BOOK I[361

My stay at Dieppe--Two phases of society--The position of my Memoirs--The year 1800--Aspect of France--I arrive in Paris--Changes in society--The year 1801--The _Mercure_--_Atala_--Madame de Beaumont and her circle--Summer at Savigny--The year 1802--Talma--The year 1803--The _Génie du Christianisme_--Failure prophesied--Cause of its final success--Defects in the work.

You know that I have often moved from spot to spot while writing these Memoirs; that I have often described those spots, spoken of the feelings with which they inspired me, and recalled my memories, thus mingling the history of my thoughts and of my wandering habitations with the history of my life.

You see where I am living now. Walking this morning on the cliffs behind Dieppe Castle, I saw the postern which communicates with the cliffs by means of a bridge thrown over a ditch: Madame de Longueville[362] escaped by that way from Queen Anne of Austria[363]; embarking secretly at the Havre, she landed at Rotterdam, and joined the Maréchal de Turenne[364] at Stenay. The great captain's laurels were no longer innocent, and the fair but caustic outlaw treated the culprit none too well.

Madame de Longueville, who had recovered from the Hôtel de Rambouillet, the Throne of Versailles, and the Municipality of Paris, became smitten with the author of the _Maximes_[365], and was as faithful to him as she was able. The latter lives less by his "thoughts" than by the friendship of Madame de La Fayette[366], Madame de Sévigné, the verses of La Fontaine, and the love of Madame de Longueville: see whither illustrious attachments lead.

The Princesse de Condé[367], when on the point of death, said to Madame de Brienne[368]:

"My dear friend, acquaint that poor wretch who is at Stenay of the state in which you see me, and let her learn how to die."

Fine words; but the Princess forgot that she herself had been loved by Henry IV., and that, when her husband carried her to Brussels, she had wanted to rejoin the Bearnese, "to escape at night by a window, and then to do thirty or forty leagues on horse-back;" she was at that time a "poor wretch" of seventeen.

Descending the cliff, I found myself on the high-road to Paris; it ascends swiftly on leaving Dieppe. On the right, on the rising slope of a bank, stands the wall of a cemetery; by the side of that wall was fixed the wheel of a rope-walk. Two rope-spinners, walking backwards in line, and swinging from leg to leg, were softly singing together. I listened: they had come to that couplet of the _Vieux caporal_, a fine poetic lie, which has brought us to our present state:

Qui là-bas sanglote et regarde? Eh! c'est la veuve du tambour, etc[369].

Those men uttered the refrain:

Conscrits au pas; ne pleurez pas . . . Marchez au pas, au pas[370],

in a voice so manly and so pathetic that the tears came to my eyes. Whilst themselves keeping step and twisting their hemp, they appeared to be spinning out the old corporal's dying moments: there was something, I cannot say what, in that glory peculiar to Béranger, thus lonesomely revealed by two sailors singing a soldier's death within view of the sea.

[Sidenote: Dieppe.]

The cliff reminded me of a monarchical greatness, the road of a plebeian celebrity: I compared in thought the men at the two extremities of society, and I asked myself to which of those eras I should have preferred to belong. When the present shall have disappeared like the past, which of those two renowns will the most attract the notice of posterity?

And yet, if facts were all, if, in history, the value of names did not counterbalance the value of events, what a difference between my time and the time which elapsed between the deaths of Henry IV. and Mazarin[371]! What are the troubles of 1648 compared to that Revolution which has devoured the old world, of which it, the Revolution, will die perhaps, leaving behind it neither an old nor a new state of society? Had not I to paint in my Memoirs pictures of incomparably higher importance than the scenes related by the Duc de La Rochefoucauld[372]? At Dieppe itself, what was the careless and voluptuous idol of seduced and rebellious Paris by the side of Madame la Duchesse de Berry[373]? The salvoes of artillery which announced to the sea the presence of the royal widow resound no longer[374]; the flattery of powder and smoke has left nothing upon the shore save the moaning of the waves.

The two daughters of Bourbon, Anne Geneviève and Marie Caroline, have departed; the two sailors singing the song of the plebeian poet will plunge into the abyss; Dieppe no longer contains myself: it was another "I," an "I" of my early days, now past, that formerly inhabited these regions, and that "I" has succumbed, for our days die before ourselves. Here you have seen me, a sub-lieutenant in the Navarre Regiment, drilling recruits on the pebbles; you have seen me here again, exiled under Bonaparte; you shall find me here again when the days of July surprise me in this place. Behold me here once more; I here resume my pen to continue my confessions.

In order that we may understand one another, it is well to cast a glance at the present state of my Memoirs.

*

What happens to every contractor working on a large scale has happened to me: I have, in the first place, built the outer wings of my edifice, and then, removing and restoring my scaffoldings in different positions, I have raised the stone and the mortar for the intermediate structures: it used to take several centuries to complete a Gothic cathedral. If Heaven grant me life, the work will be finished by stages of my various years; the architect, always the same, will have changed only in age. For the rest, it is a punishment to preserve one's intellectual being intact, imprisoned in a worn-out material covering. St Augustine, feeling that his clay was falling from him, said to God, "Be Thou a tabernacle unto my soul," and to men he said, "When you shall have known me in this book, pray for me."

Thirty-six years must be reckoned between the things which commence my Memoirs and those upon which I am now engaged. How shall I resume with any spirit the narration of a subject formerly replete for me with passion and fire, when it is no longer with living beings that I am about to converse, when it becomes a question of arousing lifeless effigies from the depths of Eternity, of descending into a funeral vault there to play at life? Am I not myself almost dead? Have my opinions not changed? Do I see objects from the same point of view? Have not the general and prodigious events which have accompanied or followed the personal events that so greatly perturbed me diminished their importance in the eyes of the world, as well as in my own eyes? Whosoever prolongs his career feels his hours grow cold; he no longer finds on the morrow the interest which he felt on the eve. When I seek in my thoughts, there are names and even persons that escape my memory, and yet they may have caused my heart to throb: vanity of man forgetting and forgotten! It is not enough to say to one's dreams, to love, "Revive!" for them to come to life again: the realm of shadows can be opened only with the golden bough, and it needs a young hand to pluck it.

_Aucuns venants des Lares patries_[375].

[Sidenote: Aspect of France in 1800.]

Imprisoned for eight years in Great Britain, I had seen only the English world, so different, especially at that time, from the European world. As the Dover packet approached Calais, in the spring of 1800, my gaze preceded me on shore. I was struck by the needy aspect of the country: scarce a few masts were to be seen in the harbour; inhabitants in carmagnole jackets and cotton caps came along the jetty to meet us: the conquerors of the Continent made themselves known to me by a clatter of wooden shoes. When we came alongside, the gendarmes and custom-house officers leapt on deck to inspect our luggage and our passports: in France a man is always suspected, and the first thing we perceive in our business, as well as in our amusements, is a cocked hat or a bayonet.

Mrs. Lindsay was waiting for us at the inn; the next day we set out with her for Paris: Madame d'Aguesseau, a young kinswoman of hers, and I. On the road one saw hardly any men; blackened and sun-burnt women, bare-footed, their heads bare or covered with a kerchief, were tilling the fields: one would have taken them for slaves. I ought rather to have been struck by the independence and virility of that land where the women wielded the mattock while the men wielded the musket. The villages looked as though a conflagration had passed over them; they were wretched and half demolished: mud or dust on every hand, dunghills and rubbish-heaps.

To the right and left of the road appeared overthrown country mansions; of their levelled thickets there remained only some squared trunks, upon which children played. One saw battered enclosure walls, deserted churches, from which the dead had been expelled, steeples without bells, cemeteries without crosses, headless saints that had been stoned in their niches. The walls were smeared with those Republican inscriptions that had already grown old: LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, OR DEATH. Sometimes they had attempted to efface the word DEATH, but the red or black letters showed through the coating of lime. This nation, which seemed on the point of extinction, was commencing a new world, like those peoples which issued from the dusk of the savagery and destruction of the Middle Ages.

Approaching the capital, between Écouen and Paris, the elms had not been cut down; I was struck by those fine roadside avenues, unknown on English soil. France was as new to me, as in former days, the forests of America. Saint-Denis was laid bare, its windows were broken; the rain penetrated into its grass-grown naves, and there were no more tombs: I have since seen there the bones of Louis XVI., the Cossacks, the coffin of the Duc de Berry, and the catafalque of Louis XVIII.

Auguste de Lamoignon came to meet Mrs. Lindsay. His well-appointed carriage formed a contrast with the clumsy carts, the dirty, broken-down diligences, drawn by hacks harnessed with ropes, which I had met since leaving Calais. Mrs. Lindsay lived at the Ternes. I was put down on the Chemin de la Révolte, and made my way to my hostess' house across the fields. I stayed with her for four-and-twenty hours; I there met a great fat Monsieur Lasalle, whom she employed in arranging emigrant business. She sent to inform M. de Fontanes of my arrival; in eight-and-forty hours he came to fetch me in a little room which Mrs. Lindsay had hired for me at an inn almost at her door.

[Sidenote: Paris once more.]

It was a Sunday: we entered Paris on foot by the Barrière de l'Étoile at about three o'clock in the afternoon. We have no idea to-day of the impression which the excesses of the Revolution had made on men's minds in Europe, and chiefly among those absent from France during the Terror: I felt literally as though I were about to descend into Hell. I had, it is true, witnessed the beginnings of the Revolution; but the great crimes had then not yet been accomplished, and I had remained under the yoke of subsequent events as these had been related in the midst of the peaceful and orderly society of England.

Proceeding under my false name, and convinced that I was compromising my friend Fontanes, to my great astonishment, on entering the Champs-Élysées, I heard the sound of violins, horns, clarionets and drums. I saw public balls, at which men and women were dancing; farther on, the Tuileries Palace appeared to my eyes, against the background of its two great clumps of chestnut-trees. As for the Place Louis XV.[376], it was bare: it had the decay, the melancholy and deserted look of an old amphitheatre; one crossed it quickly; I was quite surprised to hear no moans; I was afraid of stepping in the blood of which not a trace remained; my eyes could not tear themselves from the place in the sky where the instrument of death had raised its head; I thought I saw my brother and my sister-in-law in their shirts, standing, bound, beside the blood-stained machine: it was there that the head of Louis XVI. had fallen. In spite of the gaiety in the streets the church-steeples were dumb; it seemed to me as though I had returned on the day of infinite sorrow, on Good Friday.

M. de Fontanes lived in the Rue Saint-Honoré, near Saint-Roch. He took me home with him, introduced me to his wife, and then took me to his friend, M. Joubert, where I found a temporary shelter: I was received like a traveller of whom one has heard speak.

