Chapter XV: Introduction (1)

"Remember, so as not to lose sight of the pace of the world, that
at that time[339]... there were citizens engaged, like myself, in
ransacking the archives of the past amid the ruins of the present,
in writing the annals of the old revolutions to the uproar of the
new revolutions; they and I taking as our table, in the crumbling
edifice, the stone that had fallen at our feet, while awaiting that
which was to crush our heads" (_Études historiques_).

"I would not, for the sake of the days that remain for me to live,
begin again the eighteen months that have just elapsed. None will
ever have an idea of the violence which I have done on myself; I
have been forced to abstract my mind, for ten, twelve and fifteen
hours a day, from what was passing around me, in order childishly
to abandon myself to the composition of a work of which no one
will read a line. Who would peruse four stout volumes, when it is
already so difficult to read the _feuilleton_ of a newspaper? I
was writing ancient history, and modern history was knocking at my
door; in vain I cried, 'Wait, I am coming to you:' it passed on,
to the sound of the cannon, carrying with it three generations of
kings.

"And how marvellously the times agree with the very nature of
these _Études!_ Men are overthrowing the Cross and persecuting the
priests, and the Cross and the priests occur on every page of my
narrative; they are banishing the Capets, and I am publishing a
history in which the Capets occupy eight centuries. The longest and
the last work of my life, that which has cost me most research,
care and years, that in which I have perhaps stirred up most ideas
and facts, appears at a time when it can find no readers; it is as
though I flung it into a pit, where it will sink down under the
mass of the rubbish that will follow it. When a society is being
composed and decomposed, when the existence of each and all is at
stake, when one is not sure of a future of an hour's duration, who
cares what his neighbour does, says, or thinks? Men have something
else to trouble their heads about than Nero, Constantine, Julian,
the Apostles, the Martyrs, the Fathers of the Church, the Goths,
the Huns, the Vandals, the Franks, Clovis, Charlemagne, Hugh Capet
and Henry IV.; they have something else to think of than the
shipwreck of the old world at a time when we are all involved in
the shipwreck of the new world! Does it not argue a sort of dotage,
a kind of feeble-mindedness, to busy one's self with literature at
such a time? That is true; but this dotage has nothing to do with
my brain, it comes from the antecedents of my spiteful fortune. If
I had not made so many sacrifices to the liberties of my country, I
should not have been obliged to contract engagements which are now
being fulfilled under circumstances doubly deplorable to myself.
No author has ever been put to such a proof; thank God, it is
nearly at an end: I have nothing left to do but to sit on ruins and
despise that life which I scorned in my youth.

"After these very natural complaints, which have involuntarily
escaped me, one thought comes to console me: I began my literary
career with a work in which I considered Christianity in its
poetic and moral aspects; I end it with a work in which I regard
the same religion in its philosophical and historical aspects: I
began my political career under the Restoration, I end it with the
Restoration. It is not without a secret satisfaction that I observe
this consistency with myself."

PARIS, _May_ 1831.

I have not abandoned the resolution which I conceived at the moment
of the catastrophe of July. I have been considering the ways and
means of living abroad: difficult ways and means, because I have
nothing; the purchaser of my works has all but made me a bankrupt,
and my debts prevent me from finding anyone willing to lend me
money.

[Sidenote: I leave for Geneva.]

Be this as it may, I shall go to Geneva[340] with the sum that
has accrued to me from the sale of my last pamphlet[341]. I am
leaving a procuration to sell the house in which I write this page
for the sake of the order of dates. If I find a customer for my
bed, I can find another bed outside France. In these uncertainties
and movements, it will be impossible for me, until I am settled
somewhere, to resume the sequence of my Memoirs at the place where
I interrupted them[342]. I shall continue, therefore, to write down
the things of the actual moment of my life; I shall communicate
these things by means of the letters which I may happen to write
on the road or during my different stoppages; I shall afterwards
join the intermediary facts by a "journal" which will fill up the
intervals between the dates of those letters.

[Sidenote: I leave for Geneva.]

TO MADAME RÉCAMIER[343]

"LYONS, _Wednesday_ 18 _May_ 1831.

"Here I am, too far away from you. I have never made so sad a
journey: wonderful weather, nature all arrayed, the nightingale
singing, a starry night; and all this for whom? I shall indeed have
to return to where you are, unless you be willing to come to my
aid[344]."

TO MADAME RÉCAMIER

"LYONS, _Friday_ 20 _May._

"I spent the day, yesterday, in wandering beside the Rhone; I
contemplated the town where you were born, the hill upon which rose
the convent where you were chosen as the fairest: an expectation
which you did not disappoint; and you are not here, and years have
elapsed, and you have since been exiled to your birth-place, and
Madame de Staël is no more, and I am leaving France! One singular
personage[345] belonging to those old days has appeared before
me: I send you his note, because of its unexpectedness and its
surprise. This personage, whom I had never seen, is planting pines
in the mountains of Lyonnais. It is a long cry from there to the
Rue Feydeau and the _Maison à vendre_: what different parts men
play on earth!

"Hyacinthe has told me of the regrets and the newspaper articles:
I am not worth all that You know that I sincerely think so for
twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four; the twenty-fourth is
dedicated to vanity, which, however, is of slight duration and soon
passes. I wanted to see nobody here; M. Thiers, who was on his way
to the South, forced my door."

