Chapter VI: Book VIII: 146 (1)

The Literary Fund--My garret in Holborn--Decline in health--Visit to the doctors--Emigrants in London--Peltier--Literary labours--My friendship with Hingant--Our excursions--A night in Westminster Abbey--Distress--Unexpected succour--Lodging overlooking a cemetery--New companions in misfortune--Our pleasures--My cousin de La Boüétardais--A sumptuous rout--I come to the end of my forty crowns--Renewed distress--Table d'hôte--Bishops-Dinner at the London Tavern--The Camden Manuscripts--My work in the country--Death of my brother--Misfortunes of my family--Two Frances--Letters from Hingant--Charlotte--I return to London--An extraordinary meeting--A defect in my character--The _Essai historique sur les révolutions_--Its effect--Letter from Lemierre, nephew to the poet--Fontanes--Cléry.

A society has been formed in London for the assistance of men of letters, both English and foreign. This society invited me to its annual meeting[147]; I made it my duty to attend and to present my subscription[148]. H.R.H. the Duke of York[149] occupied the chair; on his right were the Duke of Somerset[150] and Lords Torrington[151] and Bolton[152]; I myself sat on his left. I met my friend Mr. Canning[153] there. The poet, orator, and illustrious minister made a speech in which occurred the following passage, which did me too great honour, and which was reported in the newspapers:

"Although the person of my noble friend, the Ambassador of France, is as yet but little known here, his character and writings are well known to all Europe. He began his career by expounding the principles of Christianity, and continued it by defending those of monarchy; and now he comes amongst us to unite the two countries by the common bonds of monarchical principles and Christian virtues[154]."

*

[Sidenote: The literary fund.]

It is many years since Mr. Canning, the man of letters, improved himself by the political lessons of Mr. Pitt[155]; it is almost the same number of years since I began obscurely to write in that same English capital. Both of us have attained high station and are now members of a society devoted to the relief of unfortunate authors. Is it the affinity of our grandeurs or the relation of our sufferings that brought us together in this place? What should the Governor of the East Indies and the French Ambassador be doing at the banquet of the afflicted muses? It was rather George Canning and François de Chateaubriand who sat down to it, in remembrance of their former adversity and perhaps of their former happiness: they drank to the memory of Homer singing his verses for a morsel of bread.

If the Literary Fund had existed when I arrived in London from Southampton on the 21st of May 1793, it would perhaps have paid a doctor's visit to the garret in Holborn in which my cousin de La Boüétardais[156], son of my uncle de Bedée, harboured me. It had been hoped that the change of air would do marvels towards restoring to me the strength essential to a soldier's life; but my health, instead of recovering, declined. My chest became involved; I was thin and pale, I coughed frequently, I breathed with difficulty; I had attacks of perspiration and I spat blood. My friends, who were as poor as I, dragged me from doctor to doctor. These Hippocrates kept the band of beggars waiting at their door, and then told me, for the price of one guinea, that I must bear my complaint patiently, adding:

"That's all, my dear sir."

Dr. Goodwyn[157], famous for his experiments relating to drowning people, made on his own person by his own prescriptions, was more generous: he assisted me with his advice gratis; but he said to me, with the harshness which he employed towards himself, that I might "last" a few months, perhaps one or two years, provided I gave up all fatigue.

"Do not look forward to a long career:" that was the substance of his consultations.

The certainty of my approaching end thus acquired, while increasing the natural gloom of my imagination, gave me an incredible peace of mind. This inner disposition explains a passage of the note placed at the head of the _Essai historique_[158], as well as the following passage from the _Essai_ itself:

"Smitten as I am with an illness which leaves me little hope,
I behold objects with a tranquil eye; the calm atmosphere of
the tomb is perceptible to the traveller who is but a few
days' march removed from it[159]."

The bitterness of the reflections spread over the _Essai_ will therefore arouse no astonishment: I wrote that work while lying under sentence of death, between the verdict and the execution. A writer who believed himself to be drawing near his end, amid the destitution of his exile, could scarcely cast a smiling glance upon the world.

But how to spend the days of grace that had been granted me? I might have lived or died promptly by my sword: I was forbidden to use it. What remained? A pen? It was neither known nor proved, and I was ignorant of its power. Would my innate taste for letters, the poems of my childhood, the sketches of my travels suffice to attract the public attention? The idea of writing a work on the comparative Revolutions had occurred to me; I turned it over in my mind as a subject more suited to the interests of the day; but who would undertake the printing of a manuscript with none to extol its merits, and who would support me during the composition of that manuscript? Even if I had but a few days to spend on earth, I must nevertheless have some means of support for those few days. My thirty louis, already seriously curtailed, could not go very far, and, in addition to my own distress, I had to support the general distress of the Emigration. My companions in London all had occupations: some had embarked in the coal trade, others with their wives made straw hats, others again taught the French which they did not know. They were all merry. The fault of our nation, its frivolity, had at that moment changed into virtue. They laughed in Fortune's face: that thieving wench was quite abashed at carrying off something which she was not asked to restore.

*

[Sidenote: Peltier.]

