Chapter XI: Book IX: 283 (2)

After reading the above lines again, in 1839, I will add that, having, in 1837, visited M. Carrel's grave, I found it much neglected, but I saw a black wooden cross which the dead man's sister Nathalie had planted near him. I paid Vaudran, the grave-digger, eighteen francs that remained owing for trellis-work; I instructed him to tend the grave, to sow grass on it and keep it adorned with flowers. At each new season, I go to Saint-Mandé to discharge what is due and to make sure that my intentions have been faithfully fulfilled[322].

As I am preparing to end my recollections and taking a last look round, I perceive women whom I have involuntarily forgotten; like angels grouped at the bottom of my picture, they stand leaning against the frame to watch the end of my life.

In former days, I met women who were known or celebrated in different ways. Women have changed their manner of being to-day: are they worth more, are they worth less? It is only natural that I should incline towards the past; but the past is surrounded by a mist through which objects assume an agreeable and often deceptive complexion. My youth, to which I can never go back again, produces the effect upon me of a grandmother; I hardly remember it and I should be charmed to see it once more.

[Sidenote: A Lady from Louisiana.]

A Louisianan lady came to see me from the Mississippi: I thought that I was setting eyes upon the virgin of the last loves. Célestine wrote me several letters: they might have been dated from the "Moon of the Flowers;" she showed me fragments of Memoirs which she had composed in the savannahs of Alabama. Some time after, Célestine wrote to me that she was busy with a dress for her presentation at the Court of Philip: I resumed my bear's skin. Célestine has changed into an alligator from the water of the Floridas: may Heaven grant her peace and love, for as long as those things last!

There are persons who, by thrusting themselves between you and the past, prevent your memories from coming to your recollection; there are others who become mingled from the first with what you have been. Madame Tastu[323] produces this latter effect. She has a natural turn of expression; she has left the Gallic jargon to those who believe that they make themselves younger by disguising themselves in the cloaks of our ancestors. Favorinus[324] said to a Roman who affected to talk the language of the Twelve Tables[325]:

"You want to speak with the mother[326] of Evander."

Since I have touched upon antiquity, I will say a few words on the women of its peoples and descend the ladder down to our own time. The Greek women sometimes celebrated philosophy; more often they followed another divinity: Sappho[327] has remained the immortal sibyl of Cnidus; we know very little now of what Corinna[328] did after she had conquered Pindar[329]. Aspasia taught Socrates to know Venus:

"Socrates, observe my lessons. Fill thyself with poetic enthusiasm: by its potent charm thou shalt know how to win the object that thou lovest; thou shalt enchain her to the sound of the lyre, by carrying the finished image of thy passion through her ear to her heart."

The breath of the Muses, passing over the women of Rome without inspiring them, came to quicken the nation of Clovis, still in its cradle. The _langue d'Oyl_ had Marie de France[330]; the _langue d'Oc_ the Dame de Die[331], who, in her castle of Vaucluse, complained of a cruel friend:

"I would know, my gentle and fair friend, why you treat me so fiercely and so harshly:"

Per que vos m'etz tan fers, ni tan salvatges.

The middle-ages handed those ballads on to the Renascence. Loyse Labé[332] said:

Oh! si j'étois en ce beau sein ravie
De celui-là pour lequel vais mourant[333]!

[Sidenote: Mediæval poetesses.]

Clémence de Bourges[334], surnamed the Oriental Pearl, who was buried with her face uncovered and her head crowned with flowers because of her beauty; the two Margarets[335] and Mary Stuart[336], all three Queens, expressed ingenuous frailties in ingenuous language.

I had an aunt at about that period of our Parnassus: Madame Claude de Chateaubriand; but I am more embarrassed with Madame Claude than with Mademoiselle de Boistelleul. Madame Claude, disguising herself under the name of the Lover, addresses her seventy sonnets to her mistress. Reader, forgive my Aunt Claude's two-and-twenty years: _parcendum teneris._ If my Aunt de Boistelleul was more discreet, she reckoned fifteen lustres and a half when she was singing, and the traitor Trémigon no longer appeared before her old Warbler's thought save as a Sparrow-hawk[337].

When the language was settled, liberty of sentiment and thought contracted. One remembers hardly any one, under Louis XIV., expect Madame Deshoulières[338], by turns too much extolled and too much depreciated. Elegy extended, through woman's sorrow, under the reign of Louis XV. to the reign of Louis XVI., when the great elegies of the people commence; the old school came to die with Madame de Bourdic[339], who is but little known to-day, although she left a remarkable Ode on Silence.

The new school has thrown its thoughts into another mould: Madame Tastu walks in the midst of the modern choir of poetesses in prose or verse, the Allarts[340], the Waldors[341], the Valmores[342], the Ségalas[343], the Révoils[344], the Mercœurs[345], and so on, and so on: _Castalidum turba._ Must we regret that, following the example of the Aonides, she has not celebrated the passion which, according to antiquity, smooths the brow of Cocytus and makes it smile at Orpheus' sighing? At Madame Tastu's concerts, love recites only hymns borrowed from foreign voices. This reminds me of what is related of Madame Malibran[346]: when she wanted to tell of a bird whose name she had forgotten, she used to imitate its song.

[Sidenote: Gorge Sand.]

