BOOK VII[1

I go to see my mother--Saint-Malo--Progress of the Revolution--My marriage--Paris--Old acquaintances and new--The Abbé Barthélemy--Saint-Ange--The theatres--Changes in Paris--The Club des Cordeliers--Marat--Danton--Camille Desmoulins--Fabre d'Églantine--M. de Malesherbes' opinion on the emigration--I play and lose--Adventure of the hackney-coach--Madame Roland--Barère at the Hermitage--Second Federation of the 14th of July--Preparations for the emigration--I emigrate with my brother--Adventure of Saint-Louis--We cross the frontier--Brussels--Dinner at the Baron de Breteuil's--Rivarol--Departure for the army of the Princes--The journey--I meet the Prussian army--I arrive at Trèves--The Army of the Princes--A Roman amphitheatre--_Atala_--The shirts of Henry IV.--A soldier's life--Last appearance of old military France--Commencement of the siege of Thionville--The Chevalier de La Baronnais--Continuation of the siege--A contrast--Saints in the woods--Battle of Bouvines--A patrol--An unexpected encounter--Effects of a cannon-ball and a shell--Market in camp--Night amid piled arms--The Dutch dog--A recollection of the _Martyrs_--The nature of my company--With the outposts--Eudora--Ulysses--Passage of the Moselle--A fight--Libba, the deaf and dumb girl--Assault of Thionville--The siege is raised--We enter Verdun--The Prussian evil--The retreat--Smallpox--The Ardennes--The Prince de Ligne's baggage-wagons--The women of Namur--I meet my brother at Brussels--Our last farewell--Ostend--I take passage for Jersey--I land at Guernsey--The pilot's wife--Jersey--My uncle de Bedée and his family--Description of the island--The Duc de Berry--Lost friends and relations--The misfortune of growing old--I go to England--Last meeting with Gesril.

I wrote to my brother in Paris giving him particulars of my crossing, telling him the reasons for my return, and asking him to lend me the money wherewith to pay my passage. My brother answered that he had forwarded my letter to my mother. Madame de Chateaubriand did not keep me waiting: she enabled me to clear my debt and to leave the Havre. She told me that Lucile was with her, also my uncle de Bedée and his family. This intelligence persuaded me to go to Saint-Malo, so that I might consult my uncle on the question of my proposed emigration.

Revolutions are like rivers: they grow wider in their course; I found that which I had left in France enormously swollen and overflowing its banks: I had left it with Mirabeau under the "Constituent," I found it with Danton[2] under the "Legislative[3]" Assembly.

The Treaty of Pilnitz, of the 27th of August 1791, had become known in Paris. On the 14th of December 1791, while I was being tossed by the storms, the King announced that he had written to the Princes of the Germanic Body, and in particular to the Elector of Trèves, touching the German armaments. The brothers of Louis XVI., the Prince de Condé, M. de Calonne, the Vicomte de Mirabeau, and M. de Laqueville[4] were almost immediately impeached. As early as the 9th of November, a previous decree had been hurled against the other Emigrants: it was to enter these ranks, already proscribed, that I was hastening; others might perhaps have retreated, but the threats of the stronger have always made me take the side of the weaker: the pride of victory is unendurable to me.

On my way from the Havre to Saint-Malo I was able to observe the divisions and misfortunes of France: the country-seats were burnt and abandoned; the owners, to whom distaffs had been sent, had left; the women were living sheltered in the towns. The hamlets and small market-towns groaned under the tyranny of clubs affiliated to the central Club des Cordeliers, since amalgamated with the Jacobins. The antagonist of the latter, the Société Monarchique, or des Feuillants, no longer existed; the vulgar nickname of _sans-culotte_ had become popular; the King was never spoken of save as "Monsieur Veto" or "Monsieur Capet."

[Sidenote: My marriage.]

I was tenderly welcomed by my mother and my family, although they deplored the inopportune moment which I had selected for my return. My uncle, the Comte de Bedée, was preparing to go to Jersey with his wife, his son, and his daughters. It was a question of finding money to enable me to join the Princes. My American journey had made a breach in my fortune; my property was reduced to almost nothing, where my younger son's portion was concerned, through the suppression of the feudal rights; and the benefices that were to accrue to me by virtue of my affiliation to the Order of Malta had fallen, with the remainder of the goods of the clergy, into the hands of the nation. This conjuncture of circumstances decided the most serious step in my life: my family married me in order to procure me the means of going to get killed in support of a cause which I did not love.

There was living in retirement, at Saint-Malo, M. de Lavigne[5], a knight of Saint-Louis, and formerly Commandant of Lorient. The Comte d'Artois had stayed with him there when he visited Brittany: the Prince was charmed with his host, and promised to grant him any favour he might at any time demand. M. de Lavigne had two sons: one of them[6] married Mademoiselle de La Placelière. Two daughters, born of this marriage, were left orphans on both sides at a tender age. The elder married the Comte du Plessix-Parscau[7], a captain in the Navy, the son and grandson of admirals, himself to-day a rear-admiral, a red ribbon[8] and commander of the corps of naval cadets at Brest; the younger[9] was living with her grandfather, and was seventeen years of age when I arrived at Saint-Malo on my return from America. She was white, delicate, slender and very pretty: she wore her beautiful fair hair, which curled naturally, hanging low like a child's. Her fortune was valued at five or six hundred thousand francs.

My sisters took it into their heads to make me marry Mademoiselle de Lavigne, who had become greatly attached to Lucile. The affair was managed without my knowledge. I had seen Mademoiselle de Lavigne three or four times at most; I recognised her at a distance on the "Furrow" by her pink pelisse, her white gown and her fair hair blown out by the wind, when I was on the beach abandoning myself to the caresses of my old mistress, the sea. I felt myself to possess none of the good qualities of a husband. All my illusions were alive, nothing was spent within me; the very energy of my existence had doubled through my travels. I was racked by the muse. Lucile liked Mademoiselle de Lavigne, and saw the independence of my fortune in this marriage:

"Have your way!" said I.

In me the public man is inflexible; the private man is at the mercy of whomsoever wishes to seize hold of him, and, to save myself an hour's wrangling, I would become a slave for a century.

The consent of the grandfather, the paternal uncle and the principal relatives was easily obtained: there remained to be overcome the objections of a maternal uncle, M. de Vauvert[10], a great democrat, who opposed the marriage of his niece with an aristocrat like myself, who was not one at all. We thought ourselves able to do without him, but my pious mother insisted that the religious marriage should be performed by a "non-juror" priest, which could only be done in secret. M. de Vauvert knew this, and let loose the law upon us, under pretext of rape and breach of the laws, and pleading the imaginary state of second childhood into which the grandfather, M. de Lavigne, had fallen. Mademoiselle de Lavigne, who had become Madame de Chateaubriand, without my having held any communication with her, was taken away in the name of the law and put into the Convent of Victory at Saint-Malo, pending the decision of the courts.

There was no rape, breach of the laws, adventure, nor love in the whole matter; the wedding had only the bad side of a novel: truth. The case was tried and the court pronounced the marriage civilly valid. The members of both families being in agreement, M. de Vauvert abandoned the proceedings. The constitutional clergyman, lavishly feed, withdrew his protest against the first nuptial benediction, and Madame de Chateaubriand was released from the convent, where Lucile had imprisoned herself with her.

It was a new acquaintance that I had to make, and it brought me all that I could wish. I doubt whether a finer intelligence than my wife's has ever existed: she guesses the thought and the word about to spring to the brow or the lips of the person with whom she converses; to deceive her is impossible. Madame de Chateaubriand has an original and cultured mind, writes most cleverly, tells a story to perfection, and admires me without ever having read two lines of my works: she would dread to find ideas in them that differ from hers, or to discover that people are not sufficiently enthusiastic over my merit. Although a passionate judge, she is well-informed and a good judge.

Madame de Chateaubriand's defects, if she have any, proceed from the superabundance of her good qualities; my own very serious defects result from the sterility of mine. It is easy to possess resignation, patience, a general obligingness, equanimity of temper, when one interests himself in nothing, when one is wearied by everything, when one replies to good and bad fortune alike with a desperate and despairing "What does it matter?"

Madame de Chateaubriand is better than I, although less accessible in her intercourse with others. Have I been irreproachable in my relations with her? Have I offered my companion all the sentiments which she deserved and which were hers by right? Has she ever complained? What happiness has she tasted in reward for her consistent affection? She has shared my adversities; she has been plunged into the prisons of the Terror, the persecutions of the Empire, the disgraces of the Restoration; she has not known the joys of maternity to counterbalance her sufferings. Deprived of children, which she might perhaps have had in another union, and which she would have loved madly; having none of the honours and affections which surround the mother of a family and console a woman for the loss of her prime, she has travelled, sterile and solitary, towards old age. Often separated from me, disliking literature, to her the pride of bearing my name makes no amends. Timid and trembling for me alone, she is deprived, through her ever-renewed anxiety, of sleep and of the time to cure her ills: I am her chronic infirmity and the cause of her relapses. Can I compare an occasional impatience which she has shown me with the cares which I have caused her? Can I set my good qualities, such as they are, against her virtues, which support the poor, which have established the Infirmerie de Marie-Thérèse in the face of all obstacles? What are my labours beside the works of that Christian woman? When the two of us appear before God, it is I who shall be condemned.

Upon the whole, when I consider my nature with all its imperfections, is it certain that marriage has spoilt my destiny?

I should no doubt have had more leisure and repose; I should have been better received in certain circles and by certain of the great ones of this earth; yet in politics, though Madame de Chateaubriand may have crossed me, she never checked me, for here, as in matters affecting my honour, I judge only by my own feeling. Should I have produced a greater number of works if I had remained independent, and would those works have been any better? Have there not been circumstances, as shall be seen, in which, by marrying outside France, I should have ceased to write and disowned my country? If I had not married, would not my weakness have made me the prey of some worthless creature? Should not I have squandered and polluted my days like Lord Byron[11]? To-day, when I am sinking into old age, all my wildness would have passed; nothing would remain to me but emptiness and regrets: I should be an old bachelor, unesteemed, either deceived or undeceived, an old bird repeating my worn-out song to whosoever refused to listen to it. The full indulgence of my desires would not have added one string more to my lyre, nor one more earnest note to my voice. The constraint of my feelings, the mystery of my thoughts have perhaps increased the forcefulness of my accents, quickened my works with an internal fever, with a hidden flame, which would have spent itself in the free air of love. Held back by an indissoluble tie, I purchased at first, at the cost of a little bitterness, the sweets which I taste to-day. Of the ills of my existence I have preserved only the incurable part. I therefore owe an affectionate and eternal gratitude to my wife, whose attachment has been as touching as it has been profound and sincere. She has rendered my life more grave, more noble, more honourable, by always inspiring me with respect for duty, if not always with the strength to perform it.

I was married at the end of March 1792, and on the 20th of April the Legislative Assembly declared war against Francis II.[12], who had just succeeded his father Leopold; on the 10th of the same month Benedict Labre[13] was beatified in Rome: there you have two different worlds. The war hurried the remaining nobles out of France. Persecutions were being redoubled on the one hand; on the other, the Royalists were no longer permitted to stay at home without being accounted as cowards: it was time for me to make my way to the camp which I had come so far to seek. My uncle de Bedée and his family took ship for Jersey, and I set out for Paris with my wife and my sisters Lucile and Julie.

[Sidenote: We go to Paris.]

We had secured an apartment in the little Hôtel de Villette, in the Cul-de-Sac Férou, Faubourg Saint-Germain. I hastened in search of my first friends. I saw the men of letters with whom I had had some acquaintance. Among new faces I noticed those of the learned Abbé Barthélemy[14] and the poet Saint-Ange[15]. The abbé modelled the _gynecœa_ of Athens too closely upon the drawing-rooms at Chanteloup. The translator of Ovid was not a man without talent; talent is a gift, an isolated thing: it can come together with other mental faculties, it can be separated from them. Saint-Ange supplied a proof of this; he made the greatest efforts not to be stupid, but was unable to prevent himself. A man whose pencil I admired and still admire, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre[16], was lacking in intelligence, and unfortunately his character was on a level with his intelligence. How many pictures in the _Études de la nature_ are spoilt by the writer's limited mind and want of elevation of soul.

Rulhière had died suddenly, in 1791[17], before my departure for America. I have since seen his little house at Saint-Denis, with the fountain and the pretty statue of Love, at the foot of which one reads these verses:

D'Egmont avec l'Amour visita cette rive: Une image de sa beauté Se peignit un moment sur l'onde fugitive: D'Egmont a disparu; l'Amour seul est resté[18].

When I left France the theatres of Paris were still ringing with the _Réveil d'Épiménide_[19], and with this stanza:

J'aime la vertu guerrière De nos braves défenseurs, Mais d'un peuple sanguinaire Je déteste les fureurs. À l'Europe redoutables, Soyons libres à jamais, Mais soyons toujours aimables Et gardons l'esprit français[20].

When I returned, the _Réveil d'Épiménide_ had been forgotten; and, if the stanza had been sung, the author would have been badly handled. _Charles IX._ was now the rage. The popularity of this piece depended principally upon the circumstances of the time: the tocsin, a nation armed with poniards, the hatred of the kings and the priests, all these offered a reproduction between four walls of the tragedy which was being publicly enacted. Talma, still at the commencement of his career, was continuing his successes.

While tragedy dyed the streets, the pastoral flourished on the stage; there was question of little but innocent shepherds and virginal shepherdesses: fields, brooks, meadows, sheep, doves, the golden age beneath the thatch, were revived to the sighing of the shepherd's pipe before the cooing Tirces and the simple-minded knitting-women who had but lately left that other spectacle of the guillotine. Had Sanson had time, he would have played Colin to Mademoiselle Théroigne de Méricourt's[21] Babet. The Conventionals plumed themselves upon being the mildest of men: good fathers, good sons, good husbands, they went out walking with the children, acted as their nurses, wept with tenderness at their simple games; they lifted these little lambs gently in their arms to show them the "gee-gees" of the carts carrying the victims to execution. They sang the praises of nature, peace, pity, kindness, candour, the domestic virtues; these devout philanthropists, with extreme sensibility, sent their neighbours to have their heads sliced off for the greater happiness of mankind.

*

[Sidenote: Paris in 1792.]

Paris in 1792 no longer presented the outward aspect of 1789 and 1790: one saw no longer the budding Revolution, but a people marching drunk to its destinies, across abysses and by uncertain roads. The appearance of the people was no longer tumultuous, curious, eager: it was threatening. In the streets one met none but frightened or ferocious figures, men creeping along the houses so as not to be seen, or others seeking their prey: timid and lowered eyes were turned away from you, or else harsh eyes were fixed on yours in order to sound and fathom you.

All diversity of costume had ceased; the old world kept in the background; men had donned the uniform cloak of the new world, a cloak which had become merely the last garment of the future victims. Already the social license displayed at the rejuvenation of France, the liberties of 1789, those fantastic and unruly liberties of a state of things which is engaged in self-destruction and which has not yet turned to anarchy were levelling themselves beneath the sceptre of the people; one felt the approach of a plebeian tyranny, fruitful, it is true, and filled with expectations, but also formidable in a manner very different from the decaying despotism of the old monarchy: for, the sovereign people being ubiquitous, when it turns tyrant the tyrant is ubiquitous; it is the universal presence of an universal Tiberius.

With the Parisian population was mingled an exotic population of cut-throats from the south; the advance-guard of the Marseillese, whom Danton was bringing up for the day's work of the 10th of August and the massacres of September, were recognisable by their rags, their bronzed complexions, their look of cowardice and crime, but of crime of another sun: _in vultu vitium._

In the Legislative Assembly there was no one whom I recognised; Mirabeau and the early idols of our troubles either were no more or had been hurled from their altars. In order to put together the thread of history broken by my journey in America, I must trace matters a little further back.

*

The flight of the King, on the 21st of June 1791, caused the Revolution to take an immense step forward. Brought back to Paris on the 25th of that month, he was then dethroned for the first time, since the National Assembly declared that its decrees would have the force of law without there being any need of royal sanction or acceptance. A high court of justice, anticipating the revolutionary tribunal, was established at Orleans. Thenceforward Madame Roland[22] demanded the head of the Queen, until such time as her own head should be demanded by the Revolution. The mob-gathering had taken place in the Champ de Mars, to protest against the decree which suspended the King from his functions instead of putting him upon his trial. The acceptance of the Constitution, on the 14th of September, had no calming effect. There was a question of declaring the dethronement of Louis XVI.; had this been done, the crime of the 21st of January would not have been committed; the position of the French people in relation to the monarchy and in the eyes of posterity would have been different. The Constituents who opposed the dethronement thought they were saving the Crown, whereas they undid it; those who thought to undo it by demanding the dethronement would have saved it. In politics the result is almost invariably the opposite of what is foreseen.

On the 30th of that same month of September 1791, the Constituent Assembly held its last sitting; the imprudent decree of the 17th of May previous, which prohibited the re-election of the retiring members, gave birth to the Convention. There is nothing more dangerous, more inadequate, more inapplicable to general affairs than resolutions appropriate to individuals or bodies of men, however honourable in themselves.

The decree of the 29th of September for regulating popular societies served only to make them more violent. This was the last act of the Constituent Assembly: it dissolved on the following day, bequeathing to France a revolution.

*

[Sidenote: The Legislative Assembly.]