Peltier, author of the _Domine salvum fac regem_[160] and principal editor of the _Actes des Apôtres_, continued his Parisian enterprise in London. He was not precisely vicious: but he was devoured by a vermin of small faults of which it was impossible to purify him; he was a rake, a good-for-nothing, earned a great deal of money and spent it as lavishly, was at the same time the adherent of the Legitimacy and the ambassador of the black King Christophe[161] to George III., diplomatic correspondent of M. le Comte de "Limonade," and drank up in champagne the salary which was paid him in sugar[162]. This sort of M. Violet playing the grand airs of the Revolution on a pocket violin came to see me, and offered his services as a Breton. I spoke to him of my plan of the _Essai_; he loudly approved of it:

"It will be superb!" he exclaimed, and offered me a room in the house of his printer, Baylis, who would print the work piece by piece as I wrote it.

Deboffe the bookseller should have the sale of it; he, Peltier, would trumpet it in his paper, the _Ambigu_, while one might obtain a footing in the London _Courrier français_, the editorship of which was soon to be transferred to M. de Montlosier[163]. Peltier never entertained a doubt: he spoke of getting me the Cross of St. Louis for my siege of Thionville. My Gil Blas, tall, lean, lanky, with powdered hair and a bald forehead, always shouting and joking, put his round hat on one ear, took me by the arm, and carried me off to Baylis the printer, where, without any ceremony, he hired a room for me at a guinea a month.

I was face to face with my golden future; but how to bridge over the present? Peltier obtained translations from the Latin and the English for me; I worked at translating by day, and at night at the _Essai historique_, into which I introduced a portion of my travels and my day-dreams. Baylis supplied me with the books, and I laid out a few shillings to ill purpose on the purchase of old volumes displayed on the bookstalls.

Hingant, whom I had met on the Jersey packet, had become intimate with me. He cultivated literature, he was well informed, and he wrote novels in secret and read me pages of them. He had a lodging not far from Baylis, at the end of a street leading into Holborn. I breakfasted with him every morning at ten o'clock; we talked about politics and above all about my work. I told him how much I had built of my nocturnal edifice, the _Essai_; then I reverted to my labour of the daytime, the translations. We met for dinner, at a shilling a head, in a public-house; thence we made for the fields. Often also we walked alone, for we were both of us fond of musing.

I would then direct my steps towards Kensington or Westminster. Kensington pleased me; I wandered about its solitary part, while the part adjacent to Hyde Park became filled with a brilliant multitude. The contrast between my penury and the display of wealth, between my destitution and the crowd, was pleasant to me. I watched the young Englishwomen pass in the distance with that sense of desirous confusion which my sylph had formerly caused me to feel when, after decking her with all my extravagances, I scarce dared lift my eyes upon my handiwork. Death, which I thought that I was approaching, added a mystery to this vision of a world from which I had almost departed. Did ever a look rest upon the foreigner seated at the foot of a fir-tree? Did some fair woman divine the invisible presence of René?

[Sidenote: A night in Westminster Abbey.]

At Westminster I found a different pastime: in that labyrinth of tombs I thought of mine ready to open. The bust of an unknown man like myself would never find a place amid those illustrious effigies! Then appeared the sepulchres of the monarchs: Cromwell[164] was there no longer, and Charles I.[165] was not there. The ashes of a traitor, Robert of Artois[166], lay beneath the flagstones which I trod with my loyal steps. The fate of Charles I. had just been extended to Louis XVI.; the steel was reaping its daily harvest in France, and the graves of my kindred were already dug.

The singing of the choir and the conversation of the visitors interrupted my reflections. I was not able often to repeat my visits, for I was obliged to give to the guardians of those who lived no more the shilling which was necessary to me to live. But then I would turn round and round outside the abbey with the rooks, or stop to gaze at the steeples, twins of unequal height, which the setting sun stained red with its fiery light against the black hangings of the smoke of the City.

One day, however, it happened that, wishing towards evening to contemplate the interior of the basilica, I became lost in admiration of its spirited and capricious architecture. Dominated by the sentiment of the "dowdy vastitie of our churches[167]," I wandered with slow footsteps and became benighted: the doors were closed. I tried to find an outlet; I called the usher, I knocked against the doors: all the noise I made, spread and spun out in the silence, was lost; I had to resign myself to sleeping among the dead.

After hesitating in my choice of a resting-place I stopped near Lord Chatham's[168] mausoleum, at the foot of the rood and of the double stair of Henry the Seventh's and the Knights' Chapel. At the entrance to those stairs, to those aisles enclosed with railings, a sarcophagus built into the wall, opposite to a marble figure of death armed with its scythe, offered me its shelter. The fold of a winding-sheet, also of marble, served me for a niche: following the example of Charles V.[169], I inured myself to my burial. I was in the best seats for seeing the world as it is. What a mass of greatnesses were confined beneath those vaults! What remains of them? Afflictions are no less vain than felicities: the hapless Jane Grey[170] is not different from the blithe Alice of Salisbury[171] save that the skeleton is less horrible because it has no head; her body is beautified by her punishment and by the absence of that which constituted its beauty. The tournaments of the victor of Crecy[172], the sports of the Field of the Cloth of Gold of Henry VIII.[173] will not be renewed in that theatre of funereal spectacles. Bacon[174], Newton[175], Milton[176] are interred as deeply, have passed away as completely, as their more obscure contemporaries. Should I, an exile, a vagabond, a pauper, consent to be no longer the petty, forgotten, sorrowful thing that I am in order to have been one of those famous, mighty, pleasure-sated dead? Ah, life is not all that! If from the shores of this world we cannot distinctly discern matters divine, let us not be astonished: time is a veil set between ourselves and God, even as our eyelids are interposed between our eyes and the light.

