Chapter II: Book VII: 1 (1)

I go to see my mother--Saint-Malo--Progress of the Revolution--My marriage--Paris--Old acquaintances and new--The Abbé Barthélemy--Saint-Ange--The theatres--Changes in Paris--The Club des Cordeliers--Marat--Danton--Camille Desmoulins--Fabre d'Églantine--M. de Malesherbes' opinion on the emigration--I play and lose--Adventure of the hackney-coach--Madame Roland--Barère at the Hermitage--Second Federation of the 14th of July--Preparations for the emigration--I emigrate with my brother--Adventure of Saint-Louis--We cross the frontier--Brussels--Dinner at the Baron de Breteuil's--Rivarol--Departure for the army of the Princes--The journey--I meet the Prussian army--I arrive at Trèves--The Army of the Princes--A Roman amphitheatre--_Atala_--The shirts of Henry IV.--A soldier's life--Last appearance of old military France--Commencement of the siege of Thionville--The Chevalier de La Baronnais--Continuation of the siege--A contrast--Saints in the woods--Battle of Bouvines--A patrol--An unexpected encounter--Effects of a cannon-ball and a shell--Market in camp--Night amid piled arms--The Dutch dog--A recollection of the _Martyrs_--The nature of my company--With the outposts--Eudora--Ulysses--Passage of the Moselle--A fight--Libba, the deaf and dumb girl--Assault of Thionville--The siege is raised--We enter Verdun--The Prussian evil--The retreat--Smallpox--The Ardennes--The Prince de Ligne's baggage-wagons--The women of Namur--I meet my brother at Brussels--Our last farewell--Ostend--I take passage for Jersey--I land at Guernsey--The pilot's wife--Jersey--My uncle de Bedée and his family--Description of the island--The Duc de Berry--Lost friends and relations--The misfortune of growing old--I go to England--Last meeting with Gesril.

I wrote to my brother in Paris giving him particulars of my crossing, telling him the reasons for my return, and asking him to lend me the money wherewith to pay my passage. My brother answered that he had forwarded my letter to my mother. Madame de Chateaubriand did not keep me waiting: she enabled me to clear my debt and to leave the Havre. She told me that Lucile was with her, also my uncle de Bedée and his family. This intelligence persuaded me to go to Saint-Malo, so that I might consult my uncle on the question of my proposed emigration.

Revolutions are like rivers: they grow wider in their course; I found that which I had left in France enormously swollen and overflowing its banks: I had left it with Mirabeau under the "Constituent," I found it with Danton[2] under the "Legislative[3]" Assembly.

The Treaty of Pilnitz, of the 27th of August 1791, had become known in Paris. On the 14th of December 1791, while I was being tossed by the storms, the King announced that he had written to the Princes of the Germanic Body, and in particular to the Elector of Trèves, touching the German armaments. The brothers of Louis XVI., the Prince de Condé, M. de Calonne, the Vicomte de Mirabeau, and M. de Laqueville[4] were almost immediately impeached. As early as the 9th of November, a previous decree had been hurled against the other Emigrants: it was to enter these ranks, already proscribed, that I was hastening; others might perhaps have retreated, but the threats of the stronger have always made me take the side of the weaker: the pride of victory is unendurable to me.

On my way from the Havre to Saint-Malo I was able to observe the divisions and misfortunes of France: the country-seats were burnt and abandoned; the owners, to whom distaffs had been sent, had left; the women were living sheltered in the towns. The hamlets and small market-towns groaned under the tyranny of clubs affiliated to the central Club des Cordeliers, since amalgamated with the Jacobins. The antagonist of the latter, the Société Monarchique, or des Feuillants, no longer existed; the vulgar nickname of _sans-culotte_ had become popular; the King was never spoken of save as "Monsieur Veto" or "Monsieur Capet."

[Sidenote: My marriage.]

I was tenderly welcomed by my mother and my family, although they deplored the inopportune moment which I had selected for my return. My uncle, the Comte de Bedée, was preparing to go to Jersey with his wife, his son, and his daughters. It was a question of finding money to enable me to join the Princes. My American journey had made a breach in my fortune; my property was reduced to almost nothing, where my younger son's portion was concerned, through the suppression of the feudal rights; and the benefices that were to accrue to me by virtue of my affiliation to the Order of Malta had fallen, with the remainder of the goods of the clergy, into the hands of the nation. This conjuncture of circumstances decided the most serious step in my life: my family married me in order to procure me the means of going to get killed in support of a cause which I did not love.

There was living in retirement, at Saint-Malo, M. de Lavigne[5], a knight of Saint-Louis, and formerly Commandant of Lorient. The Comte d'Artois had stayed with him there when he visited Brittany: the Prince was charmed with his host, and promised to grant him any favour he might at any time demand. M. de Lavigne had two sons: one of them[6] married Mademoiselle de La Placelière. Two daughters, born of this marriage, were left orphans on both sides at a tender age. The elder married the Comte du Plessix-Parscau[7], a captain in the Navy, the son and grandson of admirals, himself to-day a rear-admiral, a red ribbon[8] and commander of the corps of naval cadets at Brest; the younger[9] was living with her grandfather, and was seventeen years of age when I arrived at Saint-Malo on my return from America. She was white, delicate, slender and very pretty: she wore her beautiful fair hair, which curled naturally, hanging low like a child's. Her fortune was valued at five or six hundred thousand francs.

