François de Chateaubriand
Mémoires d’outre-tombe
Book XI
Translated by A. S. Kline © 2005 All Rights Reserved.
This work may be freely reproduced, stored, and transmitted, electronically or otherwise, for any non-commercial purpose.
Contents
Book XI: Chapter 1: A defect in my character
Book XI: Chapter 3: Fontanes – Cléry
Book XI: Chapter 4: The death of my mother – Return to Religion
Book XI: Chapter 5: Le Génie du Christianisme – A letter from the Chevalier de Panat
Book XI: Chapter 6: My uncle, Monsieur de Bedée – His eldest daughter
London, April to September 1822. (Revised December 1846)
My relations with Deboffe regarding L’Essai sur les
Révolutions had never completely lapsed, and it was important for me to
re-establish them swiftly in
At no time has it been possible for me to overcome that spirit of reserve and inner solitariness that prevents me talking freely about what moves me. No one can affirm without lying that I have ever uttered what the majority of people utter in their moments of pain, pleasure or vanity. Names, confessions of any degree of seriousness, rarely or ever emerge from my lips. I never speak about my passing interests, my plans, my work, my ideas, my relationships, my joys, or my sorrows, persuaded of the profound ennui that one causes others in speaking of oneself.
Sincere and truthful, I lack openness of heart: my soul always tends to shut itself off; I have never spoken fully of any matter, and I have never revealed my life except in these Memoirs. If I try to begin a story, the thought of its length suddenly terrifies me; after three or four words, the sound of my own voice becomes intolerable and I fall silent. As I have no faith in anything, except religion, I challenge everything: ill-will and denigration are two characteristics of the French spirit; mockery and slander, the guaranteed result of any confidences.
What benefit have I gained then from my reticent nature: that of becoming since I seemed impenetrable a product of others’ imaginations, which bore no relation to my reality. Even my friends were in error concerning me, in thinking to make me better known, and embellishing me with the illusions conjured by their devotion. All the mediocrities of the antechamber, offices, news-sheets and cafes, considered me full of ambition, and I had none. Cold and detached in everyday matters, I showed nothing of the man of enthusiasm or sentiment: but my swift, precise perception quickly traversed men and events, and stripped them of all importance. Far from training me to idealize applied truth, my imagination brought the highest matters down to earth, disabusing me of my illusions. The petty and ridiculous aspect of things was always the first to strike me; to my eyes, hardly anything revealed genius or greatness. Polite, laudatory, admiring of the self-important who proclaimed themselves superior intellects, my secret contempt smiled and placed over all those faces wreathed in incense the masks of Callot. In politics, the warmth of my opinions never lasted longer than my speech or my pamphlet. In my inward and contemplative being, I was a man filled with dreams; in my outward and practical being, a man of realities. Adventurous yet orderly, passionate yet methodical, there has never been a creature more fanciful and yet practical than I, more ardent and more icy; strangely androgynous, formed of the differing seed of my mother and my father.
The portraits painted of me, lacking any real resemblance, owe that fact principally to the reticence of my speech. The crowd is too superficial, too inattentive to give time, unless it has been alerted beforehand, to viewing individuals as they truly are. Whenever, by chance, I have tried to counter one of these false judgements in my prefaces, no one has believed me. In the last resort, all things being equal, I have not insisted; an as you will always freed me from the tedium of trying to persuade anyone, or seeking to prove the truth. I retreated into my heart’s depths, like a hare into its form: there I again set myself to contemplating the movement of a leaf or the angle of a blade of grass.
I do not make a virtue of my unassailable circumspection in as much as it is involuntary: though it is not insincerity it has the appearance of it; it is not in harmony with happier, kinder, more easy-going, more innocent, more abundant, more communicative natures than mine. It has often harmed me in matters of feeling, and business affairs, because I could never endure explanations and reparations by means of protestations and clarifications, lamentation and tears, verbiage and reproaches, details and apology.
