Chapter XII: Book I: 361 (2)

I have told you how, in my youth, my sister, a canoness of the Chapter of the Argentière, and destined for that of Remiremont, cherished an attachment for M. de Malfilâtre, a counsellor to the Parliament of Brittany, which, remaining locked within her breast, had increased her natural melancholy. During the Revolution she married M. le Comte de Caud, and lost him after fifteen months of marriage. The death of Madame la Comtesse de Farcy, a sister whom she fondly loved, added to Madame de Caud's sadness. She next attached herself to Madame de Chateaubriand, my wife, and gained an empire over the latter which became painful, for Lucile was violent, masterful, unreasonable, and Madame de Chateaubriand, subject to her caprices, hid from her in order to render her the services which a richer shows to a susceptible and less happy friend.

Lucile's genius and character had almost reached the pitch of madness of Jean Jacques Rousseau; she thought herself exposed to secret enemies: she gave Madame de Beaumont, M. Joubert, myself, false addresses at which to write to her; she examined the seals, seeking to discover whether they had not been broken; she wandered from one home to the other, unable to remain either with my sisters or my wife; she had taken an antipathy to them, and Madame de Chateaubriand, after showing her a devotion surpassing all that one could imagine, had ended by breaking down under the burden of so cruel an affection.

Another fatality had struck Lucile: M. de Chênedollé, then living near Vire, had gone to see her at Fougères; soon there was talk of a marriage, which fell through. Everything failed my sister at once, and, thrown back upon herself, she no longer had the strength to bear up. This plaintive spectre rested for a moment on a stone, in the smiling solitude of Savigny: there were so many hearts there which would have joyfully received her! They would so gladly have restored her to a sweet reality of existence! But Lucile's heart could beat only in an atmosphere made expressly for her and never breathed by others. She swiftly devoured the days of the world apart in which Heaven had placed her. Why had God created a being only to suffer? What mysterious relation can there be between a long-suffering nature and an eternal principle?

My sister had not changed in any way; she had only taken the fixed expression of her ills: her head had sunk a little, like a head on which the hours had weighed heavily. She reminded me of my parents: those first family memories, evoked from the grave, surrounded me like wraiths which had gathered round at night to warm themselves at the dying flame of a funeral pile. As I watched her, I seemed to see in Lucile my whole childhood, looking out at me from behind her somewhat wild eyes.

The vision of pain faded away: that woman, borne down by life, seemed to have come to fetch the other dejected woman whom she was to take with her.

*

[Sidenote: Talma.]

The summer passed: according to custom, I promised myself to begin it again next year; but the hand of the clock does not return to the hour which we would wish to call back. During the winter, in Paris, I made some new acquaintances. M. Jullien, a rich man, obliging, and a jovial table-companion, although belonging to a family in which they killed themselves, had a box at the Français; he used to lend it to Madame de Beaumont: I went four or five times to the play with M. de Fontanes and M. Joubert. When I entered the world, old-fashioned comedy was in all its glory; I found it again in a state of complete decomposition. Tragedy still kept up, thanks to Mademoiselle Duchesnois[417] and, above all, to Talma, who had attained the highest level of dramatic talent. I had seen him when he made his first appearances; he was less handsome and, so to speak, less young than at the age when I saw him again: he had acquired the distinction, the nobility, and the gravity of years.

The portrait of Talma which Madame de Staël has drawn in her work on Germany is only half true: the brilliant writer saw the great actor through a woman's imagination, and attributed to him what he lacked.

Of the intermediate world Talma did not know what to make: he did not understand the man of gentle birth; he did not know our old-time society; he had not sat at the table of high-born ladies, in the Gothic tower enshrined in the wood; he knew nothing of the flexibility, the variety of expression, the gallantry, the light charm of manner, the ingenuousness, the tenderness, the heroism based upon honour, the Christian devotion of chivalry: he was not Tancred, or Coucy, or at least he turned them into heroes of a middle-age of his own creation; his Othello was placed in the heart of Vendôme.

Then what was Talma? Himself, his century and antiquity. He had the deep and concentrated passions of love and of patriotism; they burst from his breast with the force of an explosion. He had the baleful inspiration, the deranged genius of the Revolution through which he had passed. The terrible spectacles with which he was once surrounded were renewed in his talent with the lamentable and distant accents of the choruses of Sophocles and Euripides. His grace, which was not conventional grace, took hold of you like misfortune. Dark ambition, remorse, jealousy, melancholy of soul, physical pain, madness produced by the gods and adversity, human affliction: those were what he knew. His mere entrance upon the stage, the mere sound of his voice were mightily tragic. Suffering and thought were mingled on his brow, breathed in his immovability, in his poses, his gestures, his steps. As a Greek, he would arrive, panting and ominous, from the ruins of Argos, an immortal Orestes, tormented for three thousand years by the Eumenides; as a Frenchman, he would come from the solitudes of Saint-Denis, where the Parcæ of 1793 had cut the thread of the sepulchral life of the Kings. The very picture of sorrow awaiting something unknown, but decreed by an unjust Heaven, he went his way, the galley-slave of fate, inexorably chained between fatality and terror.

Time casts an inevitable obscurity over the older dramatic masterpieces: its projected shadow changes the purest Raphaëls into Rembrandts[418]; but for Talma, a part of the marvels of Corneille and Racine would have remained unknown. Dramatic talent is a torch: it fires other half-extinguished torches and revives geniuses which enrapture you with their renewed splendour.