My sisters took it into their heads to make me marry Mademoiselle de Lavigne, who had become greatly attached to Lucile. The affair was managed without my knowledge. I had seen Mademoiselle de Lavigne three or four times at most; I recognised her at a distance on the "Furrow" by her pink pelisse, her white gown and her fair hair blown out by the wind, when I was on the beach abandoning myself to the caresses of my old mistress, the sea. I felt myself to possess none of the good qualities of a husband. All my illusions were alive, nothing was spent within me; the very energy of my existence had doubled through my travels. I was racked by the muse. Lucile liked Mademoiselle de Lavigne, and saw the independence of my fortune in this marriage:

"Have your way!" said I.

In me the public man is inflexible; the private man is at the mercy of whomsoever wishes to seize hold of him, and, to save myself an hour's wrangling, I would become a slave for a century.

The consent of the grandfather, the paternal uncle and the principal relatives was easily obtained: there remained to be overcome the objections of a maternal uncle, M. de Vauvert[10], a great democrat, who opposed the marriage of his niece with an aristocrat like myself, who was not one at all. We thought ourselves able to do without him, but my pious mother insisted that the religious marriage should be performed by a "non-juror" priest, which could only be done in secret. M. de Vauvert knew this, and let loose the law upon us, under pretext of rape and breach of the laws, and pleading the imaginary state of second childhood into which the grandfather, M. de Lavigne, had fallen. Mademoiselle de Lavigne, who had become Madame de Chateaubriand, without my having held any communication with her, was taken away in the name of the law and put into the Convent of Victory at Saint-Malo, pending the decision of the courts.

There was no rape, breach of the laws, adventure, nor love in the whole matter; the wedding had only the bad side of a novel: truth. The case was tried and the court pronounced the marriage civilly valid. The members of both families being in agreement, M. de Vauvert abandoned the proceedings. The constitutional clergyman, lavishly feed, withdrew his protest against the first nuptial benediction, and Madame de Chateaubriand was released from the convent, where Lucile had imprisoned herself with her.

It was a new acquaintance that I had to make, and it brought me all that I could wish. I doubt whether a finer intelligence than my wife's has ever existed: she guesses the thought and the word about to spring to the brow or the lips of the person with whom she converses; to deceive her is impossible. Madame de Chateaubriand has an original and cultured mind, writes most cleverly, tells a story to perfection, and admires me without ever having read two lines of my works: she would dread to find ideas in them that differ from hers, or to discover that people are not sufficiently enthusiastic over my merit. Although a passionate judge, she is well-informed and a good judge.

Madame de Chateaubriand's defects, if she have any, proceed from the superabundance of her good qualities; my own very serious defects result from the sterility of mine. It is easy to possess resignation, patience, a general obligingness, equanimity of temper, when one interests himself in nothing, when one is wearied by everything, when one replies to good and bad fortune alike with a desperate and despairing "What does it matter?"

Madame de Chateaubriand is better than I, although less accessible in her intercourse with others. Have I been irreproachable in my relations with her? Have I offered my companion all the sentiments which she deserved and which were hers by right? Has she ever complained? What happiness has she tasted in reward for her consistent affection? She has shared my adversities; she has been plunged into the prisons of the Terror, the persecutions of the Empire, the disgraces of the Restoration; she has not known the joys of maternity to counterbalance her sufferings. Deprived of children, which she might perhaps have had in another union, and which she would have loved madly; having none of the honours and affections which surround the mother of a family and console a woman for the loss of her prime, she has travelled, sterile and solitary, towards old age. Often separated from me, disliking literature, to her the pride of bearing my name makes no amends. Timid and trembling for me alone, she is deprived, through her ever-renewed anxiety, of sleep and of the time to cure her ills: I am her chronic infirmity and the cause of her relapses. Can I compare an occasional impatience which she has shown me with the cares which I have caused her? Can I set my good qualities, such as they are, against her virtues, which support the poor, which have established the Infirmerie de Marie-Thérèse in the face of all obstacles? What are my labours beside the works of that Christian woman? When the two of us appear before God, it is I who shall be condemned.

Upon the whole, when I consider my nature with all its imperfections, is it certain that marriage has spoilt my destiny?

I should no doubt have had more leisure and repose; I should have been better received in certain circles and by certain of the great ones of this earth; yet in politics, though Madame de Chateaubriand may have crossed me, she never checked me, for here, as in matters affecting my honour, I judge only by my own feeling. Should I have produced a greater number of works if I had remained independent, and would those works have been any better? Have there not been circumstances, as shall be seen, in which, by marrying outside France, I should have ceased to write and disowned my country? If I had not married, would not my weakness have made me the prey of some worthless creature? Should not I have squandered and polluted my days like Lord Byron[11]? To-day, when I am sinking into old age, all my wildness would have passed; nothing would remain to me but emptiness and regrets: I should be an old bachelor, unesteemed, either deceived or undeceived, an old bird repeating my worn-out song to whosoever refused to listen to it. The full indulgence of my desires would not have added one string more to my lyre, nor one more earnest note to my voice. The constraint of my feelings, the mystery of my thoughts have perhaps increased the forcefulness of my accents, quickened my works with an internal fever, with a hidden flame, which would have spent itself in the free air of love. Held back by an indissoluble tie, I purchased at first, at the cost of a little bitterness, the sweets which I taste to-day. Of the ills of my existence I have preserved only the incurable part. I therefore owe an affectionate and eternal gratitude to my wife, whose attachment has been as touching as it has been profound and sincere. She has rendered my life more grave, more noble, more honourable, by always inspiring me with respect for duty, if not always with the strength to perform it.