In the case of the Ives
family, this obstinate silence of mine, regarding myself, was fatal to me in
the extreme. Twenty times
I resumed my work in the
midst of my sorrows and the just reproaches I heaped on myself. I accustomed
myself to the work, since it occurred to me that in acquiring fame I would
render the Ives family less regretful of the interest they had shown in me. Charlotte, whom I sought to
reconcile myself to through renown, presided over my labours. Her image sat
before me while I wrote. When I lifted my eyes from the paper, they rested on
the beloved image, as though the original had been there in reality. The
inhabitants of the
Let us forego these
memories; memories age, and vanish, like our hopes. My life is about to change,
it will unfold under other skies, in other valleys. First love of my youth, you
flee with your charms! I happened to see
London, April to September 1822.
Life has often been
represented (by me above all), as a mountain which one climbs from one side, to
hurtle down the other: it would also be valid to compare it to one of the
The Essai offers a compendium of my existence, as poet, moralist, publicist and politician. To say that I hoped, inasmuch at least as I was able to hope, a great success for the work, that goes without saying: we lesser authors, little prodigies of a prodigious era, we have pretensions of maintaining a conversation with the future race; but we have no knowledge, to my mind, of posterity’s place of residence, we pen its address incorrectly. When we sleep in the tomb, death will freeze our words, written or sung, so solidly, they will not melt again like Rabelais’ frozen words.
The Essai became a sort of historical encyclopaedia. The only volume published was already a sufficiently deep investigation; I had the remainder in manuscript, then a poet’s lays and virelais arrived to accompany the annalist’s researches and annotations, then the Natchez, etc. I can scarcely understand today how I managed to carry out such extensive labours, in the midst of an active life, a wanderer subject to so many reverses. My tenacity when working explains this fecundity: in my youth, I have often written for twelve to fifteen hours with getting up from the table at which I sat, editing and reworking the same page a dozen times. I have not lost this ability for application with age: my diplomatic correspondence now, which is not allowed to interrupt my literary compositions, is entirely from my own hand.
The Essai made a stir among the émigrés: it was in contradiction to the views of my companions in misfortune: my independence regarding diverse social attitudes has almost always wounded the men with whom I have been aligned. I have in turn been the commander-in-chief of various armies whose soldiers were not of my own party: I have led the old Royalists to the achievement of public freedoms, and above all that of the freedom of the press, which they detested; I have rallied the liberals in the name of that same freedom to the Bourbon flag which they regarded with horror. Émigré opinion happened to attach itself, through pride, to my person: the English Revues, having spoken of me in glowing terms, their praise reflected on the whole corps of the faithful.
I had sent copies of the
Essai to Laharpe, Ginguené and De Sales. Lemierre, nephew of the poet of that name and translator of Gray’s verses, wrote to me from
Having become nigh on
well-known, the émigré nobility sought me out in
Elderly neighbours visited Mrs O’Larry, with whom I was obliged to take tea according to the ancient custom. Madame de Stael has depicted the scene in Corinne at Lady Edgermond’s house: ‘My dear, do you think the water is hot enough to add it to the tea? – My dear, I think that would be premature.’
A very beautiful young Irish lady, Mary Neale, also came to these soirees escorted by her guardian. She found some pain in the depths of my gaze, for she said to me: ‘You carry your heart in a sling’. I carried my heart I don’t know how.
Mrs O’Larry left for
Peltier was back; he had married heedlessly; always boastful, wasting his resources, and frequenting his neighbours’ money rather than their persons.
I made several new acquaintances, especially in the circles where I had family connections. Christian de Lamoignon, badly wounded in the leg in the Quiberon affair, and now a colleague in the Chamber of Peers, became my friend. He presented me to Mrs Lindsay, a friend of Auguste de Lamoignon, his brother: not quite as President Guillaume de Lamoignon was installed at Basville, between Boileau, Madame de Sevigné and Bourdaloue.