We owe to Talma the perfection of the actor's dress. But are stage realism and rigour of costume so necessary to art as is supposed? Racine's characters derive nothing from the cut of their clothes: in the pictures of the first painters, the back-grounds are neglected and the costumes incorrect. The "furies" of Orestes, or the "prophecies" of Joad, read in a drawing-room by Talma in a dress-coat, made as great an impression as when declaimed upon the stage by Talma in a Greek mantle or a Jewish robe. Iphigenia was attired like Madame de Sévigné, when Boileau addressed those fine verses to his friend:

Jamais Iphigénie en Aulide immolée
N'a coûté tant de pleurs à la Grèce assemblée
Que, dans l'heureux spectacle à nos yeux étalé,
N'en a fait sous son nom verser la Champmeslé[419].

This correctness in the representation of inanimate objects is the spirit of the arts of our time: it points to the decadence of lofty poetry and of the true drama; we are content with lesser beauties, when we are impotent to achieve the greater; we imitate armchairs and velvet to perfection, when we are no longer able to paint the expression of the man seated on that velvet and in those armchairs. Nevertheless, once one has descended to that truthfulness of material forms, one finds one's self obliged to reproduce it; for the public, itself materialized, demands it.

[Sidenote: Comments on the _Génie._]

Meanwhile I was finishing the _Génie du Christianisme_: Lucien asked to see some of the proofs; I sent them to him; he added some rather common-place notes in the margins.

Although the success of my big book was as brilliant as that of my little _Atala_, it was nevertheless more widely contested: this was a serious work, in which I no longer fought the principles of the old literature and of philosophy with a novel, but attacked them directly with arguments and facts. The Voltairean empire uttered a cry and flew to arms. Madame de Staël was mistaken as to the future of my religious studies: they brought her the work uncut; she pushed her fingers between the pages, came upon the chapter headed the _Virginité_, and said to M. Adrien de Montmorency[420], who was with her:

"Oh Heavens! Our poor Chateaubriand! That will fall to the ground!"

The Abbé de Boulogne[421], who was shown some portions of my work before it was sent to press, said to the bookseller who asked his opinion:

"If you want to ruin yourself, print that."

And the Abbé de Boulogne has since written an all too splendid eulogy of my book.

Everything, in fact, seemed to prophesy failure. What hope could I have, I with no name and no extollers, of destroying the influence of Voltaire, which had prevailed for more than half a century, of Voltaire, who had raised the huge edifice completed by the Encyclopædists and consolidated by all the famous men in Europe? What! were the Diderots, the d'Alemberts, the Duclos[422], the Dupuis[423], the Helvétius[424], the Condorcets[425] minds that carried no authority? What! was the world to return, to the Golden Legend, to renounce the admiration it had acquired for masterpieces of science and reason? How could I ever win a case which Rome armed with its thunders, the clergy with its might, had been unable to save: a case defended in vain by the Archbishop of Paris, Christophe de Beaumont[426], supported by the decrees of the Parliament and the armed force and name of the King? Was it not as ridiculous as it was rash on the part of an unknown man to set himself against a philosophical movement so irresistible as to have produced the Revolution? It was curious to see a pygmy "toughen his little arms" to stifle the progress of a century, stop civilization, and thrust back the human race! Thank God, a word would be enough to pulverize the madman: wherefore M. Ginguené, when trouncing the _Génie du Christianisme_ in the _Décade_[427] declared that the criticism came too late, since my tautologous production was already forgotten. He said this five or six months after the publication of a work which the attack of the whole French Academy, on the occasion of the decennial prizes, was not able to kill.

[Sidenote: I publish my chief work.]

It was amid the ruins of our temples that I published the _Génie du Christianisme._[428] The faithful thought themselves saved: men at that time felt a need of faith, a thirsting for religious consolations, which arose from the want of those consolations experienced since long years. What supernatural strength was required to bear all the adversities undergone! How many mutilated families had to go to the Father of mankind in search of the children they had lost! How many broken hearts, how many solitary souls, were calling for a divine hand to cure them! One threw one's self into the house of God, as one enters a doctor's house on the outbreak of an infection. The victims of our disturbances (and how many different kinds of victims!) saved themselves at the altar: shipwrecked men clinging to the rock on which they seek for salvation.

Bonaparte, at that time hoping to found his power on the first basis of society, had just made arrangements with the Court of Rome: he at first raised no obstacle against the publication of a work calculated to enhance the popularity of his schemes; he had to struggle against the men about him and against the declared enemies of religion; he was glad therefore to be defended from the outside by the opinion called up by the _Génie du Christianisme._ Later, he repented him of his mistake; ideas of regular monarchy had sprung into being together with ideas of religion.

An episode in the _Génie du Christianisme_, which at the time caused less stir than _Atala_, fixed one of the characters of modern literature; but I may say that, if _René_ did not exist, I should not now write it: if it were possible for me to destroy it, I would do so. A family of Renés, poets and prose-writers, has swarmed into being: we have heard nothing but mournful and desultory phrases; it has been a question of nothing but winds and storms, of unknown words directed to the clouds and the night. No scribbler fresh from college but has imagined himself the unhappiest of men; no babe of sixteen but has believed himself to have exhausted life and to be tormented by his genius, but has, in the abyss of his thoughts, abandoned himself to the "wave of his passions," struck his pale and dishevelled brow, and astonished stupefied mankind with a misfortune of which he did not know the name, nor they either.

In _René_ I had laid bare one of the infirmities of my century; but it was a different madness in the novelists to try to make universal such transcendental afflictions. The general sentiments which compose the basis of humanity, paternal and maternal affection, filial piety, friendship, love, are inexhaustible; but particular ways of feeling, idiosyncrasies of mind and character, cannot be spread out and multiplied over wide and numerous scenes. The small undiscovered corners of the human heart are a narrow field; there is nothing left to gather in that field after the hand which has been the first to mow it. A malady of the soul is not a permanent nor natural state: one cannot reproduce it, make a literature of it, make use of it as of a general passion constantly modified at the will of the artists who handle it and change its form.