George Sand[347], otherwise Madame Dudevant, having spoken of _René_ in the _Revue des Deux-Mondes_[348], I thanked her; she did not reply. Some time after, she sent me _Lélia_: I did not reply. Soon a short explanation took place between us:

"I venture to hope that you will forgive me for not having answered
the flattering letter which you were good enough to send me when
I spoke of _René_ in writing on _Obermann._ I did not know how to
thank you for all the kind expressions which you have used towards
my books.

"I have sent you _Lélia_, and I anxiously desire that it may
obtain the same protection from you. The fairest privilege of
an universally accepted glory like your own is to welcome and
encourage at their start those inexperienced writers for whom there
can be no lasting success without your patronage.

"Accept the assurance of my high admiration and believe me,
monsieur,

"One of your most faithful believers,

"GEORGE SAND."

At the end of October[349], Madame Sand gave me her new novel, _Jacques_: I accepted the present.

"30 _October_ 1834.

"I hasten, madame, to offer you my sincere thanks. I am going to
read _Jacques_ in Fontainebleau Forest or at the sea-side. Were
I younger, I should be less brave; but my years will defend me
against solitude, without taking anything from the passionate
admiration which I profess for your talent and which I hide from
nobody. You have attached a new enchantment, madame, to that city
of dreams whence I set out, in former days, for Greece with a
whole world of illusions: returning to his starting-point, René
lately aired his memories and his regrets on the Lido, between
Childe-Harold, who had vanished, and Lelia about to appear.

"CHATEAUBRIAND."

Madame Sand possesses a talent of the first order; her descriptions have the truth of those of Rousseau in his _Rêveries_[350] and of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre in his _Études._[351] Her frank style is tainted with none of the faults of the day. _Lélia_, though painful to read and offering none of the delicious scenes of _Indiana_ and _Valentine_, is nevertheless a master-piece of its kind: of the nature of an orgy, it is without passion, but perturbing like passion; it lacks soul, and yet it weighs upon the heart; the depravity of its maxims, its insults thrown at rectitude of life could go no further than they do; but over that abyss the author sends down her talent In the Valley of Gomorrah, the dew falls at night upon the Dead Sea.

The works of Madame Sand, her novels, the poetry of matter, are born of the time. In spite of her superiority, it is to be feared that the author has, by the very nature of her works, narrowed the circle of her readers. George Sand will never belong to every age. Of two men of equal genius, of whom one preaches order, the other disorder, the first will attract the greater number of admirers: the human race refuses to accord unanimous applause to that which offends, morality, the pillow on which the weak and the just sleep; we can hardly associate with all the memories of our life books which caused our first blush, books whose pages we did not learn by heart on leaving the cradle, books which we have read only by stealth, which have not been our acknowledged and cherished companions, which are connected with neither the purity of our sentiments nor the integrity of our innocence. Providence has confined successes that do not take their origin in good within strait limits and has given universal glory as an encouragement to virtue.

[Sidenote: Her particular talent.]

I am arguing here, I know, like a man whose restricted sight does not embrace the immense "humanitarian" horizon, like a reactionary attached to a ridiculous moral system, a decrepit moral system of olden time, good at most for unenlightened minds, in the infancy of society. A new Gospel is about to take birth forthwith, placed far above the commonplaces of that conventional wisdom which arrests the progress of mankind and the rehabilitation of that poor body of ours, so sadly slandered by the soul. When the women will be running about the streets, when it will be sufficient, in order to get married, to open a window and summon God to the wedding as witness, priest and guest: then all prudery will be destroyed; there will be nuptials everywhere and we shall rise, like the doves, to nature's level. My criticism of the taste of Madame Sand's works would, therefore, possess a certain value only in the vulgar order of past things; wherefore I hope that she will not be offended by it: the admiration which I profess for her must make her excuse remarks which owe their origin to the infelicity of my age. In former days, I should have been more carried away by the Muses; those daughters of the olden sky were my fair mistresses: they keep me company in the evening in the chimney-corner, but they soon leave me, for I go to bed early, and they go to sit up by Madame Sand's fire-side.

No doubt Madame Sand will in this way prove her intellectual omnipotence, and yet she will please less, because she will be less original: she will believe herself to be increasing her power by sounding the depths of those reveries under which she buries us vulgar men, and she will be mistaken; for she stands far above that pit, that watery hollow, that proud balderdash. While we have to put a rare, but too flexible faculty on its guard against the follies of superiority, we must also warn it that fantastic writings, intimate descriptions, to employ the jargon of the day, are limited, that their source lies in youth, that each moment of time dries up a few drops of it and that, after a certain number of productions, we end with feeble repetitions.

Is it quite sure that Madame Sand will always find the same charm in what she is writing to-day? Will not the merit and allurement of the passions of twenty years depreciate in her mind, even as the works of my early days have lost their value in mine? It is only the works of the Ancient Muse that do not change, supported as they are by the nobility of manners, the beauty of language and the majesty of those sentiments bestowed upon the whole human race. The fourth book of the _Æneid_ remains for ever exposed to the admiration of men, because it is hung up in the sky. The fleet carrying the founder of the Roman Empire; Dido, the foundress of Carthage, stabbing herself after foretelling the coming of Hannibal:

Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor[352];

Love causing the rivalry of Rome and Carthage to blaze forth from its torch, setting fire to the funeral pile whose flame the flying Æneas sees on the waves: these are very different from the walk of a dreamer in a wood or the disappearance of a libertine who drowns himself in a pond. Madame Sand will, I hope, link her talent with subjects worthy of her genius.

