Chapter VI: Book XIII: 1 (3)

So you have read none of those sempiternal lucubrations? Well then, read them; when you have done so, pass over my Spanish War, the success of which troubles you, although it forms my chief claim to be classed as a statesman; take my dispatches from Prussia, England and Rome, place them beside the other dispatches which I have mentioned: and then, with your hand on your conscience, tell me which have bored you most; tell me if my work and the work of my predecessors are not quite similar; if the grasp of small things and of "practical" matters is not as manifest on my part as on that of the past ministers and defunct ambassadors.

First of all, you will notice that I have an eye for everything; that I occupy myself with Reshid Pasha[100] and M. de Blacas; that I defend my privileges and rights as Ambassador to Rome against all comers; that I am crafty, false (an eminent quality!) and cunning to such an extent that, when M. de Funchal, in an equivocal position, writes to me, I do not reply to him, but go to see him with astute politeness, so that he is unable to show a line in my handwriting and is nevertheless satisfied. There is not an imprudent word to be criticized in my conversations with Cardinals Bernetti and Albani, the two secretaries of State; nothing escapes me; I descend to the pettiest details; I restore the accounts of the affairs of the French in Rome in such a way that they still exist on the basis on which I have placed them. With an eagle's glance, I perceive that the Treaty of Trinità de' Monti, between the Holy See and the Ambassadors Laval and Blacas, is irregular, and that neither party had the right to conclude it. Mounting higher, and coming to the greater diplomacy, I take upon myself to give the exclusion to a cardinal, because a minister of foreign affairs has left me without instructions and exposes me to seeing a creature of Austria elected Pope. I procure the secret journal of the Conclave: a thing that no ambassador has ever been able to obtain; day by day I send the list of names and votes. Nor do I neglect Bonaparte's family: I do not despair, by means of good treatment, of persuading Cardinal Fesch to send in his resignation as Archbishop of Lyons. If a _Carbonaro_ stirs, I am informed of it and able to judge how much truth there is in the conspiracy; if an abbé intrigues, I am aware of it, and I baffle the plans that had been formed to separate the French cardinals from the French Ambassador. Lastly, I discover that a great secret has been deposited by the Cardinal de Latil in the bosom of the Grand Penitentiary. Are you satisfied? Is that a man who knows his trade? Very well, and now see: I dispatched all this diplomatic business like the first ambassador that comes, without its costing me an idea, in the same way as a booby of a Lower Norman peasant knits his stockings while watching his sheep: my sheep were my dreams.

Now here is another point of view: if you compare my official letters with the official letters of my predecessors, you will see that mine treat of general affairs as well as private affairs, that I am drawn by the character of the ideas of my century into a loftier region of the human mind. This may be observed more particularly in the dispatch in which I speak to M. Portalis of the state of Italy, in which I set forth the mistake of the cabinets which take for private conspiracies that which is only the development of civilization. The _Memorandum on the War in the East_ also exposes truths of a political order which are out of the common. I have talked with two Popes of other things than cabinet intrigues; I have obliged them to speak to me of religion, liberty, the future destiny of the world. My speech delivered at the door of the Conclave has the same character. I dared to tell old men to go forward and place religion once again at the head of the march of society.

[Sidenote: My political successes.]

Readers, wait for me to end my boasting so as next to come to the object, in the manner of the philosopher Plato making a circuit round his idea. I have become old Sidrac; age prolongs my weary road[101]. I continue: I shall be a long while yet. Several writers of our time have a mania for disdaining their literary talent in order to follow their political talent, which they value far above the former. Thank God, I am governed by a contrary instinct: I make little of politics, for the very reason that I have been lucky at the game. To succeed in public life, it is not a question of acquiring qualities, but a matter of losing them. I shamelessly admit my aptitude for practical things, without cherishing the smallest illusion touching the obstacle within myself which opposes my complete success. That obstacle has nothing to do with the Muse; it arises from my indifference to everything. With this defect, it is impossible to achieve anything completely, in practical life.

Indifference, I admit, is one of the qualities of statesmen, but of statesmen without conscience. They have to know how to look dry-eyed upon any event, to swallow bitter pills like malmsey, and, where others are concerned, to set at nought morality, justice, sufferings, provided that, in the midst of revolutions, they know how to find their own particular fortune. For, to those transcendent minds, the accident, be it good or bad, is bound to bring something; it must pay at the rate of a throne, a coffin, an oath, an outrage; the tariff is made out by the Mionnets[102] of catastrophes and affronts: I am not an expert in these numismatics. Unfortunately my indifference is a double one; I grow no more excited about my person than about facts. Contempt for the world came to St. Paul the Hermit[103] from his religious faith; contempt for society comes to me from my political incredulity. This incredulity would carry me high in a sphere of action, if, more careful of my foolish self, I were able at the same time to humiliate it and to clothe it. Do what I may, I remain a numskull of a decent man, naively stupid and quite bare, unable either to cringe or to help myself.

D'Andilly[104], speaking of himself, seems to have described one side of my character:

"I have never had any ambition," he says, "because I had too much,
being unable to endure the dependence which confines within such
narrow limits the effects of the inclination which God gave me for
great things, glorious to the State, and capable of procuring the
happiness of peoples, without its being possible for me to consider
my private interests in all that. I was fit only for a king who
would have reigned by himself and who would have had no other
desire than to render his glory immortal."

