great Britain, I had seen only the English world, so different, especially at that time, from the European world. As the Dover packet approached Calais, in the spring of 1800, my gaze preceded me on shore. I was struck by the needy aspect of the country: scarce a few masts were to be seen in the harbour; inhabitants in carmagnole jackets and cotton caps came along the jetty to meet us: the conquerors of the Continent made themselves known to me by a clatter of wooden shoes. When we came alongside, the gendarmes and custom-house officers leapt on deck to inspect our luggage and our passports: in France a man is always suspected, and the first thing we perceive in our business, as well as in our amusements, is a cocked hat or a bayonet.

Mrs. Lindsay was waiting for us at the inn; the next day we set out with her for Paris: Madame d'Aguesseau, a young kinswoman of hers, and I. On the road one saw hardly any men; blackened and sun-burnt women, bare-footed, their heads bare or covered with a kerchief, were tilling the fields: one would have taken them for slaves. I ought rather to have been struck by the independence and virility of that land where the women wielded the mattock while the men wielded the musket. The villages looked as though a conflagration had passed over them; they were wretched and half demolished: mud or dust on every hand, dunghills and rubbish-heaps.

To the right and left of the road appeared overthrown country mansions; of their levelled thickets there remained only some squared trunks, upon which children played. One saw battered enclosure walls, deserted churches, from which the dead had been expelled, steeples without bells, cemeteries without crosses, headless saints that had been stoned in their niches. The walls were smeared with those Republican inscriptions that had already grown old: LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, OR DEATH. Sometimes they had attempted to efface the word DEATH, but the red or black letters showed through the coating of lime. This nation, which seemed on the point of extinction, was commencing a new world, like those peoples which issued from the dusk of the savagery and destruction of the Middle Ages.

Approaching the capital, between Écouen and Paris, the elms had not been cut down; I was struck by those fine roadside avenues, unknown on English soil. France was as new to me, as in former days, the forests of America. Saint-Denis was laid bare, its windows were broken; the rain penetrated into its grass-grown naves, and there were no more tombs: I have since seen there the bones of Louis XVI., the Cossacks, the coffin of the Duc de Berry, and the catafalque of Louis XVIII.

Auguste de Lamoignon came to meet Mrs. Lindsay. His well-appointed carriage formed a contrast with the clumsy carts, the dirty, broken-down diligences, drawn by hacks harnessed with ropes, which I had met since leaving Calais. Mrs. Lindsay lived at the Ternes. I was put down on the Chemin de la Révolte, and made my way to my hostess' house across the fields. I stayed with her for four-and-twenty hours; I there met a great fat Monsieur Lasalle, whom she employed in arranging emigrant business. She sent to inform M. de Fontanes of my arrival; in eight-and-forty hours he came to fetch me in a little room which Mrs. Lindsay had hired for me at an inn almost at her door.

[Sidenote: Paris once more.]

It was a Sunday: we entered Paris on foot by the Barrière de l'Étoile at about three o'clock in the afternoon. We have no idea to-day of the impression which the excesses of the Revolution had made on men's minds in Europe, and chiefly among those absent from France during the Terror: I felt literally as though I were about to descend into Hell. I had, it is true, witnessed the beginnings of the Revolution; but the great crimes had then not yet been accomplished, and I had remained under the yoke of subsequent events as these had been related in the midst of the peaceful and orderly society of England.

Proceeding under my false name, and convinced that I was compromising my friend Fontanes, to my great astonishment, on entering the Champs-Élysées, I heard the sound of violins, horns, clarionets and drums. I saw public balls, at which men and women were dancing; farther on, the Tuileries Palace appeared to my eyes, against the background of its two great clumps of chestnut-trees. As for the Place Louis XV.[376], it was bare: it had the decay, the melancholy and deserted look of an old amphitheatre; one crossed it quickly; I was quite surprised to hear no moans; I was afraid of stepping in the blood of which not a trace remained; my eyes could not tear themselves from the place in the sky where the instrument of death had raised its head; I thought I saw my brother and my sister-in-law in their shirts, standing, bound, beside the blood-stained machine: it was there that the head of Louis XVI. had fallen. In spite of the gaiety in the streets the church-steeples were dumb; it seemed to me as though I had returned on the day of infinite sorrow, on Good Friday.

M. de Fontanes lived in the Rue Saint-Honoré, near Saint-Roch. He took me home with him, introduced me to his wife, and then took me to his friend, M. Joubert, where I found a temporary shelter: I was received like a traveller of whom one has heard speak.