NOTE ENCLOSED IN THE ABOVE LETTER

"A neighbour, your fellow-countryman, who has no other claim upon
you than a profound admiration for your glorious talent and your
admirable character, would like to have the honour of seeing
you and offering you the homage of his respect. This next-door
neighbour at your hotel, this fellow-countryman is called

"ELLEVIOU."

TO MADAME RÉCAMIER

"LYONS, _Sunday_ 22 _May._

"We leave to-morrow for Geneva, when I shall find more memories of
you. Shall I ever see France again, after I have once crossed the
frontier? Yes, if you will, that is to say, if you remain there.
I do not wish for the events which might offer me another chance
of returning; I shall never allow the misfortunes of my country
to enter among the number of my hopes. I shall write to you on
Tuesday, the 24th, from Geneva. When shall I again see your little
hand-writing, the younger sister of mine[346]?"

[Sidenote: Letters to Madame Récamier.]

"GENEVA, _Tuesday_ 24 _May._

"We arrived here yesterday and are looking at houses. We shall
probably make shift with a little summer-house on the edge of the
lake. I cannot tell you how sad I feel as I busy myself with these
arrangements. Again another future! Again to begin anew a life
which I thought I had ended! I mean to write you a long letter
when I am a little at rest: I dread that rest, for then I shall be
contemplating without distraction those dim years upon which I am
entering with a heart so much oppressed."

9 _June_ 1831.

"You know that a 'reformed' sect has been established in the midst
of the Protestants. One of the new pastors of the new church has
been to see me and has written me two letters worthy of the first
Apostles. He wants to convert me to his faith, and I want to turn
him into a 'Papist.' We argue as though living in Calvin's[347]
day, but loving each other in Christian brotherhood and without
burning one another. I do not despair of his salvation; he is quite
shaken by my arguments in favour of the Popes. You cannot conceive
the pitch of exaltation to which he has risen, and his candour
is admirable. If you come to me, accompanied by my old friend
Ballanche, we shall do wonders. In one of the Geneva newspapers,
a Protestant controversial book is advertised, and the authors
are urged to 'stand firm' because 'the author of the _Génie du
Christianisme_ is close at hand.'

"There is a certain consolation in finding a little free people,
administered by the most distinguished men, among which religious
ideas form the basis of liberty and the chief occupation of life.

"I lunched at M. de Constant's[348], beside Madame Necker[349],
who is unfortunately deaf, but a woman of rare qualities and the
greatest distinction: we spoke only of yourself. I had received
your letter and I told M. de Sismondi the amiable things you had
said for his benefit. You see I am taking your lessons.

"Lastly, here are some verses. You are my 'star' and I am waiting
for you to go to that enchanted island.

"Delphine[350] married: O Muses! I have told you in my last letter
why I could write neither on the peerage nor on the war: I should
be attacking a contemptible body to which I have belonged and
preaching honour to those who no longer possess it.

"It needs a sailor to read the verses and understand them. I put
myself in M. Lenormant's hands. Your intelligence will suffice
for the last three stanzas, and the key to the riddle is at the
foot[351]."

"GENEVA, 18 _June_ 1831.

"You have received all my letters. I am constantly expecting a
few words from you; I can see that there will be nothing for me,
but still I am always surprised when the post brings me only
newspapers. Not a soul writes to me, except yourself; not a soul
remembers me, except yourself, and that is a great charm. I love
your solitary letter, which does not arrive as it used to arrive in
the days of my magnificence, in the midst of packets of dispatches
and of all those letters of attachment, admiration and meanness
which vanish with fortune. After your little letters, I shall
see your fair self, if I do not go to join you. You shall be my
testamentary executrix; you shall sell my poor retreat; the price
will enable you to travel towards the sun. At this moment, the
weather is admirable: as I write to you I can see Mont Blanc in
its splendour; from the top of Mont Blanc one sees the Apennines:
it seems to me as though I have but three steps to take to arrive
in Rome, where we shall go, for all will get settled in France.

"Our glorious country lacked but one thing in order to have passed
through every form of wretchedness: to have a government of
cowards; she has it now, and her youth is about to be swallowed up
in doctrine, literature and debauch, according to the particular
character of the individual. The chapter of accidents remains;
but, when a man drags along life's road, as I do, the most likely
accident is the end of the journey.

"I do no work, I can do nothing more: I am bored; it is my nature,
and I am like a fish in water: nevertheless, if the water were a
little less deep, perhaps I should be better pleased in it"

[Sidenote: Geneva.]

JOURNAL FROM THE 12TH OF JULY TO THE 1ST OF SEPTEMBER 1831

THE PÂQUIS, NEAR GENEVA.

I am settled at the Pâquis[352] with Madame de Chateaubriand; I have made the acquaintance of M. Rigaud, Chief Syndic of Geneva: above his house, by the edge of the lake, going up the Lausanne Road, you find the villa of two clerks of M. de Lapanouze[353], who have spent 1,500,000 francs in building it and laying out their gardens. When I pass on foot before their dwelling-house, I wonder at Providence, which has placed witnesses of the Restoration at Geneva in them and in me. What a fool I am! What a fool! The Sieur de Lapanouze went through royalism and misery with me: see to what his clerks have risen for having favoured the Conversion of the Funds, which I had the simplicity to oppose and by virtue of which I was turned out Here are the gentlemen: they drive up in an elegant tilbury, hat on ear, and I am obliged to step into a ditch lest the wheel should carry off a skirt of my old frock-coat. And yet I have been a peer of France, a minister, an ambassador, and in a cardboard box I have all the principal Orders of Christendom, including the Holy Ghost and the Golden Fleece. If the clerks of the Sieur César de Lapanouze, now millionaires, cared to buy my box of ribbons for their wives, they would do me a lively pleasure.