The next day I went to the police, under the name of La Sagne, to lodge my foreign passport and to receive in exchange a permit to remain in Paris, which was renewed from month to month. In a few days I hired an _entre-sol_ in the Rue de Lille, on the side of the Rue des Saints-Pères.

I had brought with me the _Génie du Christianisme_ and the first sheets of the work, printed in London. I was directed to M. Migneret[377], a worthy man, who consented to recommence the interrupted printing, and to advance me something to live on. Not a soul knew of my _Essai sur les révolutions_, notwithstanding what M. Lemierre had written to me. I unearthed the old philosopher, Delisle de Sales, who had just published his _Mémoire en faveur de Dieu_, and went to call on Ginguené. He lodged in the Rue de Grenelle-Saint-Germain, near the Hôtel du Bon La Fontaine. His porter's box still bore this inscription:

"Here we honour each other with the title of citizen and say thee and thou. Shut the door behind thee, if you please."

I went up: M. Ginguené, who hardly recognised me, spoke to me from the height of the grandeur of all that he was and had been. I humbly retired, and did not endeavour to renew such disproportionate relations.

I continued at the bottom of my heart to cherish regretful memories of England; I had lived so long in that country that I had adopted its habits: I could not reconcile myself to the dirt of our houses, our staircases, our tables, to our uncleanliness, our noisiness, our familiarity, the indiscretion of our loquacity; I was English in manners, in taste, and to a certain degree in thought; for, if, as it is said, Lord Byron sometimes drew inspiration for his _Childe-Harold_ from _René_ it is also true to say that my eight years' residence in Great Britain, preceded by a journey in America, together with my long habit of talking, writing, and even thinking in English, had necessarily influenced the turn and expression of my ideas. But gradually I came to relish the good-fellowship for which we are distinguished, that charming, swift, easy commerce of thought, that utter absence of arrogance and prejudice, that heedlessness of fortune and names, that natural level of all ranks, that equality of mind which makes French society incomparable and redeems our faults: after a few months' residence among us, one feels that he can no longer live except in Paris.

*

I locked myself into my _entre-sol_ and gave myself up entirely to work. In my intervals of rest, I went and reconnoitred in various directions. The Circus in the middle of the Palais-Royal had been filled up; Camille Desmoulins no longer held forth in the open air; one no longer saw bands of prostitutes going round, virginal attendants of the goddess Reason, and walking under the conduct of David, costumier and corybant. At the outlet of each alley, in the galleries, one met men crying sights: "galanty shows," "peep-shows," "physical cabinets," "strange animals;" in spite of all the heads that had been cut off, idlers still remained. From the cellars of the Palais-Marchand came bursts of music, accompanied by the double diapason of the big drums: it was perhaps there that dwelt the giants whom I sought, and whom immense events must necessarily have produced. I went down: an underground ball was jigging amidst seated spectators drinking beer. A little hunchback, perched on a table, played the violin and sang a hymn to Bonaparte, which ended with these lines:

Par ses vertus, par ses attraits. Il méritait d'être leur père[378]!

He was given a sou after the _ritornello._ Such is the ground-work of the human society which bore Alexander and was then bearing Napoleon.

[Sidenote: Changes in Paris.]

I visited the places where I had taken the reveries of my early years. In my old-time convents, the club-men had been driven out after the monks. Wandering behind the Luxembourg, my footsteps led me to the Chartreuse: its demolition was being completed. The Place des Victoires and the Place Vendôme mourned the missing effigies of the Great King; the community-house of the Capuchins was sacked: the inner cloisters served as a retreat for Robertson's[379] dissolving views. At the Cordeliers, I inquired in vain for the Gothic nave where I had seen Marat and Danton in their prime. On the Quai des Théatins[380], the church of that Order[381] had been turned into a café and a rope-dancers' theatre. At the door was a coloured poster representing acrobats dancing on the tight-rope, with, in big letters, ADMISSION FREE. I elbowed my way among the crowd into that perfidious cave: I had no sooner taken my seat than waiters entered, napkin in hand, shouting like mad-men--

"Give your orders, gentlemen, give your orders!"

I did not wait to be told a second time, and I pitiably made my escape amid the jeering cries of the assembly, because I had no money wherewith to "give my orders."

*

The Revolution has become divided into three parts which have nothing in common between them: the Republic, the Empire, and the Restoration; those three different worlds, each as completely finished as the others, seem separated by centuries. Each of these three worlds has had its fixed principle: the principle of the Republic was equality, that of the Empire force, that of the Restoration liberty. The Republican era is the most original, and has made the deepest impression because it has been unique in history: never had there been seen, nor ever will be again, physical order produced by moral disorder, unity issuing from the government of the multitude, the scaffold substituted for the law and obeyed in the name of humanity.

In 1801, I assisted at the second social transformation. The jumble was a strange one: by an agreed travesty, a host of people became persons who they were not; each carried his assumed or borrowed name hung round his neck, as the Venetians at the carnival carry a little mask in their hand to show that they are masked. One was reputed an Italian or a Spaniard, another a Prussian or a Dutchman: I was a Swiss. The mother passed for her son's aunt, the father for his daughter's uncle; the owner of an estate was only its steward. This movement reminded me, in an opposite sense, of the movement of 1789, when the monks and religious issued from their cloisters and the old society was invaded by the new: the latter, after supplanting the former, was supplanted in its turn.

Nevertheless, the orderly world commenced to spring up again; people left the cafés and the streets to return to their houses; they gathered together the remains of their family; they readjusted their inheritance by collecting its remnants, as, after a battle, the troop is beaten and the losses counted. Such churches as remained whole were opened: I had the happiness to sound the trumpet at the gate of the Temple. One distinguished the old republican generations which were retiring, imperial generations which were coming to the front Generals of the Requisition[382], poor, rude of speech, stern of mien, who, from all their campaigns, had brought back nothing save wounds and ragged coats, passed officers glittering with the gold lace of the Consular Army. The returned Emigrant chatted quietly with the assassins of some of his kindred. The porters, all great partisans of the late M. de Robespierre, regretted the sights on the Place Louis XV., where they cut off the heads of "women who," my own _concierge_ in the Rue de Lille told me, "had necks white as chicken's flesh."

The men of September, changing their names and their districts, sold baked potatoes at the street-corners; but they were often obliged to pack off, because the people, recognising them, upset their stalls and tried to kill them. The Revolutionaries who had waxed rich began to move into the great mansions of the Faubourg Saint-Germain that had been sold. On the road to become barons and counts, the Jacobins spoke only of the horrors of 1793, of the necessity for chastising the proletarians and putting down the excesses of the populace. Bonaparte, placing the Brutuses and Scævolas in his police, was preparing to bedizen them with ribands, to befoul them with titles, to force them to betray their opinions and dishonour their crimes. Amid all this, sprang up a vigorous generation sown in blood and growing up to shed none save that of the foreigner: from day to day, the metamorphosis was accomplished which turned Republicans into Imperialists and the tyranny of all into the despotism of one.

*

[Sidenote: My letter to Madame de Staël.]

While occupied in curtailing, expanding, altering the sheets of the _Génie du Christianisme_, I was driven by necessity to busy myself with other work. M. de Fontanes was then editing the _Mercure de France_: he suggested that I should write in that paper. These combats were not without a certain danger: the only way to touch politics was through literature, and half a word was enough for Bonaparte's police. A singular circumstance, which prevented me from sleeping, lengthened my hours and gave me more leisure. I had bought two turtle-doves; they cooed a great deal: I enclosed them in vain at night in my little travelling-trunk; they only cooed the more. In one of the moments of sleeplessness which they caused me, I bethought myself of writing for the _Mercure_ a letter to Madame de Staël[383]. This freak caused me suddenly to emerge from the shade; a few pages in a newspaper did what my two thick volumes on the Revolution had been unable to do. My head showed a little above obscurity.

This first success seemed to foretell that which was to follow. I was engaged in correcting the proofs of _Atala_ (an episode contained, as was _René_, in the _Génie du Christianisme_), when I perceived that some sheets were missing. I was seized with fright: I thought they had stolen my novel, assuredly a very ill-founded dread, for no one thought that I was worth robbing. Be this as it may, I determined to publish _Atala_ separately, and I declared my resolution in a letter addressed to the _Journal des Débats_[384] and the _Publiciste._

Before venturing to expose the work to the light of day, I showed it to M. de Fontanes: he had already read fragments of it in manuscript in London. When he came to Father Aubry's speech beside Atala's deathbed, he said brusquely, in a rough voice:

"That's not right; it's bad: write that over again!"

I went away disconsolate; I did not feel capable of doing better. I wanted to throw the whole thing into the fire; I spent from eight till eleven o'clock in the evening in my entresol, seated at my table, with my forehead resting on the back of my hands opened and spread out over my paper. I was angry with Fontanes; I was angry with myself; I did not even try to write, so great was my despair of self. Towards midnight, I heard the voice of my turtle-doves, softened by distance and rendered more plaintive by the prison in which I kept them confined: inspiration returned to me; I then and there wrote the speech of the missionary, without a single interlineation, without erasing a word, just as it remained and as it stands to-day. With a beating heart, I took it in the morning to Fontanes, who exclaimed:

"That's it, that's right! I told you you could do better!"

The noise which I have made in this world dates from the publication of _Atala._[385] I ceased to live for myself and my public career commenced. After so many military successes, a literary success seemed a prodigy: people were hungering for it. The uncommon nature of the work added to the surprise of the crowd. _Atala_, falling into the midst of the literature of the Empire, of that classic school whose very sight, like that of a rejuvenated old woman, inspired boredom, was a sort of production of an unknown kind. People did not know whether to class it among the "monstrosities" or among the "beauties:" was it a Gorgon or a Venus? The assembled academicians discoursed learnedly upon its sex and its nature, in the same way as they made reports upon the _Génie du Christianisme._ The old century rejected, the new welcomed it.

[Sidenote: I publish _Atala._]

_Atala_ became so popular that, with the Brinvilliers[386] she went to swell Curtius' collection[387]. The wagoners' inns were decorated with red, green and blue prints representing Chactas, Father Aubry, and the daughter of Simaghan. My characters were displayed in wax, in wooden boxes, on the quays, as images of the Virgin and the saints are displayed at the fair. In a boulevard theatre, I saw my savage woman, in a headdress of cock's feathers, talking to a savage of her own kind of "the soul of solitude," in a way that brought the sweat to my brow with confusion. At the Variétés, they played a piece in which a little girl and a little boy, leaving their boarding-school, went off by track-boat to get married in a small town; as, on landing, they spoke with a wild look of nothing but crocodiles, storks and forests, their parents thought that they had gone mad. I was overwhelmed with parodies, caricatures and ridicule. The Abbé Morellet, in order to confound me, took his maid-servant on his knees and was unable to hold the young virgin's feet in his hands, as Chactas held Atala's feet during the storm: if the Chactas of the Rue d'Anjou had had his portrait painted in this attitude, I would have forgiven him his criticism.

