Chapter XIII: Book II: 446 (1)

The years 1802 and 1803--Country-houses--Madame de Custine--M. de Saint-Martin--Madame de Houdetot and Saint-Lambert--Journey to the south of France--M. de la Harpe--His death--Interview with Bonaparte--I am appointed First Secretary of Embassy in Rome--Journey from Paris to the Savoy Alps--From Mont Cenis to Rome--Milan to Rome--Cardinal Fesch's palace--My occupations--Madame de Beaumont's manuscripts--Letters from Madame de Caud--Madame de Beaumont's arrival in Rome--Letters from my sister--Letter from Madame de Krüdener--Death of Madame de Beaumont--Her funeral--Letters from M. de Chênedollé, M. de Fontanes, M. Necker, and Madame de Staël--The years 1803 and 1804--First idea of my Memoirs--I am appointed French Minister to the Valais--Departure from Rome--The year 1804--The Valais Republic--A visit to the Tuileries--The Hôtel de Montmorin--I hear the death cried of the Duc d'Enghien--I give in my resignation.

My life became quite disturbed so soon as it ceased to belong to myself. I had a crowd of acquaintances outside my customary circle. I was invited to the country-houses which were being restored. One did as best he could in those half-unfurnished, half-furnished manor-houses, in which old arm-chairs and new stood side by side. Nevertheless, some of these manor-houses had remained intact, such as the Marais[447], which had come into the possession of Madame de La Briche[448], an excellent woman, whom happiness could never succeed in shaking off. I remember that my immortality went to the Rue Saint-Dominique d'Enfer to take a seat for the Marais in a wretched hired coach, where I met Madame de Vintimille and Madame de Fezensac[449]. At Champlâtreux[450] M. Molé was having some small rooms on the second floor rebuilt. His father[451], who had been killed in the revolutionary style, was replaced, in a dilapidated drawing-room, by a picture in which Matthieu Molé was represented stopping a riot with his square cap: a picture which brought home the difference in the times. A splendid intersection of roads lined with lime-trees had been cut down; but one of the avenues still remained in all the magnificence of its old shade; new plantations have since been mixed with it: this is the age of poplars.

On returning from the Emigration, there was no exile so poor but laid out the winding walks of an English garden in the ten feet of land or court-yard which he had recovered: did I myself, in days past, not plant the Vallée-aux-Loups? Was it not there that I began these Memoirs? Did I not continue them in Montboissier Park, whose appearance, disfigured by neglect, its owners were then trying to revive? Did I not lengthen them in the park at Maintenon[452], quite recently restored, a new prey for the returning democracy? The castles burnt in 1789 ought to have warned what remained of the castles to remain hidden in their ruins: but the steeples of engulfed villages which pierce through the lava of Vesuvius do not prevent new steeples and new hamlets from being planted on the surface of that same lava.

[Sidenote: The Marquise de Custine.]

Among the bees adjusting their hive was the Marquise de Custine[453], the heiress of the long tresses of Margaret of Provence[454], wife of St. Louis, whose blood flowed in her veins. I was present when she took possession of Fervacques[455], and I had the honour of sleeping in the bed of the Bearnese, as I had of sleeping in Queen Christina's[456] bed at Combourg. The journey was no trifling matter: we had to take on board the carriage Astolphe de Custine[457], then a child, M. Berstoecher, his tutor, an old Alsatian nurse, who spoke only German, Jenny, the lady's maid, and Trim, a famous dog which ate up the provisions for the journey. Would one not have thought that this colony was going to Fervacques for good? And yet the furnishing of the house was not quite finished when the signal for removal was given. I saw her who faced the scaffold with such great courage[458], I saw her, whiter than one of the Fates, dressed in black, her figure made thin by death, her head adorned only with her silken tresses; I saw her smile to me with her pale lips and her beautiful teeth when she left Sécherons, near Geneva, to breathe her last at Bex, at the entrance to the Valais; I heard her coffin pass at night along the deserted streets of Lausanne to take up its eternal place at Fervacques: she was hastening to hide herself in a property which she had possessed for but a moment, like her life. I had read on the corner of a chimney-piece in the _château_ those bad rhymes attributed to the lover of Gabrielle:

La dame de Fervacques
Mérite de vives attacques[459].

The soldier-king had said as much to many others: passing declarations of men, soon effaced and descending from beauty to beauty down to Madame de Custine. Fervacques has been sold.

I also met the Duchesse de Châtillon[460], who adorned my valley at Aulnay during my absence in the Hundred Days. Mrs. Lindsay, whom I continued to see, introduced me to Julie Talma[461]. Madame de Clermont-Tonnerre invited me. We had a common grandmother, and she was good enough to call me cousin. The widow of the Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre[462], she was married again, later, to the Marquis de Talaru[463]. She had converted M. de La Harpe in prison. It was through her that I knew Neveu, the painter, who was enrolled among the number of her _cicisbei_: Neveu brought me into momentary connection with Saint-Martin[464].

M. de Saint-Martin thought he had discovered in _Atala_ a certain cant which was far from my thoughts, but which to his mind proved an affinity of doctrine between us. Neveu, in order to bring two brothers together, asked us to dinner in a top room which he occupied in the out-houses of the Palais-Bourbon. I reached the trysting-place at six o'clock; the heavenly philosopher was at his post. At seven o'clock, a discreet man-servant placed a tureen of soup upon the table, withdrew, and closed the door. We sat down and began to eat in silence. M. de Saint-Martin, who, for the rest, had a very fine manner, pronounced only a few oracular phrases. Neveu replied with exclamations, uttered with a painter's attitudes and grimaces. I said not a word.