Nevertheless all is not roses for the Messieurs B---: they are not yet Genevese nobles, that is to say, they have not yet reached the second generation; their mother still lives in the lower part of the town and has not risen to the Saint-Pierre quarter, the Faubourg Saint-Germain of Geneva; but, with God's help, nobility will follow on money.

It was in 1805 that I saw Geneva for the first time. If two thousand years had elapsed between the dates of my two journeys, would they be further separated from each other than they are? Geneva belonged to France; Bonaparte was shining in all his glory, Madame de Staël in all hers; there was no more question of the Bourbons than if they had never existed. And Bonaparte, and Madame de Staël, and the Bourbons: what has become of them? And I, I am still there!

M. de Constant, a cousin of Benjamin Constant, and Mademoiselle de Constant, an old maid full of wit, virtue and talent, live in their cottage of "Souterre" on the bank of the Rhone; they are overlooked by another country-house, which was formerly M. de Constant's: he sold it to the Princesse Belgiojoso[354], a Milanese exile, whom I saw pass like a flower through the fête which I gave in Rome for the Grand-duchess Helen.

During my boating excursions, an old oarsman tells me of the deeds of Lord Byron, whose house we see standing on the Savoyard side of the lake. The noble peer would wait for a tempest to rise before setting sail; from the deck of his felucca, he leapt into the waves and swam in the midst of the gale to land at the feudal prisons of Bonivard: he was always the actor and the poet. I am not so eccentric: I also love the storms; but my loves with them are secret, and I do not confide them to the boatmen.

I have discovered, behind Ferney[355], a narrow valley, in which runs a tiny stream some seven or eight inches deep; this rivulet waters the roots of a few willows, hides itself here and there under patches of water-cress and shakes rushes on whose tips perch blue-winged dragon-flies. Did the man of trumpets ever see this refuge of silence right up against his resounding house? No, without a doubt: well, the water is there; it still flows; I do not know its name; perhaps it has none: Voltaire's days are spent; only his fame still makes a little noise in a little corner of our little world, even as that streamlet can be heard at a dozen paces from its banks.

Men differ from one another: I am charmed with this deserted water-furrow; within sight of the Alps, the palm-leaf of a fern which I gather delights me; the murmuring of a ripple over pebbles makes me quite happy; an imperceptible insect, seen only by myself, which plunges into the moss, as into a vast solitude, occupies my gaze and makes me dream. These are intimate trifles, unknown to the fine genius who, disguised as Orosmane[356], played his tragedies, wrote to the princes of the earth and forced Europe to come to admire him in the hamlet of Ferney. But were not those trifles too? The transitions of the world are not equal to the passing of those waters; and, as for kings, I prefer my ant.

[Sidenote: Memoires of Voltaire.]

One thing always astonishes me, when I think of Voltaire: although gifted with a superior, rational, enlightened mind, he remained completely foreign to Christianity; he never saw what every one sees: that the institution of the Gospel, to consider only the human aspect of it, is the greatest revolution that ever took place on earth. It is true to say that, in the age of Voltaire, this idea had come into the head of nobody. The theologians defended Christianity as an accomplished fact, as a verity based upon laws emanating from spiritual and temporal authority; the philosophers attacked it as an abuse springing from priests and kings: they went no further. I have no doubt that, if one could suddenly have presented the other side of the question to Voltaire, his quick and lucid intelligence would have been struck with it: one blushes to think of the mean and limited manner in which he treated a subject which embraces nothing less than the transformation of peoples, the introduction of morality, a new principle of society, another law of nations, another order of ideas, the total change of humanity. Unfortunately, the great writer who ruins himself in spreading baleful ideas drags many minds of lesser capacity with him in his fall: he is like those old Eastern despots on whose tombs men immolated slaves.

There, to Ferney, which no one visits now, to that Ferney around which I come to roam alone, how many celebrated personages at one time hastened! They sleep, gathered together for all time at the bottom of Voltaire's letters, their hypogæan Temple: the breath of one century grows weaker by degrees and dies away in the eternal silence, as one begins to hear the respiration of a new century.

THE PÂQUIS, NEAR GENEVA, 15 _September_ 1831.

O gold, which I have so long despised and which I cannot love whatever I may do, I am nevertheless forced to admit thy merit: the source of liberty, thou arrangest a thousand things in our existence, in which all is difficult without thee! Excepting glory, what is there that thou canst not procure? With thee, one is handsome, young, adored; one enjoys consideration, honours, qualities, virtues. You tell me that with gold one has but the appearance of all that: what matter, if I believe what is false to be true? Deceive me well, and I will release you from the rest: is life other than a lie? When one has no money, one is dependent upon everything and everybody. Two creatures who do not suit one another could go each his own way; well, for want of a few pistoles, they must remain face to face, sulking, fuming, souring, bored to extinction, devouring each other's souls and the whites of their eyes, furiously sacrificing to one another their tastes, their inclinations, their natural methods of life: poverty presses them close together, and, in those beggars' bonds, instead of embracing, they bite each other, but not in the way in which Flora bit Pompey. Without money, there is no means of escape; one cannot go in search of another sun, and, with a proud soul, one wears chains without ceasing. O happy Jews, dealers in crucifixes, who to-day govern Christendom, who decide peace or war, who eat pig after selling old hats, who are the favourites of kings and beauties, ugly and dirty though you be: ah, if you would but change skins with me! If I could at least creep into your iron chests, to rob you of that which you have stolen from young men under age, I should be the happiest man in the world!

