Chapter XVIII: Book XII: 500 (2)

De Brosses believes that, if the Prince of Wales attempts anything, he will not succeed, and he gives his reasons. Returning to Rome after his gallant exploits, Charles Edward, who bore the name of Count of Albany, lost his father[637]; he married the Princess of Stolberg-Gedern[638] and settled in Tuscany. Is it true that he secretly visited London in 1753 and 1761, as Hume tells us, that he was present at the coronation of George III., and that he said to some one who recognised him in the crowd:

"The man who is the object of all this pomp is he whom I envy least?"

The Pretender's was not a happy union; the Countess of Albany separated from him and fixed her residence in Rome: it was there that another traveller, Bonstetten[639], met her; the Bernese gentleman, in his old age, gave me to understand, at Geneva, that he had letters written in the first youth of the Countess of Albany[640].

Alfieri saw the wife of the Pretender at Florence, and fell in love with her for life:

"Twelve years afterwards," he says, "at the moment I am
writing, and at an age when the illusions of the passions
have ceased to operate, I feel that I become daily more
attached to her, in proportion as time destroys the
brilliancy of her fleeting beauty, the only charm which she
owes not to herself. Whenever I reflect on her virtues, my
soul is elevated, improved and tranquillized, and I dare to
affirm that the feelings of her mind, which I have uniformly
endeavoured to fortify and confirm, are not dissimilar to my
own[641]."

I have met Madame d'Albany at Florence; age had apparently produced in her an effect contrary to that which it generally produces: time ennobles the countenance and, when it belongs to an old race, imprints some trace of that race on the brow which it has marked; the Countess of Albany was thick-set, with expressionless features and a common air. If the women in Rubens' pictures were to grow old, they would be like Madame d'Albany at the age at which I met her. I am sorry that that heart, "fortified and confirmed" by Alfieri, should have had need of another support[642]. I will here recall a passage from my Letter on Rome to M. de Fontanes:

"Do you know that I only once saw Count Alfieri in my life,
and could you guess how? I saw him laid in his bier: I was
told that he had hardly altered; his physiognomy appeared to
me to be noble and grave; death doubtless gave it an added
severity; the coffin was a little too short, and they bent
the dead man's head upon his breast, which caused him to make
a terrible movement."

Nothing is so sad as, at the end of our days, to read what we have written in our youth: all that was in the present is now in the past.

[Sidenote: King Henry IX.]

I saw for a moment in Rome, in 1803, the Cardinal of York, Henry IX., that last of the Stuarts[643], then seventy-nine years of age. He had had the weakness to accept a pension from George III.: the widow of Charles I.[644] had in vain begged one from Cromwell. Thus the House of Stuart took one hundred and nineteen years to die out after losing the throne which it never recovered. Three pretenders have handed on to one another in exile the shadow of a crown; they had intelligence and courage: what did they lack? The hand of God.

Besides, the Stuarts consoled themselves at the sight of Rome; they were but one slight accident the more in those vast fragments, a small shattered column raised in the midst of a great burial-ground of ruins. Their House, in disappearing from the world, enjoyed yet this further comfort: it saw the fall of old Europe; the fatality clinging to the Stuarts dragged other kings with them to the dust, among whom was Louis XVI., whose grandfather had refused an asylum to the descendant of Charles I.[645], and Charles X. has died in exile at the age of the Cardinal of York, and his son and his grandson are wanderers on the face of the earth!

Lalande's[646] Journey in Italy, in 1765 and 1766, remains the best and the most exact as regards the Rome of the arts and of antiquities:

"I like to read the historians and poets," he says, "but one
could not read them with more pleasure than when treading the
soil which bore them, climbing the hills they describe, and
watching the flow of the rivers they have sung."

That is not so bad for an astronomer who used to eat spiders.

Duclos[647], who is almost as lean and dry as Lalande, makes this shrewd observation:

"The plays of the different nations give a fairly correct
image of their manners. Harlequin, the valet and the
principal character in the Italian comedies, is always
represented with a great desire for eating, which comes
from an habitual need. Our own comedy valets are commonly
drunkards, which may imply debauchery, but not penury."