In that case, I was not fit for the kings of the day.

Now that I have led you by the hand through the most secret winding ways of my merits, that I have made you feel all that is rare in my dispatches, like one of my colleagues at the Institute who is incessantly singing his own fame and teaching men to admire him, now I will tell you what I am leading up to with my boasting: by showing what they are able to do in public life, I wish to defend the men of letters against the men of diplomacy, the counting-house and the offices.

The latter must not be allowed to take it into their heads to think themselves above men the smallest of whom overtops them by a head: when one knows so many things, like these practical gentlemen, one should at least not display gross ignorance. You talk of "facts;" well then, recognize "facts:" the majority of the great writers of antiquity, of the middle ages, of Modern England have been great statesmen, when they have deigned to descend to public life:

"I did not wish to give them to understand," says Alfieri, refusing
an embassy, "that their diplomacy and their dispatches seemed to
me and certainly were for me less important than my tragedies or
even those of others; but it is impossible to reclaim that kind of
people: they cannot and must not be converted."

[Sidenote: Other literary diplomatists.]

Who in France was ever more literary than L'Hôpital[105], the reversioner of Horace, than d'Ossat[106], that capable ambassador, than Richelieu, that great head, who, not content with dictating "controversial treaties," with writing "Memoirs," and "histories," constantly invented dramatic subjects, and rhymed with Mailleville and Boisrobert[107], and gave birth, by the sweat of his brow, to the Academy[108] and the _Grande Pastorale?_[109] Is it because he was a bad writer that he was a great minister? But the question is not one of the possession of more or less talent; it is one of the passion for paper and ink: and M. de L'Empyrée[110] never showed more ardour nor incurred greater expense than did the cardinal to snatch the palm from Parnassus, seeing that the staging of his "tragi-comedy" of _Mirame_ cost him two hundred thousand crowns! If, in one who is both a political and a literary personage, the mediocrity of a poet caused the superiority of the statesmen, one would have thence to conclude that the weakness of the statesman would result from the strength of the poet: yet did the literary genius destroy the political genius of Solon[111], an elegist equal to Simonides[112]; of Pericles stealing from the Muses the eloquence with which he subjugated the Athenians; of Thucydides[113] and Demosthenes[114], who carried to so great a height the glory of the writer and the orator, while devoting their days to war and the public places? Did it destroy the genius of Xenophon[115], who effected the retreat of the ten thousand while dreaming of the _Cyropœdia_; of the two Scipios[116], one the friend of Lælius[117], the other associated in the fame of Terence[118]; of Cicero[119], king of letters, as he was the father of the country; of Cæsar[120], lastly, author of works of grammar, astronomy, religion, literature, of Cæsar, rival of Archilochus[121] in satire, of Sophocles[122] in tragedy, of Demosthenes in eloquence, whose _Commentaries_ are the despair of historians?

In spite of these examples and a thousand others, literary talent, which is very eminently the first of all, because it excludes no other faculty, will always in this country be an obstacle to political success. Of what use, indeed, is a high intelligence? It serves no purpose whatever. The block-heads of France, a special and wholly national type, grant nothing to the Grotiuses, the Frederics, the Bacons[123], the Thomas Mores[124], the Spensers[125], the Falklands[126], the Clarendons[127], the Bolingbrokes[128], the Burkes and the Cannings of France[129].

[Sidenote: Envy of the common herd.]

Never will our vanity recognise in a man even of genius aptitudes and the faculty of doing common things as well as they are done by a common mind. If you overpass the vulgar conception by a hairbreadth, a thousand imbeciles exclaim, "You're losing yourself in the clouds," delighted as they feel at dwelling underneath, where they insist upon thinking. Those poor envious people, by reason of their secret misery, kick against merit; they compassionately dismiss Virgil, Racine, Lamartine[130] to their verses. But, proud sirs, to what are we to dismiss you? To oblivion, which awaits you at twenty steps from your doors, while twenty verses of those poets will carry them to the furthermost posterity.

The first invasion of Rome by the French, under the Directorate, was infamous and accompanied by spoliation; the second, under the Empire, was iniquitous: but once accomplished, order reigned.

The Republic demanded of Rome, for an armistice, twenty-two millions, the occupation of the Citadel of Ancona, one hundred pictures and statues, and one hundred manuscripts, to be selected by the French commissaries. They especially wanted to have the busts of Brutus and Marcus Aurelius: so many people in France called themselves Brutus in those days, it was very simple that they should wish to possess the pious image of their putative father; but Marcus Aurelius, whose father was he? Attila, to go away from Rome, asked only a certain number of pounds of pepper and silk: in our day, she for a moment redeemed her liberty with pictures. Great artists, often neglected and unhappy, left their master-pieces to serve as a ransom for the ungrateful cities that slighted them.

The Frenchmen of the Empire had to repair the ravages which the Frenchmen of the Republic had committed in Rome; they also owed an expiation for the sack of Rome accomplished by an army led by a French Prince[131]: it was befitting that Bonaparte should set order in the ruins which another Bonaparte[132] had seen grow, and whose overthrow he described. The plan adopted by the French Administration for the excavation of the Forum was that which Raphael proposed to Leo X.: it caused to rise from the earth the three columns of the Temple of Jupiter Tonans; it laid bare the portico of the Temple of Concord; it exposed the pavement of the Via Sacra; it did away with the new buildings with which the Temple of Peace was encumbered; it removed the soil which covered the steps of the Coliseum, cleared the interior of the arena and brought to view seven or eight rooms in the Baths of Titus[133].