I was married at the end of March 1792, and on the 20th of April the Legislative Assembly declared war against Francis II.[12], who had just succeeded his father Leopold; on the 10th of the same month Benedict Labre[13] was beatified in Rome: there you have two different worlds. The war hurried the remaining nobles out of France. Persecutions were being redoubled on the one hand; on the other, the Royalists were no longer permitted to stay at home without being accounted as cowards: it was time for me to make my way to the camp which I had come so far to seek. My uncle de Bedée and his family took ship for Jersey, and I set out for Paris with my wife and my sisters Lucile and Julie.

[Sidenote: We go to Paris.]

We had secured an apartment in the little Hôtel de Villette, in the Cul-de-Sac Férou, Faubourg Saint-Germain. I hastened in search of my first friends. I saw the men of letters with whom I had had some acquaintance. Among new faces I noticed those of the learned Abbé Barthélemy[14] and the poet Saint-Ange[15]. The abbé modelled the _gynecœa_ of Athens too closely upon the drawing-rooms at Chanteloup. The translator of Ovid was not a man without talent; talent is a gift, an isolated thing: it can come together with other mental faculties, it can be separated from them. Saint-Ange supplied a proof of this; he made the greatest efforts not to be stupid, but was unable to prevent himself. A man whose pencil I admired and still admire, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre[16], was lacking in intelligence, and unfortunately his character was on a level with his intelligence. How many pictures in the _Études de la nature_ are spoilt by the writer's limited mind and want of elevation of soul.

Rulhière had died suddenly, in 1791[17], before my departure for America. I have since seen his little house at Saint-Denis, with the fountain and the pretty statue of Love, at the foot of which one reads these verses:

D'Egmont avec l'Amour visita cette rive:
Une image de sa beauté
Se peignit un moment sur l'onde fugitive:
D'Egmont a disparu; l'Amour seul est resté[18].

When I left France the theatres of Paris were still ringing with the _Réveil d'Épiménide_[19], and with this stanza:

J'aime la vertu guerrière
De nos braves défenseurs,
Mais d'un peuple sanguinaire
Je déteste les fureurs.
À l'Europe redoutables,
Soyons libres à jamais,
Mais soyons toujours aimables
Et gardons l'esprit français[20].

When I returned, the _Réveil d'Épiménide_ had been forgotten; and, if the stanza had been sung, the author would have been badly handled. _Charles IX._ was now the rage. The popularity of this piece depended principally upon the circumstances of the time: the tocsin, a nation armed with poniards, the hatred of the kings and the priests, all these offered a reproduction between four walls of the tragedy which was being publicly enacted. Talma, still at the commencement of his career, was continuing his successes.

While tragedy dyed the streets, the pastoral flourished on the stage; there was question of little but innocent shepherds and virginal shepherdesses: fields, brooks, meadows, sheep, doves, the golden age beneath the thatch, were revived to the sighing of the shepherd's pipe before the cooing Tirces and the simple-minded knitting-women who had but lately left that other spectacle of the guillotine. Had Sanson had time, he would have played Colin to Mademoiselle Théroigne de Méricourt's[21] Babet. The Conventionals plumed themselves upon being the mildest of men: good fathers, good sons, good husbands, they went out walking with the children, acted as their nurses, wept with tenderness at their simple games; they lifted these little lambs gently in their arms to show them the "gee-gees" of the carts carrying the victims to execution. They sang the praises of nature, peace, pity, kindness, candour, the domestic virtues; these devout philanthropists, with extreme sensibility, sent their neighbours to have their heads sliced off for the greater happiness of mankind.

*

[Sidenote: Paris in 1792.]

Paris in 1792 no longer presented the outward aspect of 1789 and 1790: one saw no longer the budding Revolution, but a people marching drunk to its destinies, across abysses and by uncertain roads. The appearance of the people was no longer tumultuous, curious, eager: it was threatening. In the streets one met none but frightened or ferocious figures, men creeping along the houses so as not to be seen, or others seeking their prey: timid and lowered eyes were turned away from you, or else harsh eyes were fixed on yours in order to sound and fathom you.

All diversity of costume had ceased; the old world kept in the background; men had donned the uniform cloak of the new world, a cloak which had become merely the last garment of the future victims. Already the social license displayed at the rejuvenation of France, the liberties of 1789, those fantastic and unruly liberties of a state of things which is engaged in self-destruction and which has not yet turned to anarchy were levelling themselves beneath the sceptre of the people; one felt the approach of a plebeian tyranny, fruitful, it is true, and filled with expectations, but also formidable in a manner very different from the decaying despotism of the old monarchy: for, the sovereign people being ubiquitous, when it turns tyrant the tyrant is ubiquitous; it is the universal presence of an universal Tiberius.

With the Parisian population was mingled an exotic population of cut-throats from the south; the advance-guard of the Marseillese, whom Danton was bringing up for the day's work of the 10th of August and the massacres of September, were recognisable by their rags, their bronzed complexions, their look of cowardice and crime, but of crime of another sun: _in vultu vitium._

In the Legislative Assembly there was no one whom I recognised; Mirabeau and the early idols of our troubles either were no more or had been hurled from their altars. In order to put together the thread of history broken by my journey in America, I must trace matters a little further back.