The declamatory admiration of Dupaty[648] offers no compensation for the aridity of Duclos and Lalande; still it makes one feel the presence of Rome; one feels by reflex that eloquence of descriptive style is born under the breath of Rousseau, _spiraculum vitæ._ Dupaty approaches the new school which was soon to substitute sentimentality, obscurity and mannerism for the truthfulness, clarity and naturalness of Voltaire. Nevertheless, across his affected jargon, Dupaty observes correctly; he explains the patience of the people of Rome through the age of their successive pontiffs:

"A pope," he says, "is always to them a dying king[649]."

Dupaty sees night approach at the Villa Borghese:

"There remains but one ray of day... it is expiring on the
brow of that Venus[650]."

Would the poets of our day say better? He takes leave of Tivoli:

"Adieu, thou valley!... I am a stranger; I do not inhabit
your beautiful Italy; I shall never behold you more: but
perhaps my children, some at least of my children, will come
to visit you one day; appear but as charming in their eyes as
you have to their father[651]."

"Some of the children" of the scholar and poet have visited Rome, and they could have seen the last ray of sunlight expire on the brow of the Venus Genitrix of Dupaty[652].

[Sidenote: Dupaty, Goethe.]

Scarce had Dupaty left Rome when Goethe came to take his place[653]. Did the president of the Parliament of Bordeaux ever hear speak of Goethe? And nevertheless the name of Goethe lives on this earth whence that of Dupaty has vanished. It is not that I love the mighty genius of Germany; I have little sympathy for the poet of matter: I feel Schiller, I understand Goethe. There may be great beauties in the enthusiasm which Goethe experiences in Rome for Jupiter: excellent critics think so; but I prefer the God of the Cross to the God of Olympus. I look in vain for the author of _Werther_ along the banks of the Tiber; I find him only in this phrase:

"My present life is as it were a dream of youth; we shall see
if I am fated to enjoy it, or to recognise that this too is
vain, as so many others have been."

When Napoleon's eagle allowed Rome to escape from its claws, she fell back into the bosom of her peaceful pastors: then Byron appeared at the crumbling walls of the Cæsars[654]; he flung his distressed imagination over so many ruins, like a mourning cloak. Rome, thou hadst a name, he gave thee another; that name will cling to thee; he called thee:

"The Niobe of nations! there she stands,
Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe;
An empty urn within her wither'd hands,
Whose holy dust was scatter'd long ago[655]."

After that last storm of poetry, Byron was not long in dying[656]. I might have seen Byron at Geneva, and I did not see him; I might have seen Goethe at Weimar, and I did not see him; but I saw Madame de Staël die, who, disdaining to live beyond her youth, passed swiftly to the Capitol with Corinne: imperishable names, illustrious ashes, which have associated themselves with the name and the ashes of the Eternal City[657].

Thus have the changes in manners and persons proceeded from century to century in Italy; but the great transformation has been worked, above all, by our two occupations of Rome.

The "Roman Republic," established under the influence of the Directorate, ridiculous as it was with its two "consuls" and its "lictors" (scurvy _facchini_ taken from the populace), for all that, made excellent innovations in the civil laws: it was from the prefectures, invented by that "Roman Republic," that Bonaparte borrowed the institution of his own prefects.

[Sidenote: The "Roman Republic."]

We brought to Rome the germ of an administration which had no existence; Rome, become the chief town of the Department of the Tiber, was superlatively well ruled. Its mortgage system it owes to us. The suppression of the convents, the sale of ecclesiastical property sanctioned by Pius VII. have diminished the faith in the permanence of the consecration of religious things. The famous _Index_, which still makes a little noise on our side of the Alps, makes none at all in Rome: for a few _bajocchi_ you obtain permission to read the forbidden work with a safe conscience. The _Index_ is one of those works which remain as evidences of the old times in the midst of the new. In the Republics of Rome and Athens, were not the titles of "King," the names of the great families adhering to the Monarchy respectfully preserved? It is only the French who foolishly take offense at their tombs and their annals, who hurl down the crosses, devastate the churches, out of grudge against the clergy of the Year of Grace 1000 or 1100. There is nothing more puerile or more stupid than those reminiscent outrages; nothing which would tend more to the belief that we are incapable of anything serious whatsoever, that the true principles of liberty will for ever remain unknown to us. Far from despising the past, we ought, as all nations do, to treat it as a venerable greybeard, who sits by our fireside telling what he has seen: what harm can he do us? He instructs and amuses us with his stories, his ideas, his language, his manners, his habits of former days; but he is without strength, and his hands are weak and trembling. Can it be that we are afraid of that contemporary of our fathers, who would already be with them in the tomb, if he could die, and who has no authority, save that of their dust?