Mrs Lindsay, of Irish origin, with a dry wit, a somewhat abrupt manner, elegant height, and a pleasant figure, had nobility of soul and an elevated character: émigrés of note spent the evening at the fireside of this last Ninon. The old monarchy perished with all its abuses and all its graces. It will be disinterred one day, like those skeletons of queens, adorned with necklaces, bracelets, and earrings that they exhume in Etruria. At this rendezvous I encountered Monsieur Malouët and Madame du Belloy, a woman deserving of relationship, the Comte de Montlosier and the Chevalier de Panat. The latter had a well-earned reputation for his wit, slovenliness, and greed: he belonged to that set, of men of taste, who used to sit arms crossed before French society; idlers whose mission was to see everything and judge everything, they exercised the functions newspapers now exercise, without possessing their bitterness, but also without achieving their immense popular influence.
Montlosier was forced to travel because of
his famous phrase about the cross of wood,
a phrase which I reshaped a little, when I quoted it in the Génie, but which is profoundly
true. On leaving
Montlosier, welcomed
thus for his royalist sympathies, crossed to
Feudally liberal, an aristocrat and democrat, a strange spirit, made of bits and pieces, Montlosier gave birth with difficulty to disparate ideas, but when he could manage to free them from the natal cord, they were often fine, and always full of vigour: opposed to priests as he was to noblemen, converted to Christianity by means of sophisms, while a lover of ancient times, he had been, under the influence of paganism, a warm supporter of freedom in theory and slavery in practice, who would feed the slave to the fish in the name of the liberty of the human race. Crushing in argument, a quibbler, daring and tousled, the former deputy of the Riom nobility nevertheless permitted himself to make concessions to the powerful: he knew how to manage his interests, but allowed no one to see him at it, and hid his weaknesses as a man behind his honour as a gentleman. I will hear nothing evil said of my hazy Auvernat, with his ballads of Mont-d’or and his polemics of the Plain; I had a liking for his heterogeneous personality. The long obscure development and swirl of his ideas, with its parentheses, throaty gasps, and tremulous cries of: ‘oh! oh!’ bored me (the shadowy, muddled, vaporous, and tiresome, I find abominable); but on the other hand, I was diverted by this naturalist of the volcanic regions, this lost Pascal, this orator from the mountains who ranted to the gallery as his little compatriots, the sweeps, sang from the heights of their chimneys; I liked this journalist of peat bogs and little castles, this liberal explaining the Charter through a Gothic window, this shepherd lord half-wedded to his cowgirl, sowing his barley himself, in the snow, in his little stony field: I was always grateful to him for having dedicated to me, in his hut in the Puy-de-Dôme, an ancient black stone, taken from a cemetery of the Gauls which he had discovered.
The Abbé Delille, another compatriot of those Auvernats, Sidoine Apollinaire, the Chancelier de l’Hospital, La Fayette, Thomas, and Chamfort, driven from the Continent by the torrent of Republican victories, had also recently established himself in London. The Emigration counted him among its ranks with pride; he sang our ills, even more reason to be enchanted with his muse. He worked hard; he had to, since Madame Delille locked him up, and only let him out when he had filled his day with a certain number of lines. One day, I had gone to see him; he was delayed, and then appeared, with very red cheeks: they say that Madame Delille used to slap him; I don’t know; I only say what I saw.
Who has not heard the Abbé Delille declaim his verse? He speaks very well; his person, ugly, rumpled, animated by imagination, wonderfully suits the charm of his delivery, the nature of his talent, and his priestly profession. The Abbé Delille’s masterpiece is his translation of the Georgics, in parts close to the original in feeling; but it is as if you were reading Racine translated into the language of Louis XV.
Eighteenth century literature, aside from the few fine geniuses that dominate it, that literature placed between the classical literature of the seventeenth century and the romantic literature of the nineteenth, without lacking naturalness, lacks nature; dedicated to the arrangement of words, it is neither sufficiently original like the new school, nor sufficiently pure like the old school. The Abbé Delille was the poet of modern châteaux as the troubadour was the poet of old ones; the verse of the one, the ballads of the other, reveal the difference between the aristocracy at the centre of power, and the aristocracy in a state of degeneration: the Abbé depicts readings and games of chess in country houses, where the troubadours sang of crusades and tourneys.