*

The flight of the King, on the 21st of June 1791, caused the Revolution to take an immense step forward. Brought back to Paris on the 25th of that month, he was then dethroned for the first time, since the National Assembly declared that its decrees would have the force of law without there being any need of royal sanction or acceptance. A high court of justice, anticipating the revolutionary tribunal, was established at Orleans. Thenceforward Madame Roland[22] demanded the head of the Queen, until such time as her own head should be demanded by the Revolution. The mob-gathering had taken place in the Champ de Mars, to protest against the decree which suspended the King from his functions instead of putting him upon his trial. The acceptance of the Constitution, on the 14th of September, had no calming effect. There was a question of declaring the dethronement of Louis XVI.; had this been done, the crime of the 21st of January would not have been committed; the position of the French people in relation to the monarchy and in the eyes of posterity would have been different. The Constituents who opposed the dethronement thought they were saving the Crown, whereas they undid it; those who thought to undo it by demanding the dethronement would have saved it. In politics the result is almost invariably the opposite of what is foreseen.

On the 30th of that same month of September 1791, the Constituent Assembly held its last sitting; the imprudent decree of the 17th of May previous, which prohibited the re-election of the retiring members, gave birth to the Convention. There is nothing more dangerous, more inadequate, more inapplicable to general affairs than resolutions appropriate to individuals or bodies of men, however honourable in themselves.

The decree of the 29th of September for regulating popular societies served only to make them more violent. This was the last act of the Constituent Assembly: it dissolved on the following day, bequeathing to France a revolution.

*

[Sidenote: The Legislative Assembly.]

The Legislative Assembly, installed on the 1st of October 1791, revolved within the whirlwind which was about to sweep away the living and the dead. Troubles stained the departments with blood; at Caen the people were surfeited with massacres and ate the heart of M. de Belsunce[23].

The King set his veto to the decree against the Emigrants and to that which deprived the non-juror ecclesiastics of all emolument. These lawful acts increased the excitement. Pétion had become Mayor of Paris[24]. The deputies preferred a bill of impeachment against the Emigrant Princes on the 1st of January 1792; on the 2nd, they fixed the commencement of the Year IV. of Liberty on that same 1st of January. About the 13th of February, red caps were seen in the streets of Paris, and the municipality ordered pikes to be manufactured. The manifesto of the Emigrants appeared on the 1st of March. Austria armed. Paris was divided into more or less hostile sections[25]. On the 20th of March 1792, the Legislative Assembly adopted the sepulchral piece of mechanism without which the sentences of the Terror could not have been executed; it was first tried on dead bodies, so that these might teach it its trade. One may speak of the instrument as of an executioner, since persons who were touched by its good services presented it with sums of money for its support[26]. The invention of the murder-machine, at the very moment when it had become necessary to crime, is a noteworthy proof of the intelligence of co-ordinate facts, or rather a proof of the hidden action of Providence when it proposes to change the face of empires.

Minister Roland had been summoned to the King's Council at the instigation of the Girondins[27]. On the 20th of April, war was declared against the King of Hungary and Bohemia[28]. Marat published the _Ami du peuple_ in spite of the decree by which he was stricken. The Royal German Regiment and the Berchiny Regiment deserted. Isnard[29] spoke of the perfidy of the Court, Gensonné[30] and Brissot[31] denounced the Austrian Committee. An insurrection broke out on the subject of the Royal Guard, which was disbanded[32]. On the 28th of May, the Assembly declared its sittings permanent. On the 20th of June, the Palace of the Tuileries was forced by the mob of the Faubourgs Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau, the pretext being the refusal of Louis XVI. to sanction the proscription of the priests; the King was in peril of his life. The country was declared in danger. M. de La Fayette was burnt in effigy. The federates of the second Federation were arriving; the Marseilleise, called up by Danton, were on the march: they entered Paris on the 30th of July and were billeted by Pétion at the Cordeliers.

*

By the side of the national tribune, two competing tribunes had sprung up: that of the Jacobins and that of the Cordeliers, then the more formidable because it sent members to the famous Commune of Paris and supplied it with means of action. If the formation of the Commune had not taken place, Paris, for want of a point of concentration, would have split up, and the various mayoralties become rival powers.

[Sidenote: The Club of Cordeliers.]

The Club des Cordeliers had its abode in the monastery, whose church was built in the reign of St Louis, in 1259[33], with funds paid as damages for a murder: in 1590 it became the resort of the most famous Leaguers. Certain places seem to be the laboratories of factions: "Intelligence was brought," says L'Estoile (12 July 1593), "to the Duc de Mayenne[34] of two hundred Cordeliers newly arrived in Paris, supplying themselves with arms and concerting with the Sixteen[35], who held council daily at the Cordeliers of Paris.... On that day the Sixteen, assembled at the Cordeliers, cast aside their arms."

The fanatics of the League had therefore handed down the monastery of the Cordeliers to our philosophical revolutionaries as a dead-house.

The pictures, the carved and painted images, the veils, the curtains of the convent had been pulled down; the basilica, flayed of its skin, presented its bare skeleton to the eye. In the apsis of the church, where the wind and the rain entered through the broken panes of the rose-windows, some joiners' benches served as a table for the president, when the sittings were held in the church. On these benches lay red caps, with which each speaker covered his head before ascending the tribune. The latter consisted of four buttressed stop-planks, crossed at their X by a single plank, like a scaffolding. Behind the president, together with a statue of Liberty, one saw so-called instruments of ancient justice, instruments whose place had been supplied by one other, the blood-machine, in the same way as complicated machinery has been replaced by the hydraulic ram. The Club des Jacobins _épurés_, or purged Jacobin Club, borrowed some of these arrangements of the Cordeliers.