The Legislative Assembly, installed on the 1st of October 1791, revolved within the whirlwind which was about to sweep away the living and the dead. Troubles stained the departments with blood; at Caen the people were surfeited with massacres and ate the heart of M. de Belsunce[23].

The King set his veto to the decree against the Emigrants and to that which deprived the non-juror ecclesiastics of all emolument. These lawful acts increased the excitement. Pétion had become Mayor of Paris[24]. The deputies preferred a bill of impeachment against the Emigrant Princes on the 1st of January 1792; on the 2nd, they fixed the commencement of the Year IV. of Liberty on that same 1st of January. About the 13th of February, red caps were seen in the streets of Paris, and the municipality ordered pikes to be manufactured. The manifesto of the Emigrants appeared on the 1st of March. Austria armed. Paris was divided into more or less hostile sections[25]. On the 20th of March 1792, the Legislative Assembly adopted the sepulchral piece of mechanism without which the sentences of the Terror could not have been executed; it was first tried on dead bodies, so that these might teach it its trade. One may speak of the instrument as of an executioner, since persons who were touched by its good services presented it with sums of money for its support[26]. The invention of the murder-machine, at the very moment when it had become necessary to crime, is a noteworthy proof of the intelligence of co-ordinate facts, or rather a proof of the hidden action of Providence when it proposes to change the face of empires.

Minister Roland had been summoned to the King's Council at the instigation of the Girondins[27]. On the 20th of April, war was declared against the King of Hungary and Bohemia[28]. Marat published the _Ami du peuple_ in spite of the decree by which he was stricken. The Royal German Regiment and the Berchiny Regiment deserted. Isnard[29] spoke of the perfidy of the Court, Gensonné[30] and Brissot[31] denounced the Austrian Committee. An insurrection broke out on the subject of the Royal Guard, which was disbanded[32]. On the 28th of May, the Assembly declared its sittings permanent. On the 20th of June, the Palace of the Tuileries was forced by the mob of the Faubourgs Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau, the pretext being the refusal of Louis XVI. to sanction the proscription of the priests; the King was in peril of his life. The country was declared in danger. M. de La Fayette was burnt in effigy. The federates of the second Federation were arriving; the Marseilleise, called up by Danton, were on the march: they entered Paris on the 30th of July and were billeted by Pétion at the Cordeliers.

*

By the side of the national tribune, two competing tribunes had sprung up: that of the Jacobins and that of the Cordeliers, then the more formidable because it sent members to the famous Commune of Paris and supplied it with means of action. If the formation of the Commune had not taken place, Paris, for want of a point of concentration, would have split up, and the various mayoralties become rival powers.

[Sidenote: The Club of Cordeliers.]

The Club des Cordeliers had its abode in the monastery, whose church was built in the reign of St Louis, in 1259[33], with funds paid as damages for a murder: in 1590 it became the resort of the most famous Leaguers. Certain places seem to be the laboratories of factions: "Intelligence was brought," says L'Estoile (12 July 1593), "to the Duc de Mayenne[34] of two hundred Cordeliers newly arrived in Paris, supplying themselves with arms and concerting with the Sixteen[35], who held council daily at the Cordeliers of Paris.... On that day the Sixteen, assembled at the Cordeliers, cast aside their arms."

The fanatics of the League had therefore handed down the monastery of the Cordeliers to our philosophical revolutionaries as a dead-house.

The pictures, the carved and painted images, the veils, the curtains of the convent had been pulled down; the basilica, flayed of its skin, presented its bare skeleton to the eye. In the apsis of the church, where the wind and the rain entered through the broken panes of the rose-windows, some joiners' benches served as a table for the president, when the sittings were held in the church. On these benches lay red caps, with which each speaker covered his head before ascending the tribune. The latter consisted of four buttressed stop-planks, crossed at their X by a single plank, like a scaffolding. Behind the president, together with a statue of Liberty, one saw so-called instruments of ancient justice, instruments whose place had been supplied by one other, the blood-machine, in the same way as complicated machinery has been replaced by the hydraulic ram. The Club des Jacobins _épurés_, or purged Jacobin Club, borrowed some of these arrangements of the Cordeliers.

*

The orators, who had met for purposes of destruction, were unable to agree in electing their leaders or in the methods to be employed; they treated each other as scoundrels, pickpockets, thieves, butchers, to the cacophony of the hisses and groans of their several groups of devils. Their metaphors were taken from the stock of murders, borrowed from the filthiest objects of every kind of sewer and dunghill, or drawn from the places consecrated to the prostitution of men and women. Gestures accentuated these figures of speech; everything was called by its name, with cynical indecency, in an obscene and impious pageantry of oaths and blasphemies. Destruction and production, death and generation, one distinguished naught else through the savage slang which deafened the ears. The speech-makers, with their shrill or thundering voices, had interrupters other than their opponents: the little brown owls of the cloisters without monks and the steeple without bells played in the broken windows, in the hope of booty; they interrupted the speeches. They were first called to order by the jingling of the impotent bell; but when they failed to stop their clamour, shots were fired at them to compel them to silence: they fell, throbbing, wounded and fatidical, in the midst of the pandemonium. Broken-down timber-work, rickety pews, ramshackle stalls, fragments of saints rolled and pushed against the walls, served as benches for the dirty, grimy, drunken, sweating spectators, in their ragged _carmagnoles_, with their shouldered pikes or bare crossed arms.

The most deformed of the band obtained the readiest hearing. Mental and bodily infirmities have played a part in our troubles: wounded self-love has made great revolutionaries.

*

Following this precedence of hideousness, there appeared in succession, mingled with the ghosts of the Sixteen, a series of gorgon heads. The former doctor of the Comte d'Artois' Bodyguards, the Swiss fœtus Marat[36], his bare feet in wooden clogs or hob-nailed shoes, was the first to hold forth, by virtue of his incontestable claims. Holding the office of "jester" at the Court of the people, he exclaimed, with an insipid expression and the smirk of trite politeness which the old bringing-up set on every face:

"People, you must cut off two hundred and seventy thousand heads!"

To this Caligula of the public places succeeded the atheistical shoemaker Chaumette[37]. He was followed by the "Attorney-General to the Lantern," Camille Desmoulins, a stuttering Cicero, a public counsellor of murders worn out with debauchery, a frivolous Republican with his puns and jokes, a maker of graveyard jests, who said that, in the massacres of September, "all had passed off orderly." He consented to become a Spartan, provided the making of the black broth was left to Méot the tavern-keeper[38].

Fouché[39], who had hastened up from Juilly or Nantes, studied disaster under those doctors: in the circle of wild beasts seated attentively round the chair he looked like a dressed-up hyena. He smelt the effluvium of the blood to come; already he inhaled the incense of the procession of asses and executioners, pending the day on which, driven from the Club des Jacobins as a thief, an atheist and an assassin, he should be chosen as a minister.

[Sidenote: Marat.]

When Marat had climbed down from his plank, that popular Triboulet[40] became the sport of his masters: they filliped him on the nose, trod on his feet, hustled him with "gee-ups," all of which did not prevent him from becoming the leader of the multitude, climbing to the clock of the Hôtel de Ville, sounding the tocsin for a general massacre, and triumphing in the revolutionary tribunal.

Marat, like Milton's Sin, was violated by death[41]: Chénier wrote his apotheosis, David[42] painted him in his blood-stained bath; he was compared to the divine Author of the Gospel. A prayer was dedicated to him: "Heart of Jesus, Heart of Marat; O Sacred Heart of Jesus, O Sacred Heart of Marat!" This heart of Marat had for a ciborium a costly pyx from the Royal Repository. In a grass-grown cenotaph, erected on the Place du Carrousel, were exhibited the divinity's bust, his bath, lamp, and inkstand. Then the wind changed: the unclean thing, poured from its agate urn into a different vase, was emptied into the sewer.

*

The scenes at the Cordeliers, of which I witnessed some three or four, were dominated and presided over by Danton, a Hun of Gothic stature, with a flat nose, outspread nostrils, furrowed jaws, and the face of a gendarme combined with that of a lewd and cruel attorney. In the shell of his church, as it were the skeleton of the centuries, Danton, with his three male furies, Camille Desmoulins, Marat, and Fabre d'Églantine[43], organized the assassinations of September. Billaud de Varennes[44] proposed to set fire to the prisons and burn all those inside; another Conventional voted that all the untried prisoners should be drowned; Marat declared himself in favour of a general massacre. Danton was besought to show mercy to the prisoners:

"----the prisoners!" he replied.

As author of the circular of the Commune, he invited free men to repeat in the departments the enormities perpetrated at the Carmelites and the Abbaye.

Let us consider history: Sixtus V.[45] pronounced the devotion of Jacques Clément[46] to be equal, for the salvation of mankind, to the mystery of the Incarnation, even as Marat was compared to the Saviour of the World; Charles IX.[47] wrote to the governors of provinces to imitate the St. Bartholomew[48] massacres, even as Danton summoned the patriots to copy the massacres of September. The Jacobins were plagiaries; they were still more so when they offered up Louis XVI. in imitation of Charles I.[49] As these crimes were connected with a great social movement, some have, very unaptly, imagined that those crimes produced the greatness of the Revolution, of which they were but the hideous _pasticcios_: while watching a fine nature suffering, passionate or systematic minds have admired only its convulsions.

Danton, more candid than the English, said:

"We will not try our King, we will kill him."

He also said:

"Those priests and nobles are not guilty, but they must die, because they are out of place; they trammel the movement of things and obstruct the future."

These words, beneath an appearance of horrible depth, possess no extent of genius, for they presume that innocence is nothing, and that moral order can be withdrawn from political order without causing the latter to perish, which is false.

[Sidenote: Danton.]

Danton had not the conviction of the principles he maintained; he had donned the revolutionary cloak only to make his fortune.

"Come and 'brawl' with us," he advised a young man: "when you have grown rich, you can do as you please."

He admitted that, if he had not sold himself to the Court, it was because it would not pay a high enough price for him: an instance of the effrontery of a mind that knows itself and a corruption that reveals itself open-mouthed.

Though inferior, even in ugliness, to Marat, whose agent he had been, Danton was superior to Robespierre, without, like the latter, having given his name to his crimes. He preserved the religious sense:

"We have not," he said, "destroyed superstition to establish atheism."

His passions might have been good ones, if only because they were passions. We must allow for character in the actions of men; culprits with heated imaginations like Danton seem, by reason of the very exaggeration of their sayings and doings, to be more froward than the cool-headed culprits, whereas in fact they are less so. This remark applies also to the people: taken collectively, the people is a poet, author and ardent actor of the piece which it plays or is made to play. Its excesses partake not so much of the instinct of a native cruelty as of the delirium of a crowd intoxicated with sights, especially when these are tragic: a thing so true that, in popular horrors, there is always something superfluous added to the picture and the emotion.

Danton was caught in the trap himself had laid. It availed him nothing to flick pellets of bread at his judges' noses, to reply nobly and courageously, to cause the tribunal to hesitate, to endanger and terrify the Convention, to reason logically upon crimes by which the very power of his enemies had been created, to exclaim, smitten with barren repentance, "It was I who instituted this infamous tribunal: I crave pardon for it of God and men!" a phrase which has been pilfered more than once. It was before being indicted before the tribunal that he should have declared its infamy.

It only remained to Danton to show himself as pitiless for his own death as he had been for that of his victims, to hold his head higher than the hanging knife: and this he did. From the stage of the Terror, where his feet stuck in the clotted blood of the previous day, after turning a glance of contempt and domination over the crowd, he said to the headsman:

"Show my head to the people; it is worth showing."

Danton's head remained in the executioner's hands, while the acephalous shade went to join the decapitated shades of his victims: a further instance of equality. Danton's deacon and sub-deacon, Camille Desmoulins and Fabre d'Églantine, died in the same manner as their priest.

[Sidenote: Camille Desmoulins.]

At a time when pensions were being paid to the guillotine, when one wore at the buttonhole of one's carmagnole, by way of a flower, a little guillotine in gold, or else a small piece of a guillotined person's heart; at a time when people shouted, "Hell for ever!" when they celebrated the joyful orgies of blood, steel and fury, when they toasted annihilation, when they danced the dance of the dead quite naked, so as not to have the trouble of undressing when about to join them; at that time one was bound in the end to come to the last banquet, the last pleasantry of sorrow. Desmoulins was invited to Fouquier-Tinville's[50] tribunal.

"What is your age?" asked the president.

"The age of the Sans-Culotte Jesus," replied Camille facetiously[51].

An avenging obsession compelled the assassins of Christians unceasingly to confess the name of Christ.

It would be unfair to forget that Camille Desmoulins dared to defy Robespierre and to atone for his errors by his courage. He gave the signal for the reaction against the Terror. A young and charming wife, full of energy, had, by making him capable of love, made him capable of virtue and sacrifice. Indignation instilled eloquence into the tribune's coarse and reckless irony: he attacked in the grand manner the scaffolds he had helped to erect. Adapting his conduct to his speech, he refused to consent to his execution; he struggled with the headsman in the tumbril, and arrived at the edge of the last gulf with his clothes half tom from his back.

Fabre d'Églantine, author of a play which will live[52], displayed, quite contrary to Desmoulins, a signal weakness. Jean Roseau, public executioner of Paris under the League, who was hanged for lending his offices to the assassins of the Président Brisson[53], could not bring himself to accept the rope. It seems that one does not learn how to die by killing others.

The debates at the Cordeliers established for me the fact of a state of society at the most rapid moment of its transformation. I had seen the Constituent Assembly commence the murder of the kingship in 1789 and 1790; I found the body, still quite warm, of the old monarchy handed over in 1792 to the legislative gut-workers: they disembowelled and dissected it in the cellars of their clubs, as the halberdiers cut up and burnt the body of the Balafré[54] in the garret of Blois Castle.

Of all the men whom I recall, Danton, Marat. Camille Desmoulins, Fabre d'Églantine, Robespierre, not one is alive. I met them for a moment on my passage between a nascent society in America and an expiring society in Europe; between the forests of the New World and the solitudes of exile: before I had reckoned a few months on foreign soil, those lovers of death had already spent themselves in her arms. At the distance at which I now find myself from their appearance, it seems to me as though, after descending into the infernal regions of my youth, I retain a confused recollection of the shades which I vaguely saw wander by the bank of Cocytus: they complete the varied dreams of my life, and come to be inscribed on my tablets of beyond the tomb.

*

It was a great pleasure to meet M. de Malesherbes again and speak to him of my old projects. I stated my plans for a second journey, which was to last nine years; all I had to do first was to take another little journey to Germany: I was to run to the Army of the Princes, and come back at a run to kill the Revolution; all this would be finished in two or three months, when I should hoist my sail and return to the New World, having got rid of a revolution and enriched myself by a marriage.

And yet my zeal exceeded my faith; I felt that the emigration was a stupidity and a madness:

"I was shaven on all hands," says Montaigne. "To the Ghibelin I was a Guelf, to Guelf a Ghibelin[55]."

My distaste for absolute monarchy left me with no illusions concerning the step I was taking. I cherished scruples, and, although resolved to sacrifice myself to honour, I desired to have M. de Malesherbes' opinion on the emigration. I found him much incensed: the crimes continued under his eyes had caused the friend of Rousseau to lose his political toleration; between the cause of the victims and that of the butchers he did not hesitate. He believed that anything was better than the existing state of things; he thought that, in my particular case, a man wearing the sword was bound to join the brothers of a King who was oppressed and delivered to his enemies. He approved of my returning to America, and urged my brother to go with me.

I raised the ordinary objections based upon the assistance of foreigners, the interests of the country, and so on. He replied and, passing from general arguments to details, quoted some awkward examples. He put before me the case of the Guelphs and Ghibhelinnes, relying on the troops of the Emperor and the Pope; in England, the barons rising against John Lackland. Finally, in our times, he quoted the case of the Republic of the United States imploring the assistance of France.

"In the same way," continued M. de Malesherbes, "the men most devoted to liberty and philosophy, the Republicans and Protestants, have never considered themselves to blame when they have borrowed a force which could ensure the victory of their opinion. Would the New World be free today without our gold, our ships, and our soldiers? I, Malesherbes, who am speaking to you, did not I, in 1776, receive Franklin, who came to renew the relations entered into by Silas Deane[56], and yet was Franklin a traitor? Was American liberty any the less honourable for being assisted by La Fayette and won by French grenadiers? Every government which, instead of securing the fundamental laws of society, itself transgresses the laws of equity, the rules of justice, ceases to exist, and restores man to the state of nature. It is then lawful to defend one's self as best one may, to resort to the means that appear most calculated to overthrow tyranny and to restore the rights of one and all."

[Sidenote: Talks with Malesherbes.]

The principles of natural right as set forth by the greatest publicists, developed by such a man as M. de Malesherbes, and supported by numerous historical examples, struck me without convincing me; I yielded in reality only to the impulse of my age, to the point of honour. I will add some more recent examples to those of M. de Malesherbes: during the Spanish War of 1823, the French Republican Party went to serve under the banner of the Cortès, and did not scruple to bear arms against its own country; in 1830 and 1831, the Poles and the constitutional Italians invoked the assistance of France, and the Portuguese of the "Charter" invaded their country with the aid of foreign money and foreign soldiers. We have two standards of weight and measurement: we approve in the case of one idea, one system, one interest, one man of that which we condemn in the case of another idea, another system, another interest, another man.