The distinguished members of our Church Militant were then in England: the Abbé Carron, of whom I have spoken already, in borrowing from his life of my sister Julie; the Bishop of Saint-Pol-de-Léon, a severe and narrow-minded prelate, who contributed to separating Monsieur le Comte d’Artois further and further from his century; the Archbishop of Aix, slandered perhaps because of his worldly success; another wise and pious bishop, but so avaricious, that if had experienced the misfortune of losing his soul, he would never have bought it back. Almost all misers are men of intelligence: I ought to be totally stupid.
Among the French in the western
region of
Mesdames de Caumont, de Gontaut, and du Cluzel also inhabited that quarter of exiled felicity, that is, if I am not confused regarding Madame de Caumont and Madame du Cluzel, whom I had audience with in Brussels.
Madame la Duchesse de Duras, was certainly in
London, April to September 1822.
From time to time, the Revolution brought us émigrés of a new kind with fresh opinions; various layers of exiles formed: as the earth contains beds of sand or clay, deposited by the waves of the flood. One of these waves brought me a man whose demise I still deplore today, a man who was my guide in literature and whose friendship has been one of the honours and consolations of my life.
In Book IV of these
Memoirs you have seen that I met Monsieur de Fontanes in 1789: it was last year, in
Monsieur de Fontanes has
been, with Chénier, the last writer
of the elder branch of the Classical school: his prose and his verse are akin
and belong to the same order of merit. His thoughts and imagery possess a
forgotten melancholy from the age of Louis XIV,
which only recognises the austere and sacred sadness of religious eloquence.
That melancholy is found amongst all the works of the bard of Jour des Morts, like the imprint of the
age in which he lived; it fixes the date of his appearance; it shows that he
was born after Rousseau, in
his taste adhering to Fénelon. If one were
to reduce the writings of Monsieur de Fontanes to two quite thin volumes, one
of prose, the other of verse, they would form the most elegant of funeral
monuments that one could raise over the tomb of the Classical school. (It is to
be raised through the filial piety of Madame Christine de Fontanes; Monsieur de Saint-Beuve has adorned the pediment of
the monument with his ingenious words. Note:
Among the papers my
friend left behind, may be found several cantos of a poem on Grece sauvée, books of odes, and diverse
poems, etc. He published nothing more himself: since that critic, so subtle,
enlightened, and impartial, when political opinion did not blind him, had a
terrible fear of criticism. He had been royally unjust towards Madame de Staël. In an article on the Forêt de Navarre, Garat, full of envy, thought to cut short his
poetic career at its inception. Fontanes, on his appearance, killed off the
affected
Among the posthumous odes of Monsieur de Fontanes, there is one on the Anniversary of his Birth: it has all the charm of Jour des Morts, with a deeper and more personal sentiment. I only remember these two verses:
‘Age is already here with its sufferings:
Brief hopes? Are they all the future brings?
What does the past grant? Errors, and regret.
Such is man’s destiny; he learns with age:
But what use is the sage,
Now so little time is left?
Past, present, future, they all grieve me:
Life in its decline for me lacks glory;
In the mirror of time, its charms are gone.
Pleasure! Go seek love and youthfulness;
Leave me to sadness,
And do not condemn!’
If anything in the world was bound to be antipathetic to Monsieur de Fontanes, it was my literary style. A revolution in French literature began with me, and the so-called Romantic school: however, my friend, instead of being revolted by my barbarity, conceived a passion for it. I saw immense amazement on his face when I read bits of Les Natchez, Atala and René to him; he could not analyse these works according to normal critical rules, rather he realised that he was entering a new world; he saw nature afresh; he understood a language which he could not speak. I received excellent advice from him; I owe to him whatever is correct in my style; he taught me to respect the sounds; he prevented me from falling into over-extravagant invention and the harshness of execution of my disciples.
