THE MEMOIRS OF FRANÇOIS RENÉ

VICOMTE DE CHATEAUBRIAND

SOMETIME AMBASSADOR TO ENGLAND

BEING A TRANSLATION BY ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS
OF THE MÉMOIRES D'OUTRE-TOMBE WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM CONTEMPORARY SOURCES. In 6 Volumes. Vol. III

"NOTRE SANG A TEINT
LA BANNIÈRE DE FRANCE"

LONDON: PUBLISHED BY FREEMANTLE
AND CO. AT 217 PICCADILLY MDCCCCII

VOLUME III

The years 1807, 1808, 1809 and 1810—Article in the Mercure of July 1807—I purchase the Vallée-aux-Loups and retire to it—The Martyrs—Armand de Chateaubriand—The years 1811, 1812, 1813, 1814—Publication of the Itinéraire—Letter from the Cardinal de Bausset—Death of Chénier—I become a member of the Institute—The affair of my speech—The decennial prizes—The Essai sur les Révolutions—The Natchez.

PART THE THIRD

1814-1830

[BOOKS I AND II] 45-58

The last days of the Empire

[BOOK III] 59-105

Entry of the Allies into Paris—Bonaparte at Fontainebleau—The Regency at Blois—Publication of my pamphlet De Bonaparte et des Bourbons—The Senate issues the decree of dethronement—The house in the Rue Saint-Florentin—M. de Talleyrand—Addresses of the Provisional Government—Constitution proposed by the Senate—Arrival of the Comte d'Artois—Bonaparte abdicates at Fontainebleau—Napoleon's itinerary to the island of Elba—Louis XVIII. at Compiègne—His entry into Paris—The Old Guard—An irreparable mistake—The Declaration of Saint-Ouen—Treaty of Paris—The Charter—Departure of the Allies—First year of the Restoration—First ministry—I publish my Réflexions Politiques—Madame la Duchesse de Duras—I am appointed Ambassador to Sweden—Exhumation of the remains of Louis XVI.—The first 21st of January at Saint-Denis

[BOOK IV] 106-148

Napoleon at Elba—Commencement of the Hundred Days—The return from Elba—Torpor of the Legitimacy—Article by Benjamin Constant—Order of the day of Marshal Soult—A royal session—Petition of the School of Law to the Chamber of Deputies—Plan for the defense of Paris—Flight of the King—I leave with Madame de Chateaubriand—Confusion on the road—The Duc d'Orléans and the Prince de Condé—Tournai—Brussels—Memories—The Duc de Richelieu—The King summons me to join him at Ghent—The Hundred Days at Ghent—Continuation of the Hundred Days at Ghent—Affairs in Vienna

[BOOK V] 149-184

The Hundred Days in Paris—Effect of the passage of the Legitimacy in France—Bonaparte's astonishment—He is obliged to capitulate to ideas which he thought smothered—His new system—Three enormous gamblers remain—Illusions of the Liberals—Clubs and Federates—Juggling away of the Republic: the Additional Act—Convocation of the Chamber of Representatives—A useless Champ de Mai—Cares and bitterness of Bonaparte—Resolution in Vienna—Movement in Paris—What we were doing at Ghent—M. de Blacas—The Battle of Waterloo—Confusion at Ghent—What the Battle of Waterloo was—Return of the Emperor—Reappearance of La Fayette—Renewed abdication of Bonaparte—Stormy scenes in the House of Peers—Threatening portents for the Second Restoration—The departure from Ghent—Arrival at Mons—I miss the first opportunity of fortune in my political career—M. de Talleyrand at Mons—His scene with the King—I stupidly interest myself on M. de Talleyrand's behalf—Mons to Gonesse—With M. le Comte Beugnot I oppose Fouché's nomination as minister: my reasons—The Duke of Wellington gains the day—Arnouville—Saint-Denis—Last conversation with the King

[BOOK VI] 185-229

Bonaparte at the Malmaison—General abandonment—Departure from the Malmaison—Rambouillet—Rochefort—Bonaparte takes refuge on the English fleet—He writes to the Prince Regent—Bonaparte on the Bellerophon—Torbay—Act confining Bonaparte in St Helena—He passes over to the Northumberland and sets sail—Judgment on Bonaparte—Character of Bonaparte—Has Bonaparte left us in renown what he has lost us in strength?—Futility of the truths set forth above—The Island of St. Helena—Bonaparte crosses the Atlantic—Napoleon lands at St. Helena—His establishment at Longwood—Precautions—Life at Longwood—Visits—Manzoni—Illness of Bonaparte—Ossian—Reveries of Napoleon in sight of the sea—Projects of evasion—Last occupation of Bonaparte—He lies down to rise no more—He dictates his will—Napoleon's religious sentiments—The chaplain Vignale—Napoleon's speech to Antomarchi, his doctor—He receives the last sacraments—He expires—His funeral—Destruction of the Napoleonic world—My last relations with Bonaparte—St. Helena after the death of Napoleon—Exhumation of Bonaparte—My visit to Cannes

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[Louis XVIII]
[Charles X. (as Comte D'artois)]
[La Fayette]
[Talleyrand]
[Fouché, Duc d'Otrante]
[Pius VII]

Louis XVIII.

[THE MEMOIRS OF CHATEAUBRIAND]

VOLUME III

[BOOK V][1]

Madame de Chateaubriand had been very ill during my travels; her friends had often given her up for lost. In some notes which M. de Clausel has written for his children, and which he has been good enough to permit me to look through, I find this passage:

"M. de Chateaubriand left on his journey to Jerusalem in the month of July 1806: during his absence I went every day to Madame de Chateaubriand. Our traveller did me the kindness to write me a letter of several pages from Constantinople, which you will find in the drawer in our library at Coussergues. During the winter of 1806 to 1807, we knew that M. de Chateaubriand was at sea, on his way back to Europe; one day I had gone for a walk in the garden of the Tuileries with M. de Fontanes, in a terrible west wind; we had taken shelter on the terrace by the water-side. M. de Fontanes said to me:

"Perhaps, at this minute, a blast of this horrible storm will wreck his ship.'

"We learnt since that this presentiment was very nearly realized. I make a note of this to express the lively friendship; the interest in M. de Chateaubriand's literary fame, which was to increase by this voyage; the noble, the deep and rare sentiments which animated M. de Fontanes, an excellent man whom I, too, have to thank for great services, and whom I urge you to remember in your prayers to God."

If I were destined to live, and if I could cause to live in my works all the persons who are dear to me, how gladly would I take with me all my friends!

Full of hope, I brought home my handful of gleanings my period of repose did not last long.

By a series of arrangements, I had become the sole proprietor of the Mercure.[2] Towards the end of June 1807, M. Alexandre de Laborde published his Journey in Spain; in July I wrote the article in the Mercure from which I have quoted certain passages when speaking of the death of the Duc d'Enghien: "When in the silence of abjection," etc. Bonaparte's successes, far from subduing me, had revolted me; I had gathered fresh energy in my opinions and in the storms. I did not in vain carry a face bronzed by the sun, nor had I exposed myself to the wrath of the heavens to tremble with darkened brow before a man's anger. If Napoleon had done with the kings, he had not done with me. My article, falling in the midst of his successes and of his wonders, stirred France: copies in manuscript were distributed broadcast; several subscribers to the Mercure cut out the article and had it bound separately; it was read in the drawing-rooms and hawked about from house to house. One must have lived at that time to form an idea of the effect produced by a voice resounding alone amid the silence of the world. The noble sentiments thrust down at the bottom of men's hearts revived. Napoleon flew out: one is less irritated by reason of the offense received than by reason of the idea one has formed of one's self. What! To despise his very glory; to brave for a second time the man at whose feet the universe lay prostrate!

"Does Chateaubriand think that I am an idiot, that I don't understand him! I will have him cut down on the Steps of the Tuileries!"

He gave the order to suppress the Mercure and to arrest me. My property perished; my person escaped by a miracle: Bonaparte had to occupy himself with the world; he forgot me, but I remained under the burden of the threat.

My position was a deplorable one: when I felt bound to act according to the inspiration of my sense of honour, I found myself burdened with my personal responsibility and with the trouble which I caused my wife. Her courage was great, but she suffered none the less for it, and those storms successively called down upon my head disturbed her life. She had suffered so much for me during the Revolution; it was natural that she should long for a little rest. The more so in that Madame de Chateaubriand admired Bonaparte unreservedly; she had no illusions as to the Legitimacy: she never ceased predicting what would happen to me on the return of the Bourbons.

The Vallée-aux-Loups.

The first book of these Memoirs is dated from the Vallée-aux-Loups, on the 4th of October 1811: I there give a description of the little retreat which I bought to hide me at that time [3]. Leaving our apartment at Madame de Coislin's, we went first to live in the Rue des Saints-Perès, in the Hôtel de Lavalette, which took its name from the master and mistress [4] of the hotel.

M. de Lavalette was thick-set, wore a plum-coloured coat, and carried a gold-headed cane: he became my man of business, if I have ever had any business. He had been an officer of the buttery to the King, and what I did not eat up [5] he drank.

At the end of November, seeing that the repairs to my cottage were not progressing, I determined to go and superintend them. We arrived at the Vallée in the evening. We did not take the ordinary road, but went in through the gate at the foot of the garden. The soil of the drives, soaked through with rain, prevented the horses from going; the carriage upset. A plaster bust of Homer, placed beside Madame de Chateaubriand, dashed through the window and broke its neck: a bad omen for the Martyrs, at which I was then working.

The house, full of workmen laughing, singing, and hammering, was warmed by blazing shavings and lighted by candle-ends; it looked like a hermitage illuminated at night by pilgrims, in the woods. Delighted to find two rooms made fairly comfortable, in one of which supper had been laid, we sat down to table. The next morning, awakened by the sound of the hammers and the songs of the husbandmen, I saw the sun rise with less anxiety than the master of the Tuileries.

I was in an endless enchantment; without being Madame de Sévigné, I went, provided with a pair of wooden clogs, to plant my trees in the mud, to pass up and down the same walks, to look again and again at every smallest corner, to hide wherever there was a tuft of brushwood, saying to myself that this would be my park in the future: for then the future was not lacking. When striving, to-day, by force of memory to re-open the closed horizon, I no longer find the same, but I meet with others. I lose myself in my vanished thoughts; the illusions into which I fall are perhaps as fair as their predecessors; only they are no longer so young: what I used to see in the splendour of the south, I now perceive by the light of the sunset. If, nevertheless, I could cease to be harassed by dreams! Bayard, summoned to surrender a place, replied:

"Wait till I have made a bridge of dead bodies, to pass over with my garrison."

I fear that, to go out, I shall need to pass over the bodies of my fancies.

My trees, being as yet small, did not gather the sounds of the autumn winds; but, in spring, the breezes which inhaled the breath of the flowers of the neighbouring fields retained it and poured it over my valley.

I made some additions to my cottage; I improved the appearance of its brick walls with a portico supported by two black marble columns and two white marble caryatides: I remembered that I had been to Athens. My plan was to add a tower to the end of my pavilion; meantime I made counterfeit battlements on the wall separating me from the road: I thus anticipated the mediæval mania which is stupefying us at present. The Vallée-aux-Loups is the only thing that I regret of all that I have lost; it is written that nothing shall remain to me. After the loss of my Valley, I planted the Infirmerie de Marie-Thérèse [6], which also I have lately left. I defy fate now to fix me to the smallest morsel of earth; henceforth I shall have for a garden only those avenues, honoured with such fine names, around the Invalides, along which I stroll with my one-armed or limping colleagues. Not far from those walks, Madame de Beaumont's cypress lifts its head; in those deserted spaces, the great and frivolous Duchesse de Châtillon once leant upon my arm. Now I give my arm only to time: it is very heavy!

I worked with delight at my Memoirs, and the Martyrs made progress; I had already read some books to M. de Fontanes. I had settled down in the midst of my memories as in a large library; I consulted this and then that, and next closed the register with a sigh, for I perceived that the light, in penetrating into it, destroyed its mystery. Light up the days of life, and they will no longer be what they are.