These conversations between myself and the illustrious defender of the King took place at my sister-in-law's; she had just given birth to a second son, to whom M. de Malesherbes stood god-father and gave his name, Christian. I was present at the baptism of this child, which was to see its father and mother only at an age at which life leaves no memory and appears at a distance like an ill-remembered dream. The preparations for my departure lagged. They had thought that they were making me contract a rich marriage: it appeared that my wife's fortune was invested in Church securities; the nation undertook to pay them after its own fashion. Not only that, but Madame de Chateaubriand had, with the consent of her trustees, lent the scrip of a large portion of these securities to her sister, the Comtesse du Plessix-Parscau, who had emigrated. Money was still wanting, therefore; it became necessary to borrow.

A notary procured ten thousand francs for us: I was taking them home to the Cul-de-sac Férou, in _assignats_, when, in the Rue de Richelieu, I met one of my old messmates in the Navarre Regiment, the Comte Achard. He was a great gambler; he proposed that we should go to the rooms of M----, where we could talk; the devil urged me: I went upstairs, I played, I lost all, except fifteen hundred francs, with which, full of remorse and humiliation, I climbed into the first coach that passed. I had never played before: play produced in me a sort of painful intoxication; if the passion had attacked me, it would have turned my brain. With half-disordered wits, I stepped out of the coach at Saint-Sulpice, and left my pocket-book behind, containing the remnant of my treasure. I ran home and said that I had left the ten thousand francs in a hackney-coach.

I went out again, turned down the Rue Dauphine, crossed the Pont-Neuf, feeling half inclined to throw myself into the water; I went to the Place du Palais-Royal, where I had taken the ill-omened vehicle. I questioned the Savoyards who watered the screws, and described my conveyance; they told me a number at random. The police commissary of the district informed me that that number belonged to a job-master living at the top of the Faubourg Saint-Denis. I went to the man's house; I remained all night in the stable, waiting for the hackney-coaches to return: a large number arrived in succession which were not mine; at last, at two o'clock in the morning, I saw my chariot drive in. I had hardly time to recognise my two white steeds, when the poor beasts, utterly worn out, dropped down upon the straw, stiff, their stomachs distended, their legs stretched out, as though dead.

The coachman remembered driving me. After me, he had taken up a citizen, whom he had set down at the Jacobins; after the citizen, a lady, whom he had taken to the Rue de Cléry, number 13; after that lady, a gentleman, whom he had put down at the Recollects in the Rue Saint-Martin. I promised the driver a gratuity, and, the moment daylight had come, set out on the discovery of my fifteen hundred francs, as I had gone in search of the North-West Passage. It seemed clear to me that the citizen of the Jacobins had confiscated them by right of his sovereignty. The young person of the Rue de Cléry averred that she had seen nothing in the coach. I reached the third station without any hope; the coachman gave a tolerably good description of the gentleman he had driven. The porter exclaimed:

"It's the Père So-and-so!"

He led me through the passages and the deserted apartments to a Recollect who had remained behind alone to make an inventory of the furniture of his convent. Seated on a heap of rubbish, in a dusty frock-coat, the monk listened to my story:

"Are you," he asked, "the Chevalier de Chateaubriand?"

"Yes," I replied.

"Here is your pocket-book," said he. "I would have brought it when I had finished: I found your address inside."

[Sidenote: An honest monk.]

It was this hunted and plundered monk, engaged in conscientiously counting up the relics of his cloister for his proscribes, who restored to me the fifteen hundred francs with which I was about to make my way to exile. Failing this small sum, I should not have emigrated: what should I have become? My whole life would have changed. I will be hanged if I would to-day move a step to recover a million.

This happened on the 16th of June 1792. Obeying the promptings of my instinct, I had returned from America to offer my sword to Louis XVI., not to associate myself with party intrigues. The disbanding of the King's new guard, of which Murat[57] was a member; the successive ministries of Roland[58], Dumouriez, Duport du Tertre[59]; the little conspiracies of the Court and the great popular risings filled me only with weariness and contempt. I heard much talk of Madame Roland, whom I never saw: her Memoirs show that she possessed an extraordinary strength of mind. She was said to be very agreeable: it remains to be known whether she was sufficiently so to make at all tolerable the cynicism of her unnatural virtues. Certainly the woman who, at the foot of the guillotine, asked for pen and ink to describe the last moments of her journey, to write down the discoveries she had made in the course of her progress from the Conciergerie to the Place de la Révolution, that woman displayed an absorption in futurity, a contempt for life, of which there are few examples. Madame Roland possessed character rather than genius: the first can give the second, the second cannot give the first.

On the 19th of June, I went to the Vale of Montmorency to visit the Hermitage of J. J. Rousseau: not that I delighted in the memories of Madame d'Épinay[60] and of that depraved and artificial society; but I wished to take leave of the solitude of a man whose morals were antipathetic to mine, although he himself was endowed with a talent whose accents stirred my youth. On the next day, the 20th of June, I was still at the Hermitage, and there met two men walking, like myself, in that deserted spot during the fatal day of the monarchy, indifferent as they were or might be, thought I, to the affairs of this world: one was M. Maret[61], of the Empire, the other M. Barère[62], of the Republic. The amiable Barère had come, far from the uproar, in his sentimental, philosophical way, to whisper soft revolutionary nothings to the shade of Julie. The troubadour of the guillotine, on whose report the Convention decreed that the Terror was the order of the day, escaped the same Terror by hiding in the head-basket; from the bottom of the bloody trough, beneath the scaffold, he was heard only to croak the word, "Death!" Barère belonged to the species of tigers which Oppian represents as born of the wind's light breath: _velocis Zephyri proles._

Ginguené, Chamfort, my old friends among the men of letters, were delighted with the 20th of June. La Harpe, continuing his lectures at the Lycée, shouted in a stentorian voice:

"Fools! To all the representations of the people you answered, 'Bayonets! Bayonets!' Well, you have them now, your bayonets!"

Although my travels in America had made a less insignificant personage of me, I was unable to rise to so great a height of principle and eloquence. Fontanes was in danger through his former connection with the Société Monarchique. My brother was a member of a club of _enragés._ The Prussians were marching by virtue of a convention between the Cabinets of Vienna and Berlin; a rather fierce engagement had already taken place between the French and Austrians near Mons. It was more than time for me to take a decision.

[Sidenote: My brother and I emigrate.]

My brother and I procured false passports for Lille: we were two wine-merchants and national guards of Paris, wearing the uniform and proposing to tender for the army supplies. My brother's valet, Louis Poullain, known as Saint-Louis, travelled under his own name; he came from Lamballe, in Lower Brittany, but was going to see his family in Flanders. The day of our emigration was settled for the 15th of July, the day after the second Federation. We spent the 14th in the Tivoli garden, with the Rosanbo family, my sisters and my wife. Tivoli belonged to M. Boutin[63], whose daughter had married M. de Malesherbes[64]. Towards the end of the day we saw a good many federates wandering about after disbanding; on their hats was written in chalk, "Pétion or death!" Tivoli, the starting-point of my exile, was to become a centre of amusements and fêtes. Our relations took leave of us without sadness; they were persuaded that we were going on a pleasure-trip. My recovered fifteen hundred francs seemed a treasure sufficient to bring me back in triumph to Paris.

On the 10th of July, at six o'clock in the morning, we climbed into the diligence: we had booked our seats in the front part, by the guard; the valet, whom we were supposed not to know, stuffed himself into the inside with the other passengers. Saint-Louis walked in his sleep; in Paris he used to go looking for his master at night, with his eyes open, but quite asleep. He used to undress my brother and put him to bed, sleeping all the time, answering, "I know, I know," to all that was said to him during his attacks, and waking only when cold water was thrown in his face: he was a man of about forty, nearly six feet high, and as ugly as he was tall. This poor fellow, who was very respectful by nature, had never served any master except my brother; he was quite confused when he had to sit down to table with us at supper. The passengers, great patriots all, talking of hanging the aristocrats from the lanterns, increased his dismay. The thought that, at the end of all this, he would be obliged to pass through the Austrian Army, in order to fight in the Army of the Princes, completely turned his brain. He drank heavily and climbed into the diligence again; we went back to the coupé.

In the middle of the night we heard the passengers shouting, with their heads out of the windows:

"Stop, postilion, stop!"

They stopped, the door of the diligence was opened, and immediately male and female voices exclaimed:

"Get down, citizen, get down! We can't stand this! Get down, you beast! He's a brigand! Get down, get down!"

We got down too, and saw Saint-Louis hustled, flung out of the coach, stand up, turn his wide-open but sleeping eyes around him, and take to flight in the direction of Paris, without his hat, and as fast as his legs would carry him. We were unable to acknowledge him, or we should have betrayed ourselves; we had to leave him to his fate. He was caught and taken up at the first village, and stated that he was the servant of M. le Comte de Chateaubriand, and that he lived in the Rue de Bondy, Paris. The rural police passed him on from brigade to brigade to the Président de Rosanbo's; the unhappy man's depositions served to prove our emigration, and to send my brother and sister-in-law to the scaffold.

The next day, when the diligence stopped for breakfast, we had to listen to the whole story a score of times:

"That man had a perturbed imagination; he was dreaming out loud; he said strange things; he was no doubt a conspirator, an assassin fleeing from justice."

The well-bred citizenesses blushed and waved large green-paper "Constitutional" fans. We easily recognised through these stories the effects of somnambulism, fear and wine.

[Sidenote: We cross the frontier.]

On reaching Lille, we went in search of the person who was to take us across the frontier. The Emigration had its agents of safety who eventually became agents of perdition. The monarchical party was still powerful, the question undecided: the weak and cowardly served, while awaiting the turn of events. We left Lille before the gates were closed: we stopped at a remote house, and did not start until ten o'clock at night, when it was quite dark; we carried nothing with us; we had a little cane in our hands; it was no more than a year since I, in the same way, followed my Dutchman in the American forests.

We crossed cornfields through which wound hardly traceable footpaths. The French and Austrian patrols were beating the country-side: we were liable to fall in with either, or to find ourselves in front of the pistols of a vedette. We saw single horsemen in the distance, motionless, weapon in hand; we heard the hoofs of horses in the hollow roads; laying our ears against the ground, we heard the regular tramp of infantry marching. After three hours spent alternately in running and in creeping along on tiptoe, we reached a cross-road in a wood where some belated nightingales were singing. A troop of uhlans, posted behind a hedge, fell upon us with raised sabres. We shouted:

"Officers going to join the Princes!"

We asked to be taken to Tournay, saying we were in a position to make ourselves known. The officer in command placed us between his troopers and carried us off. When day broke, the uhlans perceived our national guards' uniforms under our surtouts, and insulted the colours in which France was soon to dress her vassal, Europe.

In Tournaisis, the primitive kingdom of the Franks, Clovis resided during the early years of his reign; he set out from Tournay with his companions, summoned as he was to the conquest of the Gauls: "Arms always have right on their side," says Tacitus. Through this town, from which, in 486, the first King of the First Race[65] rode to found his long and mighty monarchy, I passed in 1792 to go and join the Princes of the Third Race on foreign soil, and I passed through it again in 1815, when the last King of the French abandoned the kingdom of the first King of the Franks: _omnia migrant._

When we reached Tournay, I left my brother to grapple with the authorities, and in the custody of a soldier visited the cathedral. In days of old, Odo of Orleans, the scholasticus of the cathedral, seated at night before the church porch, taught his disciples the course of the planets, and pointed out to them the Milky Way and the stars. I would rather have found this artless eleventh-century astronomer at Tournay than the Pandours. I delight in those days in which the chronicles tell me, under the year 1049, that, in Normandy, a man had been transformed into a donkey: that was like to have happened to me, as the reader knows, at the house of the Demoiselles Couppart, who taught me to read. Hildebert[66], in 1114, saw a girl from whose ears grew spikes of corn: perhaps it was Ceres. The Meuse, which I was soon to cross, was suspended in mid-air in the year 1118, as witness Guillaume de Nangis[67] and Albéric[68]. Rigord[69] assures us that, in 1194, between Compiègne and Clermont in Beauvoisis, there fell a storm of hail, mixed with ravens which carried charcoal and caused a fire. If the tempest, as Gervase of Tilbury[70] tells us, was unable to extinguish a candle on the window-sill of the priory of Saint-Michel "de Camissa," we also know through him that, in the Diocese of Uzès, there was a fair and clear spring which changed its place when anything unclean was thrown into it: our latter-day consciences do not put themselves out for so little.

Reader, I am not wasting time; I am chatting with you to keep you in patience while waiting for my brother, who is arranging things: here he comes, after explaining himself to the satisfaction of the Austrian commander. We have leave to go on to Brussels, an exile purchased with too much care and trouble.

*

[Sidenote: Brussels.]

Brussels was the head-quarters of the upper Emigration: the most elegant women of Paris and the most fashionable men, those who were able to march only as aides-de-camp, were awaiting amid pleasures the moment of victory. They had fine brand-new uniforms; they paraded the very pedantry of frivolity. Considerable sums, enough to keep them for a few years, were squandered in a few days: it was not worth while economizing, since we should be in Paris directly. Those gallant knights, reversing the practice of the olden chivalry, were preparing for glory with successes in love. They scornfully watched us trudging on foot, knapsack on back, small provincial gentlemen that we were, or poor officers turned into private soldiers. Those Hercules sat at the feet of their Omphales spinning the distaffs which they had sent us and which we handed back to them as we passed, contenting ourselves with our swords.

In Brussels I found my scanty luggage, which had fraudulently passed the customs ahead of me: it consisted of my Navarre uniform, a little linen, and my precious papers, with which I could not part. I was invited with my brother to dine at the Baron de Breteuil's; I there met the Baronne de Montmorency, then young and beautiful, at this moment dying; martyr bishops in watered-silk cassocks and gold crosses; young magistrates transformed into Hungarian colonels; and Rivarol, whom I saw only once in my life. His name had not been mentioned; I was struck by the conversation of a man who held forth all alone and was listened to, with some right, as an oracle. Rivarol's wit was prejudicial to his talent, as his tongue was to his pen. Talking of revolutions, he said:

"The first blow aims at God, the second strikes only a senseless slab of marble."

I had resumed my uniform of a petty infantry subaltern; I was to start on rising from dinner, and my knapsack was behind the door. I was still bronzed by the American sun and the sea air; I wore my hair uncurled and unpowdered. My face and my silence troubled Rivarol; the Baron de Breteuil, perceiving his restless curiosity, satisfied it:

"Where does your brother the chevalier come from?" he asked my brother.

I answered:

"From Niagara."

Rivarol cried:

"From the cataract!"

I was silent. He hazarded an uncompleted question:

"Monsieur is going----?"

"Where they are fighting," I broke in.

We rose from table.

This fatuous Emigrant society was hateful to me; I was eager to see my peers, Emigrants like myself with six hundred francs a year. We were very stupid, no doubt, but at least we aired our sword-blades, and, if we had obtained any successes, we should have been the last to profit by victory.

My brother remained at Brussels with the Baron de Montboissier[71], who appointed him his aide-de-camp; I set out alone for Coblentz.

There is no more historic road than that which I followed; it recalled in every part some memory or greatness of France. I passed through Liège, one of those municipal republics which so often rose against their bishops or against the Counts of Flanders. Louis XI.[72], the ally of the Liégeois, was obliged to assist at the sack of their town in order to escape from his ridiculous prison of Péronne. I was about to join and to become one of the soldiers who glory in such things. In 1792, the relations between Liège and France were more peaceful: the Abbot of Saint-Hubert was obliged every year to send two hounds to King Dagobert's successors.

At Aix-la-Chapelle there was another offering, but on the part of France: the pall that had served at the funeral of a Most Christian King was sent to the tomb of Charlemagne as a vassal banner to the lord's fief. Our kings thus did fealty and homage on taking possession of the inheritance of Eternity: laying their hands between the knees of their liege-lady, Death, they swore to be faithful to her, after pressing the feudal kiss on her mouth. This, however, was the only suzerain of whom France acknowledged herself the vassal.

The Cathedral of Aix-la-Chapelle was built by Karl the Great and consecrated by Leo III[73]. Two prelates failing to attend the ceremony, their places were filled by two Bishops of Maastricht, long deceased, and resuscitated for the purpose. Charlemagne, having lost a beautiful mistress, pressed her body in his arms and refused to be separated from it. His passion was attributed to a charm: the young corpse was examined, and a tiny pearl found beneath the tongue. The pearl was flung into a marsh; Charlemagne became madly enamoured of the marsh, and ordered it to be filled up: there he built a palace and a church, to spend his life in one and his death in the other. The authorities here are Archbishop Turpin[74] and Petrarch[75].

At Cologne I admired the cathedral: if it were finished, it would be the finest Gothic monument in Europe. The monks were the painters, the sculptors, the architects, and the masons of their basilicas; they gloried in the title of master-mason, _cœmentarius._ It is curious to hear ignorant philosophers and chattering democrats cry out to-day against the monks, as though those frocked proletarians, those mendicant orders to whom we owe almost everything, had been gentlemen!

Cologne reminded me of Caligula[76] and St. Bruno[77]; I have seen the remains of the dykes built by the former at Baiæ, and the deserted cell of the latter at the Grande Chartreuse.

I went up the Rhine as far as Coblentz: _Confluentia._ The Army of the Princes was no longer there. I crossed those empty kingdoms: _inania regna_; I saw the beautiful valley of the Rhine, the Tempe of the barbarian muses, where the knights appeared around the ruins of their castles, where one hears the clash of arms at night, when war is at hand.