All this bustle served to increase the fuss attendant upon my appearance. I became the fashion. My head was turned: I was unaccustomed to the delights of self-love and became intoxicated with it I loved fame like a woman, like a first love. And yet, coward that I was, my affright equalled my passion: I was a conscript and stood the fire badly. My natural timidity, the doubts I have always had of my talent, made me humble in the midst of my triumphs. I shrank from my splendour; I wandered in lonely places, trying to extinguish the halo with which my head was crowned. In the evenings, with my hat thrust down over my eyes, lest the great man should be recognised, I went to a public smoking-room to read my praises in secret, in some small, unknown paper. Alone with my renown, I prolonged my walks as far as the steam-pump at Chaillot[388], on the same road where I had suffered so much on going to Court: I was no more at my ease with my new honours. When my superiority dined for thirty sous in the Latin Quarter it swallowed its food the wrong way, troubled as it was by the staring of which it thought itself the object. I watched myself, I said to myself:

"And yet it is you, extraordinary being, eating like any one else!"

In the Champs-Élysées was a café which I liked because of some nightingales which hung in a cage inside the coffee-room; Madame Rousseau, who kept the place, knew me by sight, without knowing who I was. At ten o'clock in the evening, they used to bring me a cup of coffee, and I looked for _Atala_ in the _Petites-Affiches_, to the sound of the voices of my half-dozen Philomelas. Alas! I soon saw poor Madame Rousseau die; our society of the nightingales and of the fair Indian who sang, "Sweet habit of loving, so needful to life!" lasted but a moment.

If success had no power to prolong in me this stupid infatuation of vanity, or to pervert my reason, it was attended with dangers of another kind: those dangers increased on the appearance of the _Génie du Christianisme_ and on my resignation after the death of the Duc d'Enghien. Then came thronging around me, together with the young women who cry over novels, the crowd of Christian women, and those other noble enthusiasts whose breast beats high at the sight of an honourable action. The young girls of thirteen or fourteen were the most dangerous; for, knowing neither what they want nor what they want with you, they enticingly mingle your image with a multitude of fables, ribbons and flowers. Jean Jacques Rousseau speaks of the declarations which he received on the publication of the _Nouvelle Héloïse_[389] and of the conquests which were offered him: I do not know if empires would have been thus yielded to me, but I do know that I was buried beneath a heap of scented notes; if those notes were not, to-day, notes from so many grand-mothers, I should be puzzled how to relate, with becoming modesty, how they fought for a line in my hand, how they picked up an envelope addressed by me, and how, blushing and with lowered head, they hid it beneath a flowing veil of long tresses. If I have not been spoilt, it must be because my nature is good.

[Sidenote: And become the fashion.]

Whether from genuine politeness or inquisitive weakness, I sometimes went so far as to think myself obliged to call and thank the unknown ladies who signed the flattery they addressed to me with their names. One day, I found a bewitching creature under her mother's wing, on a fourth floor, where I have never set foot since. A fair Pole received me in silk-hung rooms; half-odalisk, half-Valkyrie, she looked like a snowdrop with its white flowers, or like one of those graceful heather-blooms which replace the other daughters of Flora when the season of the latter has not yet come or has passed: that female chorus, varied in age and beauty, was the realisation of my former sylph. The two-fold effect upon my vanity and my feelings was so much the more to be dreaded inasmuch as, until then, excepting one serious attachment, I had been neither sought out nor distinguished by the crowd. At the same time I am bound to say that, even though it were easy for me to take advantage of a passing illusion, my sincerity revolted against the idea of a voluptuousness that would have come to me by the chaste paths of religion: to be loved through the _Génie du Christianisme_, loved for the _Extrème Onction_, loved for the _Fête des Morts!_ I could never have been so shameful a Tartuffe.

I knew a Provençal physician, Dr. Vigaroux[390]; he had arrived at an age when every pleasure means the loss of a day, and he said "that he had no regret for the time thus lost; without troubling himself whether he gave the happiness which he received, he went towards the death of which he hoped to make his last delight." Nevertheless, I was a witness of his poor tears when he breathed his last; he could not hide his affliction from me; it was too late: his white hairs were not long enough to conceal and wipe away his tears. The only one to be really unhappy on leaving the earth is the unbeliever: for the man without faith, existence is terrible in this, that it carries a sense of annihilation; if one had not been born, he would not experience the horror of ceasing to be: the life of the atheist is a frightful lightning-flash, which serves but to reveal an abyss.

O great and merciful God, Thou hast not cast us upon earth for unworthy troubles and a miserable happiness! Our inevitable disenchantment admonishes us that our destinies are more sublime. Whatever may have been our errors, if we have preserved a serious spirit and thought of Thee in the midst of our weaknesses, we shall, whenever Thy goodness sets us free, be carried to that region where attachments endure for ever!

*

It was not long before I received the punishment of my literary vanity, the most detestable of all, if not the most foolish: I had thought that I should be able to relish in _petto_ the satisfaction of being a sublime genius, not by wearing, as they do to-day, a beard and an eccentric coat, but by remaining dressed like decent people, distinguished only by superiority. Useless hope! My pride was to be chastened; the correction was administered by the political persons whom I was obliged to know: celebrity is a benefice with the cure of souls.

M. de Fontanes was acquainted with Madame Bacciochi[391]; he introduced me to Bonaparte's sister, and soon after to the First Consul's brother Lucien[392]. The latter had a country-place near Senlis le Plessis, where I was coerced to go and dine; the château had once belonged to the Cardinal de Bernis[393]. Lucien had in his garden the tomb of his first wife[394], a lady half German and half Spanish, and the memory of the poet-cardinal. The nutrient nymph of a stream dug with the spade was a mule which drew water from a well: that was the commencement of all the rivers which Bonaparte was to cause to flow in his Empire. Efforts were being made to have my name struck off the lists; I was already called, and called myself aloud, Chateaubriand, forgetting that I ought to call myself Lassagne. Emigrants came to see me: among others, Messrs, de Bonald[395] and de Chênedollé[396]. Christian de Lamoignon, my companion in exile in London, took me to Madame Récamier: the curtain fell suddenly between her and me.

[Sidenote: The Comtesse de Beaumont.]

The person who filled the largest place in my existence, on my return from the Emigration, was Madame la Comtesse de Beaumont[397]. She lived during a part of the year at the Château de Passy, near Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, which M. Joubert inhabited during the summer. Madame de Beaumont returned to Paris, and expressed a wish to meet me.

So that my life might be one long chain of regrets, Providence willed it that the first person who received me kindly at the outset of my public career should also be the first to disappear. Madame de Beaumont opens the funeral procession of those women who have passed away before me. My most distant memories rest upon ashes, and they have continued to fall from grave to grave: like the Indian pundit, I recite the prayers for the dead until the flowers of my chaplet are faded.

Madame de Beaumont was the daughter of Armand Marc de Saint-Hérem, Comte de Montmorin, French Ambassador in Madrid, commandant in Brittany, member of the Assembly of Notables in 1787, and Foreign Minister under Louis XVI., by whom he was much liked: he perished on the scaffold, where he was followed by a portion of his family[398].

Madame de Beaumont was ill rather than well-favoured, and very like her portrait by Madame Lebrun[399]. Her face was thin and pale; her eyes were almond-shaped and would have perhaps been too brilliant, if an extraordinary suavity of expression had not half extinguished her glances and caused them to shine languidly, as a ray of light becomes mellowed by passing through crystal water. Her character had a sort of rigidity and impatience, which arose from the strength of her feelings and from the inward suffering which she experienced. Endowed with loftiness of soul and great courage, she was born for the world, from which her spirit had withdrawn through choice and unhappiness; but when a friendly voice evoked that secluded intelligence, it came and spoke to you in words from Heaven. Madame de Beaumont's extreme weakness made her slow of expression, and this slowness was touching. I knew this afflicted woman only at the moment of her flight; she was already stricken with death, and I devoted myself to her sufferings. I had taken a lodging in the Rue Saint-Honoré, at the Hôtel d'Étampes, near the Rue Neuve-du-Luxembourg. In this latter street, Madame de Beaumont occupied an apartment looking out upon the gardens of the Ministry of Justice. I called to see her every evening, with her friends and mine, M. Joubert, M. de Fontanes, M. de Bonald, M. Molé[400], M. Pasquier[401], M. de Chênedollé, men who have filled a place in literature and public life.

[Sidenote: Joseph Joubert.]

Full of oddities and eccentricities, M. Joubert will be an eternal loss to those who knew him. He had an extraordinary grip upon one's mind and heart; and, when once he had seized hold of you, his image was there, like a fixed thought, like an obsession that refused to be driven away. He made great pretensions to calmness, and no one was so easily perturbed as he: he watched himself in order to stop those emotions of the mind, which he thought injurious to his health, and constantly his friends came and disturbed the precautions which he had taken to keep well, for he could not prevent himself from being affected by their sadness or joy: he was an egoist who troubled himself only about others. In order to recover his strength, he often thought himself obliged to close his eyes and refrain from speaking for hours at a time. Heaven knows what noise and movement passed inwardly within him during this repose and silence which he laid upon himself. M. Joubert at every moment changed his diet and regimen, living one day on milk, another on minced meat, causing himself to be jolted at full speed over the roughest roads, or drawn at a snail's pace along the smoothest alleys. When he read, he tore out of his books the leaves which displeased him, thus forming a library for his own use, composed of scooped-out works, contained in bindings too large for them.

A profound metaphysician, his philosophy, thanks to an elaboration peculiar to himself, became painting or poetry; a Plato with the heart of a La Fontaine, he had formed an idea of perfection which prevented him from finishing anything. In manuscripts found after his death, he said:

"I am like an Æolian harp, which gives forth a few beautiful sounds and plays no tune."

Madame Victorine de Chastenay[402] maintained that "he had the appearance of a soul which had met with a body by accident, and put up with it as best it could:" a definition both charming and true.

We laughed at the enemies of M. de Fontanes, who tried to pass him off for a deep and dissembling politician: he was simply an irascible poet, frank to the pitch of anger, with a mind hedged in by contrariety, and as little able to conceal its opinion as to accept that of others. The literary principles of his friend Joubert were not his: the latter found some good everywhere and in every writer; Fontanes, on the contrary, held such and such a doctrine in abhorrence, and could not hear the names mentioned of certain authors. He was the sworn enemy of the principles of modern composition: to place before the reader's eyes material action, the crime at work or the gibbet with its rope, seemed to him so many enormities; he maintained that objects should never be seen except amid poetic surroundings, as though under a crystal globe. Sorrow spending itself mechanically through the eyes seemed to him a sensation fit only for the Cirque or the Grève; he understood the tragic sentiment only as ennobled by admiration and changed, through the medium of art, into "a charming pity." I quoted the Greek vases to him: in the arabesques of those vases one sees Hector's body drawn behind the car of Achilles, while a little figure, flying in the air, represents the shade of Patrocles, consoled by the vengeance of the son of Thetis.

"Well, Joubert," cried Fontanes, "what do you say to that metamorphosis of the muse? How those Greeks respected the soul!"

Joubert thought himself attacked, and placed Fontanes in contradiction with himself by reproaching him with his indulgence for me.

These discussions, highly comical as they often were, never came to an end: one evening, at half-past eleven, when I lived on the Place Louis XV., in the attic floor of Madame de Coislin's house, Fontanes climbed up my eighty-four stairs again to come furiously, with many raps of his cane, to finish an argument which he had left interrupted: it concerned Picard[403], whom at that moment he placed far above Molière; he would have taken good care not to have written a single word of what he said: Fontanes talking and Fontanes pen in hand were two different men.

It was M. de Fontanes, I like to repeat, who encouraged my first attempts: it was he who announced the publication of the _Génie du Christianisme_; it was his muse which, full of astonished devotion, directed mine in the new paths along which it had precipitated itself: he taught me to conceal the deformity of objects by the manner of throwing light upon them; to put classic language into the mouths of my romantic characters as far as in me lay.

In former days there were men who were guardians of taste, like the dragons who watched over the golden apples in the garden of the Hesperides; they did not allow youth to enter until it was able to touch the fruit without spoiling it.

[Sidenote: And other literary friends.]

My friend's writings take you by a happy road: the mind experiences a sense of well-being, and finds itself in an harmonious situation where everything charms and nothing wounds. M. de Fontanes incessantly revised his productions; none was more convinced than that master of the old days of the excellence of the maxim, "Hasten slowly." What, then, would he say to-day when, both morally and physically, we exert ourselves to do away with distances, and when we think we can never go fast enough. M. de Fontanes preferred to travel at the will of a delicious measure. You have read what I said of him when I found him in London; the regrets which I expressed then I must repeat now: life obliges us ever to weep in anticipation or in remembrance.

M. de Bonald had a shrewd intelligence; his ingenuity was mistaken for genius; he had dreamt out his political metaphysics with the Army of Condé, in the Black Forest, in the same way as those Jena and Göttingen professors who have since marched at the head of their pupils and let themselves be killed for the liberty of Germany. An innovator, although he had been a musketeer under Louis XVI., he looked upon the ancients as children in politics and literature; and he maintained, while he was the first to employ the fatuousness of the language now in use, that the Grand-master of the University was "not yet sufficiently advanced to understand that."

Chênedollé, with knowledge and talent, not native but acquired, was so sad that he nicknamed himself the "Crow[404]:" he went freebooting in my works. We had made a compact: I yielded him my skies, my mists, my clouds; but it was arranged that he should leave me my zephyrs, my waves, and my forests.

I am now speaking only of my literary friends; as to my political friends, I do not know whether I shall tell you about them: principles and speeches have sunk abysses between us!

Madame Hocquart[405] and Madame de Vintimille[406] came to the meetings in the Rue Neuve-du-Luxembourg. Madame de Vintimille, one of the women of olden time, of whom few remain, went into the world and brought us news of what was going on: I asked her if people were "still building cities." The descriptions of little scandals upon which she entered with a poignant but inoffensive raillery made us the more heartily appreciate our own security. Madame de Vintimille had been sung, together with her sister, by M. de La Harpe. Her language was guarded, her character restrained, her wit acquired; she had lived with Mesdames de Chevreuse[407], de Longueville, de La Vallière, de Maintenon[408], with Madame Geoffrin[409] and Madame du Defiant[410]. She blended well with a company whose charm depended upon the variety of its wits and the combination of their different values. Madame Hocquart had been fondly loved by Madame de Beaumont's brother[411], who had occupied himself with the lady of his thoughts to the very scaffold, as Aubiac had gone to the gallows kissing a sleeve of soft blue velvet which remained to him from the favours of Margaret of Valois[412].

[Sidenote: Who are no more.]

Never again will there assemble under the same roof so many distinguished persons belonging to different ranks and of different destinies, able to talk of the commonest as of the loftiest things: a simplicity of speech which came not from poverty but from choice. It is perhaps the last company in which the French genius of olden time has appeared. Among the new French will not be found that urbanity which is the fruit of education, and which was transformed by long usage into aptness of character. What has become of that company? Make plans, bring friends together: you but prepare for yourself an eternal mourning! Madame de Beaumont is no more, Joubert is no more, Chênedollé is no more, Madame de Vintimille is no more. I used to visit M. Joubert at Villeneuve during the vintage; I walked with him on the Yonne Hills; he picked mushrooms in the copses, and I yellow saffron in the fields. We talked of everything, and particularly of our friend Madame de Beaumont, for ever absent; we recalled the memory of our former hopes. At night we returned to Villeneuve, a town surrounded by broken-down walls, of the time of Philip Augustus[413], and by half-razed towers, from above which rose the smoke from the vintagers' hearths. Joubert showed me, in the distance from the hill, a sandy path among the woods which he used to take when going to see his neighbour, who hid herself at the Château de Passy during the Terror.

I have passed four or five times through the Senonais since the death of my dear host. I saw the hills from the high-road: Joubert walked there no longer; I recognised the trees, the fields, the vines, the little heaps of stones on which we used to rest ourselves. Driving through Villeneuve, I have cast a glance on the deserted street and the closed house of my friend. The last time when that happened, I was going on an embassy to Rome: ah, if he had been at home, I would have taken him with me to Madame de Beaumont's grave! It has pleased God to open a celestial Rome to M. Joubert, even better suited to his soul, which abandoned Platonism for Christianity. I shall not meet him again here below:

"I shall go to him rather: but he shall not return to me[414]."

The success of _Atala_ having decided me to start afresh on the _Génie du Christianisme_, of which two volumes were already in print, Madame de Beaumont offered to give me a room in the country, in a house which she had hired at Savigny[415]. I spent six months with her in this retreat, with M. Joubert and our other friends.

The house stood at the entrance to the village, on the Paris side, near an old high-road known in that part as the Chemin de Henri IV.: it leant against a vine-clad slope, and faced Savigny Park, ending in a wooded screen, and crossed by the little River Orge. On the left, the plain of Viry spread out as far as the springs of Juvisy. In every direction, in this part of the country, lie valleys, where we used to go in the evenings in search of new walks.

In the morning, we breakfasted together; after breakfast, I withdrew to my work; Madame de Beaumont had the goodness to copy out the quotations which I marked for her. This noble woman offered me a shelter when I had none: without the peace which she gave me, I should perhaps never have finished a work which I had been unable to complete during my misfortunes.

I shall evermore remember certain evenings passed in this refuge of friendship: on returning from walking we gathered near a fresh-water basin, which stood in the middle of a grass-plot in the kitchen-garden. Madame Joubert, Madame de Beaumont and I sat down on a bench; Madame Joubert's son rolled on the grass at our feet; that child has already disappeared. M. Joubert walked alone on a gravel path; two watch-dogs and a cat played around us, while pigeons cooed on the edge of the roof. What happiness for a man newly landed from exile, after spending eight years in profound abandonment, excepting a few days quickly lapsed! It was generally on these evenings that my friends made me talk of my travels: I have never described the desert of the New World so well as at that time. At night, when the windows of our rustic drawing-room were opened, Madame de Beaumont noted different constellations, telling me that I should remember one day that she had taught me to know them: since I have lost her, I have several times, not far from her grave in Rome, in the midst of the Campagna, looked in the firmament for the stars whose names she told me: I have seen them shining above the Sabine Hills; the protracted rays of those stars shot down and struck the surface of the Tiber. The spot where I saw them over the woods of Savigny, the spots where I have seen them since, the fitfulness of my destinies, that sign which a woman had left for me in the sky to remind me of her: all this broke my heart. By what miracle does man consent to do what he does upon earth, he who is doomed to die?

One day, in our retreat, we saw a man enter stealthily by one window and go out by another: it was M. de Laborie[416]; he was escaping from Bonaparte's claws. Shortly after appeared one of those souls in pain which are of a different species from other souls and which, on their passage, mingle their unknown misfortune with the vulgar sufferings of mankind: it was Lucile, my sister.

[Sidenote: I meet my sisters.]

After my arrival in France, I had written to my family to inform them of my return. Madame la Comtesse de Marigny, my eldest sister, was the first to come to me, went to the wrong street, and met five Messieurs Lassagne, of whom the last climbed up through a cobbler's trap-door to answer to his name. Madame de Chateaubriand came in her turn: she was charming, and full of the qualities calculated to give me the happiness which I found with her after we came together again. Madame la Comtess de Caud, Lucile, came next. M. Joubert and Madame de Beaumont became smitten with a passionate fondness and a tender pity for her. Then commenced between them a correspondence which ended only with the death of the two women who had bent over towards one another like two flowers of the same species on the point of fading away. Madame Lucile having stopped at Versailles on the 30th of September 1802, I received this note from her:

"I write to beg you to thank Madame de Beaumont on my behalf for the invitation she has sent me to go to Savigny. I hope to have that pleasure in about a fortnight, unless there be any objection on Madame de Beaumont's side."

Madame de Caud came to Savigny as she had promised.

I have told you how, in my youth, my sister, a canoness of the Chapter of the Argentière, and destined for that of Remiremont, cherished an attachment for M. de Malfilâtre, a counsellor to the Parliament of Brittany, which, remaining locked within her breast, had increased her natural melancholy. During the Revolution she married M. le Comte de Caud, and lost him after fifteen months of marriage. The death of Madame la Comtesse de Farcy, a sister whom she fondly loved, added to Madame de Caud's sadness. She next attached herself to Madame de Chateaubriand, my wife, and gained an empire over the latter which became painful, for Lucile was violent, masterful, unreasonable, and Madame de Chateaubriand, subject to her caprices, hid from her in order to render her the services which a richer shows to a susceptible and less happy friend.

Lucile's genius and character had almost reached the pitch of madness of Jean Jacques Rousseau; she thought herself exposed to secret enemies: she gave Madame de Beaumont, M. Joubert, myself, false addresses at which to write to her; she examined the seals, seeking to discover whether they had not been broken; she wandered from one home to the other, unable to remain either with my sisters or my wife; she had taken an antipathy to them, and Madame de Chateaubriand, after showing her a devotion surpassing all that one could imagine, had ended by breaking down under the burden of so cruel an affection.

Another fatality had struck Lucile: M. de Chênedollé, then living near Vire, had gone to see her at Fougères; soon there was talk of a marriage, which fell through. Everything failed my sister at once, and, thrown back upon herself, she no longer had the strength to bear up. This plaintive spectre rested for a moment on a stone, in the smiling solitude of Savigny: there were so many hearts there which would have joyfully received her! They would so gladly have restored her to a sweet reality of existence! But Lucile's heart could beat only in an atmosphere made expressly for her and never breathed by others. She swiftly devoured the days of the world apart in which Heaven had placed her. Why had God created a being only to suffer? What mysterious relation can there be between a long-suffering nature and an eternal principle?

My sister had not changed in any way; she had only taken the fixed expression of her ills: her head had sunk a little, like a head on which the hours had weighed heavily. She reminded me of my parents: those first family memories, evoked from the grave, surrounded me like wraiths which had gathered round at night to warm themselves at the dying flame of a funeral pile. As I watched her, I seemed to see in Lucile my whole childhood, looking out at me from behind her somewhat wild eyes.

The vision of pain faded away: that woman, borne down by life, seemed to have come to fetch the other dejected woman whom she was to take with her.

*

[Sidenote: Talma.]

The summer passed: according to custom, I promised myself to begin it again next year; but the hand of the clock does not return to the hour which we would wish to call back. During the winter, in Paris, I made some new acquaintances. M. Jullien, a rich man, obliging, and a jovial table-companion, although belonging to a family in which they killed themselves, had a box at the Français; he used to lend it to Madame de Beaumont: I went four or five times to the play with M. de Fontanes and M. Joubert. When I entered the world, old-fashioned comedy was in all its glory; I found it again in a state of complete decomposition. Tragedy still kept up, thanks to Mademoiselle Duchesnois[417] and, above all, to Talma, who had attained the highest level of dramatic talent. I had seen him when he made his first appearances; he was less handsome and, so to speak, less young than at the age when I saw him again: he had acquired the distinction, the nobility, and the gravity of years.

The portrait of Talma which Madame de Staël has drawn in her work on Germany is only half true: the brilliant writer saw the great actor through a woman's imagination, and attributed to him what he lacked.

Of the intermediate world Talma did not know what to make: he did not understand the man of gentle birth; he did not know our old-time society; he had not sat at the table of high-born ladies, in the Gothic tower enshrined in the wood; he knew nothing of the flexibility, the variety of expression, the gallantry, the light charm of manner, the ingenuousness, the tenderness, the heroism based upon honour, the Christian devotion of chivalry: he was not Tancred, or Coucy, or at least he turned them into heroes of a middle-age of his own creation; his Othello was placed in the heart of Vendôme.

Then what was Talma? Himself, his century and antiquity. He had the deep and concentrated passions of love and of patriotism; they burst from his breast with the force of an explosion. He had the baleful inspiration, the deranged genius of the Revolution through which he had passed. The terrible spectacles with which he was once surrounded were renewed in his talent with the lamentable and distant accents of the choruses of Sophocles and Euripides. His grace, which was not conventional grace, took hold of you like misfortune. Dark ambition, remorse, jealousy, melancholy of soul, physical pain, madness produced by the gods and adversity, human affliction: those were what he knew. His mere entrance upon the stage, the mere sound of his voice were mightily tragic. Suffering and thought were mingled on his brow, breathed in his immovability, in his poses, his gestures, his steps. As a Greek, he would arrive, panting and ominous, from the ruins of Argos, an immortal Orestes, tormented for three thousand years by the Eumenides; as a Frenchman, he would come from the solitudes of Saint-Denis, where the Parcæ of 1793 had cut the thread of the sepulchral life of the Kings. The very picture of sorrow awaiting something unknown, but decreed by an unjust Heaven, he went his way, the galley-slave of fate, inexorably chained between fatality and terror.

Time casts an inevitable obscurity over the older dramatic masterpieces: its projected shadow changes the purest Raphaëls into Rembrandts[418]; but for Talma, a part of the marvels of Corneille and Racine would have remained unknown. Dramatic talent is a torch: it fires other half-extinguished torches and revives geniuses which enrapture you with their renewed splendour.

We owe to Talma the perfection of the actor's dress. But are stage realism and rigour of costume so necessary to art as is supposed? Racine's characters derive nothing from the cut of their clothes: in the pictures of the first painters, the back-grounds are neglected and the costumes incorrect. The "furies" of Orestes, or the "prophecies" of Joad, read in a drawing-room by Talma in a dress-coat, made as great an impression as when declaimed upon the stage by Talma in a Greek mantle or a Jewish robe. Iphigenia was attired like Madame de Sévigné, when Boileau addressed those fine verses to his friend:

Jamais Iphigénie en Aulide immolée N'a coûté tant de pleurs à la Grèce assemblée Que, dans l'heureux spectacle à nos yeux étalé, N'en a fait sous son nom verser la Champmeslé[419].

This correctness in the representation of inanimate objects is the spirit of the arts of our time: it points to the decadence of lofty poetry and of the true drama; we are content with lesser beauties, when we are impotent to achieve the greater; we imitate armchairs and velvet to perfection, when we are no longer able to paint the expression of the man seated on that velvet and in those armchairs. Nevertheless, once one has descended to that truthfulness of material forms, one finds one's self obliged to reproduce it; for the public, itself materialized, demands it.

[Sidenote: Comments on the _Génie._]

Meanwhile I was finishing the _Génie du Christianisme_: Lucien asked to see some of the proofs; I sent them to him; he added some rather common-place notes in the margins.

Although the success of my big book was as brilliant as that of my little _Atala_, it was nevertheless more widely contested: this was a serious work, in which I no longer fought the principles of the old literature and of philosophy with a novel, but attacked them directly with arguments and facts. The Voltairean empire uttered a cry and flew to arms. Madame de Staël was mistaken as to the future of my religious studies: they brought her the work uncut; she pushed her fingers between the pages, came upon the chapter headed the _Virginité_, and said to M. Adrien de Montmorency[420], who was with her:

"Oh Heavens! Our poor Chateaubriand! That will fall to the ground!"

The Abbé de Boulogne[421], who was shown some portions of my work before it was sent to press, said to the bookseller who asked his opinion:

"If you want to ruin yourself, print that."

And the Abbé de Boulogne has since written an all too splendid eulogy of my book.

Everything, in fact, seemed to prophesy failure. What hope could I have, I with no name and no extollers, of destroying the influence of Voltaire, which had prevailed for more than half a century, of Voltaire, who had raised the huge edifice completed by the Encyclopædists and consolidated by all the famous men in Europe? What! were the Diderots, the d'Alemberts, the Duclos[422], the Dupuis[423], the Helvétius[424], the Condorcets[425] minds that carried no authority? What! was the world to return, to the Golden Legend, to renounce the admiration it had acquired for masterpieces of science and reason? How could I ever win a case which Rome armed with its thunders, the clergy with its might, had been unable to save: a case defended in vain by the Archbishop of Paris, Christophe de Beaumont[426], supported by the decrees of the Parliament and the armed force and name of the King? Was it not as ridiculous as it was rash on the part of an unknown man to set himself against a philosophical movement so irresistible as to have produced the Revolution? It was curious to see a pygmy "toughen his little arms" to stifle the progress of a century, stop civilization, and thrust back the human race! Thank God, a word would be enough to pulverize the madman: wherefore M. Ginguené, when trouncing the _Génie du Christianisme_ in the _Décade_[427] declared that the criticism came too late, since my tautologous production was already forgotten. He said this five or six months after the publication of a work which the attack of the whole French Academy, on the occasion of the decennial prizes, was not able to kill.

[Sidenote: I publish my chief work.]

It was amid the ruins of our temples that I published the _Génie du Christianisme._[428] The faithful thought themselves saved: men at that time felt a need of faith, a thirsting for religious consolations, which arose from the want of those consolations experienced since long years. What supernatural strength was required to bear all the adversities undergone! How many mutilated families had to go to the Father of mankind in search of the children they had lost! How many broken hearts, how many solitary souls, were calling for a divine hand to cure them! One threw one's self into the house of God, as one enters a doctor's house on the outbreak of an infection. The victims of our disturbances (and how many different kinds of victims!) saved themselves at the altar: shipwrecked men clinging to the rock on which they seek for salvation.

Bonaparte, at that time hoping to found his power on the first basis of society, had just made arrangements with the Court of Rome: he at first raised no obstacle against the publication of a work calculated to enhance the popularity of his schemes; he had to struggle against the men about him and against the declared enemies of religion; he was glad therefore to be defended from the outside by the opinion called up by the _Génie du Christianisme._ Later, he repented him of his mistake; ideas of regular monarchy had sprung into being together with ideas of religion.

An episode in the _Génie du Christianisme_, which at the time caused less stir than _Atala_, fixed one of the characters of modern literature; but I may say that, if _René_ did not exist, I should not now write it: if it were possible for me to destroy it, I would do so. A family of Renés, poets and prose-writers, has swarmed into being: we have heard nothing but mournful and desultory phrases; it has been a question of nothing but winds and storms, of unknown words directed to the clouds and the night. No scribbler fresh from college but has imagined himself the unhappiest of men; no babe of sixteen but has believed himself to have exhausted life and to be tormented by his genius, but has, in the abyss of his thoughts, abandoned himself to the "wave of his passions," struck his pale and dishevelled brow, and astonished stupefied mankind with a misfortune of which he did not know the name, nor they either.

In _René_ I had laid bare one of the infirmities of my century; but it was a different madness in the novelists to try to make universal such transcendental afflictions. The general sentiments which compose the basis of humanity, paternal and maternal affection, filial piety, friendship, love, are inexhaustible; but particular ways of feeling, idiosyncrasies of mind and character, cannot be spread out and multiplied over wide and numerous scenes. The small undiscovered corners of the human heart are a narrow field; there is nothing left to gather in that field after the hand which has been the first to mow it. A malady of the soul is not a permanent nor natural state: one cannot reproduce it, make a literature of it, make use of it as of a general passion constantly modified at the will of the artists who handle it and change its form.

Be that as it may, literature became tinged with the colours of my religious paintings, even as public affairs have retained the phraseology of my writings on citizenship: the _Monarchy according to the Charter_ has been the rudiment of our representative government, and my article in the _Conservateur_, on "Moral Interests and Material Interests," has bequeathed those two designations to politics.

Writers did me the honour of imitating _Atala_ and _René_, in the same way that the pulpit borrowed my accounts of the missions and advantages of Christianity. The passages in which I show that, by driving the pagan divinities from the woods, our broader religion has restored nature to its solitudes; the paragraphs where I discuss the influence of our religion upon our manner of seeing a painting, where I examine the changes wrought in poetry and eloquence; the chapters which I devote to inquiries into the foreign sentiments introduced into the dramatic characters of antiquity contain the germ of the new criticism. Racine's characters, as I have said, both are and are not Greek characters: they are Christian characters; that is what no one had understood.

[Sidenote: Effects of the publication.]

If the effect of the _Génie du Christianisme_ had been only a reaction against doctrines to which the revolutionary misfortunes were attributed, that effect would have ceased so soon as the cause was removed; it would not have been prolonged to the time at which I am writing. But the action of the _Génie du Christianisme_ upon public opinion was not confined to the momentary resurrection of a religion supposed to be in its grave: a more lasting metamorphosis was operated. If the work contained innovations of style, it also contained changes of doctrine; not only the manner, but the matter, was altered; atheism and materialism were no longer the basis of the belief or unbelief of young minds; the idea of God and of the immortality of the soul resumed its empire: whence came an alteration in the chain of ideas linked one to the other. A man was no longer riveted to his place by an anti-religious prejudice; he no longer thought himself obliged to remain a mummy of annihilation, wrapped in philosophical swathing-bands; he permitted himself to examine any system, however absurd it might seem to him, _even though it were Christian._

Besides the faithful who returned at the sound of their shepherd's voice, there were formed, by this right of free examination, other _à priori_ faithful. Lay down God as a principle, and the Word will follow. The Son proceeds necessarily from the Father.

The various abstract combinations succeed only in substituting for the Christian mysteries other mysteries still more difficult of comprehension. Pantheism, which, besides, exists in three or four shapes, and which it is the fashion nowadays to ascribe to enlightened intelligences, is the absurdest of Eastern dreams brought back to light by Spinoza[429]. One has but to read the article by the sceptic Bayle[430] on that Jew of Amsterdam. The positive tone in which certain people speak of all these things would be revolting, were it not that it arises from want of study; they take up words which they do not understand, and imagine themselves to be transcendental geniuses. Be assured that Abélard, that St. Bernard, that St. Thomas Aquinas and their fellows brought to bear upon the study of metaphysics a superiority of judgment which we do not approach; that the Saint-Simonian[431], Phalansterian, Fourieristic[432], Humanitarian[433] systems were discovered and practised by the different heresies; that what is placed before us as progress and discovery is so much old lumber hawked about for fifteen centuries in the schools of Greece and the colleges of the Middle Ages. The misfortune is that the first sectaries could not succeed in founding their Neo-Platonic Republic, when Gallienus[434] permitted Plotinus[435] to make the experiment in Campania; later, people made the great mistake of burning the sectaries when they proposed to establish the community of goods and to pronounce prostitution holy, by urging that a woman cannot, without sin, refuse a man who asks of her a transient union in the name of Jesus Christ: all that was needed, said they, to accomplish this union was to annihilate one's soul and deposit it for a moment in the bosom of God.

The shock which the _Génie du Christianisme_ gave to men's minds caused the eighteenth century to emerge from the old road and flung it for ever out of its path. People began again, or rather they began for the first time to study the sources of Christianity; on re-reading the Fathers (presuming that they had read them before) they were struck at meeting with so many curious facts, so much philosophical science, so many beauties of style of every kind, so many ideas which, by a more or less perceptible gradation, produced the transition from ancient to modern society: an unique and memorable era of humanity, in which Heaven communicates with earth through the medium of souls set in men of genius.

Beside the crumbling world of paganism there arose, in former times, as though outside society, another world, looking on at those great spectacles, poor, retiring, secluded, taking no part in the business of life except when its lessons or its succour were needed. It was a marvellous thing to see those early bishops, almost all honoured with the name of saints and martyrs, those simple priests watching over the relics and cemeteries; those monks and hermits in their convents or in their caves, laying down laws of peace, morals, charity, when all was war, corruption, barbarism; going between the tyrants of Rome and the leaders of the Tartars and Goths, to prevent the injustice of the former and the cruelty of the latter; stopping armies with a wooden cross and a peaceful word; the weakest of men, and protecting the world against Attila[436]; placed between two universes to be the link that joined them, to console the last moments of an expiring society and support the first steps of a society in its cradle.

*

[Sidenote: My own criticism.]

It was impossible but that the truths unfolded in the _Génie du Christianisme_ should contribute to a change of ideas. Again, it is to this work that the present love for the buildings of the Middle Ages is due: it is I who have called upon the young century to admire the old temples. If my opinion has been misused; if it is not true that our cathedrals approach the Parthenon in beauty; if it is false that those churches teach us unknown facts in their documents of stone; if it is madness to maintain that those granite memories reveal to us things that escaped the learned Benedictines; if by dint of eternally repeating the word Gothic people grow wearied to death of it: that is not my fault. For the rest, with respect to the arts, I know the shortcomings of the _Génie du Christianisme_; that portion of my work is faulty, because, in 1800, I was not acquainted with the arts: I had not seen Italy, nor Greece, nor Egypt. Also, I did not make sufficient use of the lives of the saints and of the legends, although they offered me a number of marvellous instances: by selecting with taste, one could there reap a plentiful harvest. This field of the wealth of mediæval imagination surpasses the _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid and the Milesian fables in fruitfulness. My work, moreover, contains some scanty or false judgments, such as that which I pronounce upon Dante, to whom I have since paid a brilliant tribute. In the serious respect, I have completed the _Génie du Christianisme_ in my _Études historiques_, one of my writings that has been least spoken of and most plundered.

The success of _Atala_ had delighted me, because my soul was still fresh; that of the _Génie du Christianisme_ was painful to me: I was obliged to sacrifice my time to a more or less useless correspondence and to irrelevant civilities. A so-called admiration did not atone to me for the vexations that await a man whose name the crowd remembers. What good can supply the place of the peace which you have lost by admitting the public to your intimacy? Add to that the restlessness with which the Muses love to afflict those who attach themselves to their cult, the worries attendant upon a compliant character, inaptitude for fortune, loss of leisure, an uncertain temper, livelier affections, unreasonable melancholy, groundless joys: who, if he had the choice, would purchase on those conditions the uncertain advantages of a reputation which you are not sure of obtaining, which will be contested during your life, which posterity will refuse to confirm, and which your death will snatch from you for ever?

The literary controversy on innovations of style which _Atala_ had aroused was renewed upon the publication of the _Génie du Christianisme._

A characteristic feature of the imperial school, and even of the republican school, must be noted: while society advanced for better or for worse, literature remained stationary; foreign to the change of the ideas, it did not belong to its own time. In comedy, the squires of the village, the Colins, the Babets, or else the intrigues of the drawing-rooms, which were no longer known, were played, as I have already remarked, before coarse and blood-thirsty men, themselves the destroyers of the manners whose picture was presented to them; in tragedy, a plebeian pit interested itself in the families of nobles and kings.

Two things kept literature at the date of the eighteenth century: the impiety which it derived from Voltaire and the Revolution, and the despotism with which Bonaparte struck it. The head of the State found a profit in those subordinate letters which he had put in barracks, which presented arms to him, which sallied forth at the command of "Turn out, the guard!" which marched in rank, and which went through their evolutions like soldiers. Any form of independence seemed a rebellion against his power; he would no more consent to a riot of words and ideas than he suffered insurrection. He suspended the Habeas Corpus for thought as well as for individual liberty. Let us also recognise that the public, weary of anarchy, was glad to submit again to the yoke of law and order.

[Sidenote: New forms in literature.]

The literature which expresses the new era did not commence to reign until forty or fifty years after the time of which it was the idiom. During that half-century, it was employed only by the opposition. It was Madame de Staël, it was Benjamin Constant[437], it was Lemercier[438], it was Bonald, it was myself, in short, who were the first to speak that language. The alteration in literature of which the nineteenth century boasts came to it from the Emigration and from exile: it was M. de Fontanes who brooded on those birds of a different species from himself, because, by going back to the seventeenth century, he had gained the strength of that fertile period and lost the barrenness of the eighteenth. One portion of the human intelligence, that which treats of transcendental matters, alone advanced with an even step with civilisation; unfortunately, the glory of knowledge was not without stain: the Laplaces[439], the Lagranges[440], the Monges[441], the Chaptals[442], the Berthollets[443], all the prodigies, once haughty democrats, became Napoleon's most obsequious servants. Let it be said to the honour of Letters: the new literature was free, science was servile; character did not correspond with genius, and they whose thought had sped to the uppermost sky were not able to raise their souls above the feet of Bonaparte: they pretended to have no need of God, that was why they needed a tyrant.

The Napoleonic classic was the genius of the nineteenth century dressed up in the periwig of Louis XIV., or curled as in the days of Louis XV. Bonaparte had ordained that the men of the Revolution should not appear at Court save in full dress, sword at side. One saw nothing of the France of the moment; it was not order, it was discipline. Nor could anything be more tiresome than that pale resuscitation of the literature of former days. That cold copy, that unproductive anachronism, disappeared when the new literature broke in noisily with the _Génie du Christianisme._ The death of the Duc d'Enghien had for me this advantage that, by causing me to step aside, it left me free in my solitude to follow my own inspiration, and prevented me from enlisting in the regular infantry of old Pindus: I owed my moral to my intellectual liberty.

In the last chapter of the _Génie du Christianisme_, I discuss what would have become of the world if the Faith had not been preached at the time of the invasion of the Barbarians; in another paragraph, I speak of an important work to be undertaken on the changes which Christianity introduced in the laws after the conversion of Constantine[444].

Supposing religious opinion to exist in its present form, if the _Génie du Christianisme_ were yet to be written, I would compose it quite differently: instead of recalling the benefits and the institutions of our religion in the past, I would show that Christianity is the thought of the future and of human liberty; that that redeeming and Messianic thought is the only basis of social equality; that it alone can establish the latter, because it places by the side of that equality the necessity of duty, the corrective and regulator of the democratic instinct. Legality is no sufficient restraint, because it is not permanent; it derives its strength from the law: now, the law is the work of men who pass away and differ. A law is not always obligatory; it can always be changed by another law: as opposed to that, morals are constant; they have their force within themselves, because they spring from the immutable order: they alone, therefore, can ensure permanency.

I would show that, wherever Christianity has prevailed, it has changed ideas, rectified notions of justice and injustice, substituted assertion for doubt, embraced the whole of humanity in its doctrines and precepts. I would try to conjecture the distance at which we still are from the total accomplishment of the Gospel, by calculating the number of evils that have been destroyed and of improvements that have been effected in the eighteen centuries which have elapsed on this side of the Cross. Christianity acts slowly, because it acts everywhere; it does not cling to the reform of any particular society, it works upon society in general; its philanthropy is extended to all the sons of Adam: that is what it expresses with a marvellous simplicity in its commonest petitions, in its daily prayers, when it says to the crowd in the temple:

"Let us pray for every suffering thing upon earth."

What religion has ever spoken in this way? The Word was not made flesh in the man of pleasure, it became incarnate in the man of sorrow, with a view to the enfranchisement of all, to an universal brotherhood and an infinite salvation.

If the _Génie du Christianisme_ had only given rise to such investigations, I should congratulate myself on having published it. It remains to be seen whether, at the time of the appearance of the book, a different _Génie du Christianisme_, raised on the new plan the outline of which I have barely indicated, would have obtained the same success. In 1803, when nothing was granted to the old religion, when it was the object of scorn, when none knew the first word of the question, would one have done well to speak of future liberty as descending from Calvary, at a time when people were still bruised from the excesses of the liberty of the passions? Would Bonaparte have suffered such a work to appear? It was perhaps useful to stimulate regrets, to interest the imagination in a cause so misjudged, to call attention to the despised object, to render it endearing before showing how serious it was, how mighty and how salutary.

Now, supposing that my name leaves some trace behind it, I shall owe this to the _Génie du Christianisme_: with no illusion as to the intrinsic value of the work, I admit that it possesses an accidental value; it came just at the right moment. For this reason it caused me to take my place in one of those historic periods which, mixing an individual with things, compel him to be remembered. If the influence of my work was not limited to the change which, in the past forty years, it has produced among the living generations; if it still served to resuscitate among late-comers a spark of the civilizing truths of the earth; if the slight symptom of life which one seems to perceive was there sustained in the generations to come, I should depart full of hope in the divine mercy. O reconciled Christian, do not forget me in thy prayers, when I am gone; my faults, perhaps, will stop me outside those gates where my charity cried on thy behalf:

"Be ye lifted up, O eternal gates[445]!"

[361] This book was begun at Dieppe in 1836 and finished in Paris in 1837. It was revised in December 1846.--T.

[362] Anne Geneviève de Bourbon-Condé, Duchesse de Longueville (1619-1679), sister of the great Condé, had intrigued against the Court, and played a great part in the war of the Fronde (1648-1652). The escape took place in 1650. Eventually, Mazarin defeating all her intrigues, the Duchesse de Longueville withdrew into retirement and a convent--T.

[363] Queen Anne of Austria (1602-1666), daughter of King Philip III. of Spain, and wife of Louis XIII. of France, whom she married in 1615. She gave birth to Louis XIV. in 1638, after twenty-three years of marriage, and became Regent of the Kingdom on the death of Louis XIII. in 1643.--T.

[364] Henri de La Tour d'Auvergne, Maréchal Vicomte de Turenne (1611-1688), joined the Fronde on Madame de Longueville's persuasion, but returned to his allegiance the next year (1651). He was born a Protestant, was converted by Bossuet, but abjured the Catholic Faith in 1678.--T.

[365] François Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1605 or 1613-1680). He played a small part in the Fronde through his infatuation for Madame de Longueville. The _Maxims_ were published in 1665, under the title of _Réflexions et sentences, ou Maximes morales._ He spent his old age in the society of Madame de La Fayette and Madame de Sévigné.--T.

[366] Marie Madeleine Comtesse de La Fayette (1634-1693), _née_ Pioche de La Vergne, author of a number of successful novels and a History of Henrietta of England.--T.

[367] Charlotte Marguerite Princesse de Condé (1594-1650), _née_ de Montmorency, and married in 1609 to Henry II. Prince de Condé, who removed her to Brussels out of the reach of King Henry IV. "That poor wretch," the Duchesse de Longueville, was her daughter.--T.

[368] Madame de Brienne was the wife of Henri Auguste Comte de Loménie de Brienne, author of the curious Memoirs.--T.

[369] BÉRANGER, _Le Vieux Caporal_, 49, 50:

"Who is sobbing and weeping down yonder? Ah, 'tis the drummer's widow so sad."--T.

[370] BÉRANGER, _Le Vieux Caporal_, chorus:

"Conscripts, keep step; do not weep; . . . Keep step, the step keep." --T.

[371] Jules Cardinal Mazarin (1602-1661), Prime Minister to the Regent Anne of Austria, and eventual victor over the Fronde.--T.

[372] The Duc de La Rochefoucauld left _Mémoires sur la règne d'Anne d'Autriche_, in addition to the _Maximes._--T.

[373] Marie Caroline Ferdinande Louise Duchesse de Berry (1798-1870), daughter of King Ferdinand I. of Naples, and married to the Duc de Berry in 1816.--T.

[374] The Duchesse de Berry brought Dieppe into fashion in the later years of the Restoration; she visited it yearly, with her children, during the bathing season.--B.

[375] RABELAIS.--_Author's Note._

[376] Now the Place de la Concorde.--T.

[377] Migneret's book-shop was at No. 1186, Rue Jacob. The houses were at that time numbered by districts, not by streets.--B.

[378]

"Both through his virtues and his charms To be their father he deserved." --T.

[379] Étienne Gaspard Robertson (1762-1837), a professor of physics who perfected or improved the Archimedean mirror, the magic-lantern, and the parachute.--T.

[380] Now the Quai Malaquais.--T.

[381] The Theatines, or "Regular Clerks," a very strict congregation, founded in 1524 by St. Cajetan and Giovanni Pietro Caraffa, Bishop of Chieti, or Theate, from which the Order takes its name.--T.

[382] The Requisition was a sort of levy in mass decreed by the Committee of Public Safety on the 23rd of August 1793, and produced 1,400,000 men. It was the immediate forerunner of the Conscription.--T.

[383] The title of this letter was _Lettre à M. de Fontanes sur la deuxième édition de l'ouvrage de Mme. de Staël_ (_De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec la morale_, etc.), and it was signed, l'_Auteur du Génie du Christianisme._ It was printed in the _Mercure_ of 1 Nivoise Year IX. (22 December 1800), and now figures in all the editions of the _Génie du Christianisme._ It is one of Chateaubriand's most eloquent writings.--B.

[384] The letter appeared in the _Journal des Débats_ of 10 Germinal Year IX. (31 March 1801).--B.

[385] The volume is announced as "just out" in the _Journal des Débats_ of 27 Germinal (17 April). It was a small duodecimo, of XXIV. +210 pages, with the title _Atala, ou les Amours de deux sauvages dans le désert._--B.

[386] Marie Marguerite Marquise de Brinvilliers (1630-1676), _née_ Dreux d'Avray, a famous poisoner, who with her lover, Gaudin de Sainte-Croix, poisoned the marquise's father, sister, and two brothers. The crimes were discovered on the death of Sainte-Croix in 1670. The Brinvilliers took to flight, but was captured at Liège, brought back to Paris, and tried and executed in 1676.--T.

[387] A waxwork show established in the Palais-Royal and on the Boulevard du Temple in 1770 by a German who called himself Curtius. The establishment on the Boulevard du Temple remained open until the end of the reign of Louis-Philippe. The figures are still sometimes met with at village fairs.--B.

[388] Chaillot, which now forms part of Paris, was at that time a village at the gates, to the west, on the road to Versailles.--T.

[389] The _Nouvelle Héloïse_, Rousseau's most popular work, was published in 1759--T.

[390] Dr. Joseph Marie Joachim Vigaroux (1759-1829), a native of Montpellier, in Provence, and author of some medical works of no special value.--T.

[391] Marie Anne Elisa Bacciochi (1774-1820), Bonaparte's eldest sister, married Felix Pascal Prince Bacciochi in 1797. Her husband became Prince of Lucca and Piombino in 1805, Elisa exercising the real power; and in 1808 Napoleon made her Grand-duchess of Tuscany. She was dethroned in 1814, and assumed the title of Countess of Compignano. Prince Bacciochi died in Rome in 1841.--T.

[392] Lucien Bonaparte (1775-1840), Napoleon's second brother, created Prince of Canino in 1804, a prisoner in England from 1810 to 1814. He was twice married to ladies of middle-class family (_vide infra_), by whom he had eleven children.--T.

[393] François Joachim Cardinal de Pierres de Bernis (1715-1794), Anacreontic poet and religious controversialist. He had been Madame de Pompadour's lover, and owed his advancement to her. Voltaire called him Babet la Bouquetière, owing to the profusion of flowers of rhetoric which he employed in his verses.--T.

[394] Madame Lucien Bonaparte (_d._ 1800), _née_ Christine Éléonore Boyer, married Lucien in 1794, and was the sister of the woman who kept the inn at Saint-Maximin, where Lucien, then under age, was staying. The marriage took place without the consent of Madame Bonaparte, the mother, and was invalid by French law. Lucien's second wife, whom he married in 1802, was Marie Alexandrine Charlotte Louise Laurence de Bleschamp (1778-1855), the divorced wife of Jean François Hippolyte Jouberthon, a retired stockbroker.--B.

[395] Louis Gabriel Amboise, Vicomte de Bonald (1753-1840), a distinguished monarchical writer, created a peer of France in 1823, and a member of the French Academy.--T.

[396] Charles Lioult de Chênedollé (1769-1833), author of the _Génie de l'homme_ and other poems.--T.

[397] Pauline Marie Michelle Frédérique Ulrique de Montmorin-Saint-Hérem, Comtesse de Beaumont (1768-1803).--T.

[398] The Comte de Montmorin did not die on the scaffold, but was butchered at the Abbaye on the 2nd of September 1792. On the next day his cousin, Louis Victor Hippolyte Luce de Montmorin, had his throat cut at the Conciergerie, where he had been taken after his acquittal by the Criminal Tribunal on the 17th of August. Madame de Montmorin, Madame de Beaumont's mother, was guillotined on the 10th of May 1794; her second son was guillotined with her. Her daughter, wife of the Comte de La Luzerne, died on the 10th of July 1794, at the Archbishop's Palace, which had been turned into the prison hospital.--B.

[399] Madame Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1756-1842), _née_ Vigée, the famous French portrait painter. She left nearly 700 portraits, in addition to some historical pictures and a crowd of landscapes.--T.

[400] Matthieu Louis Molé (1781-1855), created a Count of the Empire in 1813, when he became Minister of Justice, and held successive ministries under the Restoration and Louis-Philippe. He was a moderate statesman of much dignity of character and of great distinction of person, manners, and speech. He was elected a member of the French Academy in 1840.--T.

[401] Étienne Duc Pasquier (1767-1862), appointed Prefect of Police in 1810. After holding various ministerial offices under the Restoration, he was made President of the Chamber of Peers by Louis-Philippe in 1830, Chancellor in 1837, and a duke in 1844. Elected to the French Academy in 1842.--T.