After half an hour, the necromancer returned, removed the soup, and placed another dish on the table. The courses succeeded each other in this way, one by one, and at long intervals. M. de Saint-Martin, becoming gradually more excited, began to talk after the manner of an archangel; the more he talked, the more obscure did his language become. Neveu had hinted to me, squeezing my hand, that we should see extraordinary things, that we should hear sounds. For six mortal hours I listened and discovered nothing. At midnight, the man of visions suddenly rose to his feet. I thought that the spirit of darkness or the heavenly spirit was descending, that the bells were about to ring out through the mysterious passages; but M. de Saint-Martin declared that he was exhausted, and that we would resume the conversation another time: he put on his hat and went away. Unhappily for himself, he was stopped at the door and obliged to come back by an unexpected visit: nevertheless he was not long in disappearing. I never saw him again: he went off to die in the garden of M. Lenoir-Laroche[465], my neighbour at Aulnay.

[Sidenote: Swedenborgian nonsense.]

I am a refractory subject for Swedenborgianism; the Abbé Faria[466], at a dinner at Madame de Custine's, boasted of being able to kill a canary by magnetizing it; the canary was the stronger of the two, and the abbé, beside himself, was obliged to leave the party for fear of being killed by the canary. The sole presence of myself, the Christian, had rendered the tripod powerless.

Another time, the celebrated Gall[467], again at Madame de Custine's, dined next to me, without knowing me, mistook my facial angle, took me for a frog, and tried, when he knew who I was, to patch up his science in a way which made me blush for him. The shape of the head can assist one in distinguishing the sex in individuals, in indicating what belongs to the beast, to the animal passions; as to the intellectual faculties, phrenology will never know them. If one could collect the different skulls of the great men who have died since the commencement of the world, and were to place them before the eyes of the phrenologists without telling them to whom they belonged, they would not forward one brain to its right address: the examination of the "bumps" would produce the most comical mistakes.

I feel conscience-smitten: I spoke of M. de Saint-Martin a trifle scoffingly; I am sorry for it. That love of scoffing, which I am constantly thrusting back and which incessantly returns to me, is a cause of suffering to me; for I hate the satirical spirit as being the pettiest, commonest, and easiest of all: of course, I am bringing no charge against high comedy. M. de Saint-Martin was, when all is said and done, a man of great merit, of noble and independent character. His ideas, when they were explicable, were lofty and of a superior nature. Ought I not to sacrifice the two foregoing pages to the generous and much too flattering declaration of the author of the _Portrait de M. de Saint-Martin fait par lui-même[468]?_ I should not hesitate to suppress them, if what I say were able to do the smallest hurt to the serious reputation of M. de Saint-Martin and to the esteem which will always cling to his memory. I am glad, for the rest, to see that my recollection has not deceived me: M. de Saint-Martin may not have received quite the same impressions as myself at the dinner of which I speak; but you will see that I have not invented the scene, and that M. de Saint-Martin's account resembles mine at bottom:

"On the 27th of January 1803," he says, "I had an interview
with M. de Chateaubriand at a dinner arranged for the purpose
at M. Neveu's, in the Polytechnic School[469]. It would have
been a great advantage to me to have known him earlier: he
is the only irreproachable man of letters with whom I have
come into contact in my existence, and even then I enjoyed
his conversation only during the meal. For, immediately
afterwards, there came a visit which made him dumb for the
rest of the evening, and I do not know when the occasion will
return, because the king of this world takes great care to
put a spoke in the wheel of my cart. For the rest, of whom do
I stand in need except God?"

M. de Saint-Martin is worth a thousand of me: the dignity of his last sentence crushes my harmless banter with all the weight of a serious nature.

I had seen M. de Saint-Lambert[470] and Madame de Houdetot[471] at the Marais. Both represented the opinions and the freedom of days gone by, carefully packed up and preserved: it was the eighteenth century dying and married after its own fashion. One need but hold on to life for unlawfulness to become lawful. Men feel an infinite esteem for immorality because it has not ceased to exist and because time has adorned it with wrinkles. In truth, a virtuous husband and wife, who are not husband and wife, but who remain together out of consideration for their fellow-creatures, suffer a little from their venerable condition; they bore and detest each other cordially with all the ill-humour of old age; that is God's justice:

Malheur à qui le ciel accorde de longs jours[472]!

[Sidenote: Madame de Houdetot.]

It became difficult to understand certain pages of the _Confessions_ when one had seen the object of Rousseau's transports. Had Madame de Houdetot kept the letters which Jean Jacques wrote to her, and which he says were more brilliant than those in the _Nouvelle Héloïse?_ It is believed that she made a sacrifice of them to Saint-Lambert.

When nearly eighty years of age, Madame de Houdetot still cried in agreeable verses:

Et l'amour me console!
Rien ne pourra me consoler de lui[473].

She never went to bed without striking the floor three times with her slipper and saying, "Good-night, dear!" to the late author of the _Saisons._ That was what the philosophy of the eighteenth century amounted to in 1803.