[Sidenote: Reflections and release.]

Crouching under my marble sheet, I descended from these lofty thoughts to the simple impressions of the place and moment. My anxiety mingled with pleasure was analogous to that which I used to experience in winter in my turret at Combourg, as I listened to the wind: a breeze and a shadow possess a kindred nature. Little by little I grew accustomed to the darkness and distinguished the figures placed over the tombs. I looked up at the vaults of this English Saint-Denis, whence one might say that the years that have been and the issues of the past hung down like Gothic lamps: the entire edifice was as it were a monolithic temple of ages turned to stone.

I had counted ten o'clock, eleven o'clock by the abbey clock: the hammer rising and falling upon the bell-metal was the only living creature in those regions beside myself. Outside, the sound of a carriage, the voice of the watchman: that was all; those distant sounds of earth reached me as though from one world to another. The fog from the Thames and the smoke of coal crept into the basilica, and spread a denser dusk around.

At last a twilight spread out in a corner filled with the dimmest shadows: with fixed gaze I watched the progressive growth of the light; did it emanate from the two sons[177] of Edward IV., assassinated by their uncle? The great tragedian says:

"O thus," quoth Dighton, "lay the gentle babes,"--
"Thus, thus," quoth Forrest, "girdling one another
Within their alabaster innocent arms:
Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,
Which, in their summer beauty, kiss'd each other[178]."

God did not send me those two sad and charming souls; but the light phantom of a scarcely adolescent woman appeared carrying a light sheltered in a sheet of paper twisted shell-wise: it was the little bell-ringer. I heard the sound of a kiss, and the bell tolled the break of day. The ringer was quite terrified when I went out with her through the gate of the cloisters. I told her of my adventure; she said she had come to do duty for her father, who was sick: we did not speak of the kiss.

*

I amused Hingant with the story of my adventure, and we made a plan to lock ourselves in at Westminster; but our distress summoned us to the dead in a less poetic manner.

My funds were becoming exhausted: Baylis and Deboffe had ventured, against a written promise of reimbursement in case of non-sale, to commence the printing of the _Essai_; there their generosity ended, and very naturally; I was even astonished at their boldness. The translations fell off; Peltier, a man of pleasure, grew weary of his prolonged obligingness. He would willingly have given me what he had, if he had not preferred to squander it; but to go looking here and there for work, to do patient acts of kindness, was beyond him. Hingant also saw his treasure diminishing; we were reduced to sixty francs between us. We cut down our rations, as on a vessel when the passage is prolonged. Instead of a shilling apiece, we spent only sixpence on our dinner. With our morning tea we reduced the bread by one half, and suppressed the butter. This abstinence vexed my friend's nerves. His wits went wool-gathering; he would prick his ears and seem to be listening to some one; he would burst out laughing in reply, or shed tears. Hingant believed in magnetism, and had disordered his brain with Swedenborg's[179] rubbish. He told me in the morning that he had heard noises during the night; if I denied his fancies he grew angry. The anxiety which he caused me prevented me from feeling my own sufferings.

These were great, nevertheless: that rigorous diet, combined with the work, chafed my diseased chest; I began to find a difficulty in walking, and yet I spent my days and a part of my nights out of doors, so as not to betray my distress. When we came to our last shilling, my friend and I agreed to keep it in order to make a pretense of breakfasting. We arranged that we should buy a penny roll; that we should have the hot water and the tea-pot brought up as usual; that we should not put in any tea; that we should not eat the bread, but that we should drink the hot water with a few little morsels of sugar left at the bottom of the bowl.

Five days passed in this fashion. I was devoured with hunger; I burned with fever; sleep had deserted me; I sucked pieces of linen which I soaked in water; I chewed grass and paper. When I passed the bakers' shops, the torment I endured was horrible. One rough winter's night, I stood for two hours outside a shop where they sold dried fruits and smoked meats, swallowing all I saw with my eyes: I could have eaten not only the provisions, but the boxes and baskets in which they were packed.

On the morning of the fifth day, dropping from inanition, I dragged myself to Hingant's; I knocked at the door: it was closed. I called out; Hingant was some time without answering: at last he rose and opened the door. He laughed with a bewildered air; his frock-coat was buttoned; he sat down at the tea-table.

"Our breakfast is coming," he said in a strange voice.

I thought I saw some stains of blood on his shirt; I suddenly unbuttoned his coat: he had given himself a wound with a penknife, two inches deep, in his left breast. I called out for help. The maid-servant went to fetch a surgeon. The wound was dangerous.

This new misfortune obliged me to take a resolution. Hingant, who was a counsellor to the Parliament of Brittany, had refused to take the salary which the English Government allowed the French magistrates, in the same way that I had declined the shilling a day doled out to the Emigrants: I wrote to M. de Barentin[180] and disclosed my friend's position to him. Hingant's relations hurried to his assistance and took him away to the country. At that very moment my uncle de Bedée forwarded me forty crowns, a touching offering from my persecuted family. I seemed to see all the gold of Peru before my eyes: the mite of the French prisoners supported the exiled Frenchman.

[Sidenote: Destitution.]