Madame Sand can be converted only by the preaching of that missionary with the bald forehead and the white beard whose name is Time. At present, a less austere voice enchains the poet's captive ear. Now I am convinced that Madame Sand's talent is in some way rooted in corruption; she would become commonplace if she became timorous. The case would be different if she had always remained within the sanctuary unfrequented by men; her power of love, restrained and hidden under the virginal fillet, would have drawn from her bosom those decent melodies which suggest the woman and the angel. Be this as it may, boldness of doctrine and voluptuousness of manners are a field which had not yet been cleared by a daughter of Adam and which, delivered to female cultivation, has produced a harvest of unknown flowers. Let us leave Madame Sand to bring forth perilous marvels till the winter; she will sing no more "when the cold winds blow:" meantime let us permit her, less improvident than the grasshopper, to make a provision of glory for the time when there shall be a dearth of pleasure. Musarion's mother used to say to her:

"Thou wilt not always be sixteen.... Will Chæreas always remember his oaths, his tears and his kisses[353]?"

For the rest, many women have been seduced and as it were carried off by their young years: when the autumn days come, brought back to the maternal hearth, they have added to their cithern the grave or plaintive string on which religion or misfortune is expressed. Old age is a nocturnal traveller: the earth is hidden to her and she no longer discerns aught save the sky shining over her head.

[Sidenote: Her eccentricities.]

I have not seen Madame Sand dressed as a man or wearing the smock-frock and the ferruled stick of the mountaineer; I have not seen her drink of the bacchantes' cup or smoke, seated indolently on a sofa, like a sultana: these are natural or affected singularities that would add nothing, in my eyes, to her charm or her genius.

Is she more inspired when she sends a cloud from her mouth to mount up around her hair? Did Lélia escape from her mother's brain through a burning puff of smoke, even as Sin, according to Milton, issued from the head of the beautiful, guilty archangel amid a whirl of flame[354]? I do not know what happens in the Heavens; but, here below, Néméade[355], Phila[356], Lais[357], the witty Gnathæna[358], Phryne[359], the despair of Apelles'[360] pencil and Praxiteles'[361] chisel, Lesena[362], who was loved by Harmodius[363], the two sisters surnamed Aphyes, because they were slender and had large eyes, Dorica, whose head-band and perfumed robe were dedicated in the temple of Venus: all these enchantresses, in fine, knew none but the perfumes of Araby. Madame Sand, it is true, has on her side the authority of the Odalisks and the young Mexican girls who dance with a cigar between their lips.

After a few superior women and so many charming women whom I have met, after those daughters of the earth who said, like Madame Sand, with Sappho, "Come, in our delicious banquets, O mother of Eros, to fill our goblets with the nectar of the roses," what effect did the sight of Madame Sand have on me? Placing myself alternately in the domain of fiction and truth, I find the author of _Valentine_ making two very different impressions upon me. In the domain of fiction: I will not speak of that, for I must have ceased to understand its language. In that of reality: as a man of a serious age, entertaining notions of seemliness, attaching, as a Christian, the highest price to the timid virtues of woman, I could not say how unhappy I was made at the sight of so many fine qualities abandoned to those prodigal and fickle hours which consume and fly.

PARIS, 1838.

In the spring of this year 1838, I busied myself with the _Congrès de Vérone_[364], which I was obliged to publish by the terms of my literary engagements: I have told you of it in its proper place in these Memoirs.

A man has gone[365]: that guard of the aristocracy escorts to the rear the mighty plebeians who have already departed. When M. de Talleyrand first appeared in my political career, I said a few words about him[366]. Now his whole existence has become known to me through his last hour, to use the fine expression of one of the ancients.

[Sidenote: Talleyrand.]

I have had relations with M. de Talleyrand: as a man of honour, I have been faithful to him, as the reader will have observed, especially in the matter of the disagreement at Mons, when I most gratuitously ruined myself for him[367]. I was too simple; I shared in anything that happened to him of a disagreeable character; I pitied him when Maubreuil slapped his face[368]. There was a time when he ran after me in a coquettish manner; he wrote to me at Ghent, as you have read, that I was a "strong man[369];" when I was staying in the Rue des Capucines, he sent me, with perfect gallantry, a seal of the Foreign Office, a talisman doubtless engraved under his constellation. It is, perhaps, because I did not abuse his generosity that he became my enemy without any provocation on my part, if it was not because of a few successes which I obtained and which were not his handiwork. His tattle ran through society and did not offend, for M. de Talleyrand could not offend any one; but his intemperance of language has released me and, since he permitted himself to judge me, he left me free to make use of the same right in respect to him.

M. de Talleyrand's vanity duped him: he mistook the part which he played for his genius; he thought himself a prophet, while deceiving himself in all things; his authority had no value in matters concerning the future; he was quite unable to see ahead: he saw only behind him. Deprived of the strength of the outlook and light of conscience, he discovered nothing like superior intelligence, he appreciated nothing like uprightness. He made much of the accidents of fortune, when those accidents, which he never foresaw, had taken place, but only for himself personally. He knew nothing of that large ambition in which the interests of public glory are wrapped as the most profitable treasure for private interests. M. de Talleyrand, therefore, does not belong to the class of beings calculated to become one of those fantastic creatures to whom men's opinions, whether forced or deceived, are constantly adding fanciful attributes. Nevertheless it is certain that several sentiments, agreeing with one another for different reasons, concur to form an imaginary Talleyrand.