True, I might have a means of existence: I could apply to the monarchs; as I have lost all for the sake of their crown, it would be only fair that they should feed me. But this idea, which ought to occur to them, does not; and to me it occurs still less. Rather than sit at the banquets of kings, I should even prefer once more to begin the regimen which I kept in the old days, in London, with my poor friend Hingant. However, the happy times of garrets are past: not that I was not most comfortable there, but I should be ill at ease, I should take up too much room with the flounces of my reputation; I should no longer be there with my one shirt and the slender figure of an unknown person who has not dined. My cousin de La Boüétardais is there no more to play the violin on my truckle-bed in his red robes as a counsellor to the Parliament of Brittany, and to keep himself warm at night, covered with a chair by way of counterpane; Peltier is there no more to give us dinner with King Christophe's money; and, above all, the witch is there no more, Youth, who, with a smile, changes penury into a treasure, who brings you her younger sister, Hope, for a mistress: the latter also as deceptive as her elder, though she still returns when the other has fled for ever.

I had forgotten the distress of my first emigration and imagined that it was enough to leave France in order peacefully to preserve one's honour in exile: the larks fall ready roasted into the mouths only of those who reap the harvest, not of those who have sown it If I alone were concerned, I should do marvellously well in an alms-house: but Madame de Chateaubriand? And so I have no sooner become settled than, as I cast my eyes upon the future, anxiety seizes hold of me.

[Sidenote: The value of money.]

They wrote to me from Paris that there was no means of selling my house in the Rue d'Enfer save at a price which was not sufficient to pay off the mortgages with which that hermitage is loaded; that something might nevertheless be arranged if I were there. Acting on this communication, I have taken a useless journey to Paris, for I found neither goodwill nor a purchaser; but I saw the Abbaye-aux-Bois again and a few of my new friends. On the eve of my return here, I dined at the Café de Paris with Messieurs Arago, Pouqueville[357], Carrel and Béranger, all more or less dissatisfied and deceived by "the best of republics."

THE PÂQUIS, NEAR GENEVA, 26 _September_ 1831.

My _Études historiques_ brought me into relations with M. Carrel, even as they made me acquainted with Messieurs Thiers and Mignet. I had copied into the Preface of those Studies a fairly long passage from the _Guerre de Catalogne_[358], by M. Carrel, and especially the following:

"Things, in their continual and fatal transformations, do not
always carry every intelligence with them; they do not master every
character with equal facility; they do not take the same care
of all interests: this is what we must understand and make some
allowance for the protests raised on behalf of the past. When a
particular period is finished, the mould is shattered, and it is
enough for Providence that it can not be made over again; but of
the fragments left upon the ground, there are occasionally some
that are beautiful to look upon."

After these fine lines, I myself added this summary:

"The man who was able to write those words has reasons for sympathy
with those who have faith in Providence, who respect the religion
of the past and who also have their eyes fixed upon fragments."

M. Carrel came to thank me. He represented both the courage and the talent of the _National_, on which he worked with Messieurs Thiers and Mignet. M. Carrel belongs to a pious and royalist family of Rouen: the blind Legitimacy, which rarely distinguished merit, misjudged M. Carrel. Proud and alive to his worth, he had resort to dangerous opinions, in which one finds a compensation for the sacrifices one lays upon one's self: there happened to him what happens to all characters fit for great movements. When unforeseen circumstances oblige them to restrict themselves within a narrow circle, they consume their super-abundant faculties in efforts which go beyond the opinions and events of the day. Before revolutions, superior men die unknown: their public has not yet come; after revolutions, superior men die neglected: their public has disappeared.

M. Carrel is not happy: there is nothing more material than his ideas, nothing more romantic than his life. After being a republican volunteer in Spain, in 1823, being captured on the battle-field, condemned to death by the French authorities, and escaping a thousand dangers, he finds love mingled with the pleasures of his private existence. He has to protect a passion[359] which is the mainstay of his existence; and this large-hearted man, ever ready to face a sword's point by day-light, sets wicket-gates before him, and the shades of night: he walks in the silent fields with a beloved woman at that first dawn at which the reveille used to call him to the attack of the enemy's tents.

I leave M. Armand Carrel in order to write a few words on our famous song-writer. You will find my story too short, reader, but I have a claim on your indulgence: his name and his songs must be engraved on your memory.

M. de Béranger is not, like M. Carrel, obliged to conceal his love-affairs. After singing the praises of liberty and the popular virtues, while defying the gaols of the kings, he puts his _amours_ into a couplet, and behold Lisette immortalized.

[Sidenote: A flying visit to Paris.]