The society of Madame de Houdetot, Diderot, Saint-Lambert, Rousseau, Grimm[474], and Madame d'Épinay rendered the Valley of Montmorency insupportable to me, and though, with regard to facts, I am very glad that a relic of the Voltairean times should have come under my notice, I do not regret those times. I have lately again seen the house in which Madame de Houdetot used to live at Sannois; it is now a mere empty shell, reduced to the four walls. A deserted hearth is always interesting; but what can we gather from hearth-stones by whose side beauty has never sat, nor the mother of a family, nor religion, and whose ashes, if they were not dispersed, would carry back the memory only to days which were capable of nought save destruction?

*

A piracy of the _Génie du Christianisme_ at Avignon took me to the south of France in the month of October 1802. I knew only my poor Brittany and the northern provinces through which I had passed when leaving my country. I was about to see the sun of Provence, the sky which was to give me a fore-taste of Italy and Greece, towards which my instinct and my muse alike urged me. I was in a happy mood; my reputation made life seem light to me: there are many dreams in the first intoxication of fame, and one's eyes at first become rapturously filled with the rising light; but should that light become extinguished, it leaves you in the dark: if it last, the habit of seeing it soon renders you unmindful of it.

Lyons pleased me extremely. I renewed my acquaintance with those works of the Romans which I had not seen since the day when I read some sheets of _Atala_ out of my knapsack in the amphitheatre at Trèves. Sailing-boats crossed from one bank of the Saône to the other, carrying a light at night; they were steered by women; a sailor lass of eighteen who took me on board, at each turn of the helm, adjusted a nosegay of flowers badly fastened to her hat. I was awakened in the morning by the sound of bells. The convents poised upon the slopes seemed to have recovered their solitary inmates. The son of M. Ballanche[475], the owner, after M. Migneret, of the _Génie du Christianisme_, had become my host: he has become my friend. Who does not know to-day the Christian philosopher whose writings glow with that placid clearness on which one loves to fix his eyes, as on the ray of a friendly star in the sky?

On the 27th of October the post-barge which was taking me to Avignon was obliged to stop at Tain, owing to a storm. I thought myself in America: the Rhone reminded me of my great wild rivers. I was put into a little river-side inn; a conscript was standing at the chimney-corner; he had his sack on his back, and was on his way to join the Army of Italy. I wrote with the bellows of the chimney for a table, opposite the landlady, who sat silently before me and showed her regard for the traveller by preventing the dog and cat from making a noise. What I was writing was an article which I had almost finished while going down the Rhone, and which related to M. de Bonald's _Législation primitive._ I foresaw what has since come to pass:

"French literature," I said, "is about to change its aspect;
with the Revolution new thoughts will come into being, new
views of men and things. It is easy to foresee that our
writers will become divided. Some will strive to leave the
beaten paths; others will try to copy the old models, while
nevertheless displaying them in a new light. It is very
probable that the latter will end by getting the better
of their adversaries, because, in leaning upon the great
traditions and the great men, they will have surer guides and
more fruitful documents."

The lines ending my travelling criticism are history; my mind was beginning to move with my century:

"The author of this article," I said, "cannot resist an
image drawn from the circumstances in which he finds himself
placed. At the very moment at which he is writing these
concluding words he is descending one of the greatest rivers
of France. On two opposite mountains stand two ruined towers;
at the top of those towers are fastened little bells,
which the mountaineers ring as we pass. This river, those
mountains, those sounds, those Gothic monuments, divert the
eyes of the spectators for a moment; but not one stops to go
whither the bell-tower calls him. Thus the men who to-day
preach morality and religion in vain give the signal from
the top of their ruins to those whom the torrent of the age
carries with it; the traveller is amazed at the grandeur of
the ruins, at the sweetness of the sounds that issue from
them, at the majesty of the memories that rise above them,
but he does not interrupt his journey, and at the first turn
in the stream all is forgotten[476]."

[Sidenote: Avignon.]

When I arrived at Avignon, on the eve of All Saints' Day, a child hawking books offered them to me: I then and there bought three different pirated editions of a little novel called _Atala_. By going from one bookseller to the other, I unearthed the pirate, to whom I was not known. He sold me the four volumes of the _Génie du Christianisme_ at the reasonable price of nine francs per copy, and praised both book and author highly to me. He lived in a fine house standing in its own grounds. I thought I had made a great discovery: after four-and-twenty hours, I grew weary of following fortune, and made terms for next to nothing with the robber.

I saw Madame de Janson, a little wizened, white-haired, determined woman, who struggled with the Rhone for her estate, exchanged musket-shots with the inhabitants of the banks, and defended herself against the years.

Avignon reminded me of my fellow-countryman. Du Guesclin was good for more than Bonaparte, because he rescued France from her conquerors. On reaching the city of the Popes with the adventurers whom his glory was leading to Spain, he said to the provost sent by the Pontiff to meet him:

*

"'Brother, do not deceive me: whence comes that treasure? Has the Pope taken it from his treasure?'

"And he answered no, and that the commons of Avignon had paid it, each his portion.

"'Then, provost,' said Bertrand, 'I promise you that we will not take a farthing of it as we live, and wish that this money got together be restored to them that paid it, and tell the Pope that he have it restored to them; for if I knew that any other were done, it would lie heavy on me; and had I crossed the sea, yet would I return thence.'

"Thus was Bertrand paid with the Pope's money, and his folk absolved again, and the said first absolution again confirmed."

*

In former days Avignon was considered the commencement of a Transalpine journey: it was the entrance to Italy. The geographies say:

"The Rhone belongs to the King, but the City of Avignon is watered by a branch of the river, the Sorgue, which belongs to the Pope."