In the first place, the kings, the Cabinets, the former Foreign Ministers, the ambassadors who were once that man's dupes and who were always incapable of fathoming him are anxious to prove that they bowed only before a real superiority: they would have taken off their hats to Bonaparte's scullion. Then again, the members of the old French aristocracy who are connected with M. de Talleyrand are proud to number in their ranks a man who had the kindness to assure them of his greatness. Lastly, the Revolutionaries and the immoral generations, while railing against names, have a sneaking fondness for the aristocracy: those singular neophytes eagerly aspire to its baptism and think that they will learn fine manners from it. The prince's double apostasy at the same time charms another side of the young Democrats' self-love: for they conclude from it that their cause is the right one and that a noble and a priest are very contemptible persons.

Be it as it may with these obstacles to a true insight, M. de Talleyrand is not of the height to create a lasting illusion; he has not in him a great enough power of growth to turn lies into an increase of stature. He has been seen too near; he will not live, because his life is not connected with a national idea that survives him, nor with a celebrated action, nor with a peerless talent, nor with a useful discovery, nor with an epoch-making conception. Existence through virtue is forbidden him; dangers did not so much as deign to honour his days: he spent the Reign of Terror away from his country and returned only when the forum had become transformed into an antechamber.

Diplomatic monuments go to prove Talleyrand's relative mediocrity: you cannot quote a fact held in any esteem that belongs to him. Under Bonaparte, no important negociation was his; when he was free to act alone, he allowed occasions to escape him and spoilt what he touched. It is well averred that he was the cause of the death of the Duc d'Enghien; that stain of blood cannot be wiped out: so far from over-drawing the minister when telling the story of the Prince's murder, I spared him a great deal too much.

In his affirmations contrary to the truth, M. de Talleyrand displayed terrible effrontery. I have not spoken, in the _Congrès de Vérone_, of the speech which he read to the Chamber of Peers with reference to the address on the Spanish War; that speech opened with these solemn words:

"It is sixteen years to-day since I was called upon by him who
was then governing the world to give him my opinion as to the
struggle to be engaged upon with the Spanish people, when I had
the misfortune to displease him by unveiling the future to him,
by revealing to him all the dangers which were about to arise in
a mass from an act of aggression which was as unjust as it was
reckless. My disgrace was the fruit of my sincerity. How strange
is the destiny that brings me back, after this long space of time,
to repeat with the Legitimate Sovereign the same efforts, the same
advice[370]!"

[Sidenote: Talleyrand's lies.]

There are lapses of memory or lies that are terrifying: you open your ears, you rub your eyes, not knowing whether to believe that you are waking or sleeping. When the retailer of those imperturbable assertions descends the tribune and goes impassively to sit down in his seat, you follow him with your eyes, hung up as you are between a kind of dismay and a sort of admiration: you are not sure that that man has not received from nature an authority so great that he has the power of reconstructing or annihilating truth.

I did not reply; it seemed to me as though the shade of Bonaparte was about to ask leave to speak and to repeat the terrible contradiction which he had once given M. de Talleyrand. Witnesses of that scene were sitting among the peers, among others M. le Comte de Montesquiou[371]; the virtuous Duc de Doudeauville[372] has described it to me: he had it from the lips of the same M. de Montesquiou, his brother-in-law; M. le Comte de Cessac[373], who was present at that scene, tells it to whoever cares to listen to him: he thought that the great elector would be arrested on leaving the Emperor's closet. Napoleon, in his rage, apostrophizing his pallid minister, shouted:

"It suits you well to decry the Spanish War, you who advised me to embark on it, you from whom I have a heap of letters in which you try to prove to me that that war was as essential as it was politic[374]."

Those letters disappeared at the time of the abduction of the archives in the Tuileries, in 1814[375].

M. de Talleyrand declared, in his speech, that he had had "the misfortune to displease "Bonaparte" by unveiling the future to him, by revealing to him all the dangers which were about to arise from an act of aggression which was as unjust as it was reckless." Let M. de Talleyrand console himself in his grave: he did not have that misfortune; he must not add that calamity to all the afflictions of his life.

[Sidenote: Talleyrand's diplomatic errors.]

M. de Talleyrand's principal mistake as against the Legitimacy was that he deterred Louis XVIII. from concluding the proposed marriage between the Duc de Berry and a Russian Princess[376]; M. de Talleyrand's unpardonable mistake as against France was that he consented to the revolting Treaties of Vienna.

The result of M. de Talleyrand's negociations is that we are left without frontiers: a battle lost at Metz or Coblentz would bring the enemy's cavalry under the walls of Paris in a week. Under the Old Monarchy, not only was France enclosed within a circle of fortresses, but she was defended on the Rhine by the independent States of Germany. It was necessary to invade the electorates or negociate with them in order to reach us. On another frontier stood Switzerland, a neutral and free country; she had no roads; no one would violate her territory. The Pyrenees were impassable, guarded as they were by the Spanish Bourbons. That is what M. de Talleyrand failed to understand; those are the mistakes which will for ever condemn him as a politician: mistakes which, in one day, deprived us of the work of Louis XIV. and the victories of Napoleon.