*

The orators, who had met for purposes of destruction, were unable to agree in electing their leaders or in the methods to be employed; they treated each other as scoundrels, pickpockets, thieves, butchers, to the cacophony of the hisses and groans of their several groups of devils. Their metaphors were taken from the stock of murders, borrowed from the filthiest objects of every kind of sewer and dunghill, or drawn from the places consecrated to the prostitution of men and women. Gestures accentuated these figures of speech; everything was called by its name, with cynical indecency, in an obscene and impious pageantry of oaths and blasphemies. Destruction and production, death and generation, one distinguished naught else through the savage slang which deafened the ears. The speech-makers, with their shrill or thundering voices, had interrupters other than their opponents: the little brown owls of the cloisters without monks and the steeple without bells played in the broken windows, in the hope of booty; they interrupted the speeches. They were first called to order by the jingling of the impotent bell; but when they failed to stop their clamour, shots were fired at them to compel them to silence: they fell, throbbing, wounded and fatidical, in the midst of the pandemonium. Broken-down timber-work, rickety pews, ramshackle stalls, fragments of saints rolled and pushed against the walls, served as benches for the dirty, grimy, drunken, sweating spectators, in their ragged _carmagnoles_, with their shouldered pikes or bare crossed arms.

The most deformed of the band obtained the readiest hearing. Mental and bodily infirmities have played a part in our troubles: wounded self-love has made great revolutionaries.

*

Following this precedence of hideousness, there appeared in succession, mingled with the ghosts of the Sixteen, a series of gorgon heads. The former doctor of the Comte d'Artois' Bodyguards, the Swiss fœtus Marat[36], his bare feet in wooden clogs or hob-nailed shoes, was the first to hold forth, by virtue of his incontestable claims. Holding the office of "jester" at the Court of the people, he exclaimed, with an insipid expression and the smirk of trite politeness which the old bringing-up set on every face:

"People, you must cut off two hundred and seventy thousand heads!"

To this Caligula of the public places succeeded the atheistical shoemaker Chaumette[37]. He was followed by the "Attorney-General to the Lantern," Camille Desmoulins, a stuttering Cicero, a public counsellor of murders worn out with debauchery, a frivolous Republican with his puns and jokes, a maker of graveyard jests, who said that, in the massacres of September, "all had passed off orderly." He consented to become a Spartan, provided the making of the black broth was left to Méot the tavern-keeper[38].

Fouché[39], who had hastened up from Juilly or Nantes, studied disaster under those doctors: in the circle of wild beasts seated attentively round the chair he looked like a dressed-up hyena. He smelt the effluvium of the blood to come; already he inhaled the incense of the procession of asses and executioners, pending the day on which, driven from the Club des Jacobins as a thief, an atheist and an assassin, he should be chosen as a minister.

[Sidenote: Marat.]

When Marat had climbed down from his plank, that popular Triboulet[40] became the sport of his masters: they filliped him on the nose, trod on his feet, hustled him with "gee-ups," all of which did not prevent him from becoming the leader of the multitude, climbing to the clock of the Hôtel de Ville, sounding the tocsin for a general massacre, and triumphing in the revolutionary tribunal.

Marat, like Milton's Sin, was violated by death[41]: Chénier wrote his apotheosis, David[42] painted him in his blood-stained bath; he was compared to the divine Author of the Gospel. A prayer was dedicated to him: "Heart of Jesus, Heart of Marat; O Sacred Heart of Jesus, O Sacred Heart of Marat!" This heart of Marat had for a ciborium a costly pyx from the Royal Repository. In a grass-grown cenotaph, erected on the Place du Carrousel, were exhibited the divinity's bust, his bath, lamp, and inkstand. Then the wind changed: the unclean thing, poured from its agate urn into a different vase, was emptied into the sewer.

*

The scenes at the Cordeliers, of which I witnessed some three or four, were dominated and presided over by Danton, a Hun of Gothic stature, with a flat nose, outspread nostrils, furrowed jaws, and the face of a gendarme combined with that of a lewd and cruel attorney. In the shell of his church, as it were the skeleton of the centuries, Danton, with his three male furies, Camille Desmoulins, Marat, and Fabre d'Églantine[43], organized the assassinations of September. Billaud de Varennes[44] proposed to set fire to the prisons and burn all those inside; another Conventional voted that all the untried prisoners should be drowned; Marat declared himself in favour of a general massacre. Danton was besought to show mercy to the prisoners:

"----the prisoners!" he replied.

As author of the circular of the Commune, he invited free men to repeat in the departments the enormities perpetrated at the Carmelites and the Abbaye.

Let us consider history: Sixtus V.[45] pronounced the devotion of Jacques Clément[46] to be equal, for the salvation of mankind, to the mystery of the Incarnation, even as Marat was compared to the Saviour of the World; Charles IX.[47] wrote to the governors of provinces to imitate the St. Bartholomew[48] massacres, even as Danton summoned the patriots to copy the massacres of September. The Jacobins were plagiaries; they were still more so when they offered up Louis XVI. in imitation of Charles I.[49] As these crimes were connected with a great social movement, some have, very unaptly, imagined that those crimes produced the greatness of the Revolution, of which they were but the hideous _pasticcios_: while watching a fine nature suffering, passionate or systematic minds have admired only its convulsions.

Danton, more candid than the English, said:

"We will not try our King, we will kill him."

He also said:

"Those priests and nobles are not guilty, but they must die, because they are out of place; they trammel the movement of things and obstruct the future."

These words, beneath an appearance of horrible depth, possess no extent of genius, for they presume that innocence is nothing, and that moral order can be withdrawn from political order without causing the latter to perish, which is false.