Is the Pope very certain of long preserving the ownership of the Tiber? At Avignon they used to visit the Celestine[477] monastery. Good King René[478], who reduced the taxes when the tramontane wind blew, had painted a skeleton in one of the halls of the Celestine monastery: it was that of a woman of great beauty whom he had loved[479].

*

I looked for the Palace of the Popes and was shown the _ice-house_: the Revolution has done away with celebrated places; the memories of the past are obliged to shoot up through it and to reblossom over dead bones[480]. Alas, the groans of the victims die soon after them! They scarcely reach some echo that causes them to survive a little while after the voice from which they issued is extinguished for ever. But, while the cry of sorrow was expiring on the banks of the Rhone, one heard in the distance the sound of Petrarch's lute: a solitary _canzone_, escaping from the tomb, continued to charm Vaucluse[481] with an immortal melancholy and the love sorrows of olden time.

Alain Chartier[482] had come from Bayeux to be buried at Avignon in the Church of St. Anthony. He had written the _Belle Dame sans mercy_, and the kiss of Margaret of Scotland[483] made him live.

[Sidenote: Marseilles.]

From Avignon I went to Marseilles. What is left to be desired by a town to which Cicero addressed these words, of which the oratorical manner was imitated by Bossuet:

"Nor will I forget thee, O Massilia, who in virtue and dignity shouldst rank not only before Greece, but for aught I know before the whole world[484]!"

Tacitus, in the Life of Agricola, also praises Marseilles as combining the Greek urbanity with the economy of the Latin provinces. Daughter of Hellas, foundress of Gaul, celebrated by Cicero, captured by Cæsar, is not that sufficient glory united? I hastened to climb to _Notre Dame de la Garde_, to admire the sea which the smiling coasts of all the famous countries of antiquity line with their ruins. The sea, which does not move, is the source of mythology, even as the ocean, which rises twice a day, is the abyss to which Jehovah said:

"Thou shalt go no farther[485]."

In this same year, 1838, I climbed again to that summit; I saw again that sea which I now know so well, and at the end of which rose the Cross and the Tomb victorious. The mistral was blowing; I went into the fort built by Francis I., where no longer a veteran of the army of Egypt kept guard, but where stood a conscript destined for Algiers and lost under the gloomy vaults. Silence reigned in the restored chapel, while the wind moaned without. The hymn of the Breton sailors to Our Lady of Succour returned to my mind; you know when and how I have already quoted that plaint of my early ocean days:

Je mets ma confiance,
Vierge, en votre secours.

How many events it had needed to bring me back to the feet of the "Star of the Sea," to whom I had been vowed in my childhood! When I gazed at those votive offerings, those paintings of ship-wrecks hung all around me, it was as though I were reading the story of my life. Virgil places the Trojan hero beneath the Porches of Carthage, moved at the sight of a picture representing the burning of Troy, and the genius of the singer of Hamlet has made use of the soul of the singer of Dido.

I no longer recognised Marseilles at the foot of that rock once covered with a forest sung by Lucan: I could no longer lose my way in its long, wide, straight streets. The harbour was crowded with ships; thirty-six years ago I should with difficulty have found a "boat," steered by a descendant of Pytheas[486], to carry me to Cyprus like Joinville[487]: time rejuvenates cities, reversing its action upon men. I preferred my old Marseilles, with its memories of the Bérengers[488], the Duke of Anjou[489], King René, Guise and d'Épernon[490], with the monuments of Louis XIV. and the virtues of Belsunce[491]: the wrinkles on its brow pleased me. Perhaps, in regretting the years which it has lost, I but bewail those which I have found. Marseilles received me graciously, it is true; but the rival of Athens has grown too young for me.

If the _Memoirs_ of Alfieri[492] had been published in 1802 I should not have left Marseilles without visiting the rock from which the poet used to bathe. That rugged man once succeeded in attaining the charm of reverie and of expression:

"After the performance," he writes, "one of my amusements,
at Marseilles, was to bathe almost every evening in the
sea; I had found a very agreeable spot, on a neck of land
situated to the right of the harbour, where, seated on the
sand, with my back leaning against a rock, which prevented
me from being seen from the land side, I could behold
the sky and sea without interruption. Between those two
immensities, embellished by the rays of the setting sun, I
passed delicious hours dreaming of future delights; and there
I might unquestionably have become a poet, could I have given
any language whatever to my thoughts and feelings[493]."

[Sidenote: Jean Reboul.]

I returned through Languedoc and Gascony. At Nîmes, the Arena[494] and the Maison Carrée[495] had not yet been extricated: in the present year, 1838, I have seen them exhumed. I have also looked up Jean Reboul[496]. I had my doubts concerning those workmen poets, who are generally neither poets nor workmen: I owe M. Reboul a reparation. I found him in his bakery; I spoke to him without knowing whom I was addressing, failing to distinguish him from his fellow-worshippers of Ceres. He took my name and said he would go and see if the person for whom I was asking was there. He returned soon after and introduced himself: he took me into his shop; we wended our way through a labyrinth of flour-sacks, and clambered up a sort of ladder into a little closet resembling the upper room of a wind-mill. There we sat down and talked. I was as happy as in my garret in London, and happier than in my ministerial armchair in Paris. M. Reboul drew a manuscript from a chest of drawers, and read me some powerful verses from a poem which he is writing on the _Dernier Jour._ I congratulated him on his religion and his talent[497].