The next day I went to the police, under the name of La Sagne, to lodge my foreign passport and to receive in exchange a permit to remain in Paris, which was renewed from month to month. In a few days I hired an _entre-sol_ in the Rue de Lille, on the side of the Rue des Saints-Pères.

I had brought with me the _Génie du Christianisme_ and the first sheets of the work, printed in London. I was directed to M. Migneret[377], a worthy man, who consented to recommence the interrupted printing, and to advance me something to live on. Not a soul knew of my _Essai sur les révolutions_, notwithstanding what M. Lemierre had written to me. I unearthed the old philosopher, Delisle de Sales, who had just published his _Mémoire en faveur de Dieu_, and went to call on Ginguené. He lodged in the Rue de Grenelle-Saint-Germain, near the Hôtel du Bon La Fontaine. His porter's box still bore this inscription:

"Here we honour each other with the title of citizen and say
thee and thou. Shut the door behind thee, if you please."

I went up: M. Ginguené, who hardly recognised me, spoke to me from the height of the grandeur of all that he was and had been. I humbly retired, and did not endeavour to renew such disproportionate relations.

I continued at the bottom of my heart to cherish regretful memories of England; I had lived so long in that country that I had adopted its habits: I could not reconcile myself to the dirt of our houses, our staircases, our tables, to our uncleanliness, our noisiness, our familiarity, the indiscretion of our loquacity; I was English in manners, in taste, and to a certain degree in thought; for, if, as it is said, Lord Byron sometimes drew inspiration for his _Childe-Harold_ from _René_ it is also true to say that my eight years' residence in Great Britain, preceded by a journey in America, together with my long habit of talking, writing, and even thinking in English, had necessarily influenced the turn and expression of my ideas. But gradually I came to relish the good-fellowship for which we are distinguished, that charming, swift, easy commerce of thought, that utter absence of arrogance and prejudice, that heedlessness of fortune and names, that natural level of all ranks, that equality of mind which makes French society incomparable and redeems our faults: after a few months' residence among us, one feels that he can no longer live except in Paris.

*

I locked myself into my _entre-sol_ and gave myself up entirely to work. In my intervals of rest, I went and reconnoitred in various directions. The Circus in the middle of the Palais-Royal had been filled up; Camille Desmoulins no longer held forth in the open air; one no longer saw bands of prostitutes going round, virginal attendants of the goddess Reason, and walking under the conduct of David, costumier and corybant. At the outlet of each alley, in the galleries, one met men crying sights: "galanty shows," "peep-shows," "physical cabinets," "strange animals;" in spite of all the heads that had been cut off, idlers still remained. From the cellars of the Palais-Marchand came bursts of music, accompanied by the double diapason of the big drums: it was perhaps there that dwelt the giants whom I sought, and whom immense events must necessarily have produced. I went down: an underground ball was jigging amidst seated spectators drinking beer. A little hunchback, perched on a table, played the violin and sang a hymn to Bonaparte, which ended with these lines:

Par ses vertus, par ses attraits.
Il méritait d'être leur père[378]!

He was given a sou after the _ritornello._ Such is the ground-work of the human society which bore Alexander and was then bearing Napoleon.

[Sidenote: Changes in Paris.]

I visited the places where I had taken the reveries of my early years. In my old-time convents, the club-men had been driven out after the monks. Wandering behind the Luxembourg, my footsteps led me to the Chartreuse: its demolition was being completed. The Place des Victoires and the Place Vendôme mourned the missing effigies of the Great King; the community-house of the Capuchins was sacked: the inner cloisters served as a retreat for Robertson's[379] dissolving views. At the Cordeliers, I inquired in vain for the Gothic nave where I had seen Marat and Danton in their prime. On the Quai des Théatins[380], the church of that Order[381] had been turned into a café and a rope-dancers' theatre. At the door was a coloured poster representing acrobats dancing on the tight-rope, with, in big letters, ADMISSION FREE. I elbowed my way among the crowd into that perfidious cave: I had no sooner taken my seat than waiters entered, napkin in hand, shouting like mad-men--

"Give your orders, gentlemen, give your orders!"

I did not wait to be told a second time, and I pitiably made my escape amid the jeering cries of the assembly, because I had no money wherewith to "give my orders."

*

The Revolution has become divided into three parts which have nothing in common between them: the Republic, the Empire, and the Restoration; those three different worlds, each as completely finished as the others, seem separated by centuries. Each of these three worlds has had its fixed principle: the principle of the Republic was equality, that of the Empire force, that of the Restoration liberty. The Republican era is the most original, and has made the deepest impression because it has been unique in history: never had there been seen, nor ever will be again, physical order produced by moral disorder, unity issuing from the government of the multitude, the scaffold substituted for the law and obeyed in the name of humanity.