In the month of July, I fell ill and was obliged to return to Paris. The doctors rendered the illness dangerous. In the time of Hippocrates, there was a dearth of dead in the lower regions, says the epigram: thanks to our modern Hippocrates, there is an abundance to-day.

This was perhaps the only moment at which, when near death, I felt a desire to live. When I felt myself lapsing into faintness, which often happened, I used to say to Madame de Chateaubriand:

"Do not be alarmed; I shall come to."

I lost consciousness, but with great inward impatience, for I clung to God knows what. I also passionately longed to complete what I believed and still believe to be my most correct work. I was paying the price of the fatigue which I had undergone during my journey to the Levant.

Bonaparte and my portrait.

Girodet [7] had put the finishing touches to my portrait. He made me dark, as I then was; but he put all his genius into the work. M. Denon [8] received the master-piece for the Salon [9]; like a noble-hearted courtier, he prudently put it out of sight. When Bonaparte took his view of the gallery, after examining the pictures, he asked:

"Where is the portrait of Chateaubriand?"

He knew that it must be there: they were obliged to bring the outlaw from his hiding-place. Bonaparte, whose fit of generosity had evaporated, said, on inspecting the portrait:

"He looks like a conspirator coming down the chimney."

One day, on returning alone to the Vallée, I was told by Benjamin, the gardener, that a fat strange gentleman had come and asked for me; that, finding me out, he had said he would wait for me; that he had had an omelette made for him; and that, afterwards, he had flung himself on my bed. I went upstairs, entered my room, and saw something enormous asleep; shaking that mass, I cried:

"Hi! Hi! Who are you?"

The mass gave a start and sat up. Its head was covered with a woollen cap; it wore a smock and trousers of spotted wool, all in one piece; its face was smeared with snuff, and its tongue hung out. It was my cousin Moreau! I had not seen him since the camp at Thionville. He was back from Russia and wanted to enter the excise. My old cicerone in Paris went to die at Nantes. Thus disappeared one of the early characters of these Memoirs. I hope that, stretched on a couch of daffodils, he still talks of my verses to Madame de Chastenay, if that agreeable shade has descended to the Elysian Fields.

The Martyrs.

The Martyrs appeared in the spring of 1809. It was a conscientious piece of work. I had consulted critics of taste and knowledge: Messieurs de Fontanes, Bertin, Boissonade [10], Malte-Brun [11]; and I had accepted their judgment. Hundreds and hundreds of times I had written, unwritten and rewritten the same page. Of all my writings, this is the most noted for the correctness of the language.

I had made no mistake in the scheme of the book: at present, when my ideas have become general, no one denies that the struggles of two religions, one ending, the other commencing, afford one of the richest, most fruitful and most dramatic subjects for the Muses. I thought, therefore, that I might venture to cherish some all too foolish hopes; but I was forgetting the success of my first book: in this country you must never reckon on two close successes; one destroys the other. If you have some sort of talent for prose, beware of showing any for poetry; if you are distinguished in literature, lay no claim to politics: such is the French spirit and its poverty. The self-loves alarmed, the jealousies surprised by an author's good fortune at the outset combine and lie in wait for the poet's second publication, to take a signal vengeance:

Tous, la main dans l'encre, jurent de se venger [12].

I must pay for the silly admiration which I had obtained by trickery at the time of the appearance of the Génie du Christianisme; I must be made to restore what I had stolen! Alas, they need not have taken such pains to rob me of that which I myself did not think that I deserved! If I had delivered Christian Rome, I asked only for an obsidional crown [13], a plait of grass culled in the Eternal City.

The executioner of the justice of the vanities was M. Hoffmann [14], to whom may God grant peace! The Journal des Débats was no longer free; its proprietors had no power in it, and the censors registered my condemnation in its pages. M. Hoffmann, however, forgave the Battle of the Franks and some other pieces in the work; but, if he thought Cymodocée attractive, he was too excellent a Catholic not to grow indignant at the profane conjunction of the truths of Christianity and the fables of mythology. Velléda did not save me. It was imputed to me as a crime that I had changed Tacitus' German druidess into a Gallic woman, as though I had wanted to borrow anything beyond an harmonious name! And behold, we see the Christians of France, to whom I had rendered such great services by setting up their altars again, stupidly taking it into their heads to be scandalized on the gospel word of M. Hoffmann! The title of the Martyrs had misled them: they expected to read a martyrology, and the tiger who tore only a daughter of Homer to pieces seemed to them a sacrilege.

The real martyrdom of Pope Pius VII., whom Bonaparte had brought as a prisoner to Paris, did not scandalize them, but they were quite roused by my un-Christian fictions, as they called them. And it was M. the Bishop of Chartres [15] who undertook to punish the horrible impieties of the author of the Génie du Christianisme. Alas, he must realize that to-day his zeal is wanted for very different contests!

M. the Bishop of Chartres is the brother of my excellent friend M. de Clausel, a very great Christian, who did not allow himself to be carried away by so sublime a virtue as the critic, his brother.

I thought it my duty to reply to my censors, as I had done in the matter of the Génie du Christianisme. Montesquieu [16], with his defense of the Esprit des lois, encouraged me. I was wrong. Authors who are attacked might say the finest things in the world, and yet excite merely the smiles of impartial minds and the ridicule of the crowd. They place themselves on a bad ground: the defensive position is antipathetic to the French character. When, in reply to objections, I pointed out that, in stigmatizing this or that passage, they had attacked some fine relic of antiquity, beaten on the facts, they extricated themselves by next saying that the Martyrs was a mere "patchwork." When I justified the simultaneous presence of the two religions by the authority of the Fathers of the Church themselves, the reply was that, at the period in which I placed the action of the Martyrs, paganism no longer existed among great minds.

I believed in good faith that the work had fallen flat; the violence of the attack had shaken my conviction as an author. Some of my friends consoled me; they maintained that the proscription was unjustified, that sooner or later the public would pronounce another verdict: M. de Fontanes especially was firm; I was no Racine, but he might be a Boileau, and he never ceased saying to me:

"They'll come back to it."

His persuasion in this regard was so deep-rooted that it inspired him with some charming stanzas:

Le Tasse, errant de ville en ville, etc.[17],

without fear of compromising his taste or the authority of his judgment.

The Martyrs has, in fact, retrieved itself, has obtained the honour of four consecutive editions, and has even enjoyed particular favour with men of letters: appreciation has been shown me of a work which bears evidence of serious study, of some pains towards style, of a great reverence for language and taste.

Its reception.

Criticism of the subject-matter was promptly abandoned. To say that I had mixed profane with sacred things, because I had depicted two cults which existed side by side and which had each its beliefs, its altars, its priests, its ceremonies, was equivalent to saying that I ought to have renounced history. For whom did the martyrs die? For Jesus Christ. To whom were they immolated? To the gods of the Empire. Therefore there were two religions.

The philosophical question, namely, whether, under Diocletian [18], the Greeks and Romans believed in the gods of Homer, and whether public worship had undergone any changes, was a question that did not concern me as a poet; as an historian, I might have had many things to say.

All this no longer matters. The Martyrs has lived, contrary to my first expectation, and I have had to occupy myself only with the care of revising its text.

The fault of the Martyrs has to do with the wonderful "directness" which, owing to what remained of my classical prejudices, I had unadvisedly employed. Startled at my own innovations, I thought it impossible to dispense with a "Heaven" and a "Hell." Yet the good and bad angels sufficed to carry on the action, without delivering it to worn-out machinery. If the Battle of the Franks, Velléda, Jérôme, Augustin, Eudore, Cymodocée; if all these, and the descriptions of Naples and Greece, are unable to obtain pardon for the Martyrs, Hell and Heaven will not save it.

One of the passages which most pleased M. de Fontanes was the following:

"Cymodocée sat down at the window of the prison and, resting her head, adorned with the martyr's veil, on her hand, sighed forth these harmonious words:

"'Cleave the calm and dazzling sea, O swift vessels of Ausonia; release the sail, O slaves of Neptune, to the amorous breath of the winds, and bend over the agile oars. Bring me back to the care of my husband and my father, on the happy shores of the Pamisus! Fly, O birds of Lybia, whose supple necks so gracefully bend, fly to the summit of Ithomus and say that the daughter of Homer shall see again the laurels of Messenia! When shall I see once more my bed of ivory, the light of day so dear to mortals, the meadows studded with flowers which a clear water bathes, which modesty adorns with her breath [19]!'"

The Génie du Christianisme will remain my great work, because it produced, or decided, a revolution and commenced the new era of the literary age. The case is different with the Martyrs: it came after the revolution had been worked, and was only a superabundant proof of my doctrines; my style was no longer a new thing, and, except in the episode of Velléda and the picture of the manners of the Franks, my poem even feels the influence of the places which it has frequented: in it the classical dominates the romantic.

Lastly, the circumstances no longer existed which contributed to the success of the Génie du Christianisme; the Government, far from being favourable to me, had become hostile. The Martyrs meant to me a redoubling of persecution: the frequent allusions in the portrait of Galerius [20] and in the picture of the Court of Diocletian could not fail to arouse the attention of the imperial police, the more so inasmuch as the English translator, who had no reason to observe any circumspection, and who cared not at all whether he compromised me or not, had called attention to the allusions in his preface.

The publication of the Martyrs was coincident with a fatal occurrence. This did not disarm the aristarchs, thanks to the ardour with which we are animated for the powers that be; they felt that a literary criticism which tended to diminish the interest attached to my name might be agreeable to Bonaparte. The latter, like the millionaire bankers who give splendid banquets and charge their customers postage, did not disdain small profits.

Armand de Chateaubriand, whom you have seen as the companion of my childhood, who appeared before you again in the Princes' Army with the deaf and dumb Libba, had remained in England. He married in Jersey [21], and was charged with the correspondence of the Princes. Setting sail on the 25th of September 1808, he was landed, at eleven o'clock in the same evening, on the coast of Brittany, near Saint-Cast. The boat's crew consisted of eleven men; two only were Frenchmen: Roussel and Quintal.

Armand de Chateaubriand.

Armand proceeded to the house of M. Delaunay-Boisé-Lucas the Elder, who lived in the village of Saint-Gast, where the English had once been driven back to their ships: his host advised him to go back [22]; but the boat had already taken its homeward course to Jersey. Armand, having come to an arrangement with M. Boisé-Lucas' son, handed him the despatches with which he had been entrusted by M. Henry-Larivière [23], the Princes' agent.

"I went to the coast on the 29th of September," he says, in answer to an interrogatory, "and waited there two nights, without seeing my boat. As the moon was very bright, I withdrew, and returned on the 14th or 15th of the month. I remained till the 24th of the said month. I spent every night in the rocks, but to no purpose; my boat did not come, and by day I went to the Boisé-Lucas'. The same boat, with the same crew, to which Roussel and Quintal belonged, was to come to fetch me. With regard to the precautions taken with Boisé-Lucas the Elder, there were none besides those which I have already enumerated."

The dauntless Armand, landed at a few steps from his paternal fields, as though on the inhospitable coast of Taurida, in vain turned his eyes over the billows, by the light of the moon, in search of the bark which could have saved him. In former days, after I had already left Combourg, with the intention of going to India, I had cast my mournful gaze over the same billows. From the rocks of Saint-Cast where Armand lay, from the cape of the Varde where I had sat, a few leagues of the sea, over which our eyes have wandered in opposite directions, have witnessed the cares and divided the destinies of two men joined by ties of name and blood. It was also in the midst of the same waves that I met Gesril for the last time. Often, in my dreams, I see Gesril and Armand washing the wound in their foreheads in the deep, while, reddened to my very feet, stretches the sea with which we used to play in our childhood [24].

Armand succeeded in embarking in a boat purchased at Saint-Malo, but, driven back by the north-west wind, he was again obliged to put back. At last, on the 6th of January, assisted by a sailor called Jean Brien, he launched a little stranded boat, and got hold of another which was afloat. He thus describes his voyage, which bears an affinity to my star and my adventures, in his examination on the 18th of March:

"From nine o'clock in the evening, when we started, till two o'clock in the morning, the weather favoured us. Judging then that we were not far from the rocks called the 'Mainquiers,' we lay-to on our anchor, intending to wait for daylight; but, the wind having freshened, and fearing that it would grow still stronger, we continued our course. A few minutes later, the sea became very heavy and, our compass having been broken by a wave, we remained uncertain as to the course we were taking. The first land that came into sight on the 7th (it might then be mid-day), was the coast of Normandy, which obliged us to tack about, and we again returned and lay-to near the rocks called 'Écreho,' situated between the coast of Normandy and Jersey. Strong and contrary winds obliged us to remain in that position the whole of the rest of that day and of the next, the 8th. On the morning of the 9th, as soon as it was light, I said to Despagne that it appeared to me that the wind had decreased, seeing that our boat was not working much, and to look which way the wind was blowing. He told me that he no longer saw the rocks near which we had dropped the anchor. I then decided that we were drifting, and that we had lost our anchor. The violence of the storm left us no alternative but to make for the coast. As we saw no land, I did not know at what distance we were from it. It was then that I flung my papers into the sea, having taken the precaution to fasten a stone to them. We then scudded before the wind and made the coast, at about nine o'clock in the morning, at Bretteville-sur-Ay, in Normandy.

"We were received on the coast by the customs officers, who took me out of my boat almost dead; my feet and legs were frozen. We were both lodged with the lieutenant of the brigade of Bretteville. Two days later, Despagne was taken to the prison at Coutances, and I have not seen him since that day. A few days after, I myself was transferred to the gaol at that town; the next day, I was taken by the quarter-master to Saint-Lô, and remained for eight days with the said quarter-master. I appeared once before M. the Prefect of the department, and, on the 26th of January, I left with the captain and quarter-master of the gendarmes to be taken to Paris, where I arrived on the 28th. They took me to the office of M. Desmarets at the ministry of the general police, and from there to the prison of the Grande-Force."

Armand had the wind, the waves and the imperial police against him; Bonaparte was in connivance with the storms. The gods made a very great expenditure of wrath against a paltry existence.

The packet flung into the sea was cast back by it on the beach of Notre-Dame-d'Alloue, near Valognes. The papers contained in this packet served as documents for the conviction: there were thirty-two of them. Quintal, returning to the sands of Brittany with his boat to fetch Armand, had also, through an obstinate fatality, been shipwrecked in Norman waters a few days before my cousin. The crew of Quintal's boat had spoken; the Prefect of Saint-Lô had learnt that M. de Chateaubriand was the leader of the Princes' enterprises. When he heard that a cutter manned with only two men had run ashore, he had no doubt that Armand was one of the two shipwrecked men, for all the fishermen spoke of him as the most fearless man at sea that had ever been known.

Arrest of Armand.

On the 20th of January 1809, the Prefect of the Manche reported Armand's arrest to the general police. His letter commences:

"My conjectures have been completely verified: Chateaubriand is arrested; it was he who landed on the coast at Bretteville and who had taken the name of 'John Fall.'

"Uneasy at finding that, in spite of the very precise orders which I had given, John Fall did not arrive at Saint-Lô, I instructed Quarter-master Mauduit of the gendarmes, a trustworthy and extremely active man, to go to fetch this John Fall, wherever he might be, and bring him before me, in whatever condition he was. He found him at Coutances, at the moment when they were arranging to transfer him to the hospital, to treat him for his legs, which were frozen.

"Fall appeared before me to-day. I had had Lelièvre put in a separate room, from which he could see John Fall arrive without being observed. When Lelièvre saw him come up a flight of steps placed near this apartment, he cried, striking his hands together and changing colour:

"'It's Chateaubriand! However did they catch him?'

"Lelièvre was in no way forewarned. This exclamation was drawn from him by surprise. He asked me afterwards not to say that he had mentioned Chateaubriand's name, because he would be lost.

"I did not let John Fall see that I knew who he was."

Armand, carried to Paris and lodged at the Force, underwent a secret interrogation at the military gaol of the Abbaye. General Hulin, who was now Military Commander of Paris, appointed Bertrand, a captain in the first demi-brigade of veterans, judge-advocate of the military commission instructed, by a decree of the 25th of February, to inquire into Armand's case.

The persons implicated were M. de Goyon [25], who had been sent by Armand to Brest, and M. de Boisé-Lucas the Younger, charged to hand letters from Henry-Larivière to Messieurs Laya [26] and Sicard [27] in Paris.

In a letter of the 13th of March, addressed to Fouché, Armand said:

"Let the Emperor deign to restore to liberty men now languishing in prison for having shown me too much interest. Whatever happens, let their liberty be restored to all of them alike. I recommend my unfortunate family to the Emperor's generosity."

These mistakes of a man with human bowels addressing himself to an hyena are painful to see. Bonaparte, besides, was not the lion of Florence: he did not give up the child on observing the tears of the mother. I had written to ask Fouché for an audience; he granted me one, and assured me, with all the self-possession of revolutionary frivolity, "that he had seen Armand, that I could be easy: that Armand had told him that he would die well, and that in fact he wore a very resolute air." Had I proposed to Fouché that he should die, would he have preserved that deliberate tone and that superb indifference with regard to himself?

I applied to Madame de Rémusat, begging her to remit to the Empress a letter containing a request for justice, or for mercy, to the Emperor. Madame la Duchesse de Saint-Leu [28] told me, at Arenberg, of the fate of my letter: Joséphine gave it to the Emperor; he seemed to hesitate, on reading it; and then, coming upon some words which offended him, he impatiently flung it into the fire. I had forgotten that one should show pride only on one's own behalf.

His execution.

M. de Goyon, condemned with Armand, underwent his sentence. Yet Madame la Baronne-Duchesse de Montmorency had been induced to interest herself in his favour: she was the daughter of Madame de Matignon, with whom the Goyons were allied. A Montmorency in service ought to have obtained anything, if the prostitution of a name were enough to win over an old monarchy to a new power. Madame de Goyon, though unable to save her husband, saved young Boisé-Lucas. Everything combined towards this misfortune, which struck only unknown persons; one would have thought that the downfall of a world was in question: storms upon the waves, ambushes on land, Bonaparte, the sea, the murderers of Louis XVI., and perhaps some "passion," the mysterious soul of mundane catastrophes. People have not even perceived all these things; it all struck me alone and lived in my memory only. What mattered to Napoleon the insects crushed by his hand upon his diadem?

On the day of execution, I wished to accompany my comrade on his last battle-field; I found no carriage, and hastened on foot to the Plaine de Grenelle. I arrived, all perspiring, a second too late: Armand had been shot against the surrounding wall of Paris. His skull was fractured; a butcher's dog was licking up his blood and his brains. I followed the cart which took the bodies of Armand and his two companions, plebeian and noble, Quintal and Goyon, to the Vaugirard Cemetery, where I had buried M. de La Harpe. I saw my cousin for the last time without being able to recognise him: the lead had disfigured him, he had no face left; I could not remark the ravages of years in it, nor even see death within its shapeless and bleeding orb; he remained young in my memory as at the time of the Siege of Thionville. He was shot on Good Friday: the crucifix appears to me at the extremity of all my misfortunes. When I walk on the rampart of the Plaine de Grenelle, I stop to look at the imprint of the firing, still marked upon the wall. If Bonaparte's bullets had left no other traces, he would no longer be spoken of.

Strange concatenation of destinies! General Hulin, the Military Commander of Paris, appointed the commission which ordered Armand's brains to be blown out; he had, in former days, been appointed president of the commission which shattered the head of the Duc d'Enghien. Ought he not to have abstained, after his first misfortune, from all connection with courts-martial? And I have spoken of the death of the descendant of the Great Condé, without reminding General Hulin of the part which he played in the execution of the humble soldier, my kinsman. No doubt I, in my turn, had received from Heaven my commission to judge the judges of the tribunal of Vincennes.

The year 1811 was one of the most remarkable in my literary career [29]. I published the Itinéraire de Paris à Jerusalem[30], I accepted M. de Chénier's place at the Institute, and I began to write the Memoirs which I am now finishing.

The Itinéraire.

The success of the Itinéraire was as complete as that of the Martyrs had been disputed. There is no scribbler, however inconsiderable, but receives letters of congratulation on the appearance of his farrago. Among the new compliments which were addressed to me, I do not feel at liberty to suppress the letter of a man of virtue and merit who has produced two works of recognised authority, leaving hardly anything to be said on Bossuet and Fénelon. The Bishop of Alais, Cardinal de Bausset [31], is the biographer of those two great prelates. He goes beyond all praise with reference to me: that is the accepted usage in writing to an author, and does not count; but the cardinal at least shows the general opinion of the moment on the Itinéraire: he foresees, with respect to Carthage, the objections of which my geographical feeling might be the object; in any case, that feeling has prevailed, and I have set Dido's ports in their places. My readers will be interested to recognise in this letter the diction of a select society, a style rendered grave and sweet by politeness, religion and manner: an excellence of tone from which we are so far removed to-day.

"Villemoisson, by Lonjumeau (Seine-et-Oise),

"25 March 1811.

"You should, Sir, have received, and you have received, the just tribute of the public gratitude and satisfaction; but I can assure you that not one of your readers has enjoyed your interesting work with a truer sentiment than myself. You are the first and only traveller who has had no need of the aid of engraving and drawing to place before the eyes of his readers the places and monuments which recall fine memories and great images. Your soul has felt all, your imagination depicted all, and the reader feels with your soul and sees with your eyes.

"I could convey to you but very feebly the impression which I received from the very first pages, when skirting in your company the coast of Corfu, and when witnessing the landing of all those 'eternal' men whom opposite destinies have successively driven thither. A few lines have sufficed you to engrave the traces of their footsteps for all time; they will always be found in your Itinéraire, which will preserve them more faithfully than so many marbles which have been incapable of keeping the great names confided to them.

"I now know the monuments of Athens in the way in which one likes to know them. I had already seen them in beautiful engravings, I had admired them, but I had not felt them. One too often forgets that, if architects need exact descriptions, measurements and proportions, men need to recognise the mind and the genius which have conceived the idea of those great monuments.

"You have restored to the Pyramids that noble and profound intention which frivolous declaimers had not even perceived.

"How thankful I am to you, Sir, for delivering to the just execration of all time that stupid and ferocious people which, since twelve hundred years, has afflicted the fairest countries of the earth! One smiles with you at the hope of seeing it return to the desert whence it came.

"You have inspired me with a passing feeling of indulgence for the Arabs, for the sake of the fine comparison which you have drawn between them and the savages of North America.

"Providence seems to have led you to Jerusalem to assist at the last representation of the first scene of Christianity. If it be no longer granted to the eyes of men to behold that Tomb, 'the only one which will have nothing to give up on the Last Day,' Christians will always find it again in the Gospels, and meditative and sensitive minds in the pictures which you have drawn.

"The critics will not fail to reproach you with the men and incidents with which you have covered the ruins of Carthage and which you could not have seen, since they no longer exist. But I implore you, Sir, confine yourself to asking them if they themselves would not have been very sorry not to find them in those engaging pictures.

"You have the right, Sir, to enjoy a form of glory which belongs to you exclusively by a sort of creation; but there is an enjoyment still more satisfying to a character like yours, that is, to have endowed the creations of your genius with the nobility of your soul and the elevation of your sentiments. It is this which, at all times, will ensure to your name and memory the esteem, the admiration and the respect of all friends of religion, virtue and honour.

"It is on this score that I beg you, Sir, to accept the homage of all my sentiments.

"L. F. de Bausset, ex-Bishop of Alais."

M. de Chénier [32] died on the 10th of January 1811. My friends had the fatal idea of pressing me to take his place in the Institute. They urged that, exposed as I was to the hostilities of the head of the Government, to the suspicions and annoyances of the police, it was necessary that I should enter a body then powerful through its fame and through the men composing it; that, sheltered behind that buckler, I should be able to work in peace.

I had an invincible repugnance to occupying a place, even outside the Government; I had too clear a recollection of what the first had cost me. Chénier's inheritance seemed fraught with peril; I should not be able to say all, save by exposing myself; I did not wish to pass over regicide in silence, although Cambacérès was the second person in the State; I was determined to make my demands heard in favour of liberty and to raise my voice against tyranny; I wanted to have my say on the horrors of 1793, to express my regrets for the fallen family of our kings, to bemoan the misfortunes of those who had remained faithful to them. My friends replied that I was deceiving myself; that a few praises of the head of the Government, obligatory in the academical speech, praises of which, in one respect, I thought Bonaparte worthy, would make him swallow all the truths I might wish to utter; and that I should at the same time enjoy the honour of having maintained my opinions and the happiness of putting an end to the terrors of Madame de Chateaubriand. By dint of their besetting me, I yielded, weary of resistance: but I assured them that they were mistaken; that Bonaparte would not be taken in by common-places on his son, his wife and his glory; that he would feel the lesson but the more keenly for them; that he would recognise the man who resigned on the death of the Duc d'Enghien and the writer of the article that caused the suppression of the Mercure; that, lastly, instead of ensuring my repose, I should revive the persecutions directed against me. They were soon obliged to recognise the truth of my words: true it is that they had not foreseen the audacity of my speech.

I went to pay the customary visits to the members of the Academy [33]. Madame de Vintimille took me to the Abbé Morellet. We found him sitting in an arm-chair before his fire; he had fallen asleep, and the Itinéraire, which he was reading, had dropped from his hands. Waking with a start at the sound of my name announced by his man-servant, he raised his head and exclaimed:

"There are passages so long, so long!"

I told him, laughing, that I saw that, and that I would abridge the new edition. He was a good-natured man and promised me his vote, in spite of Atala. When, later, the Monarchie selon la Charte appeared, he could not recover from his astonishment that such a political work should have the singer of "the daughter of the Floridas" for its author. Had Grotius [34] not written the tragedy of Adam and Eve and Montesquieu the Temple de Guide? True, I was neither Grotius nor Montesquieu.

The election took place; I was elected by ballot with a fairly large majority [35]. I at once set to work on my speech; I wrote and rewrote it a score of times, never feeling satisfied with myself: at one time, wishing to make it possible for me to read, I thought it too strong; at another, my anger returning, I thought it too weak. I did not know how to measure out the dose of academic praise. If, in spite of my antipathy for Napoleon, I had tried to render the admiration which I felt for the public portion of his life, I should have gone far beyond the peroration. Milton, whom I quote at the commencement of the speech, furnished me with a model; in his Second defense of the People of England, he made a pompous eulogy of Cromwell:

"Not only the actions of our kings," he says, "but the fabled exploits of our heroes, are overcome by your achievements. Reflect, then, frequently (how dear alike the trust, and the parent from you have received it!) that to your hands your country has commended and confided her freedom: that what she lately expected from her choicest representatives she now expects, now hopes, from you alone. O reverence this high expectation, this hope of your country relying exclusively upon yourself! Reverence the glances and the gashes of those brave men who have so nobly struggled for liberty under your auspices, as well as the shades of those who perished in the conflict! Reverence, finally, yourself, and suffer not that liberty, for the attainment of which you have endured so many hardships and encountered so many perils, to sustain any violation from your own hands, or any encroachment from those of others. Without our freedom, in fact, you cannot yourself be free: for it is justly ordained by nature that he who invades the liberty of others shall in the very outset lose his own, and be the first to feel the servitude which he has induced [36]."

Johnson quoted only the praises given to the Protector [37], in order to place the Republican in contradiction with himself; the fine passage which I have just translated contains its own qualification of those praises. Johnson's criticism is forgotten, Milton's defense has remained: all that belongs to the strife of parties and the passions of the moment dies like them and with them.

I am elected.

When my speech was ready, I was sent for to read it to the committee appointed to hear it: it was rejected by the committee, with the exception of two or three members [38]. It was a sight to see the terror of the bold Republicans who listened to me and who were alarmed by the independence of my opinions; they shuddered with indignation and fright at the mere word of liberty. M. Daru [39] took the speech to Saint-Cloud. Bonaparte declared that, if it had been delivered, he would have closed the doors of the Institute and flung me into a subterranean dungeon for the rest of my life.

I received the following note from M. Daru:

"Saint-Cloud, 28 April 1811.

"I have the honour to inform Monsieur de Chateaubriand that, when he has the time or occasion to come to Saint-Cloud, I shall be able to return to him the speech which he was good enough to entrust to me. I take this opportunity to repeat to him the assurance of the high consideration with which I have the honour to salute him.

"Daru."

I went to Saint-Cloud. M. Daru returned me the manuscript, crossed out in places, and scored ab irato with parentheses and pencil marks by Bonaparte: the lion's claw had been dug in everywhere, and I experienced a sort of pleasure of irritation in imagining that I felt it in my side. M. Daru did not conceal Napoleon's anger from me; but he told me, that, if I kept the peroration, with the exception of a few words, and changed almost the whole of the rest, I should be received with great applause. The speech had been copied out at the palace; some passages had been suppressed and others interpolated. Not long after, it appeared in the provinces printed in that fashion.

This speech is one of the best proofs of the independence of my opinions and the consistency of my principles. M. Suard, who was free and firm, said that, if it had been read in the open Academy, it would have brought down the rafters of the hall with applause. Can you, indeed, imagine the warm praises of liberty uttered in the midst of the servility of the Empire?

I had kept the scored manuscript with religious care; ill-fortune willed that, when I left the Infirmerie de Marie-Thérèse, it was burnt with a heap of papers. Nevertheless the readers of these Memoirs shall not be deprived of it: one of my colleagues had the generosity to take a copy of it; here it is:

My inaugural speech.

"When Milton published Paradise Lost, not a voice was raised in the three kingdoms of Great Britain to praise a work which, in spite of its numerous defects, remains nevertheless one of the noblest monuments of the human mind. The English Homer died forgotten, and his contemporaries left to futurity the task of immortalizing the singer of Eden. Have we here one of the great instances of literary injustice of which examples are presented by nearly every century? No, gentlemen; the English, but recently escaped from the Civil Wars, were unable to bring themselves to celebrate the memory of a man who was remarked for the ardour of his opinions in a time of calamity. What shall we reserve, they asked, for the tomb of the citizen who devotes himself to the safety of his country, if we lavish honours upon the ashes of him who, at most, is entitled to claim our generous indulgence? Posterity will do justice to Milton's memory, but we owe a lesson to our sons: we must teach them, by our silence, that talents are a baleful gift when allied with the passions, and that it is better to condemn one's self to obscurity than to achieve celebrity through one's country's misfortunes.

"Shall I, gentlemen, imitate this memorable example, or shall I speak to you of the person and works of M. Chénier? To reconcile your usages and my opinions, I feel it my duty to adopt a middle course between absolute silence and a thorough consideration. But, whatever the words I may utter, no rancour will poison this address. Should you find in me the frankness of my fellow-countryman Duclos [40], I hope also to prove to you that I possess the same loyalty.

"Doubtless it would have been curious to see what a man in my position, holding my principles and my opinions, could have to say of the man whose place I occupy to-day. It would be interesting to examine the influence of revolutions upon literature, to show how systems can mislead talent and direct it into fallacious ways which seem to lead to fame and only end in oblivion. If Milton, despite his political aberrations, has left works which posterity admires, it is because Milton, without repenting his errors, withdrew from; a society which was withdrawing from him, to seek in religion the assuagement of his ills and the source of his glory. Deprived of the light of heaven, he created for himself a new earth, a new sun, and quitted, so to speak, a world where he had seen nought save misery and crime; he set in the bowers of Eden that primitive innocence, that blessed felicity which reigned beneath the tents of Jacob and Rachel; and he placed in the lower regions the torments, passions and remorse of the men whose furies he had shared.

"Unfortunately, the works of M. Chénier, though they show the germ of a remarkable talent, glow with neither that antique simplicity nor that sublime majesty. The author was distinguished for an eminently classical mind. None better understood the principles of ancient and modern literature; the stage, eloquence, history, criticism, satire: he embraced all these; but his writings bear the impress of the disastrous days that witnessed his birth. Too often dictated by the spirit of party, they have been applauded by factions. Shall I, in discussing my predecessor's works, separate what has already passed away, like our discords, and what will perhaps survive, like our glory? Here we find the interests of society and the interests of literature confounded. I cannot forget the first sufficiently to occupy myself solely with the second; wherefore, gentlemen, I am obliged either to keep silence or to raise political questions.

"There are persons who would make of literature an abstract thing and isolate it in the midst of human affairs. Such persons will say to me, 'Why keep silence? Treat M. Chénier's works only from the literary point of view.' That is to say, gentlemen, that I must abuse your patience and my own by repeating commonplaces which you can find anywhere and which you know better than I. Manners change with the times: heirs to a long series of peaceful years, our forerunners were able to indulge in purely academic discussions which were even less a proof of their talent than of their happiness. But we, who remain the victims of a great shipwreck, no longer have what is needed to relish so perfect a calm. Our ideas, our minds have taken a different direction. The man has in us taken the place of the academician: by divesting literature of all its futility, we now behold it only in the light of our mighty memories and of the experience of our adversity. What! After a revolution which has caused us, in a few years, to live through the events of many centuries, shall the writer be forbidden all lofty considerations, shall he be denied the right to examine the serious side of objects? Shall he spend a trivial life occupied with grammatical quibbles, rules of taste, petty literary judgments? Shall he grow old, bound in the swaddling-clothes of his cradle? Shall he not show, at the end of his days, a brow furrowed by his long labours, by his grave reflections, and often by those manly sufferings which add to the greatness of mankind? What important cares, then, will have whitened his hair? The miserable sorrows of self-love and the puerile sports of the mind.

"Surely, gentlemen, that would be treating ourselves with a very strange contempt! Speaking for myself, I cannot thus belittle myself, nor reduce myself to the condition of childhood at the age of strength and reason. I cannot confine myself within the narrow circle which they would trace around the writer. For instance, gentlemen, if I wished to pass a eulogy on the man of letters, on the man of the Court who presides over this meeting [41], do you believe that I would content myself with praising in him the light and ingenious French wit which he received from his mother [42], and of which he displays to us the last model? No, assuredly: I should wish to make glow once more in all its brilliancy the noble name which he bears. I should mention the Duc de Boufflers [43] who forced the Austrians to raise the blockade of Genoa. I should speak of the marshal, his father [44], of the governor who held the ramparts of Lille against the enemies of France, and who, by that memorable defense, consoled a great king's unhappy old age. It was of that companion of Turenne that Madame de Maintenon said:

"'In him the heart was the last to die.'

My speech continued.

"Lastly, I should go back to that Louis de Boufflers [45], called the Robust, who displayed in combat the vigour and valour of Hercules. Thus, at the two extremities of this family, I should find force and grace, the knight and the troubadour. They say that the French are sons of Hector: I would rather believe that they descend from Achilles, for like that hero they wield both the lyre and the sword.

"If I wished, gentlemen, to talk to you of the celebrated poet [46] who sang the charms of nature in such brilliant tones, do you think that I would confine myself to pointing out to you the admirable flexibility of a talent which succeeded in rendering with equal distinction the regular beauties of Virgil and the less correct beauties of Milton? No: I would also show you the poet refusing to part from his unfortunate countrymen, accompanying them with his lyre to foreign shores, singing their sorrows to console them; an illustrious exile among that crowd of banished men whose number I increased. It is true that his age and his infirmities, his talents and his glory had not protected him against persecution in his own country. Men tried to make him purchase peace with verses unworthy of his muse, and his muse could sing only the redoubtable immortality of crime and the reassuring immortality of virtue:

"Rassurez-vous, vous êtes immortels [47]!

"If, again, I wished to speak to you of a friend very dear to my heart [48], one of those friends who, according to Cicero, render prosperity more brilliant and adversity less irksome, I should extol the refinement and purity of his taste, the exquisite elegance of his prose, the beauty, the strength, the harmony of his verses, which, while formed after the great models, are nevertheless distinguished by their original character. I should extol that superior talent which has never known the feelings of envy, that talent made happy by every success other than its own, that talent which, for ten years, has felt all that has happened to me of an honourable nature with the deep and simple joy known only to the most generous characters and the liveliest friendship. But I should not omit my friend's political side. I should depict him at the head of one of the principal bodies of the State, delivering those speeches which are master-pieces of propriety, moderation and exaltedness. I should represent him sacrificing the gentle commerce of the Muses to occupations which would no doubt be without charm, if one did not abandon one's self to them in the hope of forming children capable of one day following the example of their fathers and avoiding their errors.

"In speaking of the men of talent of whom this meeting is composed, I could not therefore prevent myself from considering them from the point of view of morality and society. One is distinguished among you by a refined, delicate and sagacious wit, by an urbanity nowadays so rare, and by the most honourable constancy in his moderate opinions [49]. Another, under the ice of age, found the warmth of youth wherewith to plead the cause of the unfortunate [50]. A third [51], an elegant historian and agreeable poet, becomes more venerable and more dear to us by the memory of a father [52] and a son [53], both mutilated in the service of the country. Yet another, by restoring their hearing to the deaf, their speech to the dumb, recalls to us the miracles of the Gospels, to the cult of which he has devoted himself [54]. Are there not, gentlemen, among you some witnesses of your former triumphs who can tell the worthy heir [55] of the Chancelier d'Aguesseau [56] how his grandsire's name was once applauded in this assembly? I pass to the favourite nurselings of the nine Sisters, and I see the venerable author of Œdipe [57] retired in his solitude and Sophocles forgetting at Colonos the glory that calls him back to Athens. How greatly must we cherish the other sons of Melpomene who have interested us in the misfortunes of our fathers! Every French heart has throbbed anew at the presentiment of the death of Henry IV [58]. The tragic muse has re-established the honour of those gallant knights dastardly betrayed by history, and nobly revenged by one of our modern Euripides [59].

My speech continued.

"Coming to the successors of Anacreon, I would pause at the amiable man [60] who, similar to the veteran of Teos [61], still re-tells, after fifteen lustra, those love-songs which one begins to write at fifteen years. I would also, gentlemen, go to seek your renown on the stormy seas which were formerly guarded by the giant Adamastor [62], and which became appeased by the charming names of Éléonore [63] and Virginie [64]. Tibi rident æquora.

"Alas, too many of the talents in our midst have been wandering and restless! Has poetry not sung in harmonious verse of the art of Neptune [65], that so fatal art which transported it to distant shores? And has not French eloquence, after defending the altar and the State, withdrawn, as though into its source, to the land where St. Ambrose [66] first saw the light [67]? Why can I not here place all the members of this assembly in a picture the colours of which have not been embellished by flattery! For, if it be true that envy sometimes obscures the estimable qualities of men of letters, it is still more true that this class of men is distinguished by lofty sentiments, by disinterested virtues, by the hatred of oppression, devotion to friendship, and fidelity to misfortune. It is thus, gentlemen, that I love to consider a subject from all its aspects, and that I love especially to give a serious character to literature by applying it to the most exalted subjects of morality, philosophy and history. With this independence of mind, I must needs abstain from touching upon works which it is impossible to examine without irritating the passions. Were I to speak of the tragedy of Charles IX, could I refrain from avenging the memory of the Cardinal de Lorraine and discussing the strange lesson there given to Kings? Caius Gracchus, Calas, Henri VIII, Fénelon[68] would in many respects present sent to me a distortion of history upon which to rest the same doctrines. When I read the satires, I there find immolated men occupying places in the first ranks of this assembly; nevertheless, written as they are in a pure, elegant and easy style, they agreeably recall the school of Voltaire, and I should take the more pleasure in praising them inasmuch as my own name has not escaped the author's malice [69]. But let us leave on one side works which would give rise only to painful recriminations: I will not disturb the memory of a writer who was your colleague and who still numbers friends and admirers among you; he will owe to religion, which appeared to him so contemptible in the writings of those who defend it, the peace which I wish to his tomb. But even here, gentlemen, shall I not have the misfortune to strike upon a rock? For, in offering to M. Chénier this tribute of respect which is due to all the dead, I fear to meet beneath my steps ashes very differently illustrious. If ungenerous interpretations would impute this involuntary emotion to me as a crime, I should take refuge at the foot of those expiatory altars which a powerful monarch erects to the manes of outraged dynasties. Ah, how much happier would it have been for M. Chénier not to have taken part in those public calamities which at last fell back upon his head! He has known, like myself, what it means to lose in the storms a fondly cherished brother [70]. What would our unhappy brothers have said, had God summoned them on the same day before His tribunal? If they had met at the hour of death, before mingling their blood they would doubtless have cried to us, 'Cease your intestine wars, return to thoughts of love and peace; death strikes all parties alike, and your cruel divisions cost us our youth and our life.' That would have been their fraternal cry.

My speech continued.

"If my predecessor could hear these words, which now console only his shade, he would appreciate the tribute which I am here paying to his brother, for he was by nature generous: it was even this generosity of character which drew him into new ideas, very seductive no doubt, since they promised to restore to us the virtues of Fabricius [71]. But, soon deceived in his hopes, he found his mood becoming embittered, his talent changing its nature. Removed from the poet's solitude into the midst of factions, how could he have abandoned himself to those sentiments which make the charm of life? Happy had he seen no sky save the sky of Greece under which he was born [72], had he set eyes upon no ruins save those of Sparta and Athens! I should perhaps have met him in his mother's beautiful country, and we would have sworn mutual friendship on the banks of the Permessus; or else, since he was to return to his paternal fields, why did he not follow me to the deserts upon which I was flung by our tempests! The silence of the forests would have calmed that troubled soul, and the huts of the savages would perhaps have reconciled him to the palaces of kings. Vain wish! M. Chénier remained upon the stage of our excitements and our sorrows. Attacked while still in his youth by a mortal malady, you have seen him, gentlemen, droop slowly towards the tomb and leave for ever.... I have not been told of his last moments.

"None of us, who have lived through the troubles and excitements, shall escape the eyes of history. Who can flatter himself that he shall be found stainless in a time of frenzy when none has the entire use of his reason? Let us then be full of indulgence for others; let us excuse that of which we cannot approve. Such is human weakness, that talent, genius, virtue itself are sometimes able to overstep the limits of duty. M. Chénier worshipped liberty: can we ascribe it to him as a crime? The knights themselves, were they to issue from their tombs, would follow the light of our century. We should see that illustrious alliance formed between honour and liberty, as under the reign of the Valois, upon our monuments. Gothic battlements crowned with infinite grace the orders borrowed from the Greeks. Is not liberty the greatest of benefits and the first of man's needs? It kindles genius, it elevates the heart, it is as necessary to the friend of the Muses as the air he breathes. The arts are, to a certain point, able to live in dependence, because they make use of a language apart, which is not understood by the crowd; but letters, which speak an universal language, pine and perish in irons. How shall one compose pages worthy of the future, if one must forbid one's self, in writing, every magnanimous sentiment, every great and powerful thought? Liberty is so naturally the friend of science and literature, that she takes refuge with them when she is banished from the midst of the peoples; and it is we, gentlemen, whom she charges to write her annals and to revenge her on her enemies, to hand down her name and her cult to posterity for all time. To prevent any mistake in the interpretation of my thought, I declare that I am here speaking only of the liberty which is born of order and gives birth to laws, and not of that liberty which is the daughter of license and the mother of slavery. The wrong of the author of Charles IX did not, therefore, lie in offering his incense to the former of these divinities, but in believing that the rights which she gives us are incompatible with a monarchical form of government. A Frenchman displays in his opinions that independence which other nations show in their laws. Liberty is for him a sentiment rather than a principle, and he is a citizen by instinct and a subject by choice. If the writer whose loss you are mourning had made this reflection, he would not have embraced in one and the same love the liberty that creates and the liberty that destroys.

My speech concluded.

"Gentlemen, I have finished the task which the customs of the Academy have laid upon me. On the point of ending this speech, I am struck with an idea which saddens me: it is not long since M. Chénier pronounced upon my writings some findings which he was preparing to publish; and to-day it is I who am judging my judge. I say, in all the sincerity of my heart, that I would rather continue exposed to the satire of an enemy, and live peacefully in solitude, than bring home to you, by my presence in your midst, the rapid succession of men upon earth, the sudden apparition of that death which overthrows our projects and our hopes, which snatches us away at a stroke, and which sometimes hands over our memory to men entirely opposed to us in sentiment and principle. This platform is a sort of battle-field in which talents come by turns to shine and die. What diverse geniuses has it not seen pass! Corneille, Racine, Boileau, La Bruyère [73], Bossuet, Fénelon, Voltaire, Buffon [74], Montesquieu.... Who would not be afraid, gentlemen, to think that he is about to form a link in the chain of that illustrious lineage? Overcome by the weight of those immortal names, and unable to make myself recognised through my talents as the lawful heir, I will at least try to prove my descent by my sentiments.

"When my turn shall have come to yield my place to the orator who is to speak on my tomb, he may treat my works severely, but he will be obliged to say that I loved my mother-land passionately, that I would have endured a thousand ills rather than cost my country a single tear, that I would without hesitation have made the sacrifice of my days to those noble sentiments which alone give value to life and dignity to death.

"But what a moment have I chosen, gentlemen, to speak to you of mourning and obsequies! Are we not surrounded by scenes of festivity? A solitary traveller, I was meditating a few days since on the ruin of the destroyed empires: and now I see a new empire arise. Scarce have I quitted the graves in which the buried nations sleep, and I perceive a cradle laden with the destinies of the future. The acclamations of the soldier resound on every hand. Cæsar mounts to the Capitol; the nations tell of marvels, of monuments upraised, cities beautified, the frontiers of the country bathed by those distant seas which bore the ships of Scipio, and by those remote waters which Germanicus did not see.

"While the triumpher advances surrounded by his legions, what shall the tranquil children of the Muses do? They will go before the car to add the olive-branch of peace to the palms of victory, to mingle with the warlike recitals the touching images which caused Æmilius Paulus [75] to weep over the misfortunes of Perseus [76].

"And you, daughter of the Cæsars [77], come forth from your palace with your young son [78] in your arms; come, to add mercy to greatness; come, to soften victory and to temper the glitter of arms by the gentle majesty of a queen and a mother."

In the manuscript which was handed back to me, the commencement of the speech, which relates to the opinions of Milton, was struck out from one end to the other by Bonaparte's hand. A part of my protest against the isolation from affairs of State, in which it was desired to keep literature, was also stigmatized with the pencil. The eulogy of the Abbé Delille, which recalled the Emigration and the fidelity of the poet to the misfortunes of the Royal Family and to the sufferings of his companions in exile, was placed between brackets; the eulogy of M. de Fontanes had a cross set against it. Almost all that I said of M. Chénier, of his brother, of my own, of the expiatory altars which were being prepared at Saint-Denis was slashed with pencil marks. The paragraph commencing with the words, "M. Chénier worshipped liberty," etc., had a double longitudinal line drawn through it. Nevertheless, the agents of the Empire, when publishing the speech, kept this paragraph pretty correctly.

All was not ended when they had handed me back my speech; they wanted to force me to write a second. I declared that I stood by the first, and that I would write no other. The committee then declared to me that I should not be received into the Academy.

Gracious, generous and courageous persons, unknown to myself, interested themselves in me. Mrs. Lindsay, who at the time of my return to France, in 1800, had brought me from Calais to Paris, talked to Madame Gay [79]; the latter addressed herself to Madame Regnaud de Saint-Jean-d'Angély, who asked the Duc de Rovigo to leave me alone. The women of that time interposed their beauty between power and misfortune.

Bonaparte's comments.

All this perturbation was prolonged, by the decennial prizes, until the year 1812. Bonaparte, who was persecuting me, sent to the Academy to ask, in the matter of those prizes, why they had not put the Génie du Christianisme on their list. The Academy explained; several of my colleagues wrote their unfavourable judgment of my work. I might have said what a Greek poet said to a bird:

"Daughter of Attica, nurtured on honey, thou who singest so well, thou snatchest a grasshopper, a fine songstress like thyself, and carriest her for food to thy young ones. Both of you have wings, both inhabit these regions, both celebrate the birth of spring: wilt thou not restore to her her liberty? It is not just that a songstress should die by the beak of one of her fellows [80]."

This mixture of anger against and attraction for me displayed by Bonaparte is constant and strange: but now he threatens, and suddenly he asks the Institute why it has not mentioned me on the occasion of the decennial prizes. He goes further, he declares to Fontanes that, since the Institute does not think me worthy to compete for the prizes, he will give me one, that he will appoint me superintendent-general of all the libraries of France: a superintendence with the salary attached to a first-class embassy. Bonaparte's original idea of employing me in a diplomatic career did not leave him: he would not admit, for a reason well known to himself, that I had ceased to form part of the Ministry of External Relations. And yet, in spite of this proposed munificence, his Prefect of Police invited me, some time later [81], to remove myself from Paris, and I went to continue my Memoirs at Dieppe.

Bonaparte stooped to play the part of a teasing school-boy; he disinterred the Essai sur les Révolutions and delighted in the war which he brought down upon me on this subject. A certain M. Damaze de Raymond constituted himself my champion [82]: I went to thank him in the Rue Vivienne. He had a death's-head on his mantel-piece among his knick-knacks; some time later he was killed in a duel [83], and his charming features went to join the frightful face that seemed to call to him. Everyone fought in those days: one of the police-spies charged with the arrest of Georges received a bullet in the head from him.

To cut short my powerful adversary's unfair attack, I applied to that M. de Pommereul of whom I spoke to you at the time of my first arrival in Paris: he had become director-general of the State printing works and of the department of books. I asked him for leave to reprint the Essai in its entirety. My correspondence and the result of that correspondence can be seen in the preface to the 1826 edition of the Essai sur les Révolutions, vol. II. of the Complete Works. Moreover, the Imperial Government was exceedingly right to refuse its assent to the reprinting of the work in its entirety: the Essai was not, having regard both to the liberties and to the Legitimate Monarchy, a book which should be published while despotism and usurpation held sway. The police gave itself airs of impartiality by allowing something to be said in my favour, and it laughed while preventing me from doing the only thing capable of defending me. On the return of Louis XVIII., the Essai was exhumed anew: as, in the time of the Empire, they had wished to make use of it against me in a political respect, so, in the days of the Restoration, they tried to plead it against me in a religious respect. I have made so complete an apology for my errors in the notes to the new edition of the Essai historique, that there is nothing left wherewith to reproach me. Posterity will come and will pronounce on both book and commentary, if such old trash is still able to interest it. I venture to hope that it will judge the Essai as my grey head has judged it; for, as one advances in life, one assumes the equity of the future towards which one approaches. The book and the notes place me before the eyes of men such as I was at the commencement of my career and such as I am at the close of that career.

The Essai reprinted.

Moreover, this work which I have treated with pitiless rigour offers the compendium of my existence as a poet, a moralist and a future politician. The pith of the work is overflowing, the boldness of the opinions urged as far as it will go. It must needs be admitted that, in the various roads upon which I have embarked, I have never been guided by prejudice, that I have never been blind in whatsoever cause, that no interest has led me on, that the sides which I have taken have always been those of my choice.

In the Essai, my independence in matters of religion and politics is complete; I examine everything: a Republican, I serve the Monarchy; a philosopher, I honour religion. These are not contradictions: they are forced consequences of the uncertainty of theory and the certainty of practice among men. My mind, constructed to believe in nothing, not even in myself, constructed to despise everything, splendours and miseries, peoples and kings, has nevertheless been dominated by an instinct of reason which commanded it to submit to all that is recognised as fine: religion, justice, humanity, equality, liberty, glory. That which people to-day dream concerning the future, that which the present generation imagines itself to have discovered concerning a society yet to be born, founded upon principles quite different from those of the old society, is announced positively in the Essai. I have anticipated by thirty years those who call themselves the proclaimers of an unknown world. My acts have belonged to the ancient city, my thoughts to the new; the former to my duty, the latter to my nature.

The Essai was not an impious book; it was a book of doubt and sorrow. I have already said so [84].

For the rest, I have had to exaggerate my fault to myself, and to redeem with ideas of order so many passionate ideas strewn over my works. I fear lest, at the commencement of my career, I may have done harm to youth; I owe it a reparation, and at least I owe it other lessons. Let it learn that one can struggle successfully with a troubled nature; I have seen moral beauty, the divine beauty, superior to every earthly dream: it needs but a little courage to reach it and keep to it.

In order to finish what I have to say touching my literary career, I must mention the work which commenced it, and which remained in manuscript until the year in which I inserted it in my Complete Works.

At the beginning of the Natchez, the preface described how the work was recovered in England, thanks to the trouble and the obliging research of Messieurs de Thuisy.

A manuscript from which I have been able to extract Atala, René, and several descriptions included in the Génie du Christianisme, is not absolutely barren. This first manuscript was written in one piece, without sections; all the subjects were confused in it: journeys, natural history, the dramatic portion, etc.; but, besides this manuscript, composed in one stroke, there existed another, divided into books. In this second work, I had not only proceeded to the separation of the matter, but I had also changed the character of the composition, by altering it from the romantic to the idyllic.

A young man who promiscuously heaps up his ideas, his inventions, his studies, die results of his reading, is bound to produce chaos; but also in this chaos there is a certain fecundity which belongs to the potency of his age.

To me happened that which has perhaps happened to no other author: I read again, after a lapse of thirty years, a manuscript which I had totally forgotten.

I had one danger to fear. In repassing the brush over the picture, I might wipe out the colours; a surer but less rapid hand ran the risk, while obliterating some incorrect features, of causing the liveliest touches of youth to disappear: it was necessary to preserve the independence and, so to speak, the passion of the composition; the foam must be left on the bit of the youthful courser. If in the Natchez there are things which I would hazard only in trembling to-day, there are also things which I would no longer write, especially René's letter in the second volume. It is in my first manner, and reproduces all René. I do not know that the Renés who followed in my steps can have said anything more nearly approaching folly.

The Natchez.

The Natchez opens with an invocation to the desert and to the star of the night, the supreme divinities of my youth:

"In the shade of the American forests I will sing airs of solitude such as mortal ears have not yet heard; I will relate your adversities, O Natchez, O nation of Louisiana, of whom naught save the memories remain! Should the misfortunes of an obscure dweller in the woods have less claim upon our tears than those of other men? And are the mausoleums of the kings in our temples more touching than the tomb of an Indian under his native oak?

"And thou, torch of meditation, star of the night, be for me the star of Pindus! Go before my steps across the unknown regions of the New World, to reveal to me by thy light the enchanting secrets of those deserts!"

My two natures lie mingled in this singular work, particularly in the primitive original. In it are found political incidents and romantic intrigues; but, across the narrative, there is heard, throughout, a voice that sings and that seems to come from an unknown region.

From 1812 to 1814, but two years are wanting to end the Empire [85], and those two years, of which we have seen something by anticipation, were employed by me in researches into French history, and in the writing of some books of these Memoirs; but I did not print anything more. My life of poetry and erudition was really closed by the publication of my three great works, the Génie du Christianisme, the Martyrs and the Itinéraire. My political writings began with the Restoration; with those writings also began my active political existence. Here, therefore, ends my literary career properly so-called; carried away by the flood of years, I had omitted it; not until this year, 1839, have I recalled the bygone times of 1800 to 1814.

This literary career, as you have been free to convince yourselves, was no less disturbed than my career as a traveller and a soldier; there were also labours, encounters, and blood in the arena; all was not Muses and Castalian spring. My political career was even stormier.

Perhaps some remains may mark the spot where stood my gardens of Academus. The Génie du Christianisme commences the religious revolution against the philosophism of the eighteenth century. I was at the same time preparing the revolution which threatens our language, for there can be no renewal of ideas without an accompanying renewal of style. Will there be other forms of art, at present unknown, when I am gone? Will it be possible to start from our studies of to-day in order to make progress, as we ourselves have taken a step forward by starting from past studies? Are there limits which one could not overstep, because one would then run against the nature of things? Do not those limits lie in the division of the modern languages, in the decay of those same languages, in human vanity such as modern society has made it? Languages do not follow the movement of civilization until they are on the point of attaining the period of their perfection; having reached this zenith, they remain stationary for a moment, and then descend, without being able to ascend again.

Youth and age.

Now, the story which I am finishing joins the first books of my political life, written previously at different dates. I feel a little more courage on returning to the finished portions of my edifice. When I resumed my work, I trembled lest the old son of Cœlus should see the golden trowel of the builder of Troy turn into a trowel of lead. And yet it seems to me that my memory, when bidden to pour me out my recollections, has not failed me too greatly. Have you felt the ice of winter to a great extent in my narrative? Do you find an enormous difference between the extinct ashes which I have striven to revive and the living persons whom I have shown you in telling you of my early youth? My years are my secretaries: when one of them comes to die, he passes the pen to his younger brother, and I continue to dictate. As they are of one family, they write very nearly the same hand.

[1] This book was written in Paris in 1839, and revised in June 1847.—T.

[2] Chateaubriand bought it from M. de Fontanes for 20,000 francs.—B.

[3] Chateaubriand bought the Vallée-aux-Loups in August 1807, for the sum of 30,000 francs.—B.

[4] Madame de Lavalette was the widow of the Marquis de Béville.—B.

[5] Manger, to eat; also, to run through, to squander.—T.

[6] The Infirmary, situated at No. 86, Rue d'Enfer (now 92, Rue Denfert-Rochereau), was founded by M. and Madame de Chateaubriand at a considerable cost. Madame de Chateaubriand was buried beneath the altar of the chapel.—B.

[7] Anne Louis Girodet Trioson, originally Girodet de Roussy (1767-1824), a pupil of David, and not only a fine painter, but also a poet of some merit.—T.

[8] Dominique Vivant Baron Denon (1747-1825), Director-General of Museums under the Empire.—T.

[9] Chateaubriand's portrait was exhibited in the Salon of 1808.—B.

[10] Jean François Boissonade (1774-1857), a member of the Academy of Inscriptions, and a distinguished and indefatigable Hellenist.—T.

[11] Conrad Malte-Brun (1775-1826), the eminent Danish geographer.—T.

[12] "Each, his hand in th' ink-pot, swears to be revenged."—T.

[13] The crown of grass granted to a general who raised the siege of a beleaguered place.—T.

[14] François Bénoît Hoffmann (1760-1828), author of several comic operas, and a successful writer in the Journal des Débats.—T.

[15] Claude Hippolyte Clausel de Montais (1769-1857) became Bishop of Chartres in 1824. He was the first to engage, in March 1841, in the struggle of the bishops in favour of liberty of instruction, which led to the law of 25 March 1850. Thanks to his writings during this contest, Monseigneur Clausel de Montais is one of the most imposing figures in the nineteenth-century episcopate.—B.

[16] Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755). In the Esprit des lois (1748) he treats religion respectfully, but the book was condemned for its deistic tendency.—T.

[17] "Tasso wandering from town to town," etc.—T.

[18] Caius Valerius Jovius Aurelius Diocletianus, Roman Emperor (245-313), in 303 commenced a persecution of the Christians which lasted for ten years, or eight years after his abdication in 305.—T.

[19] Martyrs, XXIII.—B.

[20] Caius Galerius Valerius Maximianus, Roman Emperor (d. 311), adopted son and son-in-law of Diocletian, and associated with the latter in his persecution of the Christians.—T.

[21] Armand de Chateaubriand married in Jersey, in 1795, Jeanne Le Brun d'Anneville, who died in the island in 1857.—B.

[22] The English attempted a descent on Saint-Cast in 1758 and were defeated by the Duc d'Aiguillon.—T.

[23] Pierre François Joachim Henry-Larivière (1761-1838) worked ardently for the restoration of the Monarchy from the date of his proscription by the Convention, of which he was a member, in 1797. Louis XVIII. made him Advocate-General and a councillor of the Court of Appeal. He refused to take the oath to Louis-Philippe on the latter's usurpation in 1830.—B.

[24] The original documents of Armand's trial have been sent me by an unknown and generous hand.—Author's Note.

[25] M. de Goyon-Vaurouault.—B.

[26] Jean Louis Laya (1761-1833), author of some poetical plays and of the Ami des lois, a stirring protest against the murder of Louis XVI. He was flung into prison, where he remained until the 9 Thermidor. Under the Empire, he became a professor at the Lycée Napoléon and eventually obtained the chair of poetry at the Faculté des Lettres.—T.

[27] The Abbé Roch Ambroise Cucurron Sicard (1742-1822), the great teacher and benefactor of the deaf and dumb, and a fervent Royalist.—T.

[28] Hortense Queen of Holland (1783-1837), daughter of the Empress Joséphine by her first husband, Alexandre Vicomte de Beauharnais, and wife of Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland. She retired to Switzerland after the Restoration, with the title of Duchesse de Saint-Leu.—T.

[29] Chateaubriand says nothing of the time which elapsed between April 1809 and January 1811. These twenty months, in fact, were marked by no political or literary event that in any way affected him.—B.

[30] The Itinéraire appeared in the month of March 1811.—B.

[31] Louis François Cardinal Duc de Bausset, Bishop of Alais (1748-1824), was appointed to the see of Alais in 1784. He was dispossessed and imprisoned under the Terror. On the return of the Bourbons, he was created a peer of France in 1815, a cardinal in 1817, and a duke in the same year. He had published his successful Histoire de Fénelon in 1808; his Histoire de Bossuet, which was less well received, appeared in 1814.—T.

[32] Marie Joseph de Chénier (1764-1811).—T.

[33] A contemporary, M. Auguis, thus describes the cavalier manner in which Chateaubriand paid his visits (he quotes from the unpublished Diary of Ferdinand Denis, author of Scènes de la nature sous les tropiques and of André le voyageur):

"When Chateaubriand went to pay his French-Academy visits, he called upon his future colleagues on horseback. To the famous and powerful he paid a complete visit; to the small fry he sent in his card, without alighting from his mettlesome steed. When they came to discuss the election, M. —— voted for the horse of his new colleague, saying that, in all conscience, it was the former alone that had paid him a visit."—B.

[34] Hugo de Groot (1583-1645), known as Hugo Grotius, the celebrated Dutch jurist and writer on international law, author of De Jure belli et pacis (1624), by which the system of international law was created, etc., etc., and for some years Ambassador of Christina Queen of Sweden to France.—T.

[35] The election took place on Wednesday 20 February 1811, forty days after Marie Joseph Chenier's death. Only twenty-five members were present, and Chateaubriand was elected almost unanimously.—B.

[36] Milton, Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio secunda: Archdeacon Wrangham's translation.—T.

[37] Cf. Johnson, Lives of the English Poets: Milton, in which the poet is very roughly handled.—T.

[38] The committee consisted of Messieurs François de Neufchâteau, Regnaud de Saint-Jean d'Angély, Lacretelle the Elder, Laujon and Legouvé.—B.

[39] Pierre Antoine Noël Brunot, Comte Daru (1760-1829), a moderate revolutionary, had been imprisoned under the Terror. He was sent to Berlin as Minister Plenipotentiary in 1806 and entered the Institute in the same year. In 1811, he became Secretary of State, in which capacity he opposed the Russian War. He was created a peer by the Restoration. His works include a metrical translation of the Works of Horace (1804), a History of the Republic of Venice (1819), a History of Brittany (1826), etc.—T.

[40] Charles Pineau Duclos (1704-1772), author of the Considération des mœurs, etc., was a native of Dinan, in Brittany, and was noted for the independence of his opinions. Louis XV. pronounced the Considération to be "the work of an honest man."—T.

[41] Stanislas Chevalier de Boufflers (1737-1815) became a member of the Academy in 1788, on his return from the Governorship of Senegal. He is best known for his light erotic verse.—T.

[42] The Marquise de Boufflers, née de Beauvais-Craon, a beautiful and witty woman who had done the honours of the Court of King Stanislaus.—T.

[43] Joseph Marie Duc de Boufflers (1706-1747) relieved Genoa, besieged by the Imperial forces and by the King of Sardinia, in 1747, and died there in the same year of the small-pox.—T.

[44] Louis François Maréchal Duc de Boufflers (1644-1711), a pupil of Condé and the Turennes, became famous through his defense of Lille in 1708, for which service he was created a duke and a peer. He also conducted the retreat and saved the French Army after the defeat of Malplaquet in 1709.—T.

[45] Louis de Boufflers (1534-1553), a guidon to the Duc d'Enghien, and noted for his superhuman feats of strength and agility. He was killed, at the age of nineteen, at the siege of Pont-sur-Yonne.—T.

[46] The Abbé Delille.—B.

[47] "Be reassured, immortality's yours:" a line from Delille's Dithyrambe sur l'immortalité de l'âme, written during the Terror.—T.

[48] M. de Fontanes.—B.

[49] M. Suard.—B.

[50] The Abbé Morellet, who, in 1795, had published two eloquent appeals in favour of the victims of the Revolution, the Cri des familles and the Cause des pères.—B.

[51] Lieutenant-General Louis Philippe Comte de Ségur (1753-1830), a very intelligent writer. After going through the American War with Lafayette, he was sent as Ambassador to Russia, while still a very young man, returned to France on the outbreak of the Revolution, lived on his pen and was admitted to the Academy. Napoleon made him his Grand-Master of Ceremonies and a senator; under the Restoration, he was created a peer of France.—T.

[52] Philippe Henri Maréchal Marquis de Ségur (1724-1801) was badly wounded at the battle of Klosterkamp, in 1760.-T.

[53] Philippe Paul Comte de Ségur, author of the Campagne de Russie, was riddled with bullets at the Battle of Sommo-Sierra (1808), and refused to cease fighting until he swooned in the arms of his grenadiers.—B.

[54] The Abbé Sicard.—B.

[55] Henri Cardin Jean Baptiste Comte d'Aguesseau (1746-1826).—B.

[56] Henri François d'Aguesseau (1668-1751), thrice Chancellor of France.—T.

[57] Jean Francois Ducis (1733-1816), the tragic poet, author of Œdipe chez Admète, imitated from Sophocles and Euripides, and of imitations of many of Shakespeare's tragedies. His only original play was Abufar, ou La Famille arabe, which obtained a great success. He received Voltaire's seat in the Academy in 1778. Ducis refused the many advantages offered him by Bonaparte, preferring to live in poor and honourable retirement.—T.

[58] Gabriel Marie Jean Baptiste Legouvé (1764-1812), the poet, author of the Mort d'Abel, the Mort d'Henri IV and other tragedies, and of some didactic poetry which is better than the plays.—T.

[59] François Juste Marie Raynouard (1761-1836), author of the tragedy of the Templiers, entered the Academy in 1807 and became its perpetual secretary in 1817.—T.

[60] Pierre Laujon (1727-1811), author of some comic operas and of a collection of sportive verse entitled À-propos de société (1771). He had been secretary to the Prince de Condé.—T.

[61] Anacreon was born at Teos.—T.

[62] Cf. Camoëns, Luciad, where Adamastor is represented as the giant spirit of storms, warning Vasco de Gama off the Cape of Storms, now the Cape of Good Hope.—T.

[63] The Chevalier de Parny, author of Éléonore, was born in the Île Bourbon.—T.

[64] Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, author of Paul et Virginie, lived three years in the Mauritius.—T.

[65] Joseph Alphonse Esménard (1770-1811) accompanied General Leclerc to San Domingo, and on his return wrote his poem of the Navigation. Napoleon made him Theatrical Censor. In 1810, he entered the Institute. He was exiled, in 1811, for writing against the Emperor Alexander, returned to France after three months, and was immediately killed by a fall from his carriage.—T.

[66] St. Ambrose (circa 340-397), one of the Fathers of the Church, was Governor of Liguria when he was elected bishop by the people, although himself but recently converted to Christianity and as yet unbaptized. He was ordained priest and consecrated Bishop of Milan within a few days (374). St. Ambrose is honoured on the 7th of December.—T.

[67] Jean Siffrein Cardinal Maury (1746-1817) had been appointed to the See of Montefiascone by Pope Pius VI. in 1794. In 1810, Napoleon had nominated him Archbishop of Paris, a fact which Chateaubriand purposely disregards.—B.

[68] Chénier's tragedy of Charles IX was produced in 1789, Henri VIII and the Mort de Calas in 1791, Gracchus in 1792, Fénelon in 1793.—T.

[69] A reference to an attack in Chénier's satire entitled the Nouveaux Saints, which commences thus:

Ah! vous parlez du diable? il est bien poétique,
Dit le dévot Chactas, ce sauvage érotique.—B.

[70] André de Chénier, guillotined in 1794.—T.

[71] Caius Fabricius Luscinus (fl. 282 B.C.), the type of the ancient Roman virtue.—T.

[72] Marie Joseph Chénier was born in Constantinople in 1764.—T.

[73] Jean de La Bruyère (1644-1696), author of the Caractères.—T.

[74] Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), the great naturalist.—T.

[75] Lucius Æmilius Paulus Macedonicus (228-160 B.C.), elected Consul in 182 and 168, defeated Perseus in 167 B.C., and subdued Macedonia.—T.

[76] Perseus, the last King of Macedon (d. 167 B.C.), adorned his conqueror's triumph and allowed himself to die of starvation in his prison in Rome.—T.

[77] Marie-Louise Empress of the French (1791-1847), daughter of the Emperor Francis I., had been married to Napoleon on the 1st of April 1810.—T.

[78] Francis Charles Joseph Napoleon Duc de Reichstadt (1811-1832), created King of Rome on his birth (20 March).—T.

[79] Marie Françoise Sophie Gay (1776-1852), née Nichault de Lavalette, author of Léonie de Montbreuse, Anatolie, the Salons célèbres and other successful and distinguished works, and mother of Madame Émile de Girardin.—T.

[80] An epigram from the Anthology. The bird to which the Greek poet addressed it is the nightingale, "too great a friend of the author's," as M. de Marcellus very neatly observes, "for him to dare to call it by its name when about to speak ill of it."—B.

[81] 4 September 1812.—B.

[82] In a pamphlet entitled, Réponse aux attaques dirigées contre M. de Chateaubriand.—B.

[83] Damaze de Raymond died on the 27th of February 1813, in a duel resulting from a quarrel at the gaming-table.—B.

[84] Cf. Vol. II. p. 116.—T.

[85] Except in so far as concerns the incidents of his literary life, Chateaubriand's Memoirs give us hardly any details on the two years elapsing between 1812 and 1814. They were spent between the Vallée-aux-Loups and an apartment in the Rue de Rivoli which M. and Madame de Chateaubriand had hired from M. Alexandre de Laborde.—B.

[PART THE THIRD]

1814-1830

[BOOKS I AND II]

The last days of the Empire

Youth is a charming thing: it sets out at life's commencement crowned with flowers, as did the Athenian fleet going to conquer Sicily and the delightful plains of Enna. The prayer is offered aloud by the priest of Neptune, libations are made from goblets of gold, the crowd lining the coast unites its invocations to those of the pilot, the pæan is sung while the sail is unfurled to the rays and to the breath of dawn. Alcibiades [86], arrayed in purple and beautiful as Love, is noticeable on the triremes, proud of the seven chariots which he has launched on the Olympian race-course. But, scarce is the isle of Alcinous [87] passed, when the illusion vanishes: Alcibiades, banished, goes to grow old far away from his country and to die pierced with arrows on Timandra's bosom. The companions of his early hopes, enslaved at Syracuse, have nothing to alleviate the weight of their chains but a few verses of Euripides.

You have seen my youth quitting the shore: it had not the beauty of the pupil of Pericles [88], educated upon the knees of Aspasia [89] but it had the same morning hours—and longings and dreams, God knows! I have described those dreams to you: to-day, returning to land after many an exile, I have nothing more to tell you but truths sad as my age. If at times I still sound the chords of the lyre, these are the last harmonies of the poet seeking to cure himself of the wounds caused by the arrows of time, or to console himself for the slavery of years.

You know how changeable was my life during my condition as a traveller and a soldier; you know of my literary existence from 1800 to 1813, the year in which you left me at the Vallée-aux-Loups, which still belonged to me when my political career opened. We are about to enter into that career: before penetrating into it, I must needs revert to the general facts which I have overlooked while occupying myself solely with my works and my personal adventures. Those facts are of Napoleon's making. Let us therefore pass to him; let us speak of the huge edifice which was being built outside my dreams. I now turn historian without ceasing to be an autobiographer; a public interest is about to support my private confidences; my own smaller recitals will group themselves around my narrative.

When the war of the Revolution broke out, the kings did not understand it; they saw a revolt where they ought to have seen the changing of the nations, the end and the commencement of a world: they flattered themselves that for them there was a question only of enlarging their States with a few provinces taken from France; they believed in bygone military tactics, in bygone diplomatic treaties, in cabinet negociations: and conscripts were about to set Frederic's grenadiers to flight; monarchs were about to come to sue for peace in the ante-rooms of a few obscure demagogues; and awful revolutionary opinion was about to unravel the intrigues of old Europe upon the scaffolds. That old Europe thought it was fighting only France; it did not perceive that a new age was marching upon it.

Bonaparte, in the course of his ever-increasing successes, seemed called upon to change the royal dynasties, to make his own the oldest of them all. He had made Kings of the Electors of Bavaria, Wurtemberg and Saxony; he had given the crown of Naples to Murat, that of Spain to Joseph, that of Holland to Louis, that of Westphalia to Jerome; his sister, Élisa Bacciochi, was Princess of Lucca; he, on his own account, was Emperor of the French, King of Italy, in which kingdom were included Venice, Tuscany, Parma and Piacenza; Piedmont was united to France; he had consented to allow one of his captains, Bernadotte [90], to reign in Sweden; by the Treaty of the Confederation of the Rhine he exercised the rights of the House of Austria over Germany; he had declared himself the mediator of the Helvetian Confederation; he had laid Prussia low; without possessing a bark, he had declared the British Isles in a state of blockade. England, in spite of her fleets, was on the point of not having a port in Europe in which to discharge a bale of merchandise or post a letter.

Napoleon's position in 1813.

The Papal States formed part of the French Empire; the Tiber was a French department. In the streets of Paris, one saw cardinals, half-prisoners, who, putting their heads through the window of their cab, asked:

"Is this where the King of —— lives?"

"No," replied the porter to whom the question was put, "it's higher up."

Austria had redeemed herself only by handing over her daughter: the "raider" of the South [91] demanded Honoria [92] from Valentinian [93], with half of the provinces of the Empire.

How had those miracles been worked? What qualities were possessed by the man who gave birth to them? What qualities did he lack for their achievement? I will trace the immense fortune of Bonaparte, who, notwithstanding, passed so quickly that his days fill but a short period of the time covered by these Memoirs. Fastidious productions of genealogies, cold disquisitions upon facts, insipid verifications of dates are the burdens and servitudes of the writer.[94]

. . . . . . . . .

In the Second Book of these Memoirs you have read (I had then returned from my first exile to Dieppe):

"I have been permitted to return to my valley. The soil trembles beneath the steps of the foreign soldier: I am writing, like the last of the Romans, to the sound of the Barbarian invasion. By day I compose pages as agitated as the events of the day; at night, while the rolling of the distant cannon dies away in my solitary woods, I return to the silence of the years that sleep in the grave and to the peace of my youngest memories."

Those agitated pages which I composed by day were notes relating to the events of the moment which, when collected, formed my pamphlet De Bonaparte et des Bourbons. I had so high an opinion of the genius of Napoleon and the gallantry of our soldiers that an invasion by the foreigner which should be successful in its ultimate result could not enter into my head; but I thought that this invasion, by making France realize the danger to which Napoleon's ambition had brought her, would lead to a movement from within and that the enfranchisement of the French would be worked by their own hands. It was with this idea that I was writing my notes, so that, if our political assemblies should stay the march of the Allies and resolve to sever from a great man who had become a scourge, they should know to whom to resort; the shelter seemed to me to lie in the authority, modified in accordance with the times, under which our ancestors had lived during eight centuries: when, in a storm, one finds nothing within reach but an old edifice, all in ruins though it be, one retires to it.

In the winter of 1813 to 1814, I took an apartment in the Rue de Rivoli, opposite the first gate of the garden of the Tuileries, before which I had heard the death of the Duc d'Enghien cried. As yet there was nothing to be seen in that street except the arcades built by the Government and a few houses rising here and there with their lateral denticulation of projecting stones.

It needed nothing less than the spectacle of the calamities weighing on France to maintain the aversion which Napoleon inspired and at the same time to protect one's self against the admiration which he caused to revive so soon as he acted: he was the proudest genius of action that ever existed; his first campaign in Italy and his last campaign in France (I am not speaking of Waterloo) are his two finest campaigns: he was Condé in the first, Turenne in the second, a great warrior in the former, a great man in the latter; but they differed in their results: by the one he gained the Empire, by the other he lost it. His last hours of power, all uprooted, all barefoot as they were, could not be drawn from him, like a lion's tooth, save by the efforts of the arms of Europe. The name of Napoleon was still so formidable that the hostile armies crossed the Rhine in terror; they unceasingly looked behind them, in order well to assure themselves that their retreat would be possible; masters of Paris, they trembled yet. Alexander [95], casting his eyes towards Russia while entering France, congratulated the persons who were able to go away, and wrote his anxieties and regrets to his mother [96].

His campaign in France.

Napoleon beat the Russians at Saint-Dizier [97], the Prussians and Russians at Brienne [98], as though to do honour to the fields in which he had been brought up. He routed the Army of Silesia at Montmirail [99] and Champaubert [100] and a portion of the main army at Montereau [101]. He made head everywhere; went and returned on his steps; repelled the columns by which he was surrounded. The Allies proposed an armistice; Bonaparte tore up the proffered preliminaries and exclaimed:

"I am nearer to Vienna than the Emperor of Austria is to Paris!"

Russia, Austria, Prussia and England, for their mutual consolation, concluded a new treaty of alliance at Chaumont [102]; but in reality they were alarmed at Bonaparte's resistance and were thinking of retreat. At Lyons an army [103] was forming on the Austrian flank; Marshal Soult was checking the English; the Congress of Châtillon [104], which was not dissolved until the 18th of March, was still negociating. Bonaparte drove Blücher [105] from the heights of Craonne [106]. The main allied army had triumphed on the 26th of February, at Bar-sur-Aube, thanks only to superiority in numbers. Bonaparte, multiplying himself, had recovered Troyes [107], which the Allies reoccupied [108]. From Craonne he had moved upon Rheims [109].

"To-night," he said, "I shall go to take my father-in-law at Troyes."

On the 20th of March, an affair took place near Arcis-sur-Aube [110]. Amid a rolling fire of artillery, a shell having fallen in front of a square of the guards, the square appeared to make a slight movement: Bonaparte dashed towards the projectile, the fuse of which was smoking, and made his horse sniff at it; the shell burst, and the Emperor came safe and sound from the midst of the shattered bolt.

The battle was to recommence the following day, but Bonaparte, yielding to the inspiration of genius, an inspiration which was none the less fatal, retired in order to bear upon the rear of the confederate troops, separate them from their stores, and swell his own army with the garrisons of the frontier places. The foreigners were preparing to fall back upon the Rhine, when Alexander, by one of these Heaven-inspired impulses which change a whole world, took the resolve to march upon Paris, the road to which was becoming free [111]. Napoleon thought he would draw the mass of the enemy after him, and he was followed, by only ten thousand men of the cavalry, whom he believed to be the advance-guard of the main troops, whereas they masked the real movement of the Prussians and Muscovites. He dispersed those ten thousand horse at Saint-Dizier and Vitry, and then perceived that the great allied army was not behind them: that army, which was flinging itself upon the capital, had before it only Marshals Marmont [112] and Mortier [113], with about twelve thousand conscripts.

He retires to Fontainebleau.

Napoleon hurriedly made for Fontainebleau [114]: there a sainted victim [115], retiring, had left the requiter and the avenger. Two things in history always go side by side: let a man enter upon a path of injustice, and he at the same time opens for himself a path of perdition in which, at a given distance, the first road will converge into the second.

Men's minds were greatly agitated: the hope of at all costs seeing brought to a close a cruel war which, since twenty years, had been weighing down upon France sated with misfortune and glory, this hope carried the day, among the masses, over the feeling of nationality. Each one thought of the part he would have to take in the approaching catastrophe. Every evening my friends came to talk at Madame de Chateaubriand's, to tell and comment upon the events of the day. Messieurs de Fontanes, de Clausel, Joubert gathered with the crowd of those transient friends whom events bring and events withdraw. Madame la Duchesse de Lévis, beautiful, peaceable and devoted, whom we shall meet again at Ghent, kept Madame de Chateaubriand faithful company. Madame la Duchesse de Duras was also in Paris, and I often went to see Madame la Marquise de Montcalm [116], sister to the Duc de Richelieu [117].

The Memoirs of François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand sometime Ambassador to England. volume 3 (of 6) / Mémoires d'outre-tombe volume 3

THE MEMOIRS OF FRANÇOIS RENÉ

VICOMTE DE CHATEAUBRIAND

SOMETIME AMBASSADOR TO ENGLAND

BEING A TRANSLATION BY ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS
OF THE MÉMOIRES D'OUTRE-TOMBE WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM CONTEMPORARY SOURCES. In 6 Volumes. Vol. III

"NOTRE SANG A TEINT
LA BANNIÈRE DE FRANCE"

LONDON: PUBLISHED BY FREEMANTLE
AND CO. AT 217 PICCADILLY MDCCCCII

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[THE MEMOIRS OF CHATEAUBRIAND]

VOLUME III

[BOOK V][1]

[PART THE THIRD]

1814-1830

[BOOKS I AND II]

The Memoirs of François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand sometime Ambassador to England. volume 3 (of 6) / Mémoires d'outre-tombe volume 3

THE MEMOIRS OF FRANÇOIS RENÉ

VICOMTE DE CHATEAUBRIAND

SOMETIME AMBASSADOR TO ENGLAND

BEING A TRANSLATION BY ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOSOF THE MÉMOIRES D'OUTRE-TOMBE WITH ILLUSTRATIONSFROM CONTEMPORARY SOURCES. In 6 Volumes. Vol. III

"NOTRE SANG A TEINTLA BANNIÈRE DE FRANCE"

LONDON: PUBLISHED BY FREEMANTLEAND CO. AT 217 PICCADILLY MDCCCCII

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[THE MEMOIRS OF CHATEAUBRIAND]

VOLUME III

[BOOK V][1]

[PART THE THIRD]

1814-1830

[BOOKS I AND II]

BEING A TRANSLATION BY ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS
OF THE MÉMOIRES D'OUTRE-TOMBE WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM CONTEMPORARY SOURCES. In 6 Volumes. Vol. III

"NOTRE SANG A TEINT
LA BANNIÈRE DE FRANCE"

LONDON: PUBLISHED BY FREEMANTLE
AND CO. AT 217 PICCADILLY MDCCCCII