The French, passing through Rome, left their principles there: that is what always happens when the conquest is accomplished by a people more advanced in civilization than the people which undergoes that conquest, as witness the Greeks in Asia under Alexander, as witness the French in Europe under Napoleon. Bonaparte, when snatching sons from their mothers, when forcing the Italian nobility to leave its palaces and bear arms, was hastening the transformation of the national spirit.

As to the physiognomy of Roman society, on days of concerts or balls one might have thought himself in Paris. The Altieris[658], the Palestrinas[659], the Zagarolos[660], the Del Dragos[661], the Lantes[662], the Lozzanos would not have felt strangers in the drawing-rooms of the Faubourg Saint-Germain: still, some of those women wear a certain frightened air which has, I believe, to do with the climate. The charming Falconieri, for instance, always stands near a door, ready to fly to the Monte Mario if you look at her: the Villa Millini[663] belongs to her; a novel placed in that abandoned lodge, under the cypress trees, in view of the sea, would have its value.

But, whatever the changes in manners and persons, from century to century, in Italy may be, we observe a habit of greatness there which we paltry barbarians cannot approach. There still remains Roman blood in Rome and the traditions of the masters of the world. When one sees foreigners crammed into small new houses at the Porta del Popolo, or lodged in palaces which they have divided into boxes and pierced with chimneys, it is as though one saw rats scratching at the feet of the monuments of Apollodorus[664] and Michael Angelo and gnawing holes into the pyramids.

To-day, the Roman nobles, ruined by the Revolution, immure themselves within their palaces, live parsimoniously and have become their own stewards. When you have the good fortune, which happens very rarely, to be received by them in the evening, you pass through vast halls, unfurnished and scarcely lighted, along which antique statues stand out white against the thick shadow, like phantoms or exhumed corpses. At the end of those halls, the ragged footman who leads the way ushers you into a sort of gynecæum: around a table are seated three or four, old or young, ill-dressed women, plying their needles at fancy-work, by the light of a lamp, and exchanging a few words with a father, a brother, a husband recumbent in the dim background on tattered arm-chairs. Nevertheless, there is something, I know not what, fine, sovereign, appertaining to high breeding, in this assemblage entrenched behind its master-pieces and giving a first impression of a witches' Sabbath. The species of the _cicisbei_ is extinct, although a few shawl-bearing and footwarmer-carrying abbés survive; here and there, a cardinal still fixes himself in a woman's house like a sofa.

Nepotism and pontifical scandals are no longer possible, just as kings can no longer keep titular and honoured mistresses. Nowadays, when politics and the tragic adventures of love have ceased to fill the lives of the great ladies of Rome, how do they spend their time in the interior of their homes? It would be interesting to get to the bottom of these new manners; if I stay in Rome, I shall make it my business to do so.

*

I visited Tivoli in 1803; at that time I said, in a narrative which was printed then:

"This spot is suited to reflection and day-dreams; I go back
into my past life; I feel the burden of the present; I seek
to penetrate the future; where shall I be, what shall I be
doing and what shall I be _twenty years hence_?"

Twenty years! It seemed a century to me; I thought myself certain of inhabiting my tomb before that century had lapsed. And it is not I that have passed away, but the master of the world and his empire that have sped!

Almost all the ancient and modern travellers saw in the Roman Campagna only what they call "its horror and its nudity." Montaigne himself, who assuredly was not lacking in imagination, says:

"Far away on the left lay the Apennines; the aspect of the
foreground was exceedingly unpleasant to the eye, hilly, with
every here and there deep marshes... the country ...open,
barren, and altogether destitute of trees, and almost equally
so of houses[665]."