Elsewhere, the Forum of Trajan[134] was explored, the Pantheon, the Baths of Diocletian, the Temple of Patrician Modesty repaired. Funds were put aside for the maintenance, outside Rome, of the Walls of Falerii and the Tomb of Cæcilia Metella.

Repairing works were also undertaken for modern edifices: St. Paul's Without the Walls, which no longer exists[135], had its roofing repaired; St Agnes', San Martino ai Monti were protected against the weather. A portion of the roof and the pavement of St. Peter's was mended; lightning-conductors shielded the dome of Michael Angelo from the lightning. The sites were marked out of two cemeteries in the east and west of the city, and that on the east, near the Convent of San Lorenzo, was finished.

[Sidenote: The French in Rome.]

The Quirinal arrayed its external poverty in the luxury of porphyry and Roman marbles: designed as it was for the imperial palace, Bonaparte, before taking up his residence there, wanted to remove all traces of the abduction of the Pontiff, held captive at Fontainebleau. It was proposed to pull down the part of the city lying between the Capitol and Monte Cavallo, so that the triumpher might ride up to his Cæsarian abode through an immense avenue; events caused these gigantic dreams to fade away by destroying enormous realities.

Among the plans decided was that of building a series of quays, from Ripetta to Ripa Grande: the foundations of those quays would have been laid; the four blocks of houses between the Castle of Sant' Angelo and the Piazza Rusticucci were partly bought up and would have been demolished. A wide thoroughfare would thus have been opened on to the Square of St. Peter's, which would have been seen from the foot of the Castle of Sant' Angelo.

The French make walks wherever they go: at Cairo, I have seen a great square which they had planted with palm-trees and surrounded with cafés bearing names borrowed from the cafés of Paris; in Rome, my fellow-countrymen created the Pincio; you reach it by a flight of stairs. Going down this flight the other day, I saw a carriage pass in which was seated a woman still possessed of a certain youth: with her fair hair, the badly-outlined contour of her figure, the inelegance of her beauty, I took her for a fat, white stranger from Westphalia; it was Madame Guiccioli: nothing could go less well with the memory of Lord Byron. What matter? The daughter of Ravenna (of whom, for the rest, the poet was tired when he resolved to die) will none the less go, conducted by the Muse, to take her place in the Elysian Fields, adding one more to the divinities of the tomb.

The western portion of the Piazza del Popolo was to have been planted in the space occupied by work-yards and shops; from the end of the open place one would have seen the Capitol, the Vatican and St. Peter's beyond the quays of the Tiber: in other words, Ancient and Modern Rome.

Lastly, a wood, created by the French, rises to-day to the east of the Coliseum; one never meets anybody there: although it has shot up, it has the look of a brush-wood growing at the foot of a tall ruin.

Pliny the Younger[136] wrote to Maximus:

"Consider that you are sent to... Greece, where politeness,
learning and even agriculture itself are supposed to have taken
their first rise.... Revere the gods their founders, their ancient
glory and even that very antiquity itself which, venerable in men,
is sacred in States. Honour them therefore for their deeds of old
renown, nay, their very legendary traditions. Grant to every one
his full dignities, privileges, yes, and the indulgence of his very
vanity. Remember it was from this nation we derived our laws; that
she did not receive ours by conquest, but gave us hers by favour.
Remember, it is Athens to which you go; it is Lacedæmon you govern;
and to deprive such a people of the declining shadow, the remaining
name of liberty would be cruel, inhuman, barbarous[137]."

When Pliny wrote those noble and touching words to Maximus, did he know that he was drawing up instructions for peoples, then barbarian, that would one day come to hold sway over the ruins of Rome?

I shall soon be leaving Rome, and I hope to return. I once more love passionately this Rome so sad and so beautiful: I shall have a panorama on the Capitol, where the Prussian Minister will give up to me the little Caffarelli Palace; at Sant' Onofrio I have set up another retreat. Pending my departure and my return, I never cease wandering in the Campagna; there is no little road, running between two hedges, that I do not know better than the Combourg lanes. From the top of the Monte Mario and the surrounding hills, I discover the horizon of the sea in the direction of Ostia; I take my rest under the light and crumbling porticoes of the Villa Madama. In these architectural remains changed into farms, I often find only a timid young girl, startled and agile as her goats. When I go out by the Porta Pia, I walk to the Ponte Lamentano over the Teverone; I admire, as I pass St Agnes', a Head of Christ by Michael Angelo, which keeps watch over the almost abandoned convent. The master-pieces of the great masters thus strewn through the desert fill the soul with profound melancholy. It distresses me that they should have collected the Roman pictures in a museum; I should have much preferred to go along the slopes of the Janiculum, under the fall of the Aqua Paola, across the solitary Via delle Fomaci, to seek the _Transfiguration_ in the Recollect Monastery of San Pietro in Montorio. When one looks at the place once occupied, on the high altar of the church, by the ornament of Raphael's funeral, one's heart is struck and saddened.