I had to take leave of my host, not without wishing him the gardens of Horace. I would have better loved to see him dream beside the Cascade at Tivoli than gather the wheat crushed by the wheel above that cascade. It is true that Sophocles was perhaps a blacksmith in Athens, and that Plautus, in Rome, was a harbinger of Reboul at Nîmes[498].

Between Nîmes and Montpellier, I passed, on my left, Aigues-Mortes, which I have visited in 1838. This town is still quite intact, with its towers and its surrounding rampart; it resembles a large ship stranded on the sands where St. Louis, time and the sea have left it. The Saint-king gave "usages" and statutes to the town of Aigues-Mortes:

"He wills that the prison be such that it serve not for the extermination of the person, but for its safe-keeping; that no information be granted for mere injurious words; that adultery itself be not enquired into, except in certain cases; and that he who violates a maid, _volente vel nolente_, shall not lose his life, nor any of his members, _sed alio modo puniatur._"

At Montpellier I again saw the sea, to which I would gladly have written in the words of the Most Christian King to the Swiss Confederation: "My trusty ally and well-beloved friend." Scaliger[499] would have liked to make Montpellier "the nest of his old age." It received its name from two virgin saints, _Mons puellarum_: hence the beauty of its women. Montpellier[500], falling before the Cardinal de Richelieu, witnessed the death of the aristocratic constitution of France.

On the road from Montpellier to Narbonne, I had a return to my native disposition, an attack of my dreaminess. I should have forgotten that attack if, like certain imaginary invalids, I had not entered the day of my crisis on a tiny bulletin, the only note of that time which I have found to aid my memory. This time it was an arid space covered with fox-gloves that made me forget the world: my eyes glided over that sea of purple stalks, and encountered at the distance only the blue chain of the Cantal Mountains. In nature, with the exception of the sky, the sea and the sun, it is not the immense objects that inspire me; they give me only a sensation of greatness, which flings my own littleness distraught and disconsolate at the feet of God. But a flower which I pick, a stream of water hiding among the rushes, a bird alternately flying and resting before my eyes lead me on towards all kinds of dreams. Is it not better to be moved for no definite reason than to go through life seeking blunted interests, chilled by their repetition and their number? All is worn out nowadays, even misfortune.

At Narbonne I reached the Canal des Deux-Mers[501]. Corneille, singing this work, adds his own greatness to that of Louis XIV.[502]

[Sidenote: Toulouse.]

At Toulouse, from the bridge over the Garonne, I could see the line of the Pyrenees; I was to cross it four years later: our horizons succeed one another like our days. They offered to show me, in a cave, the dried body of Fair Paule[503]: blessed are they that have not seen and have believed! Montmorency[504] had been beheaded in the courtyard of the town-hall: that head struck off must have been very important, since they still speak of it after so many other heads have been taken off? I do not know if, in the history of criminal proceedings, there exists an eye-witness' evidence which has more clearly established a man's identity:

"The fire and smoke which covered him," said Guitaut,
"prevented me from recognising him; but seeing a man who,
after breaking six of our ranks, was still killing soldiers
in the seventh, I thought that it could be only M. de
Montmorency; I knew it for certain when I saw him thrown to
the ground under his dead horse."

The deserted Church of St. Sernin impressed me by its architecture. This church is connected with the history of the Albigenses, which the poem so well translated by M. Fauriel[505] revives:

"The gallant young count, his father's heir and the light of
his eyes, with the cross and the sword, enter together by
one of the doors. Not a single young girl remains in chamber
or on landing; the inhabitants of the town, great and small,
all come out to gaze upon the count as on a fair and blooming
rose."

It is to the time of Simon de Montfort[506] that the loss of the _langue d'Oc_ dates back:

"Simon, seeing himself lord of so many lands, bestowed them among the gentle men, both French and others, _atque loci leges dedimus_," say the eight signatory archbishops and bishops.

I should have liked to have had time to inquire at Toulouse after one of my great admirations, Cujas[507], writing, flat on the ground, with his books spread around him. I do not know whether the memory has been preserved of his twice-married daughter Suzanne. Constancy had no great attractions for Suzanne, she set it at naught; but she kept one of her husbands alive with the same infidelities which caused the other's death. Cujas was protected by the daughter of Francis I.[508], Pibrac by the daughter of Henry II.[509]: two Margarets of the blood of the Valois, the true blood of the Muses. Pibrac[510] is famous through his quatrains, which have been translated into Persian. I was perhaps lodged in the house of the president his father. That "good Lord of Pibrac," according to Montaigne, was "a man of so quaint and rare wit, of so sound judgment, and of so mild and affable behaviour." His mind was "so dissonant and different in proportion from our deplorable corruption, and so farre from agreeing with our tumultuous stormes[511]." And Pibrac wrote the apology of St. Bartholomew's Night!

I hurried on without being able to stop: fate threw me back to 1838 to admire in detail the city of Raimond de Saint-Gilles[512], and to speak of the new acquaintances I made there: M. de Lavergne[513], a man of talent, wit, and sense; Mademoiselle Honorine Gasc[514], the Malibran of the future. The latter reminded me, in my new quality of a follower of Clémence Isaure[515], of those verses which Chapelle and Bachaumont[516] wrote in the isle of Ambijoux, near Toulouse:

Hélas! que l'on serait heureux
Dans ce beau lieu digne d'envie,
Si, toujours aimé de Sylvie,
On pouvait, toujours amoureux,
Avec elle passer sa vie[517]!

Let Mademoiselle Honorine be on her guard against her beautiful voice! Talents are "gold of Toulouse:" they bring misfortune.