Be that as it may, literature became tinged with the colours of my religious paintings, even as public affairs have retained the phraseology of my writings on citizenship: the _Monarchy according to the Charter_ has been the rudiment of our representative government, and my article in the _Conservateur_, on "Moral Interests and Material Interests," has bequeathed those two designations to politics.

Writers did me the honour of imitating _Atala_ and _René_, in the same way that the pulpit borrowed my accounts of the missions and advantages of Christianity. The passages in which I show that, by driving the pagan divinities from the woods, our broader religion has restored nature to its solitudes; the paragraphs where I discuss the influence of our religion upon our manner of seeing a painting, where I examine the changes wrought in poetry and eloquence; the chapters which I devote to inquiries into the foreign sentiments introduced into the dramatic characters of antiquity contain the germ of the new criticism. Racine's characters, as I have said, both are and are not Greek characters: they are Christian characters; that is what no one had understood.

[Sidenote: Effects of the publication.]

If the effect of the _Génie du Christianisme_ had been only a reaction against doctrines to which the revolutionary misfortunes were attributed, that effect would have ceased so soon as the cause was removed; it would not have been prolonged to the time at which I am writing. But the action of the _Génie du Christianisme_ upon public opinion was not confined to the momentary resurrection of a religion supposed to be in its grave: a more lasting metamorphosis was operated. If the work contained innovations of style, it also contained changes of doctrine; not only the manner, but the matter, was altered; atheism and materialism were no longer the basis of the belief or unbelief of young minds; the idea of God and of the immortality of the soul resumed its empire: whence came an alteration in the chain of ideas linked one to the other. A man was no longer riveted to his place by an anti-religious prejudice; he no longer thought himself obliged to remain a mummy of annihilation, wrapped in philosophical swathing-bands; he permitted himself to examine any system, however absurd it might seem to him, _even though it were Christian._

Besides the faithful who returned at the sound of their shepherd's voice, there were formed, by this right of free examination, other _à priori_ faithful. Lay down God as a principle, and the Word will follow. The Son proceeds necessarily from the Father.

The various abstract combinations succeed only in substituting for the Christian mysteries other mysteries still more difficult of comprehension. Pantheism, which, besides, exists in three or four shapes, and which it is the fashion nowadays to ascribe to enlightened intelligences, is the absurdest of Eastern dreams brought back to light by Spinoza[429]. One has but to read the article by the sceptic Bayle[430] on that Jew of Amsterdam. The positive tone in which certain people speak of all these things would be revolting, were it not that it arises from want of study; they take up words which they do not understand, and imagine themselves to be transcendental geniuses. Be assured that Abélard, that St. Bernard, that St. Thomas Aquinas and their fellows brought to bear upon the study of metaphysics a superiority of judgment which we do not approach; that the Saint-Simonian[431], Phalansterian, Fourieristic[432], Humanitarian[433] systems were discovered and practised by the different heresies; that what is placed before us as progress and discovery is so much old lumber hawked about for fifteen centuries in the schools of Greece and the colleges of the Middle Ages. The misfortune is that the first sectaries could not succeed in founding their Neo-Platonic Republic, when Gallienus[434] permitted Plotinus[435] to make the experiment in Campania; later, people made the great mistake of burning the sectaries when they proposed to establish the community of goods and to pronounce prostitution holy, by urging that a woman cannot, without sin, refuse a man who asks of her a transient union in the name of Jesus Christ: all that was needed, said they, to accomplish this union was to annihilate one's soul and deposit it for a moment in the bosom of God.

The shock which the _Génie du Christianisme_ gave to men's minds caused the eighteenth century to emerge from the old road and flung it for ever out of its path. People began again, or rather they began for the first time to study the sources of Christianity; on re-reading the Fathers (presuming that they had read them before) they were struck at meeting with so many curious facts, so much philosophical science, so many beauties of style of every kind, so many ideas which, by a more or less perceptible gradation, produced the transition from ancient to modern society: an unique and memorable era of humanity, in which Heaven communicates with earth through the medium of souls set in men of genius.

Beside the crumbling world of paganism there arose, in former times, as though outside society, another world, looking on at those great spectacles, poor, retiring, secluded, taking no part in the business of life except when its lessons or its succour were needed. It was a marvellous thing to see those early bishops, almost all honoured with the name of saints and martyrs, those simple priests watching over the relics and cemeteries; those monks and hermits in their convents or in their caves, laying down laws of peace, morals, charity, when all was war, corruption, barbarism; going between the tyrants of Rome and the leaders of the Tartars and Goths, to prevent the injustice of the former and the cruelty of the latter; stopping armies with a wooden cross and a peaceful word; the weakest of men, and protecting the world against Attila[436]; placed between two universes to be the link that joined them, to console the last moments of an expiring society and support the first steps of a society in its cradle.

*

[Sidenote: My own criticism.]