My destitution had impeded my work. As I delivered no more manuscript, the printing was suspended. Deprived of Hingant's company, I did not keep on my room at Baylis' at a guinea per month; I paid the quarter that was due and went away. Below the needy Emigrants who had served as my first protectors in London were others who were even more necessitous. There are degrees among the poor as among the rich; one can go from the man who in winter keeps himself warm with his dog down to him who shivers in his torn rags. My friends found me a room more suited to my diminishing fortune: one is not always at the height of prosperity! They installed me in the neighbourhood of Marylebone Street, in a garret whose dormer window overlooked a cemetery: every night the watchman's rattle told me of the proximity of body-snatchers. I had the consolation to hear that Hingant was out of danger.

Friends came to see me in my work-room. To judge from our independence and our poverty, we might have been taken for painters on the ruins of Rome; we were artists in wretchedness on the ruins of France. My face served as a model, my bed as a seat for my pupils. The bed consisted of a mattress and a blanket. I had no sheets; when it was cold my coat and a chair, added to my blanket, kept me warm. I was too weak to make my bed; it remained turned down as God had left it.

My cousin de La Boüétardais, turned out of a low Irish lodging for not paying his rent, although he had put his violin in pawn, came to ask me for a shelter against the constable: a vicar from Lower Brittany lent him a trestle-bed. La Boüétardais, like Hingant, had been a counsellor to the Parliament of Brittany; he did not possess a handkerchief to tie round his head; but he had deserted with bag and baggage, that is to say, he had brought away his square cap and his red robe, and he slept under the purple by my side. Jocular, a good musician with a fine voice, on nights when we could not sleep he would sit up quite naked on his trestles, put on his square cap, and sing ballads, accompanying himself on a guitar with only three strings. One night when the poor fellow was in this way humming _Scendi propizia_ from Metastasio's[181] _Hymn to Venus_, he was struck by a draught; he twisted his mouth, and he died of it, but not at once, for I rubbed his cheek heartily. We held counsel in our elevated room, argued on politics, and discussed the gossip of the Emigration. In the evening, we went to our aunts and cousins to dance, after the dresses had been trimmed with ribbons and the hats made up.

They who read this portion of my Memoirs are not aware that I have interrupted them twice: once to offer a great dinner to the Duke of York, brother of the King of England; and once to give a rout on the anniversary of the entry of the King of France into Paris, on the 8th of July. That rout cost me forty thousand francs. Peers and peeresses of the British Empire, ambassadors, distinguished foreigners filled my gorgeously-decorated rooms. My tables gleamed with the glitter of London crystal and the gold of Sèvres porcelain. The most delicate dainties, wines and flowers abounded. Portland Place was blocked with splendid carriages. Collinet and the band from Almack's enraptured the fashionable melancholy of the dandies and the dreamy elegance of the pensively-dancing ladies. The Opposition and the Ministerial majority had struck a truce: Mrs. Canning[182] talked to Lord Londonderry, Lady Jersey to the Duke of Wellington. Monsieur, who this year sent me his compliments on the sumptuousness of my entertainments in 1822, did not know in 1793 that, not far from him, lived a future minister who, while awaiting the advent of his greatness, fasted over a cemetery for his sin of loyalty. I congratulate myself to-day on having experienced shipwreck, gone through war, and shared the sufferings of the humblest classes of society, as I applaud myself for meeting with injustice and calumny in times of prosperity. I have profited by these lessons: life, without the ills that make it serious, is a child's bauble.

*

I was the man with the forty crowns; but since fortunes had not yet been levelled, nor the price of commodities reduced, there was nothing to serve as a counterpoise to my rapidly diminishing purse. I could not reckon on further help from my family, exposed in Brittany to the double scourge of the Chouans[183] and the Terror. I saw nothing before me but the workhouse or the Thames.

[Sidenote: A contrast.]

Some of the Emigrants' servants, whom their masters could no longer feed, had turned into eating-house keepers in order to feed their masters. God knows the merry meals that were made at these ordinaries! God knows, too, what politics were talked there! All the victories of the Republic were turned into defeats, and, if by chance one entertained a doubt as to an immediate restoration, he was declared a Jacobin. Two old bishops, who looked like live corpses, were walking one morning in St James's Park:

"Monseigneur," said one, "do you think we shall be in France by June?"

"Why, monseigneur," replied the other, after ripe reflection, "I see nothing against it."

Peltier, the man of resource, unearthed me, or rather unnested me, in my eyry. He had read in a Yarmouth newspaper that a society of antiquarians was going to produce a history of the County of Suffolk, and that they wanted a Frenchman able to decipher some French twelfth-century manuscripts from the Camden[184] Collection. The parson at Beccles was at the head of the undertaking; he was the man to whom to apply.

"That will just suit you," said Peltier; "go down there, decipher that old waste-paper, go on sending copy for the _Essai_ to Baylis; I'll make the wretch go on with his printing; and you will come back to London with two hundred guineas in your pocket, your work done, and go ahead!" I tried to stammer out some objections:

"What the deuce!" cried my man. "Do you want to stay in this _palace_, where I'm catching cold already? If Rivarol, Champcenetz, Mirabeau-Tonneau and I had gone about pursing up our mouths, a fine business we should have made of the _Actes des Apôtres!_ Do you know that that story of Hingant is making the devil of a to-do? So you both wanted to let yourself die of hunger, did you? Ha, ha, ha! Pouf!.... Ha, ha!"