[Sidenote: Walks in Rome.]

Beyond the Ponte Lamentano, yellow pasture-lands stretch to the left to the Tiber; the river which bathed the gardens of Horace here flows unknown. Following the high road, you find the pavement of the ancient Via Tiburtina. I there this year saw the first swallow arrive.

I herborize at the Tomb of Cæcilia Metella: the undulated mignonette and the Apennine anemone make a pretty effect against the whiteness of the ruin and the ground. Taking the Ostia Road, I go to St. Paul's, lately fallen a prey to the flames; I sit down to rest on some calcined porphyry and watch the workmen silently building up a new church; they pointed out to me some columns already outlined as I descended the Simplon: the whole history of Christianity in the West begins at St. Paul's Without the Walls.

In France, when we build any bit of a house, we make a terrible noise about it; numbers of machines, and multitude of men and cries: in Italy, they undertake immense works almost without stirring. The Pope, at this very moment, is rebuilding the fallen portion of the Coliseum; half-a-dozen mason's labourers, without any scaffolding, are lifting up the colossus under whose shoulders died a nation changed into workmen slaves. Near Verona, I used often to stop to watch a village priest who was building a huge steeple by himself; the glebe farmer acted as mason under him.

I often go round the walls of Rome on foot; as I take this circular walk, I read the history of the queen of the pagan and Christian universe written in the diverse constructions, architectures and ages of the walls.

Again, I go to discover some dilapidated villa within the walls of Rome. I visit Santa Maria Maggiore, St. John Lateran with its obelisk, Santa Croce di Girusalemme with its flowers: I listen to the singing; I pray: I love to pray on my knees; in this way my heart is nearer the dust and endless rest: I draw nigh to my tomb.

My excavations are only a variation of the same pleasures. From the upland of some hill one perceives the dome of St. Peter's. What does one pay the owner of the place where treasures lie buried? The value of the grass destroyed by the excavation. Perhaps I shall give my clay to the earth in exchange for the statue which it will give me: we shall only be bartering a man's image for a man's image.

He has not seen Rome who has not walked through the streets of its suburbs interspersed with empty spaces, with gardens full of ruins, with enclosures planted with trees and vines, with cloisters where rise palm-trees and cypresses, the first resembling Eastern women, the second mourning nuns. Issuing from these ruins, one sees tall Roman women, poor and handsome, going to buy fruits or to fetch water from cascades of the aqueducts of the emperors and popes. To see the native manners in their simplicity, I pretend to be in search of an apartment to let; I knock at the door of a secluded house; they answer, "_Favorisca_," and I enter. I find, in a bare room, either a workman pursuing his trade, or a proud _zitella_, knitting her wool-work, a cat upon her knees, watching me wander at random without rising from her seat.

In bad weather, I take shelter in St. Peter's, or else lose myself in the museums of the Vatican, with its eleven thousand rooms and its eighteen thousand windows[138]. What solitudes of master-pieces! You come there through a gallery the walls of which are encrusted with epitaphs and ancient inscriptions: death seems to be born in Rome.

There are more tombs than dead in this city. I imagine that the deceased, when they feel too warm in their marble resting-places, glide into another that has remained empty, even as a sick man is moved from one bed to another. One seems to hear the bodies pass, during the night, from coffin to coffin.

The first time I saw Rome, it was the end of June: the hot season increases the abandonment of the city; the visitors fly, the inhabitants of the country remain indoors; you meet no one in the streets during the daytime. The sun darts its rays upon the Coliseum, where grasses hang motionless and nothing stirs save the lizards. The earth is bare; the cloudless sky appears even more desert than the earth. But soon the night brings the inhabitants out of their palaces and the stars out of the firmament; earth and the heavens become repeopled; Rome revives; that life silently recommencing in the darkness, around the tombs, has the air of the life and movement of the shades which redescend to Erebus at the approach of day.

[Sidenote: And in the Campagna.]

Yesterday I roamed by moonlight in the Campagna, between the Porta Angelica and the Monte Mario. A nightingale was singing in a narrow dale railed in with canes. I there, for the first time, found that melodious sadness of which the ancient poets speak in connection with the bird of spring. The long whistle which we all know, and which precedes the brilliant flourishes of the winged musician, was not piercing like that of our nightingales; it had a veiled sound like the whistle of the bullfinch of our woods. All its notes were lowered by a half tone; its burden was transposed from the major to the minor key; it sang softly; it appeared to wish to charm the sleep of the dead and not to wake them. Over this untilled common-land had passed Horace' Lydia, Tibullus' Delia, Ovid's Corinna; only Virgil's Philomela remained. That hymn of love was potent in that spot and at that hour; it gave an indescribable longing for a second life: according to Socrates, love is the desire to be born again by the agency of beauty; it was this desire that a Greek girl inspired in a youth when she said to him:

"If I had nothing left to me but the thread of my necklace of pearls, I would share it with thee."

If I have the happiness to end my days here, I have arranged to have a retreat at Sant' Onofrio adjoining the chamber where Tasso breathed his last. In the spare moments of my embassy, I shall continue my Memoirs at the window of the cell. In one of the most beautiful positions on earth, among orange-trees and evergreen oaks, with all Rome under my eyes, every morning, as I sit down to work, between the deathbed and the tomb of the poet, I shall invoke the genius of glory and misfortune.