Near the Barrière des Martyrs, below Montmartre, you see the Rue de la Tour-d'Auvergne. In this half-built, half-paved street, in a little house hiding behind a little garden and calculated upon the modesty of present-day fortunes, you will find the illustrious song-writer. A bald head, a somewhat rustic, but keen and voluptuous air announce the poet. I love to rest my eyes on that plebeian countenance, after looking at so many royal faces; I compare those so greatly different types: on the monarchical brows one sees something of an exalted nature, but blighted, impotent, effaced; on the democratic brows appears a common physical nature, but one recognises a lofty intellectual nature: the monarchical brow has lost a crown; the popular brow awaits one.

One day I asked Béranger (I beg him to forgive me for becoming as familiar as his fame), I asked him to show me some of his unknown works:

"Do you know," he said, "that I began by being your disciple? I was mad on the _Génie du Christianisme_, and I wrote Christian idylls: scenes in the life of a country priest, pictures of religious worship in the villages and in the midst of the harvest."

M. Augustin Thierry has told me that the Battle of the Franks in the _Martyrs_ suggested to him a new manner of writing history: nothing has flattered me more than to find my memory occupying a place at the commencement of the talent of the historian Thierry and the poet Béranger.

Our song-writer has the several qualities upon which Voltaire insists for the ballad:

"To succeed well in these little works," says the author of so many
graceful poems, "one needs refinement and sentiment of intellect,
to have harmony in one's head, not to lower one's self over much,
and to know how not to be too long."

Béranger has many muses, all of them charming; and, when those muses are women, he loves them all. When they betray him, he does not turn to elegiacs; and nevertheless there is a feeling of sadness at the bottom of his gaiety: his is a serious face that smiles; it is philosophy saying its prayers.

My friendship for Béranger earned me many expressions of astonishment on the part of what was called my party. An old knight of St. Louis, personally unknown to me, wrote to me from his distant turret:

"Rejoice, sir, at being praised by one who has slapped the face of your King and your God."

Well said, my gallant nobleman! You are a poet too.

[Sidenote: Béranger.]

At the end of a dinner at the Café de Paris which I gave to Messieurs de Béranger and Armand Carrel before my departure for Switzerland, M. Béranger sang us his admirable printed song:

Chateaubriand, pourquoi fuir ta patrie,
Fuir son amour, notre encens et nos soins[360]?

In it occurred this stanza on the Bourbons:

Et tu voudras t'attacher à leur chute!
Connais donc mieux leur folle vanité:
Au rang des maux qu'au ciel même elle impute,
Leur cœur ingrat met ta fidélité[361].

To this song, which belongs to the history of my time, I replied from Switzerland by a letter which is printed at the head of my pamphlet on the Briqueville[362] Motion. I said to M. de Béranger:

"From the place whence I wrote to you, monsieur, I can see the
country-house where Lord Byron lived and the roofs of Madame de
Staël's château. Where is the bard of Childe-Harold? Where is the
author of Corinne? My too long life is like those Roman roads
bordered with funeral monuments[363]."

I returned to Geneva; I next took Madame de Chateaubriand to Paris and brought back the manuscript directed against the Briqueville Motion for the banishment of the Bourbons, a motion which was taken into consideration in the sitting of the Deputies of the 17th of September of this year 1831: some attach their lives to success, others to misfortune.

PARIS, RUE D'ENFER, _end of November_ 1831.

Returning to Paris on the 11th of October, I published my pamphlet at the end of the same month; it is entitled, _De la nouvelle proposition relative au banissement de Charles X. et de sa famille, ou suite de mon dernier écrit: De la Restauration et de la Monarchie élective._

When these posthumous Memoirs appear, will the daily polemics, the events of which men are enamoured at this present hour of my life, the adversaries against whom I am fighting, will even the act of banishment of Charles X. and his Family count for anything? There you have the drawback of all diaries: you find in them ardent discussions of subjects that have become indifferent; the reader sees pass, like shadows, a host of persons whose very names he does not remember: silent supernumeraries, who fill the back of the stage. Yet it is in these dryasdust portions of the chronicles that one gathers the observations and facts of the history of mankind and men.

I placed first at the commencement of the pamphlet the decree brought forward successively by Messieurs Baude and Briqueville. After examining the five courses that lay open after the Revolution of July, I said:

"The worst of the periods through which we have passed seems to
be that in which we are, because anarchy reigns in men's reasons,
morals and intellects. The existence of nations is longer than that
of individuals: a paralytic man often remains stretched on his
couch for many years before disappearing; an infirm nation lies
long on its bed before expiring. What the new Royalty needed was
buoyancy, youth, intrepidity, to turn its back upon the past, to
march with France to meet the future.

"All this it neglects: it appeared before us reduced and
debilitated by the doctors who were physicking it. It arrived
piteous, empty-handed, having nothing to give, everything to
receive, playing the poor thing, begging everybody's pardon, and
yet snappish, declaiming against the Legitimacy and aping the
Legitimacy, against republicanism and trembling before it. This
abdominous 'system' beholds enemies only in two forms of opposition
which it threatens. To support itself it has built itself a phalanx
of re-enlisted veterans: if they bore as many stripes as they have
taken oaths, their sleeves would be more motley than the livery of
the Montmorencys.

"I doubt whether liberty will long be content with this stew-pot
of a domestic monarchy. The Franks placed liberty in a camp; in
their descendants it has retained the taste and love of its first
cradle; like the old Royalty, it wants to be raised on the shield
and its deputies are soldiers."