It has been contended that his policy was superior to Napoleon's: in the first place, we must well bear in mind that a man is purely and simply a clerk, when he holds the portfolio of a conqueror who every morning puts into it the bulletin of a victory that changes the geography of States. When Napoleon had once become inebriated, he made mistakes so enormous as to strike every eye: M. de Talleyrand probably perceived them, like everybody else; but that points to no lynx-like vision. He compromised himself in a strange fashion in the catastrophe of the Duc d'Enghien; he was mistaken about the Spanish War of 1808, although he tried, later, to disown his advice and take back his words.

However, an actor creates no illusion, if he is utterly unprovided with means of fascinating the pit: therefore the prince's life was a perpetual deception. Knowing what he lacked, he avoided, shunned whosoever was able to know him: his constant study was not to allow his measure to be taken; he withdrew into silence at seasonable times; he concealed himself during the three dumb hours which he devoted to whist. Men wondered that so great a capacity could descend to the amusements of the vulgar: who knows if that capacity was not partitioning empires while sorting the four knaves in his hand? During those moments of juggling, he inwardly worded some effective phrase, inspired by a pamphlet of the morning or a conversation of the evening. If he took you on one side to render you illustrious by his conversation, his chief manner of seduction was to load you with praises, to call you the hope of the future, to prophesy brilliant destinies for you, to give you a bill of exchange as a great man, drawn upon himself and payable at sight; but, if he thought that your faith in him was a little open to suspicion, if he perceived that you did not sufficiently admire a few short sentences with pretensions of depth, but with nothing behind them, he went away, lest he should allow the end of his wit to come to the surface. He would have told a good story, were it not that his jests fell upon an underling or a fool, at whose cost he amused himself without danger, or upon a victim, attached to his person, who formed a butt for his jokes. He was unable to keep up a serious conversation: the third time that he opened his lips, his ideas evaporated.

Old engravings of the "Abbé de Périgord" represent a very pretty man; as he grew old, M. de Talleyrand's face had turned into a death's head: his eyes were dull, so that one had a difficulty in reading them, which served his purpose. As he had received a great deal of contempt, he had soaked himself in it and placed it in the two hanging corners of his mouth.

A great manner, which came from his birth, a strict observance of the niceties, a cold and disdainful air contributed to keep up the illusion that surrounded the Prince de Bénévent. His manners exercised an empire over second-rate people and the men of the new society, to whom the society of the old days was unknown. Formerly one met persons at every turn whose ways resembled M. de Talleyrand's, and one took no notice of them; but, almost alone in the field in the midst of democratic customs, he appeared a phenomenon: in order to submit to the yoke of his forms, it suited self-love to ascribe to the minister's wit the ascendant exercised by his breeding.

When, occupying a considerable place, you find yourself mixed up with prodigious revolutions, these give you a chance importance which the common herd take for your personal merit: lost in Bonaparte's rays, M. de Talleyrand shone, under the Restoration, with the brightness borrowed from a fortune that was not his. The accidental position of the Prince de Bénévent permitted him to attribute to himself the power of overthrowing Napoleon and the honour of restoring Louis XVIII.: have I myself, like all those gapers, not been foolish enough to fall into that fable? When I was better informed, I came to know that M. de Talleyrand was not a political Warwick: his arm lacked the strength that lays low and raises thrones.

Impartial numskulls say:

"We agree, he was a very immoral man; but what ability!"

Alas, no! That hope must be lost too, so consoling for his enthusiasts, so desirable in the interests of the prince's memory: the hope of making M. de Talleyrand a demon. Beyond certain ordinary negociations, at the bottom of which he had the cleverness to place his personal interest in the first rank, there was nothing to be expected of M. de Talleyrand.

[Sidenote: Talleyrand's mediocrity.]

M. de Talleyrand kept up a few habits and a few maxims for the use of the sycophants and worthless fellows of his intimate circle. His toilet in public, copied after that of a minister in Vienna, was a triumph of diplomacy. He boasted of never being in a hurry; he boasted that time is our enemy and that we must kill it: by this he reckoned to be occupied for only a few moments.

But, as, in the last result, M. de Talleyrand did not succeed in transforming his idleness into a master-piece, it is probable that he was mistaken in talking of the necessity of getting rid of time: we triumph over time only by creating immortal things; with works that have no future, with frivolous distractions, we do not kill it: we waste it.

M. de Talleyrand entered into office[377] on the recommendation of Madame de Staël, who obtained his appointment from Chénier. He was then very destitute and he began to make his fortune five or six times over again: by the million which he received from Portugal in the hope of a signature of peace with the Directory, a peace which was never signed; by the purchase of Belgian bonds on the Peace of Amiens, of which he, M. de Talleyrand, knew before it was known to the public; by the erection of the short-lived Kingdom of Etruria; by the secularization of the ecclesiastical properties of Germany; by the jobbing of his opinions at the Congress of Vienna. The prince went so far as to try to make over some old papers in our archives to Austria; but this time he was duped by M. de Metternich, who religiously returned him the originals, after having copies taken of them.