[402] Louise Marie Victorine Comtesse de Chastenay-Lanty (1771-1855) was never married. Her title of madame is due to the fact that she became a canoness at an early age (1785). Her observation to Chateaubriand on the subject of Joubert will be found repeated in almost precisely the same words in Madame de Chastenay's recently-published Memoirs (1896), vol. II. p. 82.--T.

[403] Louis Bénoît Picard (1769-1828), an actor, theatrical manager, and author of some eighty stage-plays of varying merit. He was received into the French Academy in 1807.--T.

[404] In the "small company" which, at the beginning of the century, met in the drawing-room of Madame de Beaumont, in the Rue Neuve-du-Luxembourg, or at Chateaubriand's, in his little apartment in the Hôtel Coislin, on the Place Louis XV., or again, in the summer, at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, under M. Joubert's roof, each one, according to an ancient fashion, had his nickname. Chateaubriand was called _le chat_, the "Cat," by way of abbreviation of his name, or possibly because of his illegible handwriting; Madame de Chateaubriand, who had claws, was the "She-cat." Chênedollé and Gueneau de Mussy, more melancholy than René, had received the names of the "Big" and the "Little Crow;" sometimes also Chateaubriand was called the "Illustrious Crow of the Cordilleras," by allusion to his travels in America. Fontanes was thickset, and had something athletic in his short stature. His friends jestingly compared him to the boar of Erymanthus, and called him the "Boar." Thin and slender, skimming over the earth which she was soon to leave, Madame de Beaumont had received the nickname of the "Swallow." Joubert, a lover of the woods, and at that time a great walker, was the "Stag;" while his wife, who was goodness and wit personified, but of a somewhat fierce humour, laughed when she was called the "She-wolf." Never was so intellectual a collection of "animals" seen before.--B.

[405] Madame Hocquart was a lady possessed of many charms of beauty and mind. She was the daughter of Pourrat and the sister of Madame Laurent Lecoulteux.--B.

[406] The Comtesse de Vintimille du Luc, _née_ de La Live de Jully, was niece to Madame Hocquart.--B.

[407] Marie Duchesse de Chevreuse (1600-1679), _née_ de Rohan-Montbazon, married in 1617 to Albert Duc de Luynes, Constable of France, and in 1622 to Claude de Lorraine, Duc de Chevreuse. The Duchesse de Chevreuse was a favourite of Anne of Austria, and is famed for her beauty and her wit.--T.

[408] Françoise d'Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon (1635-1719), the last mistress and eventual wife (1684-1685) of Louis XIV.--T.

[409] Madame Geoffrin (1699-1777), _née_ Rodet, head of the famous literary _salon_ in the Rue Saint-Honoré.--T.

[410] Marie Marquise du Deffant (1697-1780), _née_ de Vichy-Chamroud, a celebrated leader of eighteenth-century society in France. Her correspondence with Walpole, Voltaire, d'Alembert, etc., was published in 1809 to 1811.--T.

[411] Antoine Hugues Calixte de Montmorin (1772-1794), guillotined 10th May 1794.--B.

[412] Margaret of Valois (1552-1615), Queen of France and Navarre, daughter of King Henry II. of France. She married in 1672 the Prince of Béarn, afterwards King of Navarre and of France (Henry IV.), who imprisoned her at Usson, in Auvergne, and eventually divorced her (1599). She left Memoirs of the period from 1565 to 1587, first published in 1658.--T.

[413] Philip II. (Augustus), King of France (1165-1223).--T.

[414] Kings XII. 23.--T.

[415] Chateaubriand and Madame de Beaumont took up their abode at Savigny on the 22nd of May 1801.--B.

[416] Antoine Athanase Roux de Laborie (1769-1840), a protégé of Talleyrand's, who attained to some distinction as a politician. He had been compromised in a Royalist conspiracy with the two brothers Bertin, with whom he afterwards founded the _Journal des Débats._--T.

[417] Catherine Joséphine Rafin (1777-1835), known as Mademoiselle Duchesnois, made her first appearance in 1802 as Phèdre. She was an ugly woman, but a fine actress. She continued to play until 1830.--T.

[418] Paul Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1674); the allusion being to Rembrandt's famous distribution of light and shade.--T.

[419]

"Ne'er did Iphigenia in Aulis laid dead Cause so many tears in all Greece to be shed As, in the fine spectacle shown us to-day, We have wept at the bidding of our Champmeslé."

Marie Desmare (1644-1698), known as Mademoiselle Champmeslé, made her first appearance in 1669, and created the title-rôle in Racine's _Iphigénie_ in 1674, under the poet's directions.--T.

[420] Anne Pierre Adrien Prince de Montmorency, later Duc de Laval (1767-1837), French Ambassador successively in Madrid (1814), Rome (1821), Vienna (1828), and London (1829). He became a member of the Chamber of Peers in 1820, in succession to his father, deceased, and resigned his peerage, together with his diplomatic functions, in 1830.--B.

[421] Étienne Antoine de Boulogne (1747-1825) was made Bishop of Troyes by Napoleon in 1808. In 1811, Bonaparte imprisoned him at Vincennes, until 1814, for protesting against the arrest of Pope Pius VII. He resumed his see under the Restoration, became Archbishop of Vienne in 1817, and was raised to the peerage in 1822.--T.

[422] Charles Pineau Duclos (1704-1772), admitted to the French Academy in 1747, and appointed its perpetual secretary in 1755, was author of the _Considérations sur le Mœurs_, etc., and took the leading part in the editing of the Dictionary.--T.

[423] Charles François Dupuis (1742-1809), member of the Institute and of the Academy of Inscriptions, and author of the _Origine de tous les cultes, ou la Religion universelle._--T.

[424] Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715-1771), one of the leaders of the French philosophy of the eighteenth century, and author of the book _De l'Esprit_ (1758), condemned by the Sorbonne, the Pope, and the Parliament of Paris, and burned by the public hangman in 1759.--T.

[425] Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), perpetual secretary of the Academy of Science, and a principal contributor to the Encyclopædia. The best known of his voluminous works is the _Esquisse des progrès de l'esprit humain._ He was arrested as a Girondin, and poisoned himself in prison (28 March 1794).--T.

[426] Christophe de Beaumont (1703-1781), successively Bishop of Bayonne, Archbishop of Vienne, and Archbishop of Paris (1746), the redoubtable adversary of both the Jansenists and Philosophers.--T.

[427] In Nos. 27, 28, and 29 of the Year X. (1802) of the _Décade philosophique, littéraire et politique._ The articles were subsequently collected into a pamphlet.--B.

[428] It was published on the 24th of Germinal Year X. (14 April 1802), by Migneret, 28, rue du Sépulcre, Faubourg Saint-Germain and Le Normant, 43, rue des Prêtres-Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, in five volumes 8vo (the fifth volume consisting entirely of notes and elucidations), with the title, _Génie du Christianisme, ou Beautés de la religion chrétienne_, by François Auguste Chateaubriand. The first page of each volume bore the following epigraph, suppressed in the later editions:

"Chose admirable! la religion chrétienne, qui ne semble avoir d'objet que la félicité de l'autre vie, fait encore notre bonheur dans celle-ci."

MONTESQUIEU, _Esprit des Lois_, XXIV., iii.--B.

[429] Baruch, or Benedict, Spinoza (1632-1677), the Portuguese-Jewish philosopher of Amsterdam. His system of pantheism is set forth in his _Ethica_ and other works.--T.

[430] Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) was born a Protestant, became a Catholic, and then a professional sceptic. His reputation rests upon his famous _Dictionnaire historique et critique_ (1697), with which he paved the way for Voltaire and his friends.--T.

[431] Claude Henri Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) was the founder of a sect, based upon more or less Socialistic principles, extinguished by ridicule, and finally dissolved by the Courts for its attacks upon public morals in 1833. Its author attempted suicide in 1823, but escaped with the loss of an eye.--T.

[432] Charles Fourier (1768-1837) was the author of the Phalansterian movement, based upon the Communistic principle.--T.

[433] The system maintaining the simple humanity of Christ, and denying His divinity.--T.

[434] Publius Licinius Gallienus, Roman Emperor (233-268), gave leave to Plotinus to build a town in Campania, to be recalled Platonopolis; but the project fell through.--T.

[435] Plotinus (_circa_ 205--_circa_ 270) opened his school of Neo-Platonic philosophy in Rome about the year 245.--T.

[436] Attila, King of the Huns (_d._ 453), when descending into Italy in 452 after his defeat in France, was stopped outside Rome by Pope St. Leo the Great, who persuaded him to return back after exacting a tribute from the Emperor Valentinian III.--T.

[437] Henri Benjamin Constant de Rebecque (1767-1830), the well-known publicist and Liberal politician.--T.

[438] Népomucène Louis Lemercier (1772-1840), a member of the French Academy, and author of a number of plays and poems all of a remarkable character. The finest is his tragedy of Agamemnon. He was one of the first to break through Boileau's rule of the three unities in dramatic literature.--T.

[439] Pierre Simon Marquis de Laplace (1749-1827), a profound geometrician and a _protégé_ of d'Alembert, was Minister of the Interior for six weeks after the 18 Brumaire, entered the Senate in 1799, and became President of that body. He was a member of the French Academy, and was created a marquis and a peer by Louis XVIII. on becoming its President (1817).--T.

[440] Joseph Louis Comte Lagrange (1736-1813), another famous mathematician. He was for twenty years President of the Berlin Academy (1766-1786). Napoleon made him a Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, a count, and a senator. He and Laplace may be said to have completed Newton's work.--T.

[441] Gaspard Monge, Comte de Péluse (1746-1818), a member of the Academy of Science, was for a month Minister of Marine under the Revolution (1792). During the wars of the Republic he devoted his knowledge to elaborating the national means of defense, was one of the founders of the Polytechnic School, accompanied Bonaparte to Egypt, and became President of the Cairo Institute. Napoleon gave him his title, created him a senator, and loaded him with honours, all of which he lost at the Restoration.--T.

[442] Jean Antoine Chaptal, Comte de Chanteloup (1756-1832), a distinguished chemist and statesman. He was placed at the head of the gunpowder factory at Grenelle in 1793, and there displayed an incredible activity. In 1798 he became one of the original members of the Institute, Minister of the Interior in 1800, a senator in 1805, and a peer of France under the Restoration (1819).--T.

[443] Claude Louis Comte Berthollet (1748-1822), another celebrated chemist, worked with Monge and Chaptal in the fabrication of gunpowder and the multiplication of the means of defense during the Republican wars. He also accompanied Bonaparte to Egypt, where he made many important researches. The Emperor made him a senator in 1805, and he received his peerage under the Restoration.--T.

[444] Constantine I. Emperor of the West (274-337), known as Constantine the Great, was converted, by a sign of the Cross in the sky, in the year 312.--T.

[445] Ps. XXIII. 7, 9.--T.