[Sidenote: Frederic William II.]

Between Coblentz and Trèves, I fell in with the Prussian Army: I was passing along the column when, coming up with the guards, I noticed that they were marching in battle order, with cannon in line; the King[78] and the Duke of Brunswick[79] were in the centre of the square, composed of Frederic's old grenadiers. My white uniform caught the King's eye: he sent for me; the Duke of Brunswick and he took off their hats and saluted the old French Army in my person. They asked me my name, my regiment, the place where I was going to join the Princes. This military welcome touched me: I replied with emotion that, on learning in America of my King's misfortunes, I had returned to shed my blood in his service. The generals and officers surrounding Frederic William made a movement of approbation, and the Prussian sovereign said:

"Sir, one always recognises the sentiments of the French nobility."

He took off his hat again and stood uncovered and motionless, until I had disappeared behind the mass of the grenadiers. Nowadays people cry out against the Emigrants: they are "tigers who rent their mother's bosom;" at the time of which I speak, men loved the examples of old, and honour ranked as high as country. In 1792, fidelity to one's oath was still accounted a duty; to-day, it has become so rare that it is regarded as a virtue.

A strange scene, already rehearsed with others than myself, almost made me retrace my steps. They refused to admit me at Trèves, where the Army of the Princes was:

"I was one of those men who await the course of events before making up their minds; I ought to have joined the cantonment three years ago; I came when victory was assured. They had no use for me; they had only too many of those heroes after the battle. Every day, squadrons of cavalry were deserting; even the artillery was melting away in a body; and, if that went on, they would not know what to do with those people!"

O prodigious illusionment of parties!

I met my cousin Armand de Chateaubriand: he took me under his protection, assembled the Bretons and pleaded my cause. They sent for me; I made my explanation: I told them that I had come from America to have the honour of serving beside my comrades; that the campaign was opened, not commenced, so that I was still in time for the first fire; that, however, I would go back if they insisted, but not before I had obtained satisfaction for an undeserved insult. The matter was arranged: as I was a good fellow, the ranks were opened to receive me, and my only difficulty was to make my selection.

*

[Sidenote: The Emigrant army.]

The Army of the Princes was composed of gentlemen, classed by provinces and serving as private soldiers: the nobility was harking back to its origin and to the origin of the monarchy, at the very moment when both the nobility and monarchy were coming to an end, even as an old man returns to childhood. There were, moreover, brigades of Emigrant officers of different regiments, who had also become soldiers: among these were my messmates of Navarre, with their colonel, the Marquis de Mortemart, at their head. I was strongly tempted to enlist with La Martinière, even though he should still be in love; but Armorican patriotism won the day. I enrolled myself in the seventh Breton Company, commanded by M. de Goyon-Miniac[80]. The nobles of my province had furnished seven companies; to these was added an eighth consisting of young men of the Third Estate: the steel-grey uniform of this last company differed from that of the others, which was royal blue with ermine facings. Men attached to the same cause and exposed to the same dangers perpetuated their political inequalities by odious distinctions: the true heroes were the plebeian soldiers, since no consideration of personal interest entered into the sacrifice they made.

Enumeration of our little army:

Infantry of gentlemen-soldiers and officers; four companies of deserters, dressed in the different uniforms of the regiments from which they came; one company of artillery; a few officers of engineers, with some guns, howitzers, and mortars of various calibres (the artillery and engineers, almost all of whom embraced the cause of the Revolution, achieved its success across the borders). A very fine cavalry, consisting of German carabineers, musketeers under the command of the old Comte de Montmorin and naval officers from Brest, Rochefort, and Toulon, supported our infantry. The wholesale emigration of these last-named officers plunged naval France back into the condition of weakness from which Louis XVI. had extricated it. Never since the days of Duquesne and Tourville[81] had our squadrons covered themselves with more glory. My comrades were delighted: I had tears in my eyes when I saw pass before them those ocean dragons, who no longer commanded the ships with which they had humbled the English and delivered America. Instead of going in search of new continents to bequeath to France, these companions of La Pérouse sank into the mud of Germany. They rode the horse dedicated to Neptune; but they had changed their element, and the land was not for them. In vain their commander carried at their head the tattered ensign of the _Belle-Poule_, the sacred relic of the White Flag, from whose shreds honour still hung, but victory had fallen.

We had tents; we lacked all beside. Our muskets, of German make, trumpery weapons and frightfully heavy, broke our shoulders, and were often not in a condition to be fired. I went through the whole campaign with one of these firelocks, the hammer of which refused to fall.

We remained two days at Trèves. It was a great pleasure to me to see Roman ruins after having seen the nameless ruins of Ohio, to visit that town so often sacked, of which Salvianus[82] said:

"O fugitives from Trèves, you ask again for theatres, you demand a circus of the princes: for what State, I pray you; for what people, for what city? _Theatra igitur quæritis, circum a principibus postulatis? Cui, quæso, statut, cui populo, cui civitati?_"

Fugitives from France, where was the people for which we wished to restore the monuments of St. Louis?

I sat down, with my musket, among the ruins; I took from my knapsack the manuscript of my travels in America; I arranged the separate sheets on the grass around me; I read over and corrected a description of a forest, a passage of _Atala_, in the fragments of a Roman amphitheatre, preparing in this way to make the conquest of France. Then I put away my treasure, the weight of which, combined with that of my shirts, my cloak, my tin can, my wicker bottle, and my little Homer, made me throw up blood.

I tried to stuff _Atala_ into my cartridge-box with my useless ammunition; my comrades made fun of me, and pulled at the sheets which stuck out on either side of the leather cover. Providence came to my rescue: one night, after sleeping in a hay-loft, I found, when I woke, that my shirts were no longer in my sack; the thieves had left the papers. I praised God: that accident assured my "fame" and saved my life, for the sixty pounds that pressed upon my shoulders would have driven me into a consumption.

"How many shirts have I?" asked Henry IV. of his body-servant.

"One dozen, Sire, and some of them are torn."

"And of handkerchiefs, is it not eight that I have?"

"There are only five left now."

The Bearnese won the Battle of Ivry[83] without shirts; the loss of mine did not enable me to restore his kingdom to his descendants.

*

We received orders to march on Thionville. We did five to six leagues a day. The weather was terrible; we tramped through the rain and slush singing, _Ô Richard! ô mon roi!_ and _Pauvre Jacques!_[84] On arriving at the encamping-place, having neither wagons nor provisions, we went with donkeys, which followed the column like an Arab caravan, to hunt for food in the farms and villages. We paid for everything scrupulously; nevertheless I had to do fatigue duty for taking two pears from the garden of a country-house without thinking. A great steeple, a great river and a great lord are bad neighbours, says the proverb.

We pitched our tents at random, and were constantly obliged to beat the canvas in order to flatten out the threads and prevent the water from coming through. We were ten soldiers to every tent; each in turn took charge of the cooking: one went for meat, another for bread, another for wood, another for straw. I made wonderful soup; I received great compliments on it, especially when I mixed milk and cabbage with the stew, in the Breton way. I had learnt among the Iroquois not to mind smoke, so that I bore myself bravely before my fire of green and damp boughs. This soldier's life is very amusing; I imagined myself still among the Indians. As we sat at mess in our tent my comrades asked me for tales of my travels; they told me some fine stories in return; we all lied like a corporal in a tavern, with a conscript paying the reckoning.

One thing tired me: washing my linen; it had to be done, and often, for the obliging robber had left me only one shirt, borrowed from my cousin Armand, besides the one on my back. When I lay soaping my stockings, my pocket-handkerchiefs and my shirt by the edge of a stream, with my head down and my loins up, I was seized with fits of giddiness; the motion of the arms gave me an unbearable pain in the chest. I was obliged to sit down among the horsetails and watercress; and, in the midst of the stir of war, I amused myself by watching the water flow peacefully past. Lope de Vega[85] makes a shepherdess wash the bandage of Love; that shepherdess would have been very useful to me for a little birch-cloth turban which my Floridans had given me.

An army is generally composed of soldiers of nearly the same age, the same height, the same strength. Very different was ours, a jumbled gathering of grown men, old men, children fresh from the dovecot, jabbering Norman, Breton, Picard, Auvergnat, Gascon, Provençal, Languedocian. A father served with his sons, a father-in-law with his son-in-law, an uncle with his nephews, a brother with a brother, a cousin with a cousin. This _arrière ban_, ridiculous as it appeared, had something honourable and touching about it, because it was animated with sincere convictions; it presented the spectacle of the old monarchy and afforded a last glimpse of a dying world. I have seen old noblemen, with stern looks, grey hair, torn coats, knapsack on back, musket slung over the shoulder, drag themselves along with a stick and supported by the arm by one of their sons; I have seen M. de Boishue, the father of my schoolfellow killed at the States of Rennes in my sight, march solitary and sad, with his bare feet in the mud, carrying his shoes at the point of his bayonet for fear of wearing them out; I have seen young wounded men lie under a tree, while a chaplain, in surtout and stole, knelt by their side, sending them to St. Louis, whose heirs they had striven to defend. The whole of this needy band, which received not a sou from the Princes, made war at its own expense, while the decrees finished despoiling it and threw our wives and mothers into prison.

The old men of former times were less unhappy and less lonely than those of to-day: if, in lingering upon earth, they had lost their friends, there was but little changed around them besides; they were strangers to youth, but not to society. Nowadays, a lagger in this world has witnessed the death not only of men, but of ideas: principles, manners, tastes, pleasures, pains, opinions, none of these resemble what he used to know. He belongs to a race different from that among which he ends his days.

[Sidenote: Old France.]

And yet, O nineteenth-century France, learn to prize that old France which was as good as you. You will grow old in your turn and you will be accused, as we were accused, of clinging to obsolete ideas. The men whom you have vanquished are your fathers; do not deny them, you are sprung from their blood. Had they not been generously faithful to the ancient traditions, you would not have drawn from that native fidelity the energy which has been the cause of your glory in the new traditions: between the old France and the new, all that has happened is a transformation of virtue.

*

Near our poor and obscure camp was another which was brilliant and rich. At the staff, one saw nothing but wagons full of eatables, met with none save cooks, valets, aides-de-camp. Nothing could have better reproduced the Court and the provinces, the monarchy expiring at Versailles and the monarchy dying on Du Guesclin's heaths. We had grown to hate the aides-de-camp; whenever there was an engagement outside Thionville, we shouted, "Forward, the aides-de-camp!" just as the patriots used to shout, "Forward, the officers!"

I felt a chill at my heart when, arriving one dark day in sight of some woods that lined the horizon, we were told that those woods were in France. To cross the frontier of my country in arms had an effect upon me which I am unable to convey. I had, as it were, a sort of revelation of the future, inasmuch as I shared none of my comrades' illusions, either with regard to the cause they were supporting or the thoughts of triumph with which they deluded themselves: I was there like Falkland[86] in the army of Charles I. There was not a Knight of the Mancha, sick, lame, wearing a night-cap under his three-cornered beaver, but was most firmly convinced of his ability, unaided, to put fifty young and vigorous patriots to flight. This honourable and agreeable pride, at another time the source of prodigies, had not attacked me: I did not feel so sure of the strength of my invincible arm.

We reached Thionville unconquered on the 1st of September; for we had met nobody on the road. The cavalry encamped to the right, the infantry to the left of the high-road running from the town towards Germany. The fortress was not visible from the camping-ground, but, six hundred paces ahead, one came to the ridge of a hill whence the eye swept the Valley of the Moselle. The mounted men of the navy joined the right of our infantry to the Austrian corps of the Prince of Waldeck[87], while the left of the infantry was covered by 1800 horse of the Maison-Rouge and Royal German Regiments. We entrenched our front with a fosse, along which the arms were stalked in line. The eight Breton companies occupied two intersecting streets of the camp, and below us was dressed the company of the Navarre officers, my former messmates.

When these field-works, which took three days, were completed, Monsieur and the Comte d'Artois arrived; they reconnoitred the place, which was called upon in vain to surrender, although Wimpfen[88] seemed willing to do so. Like the Grand Condé[89], we had not won the Battle of Rocroi, and so we were not able to capture Thionville; but we were not beaten under its walls, like Feuquières[90]. We took up a position on the high-road, at the end of a village which formed a suburb of the town, outside the horn-work which defended the bridge over the Moselle. The troops fired at each other from the houses; our post remained in possession of those which it had taken. I was not present at this first action. Armand, my cousin, was there and behaved well. While they were fighting in the village, my company was requisitioned to establish a battery on the skirt of a wood which capped the summit of a hill. Along the slope of this hill, vineyards ran down to the plain joining the outer fortifications of Thionville.

[Sidenote: The siege of Thionville.]

The engineer directing us made us throw up a gazoned cavalier for our guns; we drew a parallel open trench to place us below the cannon-balls. These earthworks took long in making, for we were all, young officers and old alike, unaccustomed to wield the mattock and spade. We had no wheelbarrows and carried the earth in our coats, which we used as sacks. Fire was opened on us from a lunette; it was the more irksome to us in that we were unable to reply: eight-pounders and a Cohorn howitzer, which was outranged, formed all our artillery. The first shell we fired fell outside the glacis and aroused the jeers of the garrison. A few days later, we were joined by some Austrian guns and gunners. One hundred infantry men and a picket of the naval cavalry were relieved at this battery every twenty-four hours. The besieged prepared to attack it; we could distinguish a movement on the rampart through the telescope. When night fell, we saw a column issue through a postern and reach the lunette under shelter of the covert way. My company was ordered up as a reinforcement.

At daybreak, five or six hundred patriots began operations in the village, on the high-road above the town; then, turning to the left, they came through the vineyards to take our battery in flank. The sailors charged bravely, but were overthrown and unmasked us. We were too badly armed to return the fire; we pushed forward with fixed bayonets. The attacking party retreated, I know not why; had they held their ground, they would have wiped us out.

We had several wounded and a few dead, among others the Chevalier de La Baronnais[91], captain of one of the Breton companies. I brought him ill-luck: the bullet which took his life ricochetted against the barrel of my musket and struck him with such force as to pierce both his temples; his brains were scattered over my face. Noble and unnecessary victim of a lost cause! When the Maréchal d'Aubeterre[92] held the States of Brittany, he went to M. de La Baronnais, the father, a poor nobleman, living at Dinard, near Saint-Malo. The Marshal, who had begged him to invite nobody, saw, on entering, a table laid for twenty-five, and scolded his host in friendly fashion.

"Monseigneur," said M. de La Baronnais, "I have only my children to dinner."

M. de La Baronnais had twenty-two boys and a girl, all by the same mother. The Revolution reaped this rich family harvest before it was ripe.

*

Waldeck's Austrian corps began operations. The attack became livelier on our side. It was a fine spectacle at night: fire-pots lit up the works of the place covered with soldiers; sudden gleams struck the clouds or the blue firmament when the guns were fired, and the bombs, crossing each other in the air, described a parabola of light. In the intervals between the reports, one heard drums rolling, gusts of military music, and the voices of the sentries on the ramparts of Thionville and at our own posts; unfortunately, they called out in French in both camps:

"_Sentinelles, prenez garde à vous!_ All's well!"

When the fighting took place, at dawn, it would happen that the lark's morning hymn followed upon the sound of musketry, while the guns, which had ceased firing, silently stared at us, with gaping mouths, through the embrasures. The song of the bird, recalling the memories of pastoral life, seemed to utter a reproach to mankind. It was the same when I came across some dead bodies in the middle of fields of lucerne in flower, or by the edge of a stream of water which bathed the hair of the slain. In the woods, at a few steps from the stress of war, I found little statues of the Saints and the Virgin. A goat-herd, a neat-herd, a beggar carrying his wallet knelt beside these peace-makers, telling their beads to the distant sound of cannon. A whole township once came with its minister to present flowers to the patron of a neighbouring parish, whose image dwelt in a wood, opposite a spring. The curate was blind: a soldier in God's army, he had lost his sight in doing good works, like a grenadier on the battlefield. The vicar administered communion for his curate, because the latter could not have laid the consecrated wafer upon the lips of the communicants. During this ceremony, and from the depths of night, he blessed the light!

Our fathers believed that the patrons of the hamlets, John "the Silent[93]," Dominic "Loricatus[94]," James "Intercisus[95]," Paul "the Simple[96]," Basil "the Hermit[97]," and so many others, were no strangers to the triumph of the arms which protect the harvests. On the very day of the Battle of Bouvines[98], robbers broke into a convent dedicated to St. Germanus[99] at Auxerre, and stole the consecrated vessels. The sacristan went to the shrine of the blessed bishop and said plaintively:

"Germanus, where wert thou when those thieves dared to violate thy sanctuary?"

A voice issuing from the shrine replied:

"I was near Cisoing, not far from Bouvines Bridge; together with other saints, I was helping the French and their King, to whom a brilliant victory has been given by our aid: _cui fuit auxilio victoria præstita nostro._"

*

[Sidenote: Fierce fighting.]

We beat the plain and pushed as far as the hamlets lying under the first entrenchments of Thionville. The village on the high-road crossing the Moselle was constantly being captured and recaptured. I took part in two of these assaults. The patriots abused us as "enemies of liberty," "aristocrats" and "Capet's satellites." We called them "brigands," "murderers," "traitors" and "revolutionaries." Sometimes we stopped fighting while a duel took place in the midst of the combatants, who became impartial seconds: O strange French character, which even passions were unable to stifle!