In 1801, I assisted at the second social transformation. The jumble was a strange one: by an agreed travesty, a host of people became persons who they were not; each carried his assumed or borrowed name hung round his neck, as the Venetians at the carnival carry a little mask in their hand to show that they are masked. One was reputed an Italian or a Spaniard, another a Prussian or a Dutchman: I was a Swiss. The mother passed for her son's aunt, the father for his daughter's uncle; the owner of an estate was only its steward. This movement reminded me, in an opposite sense, of the movement of 1789, when the monks and religious issued from their cloisters and the old society was invaded by the new: the latter, after supplanting the former, was supplanted in its turn.

Nevertheless, the orderly world commenced to spring up again; people left the cafés and the streets to return to their houses; they gathered together the remains of their family; they readjusted their inheritance by collecting its remnants, as, after a battle, the troop is beaten and the losses counted. Such churches as remained whole were opened: I had the happiness to sound the trumpet at the gate of the Temple. One distinguished the old republican generations which were retiring, imperial generations which were coming to the front Generals of the Requisition[382], poor, rude of speech, stern of mien, who, from all their campaigns, had brought back nothing save wounds and ragged coats, passed officers glittering with the gold lace of the Consular Army. The returned Emigrant chatted quietly with the assassins of some of his kindred. The porters, all great partisans of the late M. de Robespierre, regretted the sights on the Place Louis XV., where they cut off the heads of "women who," my own _concierge_ in the Rue de Lille told me, "had necks white as chicken's flesh."

The men of September, changing their names and their districts, sold baked potatoes at the street-corners; but they were often obliged to pack off, because the people, recognising them, upset their stalls and tried to kill them. The Revolutionaries who had waxed rich began to move into the great mansions of the Faubourg Saint-Germain that had been sold. On the road to become barons and counts, the Jacobins spoke only of the horrors of 1793, of the necessity for chastising the proletarians and putting down the excesses of the populace. Bonaparte, placing the Brutuses and Scævolas in his police, was preparing to bedizen them with ribands, to befoul them with titles, to force them to betray their opinions and dishonour their crimes. Amid all this, sprang up a vigorous generation sown in blood and growing up to shed none save that of the foreigner: from day to day, the metamorphosis was accomplished which turned Republicans into Imperialists and the tyranny of all into the despotism of one.

*

[Sidenote: My letter to Madame de Staël.]

While occupied in curtailing, expanding, altering the sheets of the _Génie du Christianisme_, I was driven by necessity to busy myself with other work. M. de Fontanes was then editing the _Mercure de France_: he suggested that I should write in that paper. These combats were not without a certain danger: the only way to touch politics was through literature, and half a word was enough for Bonaparte's police. A singular circumstance, which prevented me from sleeping, lengthened my hours and gave me more leisure. I had bought two turtle-doves; they cooed a great deal: I enclosed them in vain at night in my little travelling-trunk; they only cooed the more. In one of the moments of sleeplessness which they caused me, I bethought myself of writing for the _Mercure_ a letter to Madame de Staël[383]. This freak caused me suddenly to emerge from the shade; a few pages in a newspaper did what my two thick volumes on the Revolution had been unable to do. My head showed a little above obscurity.

This first success seemed to foretell that which was to follow. I was engaged in correcting the proofs of _Atala_ (an episode contained, as was _René_, in the _Génie du Christianisme_), when I perceived that some sheets were missing. I was seized with fright: I thought they had stolen my novel, assuredly a very ill-founded dread, for no one thought that I was worth robbing. Be this as it may, I determined to publish _Atala_ separately, and I declared my resolution in a letter addressed to the _Journal des Débats_[384] and the _Publiciste._

Before venturing to expose the work to the light of day, I showed it to M. de Fontanes: he had already read fragments of it in manuscript in London. When he came to Father Aubry's speech beside Atala's deathbed, he said brusquely, in a rough voice:

"That's not right; it's bad: write that over again!"