In the early days after my arrival in Rome, wandering in this way at random, I met a school of young boys between the Baths of Titus and the Coliseum. They were in charge of a master in a slouched hat, a torn and draggle-tailed gown, resembling a poor brother of Christian Doctrine. As I passed near him, I looked at him and thought he had a false air of my nephew, Christian de Chateaubriand, but I dared not believe my eyes. He looked at me in his turn, and without showing any surprise, said:

"Uncle!"

I rushed at him, quite moved, and pressed him in my arms. With a motion of the hand, he stopped his obedient and silent flock behind him. Christian was at the same time pale and brown, worn away with fever and burnt by the sun. He told me that he was prefect of studies at the Jesuit College, then taking its holiday at Tivoli. He had almost forgotten his language, and expressed himself with difficulty in French, talking and teaching only in Italian. My eyes filled with tears, as I looked at my brother's son, become a foreigner, clad in a black, dusty, worn-out coat, a school-master in Rome, covering with an old cenobite's hat the noble brow which so well became the helmet.

I had seen Christian born; a few days before my emigration, I assisted at his baptism. His father, his grandfather, the Président de Rosanbo, and his great-grandfather, M. de Malesherbes, were present. The last stood sponsor for him and gave him his own name, Christian. The Church of Saint-Laurent was deserted and already half devastated. The nurse and I took the child from the priest's hands.

Io piangendo ti presi, e in breve cesta
Fuor ti portai[139].

The new-born child was taken back to his mother and laid upon her bed, where that mother and its grandmother, Madame de Rosanbo, received it with tears of joy. Two years later, the father, the grandfather, the great-grand-father, the mother and the grandmother had perished on the scaffold, and I, a witness at the christening, was wandering in exile. These were the recollections which the sudden apparition of my nephew caused to revive in my memory amid the ruins of Rome. Christian has already passed one half of his life as an orphan; he has vowed the other half to the altar: the ever-open home of the common Father of mankind.

Christian had an ardent and jealous affection for Louis, his worthy brother: when Louis married, Christian left for Italy; he knew the Duc de Rohan-Chabot there and met Madame Récamier: like his uncle, he has come back to live in Rome, he in a cloister, I in a palace. He entered religion to restore to his brother a fortune of which he did not consider himself the possessor under the new laws: and so Malesherbes and Combourg now both belong to Louis.

[Sidenote: Christian de Chateaubriand.]

After our unexpected meeting at the foot of the Coliseum, Christian, accompanied by a Jesuit brother, came to see me at the Embassy; his bearing was sad, his aspect serious: in the old days he was always laughing. I asked him if he was happy; he answered:

"I suffered long; now my sacrifice is made and I feel contented."

Christian inherited the iron character of his paternal grand-father, M. de Chateaubriand, my father, and the moral virtues of his maternal great-grandfather, M. de Malesherbes. His sentiments are locked up within himself, although he shows them, without considering the prejudices of the crowd, when his duties are concerned: as a dragoon in the Guards, he would alight from his horse to go to the Communion Table; his messmates did not laugh at him, for his valour and his kindliness were their admiration. After he left the service, it was discovered that he used secretly to assist a considerable number of officers and soldiers; he still has pensioners in the Paris garrets, and Louis discharges his brother's debts. One day, in France, I asked Christian if he would ever marry:

"If I were to marry," he replied, "I should take one of my little cousins, the poorest."

Christian spends his nights in prayer; he gives himself up to austerities at which his superiors are alarmed: a sore which formed in one of his legs came from his persistence in remaining on his knees for hours on end; never did innocence indulge in so much repentance.

Christian is not a man of this century: he reminds me of those dukes and counts of the Court of Charlemagne who, after warring against the Saracens, founded convents on the desert sites of Gellone or Madavalle and became monks there. I look upon him as a saint: I would willingly invoke him. I am persuaded that his good works, added to those of my mother and my sister Julie, would obtain grace for me before the Sovereign Judge. I, too, have a leaning for the cloister; but, were my hour to come, I would go and ask for a solitude of the Portioncula, under the protection of my Patron Saint, called Francis because he spoke French.

I want to trail my sandals alone; for nothing in the world would induce me to have two heads in my frock.

Upon that side
Where it doth break its steepness most, arose
A sun upon the world, as duly this
From Ganges doth: therefore let none, who speak
Of that place, say Ascesi; for its name
Were lamely so deliver'd; but the East,
To call things rightly, be it henceforth styled.
A dame, to whom none openeth pleasure's gate
More than to death, was, 'gainst his father's will,
His stripling choice..........................
................................ She, bereaved
Of her first husband, slighted and obscure,
Thousand and hundred years and more, remain'd
Without a single suitor till he came.
Nor aught avail'd, that, with Amyclas, she
Was found unmoved at rumour of his voice,
Who shook the world: nor aught her constant boldness
Whereby with Christ she mounted on the cross,
When Mary stay'd beneath. But not to deal
Thus closely with thee longer, take at large
The lovers' titles--Poverty and Francis[140].

TO MADAME RÉCAMIER

"ROME, 16 _May_ 1829.