One day, I was on patrol in a vineyard; twenty paces from me was an old sporting nobleman who banged the muzzle of his musket against the vine-stocks, as though to start a hare, and then looked sharply round, in the hope of seeing a "patriot" leap out: every one had brought his own habits with him.

Another day, I went to visit the Austrian camp. Between the camp and that of the naval cavalry, a wood spread its screen, against which the place was directing an inexpedient fire; the town was shooting too much, it believed us to be more numerous than we were, which explains the pompous bulletins of the commander of Thionville. While crossing this wood, I saw something move in the grass: a man lay stretched at full length with his nose against the ground, showing only his broad back. I thought he was wounded: I took him by the nape of the neck and half lifted his head. He opened a pair of terror-struck eyes and raised himself a little upon his hands. I burst out laughing: it was my cousin Moreau! I had not seen him since our visit to Madame de Chastenay.

He had lain flat on his stomach to escape a bomb, and found it impossible to get up again. I had all the difficulty in the world to set him on his legs; his paunch was three times its former size. He told me that he was serving on the commissariat, and that he was on his way to offer some oxen to the Prince of Waldeck. In addition to this, he carried a rosary. Hugues Métel[100] tells of a wolf which resolved to embrace the monastic condition, but which, failing to accustom itself to the fasting diet, became a canon.

As I returned to camp, an officer of engineers passed close by me, leading his horse by the bridle; a cannon-ball struck the animal in the narrowest part of the neck and cut it right off; the head and neck remained hanging in the officer's hand and dragged him to the ground with their weight. I had seen a bomb fall in the middle of a ring of naval officers who were sitting eating in a circle. The mess-platter disappeared; the officers, tumbling head over heels and run, as it were, on a sand-bank, shouted like the old sea captain:

"Fire starboard guns, fire larboard guns, fire all guns, fire my wig!"

These singular shots seem to pertain to Thionville. In 1558, François de Guise[101] laid siege to the place. Marshal Strozzi[102] was killed, "while talking in the trenches to the aforesaid Sieur de Guise, who had his hand on his shoulder at the time."

*

[Sidenote: Market in camp.]

A sort of market had been formed behind our camp. The peasants had brought octaves of white Moselle wine, which remained on the wagons: the horses were taken out and ate fastened to one end of the cart, while the soldiers drank at the other end. Here and there gleamed the fires of ovens. Sausages were fried in pans, hasty puddings boiled in basins, pancakes tossed on iron dishes, puffcakes swollen out on hampers. Cakes flavoured with aniseed, rye loaves at one sou, maize cakes, green apples, red and white eggs, pipes and tobacco were sold under a tree from whose branches hung coarse cloth great-coats, for which the passers-by haggled. Village women, seated astride portable stools, milked cows, while each presented his cup to the dairy-woman and waited his turn. Before the stoves roamed cutlers in smocks and soldiers in uniform. The canteen-women went about crying aloud in German and French. There were groups standing, others seated at deal tables planted askew on the uneven ground. One sought shelter at random under a packing cloth or under branches cut in the forest, as on Palm Sunday. I believe also that there were weddings in the covered wagons, in memory of the Frankish kings. The patriots could easily have followed Majorian's[103] example and carried away the bride's chariot: _Rapit esseda victor, nubentemque nurum._[104] All sang, laughed, smoked. The scene was extremely gay at night, between the fires which lit up the earth and the stars shining overhead.

When I was neither on guard at the batteries nor on duty in the tent, I liked supping at the fair. There the stories of the camp were told again; but under the influence of liquor and good cheer they became much finer. One of our fellows, a brevet-captain, whose name I have forgotten in that of "Dinarzade" which we gave him, was famous for his yarns; it would have been more correct to say "Scheherazade," but we were not so careful as that. As soon as we saw him, we ran up to him, fought for him: we vied with each other as to who should have him on his score. Short of body, long of leg, with sunk cheeks, drooping mustachios, eyebrows forming a comma at the outer angle, a hollow voice, a huge sword in a coffee-coloured scabbard, the carriage of a soldier poet, something between the suicide and the jolly dog, that solemn wag Dinarzade never laughed, and it was impossible to look at him without laughing. He was the necessary second in all the duels and the lover of all the barmaids. He viewed all he said on the dark side, and interrupted his recitals only to take a pull at a bottle, relight his pipe, or swallow a sausage.

One night, when it was drizzling, we were seated round the tap of a wine-cask tilted towards us in a cart with its shafts in the air. A candle stuck on the cask lighted us; a piece of packing-cloth, stretched from the end of the shafts to two posts, served us for a roof. Dinarzade, with his sword awry after the manner of Frederic II., stood between one of the wheels and a horse's crupper, telling a story to our great content. The canteen-women who brought us our rations stayed with us to listen to our Arab. The attentive group of bacchantes and Silenuses which formed the chorus accompanied the narrative with marks of its surprise, approval, or disapproval.

"Gentlemen," said the story-teller, "you all knew the Green Knight, who lived in the days of King John[105]?"

Every one said:

"Yes, yes."

Dinarzade swallowed down a rolled pancake, burning himself as he did so.

"This Green Knight, gentlemen, as you know, since you have seen him, was very good-looking: when the wind blew back his ruddy locks over his casque, it looked like a twist of tow round a green turban."

The audience: "Bravo!"

[Sidenote: Dinarzade's tales.]

"One evening in May, he sounded his horn at the draw-bridge of a castle in Picardy, or Auvergne, no matter which. In that castle lived "the Lady of Great Companies." She welcomed the knight, told her servants to disarm him and lead him to the bath, and came and sat with him at a splendid table; and the pages-in-waiting were mute."

The audience: "Oh, oh!"

"The lady, gentlemen, was tall, flat, lean, and shambling, like the major's wife; otherwise she had plenty of expression and an arch look. When she laughed and showed her long teeth beneath her stumpy nose, one did not know what one was about. She fell in love with the knight and the knight with her, although he was afraid of her."

Dinarzade emptied the ashes of his pipe on the rim of the wheel and wanted to refill his cutty; they made him continue: "The Green Knight, utterly dumfoundered, resolved to leave the castle; but, before taking his leave, he asked the lady of the keep for an explanation of many strange things; at the same time he made her an offer of marriage, always provided she was not a witch."

Dinarzade's rapier was planted stiff and straight between his knees. Seated and leaning forward with our pipes, we made a garland of fire-flakes beneath him, like Saturn's ring. Suddenly Dinarzade shouted, as though beside himself:

"Well, gentlemen, the Lady of Great Companies was Death!"

And the captain, breaking the ranks and shouting "Death! Death!" put the canteen-women to flight. The meeting was closed: the uproar was great, the laughter prolonged. We approached Thionville amid the roar of the cannon of the place.

*

The siege continued, or rather, there was no siege, for the trenches were not opened, and troops were wanting to invest the place regularly. We reckoned on receiving intelligence, and waited for news of the successes of the Prussian Army or of Clerfayt's[106] Army, with which was the French corps of the Duc de Bourbon. Our scanty supplies were becoming exhausted; Paris seemed to draw farther away. The bad weather never ceased; we were flooded in the midst of our works; I sometimes woke in a trench with water up to my neck: the next day, I was a cripple.

Among my fellow-Bretons I had met Ferron de La Sigonnière[107], my old class-fellow at Dinan. We slept badly under our tent; our heads went beyond the canvas and received the rain from that sort of gutter. I would get up and go with Ferron to walk in front of the stacked arms; for all our evenings were not so gay as those with Dinarzade. We walked in silence, listening to the voices of the sentries, looking at the lights of our streets of tents as we had formerly watched the lamps in the passages at our college. We discussed the past and the future, the mistakes that had been made, those that would still be made; we deplored the blindness of our Princes, who imagined that they could return to their country with a handful of adherents and consolidate the crown on their brother's head with the aid of the foreigner. I remember saying to my friend, in the course of these conversations, that France wished to imitate England, that the King would perish on the scaffold, and that our expedition before Thionville would probably be one of the principal counts in the indictment of Louis XVI. Ferron was struck by my prophecy: it was the first I ever made. Since that time, I have made many others quite as true, quite as unheeded: when the accident occurred, the others took shelter and left me to struggle with the misfortune which I had foreseen. When the Dutch encounter a squall on the open sea, they retreat to the interior of the ship, close the hatches, and drink punch, leaving a dog on deck to bark at the storm; the danger past, Trust is sent back to his kennel in the hold, and the captain returns to enjoy the fine weather on the quarter-deck. I have been the Dutch dog of the Legitimist ship.

The memories of my life as a soldier have engraved themselves upon my thoughts; I have related them in the sixth book of the _Martyrs._ Armorican barbarian in the Princes' camp as I was, I carried Homer with my sword; I preferred "my country, the poor, small isle of Aaron, to the hundred cities of Crete." I said with Telemachus:

"The harsh country which only feeds goats is dearer to me than those in which horses are reared[108]."

My words would have brought a smile to the lips of the warlike Menelaus: άγάθος Μενἐλαος.

The rumour spread that we were at last coming to action; the Prince of Waldeck was to attempt an assault while we were to cross the river and make a diversion by a feint attack on the place from the French side.

[Sidenote: My company.]

Five Breton companies, including mine, the company of the Picardy and Navarre officers, and the regiment of volunteers, composed of young Lorraine peasants and of deserters from various regiments, were ordered up for duty. We were to be supported by the Royal Germans, the squadrons of musketeers and the different corps of dragoons which covered our left: my brother was with this cavalry with the Baron de Montboissier, who had married a daughter of M. de Malesherbes, sister to Madame de Rosanbo, and therefore aunt to my sister-in-law. We escorted three companies of Austrian artillery with heavy guns and a battery of three mortars.

We started at six o'clock in the evening; at ten we crossed the Moselle, above Thionville, on a coppered pontoon bridge:

Amæna fluenta Subterlabentis tacito rumore Mosellæ[109].

At daybreak, we were drawn up in order of battle on the left bank, with the heavy cavalry in echelons on both flanks, and the light cavalry in front. At our second movement, we formed in column and began to defile. At about nine o'clock, we heard a volley fired on our left. A carabineer officer came dashing up at full speed to tell us that a detachment of Kellermann's army was about to join issue with us, and that the action had already begun between the skirmishers. The officer's horse had been struck by a bullet on the forehead; it reared, with the foam streaming from its mouth and the blood from its nostrils: the carabineer, seated sword in hand on this wounded horse, was superb. The corps which had come out of Metz manœuvred to take us in flank: they had field-pieces with them, whose fire reached our volunteer regiment. I heard the exclamations of some recruits struck by the cannon-balls; the last cries of youth snatched living from life gave me a feeling of profound pity: I thought of the poor mothers.

The drums beat the charge, and we rushed in disorder upon the enemy. We came so close that the smoke did not prevent us from seeing the terrible expression on the faces of men ready to shed your blood. The patriots had not yet acquired the assurance that comes from the long habit of fighting and victory. Their movements were slack, they felt their way; fifty grenadiers of the Old Guard would have made head against an heterogeneous mass of undisciplined nobles, old and young: ten to twelve hundred foot-soldiers were taken aback by a few gun-shots from the Austrian heavy artillery; they retreated; our cavalry pursued them for two leagues.

A deaf-and-dumb German girl, called Libbe, or Libba, had become attached to my cousin Armand and had followed him. I found her sitting on the grass, which stained her dress with blood: her elbow rested on her upturned knees; her hand, passed through her tangled yellow tresses, supported her head. She wept as she looked at three or four killed men, new deaf-mutes, lying around her. She had not heard the clap of the thunderbolts of which she saw the effect, nor could she hear the sighs which escaped her lips when she looked at Armand; she had never heard the sound of the voice of him she loved, and she would not hear the first cry of the child she bore in her womb: if the grave contained only silence, she would not know that she had sunk into it.

For that matter, fields of slaughter lie on every hand: in the Eastern Cemetery[110] in Paris, twenty-seven thousand tombstones, two hundred and thirty thousand corpses, will show you the extent of the battle which death wages day and night at your doors.

[Sidenote: The assault of Thionville.]

After a somewhat long halt, we resumed our march, and arrived under the walls of Thionville at nightfall. The drums did not beat; the word of command was given in a whisper. The cavalry, in order to repulse any sortie, stole along the roads and hedges to the gate which we were to cannonade. The Austrian artillery, protected by our infantry, took up a position at fifty yards from the advanced works, behind a hastily thrown-up epaulement of gabions. At one o'clock on the morning of the 1st of September, a rocket, sent up from the Prince of Waldeck's camp on the other side of the place, gave the signal. The Prince commenced a smart fire, to which the town made a vigorous reply. We began to fire forthwith.

The besieged, not thinking that we had troops on that side, and not foreseeing this assault, had left the southern ramparts unprotected; we did not lose for waiting: the garrison armed a double battery, which penetrated our epaulements and dismounted two of our guns. The sky was aflame; we were shrouded in torrents of smoke. I behaved like a little Alexander: weakened by fatigue, I fell sound asleep, almost under the wheels of the gun-carriage where I was on guard. A shell, bursting six inches off the ground, sent a splinter into my right thigh. I awoke with the shock, but felt no pain, and perceived only by my blood that I was wounded. I bound up my thigh with my hand-kerchief. In the affair on the plain, two bullets had struck my knapsack during a wheeling movement. _Atala_, like a devoted daughter, placed herself between her father and the lead of the enemy: she had still to withstand the fire of the Abbé Morellet[111].

At four o'clock in the morning, the Prince of Waldeck's fire ceased: we thought the town had surrendered; but the gates were not opened, and we had to think of retiring. We returned to our positions, after a tiring march of three days.

The Prince of Waldeck had gone as far as the edge of the ditches, which he had tried to cross, hoping to bring about a surrender by means of the simultaneous attack: divisions were still supposed to exist in the town, and we flattered ourselves that the Royalist party would bring the keys to the Princes. The Austrians, having fired in barbette, lost a considerable number of men; the Prince of Waldeck had an arm shot off. While a few drops of blood flowed under the walls of Thionville, blood was flowing in torrents in the prisons of Paris: my wife and sisters were in greater danger than I.

*

We raised the siege of Thionville and set out for Verdun, which had been restored to the Allies on the 2nd of September. Longwy, the birthplace of François de Mercy[112], had fallen on the 23rd of August. Wreaths and festoons of flowers bore evidence on every side of the passage of Frederic William. Among the peaceful trophies, I observed the Prussian Eagle affixed to Vauban's[113] fortifications: it was not to stay there long; as to the flowers, they were soon to see the innocent creatures who had gathered them fade away like themselves. One of the most atrocious murders of the Terror was that of the young girls of Verdun.

"Fourteen young girls of Verdun," says Riouffe[114], "of unexampled purity, who had the air of young virgins decked for a public festival, were led together to the scaffold. They disappeared suddenly and were gathered in their springtime; the 'Court of Women,' on the morrow of their death, looked like a garden-plot stripped of its flowers by a storm. Never have I witnessed such despair as that which this act of barbarity excited among us."

Verdun is famous for its female sacrifices. According to Gregory of Tours[115], Deuteric, to protect his daughter from the prosecution of Theodebert[116], placed her in a cart drawn by two untamed oxen and had her flung into the Meuse. The instigator of the massacre of the young girls of Verdun was the regicide poetaster Pons de Verdun[117], who was infuriated against his native city. The number of agents of the Terror supplied by the _Almanach des Muses_ is incredible; the unsatisfied vanity of the mediocrities produced as many revolutionaries as the wounded pride of the cripples and abortions: a revolt analogous to that of the infirmities of mind and body. Pons attached the point of a dagger to his blunt epigrams. Faithful, as it seemed, to the traditions of Greece, the poet was willing to offer none save the blood of virgins to his gods: for the Convention decreed, on his motion, that no woman with child could be put on her trial. He also caused the sentence to be annulled condemning Madame de Bonchamps to death, the widow of the celebrated Vendean general[118]. Alas, we Royalists in the train of the Princes attained the reverses of the Vendée without passing through its glory!

We had not at Verdun, to pass the time, "that famous Comtesse de Saint-Balmont[119], who laid aside her female apparel, mounted on horseback, and herself served as an escort to the ladies who accompanied her or whom she had left in her chariot..." We had no passion for "old Gallic," nor did we write "notes in the language of Amadis[120]."

The Prussian evil[121] communicated itself to our little army: I caught it. Our cavalry had gone to join Frederic William at Valmy. We knew nothing of what was happening, and were hourly expecting the order to march forward: we received the order to beat a retreat.

[Sidenote: I am weakened by my wound.]

Very greatly weakened, and prevented by my troublesome wound from walking without pain, I dragged myself as best I could in the wake of my company, which soon dispersed. Jean Balue[122], son of a miller at Verdun, left his father's house at a very early age with a monk, who burdened him with his wallet. On leaving Verdun, "Ford Hill" according to Saumaise[123], _ver dunum_, I carried the wallet of the Monarchy, but I did not become Comptroller of Finance, nor a bishop or cardinal.

If, in the novels which I have written, I have drawn upon my own history, in the histories which I have told I have placed memories of the living history in which I took part. Thus, in my life of the Duc de Berry[124], I described some of the scenes which took place before my eyes:

"When an army is disbanded, it returns to its homes; but had the soldiers of Condé's Army any homes? Whither was the stick to lead them which they were hardly permitted to cut in the forests of Germany, after laying down the musket which they had taken up in defense of their King?...