From this general argument I pass on to the details of the system followed in our foreign relations. The immense mistake of the Congress of Vienna is that it placed a military nation like France in a condition of forced hostility with the neighbouring peoples. I point to all that the foreigners have gained in territory and power, all that we could have taken back in July. A mighty lesson! A striking proof of the vanity of military glory and of the work of conquerors! If one were to draw up a list of the Princes who have increased the possessions of France, Bonaparte would not figure on it; but Charles X. would occupy a remarkable place!

[Sidenote: Yet another pamphlet.]

Passing from argument to argument, I come to Louis-Philippe:

"Louis-Philippe is King," I say; "he wields the sceptre of the
child whose immediate heir he is, of the ward whom Charles X.
placed in the hands of the Lieutenant-general of the Kingdom as
into those of a tried guardian, a faithful trustee, a generous
protector. In that Palace of the Tuileries, instead of an innocent
couch, free from insomnia, free from remorse, free from ghosts,
what has the Prince found? An empty throne presented to him by a
headless spectre bearing, in its blood-stained hand, the head of
another spectre....

"Must we, to finish the business, put a handle to Louvel's blade
in the shape of a law, in order to strike a last blow at the
proscribed Family? If it were driven to these shores by the
tempest; if Henry, too young as yet, had not attained the years
requisite for the scaffold, well then, do you, the masters, give
him a dispensation of age to die!"

After speaking to the French Government, I turn to Holyrood and add:

"Dare I, in conclusion, take the respectful liberty of addressing
a few words to the men of exile? They have returned to sorrow as
into their mother's womb: misfortune, a seduction from which it is
difficult for me to defend myself, seems to me to be always in the
right; I fear to offend its sacred authority and the majesty which
it adds to insulted grandeurs, which henceforth have none but me to
flatter them. But I will overcome my weakness, I will strive to
voice words which, in a day of ill-fortune, might give grounds for
hope to my country.

"The education of a prince should be analogous to the form of
government and the manners of his native land. Now, there are
in France neither chivalry nor knights, neither soldiers of the
Oriflamme nor nobles barbed in steel, ready to march behind the
White Flag. There is a people which is no longer the people of
other days, a people which, changed by the centuries, has lost
the old habits and the ancient manners of our fathers. Whether we
deplore the social transformations that have arisen or glorify
them, we must take the nation as it is, facts as they are, enter
into the spirit of our time, in order to exercise an action over
that spirit.

"All is in God's hand, except the past, which, once fallen from
that hand, does not return to it.

"The moment will doubtless arrive when the orphan will leave that
palace of the Stuarts, the ill-omened refuge which seems to spread
the shadow of its fatality over his youth: the last-born of the
Bearnese must mix with children of his own age, attend the public
schools, learn all that is known to-day. Let him become the most
enlightened young man of his time; let him be acquainted with the
knowledge of the period; let him add to the virtues of a Christian
of the age of St. Louis the sagacity of a Christian of our age.
Let travel be his instructor in manners and laws; let him cross
the seas, compare institutions and governments, free peoples and
enthralled peoples; let him, if he find the occasion while abroad,
expose himself, as a simple soldier, to the dangers of war, for
none is fit to reign over Frenchmen who has not heard the hiss of
the cannon-ball. Then you will have done for him all that, humanly
speaking, you can do. But, above all, beware of fostering him in
ideas of invincible right: far from flattering him with the thought
of reascending the throne of his fathers, prepare him never to
reascend it; bring him up to be a man, not to be a king: those are
his best chances.

"Enough: whatever God's counsel may provide, there will remain to
the candidate of my fond and pious loyalty a majesty of the ages
which men cannot take from him. A thousand years attached to his
young head will always deck him with a pomp exceeding that of all
monarchs. If, in a private condition, he bear bravely this diadem
of days, of memory and of glory, if his hand raise without effort
this sceptre of time which his ancestors have bequeathed to him,
what empire will he be able to regret?"

[Sidenote: The Comte de Briqueville.]

M. le Comte de Briqueville, whose motion I thus contested, printed some reflections on my pamphlet; he sent them to me with the following note:

"MONSIEUR,

"I have yielded to the need, to the duty, to publish the
reflections brought to my mind by your eloquent words on my motion.
I obey a feeling no less sincere when I deplore that I should
find myself in opposition to you, monsieur, who add to the power
of genius so many claims to public consideration. The country is
in danger, and from that moment I cease to believe in a serious
dissension between us: this France of ours invites us to unite to
save her; assist her with your genius; we shall work, we shall
assist her with our strong arms. On that field, monsieur, is it not
true that we shall not be long in coming to an understanding? You
shall be the Tyrtæus[364] of a people of which we are the soldiers,
and it will be with the greatest happiness that I shall then
proclaim myself the most ardent of your political adherents, as I
am already the sincerest of your admirers.

"Your most humble and obedient servant,

"The Comte Armand de BRIQUEVILLE.

"PARIS, 15 _November_ 1831."

I was not slow in answering, and I broke a second still-born lance against the champion:

"PARIS, 15 _November_ 1831.