"This letter will leave Rome a few hours after me and will reach
Paris a few hours before me. It will close this correspondence
which has not missed a single post and which must form a volume
in your hands. I feel a mixture of joy and sadness which I cannot
express to you; for three or four months I rather disliked Rome;
now I have again taken to these noble ruins, to this solitude so
profound, so peaceful, and yet so full of interest and remembrance.
Perhaps, also, the unhoped-for success which I have obtained
here has attached me to the place: I arrived in the midst of all
the pre-possessions raised against me, and I have conquered all;
people seem to regret me. What shall I find on returning to France?
Noise instead of silence, excitement instead of repose, unreason,
ambitions, contests of place and vanity. The political system which
I have adopted is one which perhaps no one would care for and
which, besides, I shall not be placed in a position to carry out I
would still undertake to give a great glory to France, even as I
contributed to obtaining a great liberty for her; but would they
discard all their previous opinions to make room for me? Would they
say to me, 'Be the master, act as you please at the peril of your
head?' No; so far are they from using this language to me, that
they would take anybody in preference to myself and admit me only
after receiving the refusals of all the mediocrities of France.
Even then they would think they were doing me a great favour by
relegating me to an obscure corner. I am coming to fetch you;
ambassador or not, I should like to die in Rome. In exchange for a
small life, I should at least have a great burying-place until the
day comes when I shall go to fill my cenotaph in the sand which
beheld my birth. Adieu; I am already many leagues nearer to you."

[Sidenote: I return to France.]

It gave me great pleasure to see my friends again[141]: I dreamt only of the happiness of taking them with me and ending my days in Rome. I wrote to make still more sure of the little Caffarelli Palace, which I contemplated hiring, on the Capitol and of the cell which I applied for at Sant' Onofrio. I bought English horses and sent them to the fields of Evander. I was already, in thought, taking leave of my country with a joy that deserved to be punished. When one has travelled in his youth and passed many years out of his country, one is accustomed to place one's death anywhere: when crossing the seas of Greece, it seemed to me that all those monuments which I perceived on the promontories were hostelries in which my bed was prepared.

I went to pay my court to the King at Saint-Cloud: he asked me when I was returning to Rome. He was persuaded that I had a good heart and a bad head. The fact is that I was exactly the converse of what Charles X. thought me: I had a very cool and a very good head, and a heart which was but so-so towards seven-eighths of the human race.

I found the King very ill-disposed towards his Ministry: he caused it to be attacked by certain royalist newspapers, or rather, when the editors of those publications went to ask him if he did not think them too hostile, he exclaimed:

"No, no, go on."

When M. de Martignac had made a speech:

"Well," asked Charles X., "have you heard the Pasta[142]?"

M. Hyde de Neuville's liberal opinions displeased him; he found more complaisance in M. Portalis, the Federate, who bore cupidity stamped on his face: it is to M. Portalis that France owes her misfortunes. When I saw him at Passy, I perceived what I had in part guessed: the Keeper of the Seals, while pretending to hold the Foreign Office ad interim, was dying to keep it, although, in any event, he had provided himself with the post of President of the Court of Appeal. The King, when the question arose of the appointment of a Foreign Secretary, had said:

"I do not say that Chateaubriand shall not be my minister; but not for the present."

The Prince de Laval had refused; M. de La Ferronnays was no longer able to apply himself to regular work. In the hope that, weary of resistance, the portfolio would remain in his hands, M. Portalis made no effort to persuade the King.

Full of my coming delights in Rome, I abandoned myself to them without too deeply sounding the future; it suited me well enough that M. Portalis should keep the _ad interim_ under the shelter of which my position remained what it was. Not for a moment did I imagine that M. de Polignac might be invested with power: his limited, unpliable and perfervid mind, his fatal and unpopular name, his stubbornness, his religious opinions, exalted to the pitch of fanaticism, appeared to me so many causes for his eternal exclusion. He had, it is true, suffered for the King; but he had been amply rewarded for it by the friendship of his master and by the proud London Embassy, which I had given him under my ministry, in spite of M. de Villèle's opposition.

Of all the ministers in office whom I found in Paris, with the exception of the excellent M. Hyde de Neuville, not one pleased me: I felt them to possess a relentless capacity which left me uneasy as to the duration of their empire. M. de Martignac, who was endowed with an agreeable talent for speaking, had the sweet and worn-out voice of a man to whom women have given something of their seduction and their weakness! Pythagoras remembered having been a charming courtesan, named Alcea. The former secretary of embassy to the Abbé Sieyès[143] had also a restrained self-conceit, a calm and somewhat jealous mind. I had sent him, in 1823, to Spain, in a high and independent position[144], but he would have liked to be an ambassador. He was offended at not receiving an employment which he thought due to his merit.

My likes or dislikes mattered little. The Chamber committed a mistake in overturning a ministry which it ought to have preserved at all costs. That moderate ministry served as a hand-rail to abysses; it was easy to overthrow it, for it had nothing to support it, and the King was hostile to it: a reason the more for not quarrelling with those men, for giving them a majority by the aid of which they could have remained in office and made room one day, without accident, for a strong government. In France, people are unable to wait for anything; they loathe all that has the appearance of power until they possess it themselves. For the rest, M. de Martignac has nobly given the lie to his weaknesses by courageously expending the rest of his life in the defense of M. de Polignac.