"The time had come to part. The brothers-in-arms bade each other a last farewell, and took different roads on earth. All, before setting out, went to salute their father and captain, white-haired old Condé: the patriarch of glory gave his blessing to his children, wept over his dispersed tribe, and saw the tents of his camp fall with the grief of a man witnessing the destruction of his ancestral roof[125]."

Less than twenty years later, the leader of the new French Army, Bonaparte, also took leave of his companions: so quickly do men and empires pass, so little does the most extraordinary renown save one from the most common destiny!

We left Verdun. The rains had broken up the roads; everywhere one saw ammunition-wagons, gun-carriages, cannon stuck in the mire, chariots overturned, cutler-women with their children on their backs, soldiers dying or dead in the mud. Crossing a ploughed field, I sank down to my knees; Ferron and another comrade dragged me out despite myself: I begged them to leave me there; I had rather died.

On the 16th of October, at the camp near Longwy, the captain of my company, M. de Goyon-Miniac, handed me a very honourable certificate. At Arlon, we saw a file of wagons with their teams on the high-road: the horses, some standing, others kneeling down, others with their noses on the ground, were dead, and their bodies had grown stiff between the shafts: it was as though one saw the shades of a battlefield bivouacking on the shores of Styx.

Ferron asked me what I meant to do, and I answered that, if I could go as far as Ostend, I would take ship for Jersey, where I should find my uncle de Bedée; from there I should be able to join the Royalists in Brittany.

[Sidenote: And catch the smallpox.]

The fever was sapping my strength; I could only with difficulty support myself on my swollen thigh. I felt a new ailment lay hold of me. After twenty-four hours' vomiting, my face and body were covered with an eruption: confluent smallpox broke out; it appeared to be affected by the temperature of the air. In this condition, I set out on foot to make a journey of two hundred leagues, rich as I was to the extent of eighteen livres Tournois: all this for the greater glory of the Monarchy. Ferron, who had lent me my six small crowns of three francs, left me, he having arranged to be met in Luxembourg.

*

As I was leaving Arlon, a peasant took me up in his cart for the sum of four sous, and put me down five leagues farther on a heap of stones. I hopped a few paces with the aid of my crutch, and washed the bandage round my scratch, which had developed into a sore, in a spring rustling by the roadside, which did me a great deal of good. The smallpox had come quite out, and I felt relieved. I had not abandoned my knapsack, the straps of which cut my shoulders.

I spent that first night in a barn, and had nothing to eat. The wife of the farmer who owned the barn refused payment for my lodging. At daybreak she brought me a great basin of coffee and milk, with a black loaf which I thought excellent. I resumed my road quite merrily, although I often fell. I was joined by four or five of my comrades, who carried my knapsack; they were also very ill. We met villagers; by taking cart after cart we covered a sufficient distance in the Ardennes, in five days, to reach Attert, Flamizoul, and Bellevue. On the sixth day I found myself alone. My smallpox had grown paler and was less puffy.

After walking two leagues, which took me six hours, I saw a gipsy family encamped behind a ditch around a furze fire, with two goats and a donkey. I had no sooner reached them than I let myself drop to the ground, and the strange creatures hastened to succour me. A young woman in rags, lively, dark, and mischievous, sang, leaped, skipped around, holding her child aslant upon her breast, as though it were a hurdy-gurdy with which she was enlivening her dance; she next squatted on her heels close by my side, examined me curiously by the light of the fire, took my dying hand to tell me my fortune, and asked me for "a little sou:" it was too dear. It would be difficult to possess more knowledge, charm, and wretchedness than my sybil of the Ardennes. I do not know when the nomads, of whom I should have been a worthy son, left me; they were not there when I woke from my torpor at dawn. My fortune-teller had gone away with the secret of my future. In exchange for my "little sou," she had laid by my head an apple which served to refresh my mouth. I shook myself, like John Rabbit, among the "thyme" and the "dew"; but I was not able to "browse," nor to "trot," nor to cut many "pranks[126]." Nevertheless, I rose with the intention of "paying my court to Aurora:" she was very beautiful and I very ugly; her rosy face proclaimed her good health; she was better than the poor Cephalus[127] of Armorica. Although both of us young, we were old friends, and I imagined that her tears that morning were shed for me.

I penetrated into the forest, feeling not too sad; solitude had restored me to my own nature. I hummed the ballad by the ill-fated Cazotte[128]:

Tout au beau milieu des Ardennes, Est un château sur le haut d'un rocher[129].

Was it not in the donjon of this ghostly castle that Philip II. King of Spain imprisoned my fellow-Breton, Captain La Noue[130], who had a Chateaubriand for his grand-mother? Philip consented to release the illustrious prisoner if the latter consented to have his eyes put out; La Noue was on the point of accepting the proposal, so great was his longing to return to his dear Brittany. Alas! I was possessed with the same desire, and to lose my sight I needed only the ailment with which it had pleased God to afflict me. I did not meet "Sir Enguerrand coming from Spain[131]," but poor wretches, small pedlars who, like myself, carried their whole fortune on their back. A wood-cutter, with felt knee-caps, entered the woods: he should have taken me for a dead branch and cut me down. A few carrion crows, a few larks, a few buntings, a kind of large finches, hopped along the road or stood motionless on the border of stones, watchful of the sparrow-hawk which hovered circling in the sky. From time to time, I heard the sound of the horn of the swine-herd watching his sows and their little ones acorning. I rested in a shepherd's movable hut; I found no one at home except Puss, who made me a thousand graceful caresses. The shepherd was standing a long way off, in the centre of a common pasture, with his dogs sitting at irregular distances around the sheep; by day that herdsman gathered simples: he was a doctor and a wizard; by night, he watched the stars: then he was a Chaldean shepherd.

[Sidenote: A weary journey.]

I stood still, half a league farther, in a pasturage of deer: hunters went by at the other end. A spring murmured at my feet; at the bottom of this spring Orlando (Inamorato, not Furioso) saw a palace of crystal filled with ladies and knights. If the paladin, who joined the dazzling water-nymphs, had at least left Golden Bridle[132] at the brink of the well; if Shakespeare had sent me Rosalind and the Exiled Duke[133], they would have been very helpful to me.

After taking breath I continued my road. My impaired ideas floated in a void that was not without charm; my old phantoms, having scarce the consistency of shades three parts effaced, crowded round me to bid me farewell. I had no longer the power of memory; I beheld at an indeterminate distance the aerial forms of my relations and my friends, mingled with unknown figures. When I sat down to rest against a mile stone, I thought I saw faces smile to me in the threshold of the distant cabins, in the blue smoke escaping from the roofs of the cottages, in the tree-tops, in the transparency of the clouds, in the luminous sheaves of the sun dragging its beams over the heather like a golden rake. These apparitions were those of the Muses coming to assist the poet's death: my tomb, dug with the uprights of their lyres under an oak of the Ardennes, would have fairly well suited the soldier and the traveller. Some hazel-hens, which had strayed into the forms of the hares under the privets, alone, with the insects, produced a few murmurs around me: lives as slender, as unknown, as my life. I could walk no farther; I felt extremely ill; the smallpox was turning in and choking me.

Towards the end of the day, I lay down on my back, in a ditch, with Atala's knapsack under my head, my crutch by my side, my eyes fixed upon the sun, whose light was going out with my own. I greeted in all gentleness of thought the luminary which had lighted my first youth on my paternal moors: we retired to rest together, he to rise in greater glory, I, according to all appearances, never to wake again. I fainted away in a feeling of religion: the last sounds I heard were the fall of a leaf and the whistling of a bullfinch.

*

It seems that I lay unconscious for nearly two hours. The wagons of the Prince de Ligne[134] happened to pass; one of the drivers, stopping to cut a birch twig, stumbled over me without seeing me: he thought me dead and pushed me with his foot; I gave a sign of life. The driver called his comrades and, prompted by an instinct of pity, they threw me into a cart. The jolting revived me; I was able to talk to my deliverers; I told them that I was a soldier of the Princes' Army, and that if they would take me as far as Brussels, where I was going, I would reward them for their trouble.

"All right, mate," said one of them, "but you'll have to get down at Namur, for we're forbidden to carry anybody. We'll take you up again t'other side of the town."

I asked for something to drink; I swallowed a few drops of brandy, which threw the symptoms of my disease out again and relieved my chest for a moment: nature had endowed me with extraordinary strength.

We reached the suburbs of Namur at ten o'clock in the morning. I got down and followed the waggons at a distance; I soon lost sight of them. I was stopped at the entrance to the town. I sat down under the gateway, while my papers were being examined. The soldiers on guard, seeing my uniform, offered me a scrap of ammunition bread, and the corporal handed me some peppered brandy in a blue glass drinking-cup. I made some ceremony about drinking out of the cup of military hospitality:

"Catch hold!" he exclaimed angrily, accompanying his injunction with a _Sackerment der Teufel!_

My passage through Namur was a laborious one: I walked leaning against the houses. The first woman who saw me left her shop, gave me her arm with a pitying air, and helped me to drag myself along. I thanked her, and she replied:

"No, no, soldier,"

Soon other women came running up, bringing bread, wine, fruit, milk, soup, old clothes, blankets.

"He is wounded," said some, in their Brabançon French dialect.

"He has the smallpox," cried others, and kept back their children.

"But, young man, you will not be able to walk; you will die if you do; stay in the hospital."

[Sidenote: The women of Namur.]

They wanted to take me to the hospital, they relieved each other from door to door, and in this way helped me to the gate of the town, outside which I found the wagons again. You have seen a peasant-woman succour me; you shall see another woman show me hospitality in Guernsey. Women who have aided me in my distress, if you be still living, may God help you in your old age and in your sorrows! If you have departed this life, may your children share the happiness which Heaven has long refused me!

The women of Namur assisted me to climb into the wagon, recommended me to the driver's care, and compelled me to accept a woollen blanket. I noticed that they treated me with a sort of respect and deference: there is something superior, something delicate, in the nature of Frenchmen which other nations recognise.

The Prince de Ligne's men put me down for the second time on the road just outside Brussels, and refused to accept my last crown-piece. In Brussels, not one inn-keeper was willing to take me in. The wandering Jew, the popular Orestes, whom the ballad represents as going to that town:

Quand il fut dans la ville De Bruxelle en Brabant[135],

met with a better reception than I, for he had always five sous in his pocket. I knocked: they opened; when they saw me they said, "Move on, move on!" and shut the door in my face. I was driven out of a café. My hair hung over my face, hidden behind my beard and mustachios; I had a hay bandage round my thigh; over my tattered uniform I wore the blanket of the Namur women, knotted round my throat by way of a cloak. The beggar in the _Odyssey_ was more insolent, but not so poor as I.

I had at first presented myself to no purpose at the hotel where I had stayed with my brother: I made a second attempt; as I approached the door I saw the Comte de Chateaubriand stepping from a carriage with the Baron de Montboissier. He was alarmed at my spectral appearance. They looked for a room outside the hotel, for the proprietor absolutely refused to admit me. A wig-maker offered me a den suited to my wretchedness. My brother brought me a surgeon and a doctor. He had received letters from Paris: M. de Malesherbes invited him to return to France. He told me of the day's work of the 10th of August, the massacres of September, and the political news, of which I knew not a word. He approved of my plan to cross to Jersey, and advanced me twenty-five louis. My impaired sight hardly permitted me to distinguish my brother's features; I believed that that gloom emanated from myself, whereas it was the shadow which Eternity was spreading around him: without knowing it, we were seeing each other for the last time. All of us, such as we are, have only the present moment for our own: the next belongs to God; there are always two chances of not seeing again the friend who is leaving us: our death and his. How many men have never reclimbed the staircase they have descended!

Death touches us more before than after the decease of a friend: it is a piece of ourselves that is torn away, a world of childish recollections, of familiar intimacy, of affections and interests in common, that dissolves. My brother preceded me in my mother's womb; he was the first to dwell in those same sainted entrails whence I issued after him; he sat before me by the paternal hearth; he waited several years to welcome me, to give me my name in the Name of Jesus Christ, and to ally himself with the whole of my youth. My blood, mingled with his blood in the revolutionary receptacle, would have had the same savour, like a draught of milk supplied by the pasturage of the same mountain. But, if men caused the head of my elder, my god-father, to fall before its time, the years will not spare mine; already my forehead is shedding its covering; I feel an Ugolino, Time, stooping over me and gnawing at my skull:

... come'l pan perf ame si manduca[136].

The doctor could not recover from his astonishment: he looked upon that which did not kill me, which came to none of its natural crises, as a phenomenon unprecedented in the history of medicine. Gangrene had set in in my wound; they dressed it with quinine. Having obtained this first aid, I insisted on departing for Ostend. Brussels was hateful to me, I burned to leave it; it was once again filling with those heroes of domesticity who had returned from Verdun in their carriages, and whom I did not see in Brussels when I accompanied the King there during the Hundred Days.

[Sidenote: I reached Guernsey.]

I travelled pleasantly to Ostend by the canals: I found some Bretons there, my comrades-in-arms. We chartered a decked barge and went down the Channel. We slept in the hold, on the shingle which served as ballast. The strength of my constitution was at last exhausted. I could no longer speak; the motion of a rough sea broke me down completely. I swallowed scarce a few drops of water and lemon, and, when the bad weather compelled us to put in to Guernsey, they thought I was going to breathe my last: an emigrant priest read me the prayers for the dying. The captain, not wishing to have me die on board his ship, ordered me to be put down on the quay; they set me down in the sun, with my back leaning against a wall, and my head turned towards the open sea, facing that Isle of Alderney where, eight months before, I had beheld death in another shape.

It would seem that I was vowed to pity. The wife of an English pilot happened to pass by; she was moved and called her husband, who, assisted by two or three sailors, carried me into a fisherman's house: me, the friend of the waves; they laid me on a comfortable bed, between very white sheets. The young barge-woman took every possible care of the stranger: I owe her my life. The next day I was taken on board again. My hostess almost wept on taking leave of her patient: women have a heaven-born instinct for misfortune. My fair-haired and comely guardian, who resembled a figure in the old English prints, pressed my bloated and burning hands between her own, so cool and long; I was ashamed to touch anything so charming with anything so unseemly.

We set sail and reached the westernmost point of Jersey. One of my companions, M. du Tilleul, went to St. Helier's to my uncle. M. de Bedée sent a carriage to fetch me the next morning. We drove across the entire island: dying as I was, I was charmed with its groves; but I only talked nonsense about them, having fallen into a delirium.

I lay four months between life and death. My uncle, his wife, his son and his three daughters took it in turns to watch by my bedside. I occupied an apartment in one of the houses which they were beginning to build along the harbour: the windows of my room came down to the level of the floor, and I was able to see the sea from my bed. The doctor, M. Delattre, had forbidden them to talk to me of serious things, and especially of politics. Towards the end of January 1793, seeing my uncle enter my room in deep mourning, I trembled, for I thought we had lost one of our family: he informed me of the death of Louis XVI. I was not surprised: I had foreseen it. I asked for news of my relatives: my sisters and my wife had returned to Brittany after the September massacres; they had had great difficulty in leaving Paris. My brother had gone back to France, and was living at Malesherbes. I began to get up; the smallpox was gone; but I suffered with my chest, and a weakness remained which I long retained.

Jersey, the Cæsarea of the Itinerary of Antoninus[137], has remained subject to the Crown of England since the death of Robert, Duke of Normandy[138]; we have often tried to capture it, but always unsuccessfully. The island is a remnant of our early history: the saints coming to Brittany-Armorica from Hibernia and Albion rested at Jersey. St. Hélier[139], a solitary, dwelt in the rocks of Cæsarea; he was butchered by the Vandals. In Jersey, one finds a specimen of the old Normans; it is as though one heard William the Bastard[140] speak, or the author of the _Roman du Rou._

The island is fertile: it has two towns and twelve parishes; it is covered with country-houses and herds of cattle. The ocean wind, which seems to belie its rudeness, gives Jersey exquisite honey, cream of extraordinary sweetness, and butter deep-yellow in colour and violet-scented. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre conjectures that the apple came to us from Jersey; he is mistaken: we have the apple and the pear from Greece, as we owe the peach to Persia, the lemon to Media, the plum to Syria, the cherry to Cerasus, the chestnut to Castanea, the quince to Canea, and the pomegranate to Cyprus.

[Sidenote: And Jersey.]

I took great pleasure in going out in the early days of May. Spring in Jersey preserves all her youth; she might still be called by her former name of Primavera, a name which, as she grew older, it left to her daughter, the first flower with which it crowns itself.

*

Here I will copy for you two pages from the Life of the Duc de Berry; it is as though I told you my own:

"After twenty-two years of fighting, the brazen barrier with which France was girt about was forced: the hour of the Restoration drew nigh; our Princes left their retreats. Each of them made for a different point of the frontier, like travellers who, at the risk of their lives, seek to penetrate into a country of which marvels are related. Monsieur set out for Switzerland; Monseigneur le Duc d'Angoulême for Spain, and his brother for Jersey. In that island, in which some of the judges of Charles I. died unknown to their fellow-men, Monseigneur le Duc de Berry found French Royalists grown old in exile and forgotten for their virtues, as in former days the English regicides for their crime. He met old priests, henceforth consecrated to solitude; he realized with them the fiction of the poet who makes a Bourbon land on the island of Jersey after a storm. One of these confessors and martyrs might say to the heir of Henry IV., as the hermit of Jersey said to that great king:

Loin de la cour alors, dans cette grotte obscure De ma religion je viens pleurer l'injure[141].