The Protestant Milton casts upon the Roman Campagna a look as dry and barren as his faith. Lalande and the Président De Brosses are as blind as Milton. Only in M. de Bonstetten's _Voyage sur la scène des six derniers livres de l'Énéide_, published at Geneva in 1804, one year after my Letter to M. de Fontanes (printed in the _Mercure_ at the end of the year 1803), do we find any true sensations of that admirable solitude, and even they are mingled with objurgations:

"What a pleasure to read Virgil under the sky of Æneas
and, so to speak, in the presence of the gods of Homer!" says
M. de Bonstetten. "What a profound solitude in these deserts
in which we behold only the sea, ruined woods, trees, great
meadows, and not one inhabitant! In a vast extent of country,
I saw but a single house, and that house was near me, on the
summit of a hill. I went to it, it had no door; I climbed a
stair-case, I entered a sort of chamber, a bird of prey had
built its nest there....

"I stood some time at the window of that abandoned house. I
saw at my feet that declivity, so rich and so magnificent in
Pliny's day, now uncultivated."

Since my description of the Roman Campagna, they have passed from disparagement to enthusiasm. The English and French travellers who have followed me have marked all their steps from the Storta to Rome by ecstasies. M. de Tournon[666], in his _Études statistiques_, enters the road of admiration which I had the happiness to open:

"The Roman Campagna," he says, "unfolds more distinctly,
at each step, the serious beauty of its immense lines,
its numerous plains and its fine frame of mountains. Its
monotonous grandeur impresses and elevates the thought."

I have no need to mention M. Simond[667], whose journey reads like a wager, so much does he amuse himself by looking at Rome upside down. I was at Geneva when he died almost suddenly. A farmer, he had just cut his hay and gaily reaped his first grain, when he went to join his mown grass and his gathered harvest.

We have a few letters of the great landscape painters; Poussin and Claude Lorraine do not say a word about the Roman Campagna. But, if their pen is silent, their brush speaks; the _Agro Romano_ was a mysterious source of beauty, at which they drew, while hiding it by a sort of avarice of genius and as it were in fear, lest it should be profaned by the vulgar. Strange that it should be French eyes that best saw the light of Italy.

[Sidenote: Vandalism in the Campagna.]

I have read again my Letter to M. de Fontanes on Rome, written five and twenty years ago, and I confess that I have found it so exact that it would be impossible for me to take away or add a word to it. A foreign company has come this winter (1829) to propose to clear the Roman Campagna: ah, gentlemen, spare us your cottages and your English gardens on the Janiculum! If ever they were to disfigure the waste lands against which the ploughshare of Cincinnatus struck, on which all the grasses bend before the breath of the centuries, I should fly Rome, never to set foot in it again. Go to drag your improved ploughs elsewhere; here the earth grows and must grow only tombs. The cardinals have closed their ears to the calculations of the commercial adventurers hastening to demolish the ruins of Tusculum, which they mistake for the castles of aristocrats: they would have made lime with the marble of the sarcophagus of Æmilius Paulus, even as they have made water-shoots with the lead of the coffins of our ancestors. The Sacred College clings to the past; besides, it has been proved, to the great confusion of the economists, that the Roman Campagna paid the owners five per cent, as pasture-land and that it would not yield more than one and a half in corn. It is not through idleness, but through practical interest, that the cultivator of the plains gives the preference to _pastorizia_ over _maggesi._ The produce of an acre in the Roman territory is almost equal to the produce of the same measure in the best French departments: to convince one's self of that, one has but to read the work of Monsignore Nicolaï[668].

*

I have told you that, at first, I had a sense of weariness, at the commencement of my second journey to Rome, and that I ended by recovering under the influence of the ruins and the sun. I was still under my first impression when, on the 3rd of November 1828, I wrote to M. Villemain:

"Your letter, monsieur, was very welcome in my Roman
solitude: it has stayed my home-sickness, from which I
was suffering badly. That complaint is nothing else than
my years, which deprive my eyes of the power of seeing as
they saw before: my own ruin is not great enough to find
consolation in that of Rome. When I now wander alone amid all
these remains of the centuries, they no longer serve me as
a scale by which to measure time: I go back into the past,
I see what I have lost and the end of the short future that
lies before me; I count all the joys which I might have left,
I find none of them; I make an effort to admire what I used
to admire, and I admire it no longer. I come home to undergo
my honours, overcome by the _sirocco_ and stabbed by the
_tramontane._ There you have all my life, save only a tomb
which I have not yet had the courage to visit. We pay great
attention to crumbling monuments: we keep them up; we rid
them of their plants and flowers; the women whom I had left
young have become old, and the ruins have become young again:
what would you have one do here?