[Sidenote: Danton.]

Danton had not the conviction of the principles he maintained; he had donned the revolutionary cloak only to make his fortune.

"Come and 'brawl' with us," he advised a young man: "when you have grown rich, you can do as you please."

He admitted that, if he had not sold himself to the Court, it was because it would not pay a high enough price for him: an instance of the effrontery of a mind that knows itself and a corruption that reveals itself open-mouthed.

Though inferior, even in ugliness, to Marat, whose agent he had been, Danton was superior to Robespierre, without, like the latter, having given his name to his crimes. He preserved the religious sense:

"We have not," he said, "destroyed superstition to establish atheism."

His passions might have been good ones, if only because they were passions. We must allow for character in the actions of men; culprits with heated imaginations like Danton seem, by reason of the very exaggeration of their sayings and doings, to be more froward than the cool-headed culprits, whereas in fact they are less so. This remark applies also to the people: taken collectively, the people is a poet, author and ardent actor of the piece which it plays or is made to play. Its excesses partake not so much of the instinct of a native cruelty as of the delirium of a crowd intoxicated with sights, especially when these are tragic: a thing so true that, in popular horrors, there is always something superfluous added to the picture and the emotion.

Danton was caught in the trap himself had laid. It availed him nothing to flick pellets of bread at his judges' noses, to reply nobly and courageously, to cause the tribunal to hesitate, to endanger and terrify the Convention, to reason logically upon crimes by which the very power of his enemies had been created, to exclaim, smitten with barren repentance, "It was I who instituted this infamous tribunal: I crave pardon for it of God and men!" a phrase which has been pilfered more than once. It was before being indicted before the tribunal that he should have declared its infamy.

It only remained to Danton to show himself as pitiless for his own death as he had been for that of his victims, to hold his head higher than the hanging knife: and this he did. From the stage of the Terror, where his feet stuck in the clotted blood of the previous day, after turning a glance of contempt and domination over the crowd, he said to the headsman:

"Show my head to the people; it is worth showing."

Danton's head remained in the executioner's hands, while the acephalous shade went to join the decapitated shades of his victims: a further instance of equality. Danton's deacon and sub-deacon, Camille Desmoulins and Fabre d'Églantine, died in the same manner as their priest.

[Sidenote: Camille Desmoulins.]

At a time when pensions were being paid to the guillotine, when one wore at the buttonhole of one's carmagnole, by way of a flower, a little guillotine in gold, or else a small piece of a guillotined person's heart; at a time when people shouted, "Hell for ever!" when they celebrated the joyful orgies of blood, steel and fury, when they toasted annihilation, when they danced the dance of the dead quite naked, so as not to have the trouble of undressing when about to join them; at that time one was bound in the end to come to the last banquet, the last pleasantry of sorrow. Desmoulins was invited to Fouquier-Tinville's[50] tribunal.

"What is your age?" asked the president.

"The age of the Sans-Culotte Jesus," replied Camille facetiously[51].

An avenging obsession compelled the assassins of Christians unceasingly to confess the name of Christ.

It would be unfair to forget that Camille Desmoulins dared to defy Robespierre and to atone for his errors by his courage. He gave the signal for the reaction against the Terror. A young and charming wife, full of energy, had, by making him capable of love, made him capable of virtue and sacrifice. Indignation instilled eloquence into the tribune's coarse and reckless irony: he attacked in the grand manner the scaffolds he had helped to erect. Adapting his conduct to his speech, he refused to consent to his execution; he struggled with the headsman in the tumbril, and arrived at the edge of the last gulf with his clothes half tom from his back.

Fabre d'Églantine, author of a play which will live[52], displayed, quite contrary to Desmoulins, a signal weakness. Jean Roseau, public executioner of Paris under the League, who was hanged for lending his offices to the assassins of the Président Brisson[53], could not bring himself to accept the rope. It seems that one does not learn how to die by killing others.

The debates at the Cordeliers established for me the fact of a state of society at the most rapid moment of its transformation. I had seen the Constituent Assembly commence the murder of the kingship in 1789 and 1790; I found the body, still quite warm, of the old monarchy handed over in 1792 to the legislative gut-workers: they disembowelled and dissected it in the cellars of their clubs, as the halberdiers cut up and burnt the body of the Balafré[54] in the garret of Blois Castle.

Of all the men whom I recall, Danton, Marat. Camille Desmoulins, Fabre d'Églantine, Robespierre, not one is alive. I met them for a moment on my passage between a nascent society in America and an expiring society in Europe; between the forests of the New World and the solitudes of exile: before I had reckoned a few months on foreign soil, those lovers of death had already spent themselves in her arms. At the distance at which I now find myself from their appearance, it seems to me as though, after descending into the infernal regions of my youth, I retain a confused recollection of the shades which I vaguely saw wander by the bank of Cocytus: they complete the varied dreams of my life, and come to be inscribed on my tablets of beyond the tomb.

*

It was a great pleasure to meet M. de Malesherbes again and speak to him of my old projects. I stated my plans for a second journey, which was to last nine years; all I had to do first was to take another little journey to Germany: I was to run to the Army of the Princes, and come back at a run to kill the Revolution; all this would be finished in two or three months, when I should hoist my sail and return to the New World, having got rid of a revolution and enriched myself by a marriage.

And yet my zeal exceeded my faith; I felt that the emigration was a stupidity and a madness:

"I was shaven on all hands," says Montaigne. "To the Ghibelin I was a Guelf, to Guelf a Ghibelin[55]."