"Monseigneur le Duc de Berry spent some months in Jersey; the sea, the winds, politics bound him there. Everything opposed his impatience; he found himself on the point of renouncing his enterprise and taking ship for Bordeaux. A letter from him to Madame la Maréchale Moreau gives us a vivid idea of his occupations on his rock:

"'8 _February_ 1814.

"'Here I am like Tantalus, in sight of that unhappy France which finds so much difficulty in breaking its chains. You whose soul is so beautiful, so French, can judge of my feelings; how much it would cost me to move away from that shore which I should need but two hours to reach! When the sun lights it, I climb the tallest rocks and, with my spy-glass in my hand, I follow the whole coast: I can see the rocks of Coutances. My imagination rises, I see myself leaping on shore, surrounded by Frenchmen, wearing the white cockade in their hats; I hear the cry of 'Long live the King!' that cry which no Frenchman has ever heard with composure; the loveliest woman of the province girds me with a white sash, for love and glory always go together. We march on Cherbourg; some rascally fort, with a garrison of foreigners, tries to defend itself: we carry it by assault, and a vessel puts out to fetch the King, with the White Ensign which recalls the days of France's glory and happiness! Ah, madame, when removed by but a few hours from so likely a dream, can one think of betaking himself elsewhere!'"

*

It is three years since I wrote these pages in Paris; I had gone before M. le Duc de Berry in Jersey, the city of the exiled, by twenty-two years; I was to leave my name behind me, since Armand de Chateaubriand was married, and his son Frédéric born there[142].

Gaiety had not abandoned the family of my uncle de Bedée; my aunt continued to nurse a big dog, descended from the one whose virtues I have related: as it bit everybody and had the mange, my cousins had it secretly hanged, notwithstanding its nobility. Madame de Bedée persuaded herself that some English officers, charmed with Azor's beauty, had stolen it, and that it was living, laden with honours and dinners, in the richest castle of the Three Kingdoms. Alas, our present hilarity was compounded only out of our past gaiety! By recalling the scenes at Monchoix we found means of laughter in Jersey. The case is rare enough, for in the human heart pleasures do not keep up the same relations one to the other that sorrows do: new joys do not restore their springtime to former joys, but recent sorrows cause old sorrows to blossom over again.

For the rest, the Emigrants at that time excited general sympathy; our cause appeared to be the cause of European order: an honoured unhappiness, such as ours, is something.

M. de Bouillon[143] was the protector of the French refugees in Jersey: he dissuaded me from my plan of crossing over to Brittany, unfit as I was to endure a life of caves and forests; he advised me to go to England, and there seek the opportunity of entering the regular service. My uncle, who was very ill provided with money, began to feel straitened with his large family; he had found himself obliged to send his son to London to feed himself on starvation and hope. Fearing lest I should be a burden to M. de Bedée, I decided to relieve him of my presence.

[Sidenote: I set sail for England.]

Thirty louis, which a Saint-Malo smuggler brought me, enabled me to put my plan into execution, and I booked a berth on the packet for Southampton. I was deeply touched, on bidding farewell to my uncle: he had nursed me with the affection of a father; with him were connected the few happy moments of my childhood; he knew all I loved; I found in his features a certain resemblance to my mother. I had left that excellent mother, and was never to see her again; I had left my sister Julie and my brother, and was doomed to meet them no more; I was leaving my uncle, and his genial countenance was never again to gladden my eyes. A few months had sufficed to bring all these losses, for the death of our friends is not reckoned from the moment at which they die, but from that at which we cease to live with them.

Were it possible to say to Time, "Not so fast!" one would stop it at the hours of delight; but, as this is not possible, let us not linger here below; let us go away before witnessing the flight of friends and of those years which the poet considers alone worthy of life: _Vitâ dignior ætas._ That which delights us in the age of friendships becomes an object of suffering and regret in the age of destitution. We no longer desire the return of the smiling months to the earth; we dread it rather: the birds, the flowers, a fine evening at the end of April, a fine night commencing in the evening with the first nightingale and ending in the morning with the first swallow, those things which give the need and longing for happiness kill one. You still feel their charms, but they are no longer for you: youth which tastes them by your side, and which looks down upon you with scorn, fills you with jealousy and makes you realize the completeness of your desolation. The grace and freshness of nature, while recalling your past happiness, adds to the unsightliness of your misery. You have become a mere blot upon that nature; you spoil its harmony and its suavity by your presence, by your words, and even by the sentiments which you venture to express. You may love, but you can no longer be loved. The vernal fountain has renewed its waters without restoring your youth to you, and the sight of all that is born again, of all that is happy, reduces you to the sorrowful remembrance of your pleasures.

*

The packet on which I embarked was crowded with Emigrant families. I there made the acquaintance of M. Hingant[144], an old colleague of my brother's in the Parliament of Brittany, a man of taste and intelligence, of whom I shall have much to say. A naval officer was playing chess in the captain's room; he did not recollect my features, so greatly was I changed; but I recognised Gesril. We had not met since Brest; we were destined to part at Southampton. I told him of my travels, he told me of his. This young man, born near me among the waves, embraced his first friend for the last time in the midst of the waves which were about to witness his glorious death. Lamba Doria[145], admiral of the Genoese, after beating the Venetian fleet, learnt that his son had been killed:

"Bury him in the sea," said this Roman father, as though he had said, "Bury him in his victory."

Gesril voluntarily left the billows into which he had flung himself only the better to show them his "victory" on shore.

[Sidenote: And land at Southampton.]

I gave the certificate of my landing from Jersey at Southampton at the commencement of the sixth book of these Memoirs. Behold me, therefore, after my travels in the forests of America and the camps of Germany, arriving, as a poor Emigrant, in 1793, in the land in which I am writing all this in 1822, and in which I am living to-day a splendid ambassador.

[1] This book was written in London between April and September 1822, and revised in February 1845 and December 1846.--T.

[2] Georges Jacques Danton (1759-1794), perhaps the least contemptible of the demagogues of the time.--T.

[3] The National or Constituent Assembly passed the Constitution on the 3rd of September 1791, the King accepting it on the 13th. This Constitution created a Legislative Assembly, which alone was to retain the power of making laws, subject to the veto of the Sovereign. On the 30th of September the Constituent Assembly was dissolved and immediately succeeded by the Legislative Assembly, which consisted of 745 deputies elected by the people, and sat from 1 October 1791 to 21 September 1792. It was in this assembly that the parties of the Mountain and the Gironde were formed.--T.

[4] Jean Claude Marin Victor Marquis de Laqueville (1742-1810) commanded the corps of the nobles of Auvergne under the Comte d'Artois. He was impeached on the 1st of January 1792. He returned to France under the Consulate, and lived in retirement until his death.--B.

[5] M. Buisson de La Vigne, a retired captain of the Indian Company's fleet, had been ennobled in 1776.--B.

[6] Alexis Jacques Buisson de La Vigne, the Indian Company's manager at Lorient, married in 1770 Mademoiselle Céleste Rapion de La Placelière, of Saint-Malo.--B.

[7] Anne Buisson de La Vigne (1772-1813) married, in 1789, Hervé Louis Joseph Marie Comte du Plessix de Parscau (1762-1831). She died at Lymington in Hampshire, and is buried there with seven of her thirteen children. In 1814, the Comte de Parscau married Mademoiselle de Kermalun, a lady of forty, for the sake of the six young children left to him.--B.

[8] Knight of St. Louis.--T.

[9] Céleste Buisson de La Vigne (1774-1847), who became Madame de Chateaubriand.--B.

[10] Michel Bossinot de Vauvert (1724-1809), formerly a king's counsel and attorney to the Admiralty. He was an uncle, "Brittany fashion," of Mademoiselle Buisson de La Vigne.--B.

[11] George Gordon, sixth Lord Byron (1788-1824), the poet.--T.

[12] Francis II. Emperor of Germany (1768-1835) ascended the Imperial Throne in 1792. In 1808 he renounced his title and assumed that of Emperor of Austria, as Francis I.--T.

[13] Blessed Benedict Joseph Labre (1748-1783) had died, after a life supported by unsolicited alms and spent in constant mortifications, of a tumour in the leg resulting from his habit of being always upon his knees.--T.

[14] The Abbé Jean Jacques Barthélemy (1716-1795), Keeper of the Royal Cabinet of Medals, member of the French Academy and the Academy of Inscriptions, and a distinguished archæologist. In 1788 he published his _Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce vers le milieu du IVe. siècle avant l'ère vulgaire_, which made his name. He spent the greater portion of his life with the Duc and Duchesse de Choiseul on their estate of Chanteloup, near Amboise.--T.

[15] Ange François Fariau (1747-1810), known as M. de Saint-Ange, became a member of the French Academy just before his death. His translations in verse of the _Metamorphoses_ and other of Ovid's works are of great merit; but he appears to have been cursed with inordinate vanity, in addition to the stupidity of which Chateaubriand speaks.--T.

[16] Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737-1814), the famous author of the _Études de la nature_ and of _Paul et Virginie._ He preached virtue in all his works; his personal character and conduct were far from being irreproachable.--T.

[17] 30 January 1791.--B.

[18]

"D'Egmont with Love one day this bank her presence gave; For a moment the water stained With the image of her beauty upon the fleeting wave: Then D'Egmont disappeared; and Love alone remained.--T."

[19] By Carbon de Flins des Oliviers.--T.

[20]

"Our brave defenders' warlike zeal Wakes pride within my breast, But when through gore the people reel, Their fury I detest. Let Europe of us dwell in fear, Let us live ever free, But Gallic wit our lives shall cheer, And amiability."--T.

[21] Anne Joseph Terwagne, Demoiselle Théroigne de Méricourt (1762-1817), a formidable virago of the Revolution. She was fustigated and driven insane by her fellow-bacchanals in October 1792, and died mad at the Salpétrière.--T.

[22] Manon Jeanne Roland (1754-1793), _née_ Philipon, wife of Jean Marie Roland de La Platière, Minister of the Interior in 1791. She and her husband espoused the party of the Girondins; and Madame Roland was guillotined at the instance of the Mountain, 8 November 1793. Her husband killed himself on hearing the news.--T.

[23] Major the Comte de Belsunce (_d._ 1790). He was cut up into pieces and his heart was eaten by a woman.--B.

[24] Jérôme Pétion de Villeneuve (1759-1794) was elected mayor on the 14th of November 1791. He took no step to suppress the insurrections of June and August 1792, nor the massacres of September. Having voted, however, at the trial of Louis XVI. for "death with delay and appeal to the people," he became odious to the revolutionaries and was proscribed with the Girondins, 31 May 1793. He fled and perished in the Bordeaux marshes, where his body was half eaten by wolves.--T.

[25] Before 1789, Paris was divided into 21 quarters. On the 23rd of April 1789 the King ruled that, for the convocation of the three Estates, the town should be divided into 60 arrondissements, or wards, and districts, for which, on the 27th of June 1790, the Constituent Assembly substituted 48 sections.--B.

[26] On the 17th of Germinal Year II. (6 April 1794) a citizen presented himself at the bar of the Convention and offered a sum of money "towards the expenses of the support and repairing of the guillotine" (_Moniteur_, 7 April 1794).--B.

[27] 23 March 1792.--B.

[28] Francis II., Emperor of Germany, etc., etc.--T.

[29] Maximin Isnard (1751-1825) voted for the death of the King, but, after distinguishing himself by the violence of his language and opinions, underwent a remarkable religious and political conversion. He was a member of the Council of Five Hundred, but took no part in public affairs after the advent of Bonaparte.--B.

[30] Armand Gensonné (1758-1793), the friend and confidant of Dumouriez, executed 31 October 1793.--T.

[31] Jean Pierre Brissot de Warville (1754-1793), at one time editor of the _Moniteur_ and of the _Patriote français_, and prime mover in the declaration of war against Austria. He was guillotined on the same day as Gensonné.--T.

[32] The decree ordering the dissolution of the King's Constitutional Guard was voted 29 May 1792.--B.

[33] It was burnt down in 1580.--_Author's Note._

[34] Charles de Lorraine, Duc de Mayenne (1554-1611), second son of François Duc de Guise, and head of the League.--T.

[35] A political club connected with the League and called the Sixteen from the number of its leading members, each of whom was put in charge of one of the then sixteen quarters of Paris.--T.

[36] Jean Paul Marat (1743-1793) was born either at Geneva or at Boudry, near Neufchâtel, in Switzerland.--T.

[37] Pierre Gaspard Chaumette (1763-1794), the inventor of the Feast of Reason, self-known as "Anaxagoras Chaumette," and guillotined 13 April 1794.--T.

[38] Méot kept the best tavern in Paris, in the Palais-Royal.--B.

[39] Joseph Fouché, Duc d'Otrante (1754-1820), had been a schoolmaster at Juilly and principal of the Oratorian College at Nantes, when he was sent to the Convention. He became subsequently a Conservative senator under Napoleon, a duke and a peer, and was Minister of Police under the Directory, Napoleon, and Louis XVIII.--T.

[40] Triboulet (1479-_circa_ 1536), Court Fool to Louis XII. and Francis I.--T.

[41] _Paradise Lost_, II. 790-814, in which Sin is represented as being violated by her own offspring, Death.--T.

[42] Jacques Louis David (1748-1825), the great painter of the Revolution and the Empire.--T.

[43] Philippe François Nazaire Fabre d'Églantine (1755-1794), a light dramatic poet of no mean order, acted as Danton's secretary. He was subsequently traduced for accepting bribes from the Indian Company, and guillotined on the same day (5 April 1794) as Danton and Desmoulins, who protested at being "coupled with a thief."--T.

[44] Jacques Nicolas Billaud-Varenne (1756-1819), a very bloodthirsty member of the Convention. Billaud was transported with Collot d'Herbois to Cayenne, and succeeded in making his escape, after twenty years, to the Republic of San Domingo, the President of which gave him a pension.--T.

[45] Felice Peretti, Pope Sixtus V. (1521-1590), was elected to the Holy See on the death of Gregory XIII. in 1585. His short reign was marked by a magnificent internal administration. In France he patronized and encouraged the League.--T.

[46] Jacques Clément (1564-1589), the Dominican monk who assassinated Henry III. and was himself killed on the spot. It is a fact that some of the extreme Leaguers called for his canonization.--T.

[47] Charles IX. (1550-1574), elder brother and predecessor of Henry III.--T.

[48] 24 August 1572.--T.

[49] King Charles I. (1600-1649) was murdered on the 30th of January 1649; King Louis XVI. on the 21st of January 1793.--T.

[50] Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville (1747-1795), Public Prosecutor to the Revolutionary Tribunal, guillotined 6 May 1795.--T.

[51] The blasphemy was not even accurate. Desmoulins was in his thirty-fourth year.--T.

[52] _Le Philinte de Molière, ou, la suite du Misanthrope_, a comedy in five acts, in verse, first performed at the Théâtre Français on the 22nd of February 1790, is Fabre d'Églantine's best piece: it is one of our good comedies of the second rank. What will live longest of Fabre d'Églantine's is his ballad, "Il pleut, il pleut, bergère" ("O shepherdess, 'tis raining").--B.

[53] Barnabé Brisson (1531-1591), made First President of the Parliament of Paris by the Sixteen (_vide supra_, p. 15), when Henry III. had left the capital, instead of Achille de Harlay, whom they had sent to the Bastille; but they were dissatisfied with him, owing to the attachment he preserved for the royal authority, and eventually murdered him by hanging him.--T.

[54] Henri de Lorraine, Duc de Guise (1550-1588), nicknamed the _Balafré_ from a disfiguring scar which he received at the engagement of Dormans (1575). He was the son of François Duc de Guise, and brother to the Duc de Mayenne (_vide supra_, p. 15) and Louis de Lorraine, Cardinal de Guise. In 1576 he became the head of the newly formed League. In 1588, after conducting a long and active opposition to the Throne, he attended the States-General summoned by Henry III. at his castle at Blois, and was murdered by the royal guards at the door of the King's closet, 23 December 1588. His brother Louis II., Cardinal de Guise, Archbishop of Rheims, was put to death by the King's orders on the following day.--T.

[55] Florio's MONTAIGNE, Booke III. chap. 12: _Of Physiognomy._--T.

[56] Silas Deane (1737-1789), a member of the first American Congress, was sent to Paris to rally the Court of France to the cause of the insurgents. His negotiations were fruitless, and Franklin was sent to second him. The latter was more successful, and signed two treaties with the Cabinet of Versailles in February 1778.--B.

[57] Joachim Murat (1767-1815), later King of Naples. He was the son of an inn-keeper, enlisted at the commencement of the Revolution, and was a member of the King's Constitutional Guard for about a month in the spring of 1792. He was in command of the sixty grenadiers who dispersed the Council of Five Hundred, and Bonaparte rewarded him with the hand of his sister Caroline. When Bonaparte became Emperor, Murat received his marshal's baton and the title of prince. In 1808, Napoleon made him King of the Two Sicilies. He did not cross the Straits, but reigned peacefully on the mainland until 1812. In 1814, the Powers consented to leave him on the throne, but, declaring in favour of Napoleon on his return from Elba, he was defeated at Tolentino, captured at Pizzo in Calabria, and shot, by order of King Ferdinand II., on the 13th of October 1815.--T.

[58] Jean Marie Roland de La Platière (1734-1793), twice Minister of the Interior, and husband of the more famous Madame Roland. He committed suicide with a sword-stick on hearing of his wife's execution.--T.