I went away disconsolate; I did not feel capable of doing better. I wanted to throw the whole thing into the fire; I spent from eight till eleven o'clock in the evening in my entresol, seated at my table, with my forehead resting on the back of my hands opened and spread out over my paper. I was angry with Fontanes; I was angry with myself; I did not even try to write, so great was my despair of self. Towards midnight, I heard the voice of my turtle-doves, softened by distance and rendered more plaintive by the prison in which I kept them confined: inspiration returned to me; I then and there wrote the speech of the missionary, without a single interlineation, without erasing a word, just as it remained and as it stands to-day. With a beating heart, I took it in the morning to Fontanes, who exclaimed:

"That's it, that's right! I told you you could do better!"

The noise which I have made in this world dates from the publication of _Atala._[385] I ceased to live for myself and my public career commenced. After so many military successes, a literary success seemed a prodigy: people were hungering for it. The uncommon nature of the work added to the surprise of the crowd. _Atala_, falling into the midst of the literature of the Empire, of that classic school whose very sight, like that of a rejuvenated old woman, inspired boredom, was a sort of production of an unknown kind. People did not know whether to class it among the "monstrosities" or among the "beauties:" was it a Gorgon or a Venus? The assembled academicians discoursed learnedly upon its sex and its nature, in the same way as they made reports upon the _Génie du Christianisme._ The old century rejected, the new welcomed it.

[Sidenote: I publish _Atala._]

_Atala_ became so popular that, with the Brinvilliers[386] she went to swell Curtius' collection[387]. The wagoners' inns were decorated with red, green and blue prints representing Chactas, Father Aubry, and the daughter of Simaghan. My characters were displayed in wax, in wooden boxes, on the quays, as images of the Virgin and the saints are displayed at the fair. In a boulevard theatre, I saw my savage woman, in a headdress of cock's feathers, talking to a savage of her own kind of "the soul of solitude," in a way that brought the sweat to my brow with confusion. At the Variétés, they played a piece in which a little girl and a little boy, leaving their boarding-school, went off by track-boat to get married in a small town; as, on landing, they spoke with a wild look of nothing but crocodiles, storks and forests, their parents thought that they had gone mad. I was overwhelmed with parodies, caricatures and ridicule. The Abbé Morellet, in order to confound me, took his maid-servant on his knees and was unable to hold the young virgin's feet in his hands, as Chactas held Atala's feet during the storm: if the Chactas of the Rue d'Anjou had had his portrait painted in this attitude, I would have forgiven him his criticism.

All this bustle served to increase the fuss attendant upon my appearance. I became the fashion. My head was turned: I was unaccustomed to the delights of self-love and became intoxicated with it I loved fame like a woman, like a first love. And yet, coward that I was, my affright equalled my passion: I was a conscript and stood the fire badly. My natural timidity, the doubts I have always had of my talent, made me humble in the midst of my triumphs. I shrank from my splendour; I wandered in lonely places, trying to extinguish the halo with which my head was crowned. In the evenings, with my hat thrust down over my eyes, lest the great man should be recognised, I went to a public smoking-room to read my praises in secret, in some small, unknown paper. Alone with my renown, I prolonged my walks as far as the steam-pump at Chaillot[388], on the same road where I had suffered so much on going to Court: I was no more at my ease with my new honours. When my superiority dined for thirty sous in the Latin Quarter it swallowed its food the wrong way, troubled as it was by the staring of which it thought itself the object. I watched myself, I said to myself:

"And yet it is you, extraordinary being, eating like any one else!"

In the Champs-Élysées was a café which I liked because of some nightingales which hung in a cage inside the coffee-room; Madame Rousseau, who kept the place, knew me by sight, without knowing who I was. At ten o'clock in the evening, they used to bring me a cup of coffee, and I looked for _Atala_ in the _Petites-Affiches_, to the sound of the voices of my half-dozen Philomelas. Alas! I soon saw poor Madame Rousseau die; our society of the nightingales and of the fair Indian who sang, "Sweet habit of loving, so needful to life!" lasted but a moment.

If success had no power to prolong in me this stupid infatuation of vanity, or to pervert my reason, it was attended with dangers of another kind: those dangers increased on the appearance of the _Génie du Christianisme_ and on my resignation after the death of the Duc d'Enghien. Then came thronging around me, together with the young women who cry over novels, the crowd of Christian women, and those other noble enthusiasts whose breast beats high at the sight of an honourable action. The young girls of thirteen or fourteen were the most dangerous; for, knowing neither what they want nor what they want with you, they enticingly mingle your image with a multitude of fables, ribbons and flowers. Jean Jacques Rousseau speaks of the declarations which he received on the publication of the _Nouvelle Héloïse_[389] and of the conquests which were offered him: I do not know if empires would have been thus yielded to me, but I do know that I was buried beneath a heap of scented notes; if those notes were not, to-day, notes from so many grand-mothers, I should be puzzled how to relate, with becoming modesty, how they fought for a line in my hand, how they picked up an envelope addressed by me, and how, blushing and with lowered head, they hid it beneath a flowing veil of long tresses. If I have not been spoilt, it must be because my nature is good.