Peltier, doubled in two, was holding his knees with laughter. He had just received a hundred subscriptions to his paper from the colonies; he had been paid for them, and jingled his guineas in his pocket. He dragged me by main force, together with the apoplectic La Boüétardais and two tattered Emigrants who were at hand, to dine at the London Tavern. He made us drink port and eat roast beef and plum-pudding till we were ready to burst.

"Monsieur le comte," he asked my cousin, "what makes you carry your potato-trap askew like that?"

La Boüétardais, half shocked, half pleased, explained the thing as best he could; he described how he had been suddenly seized while singing the words, "_O bella Venere!_" My poor paralytic looked so dead, so benumbed, so shabby, as he stammered out his "_bella Venere_" that Peltier fell back, roaring with laughter, and almost upset the table by striking it with his two feet underneath.

[Sidenote: I go to Beccles.]

Upon reflection, the advice of my fellow-countryman, a real character out of my other fellow-countryman, Le Sage[185], did not appear to me so bad. After three days spent in making inquiries and in obtaining some clothes from Peltier's tailor, I set out for Beccles with some money lent me by Deboffe, on the understanding that I was going on with the _Essai._ I changed my name, which no Englishman was able to pronounce, for that of Combourg, which had been borne by my brother, and which reminded me of the sorrows and pleasures of my early youth. I alighted at the inn, and handed the minister of the place a letter from Deboffe, who was greatly esteemed in the English book-world. The letter recommended me as a scholar of the first rank. I was very well received, saw all the gentlemen of the district, and met two officers of our Royal Navy who were giving French lessons in the neighbourhood.

*

My strength improved; my trips on horseback restored my health a little. England, viewed thus in detail, was melancholy, but charming; it was the same thing, the same outlook wherever I went. M. de Combourg was invited to every party. I owed to study the first alleviation of my lot. Cicero was right to recommend the commerce of letters in the troubles of life. The women were delighted to meet a Frenchman to talk French with.

The misfortunes of my family, which I learnt from the newspapers, and which made me known by my real name (for I was unable to conceal my grief), increased the interest which my acquaintances took in me. The public journals announced the death of M. de Malesherbes; of his daughter, Madame la Présidente de Rosanbo; of his granddaughter, Madame de Chateaubriand; and of his grandson-in-law, the Comte de Chateaubriand, my brother, all immolated together, on the same day, at the same hour, on the same scaffold[186]. M. de Malesherbes was an object of admiration and veneration among the English; my family connection with the defender of Louis XVI. added to the kindness of my hosts.

My uncle de Bedée informed me of the persecutions endured by the rest of my relations. My old and incomparable mother had been flung into a cart with other victims and carried from the depths of Brittany to the gaols of Paris, in order to share the lot of the son whom she had loved so well. My wife and my sister Lucile were awaiting their sentence in the dungeons at Rennes; there had been a question of imprisoning them at Combourg Castle, which had become a State fortress: their innocence was accused of the crime of my emigration. What were our sorrows on foreign soil compared with those of the French who had remained at home? And yet, what unhappiness, amid the sufferings of exile, to know that our very exile was made the pretext for the persecution of our kin.

Two years ago my sister-in-law's wedding ring was picked up in the kennel of the Rue Cassette; it was brought to me, broken; the two hoops of the ring had come apart and hung linked together; the names were clearly legible engraved inside. How had the ring come to be found there? When and where had it been lost? Had the victim, imprisoned at the Luxembourg, passed by the Rue Cassette on her way to execution? Had she dropped the ring from the tumbril? Had the ring been torn from her finger after the execution? I was shocked at the sight of this symbol, which, both by its broken condition and its inscription, reminded me of a destiny so cruel. Something fatal and mysterious was attached to this ring, which my sister-in-law seemed to send me from among the dead, in memory of herself and my brother. I have given it to her son[187]: may it not bring him ill-luck!

Cher orphelin, image de ta mère,
Au ciel pour toi, je demande, ici-bas,
Les jours heureux retranchés à ton père
Et les enfants que ton oncle n'a pas[188].

This halting stanza and two or three others are the only present I was able to make my nephew on his marriage.

[Sidenote: Execution of my brother.]

Another relic remains to me of these misfortunes. The following is a letter which M. de Contencin wrote to me when, in turning over the city records, he found the order of the revolutionary tribunal which sent my brother and his family to the scaffold:

"Monsieur le vicomte,

"There is a sort of cruelty in awaking in a mind that has
suffered much the memory of the ills which have affected it
most painfully. This consideration made me hesitate some time
before offering for your acceptance a very pathetic document,
upon which I alighted in the course of my historical
researches. It is a death-certificate, signed before the
decease by a man who always displayed himself as implacable
as death itself, whenever he found illustriousness and virtue
united in the same person.

"I hope, monsieur le vicomte, that you will not take it too
ill of me if I add to your family records a document which
recalls such cruel memories. I presumed that it would have an
interest for you, since it had a value in my eyes, and I at
once thought of offering it to you. If I am not guilty of an
indiscretion, I shall be doubly gratified, as this proceeding
gives me the opportunity to express to you the feelings of
profound respect and sincere admiration with which you have
long inspired me, and with I am, monsieur le vicomte,

"your most humble, obedient servant,

"A. DE CONTENCIN.