My feet burned to leave Paris; I could not grow accustomed to the grey and dismal sky of France, my father-land: what should I have thought of the sky of Brittany, my mother-land, to speak Greek? But there, at least, there are sea-breezes and calms: _tumidis albens fluctibus_[145] or _venti posuere._[146] My orders were given to make certain necessary changes and extensions in my house and garden in the Rue d'Enfer, so that, at my death, when I bequeathed this house to Madame de Chateaubriand's Infirmary, it might be more profitable. I intended this property to form a retreat for a few sick artists and men of letters. I looked up at the pale sun and said:

"I shall soon see you with a better face, and we shall not part again."

[Sidenote: I set out again for Rome.]

After taking leave of the King, and hoping to rid him of my presence for ever, I climbed into my carriage. I was first going to the Pyrenees, to take the waters of Cauterets; from there, passing through Languedoc and Provence, I was to go to Nice, where I would join Madame de Chateaubriand. We would drive along the Cornice together, arrive at the Eternal City, which we would cross without stopping, and, after a two months' stay in Naples, at Tasso's cradle, return to his tomb in Rome. That moment is the only one in my life at which I was completely happy, at which I longed for nothing more, at which my existence was filled, at which I saw nothing to my last hour but a series of days of rest. I was reaching the haven; I was entering under full sail like Palinurus: _inopina quies._[147]

My whole journey to the Pyrenees was a series of dreams: I stopped when I wished; I followed on my road the chronicles of the middle ages, which I found everywhere; in Berry I saw those little leafy roads which the author of _Valentine_[148] calls _traînes_ and which reminded me of my Brittany. Richard Cœur-de-Lion[149] had been slain at Chalus, at the foot of the tower:

"Mussulman child, hold thy peace! Here comes King Richard!"

At Limoges, I took off my hat from respect for Molière; at Périgueux, the partridges in their earthenware tombs no longer sang with different voices as in the time of Aristotle. I there met my old friend Clausel de Coussergues; he carried a few pages of my life with him. At Bergerac, I could have looked at Cyrano's[150] nose without being obliged to fight that cadet of the Guards: I left him in his dust with "those gods whom men has made and who have not made man."

At Auch, I admired the stalls sculptured after cartoons obtained from Rome at the fine period of the arts. D'Ossat, my predecessor at the Court of the Holy Father, was born near Auch[151]. The sun was beginning to resemble that of Italy. At Tarbes, I should have liked to lodge at the Star Inn, where Froissart[152] alighted with Messire Espaing of Lyons, "valiant man and wise and fair knight," and where he found "good hay, good oats and fair rivers."

As the Pyrenees rose up on the horizon, my heart beat: from the depth of three and twenty years issued memories to which the perspective of time gave added beauty; I was returning from Palestine and Spain, when I caught sight of the summits of those mountains from the other side of their chain. I agree with Madame de Motteville; I think that it was in one of those castles of the Pyrenees that Urganda the Unknown dwelt. The past is like a museum of antiquities; in it one visits the hours that have elapsed; each one can recognise his own. One day, walking about a deserted church, I heard footsteps dragging along the flag-stones, like those of an old man in search of his tomb. I looked round and saw nobody; it was I that had awakened myself.

[Sidenote: Romance at Cauterets.]

The happier I was at Cauterets, the greater pleasure did I take in the melancholy of what was ended. The narrow and confined valley is enlivened by a mountain torrent; beyond the town and the mineral springs, it divides into two defiles, one of which, famous for its sites, ends in the Pont d'Espagne and glaciers. I benefited by the baths; I made long excursions alone, imagining myself on the steeps of the Sabina. I made every effort to be sad, and could not succeed. I wrote a few stanzas on the Pyrenees[153]; it was impossible for me to finish my ode: I had draped my drum lugubriously to beat the troop of the visions of my past nights; but ever, amid these visions recalled, mingled some dreams of the moment, whose happy look foiled the air of consternation of their older fellows.

One day as I was versifying I met a young woman seated beside the torrent; she rose and walked straight towards me: she knew, by the rumour of the hamlet, that I was at Cauterets. It appeared that the stranger was an Occitanian[154] lady who had been writing to me for two years without my having ever seen her: my mysterious anonymous correspondent unveiled: _patuit Dea._

I went to pay a respectful visit to the naiad of the torrent. One evening she saw me to the door as I was leaving, and wanted to go with me; I was obliged to carry her indoors in my arms. I never felt so ashamed; to inspire a sort of attachment at my age seemed to me really ridiculous; the more I might have been flattered by this oddness, the more humiliated was I, rightly taking it for a mockery. I would gladly have hidden myself for shame among the bears, our neighbours. I was far from saying to myself what Montaigne said:

"Love would restore me the vigilancy, sobriety, grace and care of my person[155]."

My dear Michael, you say charming things, but, at our age, you see, love does not restore us what you here suppose. There is but one thing for us to do: to stand frankly aside. Instead, therefore, of returning to "sound and wise studies, whereby I might procure more love," I have allowed the fugitive impression of my Clémence Isaure to fade away; the mountain breeze soon dissipated that caprice of a flower; the witty, determined and charming stranger of sixteen was grateful to me for doing her justice: she has married.

[Sidenote: The Polignac ministry.]