My distaste for absolute monarchy left me with no illusions concerning the step I was taking. I cherished scruples, and, although resolved to sacrifice myself to honour, I desired to have M. de Malesherbes' opinion on the emigration. I found him much incensed: the crimes continued under his eyes had caused the friend of Rousseau to lose his political toleration; between the cause of the victims and that of the butchers he did not hesitate. He believed that anything was better than the existing state of things; he thought that, in my particular case, a man wearing the sword was bound to join the brothers of a King who was oppressed and delivered to his enemies. He approved of my returning to America, and urged my brother to go with me.

I raised the ordinary objections based upon the assistance of foreigners, the interests of the country, and so on. He replied and, passing from general arguments to details, quoted some awkward examples. He put before me the case of the Guelphs and Ghibhelinnes, relying on the troops of the Emperor and the Pope; in England, the barons rising against John Lackland. Finally, in our times, he quoted the case of the Republic of the United States imploring the assistance of France.

"In the same way," continued M. de Malesherbes, "the men most devoted to liberty and philosophy, the Republicans and Protestants, have never considered themselves to blame when they have borrowed a force which could ensure the victory of their opinion. Would the New World be free today without our gold, our ships, and our soldiers? I, Malesherbes, who am speaking to you, did not I, in 1776, receive Franklin, who came to renew the relations entered into by Silas Deane[56], and yet was Franklin a traitor? Was American liberty any the less honourable for being assisted by La Fayette and won by French grenadiers? Every government which, instead of securing the fundamental laws of society, itself transgresses the laws of equity, the rules of justice, ceases to exist, and restores man to the state of nature. It is then lawful to defend one's self as best one may, to resort to the means that appear most calculated to overthrow tyranny and to restore the rights of one and all."

[Sidenote: Talks with Malesherbes.]

The principles of natural right as set forth by the greatest publicists, developed by such a man as M. de Malesherbes, and supported by numerous historical examples, struck me without convincing me; I yielded in reality only to the impulse of my age, to the point of honour. I will add some more recent examples to those of M. de Malesherbes: during the Spanish War of 1823, the French Republican Party went to serve under the banner of the Cortès, and did not scruple to bear arms against its own country; in 1830 and 1831, the Poles and the constitutional Italians invoked the assistance of France, and the Portuguese of the "Charter" invaded their country with the aid of foreign money and foreign soldiers. We have two standards of weight and measurement: we approve in the case of one idea, one system, one interest, one man of that which we condemn in the case of another idea, another system, another interest, another man.

These conversations between myself and the illustrious defender of the King took place at my sister-in-law's; she had just given birth to a second son, to whom M. de Malesherbes stood god-father and gave his name, Christian. I was present at the baptism of this child, which was to see its father and mother only at an age at which life leaves no memory and appears at a distance like an ill-remembered dream. The preparations for my departure lagged. They had thought that they were making me contract a rich marriage: it appeared that my wife's fortune was invested in Church securities; the nation undertook to pay them after its own fashion. Not only that, but Madame de Chateaubriand had, with the consent of her trustees, lent the scrip of a large portion of these securities to her sister, the Comtesse du Plessix-Parscau, who had emigrated. Money was still wanting, therefore; it became necessary to borrow.

A notary procured ten thousand francs for us: I was taking them home to the Cul-de-sac Férou, in _assignats_, when, in the Rue de Richelieu, I met one of my old messmates in the Navarre Regiment, the Comte Achard. He was a great gambler; he proposed that we should go to the rooms of M----, where we could talk; the devil urged me: I went upstairs, I played, I lost all, except fifteen hundred francs, with which, full of remorse and humiliation, I climbed into the first coach that passed. I had never played before: play produced in me a sort of painful intoxication; if the passion had attacked me, it would have turned my brain. With half-disordered wits, I stepped out of the coach at Saint-Sulpice, and left my pocket-book behind, containing the remnant of my treasure. I ran home and said that I had left the ten thousand francs in a hackney-coach.

I went out again, turned down the Rue Dauphine, crossed the Pont-Neuf, feeling half inclined to throw myself into the water; I went to the Place du Palais-Royal, where I had taken the ill-omened vehicle. I questioned the Savoyards who watered the screws, and described my conveyance; they told me a number at random. The police commissary of the district informed me that that number belonged to a job-master living at the top of the Faubourg Saint-Denis. I went to the man's house; I remained all night in the stable, waiting for the hackney-coaches to return: a large number arrived in succession which were not mine; at last, at two o'clock in the morning, I saw my chariot drive in. I had hardly time to recognise my two white steeds, when the poor beasts, utterly worn out, dropped down upon the straw, stiff, their stomachs distended, their legs stretched out, as though dead.

The coachman remembered driving me. After me, he had taken up a citizen, whom he had set down at the Jacobins; after the citizen, a lady, whom he had taken to the Rue de Cléry, number 13; after that lady, a gentleman, whom he had put down at the Recollects in the Rue Saint-Martin. I promised the driver a gratuity, and, the moment daylight had come, set out on the discovery of my fifteen hundred francs, as I had gone in search of the North-West Passage. It seemed clear to me that the citizen of the Jacobins had confiscated them by right of his sovereignty. The young person of the Rue de Cléry averred that she had seen nothing in the coach. I reached the third station without any hope; the coachman gave a tolerably good description of the gentleman he had driven. The porter exclaimed:

"It's the Père So-and-so!"

He led me through the passages and the deserted apartments to a Recollect who had remained behind alone to make an inventory of the furniture of his convent. Seated on a heap of rubbish, in a dusty frock-coat, the monk listened to my story:

"Are you," he asked, "the Chevalier de Chateaubriand?"