"MONSIEUR,

"Your letter is worthy of a gentleman: forgive me for using this
old word, which becomes your name, your courage, your love of
France. Like you, I detest the foreign yoke: if the question were
that of defending my country, I should not ask to wear the lyre
of the poet, but the sword of the veteran, in the ranks of your
soldiers.

"I have not yet read your reflections, monsieur; but, if the state
of politics led you to withdraw the motion which has so strangely
saddened me, how happy I should be to find myself by your side,
with no obstacle between us, on the field of liberty, of honour, of
the glory of our country!

"I have the honour to be, monsieur, with the most distinguished
regard,

"Your most humble and most obedient servant,

"CHATEAUBRIAND."

PARIS, INFIRMERIE DE MARIE-THÉRÈSE, RUE D'ENFER,

_December_ 1831.

A poet[365], mingling the proscriptions of the Muses with those of the laws, attacked the widow and the orphan in a vigorous improvisation. As these verses were by a writer of talent, they acquired a sort of authority which forbade me to let them pass in silence; I faced about to meet another enemy[366].

The reader would not understand my reply if he did not read the poet's lampoon; I invite you, therefore to cast your eyes over those verses: they are very fine and are to be found everywhere. My reply has not been published: it appears for the first time in these Memoirs. Wretched contentions in which revolutions end! See to what a struggle we come, the feeble successors of those men who, arms in hand, treated great questions of glory and liberty by shaking the universe! Pygmies to-day utter their little cry among the tombs of the giants buried beneath the mountains which they have overturned upon themselves.

"PARIS, _Wednesday evening_, 9 _November_ 1831.

"SIR,

"I received this morning the last number of _Némésis_ which you
have done me the honour to send me. To protect myself against the
seduction of those praises awarded with so much brilliancy, grace
and charm, I need to recall the obstacles that exist between us.
We live in two worlds apart; our hopes and fears are not the same;
you burn what I adore, and I burn what you adore. You, sir, have
grown up amid a crowd of abortions of July; but, even as all the
influence which you attribute to my prose will not, according to
you, raise up a fallen House, so, according to me, will all the
might of your poetry fail to abase that noble House. Can it be that
both you and I are thus placed in two impossible positions?

"You are young, sir, like the future which you dream of and which
will trick you; I am old, like time, which I dream of and which
escapes me. If you were to come to sit by my fireside, you
obligingly say, you would reproduce my features with your graver:
I should strive to make you a Christian and a Royalist. Since your
lyre, at the first chord of its harmony, sang my Martyrs and my
Pilgrimage, why should not you complete the course? Enter the holy
place; time has stripped me only of my hair, as it strips a tree of
its leaves in winter, but the sap remains in my heart: my hand is
still firm enough to hold the torch which would guide your steps
under the vaults of the sanctuary.

[Sidenote: Letter to Barthélemy.]

"You declare, sir, that it would need a people of poets to
understand my contradictions of 'extinct kingdoms and young
republics:' is it likely that you too have not celebrated liberty
and yet found some magnificent words for the tyrants who oppressed
it? You quote the Du Barrys, the Montespans, the Fontanges, the La
Vallières: you recall royal weaknesses; but did those weaknesses
cost France what the debauches of Danton and Camille Desmoulins
cost her? The morals of those plebeian Catalines were reflected
even in their speech: they borrowed their metaphors from the
piggeries of infamous persons and prostitutes. Did the frailties
of Louis XIV. and Louis XV. send the fathers and husbands to the
gallows, after dishonouring the daughters and wives? Did his
blood-baths do more to render chaste a revolutionary's lewdness
than did her milk-baths to render virginal a Poppæa's pollution?
If Robespierre's hucksters had retailed to the people of Paris
the blood from Danton's bathing-tub, as Nero's slaves sold to the
inhabitants of Rome the milk from his courtesan's _thermæ_, do
you think that any virtue would have been found in the rinsings of
the obscene headsmen of the Terror?

"The swiftness and the height of the flight of your muse have
deceived you, sir: the sun, which laughs at all misery, must have
struck the garments of a widow; they must have seemed 'gilded' to
you: I have seen those garments, they were of mourning; they knew
nothing of pleasure; the child, in the entrails which bore him, was
rocked only to the sound of tears; if he had 'danced nine months in
his mother's womb,' as you say, he would then have known joy only
before being born, between conception and delivery, between the
assassination and the proscription! 'The pallor of fearsome omen'
which you remarked on Henry's face is the result of his father's
blood-letting, and not of a ball of two hundred and seventy nights.
The old curse was kept up for the daughter of Henry IV.: _In dolore
paries filios._ I know none save the Goddess of Reason whose
confinements, hastened by adultery, took place amid the dances of
Death. From her public flanks fell unclean reptiles which, at that
very instant, began to jig in the ring with the knitting-women
around the scaffold, to the sound of the rise and fall of the
knife, the refrain of that devils' dance.

"Ah sir, I entreat you, in the name of your rare talent, cease to
reward crime and to punish misfortune by the sentences improvised
by your muse; do not condemn the first to Heaven, the second to
Hell. If, while remaining attached to the cause of liberty and
enlightenment, you were to afford an asylum to religion, humanity,
innocence, you would see another sort of Nemesis appear before
you in your waking hours, one worthy of all the earth's homage.
And, while waiting to pour over virtue, better than I know how,
'the whole ocean of your fresh ideas,' continue, in the spirit of
vengeance which you have adopted, to drag our turpitude to the
_gemoniæ_; overthrow the false monuments of a revolution which
has not built the temple fit for its cult; turn up their ruins with
the plough-share of your satire; sow salt in that field to make it
barren, so that no new vileness can shoot there. I recommend above
all, sir, to your attention, that Government which has fallen so
low that it trembles before the pride of the obedience, the victory
of the defeats, and the glory of the humiliations of the country.