It was impossible but that the truths unfolded in the _Génie du Christianisme_ should contribute to a change of ideas. Again, it is to this work that the present love for the buildings of the Middle Ages is due: it is I who have called upon the young century to admire the old temples. If my opinion has been misused; if it is not true that our cathedrals approach the Parthenon in beauty; if it is false that those churches teach us unknown facts in their documents of stone; if it is madness to maintain that those granite memories reveal to us things that escaped the learned Benedictines; if by dint of eternally repeating the word Gothic people grow wearied to death of it: that is not my fault. For the rest, with respect to the arts, I know the shortcomings of the _Génie du Christianisme_; that portion of my work is faulty, because, in 1800, I was not acquainted with the arts: I had not seen Italy, nor Greece, nor Egypt. Also, I did not make sufficient use of the lives of the saints and of the legends, although they offered me a number of marvellous instances: by selecting with taste, one could there reap a plentiful harvest. This field of the wealth of mediæval imagination surpasses the _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid and the Milesian fables in fruitfulness. My work, moreover, contains some scanty or false judgments, such as that which I pronounce upon Dante, to whom I have since paid a brilliant tribute. In the serious respect, I have completed the _Génie du Christianisme_ in my _Études historiques_, one of my writings that has been least spoken of and most plundered.

The success of _Atala_ had delighted me, because my soul was still fresh; that of the _Génie du Christianisme_ was painful to me: I was obliged to sacrifice my time to a more or less useless correspondence and to irrelevant civilities. A so-called admiration did not atone to me for the vexations that await a man whose name the crowd remembers. What good can supply the place of the peace which you have lost by admitting the public to your intimacy? Add to that the restlessness with which the Muses love to afflict those who attach themselves to their cult, the worries attendant upon a compliant character, inaptitude for fortune, loss of leisure, an uncertain temper, livelier affections, unreasonable melancholy, groundless joys: who, if he had the choice, would purchase on those conditions the uncertain advantages of a reputation which you are not sure of obtaining, which will be contested during your life, which posterity will refuse to confirm, and which your death will snatch from you for ever?

The literary controversy on innovations of style which _Atala_ had aroused was renewed upon the publication of the _Génie du Christianisme._

A characteristic feature of the imperial school, and even of the republican school, must be noted: while society advanced for better or for worse, literature remained stationary; foreign to the change of the ideas, it did not belong to its own time. In comedy, the squires of the village, the Colins, the Babets, or else the intrigues of the drawing-rooms, which were no longer known, were played, as I have already remarked, before coarse and blood-thirsty men, themselves the destroyers of the manners whose picture was presented to them; in tragedy, a plebeian pit interested itself in the families of nobles and kings.

Two things kept literature at the date of the eighteenth century: the impiety which it derived from Voltaire and the Revolution, and the despotism with which Bonaparte struck it. The head of the State found a profit in those subordinate letters which he had put in barracks, which presented arms to him, which sallied forth at the command of "Turn out, the guard!" which marched in rank, and which went through their evolutions like soldiers. Any form of independence seemed a rebellion against his power; he would no more consent to a riot of words and ideas than he suffered insurrection. He suspended the Habeas Corpus for thought as well as for individual liberty. Let us also recognise that the public, weary of anarchy, was glad to submit again to the yoke of law and order.

[Sidenote: New forms in literature.]

The literature which expresses the new era did not commence to reign until forty or fifty years after the time of which it was the idiom. During that half-century, it was employed only by the opposition. It was Madame de Staël, it was Benjamin Constant[437], it was Lemercier[438], it was Bonald, it was myself, in short, who were the first to speak that language. The alteration in literature of which the nineteenth century boasts came to it from the Emigration and from exile: it was M. de Fontanes who brooded on those birds of a different species from himself, because, by going back to the seventeenth century, he had gained the strength of that fertile period and lost the barrenness of the eighteenth. One portion of the human intelligence, that which treats of transcendental matters, alone advanced with an even step with civilisation; unfortunately, the glory of knowledge was not without stain: the Laplaces[439], the Lagranges[440], the Monges[441], the Chaptals[442], the Berthollets[443], all the prodigies, once haughty democrats, became Napoleon's most obsequious servants. Let it be said to the honour of Letters: the new literature was free, science was servile; character did not correspond with genius, and they whose thought had sped to the uppermost sky were not able to raise their souls above the feet of Bonaparte: they pretended to have no need of God, that was why they needed a tyrant.

The Napoleonic classic was the genius of the nineteenth century dressed up in the periwig of Louis XIV., or curled as in the days of Louis XV. Bonaparte had ordained that the men of the Revolution should not appear at Court save in full dress, sword at side. One saw nothing of the France of the moment; it was not order, it was discipline. Nor could anything be more tiresome than that pale resuscitation of the literature of former days. That cold copy, that unproductive anachronism, disappeared when the new literature broke in noisily with the _Génie du Christianisme._ The death of the Duc d'Enghien had for me this advantage that, by causing me to step aside, it left me free in my solitude to follow my own inspiration, and prevented me from enlisting in the regular infantry of old Pindus: I owed my moral to my intellectual liberty.

In the last chapter of the _Génie du Christianisme_, I discuss what would have become of the world if the Faith had not been preached at the time of the invasion of the Barbarians; in another paragraph, I speak of an important work to be undertaken on the changes which Christianity introduced in the laws after the conversion of Constantine[444].

Supposing religious opinion to exist in its present form, if the _Génie du Christianisme_ were yet to be written, I would compose it quite differently: instead of recalling the benefits and the institutions of our religion in the past, I would show that Christianity is the thought of the future and of human liberty; that that redeeming and Messianic thought is the only basis of social equality; that it alone can establish the latter, because it places by the side of that equality the necessity of duty, the corrective and regulator of the democratic instinct. Legality is no sufficient restraint, because it is not permanent; it derives its strength from the law: now, the law is the work of men who pass away and differ. A law is not always obligatory; it can always be changed by another law: as opposed to that, morals are constant; they have their force within themselves, because they spring from the immutable order: they alone, therefore, can ensure permanency.