"Prefecture of the Seine,

"Paris, 28 _March_ 1835."

I replied to the above letter as follows:

"I had had the Sainte-Chapelle searched, monsieur, for the
documents concerning the trial of my unfortunate brother and
his wife, but the 'order' which you have been good enough to
send me was not to be found. This order and so many others,
with their erasures and their mangled names, have doubtless
been presented to Fouquier before the tribunal of God; he
will have been compelled to acknowledge his signature. Those
are the times which people regret, and on which they write
volumes filled with admiration! For the rest, I envy my
brother: he, at least, has since many a long year quitted
this sad world. I thank you infinitely, monsieur, for the
esteem which you have shown me in your beautiful and noble
letter, and I beg you to accept the assurance of the very
distinguished consideration with which I have the honour to
be, etc."

This death order is, above all, remarkable for the proof which it affords of the levity with which the murders were committed: names are wrongly spelt, others are effaced. These defects of form, which would have been enough to stay the simplest sentence, did not stop the headsmen; all they cared for was the exact hour of death: "at five o'clock precisely." Here is the authentic document, I copy it faithfully:

"Executor of Criminal Judgments,

"REVOLUTIONARY TRIBUNAL.

"The executor of criminal judgments will not fail to go to
the house of justice of the Conciergerie, there to execute
the judgment which condemns Mousset, d'Esprémenil, Chapelier,
Thouret, Hell, Lamoignon Malsherbes, the woman Lepelletier
Rosambo, Chateau Brian, and his wife [proper name effaced
and illegible], the widow Duchatelet, the wife of Grammont,
formerly duke, the woman Rochechuart [Rochechouart], and
Parmentier;--14, to the penalty of death. The execution will
take place to-day, at five o'clock precisely, on the Place de
la Révolution in this city.

"H. Q. FOUQUIER,

"Public Prosecutor.

"Given at the Tribunal, 3 Floréal, Year II. of the French
Republic.

"_Two conveyances._"

The 9 Thermidor saved my mother's days; but she was forgotten at the Conciergerie. The conventional commissary found her:

"What are you doing here, citizeness?" he asked. "Who are you? Why do you stay here?"

My mother replied that, having lost her son, she had not inquired what was going on, and that it was indifferent to her whether she died in prison or elsewhere.

"But perhaps you have other children?" said the commissary.

[Sidenote: Release of my mother.]

My mother mentioned my wife and sisters detained in custody at Rennes. An order was sent to place them at liberty, and my mother was compelled to leave the prison.

In the histories of the Revolution, the writers have omitted to set the picture of outer France by the side of the picture of inner France, to depict that great colony of exiles, changing its industry and its sorrows in accordance with the diversity of climate and the difference in national manners.

Outside France, everything operated by individuals: changes of condition, obscure afflictions, noiseless and unrewarded sacrifices; and, in this variety of individuals of every rank, age and sex, one fixed idea was preserved: that of Old France travelling with her prejudices and her faithful sons, as formerly the Church of God had wandered over the earth with her virtues and her martyrs.

Inside France, everything operated in the mass: Barère announcing murders and conquests, civil wars and foreign wars; the gigantic combats of the Vendée and on the banks of the Rhine; thrones toppling to the sound of the march of our armies; our fleets swallowed up by the waves; the people disinterring the monarchs at Saint-Denis and flinging the dust of the dead kings into the eyes of the living kings to blind them; New France, glorying in her new-found liberties, proud even of her crimes, steadfast on her own soil, while extending her frontiers, doubly armed with the headsman's blade and the soldier's sword.

In the midst of my family sorrows I received some letters from my friend Hingant, to reassure me as to his fate: letters very remarkable in themselves; he wrote to me in September 1795:

"Your letter of the 23rd of August is full of the most
touching feeling. I showed it to a few people, whose eyes
filled with tears on reading it. I was almost tempted to say
what Diderot said on the day when J. J. Rousseau came and
cried in his prison at Vincennes:

"'See how my friends love me.'

"My illness, as a matter of fact, was only one of those
nervous fevers which cause great suffering, and for which
time and patience are the best remedies. During the fever I
read extracts from the _Phædo_ and _Timæus_, and I said with
Cato:

"'It must be so, Plato; thou reason'st well[189]!'

"I had formed an idea of my journey as one might form an idea
of a voyage to India. I imagined that I should see many new
objects in the 'spirit world,' as Swedenborg calls it, and
above all that I should be free from the fatigue and dangers
of the journey."

Eight miles from Beccles, in a little town called Bungay, lived an English clergyman, the Rev. Mr. Ives[190], a great Hellenist and mathematician. He had a wife who was still young, with a charming appearance, mind and manners, and an only daughter, fifteen years of age. I was introduced to this household, and was better received there than anywhere else. We took our wine in the old English fashion, and sat two hours at table after the ladies had left. Mr. Ives, who had been to America, liked to tell of his travels, to hear the story of my own, to talk of Newton and Homer. His daughter, who had become learned in order to please her father, was an excellent musician, and sang as Madame Pasta[191] sings to-day. She reappeared in time to pour out tea, and charmed away the old parson's infectious drowsiness. Leaning against the end of the piano, I listened to Miss Ives in silence.