[Sidenote: Bordeaux.]

Bordeaux was as yet scarce rid of its scaffolds and its dastardly Girondins. All the towns which I saw had the appearance of beautiful women lately risen from a violent malady, and hardly commencing to breathe again. In Bordeaux, Louis XIV. had caused the Palais des Tutelles to be razed, in order to build the Chateau Trompette[518]; Spon[519] and the lovers of antiquity groaned:

Pourquoi démolit-on ces colonnes des dieux, Ouvrage des Césars, monument tutélaire[520]?

There were but a few remains of the Arena to be seen. Were we to offer a token of regret to all that falls, life would be too short for our tears.

I took ship for Blaye. I saw the castle, then unknown, to which in 1833 I addressed these words:

"O captive of Blaye[521], I am sorrow-stricken to be able to do nothing to forward your present destinies!"

I travelled towards Rochefort, and went on to Nantes through the Vendée.

This district bore the mutilations and scars due to its valour, like an old warrior. Bones bleached by time and ruins blackened by fire met the gaze. When the Vendeans were on the point of attacking the enemy, they knelt down to receive the blessing of a priest. Prayers uttered under arms were not reckoned as weakness, for the Vendean who raised his sword towards Heaven asked for victory, not for life.

The diligence in which I found myself interred was full of travellers who related the rapes and murders with which they had glorified their lives in the wars of the Vendée. My heart throbbed when, after crossing the Loire at Nantes, we entered Brittany. I passed by the College of Rennes, which witnessed the last years of my childhood. I was able to remain for only four-and-twenty hours with my wife and sisters, and I returned to Paris.

*

I arrived in time for the death of a man who belonged to those superior names of the second rank in the eighteenth century which, forming a solid rear-line in society, gave it a certain fulness and consistency.

I had known M. de La Harpe in 1789: like Flins, he had become smitten with a great passion for my sister, Madame la Comtesse de Farcy. He used to come up with three large volumes of his works under his little arms, quite astounded to find that his glory did not triumph over the most rebellious hearts. Loud-voiced, and eager in manner, he thundered against every abuse, ordered an omelette to be made for him at the ministers' houses when the dinner had not been to his taste, eating with his fingers, dragging his cuffs in the dishes, talking philosophical scurrilities to the greatest lords, who doted on his impertinences; but, when all was said, his was an upright and enlightened mind, impartial amid all its passions, with a quick sense for talent, capable of admiration, of shedding tears over fine poetry or a fine action, and possessing a foundation fit to support repentance. He was not wanting at the end; I saw him die the death of a brave Christian, with his taste enlarged by religion, and retaining no pride except as against impiety, no hatred except that of "Revolutionary language[522]."

[Sidenote: Death of M. de La Harpe.]

On my return from the Emigration, religion had disposed M. de La Harpe in favour of my works: the illness which attacked him did not prevent him from working himself; he read me passages from a poem which he was writing on the Revolution[523]; in it occurred notably some pithy lines directed against the crimes of the age and the "worthy men" who had permitted them:

Mais s'ils ont tout osé, vous avez tout permis:
Plus l'oppresseur est vil, plus l'esclave est infâme[524].

Forgetting that he was ill, dressed in a wadded spencer, with a white cotton night-cap on his head, he recited with all his might; then, dropping his copy-book, he said in a voice that hardly reached the ear:

"I can't go on; I feel a grip of iron in my side."

And if, unfortunately, a maid-servant should happen to pass by, he would resume his stentorian voice and roar:

"Go away! Shut the door!"

I said to him one day:

"You will live for the good of religion."

"Ah, yes," he replied, "it would certainly be for God; but He does not wish it, and I shall die within these few days."

Falling back into his chair, and drawing his night-cap over his ears, he expiated his former pride by his present resignation and humility.

At a dinner at Migneret's, I had heard him speak of himself with the greatest modesty, declaring that he had done nothing out of the common, but that he believed that art and the language had not degenerated in his hands.

M. de La Harpe quitted this life on the 11th of February 1803; the author of the _Saisons_ died almost at the same time, fortified with all the consolations of philosophy, as M. de La Harpe died fortified with all the consolations of religion: the one was visited by men, the other by God.

M. de La Harpe was buried on the 12th of February 1803 in the cemetery at the Barrière de Vaugirard. The coffin was placed beside the grave on the little mound of earth that was soon to cover it, and M. de Fontanes delivered a funeral oration. It was a dismal scene: whirling snow-flakes fell from the clouds and covered the pall with white, while the wind blew it upwards, to allow the last words of friendship to reach the ears of death. The cemetery has been destroyed and M. de La Harpe disinterred: there was hardly anything left of his poor ashes. M. de La Harpe had been married under the Directory, and had not been happy with his beautiful wife; she had been seized with loathing at the sight of him, and had persisted in refusing him any of his rights[525].

For the rest, M. de La Harpe, like everything else, had diminished by the side of the Revolution, which was ever growing in dimensions: reputations hastily shrank away before the representative of that Revolution, even as dangers lost their power before him.

*

While we were engrossed with vulgar life and death, the gigantic progress of the world was being realized; the Man of the Time was taking the head of the table at the banquet of the human race. Amid vast commotions, precursors of the universal displacement, I had landed at Calais to bear my part in the general action, within the limits set to each soldier. I arrived, in the first year of the century, at the camp where Bonaparte was beating the destinies to arms: soon after, he became First Consul for life.