I would show that, wherever Christianity has prevailed, it has changed ideas, rectified notions of justice and injustice, substituted assertion for doubt, embraced the whole of humanity in its doctrines and precepts. I would try to conjecture the distance at which we still are from the total accomplishment of the Gospel, by calculating the number of evils that have been destroyed and of improvements that have been effected in the eighteen centuries which have elapsed on this side of the Cross. Christianity acts slowly, because it acts everywhere; it does not cling to the reform of any particular society, it works upon society in general; its philanthropy is extended to all the sons of Adam: that is what it expresses with a marvellous simplicity in its commonest petitions, in its daily prayers, when it says to the crowd in the temple:

"Let us pray for every suffering thing upon earth."

What religion has ever spoken in this way? The Word was not made flesh in the man of pleasure, it became incarnate in the man of sorrow, with a view to the enfranchisement of all, to an universal brotherhood and an infinite salvation.

If the _Génie du Christianisme_ had only given rise to such investigations, I should congratulate myself on having published it. It remains to be seen whether, at the time of the appearance of the book, a different _Génie du Christianisme_, raised on the new plan the outline of which I have barely indicated, would have obtained the same success. In 1803, when nothing was granted to the old religion, when it was the object of scorn, when none knew the first word of the question, would one have done well to speak of future liberty as descending from Calvary, at a time when people were still bruised from the excesses of the liberty of the passions? Would Bonaparte have suffered such a work to appear? It was perhaps useful to stimulate regrets, to interest the imagination in a cause so misjudged, to call attention to the despised object, to render it endearing before showing how serious it was, how mighty and how salutary.

Now, supposing that my name leaves some trace behind it, I shall owe this to the _Génie du Christianisme_: with no illusion as to the intrinsic value of the work, I admit that it possesses an accidental value; it came just at the right moment. For this reason it caused me to take my place in one of those historic periods which, mixing an individual with things, compel him to be remembered. If the influence of my work was not limited to the change which, in the past forty years, it has produced among the living generations; if it still served to resuscitate among late-comers a spark of the civilizing truths of the earth; if the slight symptom of life which one seems to perceive was there sustained in the generations to come, I should depart full of hope in the divine mercy. O reconciled Christian, do not forget me in thy prayers, when I am gone; my faults, perhaps, will stop me outside those gates where my charity cried on thy behalf:

"Be ye lifted up, O eternal gates[445]!"

[361] This book was begun at Dieppe in 1836 and finished in Paris in 1837. It was revised in December 1846.--T.

[362] Anne Geneviève de Bourbon-Condé, Duchesse de Longueville (1619-1679), sister of the great Condé, had intrigued against the Court, and played a great part in the war of the Fronde (1648-1652). The escape took place in 1650. Eventually, Mazarin defeating all her intrigues, the Duchesse de Longueville withdrew into retirement and a convent--T.

[363] Queen Anne of Austria (1602-1666), daughter of King Philip III. of Spain, and wife of Louis XIII. of France, whom she married in 1615. She gave birth to Louis XIV. in 1638, after twenty-three years of marriage, and became Regent of the Kingdom on the death of Louis XIII. in 1643.--T.

[364] Henri de La Tour d'Auvergne, Maréchal Vicomte de Turenne (1611-1688), joined the Fronde on Madame de Longueville's persuasion, but returned to his allegiance the next year (1651). He was born a Protestant, was converted by Bossuet, but abjured the Catholic Faith in 1678.--T.

[365] François Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1605 or 1613-1680). He played a small part in the Fronde through his infatuation for Madame de Longueville. The _Maxims_ were published in 1665, under the title of _Réflexions et sentences, ou Maximes morales._ He spent his old age in the society of Madame de La Fayette and Madame de Sévigné.--T.

[366] Marie Madeleine Comtesse de La Fayette (1634-1693), _née_ Pioche de La Vergne, author of a number of successful novels and a History of Henrietta of England.--T.

[367] Charlotte Marguerite Princesse de Condé (1594-1650), _née_ de Montmorency, and married in 1609 to Henry II. Prince de Condé, who removed her to Brussels out of the reach of King Henry IV. "That poor wretch," the Duchesse de Longueville, was her daughter.--T.

[368] Madame de Brienne was the wife of Henri Auguste Comte de Loménie de Brienne, author of the curious Memoirs.--T.

[369] BÉRANGER, _Le Vieux Caporal_, 49, 50:

"Who is sobbing and weeping down yonder?
Ah, 'tis the drummer's widow so sad."--T.

[370] BÉRANGER, _Le Vieux Caporal_, chorus:

"Conscripts, keep step; do not weep;
. . . Keep step, the step keep."
--T.

[371] Jules Cardinal Mazarin (1602-1661), Prime Minister to the Regent Anne of Austria, and eventual victor over the Fronde.--T.

[372] The Duc de La Rochefoucauld left _Mémoires sur la règne d'Anne d'Autriche_, in addition to the _Maximes._--T.

[373] Marie Caroline Ferdinande Louise Duchesse de Berry (1798-1870), daughter of King Ferdinand I. of Naples, and married to the Duc de Berry in 1816.--T.

[374] The Duchesse de Berry brought Dieppe into fashion in the later years of the Restoration; she visited it yearly, with her children, during the bathing season.--B.

[375] RABELAIS.--_Author's Note._

[376] Now the Place de la Concorde.--T.

[377] Migneret's book-shop was at No. 1186, Rue Jacob. The houses were at that time numbered by districts, not by streets.--B.

[378]

"Both through his virtues and his charms To be their father he deserved." --T.