Rumours of ministerial changes had reached our fir-groves. Well-informed persons went so far as to speak of the Prince de Polignac; but I was quite incredulous. At last the newspapers came: I opened them, and my eyes were struck by the official ordinance confirming the rumours that had been spread[156]. I had experienced many a change of fortune since I had come into the world, but I had never received so great a shock. My destiny had once more extinguished my dreams; and this breath of fate not only put out my illusions, but carried away the Monarchy. This blow hurt me terribly; I had a moment of despair, for my mind was made up at once: I felt that I must retire. The post brought me a crowd of letters; all urged me to send in my resignation. Even persons with whom I was hardly acquainted thought themselves obliged to order my retirement.

I was shocked by this officious interest shown in my good fame. I thank Heaven that I have never stood in need of counsels of honour; my life has been one series of sacrifices, which have never been commanded of me by any one; in matters of duty, I have a spontaneous mind. To me, falls spell ruin, for I possess nothing save debts, debts which I contract in places where I do not remain long enough to pay them; in such a way that, every time that I retire from public life, I am reduced to working as a bookseller's hireling. Some of those proud obliging people, who preached honour and liberty to me through the post and preached it even much more loudly when I arrived in Paris, handed in their resignation as councillors of State; but some were rich, and others took care not to resign the secondary places which they held and which left them the means of existence. They acted like the Protestants, who reject some of the dogmas of the Catholics and keep others quite as difficult to believe in. There was no completeness in those oblations, no full sincerity: men surrendered an income of ten or fifteen thousand francs, it is true, but returned home opulent in their patrimonies or, at least, provided with the daily bread which they had prudently kept back. Where I was concerned, they made less ceremony; for me they were filled with self-denial, they could never strip themselves sufficiently of all that I possessed:

"Come, George Dandin, pluck up courage; zounds, son-in-law, do us credit; off with your coat! Throw out of window two hundred thousand livres a year, a place to your liking, a high and magnificent place, the empire of the arts in Rome, the happiness of at last receiving the reward of your long and laborious struggle. Such is our good pleasure. At that price you will have our esteem. In the same way as we have stripped ourselves of our cloaks, leaving a good flannel waistcoat underneath, so you must throw off your velvet mantle, and remain naked. There is perfect equality, an exact level of altar and sacrifice."

And, strange to relate, in this generous ardour to turn me out, the men who intimated their wishes to me were neither my real friends nor the joint sharers of my political opinions. I was to immolate myself forthwith to Liberalism, to the doctrine which had continually attacked me; I was to run the risk of shaking the Legitimist Throne in order to deserve the praises of a few poltroons of enemies, who had not the thorough courage to starve.

I was to find myself swamped by a long embassy; the entertainments which I had given had ruined me; I had not paid the expenses of my first establishment. But what broke my heart was the loss of what I had promised myself in the way of happiness for the rest of my life.

I have not to reproach myself with bestowing upon anybody those Catonian counsels which impoverish him who receives, not him who gives them, fully convinced as I am that those counsels are of no use to the man who does not feel them within himself. My resolve was fixed, as I have said, from the first; it cost me nothing to take, but it was painful to execute. When, at Lourdes, instead of turning south and rolling towards Italy, I took the road for Pau[157], my eyes filled with tears: I admit my weakness. What matter, if I none the less accepted and held the challenge fortune sent me? I did not return quickly, in order to let the days slip by. I slowly unwound the thread of that road which I had wound up with such alacrity, but a few weeks before.

The Prince de Polignac dreaded my resignation. He felt that, if I retired, I should deprive him of Royalist votes in the Chambers and jeopardize his ministry. The idea was suggested to him of sending an express to me in the Pyrenees with orders from the King to go at once to Rome, to receive the King[158] and Queen of Naples[159], who were coming to marry their daughter[160] in Spain. I should have been greatly perplexed had I received that order. Perhaps I should have felt obliged to obey it, free to send in my resignation after fulfilling it. But, once in Rome, what might have happened? I should perhaps have been delayed; the fatal days[161] might have surprised me at the Capitol. Perhaps, also, the indecision in which I might have remained would have given M. de Polignac the parliamentary majority of which he was but a few votes short. Then the Address would not have been passed; the Ordinances resulting from that address would not have seemed necessary to their baleful authors: _Diis aliter visum._

[Sidenote: I resign my Embassy.]

I found Madame de Chateaubriand quite resigned in Paris. Her head was turned at the idea of being Ambassadress in Rome, and assuredly many a woman's head would be turned for less; but, in great circumstances, my wife has never hesitated to approve of what she thought calculated to add consistency to my life and to enhance my name in the public esteem: in this she has more merit than most women. She loves display, titles and fortune; she detests poverty and a mean establishment; she despises those susceptibilities, those excesses of loyalty and self-sacrifice which she looks upon as thorough duperies for which nobody thanks you; she would never have cried, "Long live the King _quand même_;" but, where I am in question, everything changes: with a firm mind she accepts my disgraces, while cursing them.

I had still to fast, to watch, to pray for the salvation of those who took good care not to don the hair-cloth with which they hastened to cover me. I was the sacred ass, the ass laden with the dry relics of liberty, relics which they adored with great devotion, provided they did not have the trouble of carrying them.

The day after my return to Paris, I went to M. de Polignac.

I had written him this letter on my arrival:

"PARIS, 28 _August_ 1829.

"PRINCE,