[Sidenote: And become the fashion.]

Whether from genuine politeness or inquisitive weakness, I sometimes went so far as to think myself obliged to call and thank the unknown ladies who signed the flattery they addressed to me with their names. One day, I found a bewitching creature under her mother's wing, on a fourth floor, where I have never set foot since. A fair Pole received me in silk-hung rooms; half-odalisk, half-Valkyrie, she looked like a snowdrop with its white flowers, or like one of those graceful heather-blooms which replace the other daughters of Flora when the season of the latter has not yet come or has passed: that female chorus, varied in age and beauty, was the realisation of my former sylph. The two-fold effect upon my vanity and my feelings was so much the more to be dreaded inasmuch as, until then, excepting one serious attachment, I had been neither sought out nor distinguished by the crowd. At the same time I am bound to say that, even though it were easy for me to take advantage of a passing illusion, my sincerity revolted against the idea of a voluptuousness that would have come to me by the chaste paths of religion: to be loved through the _Génie du Christianisme_, loved for the _Extrème Onction_, loved for the _Fête des Morts!_ I could never have been so shameful a Tartuffe.

I knew a Provençal physician, Dr. Vigaroux[390]; he had arrived at an age when every pleasure means the loss of a day, and he said "that he had no regret for the time thus lost; without troubling himself whether he gave the happiness which he received, he went towards the death of which he hoped to make his last delight." Nevertheless, I was a witness of his poor tears when he breathed his last; he could not hide his affliction from me; it was too late: his white hairs were not long enough to conceal and wipe away his tears. The only one to be really unhappy on leaving the earth is the unbeliever: for the man without faith, existence is terrible in this, that it carries a sense of annihilation; if one had not been born, he would not experience the horror of ceasing to be: the life of the atheist is a frightful lightning-flash, which serves but to reveal an abyss.

O great and merciful God, Thou hast not cast us upon earth for unworthy troubles and a miserable happiness! Our inevitable disenchantment admonishes us that our destinies are more sublime. Whatever may have been our errors, if we have preserved a serious spirit and thought of Thee in the midst of our weaknesses, we shall, whenever Thy goodness sets us free, be carried to that region where attachments endure for ever!

*

It was not long before I received the punishment of my literary vanity, the most detestable of all, if not the most foolish: I had thought that I should be able to relish in _petto_ the satisfaction of being a sublime genius, not by wearing, as they do to-day, a beard and an eccentric coat, but by remaining dressed like decent people, distinguished only by superiority. Useless hope! My pride was to be chastened; the correction was administered by the political persons whom I was obliged to know: celebrity is a benefice with the cure of souls.

M. de Fontanes was acquainted with Madame Bacciochi[391]; he introduced me to Bonaparte's sister, and soon after to the First Consul's brother Lucien[392]. The latter had a country-place near Senlis le Plessis, where I was coerced to go and dine; the château had once belonged to the Cardinal de Bernis[393]. Lucien had in his garden the tomb of his first wife[394], a lady half German and half Spanish, and the memory of the poet-cardinal. The nutrient nymph of a stream dug with the spade was a mule which drew water from a well: that was the commencement of all the rivers which Bonaparte was to cause to flow in his Empire. Efforts were being made to have my name struck off the lists; I was already called, and called myself aloud, Chateaubriand, forgetting that I ought to call myself Lassagne. Emigrants came to see me: among others, Messrs, de Bonald[395] and de Chênedollé[396]. Christian de Lamoignon, my companion in exile in London, took me to Madame Récamier: the curtain fell suddenly between her and me.

[Sidenote: The Comtesse de Beaumont.]

The person who filled the largest place in my existence, on my return from the Emigration, was Madame la Comtesse de Beaumont[397]. She lived during a part of the year at the Château de Passy, near Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, which M. Joubert inhabited during the summer. Madame de Beaumont returned to Paris, and expressed a wish to meet me.

So that my life might be one long chain of regrets, Providence willed it that the first person who received me kindly at the outset of my public career should also be the first to disappear. Madame de Beaumont opens the funeral procession of those women who have passed away before me. My most distant memories rest upon ashes, and they have continued to fall from grave to grave: like the Indian pundit, I recite the prayers for the dead until the flowers of my chaplet are faded.