"Yes," I replied.

"Here is your pocket-book," said he. "I would have brought it when I had finished: I found your address inside."

[Sidenote: An honest monk.]

It was this hunted and plundered monk, engaged in conscientiously counting up the relics of his cloister for his proscribes, who restored to me the fifteen hundred francs with which I was about to make my way to exile. Failing this small sum, I should not have emigrated: what should I have become? My whole life would have changed. I will be hanged if I would to-day move a step to recover a million.

This happened on the 16th of June 1792. Obeying the promptings of my instinct, I had returned from America to offer my sword to Louis XVI., not to associate myself with party intrigues. The disbanding of the King's new guard, of which Murat[57] was a member; the successive ministries of Roland[58], Dumouriez, Duport du Tertre[59]; the little conspiracies of the Court and the great popular risings filled me only with weariness and contempt. I heard much talk of Madame Roland, whom I never saw: her Memoirs show that she possessed an extraordinary strength of mind. She was said to be very agreeable: it remains to be known whether she was sufficiently so to make at all tolerable the cynicism of her unnatural virtues. Certainly the woman who, at the foot of the guillotine, asked for pen and ink to describe the last moments of her journey, to write down the discoveries she had made in the course of her progress from the Conciergerie to the Place de la Révolution, that woman displayed an absorption in futurity, a contempt for life, of which there are few examples. Madame Roland possessed character rather than genius: the first can give the second, the second cannot give the first.

On the 19th of June, I went to the Vale of Montmorency to visit the Hermitage of J. J. Rousseau: not that I delighted in the memories of Madame d'Épinay[60] and of that depraved and artificial society; but I wished to take leave of the solitude of a man whose morals were antipathetic to mine, although he himself was endowed with a talent whose accents stirred my youth. On the next day, the 20th of June, I was still at the Hermitage, and there met two men walking, like myself, in that deserted spot during the fatal day of the monarchy, indifferent as they were or might be, thought I, to the affairs of this world: one was M. Maret[61], of the Empire, the other M. Barère[62], of the Republic. The amiable Barère had come, far from the uproar, in his sentimental, philosophical way, to whisper soft revolutionary nothings to the shade of Julie. The troubadour of the guillotine, on whose report the Convention decreed that the Terror was the order of the day, escaped the same Terror by hiding in the head-basket; from the bottom of the bloody trough, beneath the scaffold, he was heard only to croak the word, "Death!" Barère belonged to the species of tigers which Oppian represents as born of the wind's light breath: _velocis Zephyri proles._

Ginguené, Chamfort, my old friends among the men of letters, were delighted with the 20th of June. La Harpe, continuing his lectures at the Lycée, shouted in a stentorian voice:

"Fools! To all the representations of the people you answered, 'Bayonets! Bayonets!' Well, you have them now, your bayonets!"

Although my travels in America had made a less insignificant personage of me, I was unable to rise to so great a height of principle and eloquence. Fontanes was in danger through his former connection with the Société Monarchique. My brother was a member of a club of _enragés._ The Prussians were marching by virtue of a convention between the Cabinets of Vienna and Berlin; a rather fierce engagement had already taken place between the French and Austrians near Mons. It was more than time for me to take a decision.

[Sidenote: My brother and I emigrate.]

My brother and I procured false passports for Lille: we were two wine-merchants and national guards of Paris, wearing the uniform and proposing to tender for the army supplies. My brother's valet, Louis Poullain, known as Saint-Louis, travelled under his own name; he came from Lamballe, in Lower Brittany, but was going to see his family in Flanders. The day of our emigration was settled for the 15th of July, the day after the second Federation. We spent the 14th in the Tivoli garden, with the Rosanbo family, my sisters and my wife. Tivoli belonged to M. Boutin[63], whose daughter had married M. de Malesherbes[64]. Towards the end of the day we saw a good many federates wandering about after disbanding; on their hats was written in chalk, "Pétion or death!" Tivoli, the starting-point of my exile, was to become a centre of amusements and fêtes. Our relations took leave of us without sadness; they were persuaded that we were going on a pleasure-trip. My recovered fifteen hundred francs seemed a treasure sufficient to bring me back in triumph to Paris.

On the 10th of July, at six o'clock in the morning, we climbed into the diligence: we had booked our seats in the front part, by the guard; the valet, whom we were supposed not to know, stuffed himself into the inside with the other passengers. Saint-Louis walked in his sleep; in Paris he used to go looking for his master at night, with his eyes open, but quite asleep. He used to undress my brother and put him to bed, sleeping all the time, answering, "I know, I know," to all that was said to him during his attacks, and waking only when cold water was thrown in his face: he was a man of about forty, nearly six feet high, and as ugly as he was tall. This poor fellow, who was very respectful by nature, had never served any master except my brother; he was quite confused when he had to sit down to table with us at supper. The passengers, great patriots all, talking of hanging the aristocrats from the lanterns, increased his dismay. The thought that, at the end of all this, he would be obliged to pass through the Austrian Army, in order to fight in the Army of the Princes, completely turned his brain. He drank heavily and climbed into the diligence again; we went back to the coupé.

In the middle of the night we heard the passengers shouting, with their heads out of the windows:

"Stop, postilion, stop!"

They stopped, the door of the diligence was opened, and immediately male and female voices exclaimed:

"Get down, citizen, get down! We can't stand this! Get down, you beast! He's a brigand! Get down, get down!"