"Well, I assure you, monsieur, that I long only to return to
my Rue d'Enfer, never again to leave it. I have fulfilled
all my engagements towards my country and my friends. Once
you and M. Bertin de Vaux have entered the State Council, I
shall have nothing more to ask, for your talents will soon
carry you higher. My retirement has, I hope, done a little to
bring about the cessation of a formidable opposition; public
liberty has been won for France for ever. My sacrifice must
now end with my role in life. I ask nothing but to return to
my 'Infirmary.' I have nothing but praise for this country; I
have been admirably received, I have found a government full
of tolerance and very well informed of affairs outside Italy;
but, when all is said and done, nothing pleases me more than
the idea of disappearing entirely from the world's scene: it
is good to be preceded to the tomb by the silence which one
will find there.

"I thank you for being so good as to speak to me of your
labours. You will write a work which will be worthy of you
and increase your reputation[669]. If you have any researches
to make here, have the kindness to tell me of them: a rummage
in the Vatican might furnish you with treasures. Alas, I saw
but too much of that poor M. Thierry[670]! I assure you that
I am haunted by his memory: so young, so full of love for his
work, and to go! And, as always happens with real merit, his
mind was improving and reason, with him, taking the place
of system: I still hope for a miracle. I have written on
his behalf; I have not even had an answer. I have been more
fortunate for you, and a letter from M. de Martignac gives me
to hope at last that justice, although tardy and incomplete,
will be done you. I no longer live, monsieur, except for my
friends; you must permit me to include yourself in the number
of those who are still left to me.

"I remain, monsieur, with as much sincerity as admiration,

"Your most devoted servant[671],

"CHATEAUBRIAND."

[Sidenote: Augustin Thierry.]

TO MADAME RÉCAMIER

"ROME, _Saturday_, 8 _November_ 1832.

"M. de La Ferronnays informs me of the surrender of
Varna[672], which I knew. I believe that I once told you that
the whole question seemed to me to lie in the fall of that
place, and that the Grand Turk would not dream of peace until
the Russians had done what they did not do in their earlier
wars. Our newspapers have been wretchedly Turcophile these
last times. How can they ever have been able to forget the
noble cause of Greece and to fall into admiration before the
barbarians who spread slavery and pestilence over the country
of great men and the fairest portion of Europe? That is what
we are, we French: a trifle of personal discontent makes us
forget our principles and the most generous sentiments. The
Turks, when beaten, will perhaps arouse some pity in me; the
Turks victorious would fill me with horror.

"So my friend M. de La Ferronnays remains in power. I flatter
myself that my determination to follow him has got rid of
the competitors for his office. But, after all, I shall have
to leave this; I now long only to return to my solitude and
to quit the career of politics. I thirst for independence in
my last years. New generations have arisen, they will find
the public liberty established for which I have fought so
hard: let them then lay hold of, but let them not misuse my
inheritance, and let me go to die in peace near you.

"I went two days ago to walk in the grounds of the Villa
Panfili: what a beautiful solitude!"

"ROME, _Saturday_, 15 _November._

"There has been a first ball at Torlonia's[673]. I met all
the English on earth there; I thought myself still Ambassador
in London. The Englishwomen appear to me to be _figurantes_
who are engaged to dance in the winter in Paris, Milan,
Rome, Naples, and who return to London in the spring, when
their engagements have expired. The hoppings on the ruins of
the Capitol, the uniform manners which 'great' society puts
on everywhere are very strange things: if even I had the
resource of escape into the deserts of Rome!

"What is really deplorable here, what clashes with the nature
of the place is that multitude of insipid Englishwomen and
frivolous dandies who, holding each other linked by the arm,
as the bats do by the wing, parade their eccentricity, their
boredom and their insolence at your receptions, and make
themselves at home in your house as at an inn. This vagrant
and swaggering Great Britain makes for your seats at public
solemnities, and boxes with you to turn you out of them: all
day long it hastily swallows pictures and ruins and, in the
evening, it comes to swallow cakes and ices at your parties,
feeling that it confers a great honour upon you in doing so.
I do not know how an ambassador can endure those unmannerly
guests, nor why he does not show them his door."