[379] Étienne Gaspard Robertson (1762-1837), a professor of physics who perfected or improved the Archimedean mirror, the magic-lantern, and the parachute.--T.

[380] Now the Quai Malaquais.--T.

[381] The Theatines, or "Regular Clerks," a very strict congregation, founded in 1524 by St. Cajetan and Giovanni Pietro Caraffa, Bishop of Chieti, or Theate, from which the Order takes its name.--T.

[382] The Requisition was a sort of levy in mass decreed by the Committee of Public Safety on the 23rd of August 1793, and produced 1,400,000 men. It was the immediate forerunner of the Conscription.--T.

[383] The title of this letter was _Lettre à M. de Fontanes sur la deuxième édition de l'ouvrage de Mme. de Staël_ (_De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec la morale_, etc.), and it was signed, l'_Auteur du Génie du Christianisme._ It was printed in the _Mercure_ of 1 Nivoise Year IX. (22 December 1800), and now figures in all the editions of the _Génie du Christianisme._ It is one of Chateaubriand's most eloquent writings.--B.

[384] The letter appeared in the _Journal des Débats_ of 10 Germinal Year IX. (31 March 1801).--B.

[385] The volume is announced as "just out" in the _Journal des Débats_ of 27 Germinal (17 April). It was a small duodecimo, of XXIV. +210 pages, with the title _Atala, ou les Amours de deux sauvages dans le désert._--B.

[386] Marie Marguerite Marquise de Brinvilliers (1630-1676), _née_ Dreux d'Avray, a famous poisoner, who with her lover, Gaudin de Sainte-Croix, poisoned the marquise's father, sister, and two brothers. The crimes were discovered on the death of Sainte-Croix in 1670. The Brinvilliers took to flight, but was captured at Liège, brought back to Paris, and tried and executed in 1676.--T.

[387] A waxwork show established in the Palais-Royal and on the Boulevard du Temple in 1770 by a German who called himself Curtius. The establishment on the Boulevard du Temple remained open until the end of the reign of Louis-Philippe. The figures are still sometimes met with at village fairs.--B.

[388] Chaillot, which now forms part of Paris, was at that time a village at the gates, to the west, on the road to Versailles.--T.

[389] The _Nouvelle Héloïse_, Rousseau's most popular work, was published in 1759--T.

[390] Dr. Joseph Marie Joachim Vigaroux (1759-1829), a native of Montpellier, in Provence, and author of some medical works of no special value.--T.

[391] Marie Anne Elisa Bacciochi (1774-1820), Bonaparte's eldest sister, married Felix Pascal Prince Bacciochi in 1797. Her husband became Prince of Lucca and Piombino in 1805, Elisa exercising the real power; and in 1808 Napoleon made her Grand-duchess of Tuscany. She was dethroned in 1814, and assumed the title of Countess of Compignano. Prince Bacciochi died in Rome in 1841.--T.

[392] Lucien Bonaparte (1775-1840), Napoleon's second brother, created Prince of Canino in 1804, a prisoner in England from 1810 to 1814. He was twice married to ladies of middle-class family (_vide infra_), by whom he had eleven children.--T.

[393] François Joachim Cardinal de Pierres de Bernis (1715-1794), Anacreontic poet and religious controversialist. He had been Madame de Pompadour's lover, and owed his advancement to her. Voltaire called him Babet la Bouquetière, owing to the profusion of flowers of rhetoric which he employed in his verses.--T.

[394] Madame Lucien Bonaparte (_d._ 1800), _née_ Christine Éléonore Boyer, married Lucien in 1794, and was the sister of the woman who kept the inn at Saint-Maximin, where Lucien, then under age, was staying. The marriage took place without the consent of Madame Bonaparte, the mother, and was invalid by French law. Lucien's second wife, whom he married in 1802, was Marie Alexandrine Charlotte Louise Laurence de Bleschamp (1778-1855), the divorced wife of Jean François Hippolyte Jouberthon, a retired stockbroker.--B.

[395] Louis Gabriel Amboise, Vicomte de Bonald (1753-1840), a distinguished monarchical writer, created a peer of France in 1823, and a member of the French Academy.--T.

[396] Charles Lioult de Chênedollé (1769-1833), author of the _Génie de l'homme_ and other poems.--T.

[397] Pauline Marie Michelle Frédérique Ulrique de Montmorin-Saint-Hérem, Comtesse de Beaumont (1768-1803).--T.

[398] The Comte de Montmorin did not die on the scaffold, but was butchered at the Abbaye on the 2nd of September 1792. On the next day his cousin, Louis Victor Hippolyte Luce de Montmorin, had his throat cut at the Conciergerie, where he had been taken after his acquittal by the Criminal Tribunal on the 17th of August. Madame de Montmorin, Madame de Beaumont's mother, was guillotined on the 10th of May 1794; her second son was guillotined with her. Her daughter, wife of the Comte de La Luzerne, died on the 10th of July 1794, at the Archbishop's Palace, which had been turned into the prison hospital.--B.

[399] Madame Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1756-1842), _née_ Vigée, the famous French portrait painter. She left nearly 700 portraits, in addition to some historical pictures and a crowd of landscapes.--T.

[400] Matthieu Louis Molé (1781-1855), created a Count of the Empire in 1813, when he became Minister of Justice, and held successive ministries under the Restoration and Louis-Philippe. He was a moderate statesman of much dignity of character and of great distinction of person, manners, and speech. He was elected a member of the French Academy in 1840.--T.