"CHATEAUBRIAND."

PARIS, RUE D'ENFER, _end of March_ 1832.

Those travels and those contests came to an end for me in the year 1831; at the beginning of the year 1832, a new annoyance.

The Paris Revolution had left on the streets of Paris a host of Swiss, of Body-guards, of men of all conditions kept by the Court, who were now starving and whom certain monarchical dunderheads, young and foolish under their grey hairs, thought of enlisting for a surprise.

In this formidable plot there was no lack of serious, pale, lean, diaphanous, bent persons, with noble faces, eyes still bright, white heads; that past suggested honour resuscitated, coming to try, with its shadowy hands, to restore the Family which it had been unable to maintain with its living hands. Often men on crutches pretend to prop crumbling monarchies; but, at this period of society, the restoration of a mediæval monument has become impossible, because the genius which quickened that architecture is dead: what we take for Gothic is merely antiquated.

On the other hand, the heroes of July, whom the _juste-milieu_ had swindled out of the Republic, desired nothing more than to come to an understanding with the Carlists to revenge themselves on a common enemy, remaining free to cut each other's throats after the victory. M. Thiers having extolled the system of 1793 as the work of liberty, victory and genius, young imaginations became kindled at the flame of a conflagration of which they saw only the distant reverberation; they have got no further than the poetry of the Terror: a mad and hideous parody which sets back the hour of liberty. This is to disregard at once time, history and humanity; it is to oblige the world to recoil under the whip of the convict-keeper in order to escape those fanatics of the scaffold.

Money was needed to feed all those malcontents, dismissed heroes of July, or servants out of place: people clubbed together. Carlist and republican cabals were held in every comer of Paris, and the police, informed of all that went on, sent its spies from club to garret to preach equality and liberty. I was told of these proceedings, which I opposed. The two parties wanted to declare me their leader at the assured moment of triumph: a Republican club asked me if I would accept the Presidency of the Republic; I answered:

"Yes, most certainly; but after M. de La Fayette."

[Sidenote: The Marquis de La Fayette.]

This was thought modest and proper. General La Fayette used sometimes to come to Madame Récamier's; I used to make fun of his "best of republics;" I asked him if he would not have done better to proclaim Henry V. and to be the real President of France during the minority of the royal infant. He agreed and took the jest in good part, for he was a well-bred man. Each time we met, he would say:

"Ah, you are going to pick your quarrel again!"

I used to make him admit that no one had been more caught than himself by his good friend Philip.

In the midst of this excitement and these extravagant plottings, arrived a man in disguise. He landed at my door with a tow wig on his pate and a pair of green spectacles on his nose, hiding his eyes, which could see quite well without spectacles. He had his pockets stuffed with bills of exchange, which he displayed; and, suddenly aware that I wanted to sell my house and settle my affairs, he offered me his services. I could not help laughing at this gentleman (a man, otherwise, of intelligence and resource) who thought himself obliged to buy me for the Legitimacy. When his offers became too pressing, he saw on my lips a certain scornfulness which obliged him to beat a retreat, and he wrote to my secretary this little note, which I have kept:

"SIR,

"Yesterday evening I had the honour to see M. le Vicomte de
Chateaubriand, who received me with his customary kindness;
nevertheless, I seem to have perceived that he no longer showed his
usual geniality. Tell me, I beg of you, what can have caused me
to lose his confidence, which I valued more highly than anything
else. If he has been told 'stories' about me, I am not afraid to
expose my conduct to the light of day, and I am prepared to reply
to anything that he may have been told: he knows too well the
spitefulness of intriguing people to condemn me unheard. There are
timid persons too who make others so; but we must hope that the day
will come when we shall see people who are really devoted. Well,
he told me that it was of no use for me to meddle in his business;
I am sorry for that, because I flatter myself that it would have
been arranged according to his wishes. I have little doubt as to
the person who has wrought this change in him; if I had been less
discreet at the time, this person would not have been in a position
to injure me with your excellent 'patron.' However, I am none
the less devoted to him, as you may assure him once more with my
respectful homage. I venture to hope that a day will come when he
will be able to know me and to judge of me.

"Pray accept, sir, etc."

Hyacinthe answered this note with the following reply at my dictation:

"My patron has nothing whatever in particular against the person
who has written to me; but he wishes to live outside everything,
and does not wish to accept any service."

Shortly afterwards, the catastrophe came.

[Sidenote: A Royalist conspiracy.]

Do you know the Rue des Prouvaires[367], a narrow, dirty, populous street, near Saint-Eustache and the markets? It was there that the famous supper of the Third Restoration was held. The guests were armed with pistols, daggers and keys; after drinking, they were to make their way into the gallery of the Louvre and, passing at midnight through a double row of master-pieces, go to strike the usurping monster in the midst of a fête. The conception was a romantic one: the sixteenth century had returned; one might have believed one's self in the times of the Borgias, the Florentine Medicis and the Parisian Medicis: only the men were different.