Madame de Beaumont was the daughter of Armand Marc de Saint-Hérem, Comte de Montmorin, French Ambassador in Madrid, commandant in Brittany, member of the Assembly of Notables in 1787, and Foreign Minister under Louis XVI., by whom he was much liked: he perished on the scaffold, where he was followed by a portion of his family[398].

Madame de Beaumont was ill rather than well-favoured, and very like her portrait by Madame Lebrun[399]. Her face was thin and pale; her eyes were almond-shaped and would have perhaps been too brilliant, if an extraordinary suavity of expression had not half extinguished her glances and caused them to shine languidly, as a ray of light becomes mellowed by passing through crystal water. Her character had a sort of rigidity and impatience, which arose from the strength of her feelings and from the inward suffering which she experienced. Endowed with loftiness of soul and great courage, she was born for the world, from which her spirit had withdrawn through choice and unhappiness; but when a friendly voice evoked that secluded intelligence, it came and spoke to you in words from Heaven. Madame de Beaumont's extreme weakness made her slow of expression, and this slowness was touching. I knew this afflicted woman only at the moment of her flight; she was already stricken with death, and I devoted myself to her sufferings. I had taken a lodging in the Rue Saint-Honoré, at the Hôtel d'Étampes, near the Rue Neuve-du-Luxembourg. In this latter street, Madame de Beaumont occupied an apartment looking out upon the gardens of the Ministry of Justice. I called to see her every evening, with her friends and mine, M. Joubert, M. de Fontanes, M. de Bonald, M. Molé[400], M. Pasquier[401], M. de Chênedollé, men who have filled a place in literature and public life.

[Sidenote: Joseph Joubert.]

Full of oddities and eccentricities, M. Joubert will be an eternal loss to those who knew him. He had an extraordinary grip upon one's mind and heart; and, when once he had seized hold of you, his image was there, like a fixed thought, like an obsession that refused to be driven away. He made great pretensions to calmness, and no one was so easily perturbed as he: he watched himself in order to stop those emotions of the mind, which he thought injurious to his health, and constantly his friends came and disturbed the precautions which he had taken to keep well, for he could not prevent himself from being affected by their sadness or joy: he was an egoist who troubled himself only about others. In order to recover his strength, he often thought himself obliged to close his eyes and refrain from speaking for hours at a time. Heaven knows what noise and movement passed inwardly within him during this repose and silence which he laid upon himself. M. Joubert at every moment changed his diet and regimen, living one day on milk, another on minced meat, causing himself to be jolted at full speed over the roughest roads, or drawn at a snail's pace along the smoothest alleys. When he read, he tore out of his books the leaves which displeased him, thus forming a library for his own use, composed of scooped-out works, contained in bindings too large for them.

A profound metaphysician, his philosophy, thanks to an elaboration peculiar to himself, became painting or poetry; a Plato with the heart of a La Fontaine, he had formed an idea of perfection which prevented him from finishing anything. In manuscripts found after his death, he said:

"I am like an Æolian harp, which gives forth a few beautiful sounds and plays no tune."

Madame Victorine de Chastenay[402] maintained that "he had the appearance of a soul which had met with a body by accident, and put up with it as best it could:" a definition both charming and true.

We laughed at the enemies of M. de Fontanes, who tried to pass him off for a deep and dissembling politician: he was simply an irascible poet, frank to the pitch of anger, with a mind hedged in by contrariety, and as little able to conceal its opinion as to accept that of others. The literary principles of his friend Joubert were not his: the latter found some good everywhere and in every writer; Fontanes, on the contrary, held such and such a doctrine in abhorrence, and could not hear the names mentioned of certain authors. He was the sworn enemy of the principles of modern composition: to place before the reader's eyes material action, the crime at work or the gibbet with its rope, seemed to him so many enormities; he maintained that objects should never be seen except amid poetic surroundings, as though under a crystal globe. Sorrow spending itself mechanically through the eyes seemed to him a sensation fit only for the Cirque or the Grève; he understood the tragic sentiment only as ennobled by admiration and changed, through the medium of art, into "a charming pity." I quoted the Greek vases to him: in the arabesques of those vases one sees Hector's body drawn behind the car of Achilles, while a little figure, flying in the air, represents the shade of Patrocles, consoled by the vengeance of the son of Thetis.

"Well, Joubert," cried Fontanes, "what do you say to that metamorphosis of the muse? How those Greeks respected the soul!"

Joubert thought himself attacked, and placed Fontanes in contradiction with himself by reproaching him with his indulgence for me.