Incapable of writing a single sentence unaided, M. de Talleyrand made men work competently under him: when, by dint of erasions and alterations, his secretary had succeeded in drafting his dispatches to his liking, he copied them out with his own hand. I have heard him read, from the Memoirs which he commenced, a few pleasing details about his youth. As he varied in his tastes, detesting to-morrow what he loved yesterday, if those Memoirs exist in their entirety, which I doubt, and if he has preserved the opposite versions, it is probable that his judgments on the same fact and especially on the same man will contradict each other outrageously. I do not believe in the story that the manuscripts have been deposited in England; the order which, they pretend, has been given to publish them not before forty years hence[378] seems to me a piece of posthumous jugglery.

Slothful and without attainments, with a frivolous nature and a dissipated heart, the Prince de Bénévent gloried in that which ought to have humbled his pride, in remaining standing after the fall of empires. The minds of the first order which produce revolutions disappear; the minds of the second order which profit by them survive. Those persons of the morrow and of their wits preside at the march-past of the generations; it is their business to endorse the passports, to confirm the sentence: M. de Talleyrand was of that inferior species; he signed events, he did not make them.

To survive governments, to remain when a power goes, to declare one's self permanent, to boast of belonging only to the country, of being the man of things and not the man of individuals: that is the fatuousness of an uneasy egoism, which strives to hide its want of elevation under lofty words. Nowadays we count many of those unruffled characters, many of those citizens of the soil: still, if there is to be any greatness in growing old like the hermit in the ruins of the Coliseum, they must be guarded with a cross; M. de Talleyrand had trodden his underfoot.

Our species is divided into two unequal parts: the men of death, loved by death, a chosen band which is born again; the men of life, forgotten by life, a multitude condemned to annihilation which is born no more. The temporary existence of these latter consists of name, credit, place, fortune; their fame, their authority, their power fade away with their person: closed are their drawing-room and their coffin, closed is their destiny. Thus befell M. de Talleyrand; his mummy, before descending into its crypt, was shown for a moment in London[379], as the representative of the corpse-like Royalty that reigns over us.

[Sidenote: Talleyrand's depravity.]

M. de Talleyrand betrayed all governments and, I repeat, raised or overthrew none. He had no real superiority, in the sincere acceptance of those two words. A fry of trite prosperities, so common in aristocratic life, does not take a man two feet beyond the grave. The evil which is not worked with a terrible explosion, the evil parsimoniously exerted by the slave for the master's benefit is no more than turpitude. Vice, the pander of crime, enters into domestic service. Suppose M. de Talleyrand a plebeian, poor, obscure, having, besides his immorality, nothing save his incontestable drawing-room wit: we should certainly never have heard speak of him. Take away from M. de Talleyrand the debased great lord, the married priest, the degraded bishop: what remains to him? His reputation and his successes have depended on that treble depravity.

The comedy with which the prelate crowned his eighty-two years is a pitiful thing: first, to give a proof of strength, he went to pronounce at the Institute the common eulogy of a poor German dolt[380] whom he did not care about. In spite of all the sights with which our eyes have been glutted, people lined up to see the great man go out[381]; next, he came to die at home, like Diocletian, showing himself to the universe. The crowd gaped at the last moments[382] of that prince three parts rotten, with a gangrenous aperture in his side, his head falling on his breast in spite of the bandage that supported it, he disputing minute by minute his reconciliation with Heaven, his niece playing beside him a part long prepared between a priest who was imposed upon and a little girl who was deceived. Weary of resistance, when his power of speech was about to leave him, he signed (or perhaps he did not even sign) the disavowal of his early adhesion to the Constitutional Church; but without giving any sign of repentance, without fulfilling the Christian's last duties, without retracting the immorality and scandal of his life. Never did pride appear so contemptible, admiration so foolish, piety so greatly duped. Rome, always prudent, did not make the retractation public, for a very good reason.

[Sidenote: Talleyrand's death.]

M. de Talleyrand failed to put in an appearance in answer to a long-standing summons issued by the Judgment Seat on High; death sought him on the part of God and has found him at last.

To analyze minutely a life as corrupted as that of M. de Lafayette was healthy, one would have to face a distaste which I am incapable of overcoming. Men of sores resemble prostitutes' carcasses: they have been so much eaten away by the ulcers that they are of no use to the dissecting-room. The French Revolution is one vast political destruction, set in the midst of the old world; let us fear lest a much more fatal destruction be established, let us fear a moral destruction through the evil side of that Revolution. What would become of the human race if a strenuous attempt were made to rehabilitate manners justly stigmatized, to offer odious examples to our enthusiasm, to show us the progress of the age, the establishment of liberty, the profundity of genius in abject natures and atrocious actions? Not daring to extol the evil under its own name, they sophisticate it: beware of taking that brute for a spirit of darkness; it is an angel of light! All ugliness is beautiful, every shame honourable, every enormity sublime; every vice has its admiration awaiting it. We have gone back to that material society of paganism in which every form of depravity had its altars. Back, those cowardly, lying, criminal praises, which pervert the public conscience, which debauch youth, which discourage good people, which are an outrage against virtue and the spitting of the Roman soldier in the face of Christ!

PARIS, 1839.

When I was in Prague, in 1833, Charles X. said to me:

"So that old Talleyrand is still alive?"

And Charles X. left this life two years before M. de Talleyrand; the Monarch's private and Christian death forms a contrast with the public death of the apostate bishop, dragged against his will to the feet of the divine incorruptibility.