After the adoption of the Concordat by the Legislative Body in 1802, Lucien, then Minister of the Interior, gave an entertainment to his brother; I was invited, as having rallied the Christian forces and led them back to the charge. I was in the gallery when Napoleon entered: he struck me pleasantly; I had never seen him except at a distance. His smile was beautiful and caressing; his eyes were admirable, owing especially to the manner in which they were placed beneath his forehead and framed in his eyebrows. There was as yet no charlatanism in his glance, nothing theatrical or affected. The _Génie du Christianisme_, which was then making a great stir, had worked upon Napoleon. A prodigious imagination animated that so frigid politician: he would not have been what he was, if the Muse had not been there; reason but carried out the poet's ideas. All those men who lead the large life are always a compound of two natures, for they must be capable of inspiration and of action: one conceives the plan, the other accomplishes it.

[Sidenote: The First Consul.]

Bonaparte saw me and recognised me, I know not by what. When he turned in my direction no one knew whom he was making for; the ranks opened successively; each hoped that the Consul would stop at him; he appeared to feel a certain impatience with those misconceptions. I hid behind my neighbours; suddenly Bonaparte raised his voice and said:

"Monsieur de Chateaubriand!"

I then remained standing out alone, for the crowd withdrew, and soon formed again in a circle around the speakers. Bonaparte addressed me with simplicity: without paying me any compliments, without idle questions, without preamble, he spoke to me at once of Egypt and the Arabs, as though I had been one of his intimates, and as though he were only continuing a conversation already commenced between us.

"I was always much impressed," he said, "when I saw the sheiks fall on their knees in the middle of the desert, turn towards the East, and touch the sand with their foreheads. What was that unknown thing which they worshipped in the East?"

Bonaparte interrupted himself and broached another idea without any transition:

"Christianity! Have not the ideologists tried to make a system of astronomy of it? And if that should be so, do they think they can persuade me that Christianity is small? If Christianity is the allegory of the movement of the spheres, the geometry of the stars, the free-thinkers may say what they please: in spite of themselves, they have still left tolerable greatness to 'the infamous thing.'"

Incontinently Bonaparte moved away. As with Job, in my night "a spirit passed before me, the hair of my flesh stood up. There stood one whose countenance I knew not ... and I heard the voice as it were of a gentle wind[526]."

My days have been but a series of visions; Hell and Heaven have continually opened up beneath my feet or over my head, without giving me time to explore their darkness or their light. One single time, on the shore of the two worlds, I met the man of the last and the man of the new century: Washington and Napoleon. I conversed for a moment with each; both sent me back to solitude: the first through a kindly wish, the second through a crime.

I observed that, when going round among the crowd, Bonaparte cast deeper glances on me than those which he had fixed upon me while talking to me. I too followed him with my eyes:

Chi è quel grande che non par che curi
L'incendio[527]?

In consequence of this interview, Bonaparte thought of me for Rome: he had decided at a glance where and how I could be of use to him. It mattered little to him that I had no experience of public affairs, that I was entirely unacquainted with practical diplomacy; he believed that a given mind always understands and has no need of apprenticeship. He was a great discoverer of men: but he wished them to possess talent only for him, and even then on condition that that talent was not much discussed; jealous of every renown, he regarded it as an usurpation over his own: there was to be none save Napoleon in the universe.

Fontanes and Madame Bacciochi spoke to me of the pleasure the Consul had found in "my conversation:" I had not opened my mouth; that meant that Bonaparte was pleased with himself. They urged me to avail myself of fortune. The idea of being anything had never occurred to me; I flatly refused. Then they persuaded an authority to speak whom it was difficult for me to resist.

The Abbé Émery[528], the superior of the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice, came and entreated me, in the name of the clergy, to accept, for the good of religion, the post of first secretary to the embassy which Bonaparte had reserved for his uncle, Cardinal Fesch[529]. He gave me to understand that the cardinal's intelligence was not very remarkable and that I should soon find myself the master of affairs. A singular chance had brought me into connection with the Abbé Émery: I had crossed to the United States with the Abbé Nagat and several seminarists, as you know. That remembrance of my obscurity, my youth, my life as a traveller, which reflected itself in my public life, seized hold of my imagination and my heart. The Abbé Émery, who was esteemed by Bonaparte, was subtle by nature and by reason of his cloth and of the Revolution; but he used that threefold subtlety only on behalf of his true merit; ambitious only to do good, he acted only in the most prosperous circle of a seminary. Circumspect as he was in his actions and words, it would have been superfluous to do violence to the Abbé Émery, for he always held his life at your disposal, in exchange for his will, which he never surrendered: his strength lay in waiting for you, seated on his tomb.

[Sidenote: I am sent to Rome.]

He failed in his first attempt; he returned to the charge, and his patience ended by persuading me. I accepted the place which he had been commissioned to offer me, without being in the smallest degree convinced of my usefulness in the post to which I was called: I am no good at all in the second rank. I might perhaps have again withdrawn, if the thought of Madame de Beaumont had not come to put an end to my scruples. M. de Montmorin's daughter was dying; she had been told that the climate of Italy would be favourable to her; if I went to Rome she would make up her mind to cross the Alps. I sacrificed myself to the hope of saving her. Madame de Chateaubriand prepared to come to join me; M. Joubert spoke of accompanying her; and Madame de Beaumont set out for Mont-Dore[530], in order afterwards to complete her cure on the banks of the Tiber.