[Sidenote: My Memorandum on the East.]

I have spoken in the _Congrès de Vérone_ of the existence of my Memorandum on Eastern Affairs. When I sent it, in 1828, to M. le Comte de La Ferronnays, then Minister for Foreign Affairs, the world was not what it is: in France, the Legitimacy existed; in Russia, Poland had not perished; Spain was still Bourbon; England had not yet the honour of protecting us. Many things, therefore, have become old in this Memorandum: to-day, my foreign policy would, in many respects, be different; twelve years have altered diplomatic relations, but the basis of the truths has remained the same. I have inserted this Memorandum in its entirety in order once more to revenge the Restoration for the absurd reproaches which continue to be obstinately addressed to it, in spite of the evidence of facts. The Restoration, so soon as it had chosen its ministers from among its friends, never ceased to occupy itself with the independence and honour of France: it protested against the Treaties of Vienna; it demanded protective frontiers, not for the vain-glory of pushing itself to the banks of the Rhine, but to ensure its safety; it laughed when they talked to it of the equilibrium of Europe, an equilibrium so unjustly broken where it was concerned: that was why it first wished to cover itself on the south, because it had pleased the others to disarm it on the north. At Navarino, it recovered a navy and the liberty of Greece; the Eastern Question did not take it unawares.

I have kept three opinions on the East from the time at which I wrote that Memorandum:

First, if Turkey in Europe is to be broken up, we must have a share in that distribution in the shape of an increase of territory on our frontiers and the ownership of some military point in the Archipelago. To compare the partition of Turkey with the partition of Poland is an absurdity.

Secondly, to regard Turkey, as it was during the reign of Francis I., as a useful power to our policy, is to do away with three centuries of history.

Thirdly, to pretend to civilize Turkey by giving her steamboats and railways, by disciplining her armies, by teaching her to work her fleets, is not to extend civilization to the East, but to introduce barbarism into the West. Ibrahims to come would be able to carry back the future to the time of Charles the Hammer or to the time of the Siege of Vienna, when Europe was saved by that heroic Poland on whom weighs the ingratitude of kings.

I must remark that I was the only one, with Benjamin Constant, to point out the improvidence of the Christian governments: a people whose social order is based upon slavery and polygamy is a people that must be sent back to the steppes of the Mongols.

In the last result, Turkey in Europe, become a vassal of Russia by virtue of the treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi[674], no longer exists: if the question is to be decided at once, which I doubt, it would perhaps be better that an independent empire should have its seat in Constantinople and form Greece into a whole. Is that possible? I do not know. As for Mehemet Ali[675], the relentless tax-gatherer and custom-house officer, Egypt, in so far as French interests are concerned, is better guarded by him than she would be by the English.

But here am I exerting myself to demonstrate the honour of the Restoration: why, who troubles himself about what it has done, who, above all, will trouble himself about it some years hence? It would be as well worth my while to become excited over the interests of Tyre and Ecbatana: that past world is gone, never to return. After Alexander, the Roman power commenced; after Cæsar, Christianity changed the world; after Charlemagne, the feudal night gave birth to a new society; after Napoleon, nothing: we see no empire come, nor religion, nor barbarians. Civilization has risen to its highest level, but it is a material civilization, an unfruitful civilization, which can produce nothing, since life can be given only by moral means; we can arrive at the creation of peoples only by the roads of Heaven: railways will lead us only more swiftly to the abyss.

You now have the prolegomena which seemed to me necessary for the understanding of the Memorandum which follows, and which is also to be found at the Foreign Office.

[Sidenote: To M. de La Ferronnays.]

LETTER TO M. LE COMTE DE LA FERRONAYS

"ROME, 30 _November_ 1828.

"In your private letter of the 10th of November, my noble
friend, you said:

"'I send you a brief summary of our political situation,
and you will be kind enough to let me, in return, have your
ideas, which are always so useful to know in matters of this
sort.'

"Your friendship, noble count, judges me too indulgently; I
do not in the least believe that I shall be enlightening you
by sending you the Memorandum annexed: I merely obey you."

MEMORANDUM