On the 3rd of October 1836, I wrote the following letter to Madame la Duchesse de Berry, and I added a postscript to it on the 15th of November of the same year:

"MADAME,

"M. Walsh[383] has handed me the letter with which you have been
good enough to honour me. I should be ready to obey Your Royal
Highness' wishes, if writing could do anything at present; but
public opinion has fallen into such a state of apathy that the
greatest events would hardly be able to stir it. You have permitted
me, Madame, to speak with an amount of frankness which only my
devotion could excuse: as Your Royal Highness knows, I have been
opposed to almost all that has been done; I ventured even not to
be in favour of your journey to Prague. Henry V. is now emerging
from childhood; he will soon enter the world with an education
that has taught him nothing of the age in which we live. Who will
be his guide, who will show him Courts and men? Who will make him
known and as it were appear, at a distance, to France? These are
important questions which will, probably and unfortunately, be
resolved in the same sense as all the others. Be this as it may,
the rest of my life belongs to my young King and his august mother.
My previsions of the future will never make me unfaithful to my
duty.

"Madame de Chateaubriand asks leave to lay her respects at Madame's
feet. I offer to Heaven all my prayers for the glory and prosperity
of the mother of Henry V. and I am, with profound respect,

"Madame,

"Your Royal Highness' most humble and most obedient servant,

"CHATEAUBRIAND.

_"P.S._ This letter has been waiting for a month for a safe
opportunity of reaching Madame. This very day, I hear of the death
of Henry's august grandfather[384]. Will the sad news cause any
change in Your Royal Highness' destiny? Dare I beg Madame to permit
me to enter into all the sentiments of regret which she must feel,
and to offer the respectful tribute of my grief to Monsieur le
Dauphin and Madame la Dauphine?

"CHATEAUBRIAND.

"15 _November._"

[Sidenote: Death of Charles X.]

Charles X. is no more:

Soixante ans de malheurs out paré la victime[385]!

Thirty years of exile; death at seventy-nine in a foreign land! So that none might doubt of the errand of misfortune with which Heaven had entrusted that Prince, it was a plague that came to fetch him.

Charles X., at his last hour, recovered the calm, the equanimity which sometimes failed him during his long career. When he learnt the danger that threatened, he was content to say:

"I did not think that this illness would turn so short."

When Louis XVI. set out for the scaffold, the officer on duty refused to receive the will of the condemned man because there was no time, and he, the officer, had to take the King to execution; the King replied:

"That is so."

If Charles X., in other days of peril, had treated his life with the same indifference, what wretchedness would he not have spared himself! One can understand that the Bourbons cling to a religion which makes them so noble at the moment of death; Louis IX., attached to his posterity, sends them the saint's courage to await them beside the coffin. That House knows wonderfully how to die: true, it has been learning death for more than eight hundred years.

Charles X. went away persuaded that he had made no mistake: if he hoped for the divine mercy, it was because of the sacrifice which he believed that he had made of his crown to what he thought to be the duty of his conscience and the welfare of his people; conviction is too rare not to be valued. Charles X. was able to bear himself this witness that the reign of his two brothers and his own were neither without liberty nor without glory: under the Martyr King, the enfranchisement of America and the emancipation of France; under Louis XVIII., representative government given to our country, the Royalty restored in Spain, the independence of Greece recovered at Navarino; under Charles X., Africa left to us in compensation for the territory lost through the conquests of the Republic and the Empire: those are results which remain established in our records, in spite of stupid jealousies and vain enmities; those results will stand out more prominently as we sink lower into the abasement of the Royalty of July. But it is to be feared that those costly ornaments will be for the benefit of past days only, like the garland of flowers on Homer's head discarded with great respect by the Republic of Plato. The Legitimacy to-day seems to have no intention of going further; it appears to be adopting its fall.

The death of Charles X. could be an effective event only by putting an end to a deplorable contest for a sceptre and giving a new direction to the education of Henry V.: now it is to be feared that the absent crown will always be disputed, that the education will be finished without having been virtually changed. Perhaps, by saving themselves the trouble of taking sides, they will fall asleep in habits dear to weakness, sweet to family-life, easy to lassitude, the result of long sufferings. Misfortune perpetuated produces on the mind the same effect as old age on the body: one can no longer move, one takes to one's bed. Misfortune again resembles the executioner of the high decrees of Heaven: it strips the condemned man, snatches the sceptre from the king, the sword from the warrior; it takes the noble's dignity, the soldier's heart, and sends them back degraded into the crowd.

On the other hand, one derives from extreme youth arguments in favour of postponement: when one has much time to spend, one persuades one's self that one can wait, that one has years to play with before events happen:

"They will come to us," one cries, "without our going to any trouble; all will ripen; the throne will come of itself; in twenty years, prejudice will be wiped out."

This calculation might have some justness, if generations did not pass away or did not become indifferent; but a certain thing may appear a necessity at one time and not be even felt at another.

[Sidenote: Charles's predecessors.]

Alas, how swiftly things fade away! Where are the three brothers whom I have seen reign in succession? Louis XVIII. is at Saint-Denis, with the mutilated relics of Louis XVI.; Charles X. has just been laid, at Gorlitz, in a coffin locked with three keys.

The remains of that King, falling from on high, startled his ancestors; they turned in their sepulchres; drawing closer together, they said:

"Let us make room; here is the last of our number."