When the music was over, the young lady questioned me about France, about literature; asked me to set her plans of studies; she wished particularly to know the Italian authors, and begged me to give her some notes on the _Divina Commedia_ and the _Gerusalemme._ Gradually I began to experience a timid charm that issued from the soul: I had decked the Floridans, I should not have ventured to pick up Miss Ives's glove; I grew confused when I tried to translate a passage from Tasso. I was more at my ease with that chaster and more masculine genius, Dante.

Charlotte Ives's age and my own were suited. Into friendships formed in the midst of one's career, there enters a certain melancholy; when two people do not meet at the very outset, the memories of the person beloved are not mingled with that portion of our days in which we breathed without knowing her: those days, which belong to another society, are painful to the memory, and as though curtailed from our existence. When there is a disproportion of age, the drawbacks increase: the older of the two commenced life before the younger was born; the younger is destined to remain alone in his turn: one has walked in a solitude this side of a cradle, the other will cross a solitude that side of a tomb; the past was a desert for the first, the future will be a desert for the second. It is difficult to be in love in all the conditions that produce happiness: youth, beauty, seasonable time, harmony of hearts, tastes, character, graces, and years.

Having had a fall from my horse, I stayed some time with Mr. Ives. It was winter; the dreams of my life began to flee before reality. Miss Ives became more reserved; she ceased to bring me flowers; she would no longer sing.

[Sidenote: Charlotte Ives.]

If I could have been told that I should pass the rest of my life unknown in the bosom of this retiring family, I should have died of pleasure: love needs but permanency to become at once an Eden before the fall and an Hosanna without end. Contrive that beauty lasts, that youth remains, that the heart can never weary, and you reproduce Heaven. Love is so surely the sovereign felicity that it is pursued by the phantom of perpetuity; it will consent to pronounce only irrevocable vows; in the absence of joys, it seeks to make endless its sorrows; a fallen angel, it still speaks the language it spoke in the incorruptible abode; its hope is that it may never cease; in its twofold nature and its twofold illusion here below, it strives to perpetuate itself by immortal thoughts and never-failing generations.

I beheld with dismay the moment approach when I should be obliged to go. On the eve of the day announced for my departure, our dinner was a gloomy one. To my great surprise, Mr. Ives withdrew at dessert, taking his daughter with him, and I remained alone with Mrs. Ives: she was extremely embarrassed. I thought she was going to reproach me with an inclination which she might have discovered, although I had never mentioned it. She looked at me, lowered her eyes, blushed; herself bewitching in her confusion, there was no sentiment which she might not by right have claimed for herself. At last, overcoming with an effort the obstacle which had prevented her from speaking:

"Sir," she said in English, "you behold my confusion: I do not know if Charlotte pleases you, but it is impossible to deceive a mother's eyes; my daughter has certainly conceived an attachment for you. Mr. Ives and I have consulted together: you suit us in every respect; we believe you will make our daughter happy. You no longer possess a country; you have lost your relations; your property is sold: what is there to take you back to France? Until you inherit what we have, you will live with us."

Of all the sorrows that I had undergone, this was the sorest and greatest. I threw myself at Mrs. Ives's feet; I covered her hands with my kisses and my tears. She thought I was weeping with happiness, and herself began to sob for joy. She stretched out her arm to pull the bell-rope; she called her husband and daughter:

"Stop!" I cried. "I am a married man!"

She fell back fainting.

I went out and, without returning to my room, left the house on foot I reached Beccles and took the mail for London, after writing a letter to Mrs. Ives of which I regret that I did not keep a copy.

I have retained the sweetest, the tenderest, the most grateful recollection of that event. Before I made my name, Mr. Ives's family was the only one that bore me good-will and welcomed me with genuine affection. Poor, unknown, proscribed, with neither beauty nor attraction, I was offered an assured future, a country, a charming wife to take me out of my loneliness, a mother almost as beautiful to fill the place of my old mother, a father full of information, loving and cultivating literature, to replace the father of whom Heaven had bereaved me: what did I bring to set off against all that? No illusion could possibly enter into the choice they made of me; there was no doubt that I was loved. Since that time, I have met with but one attachment sufficiently lofty to inspire me with the same confidence. As to any interest of which I may subsequently have been the object, I have never been able to make out whether outward causes, a noisy fame, official finery, the glamour of a high literary or political position were not the covering which attracted the attentions shown to me.

For the rest, if I had married Charlotte Ives, my part on earth would have been changed: buried in an English county, I should have become a sporting gentleman; not a single line would have fallen from my pen; I should even have forgotten my language, for I wrote in English, and my ideas were beginning to take shape in English in my head. Would my country have lost much by my disappearance? If I could put on one side that which has consoled me, I would say that I should already have numbered days of calm, instead of the troubled days that have fallen to my share. The Empire, the Restoration, the divisions and quarrels of France: what would all that have mattered to me? I should not each morning have to palliate faults, to contend with errors. Is it certain that I possess a real talent, and that that talent is worth the sacrifice of my whole life? Shall I outlast my tomb? If I do go beyond it, in the transformation which is now being brought about, in a changed world occupied with very different things, will there be a public to hear me? Shall I not be a man of the past, unintelligible to the new generations? Will not my ideas, my opinions, my very style seem tedious and antiquated to a scornful posterity? Will my shade be able to say, as the shade of Virgil said to Dante:

"_Poeta fui e cantai_: I was a poet and I sang?"[192]

*

[Sidenote: I return to London.]