[59] Louis François Duport du Tertre (1754-1793), Minister of the Interior from 1790 to 1792, and guillotined 28 November 1793. His wife committed suicide in despair a few days later.--T.

[60] Louise Florence Pétronille de La Live d'Épinay (1725-1783), _née_ Tardieu d'Esclavelles, wife of Denis Joseph de La Live d'Épinay, a rich farmer-general. She built the Hermitage for Rousseau in the Forest of Montmorency, ten miles north of Paris, and lavished benefits upon him. Eventually, however, the philosopher grew jealous of Grimm, and turned ungrateful for the favours shown him.--T.

[61] Bernard Hugues Maret, Duc de Bassano (1763-1839). Bonaparte made him Secretary-general to the Consuls, and, in 1804, Secretary of State, in which capacity he accompanied the Emperor on all his campaigns. In 1811, he was created Duc de Bassano, and appointed Foreign Minister; in 1813, Minister for War. In 1815, he was exiled, returning to France in 1820. Louis Philippe made him a peer of France, and he held office for less than a week in 1834.--T.

[62] Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac (1755-1841), one of the meanest turn-coats and time-servers of revolutionary France. He was exiled on the Restoration, and returned to France on the usurpation of Louis-Philippe.--T.

[63] M. Boutin (_d._ 1794), Treasurer to the Navy, had built the Tivoli garden in the middle of the Rue de Clichy. He was guillotined 22 July 1794.--T.

[64] This is not accurate. Madame de Malesherbes was Françoise Thérèse Grimod, daughter of Gaspard Grimod, Seigneur de La Reynière, farmer-general. M. and Madame de Malesherbes were married on the 4th of February 1749.--B.

[65] Clovis I. (465-511), grandson of Merovius or Merowig, was the real founder of the First or Merovingian Race of Kings of France (418-752). The second was the Carlovingian Race or Dynasty (715-987); the third the Capetians (987), who were subdivided into numerous branches, and preserve their right to the French Throne to this day.--T.

[66] Hildebert, Archbishop of Tours (_circa_ 1057-1134), author of a number of Latin treatises, letters, and poems.--T.

[67] Guillaume de Nangis (_d._ 1300), a Benedictine of Saint-Denis, author of a Chronicle of the Kings of France, etc.--T.

[68] Albéric, a Cistercian monk of the Abbey of Trois-Fontaines, near Châlons-sur-Marne, who lived in the thirteenth century, and wrote a Chronicle which goes from the Creation to 1241.--T.

[69] Rigord, Rigordus, or Rigoltus (_d. circa_ 1207), author of a History of Philip Augustus, in Latin, continued by Guillaume le Breton.--T.

[70] Gervase of Tilbury (_fl._ 1211), author of the _Otia Imperialia._--T.

[71] The Baron de Montboissier was Malesherbes' son-in-law, and uncle by marriage to Chateaubriand's brother.--B.

[72] Louis XI., King of France (1423-1479), who had incited the town of Liège to revolt, was enticed to Péronne by Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, on the pretext of a conference, held as a prisoner, and released only on condition that he accompanied the Duke to the siege of the insurgent city.--T.

[73] Pope Leo III. (_d._ 816), elected to the Papacy in 795, was driven from Rome by a conspiracy to murder him, and took shelter with Charlemagne. He consecrated the octagonal Cathedral of Aix in 799; and in 800, in Rome, crowned Charles Emperor of the West.--T.

[74] John Turpin, Archbishop of Rheims (_d. circa_ 794), Charlemagne's secretary, friend, and comrade-in-arms. He was falsely reputed the author of the be _Vitâ Caroli Magni et Rolandi_, popularly known as Archbishop Turpin's Chronicle.--T.

[75] Francesco Petrarca, known as Petrarch (1304-1374), tells the legend in his poems.--T.

[76] Caligula (12-41) was the son of Germanicus and Agrippina, at whose instance Germanicus enlarged Cologne, calling it Colonia Agrippina.--T.

[77] St. Bruno (_circa_ 1030-1101), founder of the Carthusian order, was born at Cologne.--T.

[78] Frederic William II., King of Prussia (1744-1797), nephew and successor (1786) of Frederic the Great.--T.

[79] Charles Frederick William, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg (1735-1806), Commander-in-Chief of the allied Prussian and Austrian armies. He was mortally wounded at the Battle of Auerstadt (14 October 1806), and was the father of "Brunswick's fated chieftain" killed at Waterloo.--T.

[80] Pierre Louis Alexandre de Gouyon (not Goyon) de Miniac (_circa_ 1754-1818).--B.

[81] Anne Hilarion de Contentin, Comte de Tourville (1642-1701), a famous French admiral; fought under Duquesne, commanded under the Maréchal de Vivonne at Palermo (1677), went to Ireland in 1690 to support the cause of James II., was defeated by the English at the Battle of the Hogue (1692), but defeated them at the first Battle of St. Vincent (1693).--T.

[82] Salvianus (_circa_ 390-484), author of the treatises, _De Gubernatione Dei, Adversus Avaritiam_, and some letters--T.

[83] Henry IV. defeated the Leaguers at Ivry in 1590.--T.

[84] Words and music by the Marquise de Travanet, _née_ de Bombelles, lady to Madame Élisabeth.--B.

[85] Lope Felix de Vega Carpia (1562-1635), the fertile Spanish poet, author of the _Arcadia_ and some 2000 plays and an endless number of poems of every description.--T.

[86] Lucius Cary, second Viscount Falkland (1610-1643), Secretary of State to Charles I. Although at first favouring the rebellion, he joined the King's side and died fighting for Charles at Newbury.--T.

[87] Christian Augustus Prince of Waldeck (1744-1798), fought for Austria against the Turks and against the French, lost an arm at the siege of Thionville, took part in the attack on the lines of Weissemberg, replaced Mack, and went to Portugal, where he died.--T.

[88] Louis Félix Baron de Wimpfen (1744-1814), a Royalist brigadier in the Revolutionary service. He defended Thionville for fifty-five days, until he was relieved by the victory of Valmy. He concealed himself during the Terror. The Consulate restored him to his rank as general of division, and Napoleon appointed him inspector of studs, and created him a baron in 1809.--B.

[89] Louis II. Prince de Condé (1621-1686), known as the Grand Condé, captured Thionville in 1643, after first causing the Spaniards to raise the siege of Rocroi, and signally defeating them on the 19th of May.--T.

[90] Manassès de Pas, Marquis de Feuquières (1590-1639), besieged Thionville in 1639, but was defeated by the garrison, and himself wounded and taken prisoner. He died of his wounds a few months later.--T.

[91] The Chevalier de La Baronnais was one of the numerous sons of François Pierre Collas, Seigneur de La Baronnais, married in 1750 to Renée de Kergu. Chateaubriand is not quite accurate as to the proportions of his family. There were twenty children in all, twelve sons and eight daughters.--B.

[92] Joseph Henri Bouchard d'Esparbès, Maréchal Marquis d'Aubeterre (1714-1788), after fulfilling several important embassies, was appointed Commandant of Brittany in 1775.--T.

[93] St. John the Silent (454-_circa_ 589), so called from his love of silence and retirement. At the age of twenty-eight he was consecrated Bishop of Colonus, near Athens, but resigned his see in nine years, and withdrew to the Monastery of St. Sabar in Jerusalem. His feast falls on the 13th of May.--T.

[94] St. Dominic Loricatus (_d._ 1060) spent his life in the Apennines, wearing a coat of mail, which he laid aside only to scourge himself. He is honoured on the 14th of October.--T.

[95] St. James Intercisus (_d._ 421). Born in Persia, he at first abjured Christianity in obedience to a decree of King Yezdedjerd I.; but, repenting of his apostasy, he resumed the faith, and was condemned to be cut to pieces while living, a martyrdom which he heroically endured on the 27th of November 421. His feast is celebrated on the anniversary of that day.--T.

[96] St. Paul the Simple (229-342) retired at the age of twenty-two to the Thebaïde Desert, where he became a disciple of St. Anthony and lived for ninety-one years. He is honoured on the 7th of March.--T.

[97] St. Basil the Hermit (_d._ circa 640), a native of Limousin, spent forty years wrestling with the Evil One in a retreat which he had built for himself in the neighbourhood of Verzy, in Champagne. His feast falls on the 26th of November.--T.

[98] Philip Augustus defeated the Emperor Otho IV. and his allies at Bouvines, 27 August 1214.--T.

[99] St. Germanus of Auxerre, Bishop of Auxerre (380-448), was Governor of the province of Auxerre for the Emperor of the West, when he was ordained priest by Amador, the bishop of the diocese, whom he succeeded after the latter's death in 418. He visited England in 428 and 446 to preach against the Pelagian heresy. He is honoured on the 26th of July.--T.

[100] Hugues Métel (1080-1157), a twelfth-century ecclesiastical writer. The allusion is to an apologue entitled, _D'un loup qui se fit hermite_, which stands at the head of the poems.--B.

[101] François de Lorraine, Duc de Guise (1519-1563), one of the greatest French captains, and leader of the Catholic army. He was assassinated at the siege of Orléans by a Huguenot nobleman called Poltrot de Méré.--T.

[102] Pietro Strozzi (1550-1558), a marshal in the French service, and commander-in-chief of the army of Pope Paul IV.--T.

[103] Julius Majorianus, known as the Emperor Majorian (_d._ 461) defeated Theodoric II., King of the Visigoths, in Gaul, and was about to attack Genseric, King of the Vandals, in Africa, when he was deposed and put to death by Ricimer, who had raised him to power.--T.

[104] SIDONIUS APOLLINARIS.--_Author's Note._

[105] John II., King of France (1319-1364), known as John the Good, taken prisoner at the Battle of Poitiers by Edward the Black Prince (1356). Peace was concluded in 1360, and John returned to France, leaving his son as a hostage. The latter escaped, and King John voluntarily returned to London and surrendered, saying that "if good faith was banished from the earth, it should find an asylum in the hearts of kings." He died shortly after his arrival in London (8 April 1364).--T.

[106] François Sébastien Charles Joseph de Croix, Comte de Clerfayt (1733-1798), created, in 1795, a field-marshal in the Austrian Army. He was a native of Brussels, at that time the capital of the Austrian Netherlands, and was a very fine general. Not the least of his feats was his masterly retreat after the Battle of Jemmapes (6 November 1792). In 1795, he defeated three French army corps in succession, and relieved Mayence, which was besieged by one of them.--T.

[107] François Prudent Malo Ferron de La Sigonnière (1768-1815).--B.

[108] Cf. _Odyssey_, IV. 606.--T.

[109] AUSONIUS, _Eidyllia_, CCCXXXIV. 21, _Ausonii Mosella._--T.

[110] Now known as the cemetery of Père Lachaise.--T.

[111] The Abbé André Morellet (1727-1819), a Member of the Academy, and at one time a leading member of Madame Geoffrin's circle. His attacks on Chateaubriand are mentioned later, when Chateaubriand speaks of the publication of _Atala._--T.

[112] Field-Marshal Franz Baron von Mercy (_d._ 1645), one of the great generals of the seventeenth century. He took service under the Elector of Bavaria, and distinguished himself in the German wars against France. In 1645 he defeated Turenne at Mariendal, but was himself beaten by Condé in the plains of Nördlingen (7 August 1645), and received a wound of which he died the next day.--T.

[113] Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633-1707), the famous French engineer. Longwy was one of the many fortifications constructed by Vauban along the German frontier. He was created a marshal in 1703 by Louis XIV., who in 1693 had founded the order of St. Louis at Vauban's instance.--T.

[114] Honoré Jean Riouffe (1764-1813), created a baron of the Empire in 1810; author of the _Mémoires d'un détenu, pour servir à l'histoire de la tyrannie de Robespierre_, from which the above quotation is taken.--B.

[115] St. Gregory of Tours (_circa_ 540--_circa_ 594), Bishop of Tours, and author of a _History of the Franks_ extending from 417 to 591.--T.

[116] Theodebert I., King of Metz or Austrasia (_d._ 548).--T.

[117] Philippe Laurent Pons (1759-1844), known as Pons de Verdun, was, before the Revolution, a regular contributor to the _Almanach des Muses._ He was sent to the Convention by the Meuse and voted for the death of the King. As a member of the Council of Five Hundred, he rallied to the cause of Bonaparte, and became advocate-general to the Court of Appeal under the Empire.--B.

[118] Artus de Bonchamp (1769-1793), mortally wounded outside Cholet (17 October 1793).--T.

[119] Alberte Barbe d'Ercecourt, Dame de Saint-Balmon (1608-1660), took up arms during her husband's absence in the Thirty Years' War, and defended her house against the marauders.--B.

[120] Amadis of Gaul, hero of the famous prose romance written in the fourteenth century by different authors, partly in Spanish, partly in French.--T.

[121] A loathsome form of vermin.--T.

[122] Jean La Balue (1421-1491) became a bishop, Almoner to King Louis XI., Intendant of Finance, and was for many years virtual Prime Minister of France. He abolished the Pragmatic Sanction (1461), and was created a cardinal by Pope Pius II. Subsequently he corresponded with the King's enemies and (1469) was imprisoned by Louis XI. in an iron cage, from which he was released only upon the King's death, eleven years later. In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII. sent La Balue to France as legate _in latere_; but he was so badly received that he was obliged to return to Rome.--T.

[123] Claude de Saumaise (1588-1658), known as Salmasius, or the Prince of Commentators.--T.

[124] Charles Ferdinand Duc de Berry (1778-1820), second son of the Comte d'Artois, later Charles X., and father of the Duc de Bordeaux, known later as Comte de Chambord and Henry V. The Duc de Berry was assassinated by Louvel on leaving the Opera House in Paris, 6 February 1820.--T.

[125] _Mémoires, lettres, et pièces authentiques touchant la vie et la mort de S. A. R. Ch. F. d'Artois, fils de France, Duc de Berry_, II. viii.--B.

[126] LA FONTAINE'S _Fables_, book VII., fab. 16: _The Cat, the Weasel, and the Young Rabbit_, 7-9.--T.

[127] Cephalus of Thessaly, husband of Procris, and beloved by Aurora because of his surpassing beauty.--T.

[128] Jean Cazotte (1720-1792), the facile Royalist poet, author of the _Veillée de la Bonne femme; ou, le Réveil d'Enguerrand_, which opens with the lines quoted.--T.

[129]

"Right in the middle of the Ardennes Stands a fine castle atop of a rock."--T.

[130] François de La Noue (1531-1591), nicknamed _Bras-de-Fer_, Iron Arm, a famous Calvinist captain. Fighting at the head of the army of the States-General against Spain, he was captured (1578) and kept prisoner for five years in the fortresses of Limburg and Charlemont. He was killed at the siege of Lamballe in Brittany, where he was sent by Henry IV.--T.

[131] CAZOTTE, _La Veillée de la Bonne femme_, supra.--T.

[132] Orlando's famous steed.--T.

[133] Most of the scenes in _As You Like It_ are laid in the Forest of Arden.--T.

[134] Charles Joseph Prince de Ligne (1735-1844), a Flemish general in the Austrian service, famous for his wit, his personal graces, and his military talent. Francis II. created him a field-marshal in 1808.--T.

[135]

"When he was in the town, Brussels town in Brabant."--T.

[136] DANTE, _Inferno_, XXXVII. 127.--T.

[137] Antoninus Pius, Emperor of Rome (86-161), author or originator of the _Itinerarium Provinciarum._--T.

[138] Robert II., Duke of Normandy (_circa_ 1056-1134), nicknamed Robert Curthose, eldest son of William the Conqueror. He was defeated by his brother, Henry I., at Tinchebray (1106), and imprisoned at Cardiff Castle until his death in 1134.--T.

[139] St. Helerius, hermit and martyr, patron saint of Jersey. His head was cut off by pirates. His feast falls on the 16th of July.--T.

[140] William I., the Conqueror, King of England (1027-1087), is generally called William the Bastard by French writers. He was the illegitimate son of Robert I. the Devil, Duke of Normandy, and Arlotta, a washerwoman of Falaise.--T.

[141] VOLTAIRE, L'_Henriade_:

"Then, far removed from Court, to this obscure retreat, I come to mourn the blows with which my creed has met."--T.

[142] Armand Louis de Chateaubriand married in Guernsey, 14 September 1795, Mademoiselle Jeanne le Brun, of Jersey; the young couple settled in Jersey, where were born Jeanne (16 June 1796) and Frédéric (11 November 1799).--B.

[143] Philippe d'Auvergne, Prince de Bouillon (1754-1816), born in Jersey, was the son of Charles d'Auvergne, a poor lieutenant in the British Navy, and had been adopted by the Duc Godefroy de Bouillon, who saw his race threatened with extinction. Philippe d'Auvergne devoted himself whole-heartedly to the cause of his new fellow-countrymen in their difficulties with the English governors of the island. His career was one of inconceivable adventures, and his end, which occurred in London, was mysterious.--B.

[144] François Marie Anne Joseph Hingant de La Tiemblais (1761-1827). No less than twenty-two members of his family suffered as victims of their religious and political faith. He furnished Chateaubriand with many of the materials for the _Génie du Christianisme_, and himself published some valuable literary and scientific works and an interesting novel (1826), entitled _Le Capucin, anecdote historique._--B.

[145] Lamba Doria defeated Andrea Dandola, the Venetian admiral, before the island of Curzola, off the coast of Dalmatia, in 1298.--T.