Bonaparte did not make so much noise on entering eternal life; the old dead did not wake for the emperor of the new dead. They did not know him.

The French Monarchy connects the Ancient World with the Modern World. Augustulus[386] laid down the diadem in 476. Five years later, in 481, the first dynasty of our kings, in the person of Clovis, was reigning over the Gauls.

Charlemagne, when associating Louis the Débonnaire with himself on the throne, said to him:

"Son dear to God, my years are hastening, even my old age escapes me; the time of my death is drawing nigh. The land of the Franks beheld my birth: Christ accorded me that honour. First among the Franks, I have obtained the name of Cæsar and transferred to the Empire of the Franks the Empire of the House of Romulus."

Under Hugh, with the Third Dynasty, the Elective Monarchy became hereditary. Hereditary right gave birth to legitimacy, or permanence, or duration.

The Christian Empire of the French must be placed between the baptismal fonts of Clovis and the scaffold of Louis XVI. The same religion stood at either barrier:

"Gentle Sicamber, bow thy neck, worship what thou hast burnt, burn what thou hast worshipped," said the priest who administered the baptism of water to Clovis.

"Son of St. Louis, rise up to Heaven," said the priest[387] who assisted Louis XVI. at the baptism of blood.

If there were nothing in France save that old House of France built up by time and of astounding majesty, we could make a finer show than all the other nations in the matter of illustrious things. The Capets were reigning when the other sovereigns of Europe were still subjects. The vassals of our kings have become kings. Those sovereigns have handed down to us, with their names, titles which posterity has accepted as authentic: some are called Augustus[388], Saint[389], the Pious[390], the Great[391], the Courteous[392], the Bold[393], the Wise[394], the Victorious[395], the Well-beloved[396]; others the Father of the People[397], the Father of Letters[398]:

"As it is writ in blame," says an old historian, "that all the good
Servian kings could easily go into a ring, the bad kings of France
could do so more easily, so small is their number."

Under the Royal Family, the darkness of the Barbarians was dispelled, the language was formed; literature and arts produced their master-pieces; our towns were beautified, our monuments raised, our roads opened, our harbours constructed; our armies astonished Europe and Asia and our fleets covered the two oceans.

Our pride waxes furious at the mere display of those magnificent tapestries in the Louvre; shadows, shadowy embroideries shock us. Unknown this morning, still more unknown this evening, we are none the less persuaded that we efface all that went before us. And yet each fleeting moment asks us, "Who art thou?" and we know not what to reply. Charles X. replied: he went away with a whole era of the world; the dust of a thousand generations is mingled with his; history salutes him, the centuries kneel before his tomb; all have known his House; it has never failed them: it is they who have been wanting towards that House.

[Sidenote: The last of the Bourbons.]

O banished King, men have been able to outlaw you, but you shall not be driven out by time: you are sleeping your hard sleep in a monastery, on the last plank but yesterday destined for some Franciscan. No heralds-at-arms at your obsequies: none save a troop of bleached and hoary old times; no grandees to fling the emblems of their dignities into the vault: they have done homage for them elsewhere. Mute ages are seated beside your bier; a long procession of past days, with closed eyes, silently mourns around your coffin.

By your side lie your heart and your intestines, snatched from your breast and your loins, even as we lay beside a dead mother the abortive fruit that has cost her her life. At each anniversary, O Most Christian Monarch, O cenobite after death, some brother will recite to you the prayers of the memorial service; you will attract to your eternal _Hic Jacet_ none save your sons banished with you: for even at Trieste the monument of Mesdames is empty; their sacred relics have returned to their country and you have paid to exile, by your own exile, the debt of those noble ladies.

Ah, why do they not to-day bring together so many dispersed remains, even as they collect antiques unearthed from different excavations? The Arc de Triomphe would carry Napoleon's sarcophagus as its crowning, or the bronze column raise motionless victories over immortal remains. And yet the stone carved by order of Sesostris hence-forward buries the scaffold of Louis XVI. under the weight of the ages. The hour will come when the obelisk of the desert shall find again, on the place of the murders, the silence and solitude of Luxor.

[283] This book was written in Paris, in 1837 and 1838, and revised in June 1847--T.

[284] Ferdinand Philippe Louis Charles Henri Duc d'Orléans (1810-1842) married, on the 30th of May 1837, the Princess Helen of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. He was killed, on the 13th of July, at Neuilly, by leaping from his carriage, of which the horses had run away. His widow, who was and remained a Lutheran, died in 1858.--T.

[285] Charles Jean Marie Barbaroux (1767-1794), a noted Girondin orator and politician, belonged, like most of the participants in the Revolution of 1789, to the middle-classes, and was a lawyer by profession. He led the Marseillaise section in the attack on the Tuileries, on the 10th of August 1792. He was sent, as a Girondin deputy, to the Convention, where he appears to have been noted for the beauty of his person no less than for his eloquence, and soon went to loggerheads with Marat and Robespierre. In the trial of Louis XVI., he voted for the appeal to the nation. He was proscribed, on the 31st of May 1793, as a Royalist and an enemy of the Republic: he sought shelter in Calvados and took ship at Quimper for Bordeaux. Hardly had he arrived there when he was arrested and well and duly guillotined, on the 25th of July 1794 and in the twenty-eighth year of his age. Carlyle says, wrongly, I believe, that he shot himself to escape arrest.--T.