I returned to London, but found no repose: I had fled from my fate as a miscreant from his crime. How painful it must have been to a family so worthy of my homage, of my respect, of my gratitude, to receive a sort of refusal from the unknown man whom they had welcomed, to whom they had offered a new home with a simplicity, an absence of suspicion, of precaution, almost patriarchal in character! I imagined Charlotte's grief, the just reproaches with which I was liable and deserved to be covered: for, after all, I had taken pleasure in yielding to an inclination of which I knew the insuperable unlawfulness. Had I, in fact, made a vain attempt at seduction, without taking into account the heinousness of my conduct? But whether I stopped, as I did, in order to remain an honest man, or overcame all obstacles in order to surrender to an inclination stigmatized beforehand through my conduct, I could only have plunged the object of that seduction into sorrow or regret.

From these bitter reflections I abandoned myself to other thoughts no less filled with bitterness: I cursed my marriage, which, according to the false perception of a mind at that time very sick, had thrown me out of my course and was robbing me of happiness. I did not reflect that, on account of the ailing temperament to which I was subject, and the romantic notions of liberty which I cherished, a marriage with Miss Ives would have been as painful to me as a more independent union.

One thing within me remained pure and charming, although profoundly sad: the image of Charlotte; that image ended by prevailing over my revolts against my fate. I was tempted a hundred times to return to Bungay, not to appear before the troubled family, but to hide by the road-side to see Charlotte pass, to follow her to the temple where we had the same God, if not the same altar, in common, to offer that woman, through the medium of Heaven, the inexpressible ardour of my vows, to pronounce, at least in thought, the prayer from the nuptial benediction which I might have heard from a clergyman's lips in that temple:

"O God,... look mercifully upon this thy handmaid. ... now to
be joined in wedlock.... May it be to her a yoke of love and
peace.... May she be fruitful in offspring ... that they may
both see their children's children unto the third and fourth
generation, and arrive at a desired old age[193]."

Wavering between resolve and resolve, I wrote Charlotte long letters which I tore up. A few unimportant notes which I had received from her served me as a talisman; attached to my steps by my thought, Charlotte, gracious and compassionate, followed me along the paths of my sylph, purifying them as she went. She absorbed my faculties; she was the centre through which my intelligence made its way, in the same way as the blood passes through the heart; she disgusted me with all else, for I made of her a perpetual object of comparison to her advantage. A real and unhappy passion is a poisoned leaven which remains at the bottom of the soul, and which would poison the bread of the angels.

The spots by which I had wandered, the hours and words which I had exchanged with Charlotte, were engraved on my memory: I saw the smile of the wife who had been destined for me; I respectfully touched her black tresses; I pressed her shapely arms to my breast, like a chain which I might have worn round my neck. No sooner was I in some sequestered spot than Charlotte, with her white hands, came to sit by my side. I divined her presence, as at night one inhales the perfume of unseen flowers.

I had lost Hingant's company, and my walks, more solitary than before, left me full liberty to carry with me the image of Charlotte. There was not a common, a road, a church, within thirty miles of London, that I did not visit. The most deserted places, a field of nettles, a ditch planted with thistles, all that was neglected by men, became favourite spots for me, and in those spots Byron already drew breath. Leaning my head upon my hand, I contemplated the scorned sites; when their painful impression affected me too greatly, the memory of Charlotte came to enchant me: I was then like the pilgrim who, on reaching a solitude within view of the rocks of Mount Sinai, heard the nightingale sing.

In London, my habits aroused surprise. I looked at nobody, I never replied, I did not know what was said to me: my old associates suspected me of madness.

*

What happened at Bungay after my departure? What became of that family to which I had brought joy and mourning?

You will have remembered that I am at present Ambassador to the Court of George IV., and that I am writing in London, in 1822, of what happened to me in London in 1795.

Some matters of business obliged me, a week ago, to interrupt the narrative which I resume to-day. During this interval, my man came and told me one morning, between twelve and one o'clock, that a carriage had stopped at my door and that an English lady was asking to see me. As I have made it a rule, in my public position, to deny myself to nobody, I ordered the lady to be shown up.

[Sidenote: Lady Sutton.]

I was in my study, when Lady Sutton was announced; I saw a lady in mourning enter the room, accompanied by two handsome boys also in mourning: one might have been sixteen, the other fourteen years of age. I went towards the stranger; her perturbation was such that she could hardly walk. She said to me, in faltering accents:

"My lord, do you remember me?"

Yes, I remembered Miss Ives! The years which had passed over her head had left only their spring-time behind. I took her by the hand, I made her sit down, and I sat down by her side. I could not speak; my eyes were full of tears; I gazed at her in silence through those tears; I felt how deeply I had loved her by what I was now experiencing. At last I was able to say, in my turn:

"And you, madam, do you remember me?"

She raised her eyes, which till then she had kept lowered, and for sole reply gave me a smiling and melancholy glance, like a long remembrance. Her hand still lay between mine. Charlotte said to me:

"I am in mourning for my mother; my father has been dead many years. These are my children."

At these words, she drew away her hand and sank back into her chair, covering her eyes with her handkerchief. Soon she resumed: