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. V
"NOTRE SANG A TEINT
LA BANNIÈRE DE FRANCE"
LONDON: PUBLISHED BY FREEMANTLE AND CO. AT 217 PICCADILLY MDCCCCII
Chateaubriand's tomb.
CONTENTS
VOLUME VI
Journal from Carlsbad to Paris—Cynthia—Eger—Wallenstein—Weissenstadt —Berneck—Memories—Bayreuth—Voltaire—Hollfeld—The church—The little girl with the basket—The inn-keeper and his maid-servant—Bamberg—The female hunchback—Würzburg: its canons—A drunkard—The swallow—The inn at Wiesenbach—A German and his wife—My age and appearance—Heidelberg—Pilgrims—Ruins—Mannheim—The Rhine—-The Palatinate—Aristocratic and plebeian armies—Convent and castle—A lonely inn—Kaiserslautern—Saarbrück—Metz—Charles X.'s Council in France—Ideas on Henry V.—My letter to Madame la Dauphine—Letters from Madame la Duchesse de Berry
Journal from Paris to Venice—The Jura—The Alps—Milan—Verona—The roll-call of the dead—The Brenta—Incidental remarks—Venice—Venetian architecture—Antonio—The Abbé Betio and M. Gamba—The rooms in the Palace of the Doges—Prisons—Silvio Pellico's prison—The Frari—The Academy of Fine Arts—Titian's Assumption—The metopes of the Parthenon—Original drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo and Raphael—The Church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo—The Arsenal—Henry IV.—A frigate leaving for America—The Cemetery of San Cristoforo—San Michele di Murano—Murano—The woman and the child—Gondoliers—Bretons and Venetians—Breakfast on the Riva degli Schiavoni—The tomb of Mesdames at Trieste—Rousseau and Byron—Great geniuses inspired by Venice—Old and new courtezans—Rousseau and Byron compared
Arrival of Madame de Bauffremont in Venice—Catajo—The Duke of Modena—Petrarch's Tomb at Arqua—The land of poets—Tasso—Arrival of Madame la Duchesse de Berry—Mademoiselle Lebeschu—Count Lucchesi-Palli—Discussion—Dinner—Bugeaud the gaoler—Madame de Saint-Priest, M. de Saint-Priest—Madame de Podenas—Our band—I refuse to go to Prague—I yield at a word—Padua—Tombs—Zanze's manuscript—Unexpected news—The Governor of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom—Letters from Madame to Charles X. and Henry V.—M. de Montbel—My note to the Governor—I set out for Prague
Journal from Padua to Prague, from the 20th to the 26th of September 1833—Conegliano—The translator of the Dernier Abencerrage—Udine—Countess Samoyloff—M. de La Ferronays—A priest—Carinthia—The Drave—A peasant lad—Forges—Breakfast at the hamlet of St. Michael—The neck of the Tauern—A cemetery—Atala: how changed—A sunrise—Salzburg—A military review—Happiness of the peasants—Woknabrück—Reminiscences of Plancoët—Night—German and Italian towns contrasted—Linx—The Danube—Waldmünchen—Woods—Recollections of Combourg and Lucile—Travellers—Prague—Madame de Gontaut—The young Frenchmen—Madame la Dauphine—An excursion to Butschirad—Butschirad—Charles X. asleep—Henry V.—Reception of the young men—The ladder and the peasant-woman—Dinner at Butschirad—Madame de Narbonne—Henry V.—A rubber—Charles X.—My incredulity touching the declaration of majority—The newspapers—Scene of the young men—Prague—I leave for France—I pass by Butschirad at night—A meeting at Schlau—Carlsbad empty—Hollfeld—Bamberg—My different St. Francis' Days—Trials of religion—France
General politics of the moment—Louis-Philippe—M. Thiers—M. de La Fayette—Armand Carrel—Of some women: the lady from Louisiana—Madame Tastu—Madame Sand—M. de Talleyrand—Death of Charles X.
Conclusion—Historical antecedents from the Regency to 1793—The Past—The old European order expiring—Inequality of fortunes—Danger of the expansion of intellectual nature and material nature—The downfall of the monarchies—The decline of society and the progress of the individual—The future—The difficulty of understanding it—The Christian idea is the future of the world—Recapitulation of my life—Summary of the changes that have happened on the globe during my life—End of the Mémoires d'Outre-tombe
APPENDICES
I. THE MORGANATIC MARRIAGE OF THE DUCHESSE DE BERRY [229]-[235]
II. UNPUBLISHED FRAGMENTS OF THE MÉMOIRES D'OUTRE-TOMBE [236]-[247]
III. THE LAST YEARS OF CHATEAUBRIAND [248]
IV. THE TRANSLATOR'S SECOND NOTE [263]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
VOL. VI
[Chateaubriand's Tomb]
[The Duchesse de Berry]
[The Duc and Duchesse d'angoulême]
[Louis Philippe]
[Adolphe Thiers]
[The Vicomtesse de Chateaubriand]
THE MEMOIRS OF CHATEAUBRIAND
VOLUME VI[1]
[BOOK V]
Journal from Carlsbad to Paris—Cynthia—Eger—Wallenstein—Weisaenstadt—Berneck—Memories —Bayreuth—Voltaire—Hollfeld—The church—The little girl with the basket—The inn-keeper and his maid-servant—Bamberg—The female hunchback—Würzburg: its canons—A drunkard—The swallow—The inn at Wiesenbach—A German and his wife—My age and appearance—Heidelberg—Pilgrims—Ruins—Mannheim—The Rhine—The Palatinate—Aristocratic and plebeian armies—Convent and castle—A lonely inn—Kaiserslautern—Saarbrück—Metz—Charles X.'s Council in France—Ideas on Henry V.—My letter to Madame la Dauphine—Letters from Madame la Duchesse de Berry.
1 June 1833, evening.
The journey from Carlsbad to Elbogen, along the Eger, is pleasant. The castle of this little town is of the twelfth century and keeps sentry on a rock, at the entrance to the gorge of a valley. The foot of the rock, covered with trees, is contained within a bend of the Eger: hence the name of the town and the castle, Elbogen, the Elbow.
The donjon was red with the last rays of the sun when I saw it from the high-road. Above the mountains and woods hung the twisted column of smoke of a foundry.
I started at half-past nine from the Zwoda stage. I followed the road along which Vauvenargues passed in the retreat from Prague, the young man to whom Voltaire, in the Éloge funèbre des officiers morts en 1741, addresses these words:
"Thou art no more, O sweet hope of my remaining days;
I have always beheld in thee the most unfortunate of men
and the most tranquil."
From inside my calash, I watched the stars rise.
Be not afraid, Cynthia,[2] it is but the whispering of the reeds bent by our passage through their mobile forest. I have a dagger for jealous men and blood for thee. Let not this tomb cause thee any alarm; it is that of a woman once loved like thyself: Cecilia Metella lay here.
How wonderful is this night in the Roman Campagna! The moon rises behind the Sabine Hill to contemplate the sea; she causes to stand forth from the diaphanous darkness the ashen-blue summits of Albano, the more distant, less deeply-graven lines of Soracte. The long canal of the old aqueducts lets fall a few globules of its waters through the mosses, columbines, gilliflowers, and joins the mountains to the city walls. Planted one above the other, the aerial porticoes, cutting into the sky, turn in mid-air the torrent of the ages and the course of the brooks. The legislatrix of the world, Rome, seated on the stone of her sepulchre, with her robe of centuries, projects the irregular outline of her tall figure into the milky solitude.
Let us sit down: this pine-tree, like the goat-herd of the Abruzzi, unfolds its parasol among ruins. The moon showers her snowy light upon the Gothic crown of the tower of Metella's tomb and on the festoons of marble that link the horns of the bucrania: a graceful pomp inviting us to enjoy life, which speeds so soon.
Hark! The nymph Egeria is singing beside her fountain; the nightingale warbles in the vine of the Hypogeum of the Scipios; the languid Syrian breeze indolently wafts to us the fragrance of the wild tuberoses. The palm-tree of the abandoned villa waves half-drowned in the amethyst and azure of the Phosbean light. But thou, made pale by the reflections of Diana's purity, thou, O Cynthia, art a thousand times more graceful than that palm-tree. The shades of Delia, Lalage, Lydia, Lesbia, resting on broken cornices, stammer mysterious words around thee. Thy glances cross those of the stars and mingle with their rays.
To Cynthia.
But, Cynthia, nothing is real except the happiness which thou canst enjoy. Those constellations which shine so brightly on thy head harmonize with thy bliss only through the illusions of a beguiling perspective. O young and fair Italian, time is ending! On those flowery carpets thy companions have already passed.
A mist unfolds itself, rises and veils the eye of the night with a silvery retina; the pelican cries and returns to the strand; the woodcock alights in the horse-tails of the diamond-studded springs; the bell resounds under the dome of St. Peter's; the nocturnal plain-chant, the voice of the middle-ages, saddens the lonely monastery of Santa-Croce; the monk chants Lauds upon his knees, on the calcined columns of San Paolo; vestals prostrate themselves on the icy slab that closes their crypts; the pifferaro pipes his midnight lament before the solitary Madonna, at the condemned gate of a catacomb. 'Tis the hour of melancholy; religion awakens and love falls asleep!
Cynthia, thy voice is weakening: the refrain which the Neapolitan fisherman taught thee in his swift-sailing bark, or the Venetian oarsman in his gondola, dies away on thy lips. Yield to the exhaustion of thy sleep; I will watch over thy repose. The darkness with which thy lids cover thy eyes vies in suavity with that which drowsy, perfumed Italy pours over thy brow. When the neighing of our horses is heard in the Campagna, when the morning-star proclaims the dawn, the herd of Frascati will come down with his goats and I shall not cease to soothe thee with my whispered lullaby:
"A bundle of jasmin and narcissus, an alabaster Hebe but lately emerging from the hollow way of an excavation, or fallen from the frontal of a temple, lies on this bed of anemones: no, Muse, you err. The jasmin, the alabaster Hebe is a Roman sorceress, born sixteen months ago of May and the half of a spring, to the sound of the lyre, at the rise of dawn, in a field of roses of Pæstum.
"Winds from the orange-trees of Palermo that blow over Circe's isle; breezes that pass to Tasso's tomb, that caress the nymphs and Cupids of the Farnese; you that play in the Vatican among Raphael's Virgins, among the statues of the Muses; you that dip your wings in the cascades of Tivoli; genii of the arts that live on master-pieces and flutter with the memories, come: you alone do I permit to inspire Cynthia's sleep.
"And you, majestic daughters of Pythagoras, Fates in your robes of flax, inevitable sisters seated at the axle of the spheres, turn the thread of Cynthia's destiny over golden spindles; make it fall from your fingers and rise again to your hands with ineffable harmony; immortal spinsters, open the gate of ivory to those dreams which lie on a woman's breast without oppressing it! I will sing thee, O canephor of the Roman solemnities, young Charite fed on ambrosia in Venus' lap, smile sent from the East to glide over my life, violet forgotten in Horace' garden...."
"Mein Herr, ten kreutzers vor de durnbike!"
A plague upon you with your "crutches!" I had changed my sky! I was just in the right mood! The Muse will not return! That accursed Eger, to which we are coming, is the cause of my unhappiness.
The nights are fatal at Eger. Schiller shows us Wallenstein, betrayed by his accomplices, going to the window of a room in the fortress of Eger:
Am Himmel ist geschäftige Bewegung,
Des Thurmes Fahne jagt der Wind, schnell geht
Der Wolken Zug, die Mondeszichel wankt,
Und durch die Nacht zucht ungewisse Helle[3].
Wallenstein, on the point of being assassinated, expresses himself in touching terms on the death of Max Piccolomini[4], beloved by Thekla[5]:
Die Blume ist hinweg aus meinem Leben
. . . . . . .
Denn er stand neben mir, wie meine Jugend,
Er machte mir das Wirkliche zum Traum[6].
Wallenstein retires to his place of rest:
Sieh, es ist Nacht geworden; auf dem Schloss
Ist's auch schon stille. Leucine, Kämmerling!
. . . . . . .
Ich denke einen langen Schlaf zu thun;
Denn dieser letzten Tage Qual war gross.
Sorgt, dass sie nicht zu zeitig mir erwecken[7].
The dagger of the murderers snatches Wallenstein from his dreams of ambition, even as the voice of the turnpike-man put an end to my dream of love. Both Schiller and Benjamin Constant, who gave proof of a new talent by imitating the German tragic poet, have gone to join Wallenstein, while I, at the gates of Eger, recall their treble fame.
Bavaria.
2 June 1833.
I passed through Eger and, on Saturday the 1st of June, at day-break, entered Bavaria: a tall red-haired girl, bare-foot and bare-headed, came to open the turnpike to me, like Austria in person. The cold lasted: the grass in the moats was covered with a white hoar-frost; wet foxes came out of the oat-fields; grey, zig-zag, wide-spreading clouds hung across in the sky like eagles' wings.
I arrived at Weissenstadt at nine o'clock in the morning; at the same moment, a sort of gig was carrying away a young woman driving without a hat; she looked very much like what she probably was: joy, love's short fortune, then the hospital and the common grave. Strolling pleasure, may Heaven not be too severe on your boards! There are so many actors worse than yourself in this world!
Before entering the village, I passed through "wastes:" this word was at the point of my pencil; it belonged to our old Frankish tongue: it describes the aspect of a desolate country better than the word "lande," which means earth. I still know the song which they used to sing in the evening when crossing the waste-lands:
C'est le chevalier des Landes:
Malheureux chevalier!
Quand il fut dans la lande,
A ouï les sings sonner[8].
After Weissenstadt comes Berneck. On leaving Berneck, the road is lined with poplar-trees, whose winding avenue filled me with an indescribable sentiment of mingled pleasure and sadness. On ransacking my memory, I found that they resembled the poplars with which the high-road was formerly laid out at the entrance to Villeneuve-sur-Yonne on the Paris side. Madame de Beaumont is no more; M. Joubert is no more; the poplars are felled and, after the fourth fall of the Monarchy, I am passing at the feet of the poplars at Berneck:
"Give me," says St. Augustine, "a man who loves, and he will understand what I say."
Youth laughs at those disappointments; it is charming, happy: in vain do you tell it that the time will come when it too will know a similar bitterness; it thrusts you aside with its light wing and flies away in search of pleasures: it is right, if it dies with them.
Here is Bayreuth, a reminiscence of another sort. This town stands in the middle of a hollow plain of crops mixed with meadow-land: it has wide streets, low houses, a weak population. In the time of Voltaire and Frederic II., the Margravine of Bayreuth was famous; her death inspired the bard of Ferney with the only ode in which he displayed any lyrical talent:
Tu ne chanteras plus, solitaire Sylvandre,
Dans ce palais des arts, où les sons de ta voix
Contre les préjugés osaient se faire entendre,
Et de l'humanité faisaient parler les droits[9].
The poet here praises himself justly, were it not that there was no one less solitary in the world than Voltaire-Sylvander. The poet adds, addressing the Margravine:
Des tranquilles hauteurs de la philosophie,
Ta pitié contemplait, avec des yeux sereins,
Les fantômes changeants du songes de la vie,
Tant de rêves détruits, tant de projets si vains[10].
Bayreuth.
From the height of a palace, it is easy to look down with calm eyes upon the poor devils who pass along the street; but those lines are none the less mightily true.... Who could feel them better than myself? I have seen so many phantoms defile through the dream of life! At this very moment, have I not been looking on the three royal larvæ in the Castle in Prague and on the daughter of Marie-Antoinette at Carlsbad? In 1733, just a century ago, what was it occupied men's minds? Had they the least idea of what is now? When Frederic was married, in 1733, under the rough tutelage of his father, had he, in Mathew Laensberg[11], seen M. de Tournon[12] Intendant of Bayreuth and leaving his intendance for the "Prefectship" of Rome? In 1933, the traveller passing through Franconia will ask of my shade if I could have guessed the facts of which he will be a witness.
While I was breakfasting, I read some lessons which a German lady, young and pretty, of course, was writing to a master's dictation:
"Celui qu'il est content, est riche. Vous et je nous avons peu d'argent; mais nous sommes content. Nous sommes ainci à mon avis plus riches que tel qui a un tonne d'or, et il est...."
That is true, mademoiselle, you and je have little money; you are satisfied, as it seems, and you laugh at a ton of gold; but, if, by chance, I were not satisfied, you must agree that, for me, a ton of gold might be rather pleasant.
On leaving Bayreuth, one goes up. Slender pruned firs represented to me the pillars of the mosque at Cairo or the Cathedral of Cordova, but shrunk and blackened, like a landscape reproduced in the camera obscura. The road runs on from hill to hill and valley to valley: the hills wide, with a tuft of wood on their brows; the valleys narrow and green, but badly watered. At the lowest point of these valleys, one sees a hamlet marked by the campanile of a little church. The whole of Christian civilization was formed in this way: the missionary, become a parish-priest, stopped; the Barbarians cantoned themselves around him, like flocks gathering round the shepherd. In former days, those remote habitations would have made me dream more than one kind of dream; to-day, I dream not at all and am nowhere at ease.
Baptiste, suffering from over-fatigue, compelled me to stop at Hollfeld. While supper was being made ready, I climbed the rock which overlooks a part of the village. Upon that rock rises a square belfry; swifts screamed as they swept round the roof and fronts of the turret. That scene consisting of a few birds and an old tower had not repeated itself since the days of my childhood at Combourg; my heart was quite oppressed by it. I went down to the church on a hanging ground towards the west; it was surrounded by its grave-yard abandoned by the new deceased. The old dead only marked out their furrows there: a proof that they had tilled their field. The setting sun, pale and drowned, on the horizon, in a fir-plantation, lit up the lonely refuge where no other man than I stood erect. When shall I be recumbent in my turn? We are beings of nothingness and darkness; our impotency and our potency are strongly characterized: we cannot, at will, procure for ourselves either light or life; but nature, by giving us eye-lids and a hand, has put night and death at our disposal.
Entering the church, whose door was half-open, I knelt down with the intention of saying an Our Father and Hail Mary for the repose of my mother's soul: a servitude of immortality laid upon Christian souls in their mutual affection. Suddenly I thought I heard the shutter of a confessional open; I fancied that Death, instead of a priest, was about to appear at the penance grating. At that very moment, the bell-ringer came to lock the door of the church: I had only time to leave.
The little basket-carrier.
Returning to the inn, I met a little basket-carrier: she had bare legs and feet; her skirt was short, her bodice torn; she walked stooping and with her arms crossed. Together we climbed a steep road; she turned her sun-burnt face a little to my side; her pretty and dishevelled head was glued against her basket. Her eyes were black; her mouth was half open to facilitate her breathing; one saw that, under her burdened shoulders, her young breast had as yet felt no other weight than the spoils of the orchards. She tempted one to talk to her of roses:
"Ρόδα μ'εἴ ρηχας[13]."
I applied myself to casting the adolescent vintager's horoscope: will she grow old at the wine-press, unknown and happy as the mother of a family? Will she be carried off to the camps by a corporal? Will she fall a prey to some Don Juan? The abducted village-girl loves her ravisher as much with astonishment as with passion: he transports her to a marble palace on the Straits of Messina, under a palm-tree beside a spring, opposite the sea displaying its azure billows and Etna belching flames.
I had reached this point in my story, when my companion, turning to the left in a wide open space, went towards some lonely dwellings. As she was about to disappear, she stopped, cast a last look at the stranger, and then, bowing her head to pass, with her basket, under a low door-way, entered a cottage, like a little shy cat gliding into a barn among the sheaves. Let us go on to find in her prison Her Royal Highness Madame la Duchesse de Berry:
Je la suivis, mais je pleurai
De ne pouvoir plus suivre qu'elle[14].
My host at Hollfeld is a curious man: he and his maid-servant are inn-keepers with extreme reluctance; they abhor travellers. When they espy a carriage from afar, they go to hide themselves, cursing those vagabonds who have nothing to do but scour the high-roads, those idle persons who disturb an honest publican and prevent him from drinking the wine which he is obliged to sell to them. The old servant sees that her master is being ruined, but she is waiting for a stroke of Providence in his favour; like Sancho, she will say:
"Sir, accept this fine Kingdom of Micomicon which falls from heaven into your hand."
Once the first movement of ill-humour is past, the couple, in the interval between two bouts, put a good face on the matter. The chamber-maid murders a trifle of French, squints for two and has an air of saying to you:
"I have seen finer sparks than you in Napoleon's armies!"
She smelt of tobacco and brandy, like glory by the camp-fire; she ogled me with a provoking and wicked glance: how sweet it is to be loved at the very moment when one had given up all hopes of it! But, Javotte, you come too late for my "broken and mortified temptations," as a Frenchman of old said; my sentence is passed:
"Harmonious veteran, take thy rest," M. Lerminier[15] has said to me.
You see, fair and friendly stranger, I am forbidden to listen to your song:
Vivandière du regiment,
Javotte l'on me nomme,
Je vends, je donne, et bois gaîment
Mon vin et mon rogomme.
J'ai le pied leste et l'œil mutin,
Tin tin, tin tin, tin tin, tin tin,
R'lin lin tin[16].
There you have another reason why I withstand your seductions; you are frivolous; you would betray me. Fly away then, Dame Javotte of Bavaria, like your predecessor, Madame Isabeau[17].
2 June 1833.
I have left Hollfeld, I am passing through Bamberg at night. All is sleeping: I see only a tiny light whose feeble glimmer comes from the back of a room to grow wan at a window. What is waking here: pleasure or sorrow, love or death?
At Bamberg, in 1815, Berthier, Prince of Neufchâtel, fell from a balcony into the street[18]: his master was about to fall from a greater height.
Sunday 2 June.
At Dettelbach, reappearance of the vines. Four growths mark the limit of four natures and four climates: the birch, the vine, the olive and the palm, always going towards the sun.
The Hunchback.
After Dettelbach, two stages to Würzburg, and a female hunchback seated behind my carriage; it was Terence's Andria: Inopia.... egregia forma.... ætate integra.[19] The postillion wanted to make her get down; I objected, for two reasons: first, because I should have been afraid lest that fairy should have thrown a spell over me; secondly, because, having read in a biography of myself that I am a hunchback, all female hunchbacks are my sisters. Who can satisfy himself that he is not hunchbacked? Who will ever tell you that you are? If you look at yourself in the glass, you cannot say at all; do we ever see ourselves as we are? You will find a turn in your figure that suits you to perfection. All hunchbacks are proud and happy; the advantages of the hump are hallowed in song. At the entrance to a lane, my hunchback, in her ragged finery, stepped majestically to the ground: carrying her burden, like all mortals, Serpentina plunged into a corn-field and disappeared among spikes taller than herself.
At mid-day, on the 2nd of June, I had reached the top of a hill from which one descried Würzburg: the citadel on a height, the town below, with its palace, its steeples and its turrets. The palace, although thick-set, would be handsome even in Florence; in case of rain, the Prince could give shelter to all his subjects in his mansion without giving up his own apartments.
The Bishop of Würzburg was formerly the Sovereign Bishop: the nomination was in the gift of the canons of the Chapter. After his election, he passed, stripped to the waist, between his colleagues drawn up in two rows, who scourged him. It was hoped that the princes, offended at this manner of consecrating a royal back, would refrain from presenting themselves as candidates. To-day this would be of no avail: there is not a descendant of Charlemagne but would consent to be whipped for three days on end to obtain the crown of Yvetot.
I have seen the Emperor of Austria's brother Duke of Würzburg[20]; he used to sing very prettily at Fontainebleau, in the Galerie de François Ier, at the concerts of the Empress Joséphine.
They kept Schwartz two hours at the passport-office. Left with my unharnessed carriage in front of a church, I went in: I prayed with the Christian crowd which represents the old society in the midst of the new. A procession went out and marched round the church: why am I not a monk on the walls of Rome? The times to which I belong would be realized in me.
When the first seeds of religion budded in my soul, I opened out like a virgin soil which, cleared of its brambles, bears its first harvest. Came a dry and icy wind, and the soil was parched. The sky took pity on it; it gave it its tepid dews; then the wind blew again. This alternation of faith and doubt long made my life a mixture of despair and unspeakable delights. O my good, sainted mother, pray Jesus Christ for me: your son needs redeeming more than other men!
I left Würzburg at four o'clock and took the Mannheim Road. I entered the Grand-duchy of Baden; I found a village in a merry mood; a drunkard gave me his hand, shouting:
"Long live the Emperor!"
Everything that has happened since the fall of Napoleon is null and void in Germany. The men who rose to snatch their national independence from Bonaparte's ambition dream only of him, so greatly did he stir the imagination of the nations, from the Bedouins in their tents to the Teutons in their huts.
As I went towards France, the children became noisier in the hamlets, the postillions drove faster, life sprang up once more.
The Swallow.
At Bischoffsheim, where I dined, a fair onlooker appeared at my state banquet: a swallow, a real Procne, with a reddish breast, came to perch at my open window, on the iron bar from which swung the sign of the Golden Sun; then it warbled most sweetly, looking at me as though it knew me and without showing the least alarm. I have never complained of being awakened by the daughter of Pandion; I have never, like Anacreon, called her a "chatterer;" I have always, on the contrary, hailed her return with the song of the children of the isle of Rhodes:
"She comes, the swallow comes, bringing good seasons and a joyful time! Open the window, do not despise the swallow[21]!"
"François," said my fellow-guest at Bischoffsheim, "my great-great-grandmother used to live at Combourg, under the rafters of the roof of your turret; you used to keep her company every year, in autumn, in the reeds in the pond, when you went dreaming, of an evening, with your sylph. She landed on your native rock, on the very day when you embarked for America, and she followed your sail for some time. My grandmother built her nest in Charlotte's window; eight years after, she arrived at Jaffa with you: you have mentioned this in your Itinéraire?[22] My mother, while twittering to the dawn, fell one day into your room at the Foreign Office[23]; you opened the window for her. My mother has had many children: I who am speaking to you am of her last nest; I have met you before on the old Tivoli Road in the Roman Campagna: do you remember? My feathers were so black and so glossy! You looked at me sadly. Would you like us to fly away together?"
"Alas, my dear swallow, who know my story so well, you are extremely kind; but I am a poor moulting bird, and my feathers will never come back; I cannot, therefore, fly away with you. And you could not carry me: I am too heavy with sorrows and years. And then, where should we go? Spring and beautiful climates are no longer of my season. For you, the air and love; for me, the ground and loneliness. You are going away: may the dew cool your wings! May a hospitable yard offer to your tired flight, when you are crossing the Ionian Sea! May a peaceful October save you from shipwreck! Greet the olive-trees of Athens and the palm-trees of Rosetta for me. If I am no more when the flowers bring you back, I invite you to my funeral banquet: come at sunset to snap up the gnats on the grass of my grave; like you, I love liberty and I have lived on little[24]."
3 and 4 June 1833.
I set out myself by land, a few moments after the swallow had set sail. The night was overcast; the moon hovered, weakened and wasted, among the clouds; my eyes, half-asleep, closed as they looked at it; I felt as though I were expiring in the mysterious light which illumines the shadows: "I felt," says Manzoni, "I know not what peaceful depression, the fore-runner of the last rest."
I stopped at Wiesenbach: a solitary inn, a narrow, cultivated valley between two wooded hills. A German from Brunswick, a traveller like myself, hearing my name pronounced, came running up to me. He pressed my hand, spoke to me of my works; his wife, he told me, was learning to read French in the Génie du Christianisme. He did not cease to express surprise at my "youth:"
"But," he added, "that is the fault of my judgment; I ought to think you, from your last works, as young as you look."
My age and appearance.
My life has been mixed up with so many events that, in my readers' heads, I have the ancientness of those events themselves. I often speak of my grey head; this is calculated vanity on my part, so that people may exclaim, when they see me:
"Ah, he is not so old!"
A man is at ease with white hair: he can boast of it; to glory in having black hair would be in bad taste: a fine matter for triumph, to be as your mother made you! But to be as time, misfortune and wisdom have dressed you, that is fine! My little artifice has succeeded sometimes. Quite recently a priest asked to see me; he stood dumb at the sight of me; at last recovering his speech, he cried:
"Ah, monsieur, so you will be able to fight a long time yet for the faith!"
One day, as I was passing through Lyons, a lady wrote to me; she begged me to give her daughter a seat in my carriage and take her to Paris. The proposal struck me as singular; but, after all, having verified the signature, I found my unknown correspondent to be a highly respectable lady and I replied politely. The mother introduced her daughter to me, a divinity of sixteen. No sooner had the mother set eyes upon me than she blushed scarlet; her confidence forsook her:
"Forgive me," she stammered; "I am none the less filled with esteem.... But you understand the proprieties.... I made a mistake.... I am so greatly surprised."
I insisted, looking at my promised companion, who seemed amused at the discussion; I was lavish with protestations that I would take every imaginable care of that beautiful young person; the mother humbled herself with excuses and courtesies. The two ladies departed. I was proud of having frightened them so much. For some hours I thought myself made young again by the Dawn. The lady had fancied that the author of the Génie du Christianisme was a venerable Abbé de Chateaubriand, a tall, dry, simple old man, constantly taking snuff out of a huge tin snuff-box, who might very well be trusted to take an innocent school-girl to the Sacred Heart.
They used to tell in Vienna, two or three lustres ago, that I lived all alone in a certain valley called the Vallée-aux-Loups. My house was built on an island; when people wanted to see me, they had to blow a horn on the opposite bank of the river: a river at Châtenay! I then looked out through a hole: if the company pleased me, a thing that hardly ever happened, I came myself to fetch them in a little boat; if not, not. In the evening, I pulled my boat on shore and nobody was allowed to land on my island. In point of fact, I ought to have lived in this way; this Viennese story has always charmed me: M. de Metternich surely did not invent it; he is not sufficiently my friend for that.
I do not know what the German traveller will have told his wife about me, nor if he went out of his way to undeceive her as to my decrepitude. I fear that I possess the drawbacks of black hair and white hair both and that I am neither young enough nor staid enough. For the rest, I was hardly in the mood for coquetry at Wiesenbach; a melancholy wind blew under the doors and through the passages of the inn: when the breeze blows, I am in love with nothing else.
From Wiesenbach to Heidelberg, one follows the course of the Necker, cased by hills which carry forests on a bank of sand and red sulphate. How many rivers I have seen flow! I met pilgrims from Walthüren: they formed two parallel lines on either side of the high-road; the carriages passed in the middle. The women walked bare-foot, beads in hand, with a parcel of linen on their heads; the men bare-headed, also carrying their beads in their hands. It was raining; in some places the watery clouds crept along the sides of the hills. Boats loaded with timber went down the river, others went up, under sail, or in tow. In the broken places in the hills were hamlets standing among the fields, in the midst of rich vegetable-gardens adorned with Bengal roses and different flowering shrubs. Pilgrims, pray for my poor little King: he is exiled, he is innocent; he is commencing his pilgrimage while you are performing yours and I ending mine. If he is not to reign, it will always be a certain glory to me to have fastened the wreck of so great a fortune to my life-boat God alone sends the fair wind and opens the harbour.
Heidelberg.
As one approaches Heidelberg, the bed of the Necker, strewn with rocks, widens. One sees the wharf of the town and the town itself, which wears a pleasant mien. The back-ground of the whole picture ends in a tall earthly horizon: it seems to bar the stream.
A red-brick triumphal arch marks the entrance to Heidelberg. To the left, on a hill, stand the ruins of a medieval castle. Apart from their picturesque effect and some popular traditions, the remains of the Gothic period interest only the nations whose work they are. Does a Frenchman trouble his head about the lords Palatine, the princesses Palatine, plump, white and blue-eyed though they may have been? One forgets them for St. Geneviève of Brabant[25]. Those modern ruins have nothing in common with modern nations, excepting their outward aspect of Christianity and their feudal character.
It is different, leaving out the sun, with the monuments of Greece and Italy; these belong to all nations: they commence their history; their inscriptions are written in languages known to all civilized men. The ruins even of renovated Italy possess a general interest, because they are stamped with the seal of the arts and the arts come within the public domain of society. A fresco by Domenichino[26] or Titian that becomes obliterated, a palace by Michael Angelo or Palladio[27] that crumbles throw the genius of all the centuries into mourning.
At Heidelberg, they show a tun of inordinate proportions, a drunkards' Coliseum in ruins: at least no Christian has lost his life in that amphitheatre of the Vespasians of the Rhine; his reason, yes: that is no great loss.
At the outlet of Heidelberg, the hills to the right and left of the Necker fall away, and one enters upon a plain. A winding embankment, raised a few feet above the level of the corn-fields, is delineated between two rows of cherry-trees harshly treated by the wind and of walnut-trees "often by the wayfarers attacked[28]."
At the entrance to Mannheim, one drives through hop-vines, whose long, dry props were as yet decorated to only one third of their height by the climbing creeper. Julian the Apostate wrote a pretty epigram against beer; the Abbé de La Bletterie[29] imitated it with some elegance:
Tu n'es qu'un faux Bacchus ...
J'en atteste le véritable.
. . . . . . .
Que le Gaulois, pressé d'une soif éternelle
Au défaut de la grappe ait recours aux épis,
De Cérès qu'il vante le fils:
Vive le fils de Semèle[30].
A few orchards, some walks shaded by willow-trees of all sizes form a verdant suburb to Mannheim. The houses in the town have often only one storey above the ground-floor. The main street is wide and planted with trees in the middle: one more down-fallen city. I do not like false gold, and so I did not want any Mannheim gold; but I certainly have "Toulouse gold[31]," to judge by the disasters of my life: yet who has more than I respected the Temple of Apollo?
3 and 4 June 1833.
I crossed the Rhine at two o'clock in the afternoon. At the moment of passing, a steam-boat came up stream. What would Cæsar have said if he had met such a machine while he was building his bridge?
On the other side of the Rhine, opposite Mannheim, one finds Bavaria again, as a result of the odious slashings and jobbings of the Treaties of Paris, Vienna and Aix-la-Chapelle. Every one cut out his share with scissors, without any regard for reason, humanity or justice, without troubling about the slice of population that fell into a pair of royal chops.
The Palatinate.
Driving through the Cisrhenan Palatinate, I reflected how this country had once formed a department of France, how white Gaul was girt about by the Rhine, the "blue sash" of Germany. Napoleon and the Republic before him had realized the dream of several of our kings, above all of Louis XIV. So long as we do not occupy our natural frontiers, there will be war in Europe, because the interest of self-preservation drives France to seize the boundaries necessary to her national independence. Here we have planted trophies to claim back in due season.
The plain between the Rhine and the Monts Tonnerre looks sad; earth and men seem to say that their fate is not settled, that they belong to no people; they appear to be expecting new invasions, as it were new river-floods. The Germans of Tacitus devastated great spaces on their frontiers and left them empty between these and their enemies. Woe to the border populations that till the battlefields on which the nations are to meet!
As I approached ——, I saw a sad sight: a wood of young fir-trees, five or six feet high, felled and bound into faggots, a forest mown like grass. I have spoken of the cemetery of Lucerne, where the children's burials throng on one side. I never felt more keenly the need to end my wanderings, to die under the protection of a friendly hand laid upon my heart to interrogate it, when they shall say:
"It has stopped beating."
From the edge of my tomb I would like to be able to cast back a glance of satisfaction over my many years, just as a pontiff, on reaching the sanctuary, blesses the long line of the priests who have served as his retinue.
Louvois[32] burnt down the Palatinate; unfortunately it was Turenne's hand that held the torch. The Revolution laid waste the same country, the witness and victim by turns of our aristocratic and plebeian struggles. It is enough to name the warriors to judge of the difference of the times: on the one side, Condé, Turenne, Créqui[33], Luxembourg, La Force[34], Villars[35]; on the other, Kellermann, Hoche, Pichegru, Moreau. Let us deny none of our victories; military glories especially have known only enemies of France and held only one opinion: on the battle-field, honour and danger level all ranks. Our fathers called the blood that flowed from a non-mortal wound "volatile blood:" a phrase typical of the contempt for death natural to Frenchmen in every century. Institutions can alter nothing in this national genius. The soldiers who, after the death of Turenne[36], said, "Let the Pie loose, we shall encamp where she stops," would have been quite as good as Napoleon's grenadiers.
On the heights of Dunkheim, the first rampart of the Gauls on that side, one discovers the seats of camps and military positions to-day empty of soldiers: Burgundians, Franks, Goths, Huns, Suevi, so many waves of the Barbarian deluge, have by turns assailed those heights.
Not far from Dunkheim, one sees the remains of a monastery. The monks enclosed within that retreat had seen many armies passing round at their feet; they had shown hospitality to many warriors; there some crusader had ended his life, changed his helm for the frock; there were passions which called for silence and rest before the last rest and the last silence. Did they find what they sought? Those ruins will not tell.
After the remnants of the sanctuary of peace come the fragments of the lair of war: the demolished bastions, mantlets, curtains, trunnions of a fortress. Ramparts crumble even as cloisters. The castle was ambushed in a rugged path to close it to the enemy: it did not keep time and death from passing.
From Dunkheim to Frankenstein, the road pushes through a valley so narrow that it will scarcely hold a carriage way; the trees descending from two opposite slopes join and embrace in the ravine. I have followed similar dales between Messenia and Arcadia, but for the good road: Pan knew nothing about civil engineering. Flowering broom and a jay carried me back to the recollection of Brittany; I remember the pleasure which the cry of that bird gave me in the mountains of Judea. My memory is a panorama; there the most varied sites and skies, with their scorching sun or their foggy horizon, come to paint themselves on the same canvas.
The inn at Frankenstein is placed in a meadow in the mountains, watered by a stream. The postmaster speaks French; his young sister, or his wife, or his daughter is charming. He complains of being a Bavarian; he busies himself with the cultivation of forests; to me he represented an American planter.
At Kaiserslautern, where I arrived at night as at Bamberg, I passed through the region of dreams: what did all those sleeping inhabitants see in their slumbers? If I had time, I would tell the story of their visions. Nothing would have reminded me of earth, if two quails had not called to one another from cage to cage. In the fields in Germany, from Prague to Mannheim, one meets only carrion crows, sparrows and larks; but the towns are full of nightingales, warblers, thrushes, quails: plaintive prisoners, male and female, who greet you at the bars of their gaol when you pass. The windows are decked with pinks, mignonette, roses, jasmine. The northern nations have the tastes of another clime; they love the arts and music: the Germans came to fetch the vine in Italy; their sons would gladly repeat the invasion to conquer birds and flowers in the same spots.
Prussia.
The change in the post-boy's jacket told me, on Tuesday the 4th of June, at Saarbrück, that I was entering Prussia. I saw a squadron of hussars ride past under the window of my inn; they looked very spirited: I was as spirited as they; I would cheerfully have helped to give those gentry a drubbing, even though a lively feeling of respect makes me attached to the Prussian Royal Family, even though the outbursts of the Prussians in Paris were but reprisals for Napoleon's brutality in Berlin; but, if history has the time to enter into the cold justice which connects consequences with their origins, the man who witnesses living facts is carried away by those facts, without going back to the past to seek the causes from which they sprang and which excuse them. My country has done me great harm; but how gladly I would offer up my blood for her! Oh, what strong heads, what consummate politicians, above all, what good Frenchmen were those negociators of the Treaties of 1815!
A few hours yet, and my native soil will once more quiver beneath my steps. What shall I hear? Since three weeks I have known nothing of what my friends have been saying and doing. Three weeks! A long space of time for man whom one moment carries away, for empires which three days suffice to overthrow! And my prisoner of Blaye: what has become of her? Shall I be able to convey to her the answer which she is awaiting? If ever the person of an ambassador should be sacred, it is mine; my diplomatic career was consecrated near the Head of the Church; it has been completely sanctified near an unfortunate monarch: I have negociated a new family compact among the children of the Bearnese; I have carried and brought back its deeds from prison to exile and from exile to prison.
4 and 5 June.
As I passed the border which separates the territory of Saarbrück from that of Forbach, France did not show herself to me in a brilliant manner: first, a cripple seated in a wooden bowl; then, another man who crawled on his hands and knees, dragging his legs after him like two crooked tails or two dead snakes; next, appeared, in a cart, two swarthy, wrinkled old women, the van-guard of the women of France. It was enough to make one go back again to the Prussian Army.
But presently I found a handsome young soldier walking with a young girl; the soldier was pushing the young girl's wheel-barrow before him and she was carrying the trooper's pipe and sword. Further on, another young girl holding the tail of a plough and an aged ploughman goading the oxen; further on, an old man begging for a blind child; further on, a cross. In a hamlet, a dozen children's heads, at the window of an unfinished house, looked like a group of angels in a glory. Here is a tiny girl of five or six, sitting on the threshold of a cottage-door, with bare head, fair hair, a dirty face, pulling a little grimace because of a cold wind blowing; with her two white shoulders peeping from a torn frock, her arms crossed over her knees drawn up close to her chest, looking at what was going on around her with the curiosity of a bird, Raphael would have sketched her; as for me, I felt inclined to steal her from her mother.
France.
At the entrance to Forbach, a troop of learned dogs appeared: the two biggest harnessed to the costume-wagon; five or six others of different tails, noses, sizes and colours followed the baggage, each with its piece of bread in its mouth. Two grave instructors, one carrying a big drum, the other carrying nothing, led the band. Go, my friends, go round the world as I have done, in order to learn to know the nations. You have your place in the world just as much as I; you are quite as good as the dogs of my kind. Give a paw to Diane, to Mirza, to Pax, with your hat on your ear, your sword by your side, your tail sticking out like a trumpet between the skirts of your coat: dance for a bone, or for a kick, as we men do; but do not go making the mistake of jumping for the King!
Reader, bear with these arabesques; the hand that traced them will never do you any other harm: it is withered. Remember, when you see them, that they are only the freakish scrolls drawn by a painter on the vault of his tomb.
At the custom-house, an elderly junior clerk made a pretense at examining my calash. I had got a five-franc piece ready; he saw it in my hand, but dared not take it, because of his superiors, who were watching him. He took off his cap, on the pretext of searching me better, laid it on the seat in front of me and said, in an under-tone:
"In my cap, please."
Oh, what a great phrase! It comprises the history of the human race; how often have liberty, loyalty, friendship, devotion, love said:
"In my cap, please!"
I shall give that phrase to Béranger for the chorus of a song.
I was struck, on entering Metz, by something which I had not noticed in 1821; the modern fortifications surround the Gothic fortifications: Guise and Vauban[37] are two names that go well together.
Our years and our memories lie in regular and parallel strata at different depths of our life, deposited by the waves of time that pass over us in succession. It was from Metz, in 1792, that the column issued which was engaged under the walls of Thionville with our little corps of Emigrants. I am returning from my pilgrimage to the retreat of the banished Prince whom I served in his first exile. I then gave him a little of my blood; I have just been weeping with him: at my age, we have little left but tears.
In 1821, M. de Tocqueville[38], my brother's brother-in-law, was Prefect of the Moselle. The trees, no thicker than laths, which M. de Tocqueville planted, in 1820, at the gates of Metz now give shade. There is a scale to measure our days by; but man is not like wine, he does not improve when reckoned by vintages. The ancients used to steep roses in their Falernian; when an amphora of a hundred-year-old consulate was uncorked, it perfumed the banquet. The clearest intelligence might be mingled with old years, and no one would be tempted to get tipsy with it.
I had not been a quarter of an hour in the inn at Metz, when behold Baptiste coming in a great state of excitement: mysteriously he drew from his pocket a white paper parcel, containing a seal; M. le Duc de Bordeaux and Mademoiselle had charged him with that seal, telling him to give it me "only on French soil." They had been very anxious the whole night before my departure, fearing lest the jeweller would not have time to finish the work.
The seal has three faces: on one is engraved an anchor; on the second, the two words which Henry said to me at our first interview: "Yes, always!" on the third, the date of my arrival in Prague. The brother and sister begged me to wear the seal "for love of them." The mystery of this present, the order given by the two exiled children to hand me the token of their memory "only on French soil" filled my eyes with tears. The seal shall never leave me; I shall wear it "for love of Louise and Henry."
I would have liked to see, at Metz, the house of Fabert[39], the common soldier who became a marshal of France and who received the collar of the Orders, his nobility tracing its origin only to his sword.
The Barbarians our fathers, at Metz, butchered the Romans[40] surprised in the midst of the debauchery of a feast; our soldiers have waltzed, in the monastery of Alcobaça, with the skeleton of Iñez de Castro[41]: sorrows and pleasures, crimes and follies, fourteen centuries separate you and you are all alike completely past. The eternity commenced just now is as old as the eternity dating from the first death, the murder of Abel. Nevertheless, men, during their ephemeral appearance on this globe, persuade themselves that they are leaving some trace behind them: why, good Heaven, yes, every fly has its shadow!
I left Metz and passed through Verdun, where I was so unhappy and where Carrel's lonely friend lives to-day[42]. I skirted the heights of Valmy; I do not care to speak of it any more than of Jemmapes: I should be afraid lest I should find a crown there.
Châlons reminded me of a great weakness of Bonaparte, who banished beauty there[43]. Peace be with Châlons, which tells me that I still have friends!
At Château-Thierry, I found my idol, La Fontaine. It was the hour of the Angelus: Jean's wife was no longer there, and Jean had returned to Madame de La Sablière[44].
As I grazed the wall of Meaux Cathedral, I repeated Bossuet's[45] own words to him:
"Man reaches his tomb dragging behind him the long chain of his hopes deceived."
Back in Paris.
In Paris, I passed the quarters in which I had lived with my sisters in my youth; next, the Palace of Justice, commemorative of my trial; next, the Prefecture of Police, which served me as a prison. I have returned at last to my hospice, thus winding off the skein of my days. The frail insect of the sheep-folds drops at the end of a silken thread to the ground, where the foot of some ewe will soon crush it.
Paris, Rue d'Enfer, 6 June 1833.
On alighting from my carriage and before going to bed, I wrote a letter to Madame la Duchesse de Berry to give her an account of my mission. My return had put the police into a flutter; the telegraph announced it to the Prefect of Bordeaux and the commandant of the fortress of Blaye: orders were given to redouble the measures of supervision; it appears even that Madame was put on board before the day fixed for her departure[46]. My letter missed Her Royal Highness by a few hours and was taken to her in Italy.
If Madame had made no declaration; if even, after that declaration, she had denied the consequences of it; much more if, on arriving in Sicily, she had protested against the part which she had been compelled to play in order to escape from her gaolers, France and Europe would have believed her word, so greatly was Philip's Government under suspicion. All the Judases would have suffered punishment for the spectacle which they gave to the world in the smoking-room at Blaye. But Madame would not consent to retain a political character by denying her marriage; what one gains, by a lie, in reputation for cleverness one loses in consideration: any former sincerity which you may have professed hardly avails to defend you. When a man who enjoys public esteem demeans himself, he is no longer sheltered within his name, but behind his name. Madame, by her admission, escaped from the gloom of her prison: the female eagle, like the male eagle, has need of liberty and sunlight.
M. le Duc de Blacas, in Prague, had announced to me the formation of a council of which I was to be the head, with M. the Chancellor[47] and M. le Marquis de Latour-Maubourg: I was going to become alone (still according to M. le Duc) the Council of Charles X., absent on some business. I was shown a plan: the machinery was very complicated; M. de Blacas' work retained a few arrangements made by the Duchesse de Berry, when she, on her side, had laid claim to organizing the State by coming madly, but bravely, to place herself at the head of her Kingdom in partibus. The ideas of that adventurous woman were not at all lacking in good sense: she had divided France into four great military governments, chosen the commanders, appointed the officers, embodied the soldiers and, without troubling whether all her people had joined the flag, she would herself have hastened to carry it; she did not doubt but that she would find in the fields St. Martin's[48] cope or the Oriflamme, Galaor[49] or Bayard. Blows of battle-axes and bullets from fire-locks, retreats into the forests, perils in the homes of a few faithful friends, caves, castles, cottages, escalades: all this suited and delighted Madame. There is something eccentric, original and captivating in her character that will make her live. The future will take her as it pleases, in spite of correct persons and sober-minded cowards.
My plans for Henry V.
I should have brought to the Bourbons, if they had sent for me, the popularity which I enjoyed by my two-fold claim as a writer and a statesman. I could have no doubt of that popularity, for I had received the confidences of every shade of opinion. People had not confined themselves to generalities; each had pointed out to me what he desired in case of eventualities; many had confessed their genius to me and rendered obvious to me the place for which they were eminently fitted. Everybody, friends and enemies alike, sent me to be about the person of the Duc de Bordeaux. By the different combinations of my opinions and my fortunes, by the ravages of death, which had successively carried away the men of my generation, I seemed to be the only one left for the choice of the Royal Family.
I might feel tempted by the part awarded to me: there was something calculated to flatter my vanity, as an unknown servant and rejected by the Bourbons, in the idea of being the support of their House; of holding out my hand to Philip Augustus, St. Louis, Charles V., Louis XII., Francis I., Henry IV. and Louis XIV. in their tombs; of protecting with my feeble renown the blood, the crown and the shades of so many great men: I alone against faithless France and dishonoured Europe.
But to arrive at that what should I have had to do? What the commonest mind would have done: fawn upon the Court of Prague, overcome its antipathies, conceal my ideas from it until I was in a position to develop them.
And, certainly, those ideas went far: if I had been the young Prince's governor, I should have striven to gain his confidence. If he had recovered his crown, I should have advised him to wear it only to lay it aside at the proper time. I would have liked to see the Capets disappear in a manner worthy of their greatness. What a fine, what an illustrious day that would have been when, after setting up religion, perfecting the Constitution of the State, enlarging the rights of citizens, breaking the last fetters of the press, emancipating the commons, destroying monopoly, striking the balance between wages and labour, consolidating property and restricting its abuses, reviving industry, reducing taxation, re-establishing our honour among the nations, extending our frontiers and thus securing our independence against the foreigner; when, after accomplishing all these things, my pupil would have said to the nation solemnly called together:
"Frenchmen, your education is finished with mine. My first ancestor, Robert the Strong[50], died for you, and my father asked for mercy for the man who took his life. My sires raised and formed France through barbarism; now the march of events, the progress of civilization compel you to dispense with a protector. I am descending the throne; I confirm all the benefits of my fathers, while releasing you from your oaths to the Monarchy."
Say if that end would not have surpassed all that is most wonderful in that dynasty! Say if ever a magnificent enough temple could have been raised to its memory! Compare that end with that which the decrepit sons of Henry IV. would make, stubbornly pinning themselves to a throne swamped by democracy, trying to preserve their power with the aid of measures of police, measures of violence, methods of corruption, and dragging on for a few short moments a degraded existence!
"Let them make my brother King," said the child Louis XIII., after the death of Henry IV., "I do not want to be King."
Henry V. has no other brother than his people: let him make it King.
To arrive at this resolution, chimerical though it may seem, one would have to feel the greatness of one's race, not because one was descended from an old stock, but because one was the heir of men through whom France became powerful, enlightened and civilized.
Now, as I have just said, the way to be called upon to set to work on that plan would have been to wheedle the weaknesses of Prague, to raise magpies with the child of the throne like Luynes[51], to flatter Concini[52] like Richelieu. I had begun well at Carlsbad; a little note of submission and gossip would have forwarded my business. To bury myself alive in Prague was no easy matter, it is true; for not only should I have had to overcome the repugnance of the Royal Family, but the hatred of the foreigners as well. My ideas are odious to the Cabinets; they know that I detest the Treaties of Vienna, that I would make war at any price to give France the necessary frontiers and to restore the balance of power in Europe.
However, by giving signs of repentance, by weeping, by expiating my sins of national honour, by beating my breast, by admiring for my penance the genius of the blockheads who govern the world, I might perhaps have been able to crawl into the Baron de Damas' place; then, suddenly standing erect, I should have flung away my crutches.
Wherein I fail.
But, alas, where is my ambition? Where is my faculty of dissimulation? Where is my art of enduring constraint and boredom? Where is my capacity for attaching importance to anything whatsoever? I took up my pen two or three times, I began to draft two or three letters in obedience to Madame la Dauphine, who had ordered me to write to her. Soon, revolting against myself, I wrote at one dash and after my own manner the letter which was to break my neck. I knew it quite well; I weighed the results quite well: it matters little. And to-day, now that the thing is done, I am delighted at having sent the whole business to the devil and flung my "governorship " out of so wide a window. I shall be told:
"Could you not have expressed the same truths by stating them less crudely?"
Yes, yes, by diluting, beating about the bush, employing honeyed words, bleating, quavering:
Son œil tout pénitent ne pleure qu'eau béniste[53].
I cannot do that.
Here is the letter, abridged, however, by almost half its length, which will make the hair of our drawing-room diplomatists rise up in dismay: the Duc de Choiseul was somewhat of my humour; therefore he spent the end of his end at Chanteloup:
"Paris, Rue d'Enfer, 30 June 1833.
"Madame,
"The most precious moments of my long career are those which Madame la Dauphine permitted me to spend with her. It was in a humble house at Carlsbad that a Princess who is the object of universal veneration deigned to speak to me with confidence. Heaven has laid at the bottom of her soul a treasure of magnanimity and religion which the prodigality of misfortune has not been able to dry up. I had before me the daughter of Louis XVI. exiled anew; that orphan of the Temple whom the Martyr-King pressed to his heart before going to gather the palm! God's name is the only name that one can pronounce when one comes to plunge one's self in contemplation of the impenetrable counsels of His Providence.
"Praise is suspicious, when it is addressed to prosperity: with the Dauphiness, admiration knows no embarrassment. I have said it, Madame: your sorrows have attained so great a height, that they have become one of the glories of the Revolution. I shall therefore, once in my life, have met destinies so superior, so much apart, that I can tell them, without fear of offending them or of being misunderstood, what I think of the future state of society. One can discuss the fate of empires with you, who would, without regretting them, see pass at the feet of your virtue all those earthly kingdoms, many of which have already flowed away at the feet of your House.
"The catastrophes of which you have been the most illustrious witness and the sublimest victim, great though they appeared to be, are, nevertheless, but the particular accidents of the general transformation which is being operated in the human race; the reign of Napoleon, which shook the world, is but a link in the revolutionary chain. We must start from this truth to understand the possibilities of a third Restoration and what means that Restoration possesses of being included in the plan of social changes. If it did not enter into it as an homogeneous element, it would inevitably be rejected by an order of things contrary to its nature.
"Therefore, Madame, if I told you that the Legitimacy had a chance of returning through the aristocracy of the nobles and clergy, with their privileges; through the Court, with its distinctions; through the Royalty, with its attractions, I should be deceiving you. The Legitimacy, in France, is no longer a sentiment; it is a principle in so far as it guarantees property and interests, rights and liberties; but if it remained proved that the Legitimacy would not defend or was powerless to protect that property and those interests, those rights and those liberties, it would cease to be even a principle. When any one puts forward that the Legitimacy will necessarily come about, that it cannot be dispensed with, that it is enough to wait, for France to come crying mercy to it on her knees, he is putting forward an illusion. The Restoration may never return, or may last for but a moment, if the Legitimacy seeks its strength where it does not exist.
My letter to the Dauphiness.
"Yes, Madame, I say it sorrowfully, Henry V. might remain a foreign and banished Prince: a young and new ruin of an edifice already fallen, but, in short, a ruin. We old servants of the Legitimacy will soon have spent the small stock of years that is left to us; we shall shortly be resting in our graves, asleep with our old ideas, like the ancient knights with their ancient suits of armour into which rust and time have eaten, suits of armour which no longer shape themselves to the figure nor adapt themselves to the usages of the living.
"All that was militating, in 1789, for the preservation of the old order of things, religion, laws, manners, customs, property, classes, privileges, corporations, no longer exists. A general ferment has become manifest; Europe is hardly safer than ourselves; no form of society is entirely destroyed, none entirely established; all is worn or new, or decrepit or not yet rooted; all has the weakness of old age or childhood. The kingdoms that have sprung from the territorial limitations drawn by the last treaties are of yesterday; love of country has lost its force, because the country is an uncertain and fleeting thing to populations sold by auction, dealt in like second-hand furniture, now allotted to hostile populations, now handed over to unknown masters. Thus dug up, furrowed, tilled, the soil is prepared to receive the democratic seed which the Days of July have ripened.
"The kings think that, by keeping sentry around their thrones, they will stop the movements of intelligence; they imagine that, by giving a description of the principles, they will have them seized at the frontiers; they are persuaded that, by multiplying customs-officers, gendarmes, police-spies, military commissions, they will prevent them from circulating. But those ideas do not travel on foot: they are in the air, they fly, we breathe them. The absolute governments, which are establishing telegraphs, railways, steam-boats and trying, at the same time, to keep men's minds on the level of the political dogmas of the fourteenth century, are inconsistent; at once progressive and reactionary, they are lost in the confusion resulting from a contradiction of theory and practice. It is impossible to separate the industrial principle from the principle of liberty; one must needs stifle both or admit both. Wherever the French language is understood, ideas come with the passports of the age.
"You see, Madame, how essential it is that the starting-point should be carefully chosen. The child of hope under your guard, innocence taking refuge under your virtues and misfortunes as under a royal canopy: I know no more imposing spectacle; if there be a chance of success for the Legitimacy, it is there in its entirety. The France of the future will be able to bow, without descending, before the glory of the past, to stand in emotion before that great apparition in her history represented by the daughter of Louis XVI. leading the last of the Henrys by the hand. As the Queen-protectress of the young Prince, you will exercise over the nation the influence of the immense memories mingled in your august person. Who will not feel an unaccustomed confidence revive within him when the orphan of the Temple watches over the education of the orphan of St. Louis?
"It is to be desired, Madame, that this education, directed by men whose names are popular in France, should in a certain measure become public. Louis XIV., who otherwise justifies the pride of his motto[54], did a great injury to his House by isolating the Sons of France behind the barriers of an Oriental education.
"The young Prince appeared to me to be gifted with a quick intelligence. He will have to complete his studies by travels among the nations of the Old and even of the New Continent, so as to become acquainted with politics and to be alarmed at neither institutions nor doctrines. If he could serve as a soldier in some far-off foreign war, one ought not to dread to expose him. He has a resolute air; he seems to have in his heart the blood of his father and of his mother; but, if he could ever experience anything but the sense of glory in danger, let him abdicate: without courage, in France, there is no crown.
"Madame, on seeing me extend into a long future the thought of the education of Henry V., you will naturally suppose that I do not think him destined to ascend the throne so soon. I will endeavour impartially to deduct the opposite reasons for hopes and fears.
"The Restoration may take place to-day, to-morrow. There is something so sudden, so inconstant observable in the French character, that a change is always probable; it is always safe to wager a hundred to one, in France, that any particular thing will not last: it is at the moment when the Government appears most firmly seated that it falls. We have seen the nation worship Bonaparte and detest him, abandon him, take him back, abandon him again, forget him in his exile, raise altars to him after his death, and then relapse from its enthusiasm. That fickle nation, which never loved liberty save by fits and starts, but which ever dotes on equality; that multiform nation was fanatical under Henry IV., factious under Louis XIII., grave under Louis XIV., revolutionary under Louis XVI., gloomy under the Republic, warlike under Bonaparte, constitutional under the Restoration: to-day it is prostituting its liberties to the so-called Republican Monarchy, perpetually varying its nature in the spirit of its leaders. Its changefulness has increased since it has thrown off the habits of the home and the yoke of religion.
On the prospects.
"Therefore, a chance may bring about the fall of the Government of the 9th of August; but a chance may be delayed: an abortive child has been born to us, but France is a sturdy mother; she may, with the milk of her breast, be able to correct the vices of a depraved paternity.
"Although the present royalty does not seem as though it were likely to live, I continue to fear that it may live beyond the limit which one might assign to it. Since forty years, all governments have perished in France by their own fault alone. Louis XVI. could have saved his crown and his life twenty times over; the Republic died only of the excesses of its furies; Bonaparte was able to establish his dynasty, yet flung himself down from the height of his glory; but for the Ordinances of July, the Legitimist Throne would still be standing. The head of the present Government will make none of those mistakes that kill; his power will never commit suicide; all his cleverness is employed exclusively for his preservation: he is too intelligent to die by an act of folly nor has he enough in him to be guilty of the mistakes of genius or the weaknesses of honour or virtue. He has felt that he might be destroyed by war: he will not make war; it matters little to him, whether France be degraded in the eyes of foreigners: publicists will prove to him that disgrace is industry and ignominy credit.
"The sham Legitimacy wants all that the Legitimacy wants, with the exception of the Royal Person: it wants order; it can obtain that through 'arbitrariness' more easily than the Legitimacy. To perpetrate acts of despotism with words of liberty and pretended royalist institutions, that is all that it wants; each accomplished fact brings forth a recent right which combats an ancient right, each hour commences a legality. Time has two powers: with one hand it overthrows, with the other it builds up. Lastly, time acts upon men's minds by the mere fact that it progresses; they sever violently from those in power, attack them, sulk with them; then lassitude supervenes; success reconciles people to its cause: soon none remains outside, save a few lofty souls, whose perseverance confounds those who have failed.
"Madame, this long statement obliges me to make a few explanations to Your Royal Highness.
"If I had not raised a free voice in the day of fortune, I should not have felt the courage to speak the truth in the time of misfortune. I did not go to Prague of my own accord; I would not have ventured to trouble you with my presence; the dangers of devotion do not lie about your august person, they lie in France: that is where I have sought them. Since the Days of July, I have never ceased to fight for the legitimist cause. I was the first to proclaim the kingship of Henry V. A jury of Frenchmen, which acquitted me, left my proclamation in force. I long for nothing but rest, the need of my years; yet I did not hesitate to sacrifice it when the decrees extended and renewed the proscription of the Royal Family. Offers were made to me to attach me to the Government of Louis-Philippe: I had not earned that proof of good-will; I showed how incompatible it was with my nature by claiming my share in my old King's adversity. Alas, I had not brought about that adversity and I had tried to prevent it! I am not recalling these circumstances to give myself an importance or create for myself a merit which I do not possess; I have done no more than my duty; I am only explaining my position, in order to excuse the independence of my language. Madame will pardon the frankness of a man who would joyfully accept a scaffold to restore to her a throne.
"When I appeared before Your Majesty at Carlsbad, I may say that I had not the happiness to be known to you. You had scarcely done me the honour to address a few words to me in my life. You were able to see, in our solitary conversations, that I was not the man that had perhaps been described to you, that the independence of my mind did not take away from the moderation of my character and, above all, did not break the chains of my admiration and respect for the illustrious daughter of my Kings.
Of the Legitimate Monarchy.
"I again beseech Your Majesty to consider that the order of the truths developed in this letter, or rather in this memorandum, is what constitutes my strength, if I have any; it is that which enables me to reach men of different parties and bring them back to the royalist cause. If I had rejected the opinions of the age, I should have had no hold upon my time. I am seeking to rally round the ancient throne those modern ideas which, from being hostile, become friendly in passing through my loyalty. If the liberal opinions which abound ceased to be diverted to the profit of the reconstructed Legitimate Monarchy, Monarchical Europe would perish. It is a fight to the death between the two principles, monarchical and republican, if they remain distinct and separate: the consecration of a single edifice built up again out of the various materials of two edifices would belong to you, Madame, to you who have been admitted into the highest as into the most mysterious of initiations, undeserved misfortune, to you who are marked at the altar with the blood of the spotless victim, to you who, in the contemplation attendant upon a saintly austerity, would open with a pure and blessed hand the portals of the new temple.
"Your sagacity, Madame, and your superior reason will throw light upon and correct all that may be doubtful or erroneous in my opinions touching the present state of France.
"My emotion, as I end this letter, passes all that I can say.
"And so the palace of the sovereigns of Bohemia is the Louvre of Charles X. and of his pious and royal son! And so Hradschin is young Henry's Pau Castle! And you, Madame: in what Versailles do you live? With what can your piety, your greatnesses, your sufferings be compared, if not with those of the women of the House of David who wept at the foot of the Cross? May Your Majesty see the Royalty of St Louis rise radiant from the tomb! May I exclaim, recalling the century which bears the name of your glorious ancestor; for, Madame, nothing becomes you, nothing is contemporaneous with you but what is great and sacred:
O jour heureux pour moi!
De quelle ardeur j'irais reconnaître mon roi[55]!"I am, Madame, with the most profound respect,
"Your Majesty's most humble and most obedient servant,
"Chateaubriand."
After writing this letter, I resumed the habits of my life: I found my old priests again, the lonely corner in my garden, which seemed to me much finer than Count Chotek's garden, my Boulevard d'Enfer, my Cimetière de l'Ouest, my Memoirs reminding me of my past days and, above all, the select little society of the Abbaye-aux-Bois. The kindness of a serious friendship makes the thoughts abound; a few moments of the commerce of the soul suffice for the needs of my nature; I afterwards make up for this expenditure of intelligence by twenty-two hours of inaction and sleep.
Paris, Rue d'Enfer, 25 August 1833.
While I was beginning to breathe, I saw one morning the traveller enter my house who had handed a packet from me to Madame la Duchesse de Berry at Palermo; he brought me this reply from the Princess:
Letter from Madame de Berry.
"Naples, 10 August 1833.
"I have written you a line, monsieur le vicomte, to acknowledge the receipt of your letter, wishing to have a safe opportunity of speaking to you of my gratitude for what you have seen and done in Prague. It seems to me that they let you see very little, but enough, however, to enable you to judge that, despite the methods employed, the result, in so far as our dear child is concerned, is not what one might fear. I am very glad to receive this assurance from you; but I hear from Paris that M. Barrande has been sent away. What is to be done in this? How I long to be at my post!
"As to the requests which I asked you to make (and which were not quite welcomed), they have proved by their action that they were no better informed than I: for I was not in any need of what I asked, having in no way lost my rights.
"I am going to ask your advice to reply to the solicitations which I receive from all sides. You will make such use of what follows as, in your wisdom, you think proper. Royalist France, the people devoted to Henry V. look to his mother, now at last free, to issue a proclamation.
"I left at Blaye a few lines which must be known to-day; they expect more from me; they want to know the sad story of my detention during seven months in that impenetrable fortress. It ought to be made known in its fullest details; let the cause be seen, in this story, of all the tears and griefs that have broken my heart. Men will learn from it the moral tortures which I have been made to suffer. Justice must be done in it to them to whom it belongs; but also it must reveal the atrocious measures taken against a defenseless woman, defenseless because she was always refused a council, by a Government having her kinsman at its head, in order to tear from me a secret which, in any case, could not concern politics and the discovery of which ought not to change my situation if I was an object of dread to the French Government, which had the power of guarding me, but not the right, without a trial which I claimed more than once.
"But my kinsman, the husband of my aunt, the head of a family which, in spite of the general and so justly wide-spread opinion against it, I had allowed to hope for the hand of my daughter, Louis-Philippe in short, thinking me to be with child and unmarried (which would have decided any other family to open the doors of my prison), had every form of moral torture inflicted on me to force me to take steps by means of which he expected to be able to establish his niece's dishonour. For the rest, if I am bound to explain myself positively as to my declarations and their motives, without entering into any details as to my private life, for which I am accountable to no one, I will say in all truth that they were torn from me by my vexations, my moral tortures and the hope of recovering my liberty.
"The bearer will give you details and tell you of the forced uncertainty as to the moment of my journey and its destination, which interfered with my wish to avail myself of your obliging offer by inviting you to join me before I went to Prague, as I have great need of your advice. To-day it would be too late, as I wish to be with my children as soon as possible. But, as nothing is certain in this world and as I am used to disappointments, if my arrival in Prague should, against my wish, be delayed, I rely surely upon seeing you at the place where I shall be obliged to stop and will write to you from there; if, on the contrary, I reach my son as soon as I hope, you know better than I if you ought to come there. I can only assure you of the pleasure it would give me to see you at all times and places.
"Marie Caroline."
Naples, 18 August 1833.
"Our friend has not been able to start yet and I have received news of what is happening in Prague which is not of a nature calculated to diminish my longing to go there, but which also makes the need of your advice more urgent. If, therefore, you are able to proceed to Venice without delay, you will find me there, or else letters left at the post-office telling you where you can join me. I shall travel part of the journey with some people for whom I entertain feelings of great friendship and gratitude: M.[56] and Madame de Bauffremont[57]. We often speak of you; their devotion to myself and to our Henry makes them long to see you arrive. M. de Mesnard[58] shares that longing."
Madame de Berry refers in her letter to a little manifesto[59] which was issued after she left Blaye and which was of no great value, because it said neither yes nor no. The letter, on the other hand, is curious as an historical document, since it reveals the feelings of the Princess towards her kinsmen-gaolers and points to the sufferings endured by her. Marie-Caroline's reflections are just; she expresses them with spirit and pride. Again, one likes to see that courageous and devoted mother, whether fettered or free, constantly occupied with the interests of her son. There, at least in that heart, are youth and life to be found. It cost me an effort once more to undertake a long journey; but I was too much touched by the confidence of that poor Princess to refuse to obey her wishes and to abandon her on the high-road. M. Jauge came to the assistance of my poverty, as he had done the first time.
I took the field again with a dozen volumes scattered around me. Now, while I was peregrinating da capo in the Prince de Bénévent's calash, he was eating in London in the manger of his fifth master, in expectation of the accident which will send him, perhaps, to sleep at Westminster, among saints, kings and wise men: a burial to which his religion, fidelity and virtues have justly entitled him.
[1] This book was written on the road from Carlsbad to Paris, from the 1st to the 5th of June 1833, and in Paris, in the Rue d'Enfer, from the 6th of June to the 25th of August 1833.—T.
[2] The author addresses an imaginary Cynthia. Cynthia was one of the surnames of Diana, from Mount Cynthus, where she was born.—B.
[3] Schiller: Wallenstein's Tod, Act V. Sc. iii.
[4] Max Piccolomini, son to Octavio Piccolomini, the famous Austrian general.—T.
[5] Thekla, Wallenstein's daughter.—T.
[6] Wallenstein: Tod, Act V. Sc. iii.—T.
[7] Wallenstein's Tod. Act V. Sc. v.—T.
[8] "It is the knight of the Landes:
O unhappy knight!
Heard bells ring on every hand,
When crossing the waste at night."—T.
[9] Voltaire: Ode sur la mort de S. A. S. Mme. la princesse de Bareith, 141-144:
"Lonely Sylvander, thou shalt sing no more
In this Art's palace, where thy voice did ban,
Loudly, the firm-set prejudice of yore
And made the world talk of the rights of man."—T.
[10] Ode sur la mort de S. A. S. Mme. la princesse de Bareith, 91-94:
"From philosophie heights, free from all strife,
Thy pity contemplated, with calm eyes,
The changing phantoms of the dreams of life:
So many a dream or plan in ruin lies."—T.
[11] Mathew Laensberg (fl. 17th Century) was supposed to be the author of the famous Almanack de Liège, called by his name and first published in 1636, containing prognostications in the manner of the modern Zadkiel or Old Moore.—T.
[12] The Comte de Toumon (cf. Vol. V., p. 258, n. 1) was appointed Intendant of Bayreuth by Napoleon before being moved to Rome, as Prefect, in 1809.—T.
[13] Aristophanes.—Author's Note.
[14] Voltaire: Stances à madame la marquise Du Châtelet, 29-36:
"I followed her, but wept that now
I could not follow others as well."
The poet is able to continue the pursuit of friendship, but must abandon that of love.—T.
[15] Jean Louis Eugène Lerminier (1803-1857), a liberal professor and journalist. He had published, on the 15th of October 1832, an article in the Revue des Deux-Mondes, entitled, De l'Opinion légitimiste: M. de Chateaubriand, to which the author of the Memoirs alludes above.—B.
[16] Béranger: La Vivandière, 1-7, not quite correctly quoted. In the original, the vivandière is called "Catin:" Chateaubriand substitutes "Javotte," a favourite name for an inn-servant in France, and alters the last lines so as to avoid the rhyme to "Catin" at the end. To attempt a rough translation:
"I'm the vivandière so gay,
Javotte I'm called: that's handy;
I sell, I drink, I give away
My wine, my rum, my brandy.
I'm light of foot and I give a wink,
Chink chink, chink chink, chink chink, chink chink,
Clink, clink, chink."—T.
[17] Isabel, or Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France (d. 1435), married in 1385 to Charles VI. She obtained the Regency when the King became demented in 1392, favoured the enemies of France and, in 1420, concluded the Treaty of Troyes, which placed the crown on the head of Henry V. of England.—T.
[18] Cf. Vol. III., p. 91, n. 3. Berthier was watching a Russian regiment pass under his windows, on its way to the French frontier, when he was seized with a sudden fit of madness and jumped from the balcony to the pavement below (1 June 1815).—T.
[19] Andria, Act. I. Sc. i. 44.45.—T.
[20] Ferdinand III. Archduke of Austria, Grand-duke of Tuscany, later Grand-duke of Würzburg (1769-1824), brother of the Emperor Francis I. He was Grand-duke of Tuscany from 1790, but lost his States in 1796. In 1805, the Bishopric of Würzburg was secularized and turned into a grand-duchy, and the Archduke Ferdinand became its titulary. On the fall of the Empire, Tuscany was restored to Austria and Ferdinand reinstated. At the same time (1814), Würzburg was restored to Bavaria.—B.
[21] These lines are a translation from the χελιδονίζειν, recorded by Athenæus.—B.
[22] Chateaubriand writes, when describing his arrival at Jaffa, in the Itinéraire de Paris à Jerusalem:
"The wind fell, at mid-day. The calm continued for the rest of that day and was prolonged till the 29th [of September 1806]. We were boarded by three new passengers: two wagtails and a swallow."
And then he refers again to the swallows at Combourg in his childhood and to the swallows in America which, in their turn, reminded him of the Combourg swallows.—B.
[23] In the Congrès de Vérone (Vol. II., p. 389), Chateaubriand, writing of his dismissal from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs (6 June 1824), begins with these charming lines:
"On the 6th, in the morning, we were not sleeping; the dawn murmured in the little garden; the birds twittered: we heard the day break; a swallow fell down our chimney into our room; we opened the window for it: if we could only have flown away with it!"—B.
[24] This reply to the swallow was written long before 1833. The Comte de Marcellus relates, in Chateaubriand et son temps, how, in the summer of 1822, he was walking with the Ambassador in Kensington Gardens. Chateaubriand told him how, early that same morning, he had imagined that he heard a swallow twittering outside his window. He looked and saw a smoke and soot-blackened sparrow which might almost be mistaken for a swallow; and he set himself to hold an imaginary conversation with the swallow disguised as a sparrow. He handed Marcellus a paper covered with the words which he had addressed to it and which he had written down so soon as the light permitted. They correspond literally with the above speech.
Marcellus goes on to say that he clapped his hands with delight at reading this inspiration in the manner of the ancients, until, at the end of the paper and as though at the end of his enthusiasm, he began to smile:
"'What is it?' asked the poet, alarmed. 'Some slip?'
'Oh no,' I replied; 'only that "I live on little" troubles me, although it suits the passage so admirably.'
"'Well?' asked M. de Chateaubriand, with a certain animation.
"'Why, have you so soon forgotten that the Duke of York is dining with you to-night and that yesterday we drew up together, under the dictation of our famous Montmirel, the fabric of the most splendid banquet that ever perfumed the kitchens and honoured the annals of diplomacy?'
"M. de Chateaubriand replied:
"'Ah, you are right; I did not think of that this morning.'"—B.
[25] St. Geneviève of Brabant (fl. 8th Century), the subject of a number of romantic legends and adventures.—T.
[26] Domenico Zampieri (1581-1641), known as Domenichino, a noted Italian painter of the Eclectic-Bologna School.—T.
[27] Andrea Palladio (1518-1580), the celebrated Italian architect.—T.
[28] Boileau: Épitres, vi.—B.
[29] Jean Philippe René de La Bletterie (1696-1772), a priest of the Oratory, a native of Brittany like Chateaubriand and author of an Histoire de l'empereur Julien l'Apostat (1735).—T.
[30] The following is John Duncombe's translation of Julian's Greek Epigram on Barley-wine:
"Who, what art thou? Thy name, thy birth declare:
Thou art no Bacchus, I by Bacchus swear.
Jove's son alone I know, I know not thee;
Thou smell'st like goats, but sweet as nectar he.
In Gallia, thirsty Gallia, thou wert born,
Scanty of grapes, but prodigal of corn.
Bromus, not Bromius, styl'd, thy brows with corn,
As sprung from Ceres, not from Jove, adorn."
[31] The common phrase is, "That's Toulouse gold, which will cost him dear:" a reference to the gold stolen by the Romans at Toulouse, which brought ill-luck, according to the legend, to all who possessed it.—T.
[32] François Michel Letellier, Marquis de Louvois (1641-1691), the organizer of the French standing army. Louvois was Minister of War from 1666 to 1691; the Palatinate was burnt down in 1674 and again in 1689.—T.
[33] François de Bonne de Créqui, Maréchal Duc de Lesdiguières (circa 1687), one of the greatest French captains of the seventeenth century, served gloriously under Louis XIV. in the campaigns of Flanders, Alsace and Lorraine, from 1667 to 1678. He took Luxemburg in 1684.—T.
[34] Armand Maréchal de La Force (circa 1586-1675) served with distinction in the Italian and German Wars.—T.
[35] Louis Hector Maréchal Duc de Villars (1653-1734), Marlborough's famous adversary.—T.
[36] Turenne was killed by a cannon-ball while reconnoitering at Sasbach (27 July 1675). The Pic was his favourite piebald charger.—T.
[37] François de Lorraine, Duc de Guise, successfully defended Metz against Charles V. from October 1552 to January 1553; Vauban laid the new fortifications, outside the old, in the reign of Louis XIV.—T.
[38] The father of Alexis de Tocqueville.—Author's Note. Cf. Vol. II., p. 295, n. 1.—T.
The Comte de Tocqueville administered the Department of the Moselle from February 1817 to June 1823.—B.
[39] Abraham Maréchal Fabert (1599-1662), Governor of Sedan, son of Abraham Fabert, the director of the ducal printing-works at Metz, was the first commoner who became a marshal of France (1658).—T.
[40] Metz was plundered by the Vandals in 406.—T.
[41] Iñez de Castro (d. 1355), favourite and, later, wife of Peter of Portugal, son of Alphonsus IV. The King had her murdered to prevent the consequences of an unequal union. When Peter ascended the throne, as Peter I., afterwards surnamed the Justiciary and the Cruel, he avenged her death on her murderers by having their hearts torn out in his presence at Santarem, in 1360. He caused Iñez to be exhumed and crowned and showed her royal honours.—T.
[42] Cf. Vol. V., p. 207, n. 1.—T.
[43] Madame Récamier was banished to Chalons in September 1811.—T.
[44] Madame de La Sablière (fl. 17th Century), wife of Antoine Rambouillet de La Sablière, one of the ornaments of the seventeenth century and immortalized by the hospitality which she accorded to La Fontaine.—T.
[45] Bossuet was Bishop of Meaux.—T.
[46] The Duchesse de Berry embarked on the 9th of June 1833.—B.
[47] The Marquis de Pastoret.—B.
[48] St. Martin (circa 316—circa 397) Bishop of Tours (371). He is honoured on the 11th of November.—T.
[49] The brother of Amadis of Gaul.—T.
[50] Robert Count of Paris (d. 866), surnamed the Strong, father of Robert I. King of France and stock of the Capets, was killed at Brissarthe, in Anjou, while giving battle to the Normans.—T.
[51] Charles d'Albert, Connétable Duc de Luynes (1578-1621), was a page of Henry IV. He curried favour with the Dauphin by his skill in raising speckled magpies. When the latter succeeded as Louis XIII., he loaded Luynes with favours and dignities, gave him his duchy and created him Constable of France. Luynes was on the verge of being disgraced, when he died, of purples, on the 15th of December 1621.—T.
[52] Concino Concini, later Maréchal Marquis d'Ancre, Baron de Lussigny (d. 1617), was a member of the Household of Marie de' Medici, wife of Henry IV. After the King's death, he bought the Marquisate of Ancre and was appointed Governor of Normandy and a marshal of France without ever having drawn the sword. He was, at the same time, Prime Minister of Louis XIII.; and he had Richelieu for his private secretary. The Duc de Luynes contributed towards hastening his downfall and, at last, the young King ordered his assassination, which took place in the court-yard of the Louvre on the 14th of April 1617.—T.
[53] Mathurin Régnier: Sat. XIII.; Macette, 30:
"Her penitent eye sheds holy water and none other."—T.
[54] "L'État c'est moi! The State is I!"—T.
[55] Racine: Athalie, Act I. Sc. i.:
"O happy day for me!
How gladly would I go my King again to see!"—T.
[56] Théodore Demetrius Prince de Bauffremont-Courtenay (1793-1853).—T.
[57] Anne Laurence de Montmorency, Princesse de Bauffremont-Courtenay (1802-1860), married to Théodore Prince de Bauffremont on the 6th of September 1819.—T.
[58] Louis Charles Bonaventura Pierre Comte de Mesnard (1769-1842) emigrated in 1791 and became attached to the person of the Duc de Berry. The Duke, on his return to France, appointed him his aide-de-camp and, in 1816, he was appointed First Equerry to the Duchess, whom he had gone to Marseilles to meet. The Comte de Mesnard was with the Duc de Berry at the moment of his assassination. He was created a peer of France in 1823. In 1830, he accompanied the Duchesse de Berry to England, returned with her to France in 1832, took part in the attempted rising in the Vendée and was arrested with his royal mistress at Nantes. He was tried and acquitted on the 15th of March 1833 and at once joined the Duchesse de Berry in Italy.—T.