These discussions, highly comical as they often were, never came to an end: one evening, at half-past eleven, when I lived on the Place Louis XV., in the attic floor of Madame de Coislin's house, Fontanes climbed up my eighty-four stairs again to come furiously, with many raps of his cane, to finish an argument which he had left interrupted: it concerned Picard[403], whom at that moment he placed far above Molière; he would have taken good care not to have written a single word of what he said: Fontanes talking and Fontanes pen in hand were two different men.

It was M. de Fontanes, I like to repeat, who encouraged my first attempts: it was he who announced the publication of the _Génie du Christianisme_; it was his muse which, full of astonished devotion, directed mine in the new paths along which it had precipitated itself: he taught me to conceal the deformity of objects by the manner of throwing light upon them; to put classic language into the mouths of my romantic characters as far as in me lay.

In former days there were men who were guardians of taste, like the dragons who watched over the golden apples in the garden of the Hesperides; they did not allow youth to enter until it was able to touch the fruit without spoiling it.

[Sidenote: And other literary friends.]

My friend's writings take you by a happy road: the mind experiences a sense of well-being, and finds itself in an harmonious situation where everything charms and nothing wounds. M. de Fontanes incessantly revised his productions; none was more convinced than that master of the old days of the excellence of the maxim, "Hasten slowly." What, then, would he say to-day when, both morally and physically, we exert ourselves to do away with distances, and when we think we can never go fast enough. M. de Fontanes preferred to travel at the will of a delicious measure. You have read what I said of him when I found him in London; the regrets which I expressed then I must repeat now: life obliges us ever to weep in anticipation or in remembrance.

M. de Bonald had a shrewd intelligence; his ingenuity was mistaken for genius; he had dreamt out his political metaphysics with the Army of Condé, in the Black Forest, in the same way as those Jena and Göttingen professors who have since marched at the head of their pupils and let themselves be killed for the liberty of Germany. An innovator, although he had been a musketeer under Louis XVI., he looked upon the ancients as children in politics and literature; and he maintained, while he was the first to employ the fatuousness of the language now in use, that the Grand-master of the University was "not yet sufficiently advanced to understand that."

Chênedollé, with knowledge and talent, not native but acquired, was so sad that he nicknamed himself the "Crow[404]:" he went freebooting in my works. We had made a compact: I yielded him my skies, my mists, my clouds; but it was arranged that he should leave me my zephyrs, my waves, and my forests.

I am now speaking only of my literary friends; as to my political friends, I do not know whether I shall tell you about them: principles and speeches have sunk abysses between us!

Madame Hocquart[405] and Madame de Vintimille[406] came to the meetings in the Rue Neuve-du-Luxembourg. Madame de Vintimille, one of the women of olden time, of whom few remain, went into the world and brought us news of what was going on: I asked her if people were "still building cities." The descriptions of little scandals upon which she entered with a poignant but inoffensive raillery made us the more heartily appreciate our own security. Madame de Vintimille had been sung, together with her sister, by M. de La Harpe. Her language was guarded, her character restrained, her wit acquired; she had lived with Mesdames de Chevreuse[407], de Longueville, de La Vallière, de Maintenon[408], with Madame Geoffrin[409] and Madame du Defiant[410]. She blended well with a company whose charm depended upon the variety of its wits and the combination of their different values. Madame Hocquart had been fondly loved by Madame de Beaumont's brother[411], who had occupied himself with the lady of his thoughts to the very scaffold, as Aubiac had gone to the gallows kissing a sleeve of soft blue velvet which remained to him from the favours of Margaret of Valois[412].

[Sidenote: Who are no more.]

Never again will there assemble under the same roof so many distinguished persons belonging to different ranks and of different destinies, able to talk of the commonest as of the loftiest things: a simplicity of speech which came not from poverty but from choice. It is perhaps the last company in which the French genius of olden time has appeared. Among the new French will not be found that urbanity which is the fruit of education, and which was transformed by long usage into aptness of character. What has become of that company? Make plans, bring friends together: you but prepare for yourself an eternal mourning! Madame de Beaumont is no more, Joubert is no more, Chênedollé is no more, Madame de Vintimille is no more. I used to visit M. Joubert at Villeneuve during the vintage; I walked with him on the Yonne Hills; he picked mushrooms in the copses, and I yellow saffron in the fields. We talked of everything, and particularly of our friend Madame de Beaumont, for ever absent; we recalled the memory of our former hopes. At night we returned to Villeneuve, a town surrounded by broken-down walls, of the time of Philip Augustus[413], and by half-razed towers, from above which rose the smoke from the vintagers' hearths. Joubert showed me, in the distance from the hill, a sandy path among the woods which he used to take when going to see his neighbour, who hid herself at the Château de Passy during the Terror.