[401] Étienne Duc Pasquier (1767-1862), appointed Prefect of Police in 1810. After holding various ministerial offices under the Restoration, he was made President of the Chamber of Peers by Louis-Philippe in 1830, Chancellor in 1837, and a duke in 1844. Elected to the French Academy in 1842.--T.

[402] Louise Marie Victorine Comtesse de Chastenay-Lanty (1771-1855) was never married. Her title of madame is due to the fact that she became a canoness at an early age (1785). Her observation to Chateaubriand on the subject of Joubert will be found repeated in almost precisely the same words in Madame de Chastenay's recently-published Memoirs (1896), vol. II. p. 82.--T.

[403] Louis Bénoît Picard (1769-1828), an actor, theatrical manager, and author of some eighty stage-plays of varying merit. He was received into the French Academy in 1807.--T.

[404] In the "small company" which, at the beginning of the century, met in the drawing-room of Madame de Beaumont, in the Rue Neuve-du-Luxembourg, or at Chateaubriand's, in his little apartment in the Hôtel Coislin, on the Place Louis XV., or again, in the summer, at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, under M. Joubert's roof, each one, according to an ancient fashion, had his nickname. Chateaubriand was called _le chat_, the "Cat," by way of abbreviation of his name, or possibly because of his illegible handwriting; Madame de Chateaubriand, who had claws, was the "She-cat." Chênedollé and Gueneau de Mussy, more melancholy than René, had received the names of the "Big" and the "Little Crow;" sometimes also Chateaubriand was called the "Illustrious Crow of the Cordilleras," by allusion to his travels in America. Fontanes was thickset, and had something athletic in his short stature. His friends jestingly compared him to the boar of Erymanthus, and called him the "Boar." Thin and slender, skimming over the earth which she was soon to leave, Madame de Beaumont had received the nickname of the "Swallow." Joubert, a lover of the woods, and at that time a great walker, was the "Stag;" while his wife, who was goodness and wit personified, but of a somewhat fierce humour, laughed when she was called the "She-wolf." Never was so intellectual a collection of "animals" seen before.--B.

[405] Madame Hocquart was a lady possessed of many charms of beauty and mind. She was the daughter of Pourrat and the sister of Madame Laurent Lecoulteux.--B.

[406] The Comtesse de Vintimille du Luc, _née_ de La Live de Jully, was niece to Madame Hocquart.--B.

[407] Marie Duchesse de Chevreuse (1600-1679), _née_ de Rohan-Montbazon, married in 1617 to Albert Duc de Luynes, Constable of France, and in 1622 to Claude de Lorraine, Duc de Chevreuse. The Duchesse de Chevreuse was a favourite of Anne of Austria, and is famed for her beauty and her wit.--T.

[408] Françoise d'Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon (1635-1719), the last mistress and eventual wife (1684-1685) of Louis XIV.--T.

[409] Madame Geoffrin (1699-1777), _née_ Rodet, head of the famous literary _salon_ in the Rue Saint-Honoré.--T.

[410] Marie Marquise du Deffant (1697-1780), _née_ de Vichy-Chamroud, a celebrated leader of eighteenth-century society in France. Her correspondence with Walpole, Voltaire, d'Alembert, etc., was published in 1809 to 1811.--T.

[411] Antoine Hugues Calixte de Montmorin (1772-1794), guillotined 10th May 1794.--B.

[412] Margaret of Valois (1552-1615), Queen of France and Navarre, daughter of King Henry II. of France. She married in 1672 the Prince of Béarn, afterwards King of Navarre and of France (Henry IV.), who imprisoned her at Usson, in Auvergne, and eventually divorced her (1599). She left Memoirs of the period from 1565 to 1587, first published in 1658.--T.

[413] Philip II. (Augustus), King of France (1165-1223).--T.

[414] Kings XII. 23.--T.

[415] Chateaubriand and Madame de Beaumont took up their abode at Savigny on the 22nd of May 1801.--B.

[416] Antoine Athanase Roux de Laborie (1769-1840), a protégé of Talleyrand's, who attained to some distinction as a politician. He had been compromised in a Royalist conspiracy with the two brothers Bertin, with whom he afterwards founded the _Journal des Débats._--T.

[417] Catherine Joséphine Rafin (1777-1835), known as Mademoiselle Duchesnois, made her first appearance in 1802 as Phèdre. She was an ugly woman, but a fine actress. She continued to play until 1830.--T.

[418] Paul Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1674); the allusion being to Rembrandt's famous distribution of light and shade.--T.

[419]

"Ne'er did Iphigenia in Aulis laid dead
Cause so many tears in all Greece to be shed
As, in the fine spectacle shown us to-day,
We have wept at the bidding of our Champmeslé."

Marie Desmare (1644-1698), known as Mademoiselle Champmeslé, made her first appearance in 1669, and created the title-rôle in Racine's _Iphigénie_ in 1674, under the poet's directions.--T.

[420] Anne Pierre Adrien Prince de Montmorency, later Duc de Laval (1767-1837), French Ambassador successively in Madrid (1814), Rome (1821), Vienna (1828), and London (1829). He became a member of the Chamber of Peers in 1820, in succession to his father, deceased, and resigned his peerage, together with his diplomatic functions, in 1830.--B.

[421] Étienne Antoine de Boulogne (1747-1825) was made Bishop of Troyes by Napoleon in 1808. In 1811, Bonaparte imprisoned him at Vincennes, until 1814, for protesting against the arrest of Pope Pius VII. He resumed his see under the Restoration, became Archbishop of Vienne in 1817, and was raised to the peerage in 1822.--T.

[422] Charles Pineau Duclos (1704-1772), admitted to the French Academy in 1747, and appointed its perpetual secretary in 1755, was author of the _Considérations sur le Mœurs_, etc., and took the leading part in the editing of the Dictionary.--T.