M. de Talleyrand[531] occupied the Ministry for Foreign Affairs; he sent me my nomination. I dined with him: he has always maintained in my mind the place which he occupied at our first meeting. For the rest, his fine manners made a contrast with those of the ruffians of his environment; his profligacy assumed an astounding importance: in the eyes of a brutal gang, moral corruption seemed genius, frivolity profundity. The Revolution was over-modest; it did not sufficiently appreciate its superiority: it is not the same thing to stand above crimes or beneath them.

I saw the ecclesiastics attached to the cardinal's person; I remarked the gay Abbé de Bonnevie[532]: formerly, in his capacity as chaplain to the Army of the Princes, he had taken part in the retreat from Verdun; he had also been grand-vicar to the Bishop of Châlons, M. de Clermont-Tonnerre[533], who set out behind us in order to claim a pension from the Holy See, in his quality as a "Chiaramonte[534]." So soon as my preparations were completed I started: I was to precede Napoleon's uncle to Rome.

*

In Lyons I again saw my friend M. Ballanche. I witnessed the revival of Corpus Christi: I felt as though I had in some way contributed to those posies of flowers, to that joy of Heaven which I had called back to earth.

I continued my journey, finding a cordial welcome wherever I went: my name was linked with the restoration of the altars. The keenest pleasure which I have experienced has been to feel myself honoured in France and abroad with marks of serious interest. It has sometimes happened that, while resting in a village inn, I saw a father and mother enter with their son: they told me they were bringing their child to thank me. Was it self-conceit that then gave me the pleasure of which I speak? How did it affect my vanity that lowly and honest people should give me a token of their satisfaction on the high-road, in a place where none overheard them? What did touch me, at least I venture to think so, was that I had done some little good, consoled a few distressed, caused the hope to revive in a mother's yearnings of bringing up a Christian son: that is to say, a submissive son, respectful, attached to his parents. Should I have tasted this pure joy if I had written a book which morals or religion would have had cause to bewail?

[Sidenote: My journey to Rome.]

The road is somewhat dreary on leaving Lyons: after leaving the Tour-du-Pin, as far as Pont-de-Beauvoisin, it is shady and wooded. At Chambéry, where Bayard's chivalrous soul showed itself so fine, a man was welcomed by a woman, and by way of payment for the hospitality received at her hands, thought himself philosophically obliged to dishonour her. That is the danger of literature: the desire to make a stir gets the better of generous sentiment; if Rousseau had never become a celebrated writer, he would have buried in the valleys of Savoy the frailties of the woman who had fed him; he would have sacrificed himself to the very faults of his friend; he would have relieved her in her old age, instead of contenting himself with giving her a snuff-box and running away. Ah, may the voice of friendship betrayed never be raised against our tombstones!

After passing Chambéry, one comes to the stream of the Isère. On every hand, in the valleys, one meets with road-side crosses and lady-statues fixed in the trunks of the pine-trees. The little churches, surrounded with trees, form a touching contrast with the great mountains. When the winter whirlwinds come sweeping down from those ice-laden summits, the Savoyard takes shelter in his rustic temple and prays.

The valleys which one enters above Montmélian are hemmed by mountains of different shapes, sometimes half bare, sometimes clad in forests. Aiguebelle seems to shut in the Alps; but, on turning round an isolated rock, fallen in the middle of the road, you catch sight of new valleys attached to the course of the Arc. The mountains on either side stand erect; their flanks become perpendicular; their barren summits begin to display a few glaciers: torrents come rushing down to swell the Arc, which runs madly along. Amid this tumult of the waters, one remarks a light cascade which falls with infinite grace beneath a curtain of willows.

After crossing Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne I arrived towards sunset at Saint-Michel, and found no horses. I was obliged to stop, and went for a stroll outside the village. The air became transparent on the ridge of the mountains; their denticulation was outlined with extraordinary clearness, while a great darkness, issuing from their feet, rose towards their crests. The note of the nightingale was heard below, the cry of the eagle above; the blossoming lote-tree stood in the valley, the white snow on the mountain. A castle, popularly believed to be the work of the Carthaginians, showed upon the sheer-cut redan. There, incorporated with the rock, had stood one man's hatred, overcoming all obstacles. The vengeance of the human race weighed down upon a free people, which was able to build its greatness only with the slavery and blood of the rest of the world.

I left at day-break and arrived at about two o'clock in the afternoon at Lans-le-Bourg, at the foot of Mont Cenis. On entering the village, I saw a peasant who held an eaglet by the feet; a pitiless band struck the young king, insulted his youthful weakness and fallen majesty; the father and mother of the noble orphan had been killed. They offered to sell him to me: he died of the ill-treatment to which he had been subjected before I was able to deliver him. I then remembered poor little Louis XVII.; to-day I think of Henry V.: what swiftness of downfall and misfortune!

Here one begins to ascend Mont Cenis and leave the little River Arc, which brings you to the foot of the mountain. On the other side of Mont Cenis, the Dora opens the entrance of Italy to you. Rivers are not only "moving high-roads," as Pascal calls them, but they also mark the road for men.

Standing for the first time on the summit of the Alps, I was seized with a strange emotion. I was like the lark which had just crossed the frozen upland, and which, after singing its little burden of the plains, had alighted amid the snows, instead of dropping down upon the harvest. The stanzas with which those mountains inspired me in 1822 reflect with some accuracy my feeling on the same spot in 1803:

Alpes, vous n'avez point subi mes destinées!
Le temps ne vous peut rien;
Vos fronts légèrement ont porté les années
Qui pèsent sur le mien.