I have passed four or five times through the Senonais since the death of my dear host. I saw the hills from the high-road: Joubert walked there no longer; I recognised the trees, the fields, the vines, the little heaps of stones on which we used to rest ourselves. Driving through Villeneuve, I have cast a glance on the deserted street and the closed house of my friend. The last time when that happened, I was going on an embassy to Rome: ah, if he had been at home, I would have taken him with me to Madame de Beaumont's grave! It has pleased God to open a celestial Rome to M. Joubert, even better suited to his soul, which abandoned Platonism for Christianity. I shall not meet him again here below:

"I shall go to him rather: but he shall not return to me[414]."

The success of _Atala_ having decided me to start afresh on the _Génie du Christianisme_, of which two volumes were already in print, Madame de Beaumont offered to give me a room in the country, in a house which she had hired at Savigny[415]. I spent six months with her in this retreat, with M. Joubert and our other friends.

The house stood at the entrance to the village, on the Paris side, near an old high-road known in that part as the Chemin de Henri IV.: it leant against a vine-clad slope, and faced Savigny Park, ending in a wooded screen, and crossed by the little River Orge. On the left, the plain of Viry spread out as far as the springs of Juvisy. In every direction, in this part of the country, lie valleys, where we used to go in the evenings in search of new walks.

In the morning, we breakfasted together; after breakfast, I withdrew to my work; Madame de Beaumont had the goodness to copy out the quotations which I marked for her. This noble woman offered me a shelter when I had none: without the peace which she gave me, I should perhaps never have finished a work which I had been unable to complete during my misfortunes.

I shall evermore remember certain evenings passed in this refuge of friendship: on returning from walking we gathered near a fresh-water basin, which stood in the middle of a grass-plot in the kitchen-garden. Madame Joubert, Madame de Beaumont and I sat down on a bench; Madame Joubert's son rolled on the grass at our feet; that child has already disappeared. M. Joubert walked alone on a gravel path; two watch-dogs and a cat played around us, while pigeons cooed on the edge of the roof. What happiness for a man newly landed from exile, after spending eight years in profound abandonment, excepting a few days quickly lapsed! It was generally on these evenings that my friends made me talk of my travels: I have never described the desert of the New World so well as at that time. At night, when the windows of our rustic drawing-room were opened, Madame de Beaumont noted different constellations, telling me that I should remember one day that she had taught me to know them: since I have lost her, I have several times, not far from her grave in Rome, in the midst of the Campagna, looked in the firmament for the stars whose names she told me: I have seen them shining above the Sabine Hills; the protracted rays of those stars shot down and struck the surface of the Tiber. The spot where I saw them over the woods of Savigny, the spots where I have seen them since, the fitfulness of my destinies, that sign which a woman had left for me in the sky to remind me of her: all this broke my heart. By what miracle does man consent to do what he does upon earth, he who is doomed to die?

One day, in our retreat, we saw a man enter stealthily by one window and go out by another: it was M. de Laborie[416]; he was escaping from Bonaparte's claws. Shortly after appeared one of those souls in pain which are of a different species from other souls and which, on their passage, mingle their unknown misfortune with the vulgar sufferings of mankind: it was Lucile, my sister.

[Sidenote: I meet my sisters.]

After my arrival in France, I had written to my family to inform them of my return. Madame la Comtesse de Marigny, my eldest sister, was the first to come to me, went to the wrong street, and met five Messieurs Lassagne, of whom the last climbed up through a cobbler's trap-door to answer to his name. Madame de Chateaubriand came in her turn: she was charming, and full of the qualities calculated to give me the happiness which I found with her after we came together again. Madame la Comtess de Caud, Lucile, came next. M. Joubert and Madame de Beaumont became smitten with a passionate fondness and a tender pity for her. Then commenced between them a correspondence which ended only with the death of the two women who had bent over towards one another like two flowers of the same species on the point of fading away. Madame Lucile having stopped at Versailles on the 30th of September 1802, I received this note from her:

"I write to beg you to thank Madame de Beaumont on my behalf
for the invitation she has sent me to go to Savigny. I hope
to have that pleasure in about a fortnight, unless there be
any objection on Madame de Beaumont's side."

Madame de Caud came to Savigny as she had promised.