[423] Charles François Dupuis (1742-1809), member of the Institute and of the Academy of Inscriptions, and author of the _Origine de tous les cultes, ou la Religion universelle._--T.

[424] Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715-1771), one of the leaders of the French philosophy of the eighteenth century, and author of the book _De l'Esprit_ (1758), condemned by the Sorbonne, the Pope, and the Parliament of Paris, and burned by the public hangman in 1759.--T.

[425] Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), perpetual secretary of the Academy of Science, and a principal contributor to the Encyclopædia. The best known of his voluminous works is the _Esquisse des progrès de l'esprit humain._ He was arrested as a Girondin, and poisoned himself in prison (28 March 1794).--T.

[426] Christophe de Beaumont (1703-1781), successively Bishop of Bayonne, Archbishop of Vienne, and Archbishop of Paris (1746), the redoubtable adversary of both the Jansenists and Philosophers.--T.

[427] In Nos. 27, 28, and 29 of the Year X. (1802) of the _Décade philosophique, littéraire et politique._ The articles were subsequently collected into a pamphlet.--B.

[428] It was published on the 24th of Germinal Year X. (14 April 1802), by Migneret, 28, rue du Sépulcre, Faubourg Saint-Germain and Le Normant, 43, rue des Prêtres-Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, in five volumes 8vo (the fifth volume consisting entirely of notes and elucidations), with the title, _Génie du Christianisme, ou Beautés de la religion chrétienne_, by François Auguste Chateaubriand. The first page of each volume bore the following epigraph, suppressed in the later editions:

"Chose admirable! la religion chrétienne, qui ne semble avoir
d'objet que la félicité de l'autre vie, fait encore notre
bonheur dans celle-ci."

MONTESQUIEU, _Esprit des Lois_, XXIV., iii.--B.

[429] Baruch, or Benedict, Spinoza (1632-1677), the Portuguese-Jewish philosopher of Amsterdam. His system of pantheism is set forth in his _Ethica_ and other works.--T.

[430] Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) was born a Protestant, became a Catholic, and then a professional sceptic. His reputation rests upon his famous _Dictionnaire historique et critique_ (1697), with which he paved the way for Voltaire and his friends.--T.

[431] Claude Henri Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) was the founder of a sect, based upon more or less Socialistic principles, extinguished by ridicule, and finally dissolved by the Courts for its attacks upon public morals in 1833. Its author attempted suicide in 1823, but escaped with the loss of an eye.--T.

[432] Charles Fourier (1768-1837) was the author of the Phalansterian movement, based upon the Communistic principle.--T.

[433] The system maintaining the simple humanity of Christ, and denying His divinity.--T.

[434] Publius Licinius Gallienus, Roman Emperor (233-268), gave leave to Plotinus to build a town in Campania, to be recalled Platonopolis; but the project fell through.--T.

[435] Plotinus (_circa_ 205--_circa_ 270) opened his school of Neo-Platonic philosophy in Rome about the year 245.--T.

[436] Attila, King of the Huns (_d._ 453), when descending into Italy in 452 after his defeat in France, was stopped outside Rome by Pope St. Leo the Great, who persuaded him to return back after exacting a tribute from the Emperor Valentinian III.--T.

[437] Henri Benjamin Constant de Rebecque (1767-1830), the well-known publicist and Liberal politician.--T.

[438] Népomucène Louis Lemercier (1772-1840), a member of the French Academy, and author of a number of plays and poems all of a remarkable character. The finest is his tragedy of Agamemnon. He was one of the first to break through Boileau's rule of the three unities in dramatic literature.--T.

[439] Pierre Simon Marquis de Laplace (1749-1827), a profound geometrician and a _protégé_ of d'Alembert, was Minister of the Interior for six weeks after the 18 Brumaire, entered the Senate in 1799, and became President of that body. He was a member of the French Academy, and was created a marquis and a peer by Louis XVIII. on becoming its President (1817).--T.

[440] Joseph Louis Comte Lagrange (1736-1813), another famous mathematician. He was for twenty years President of the Berlin Academy (1766-1786). Napoleon made him a Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, a count, and a senator. He and Laplace may be said to have completed Newton's work.--T.

[441] Gaspard Monge, Comte de Péluse (1746-1818), a member of the Academy of Science, was for a month Minister of Marine under the Revolution (1792). During the wars of the Republic he devoted his knowledge to elaborating the national means of defense, was one of the founders of the Polytechnic School, accompanied Bonaparte to Egypt, and became President of the Cairo Institute. Napoleon gave him his title, created him a senator, and loaded him with honours, all of which he lost at the Restoration.--T.

[442] Jean Antoine Chaptal, Comte de Chanteloup (1756-1832), a distinguished chemist and statesman. He was placed at the head of the gunpowder factory at Grenelle in 1793, and there displayed an incredible activity. In 1798 he became one of the original members of the Institute, Minister of the Interior in 1800, a senator in 1805, and a peer of France under the Restoration (1819).--T.

[443] Claude Louis Comte Berthollet (1748-1822), another celebrated chemist, worked with Monge and Chaptal in the fabrication of gunpowder and the multiplication of the means of defense during the Republican wars. He also accompanied Bonaparte to Egypt, where he made many important researches. The Emperor made him a senator in 1805, and he received his peerage under the Restoration.--T.

[444] Constantine I. Emperor of the West (274-337), known as Constantine the Great, was converted, by a sign of the Cross in the sky, in the year 312.--T.

[445] Ps. XXIII. 7, 9.--T.