It was a great joy to
meet him again in
A PEASANT FROM THE VENDÉE
Monsieur du Theil, Monsieur the Comte d’Artois’ chargé
d’affaires in
This man, who was no one, had seen Cathelineau die, the first general of the Vendée and a peasant like himself; Bonchamp, in whom Bayard lived again; Lescure, armed with a hair-shirt, no proof against a bullet; General d’Elbée, executed by firing squad while seated in an armchair, his wounds preventing him from meeting death while standing; and La Rochejaquelein, whose death the patriots ordered verified, so as to reassure the Convention in the midst of its victories. This man, who was no one, had been involved in the capture and re-capture of towns, villages, and redoubts, in seven hundred individual actions and seventeen formal battles; he had fought against an army of three hundred thousand regulars, and six to seven hundred thousand conscripts and National Guards; he had helped to capture a hundred canon, and fifty thousand rifles; he had passed through the columns from hell, companies of incendiaries commanded by Conventionnels; he found himself in the midst of an ocean of fire, which, on three occasions, rolled its waves towards the woods of the Vendée; at last, he had seen three hundred thousand Hercules of the plough perish, companions in labour, and seen a thousand square miles of fertile country change to a desert of ashes.
The two
In the waiting room crowd, I was the only person to treat with admiration and respect this representative of the ancient Jacques, who, in throwing off the yoke of their lords completely, under Charles V, repulsed the foreign invader: I seemed to be looking at a son of those communes of the age of Charles VII, who with the minor provincial nobility, re-conquered the soil of France, foot by foot, furrow by furrow. He had the indifferent air of a savage; his look was grey and inflexible like a rod of iron; his lower lip quivered over gritted teeth; his hair hung from his head in serpent locks, seemingly lifeless, but ready to spring upwards again; his arms, hanging by his sides, gave a nervous twitch to enormous wrists marked by sabre cuts; he might have been taken for a sawyer of longstanding. His physiognomy expressed a working man’s rustic nature, placed, by the powers that be, at the service of ideas and interests contrary to that nature; the inborn fidelity of the vassal, the simple faith of the Christian, mingled there with a rough plebeian independence accustomed to value itself and do itself justice. The feeling for liberty seemed in him to be no more than the strength of his hand and the intrepidity of his heart. He spoke no more than a lion does; he scratched himself like a lion, yawned like a lion, turned to one side like a bored lion, dreaming, it would seem, of blood and the wild: his knowledge was like that of the dead.
What men, everywhere,
the French were then: what a race we are today! But the Republicans had their
leadership with them, amongst them, while the Royalist leadership was outside
MY WALKS WITH FONTANES
While
I was indulging in these reflections on the ploughman, like those of another
sort I had indulged in at the sight of Mirabeau
and Danton, Fontanes obtained a private audience
with the person he called amusingly the Controller
General of Finances: he emerged highly satisfied, since Monsieur du Theil had promised to support the publication
of my works, and Fontanes thought only
of me. It was impossible to find a better man: reticent regarding what
concerned himself he was all courage for a friend; he showed it, at the time of
my resignation following the death of the Duke d’Enghien. In conversation he bristled with
ridiculous literary passions. In politics, he talked nonsense; the crimes of
the Convention had induced in him a horror of liberty. He detested the
newspapers, philosophizing, ideology, and he communicated that dislike to Bonaparte, when he drew near the master of
We went on walks in the countryside; we would stop beneath one of those large spreading elms in the meadows. Leaning against the trunk of the elm, my friend would tell me about his former travels in England before the Revolution, and recite the lines he had once addressed to two young ladies, who had become old in the shadow of the towers of Westminster; those towers which he had found standing as he had left them, while at their base were buried the hours and illusions of his youth.
We often dined in some
solitary tavern in
We saw
The Duke de Bourbon, Fontanes and I, all equally proscribed, sought shelter, on foreign soil, under a poor man’s roof, from the same storm! Fata viam invenient: Fate finds a way.
Fontanes was recalled to
28th of July 1798.
‘If you have felt regret at my departure from
Adieu, I embrace you tenderly, and am your friend,
Fontanes.’
Fontanes tells me he is composing verse while changing his place of exile. One can never rob a poet of all he has; he carries his lyre with him. Leave the swan its wings; each night unknown waves will repeat melodious cries that would be better heard on the Eurotas.
The future is yours: did Fontanes speak true? Ought I to congratulate myself on his prediction? Alas! The future he announced is already past: shall I possess another?
That first affectionate letter from the foremost friend I encountered in my life, and who after that date marched in step with me for twenty-three years, warns me painfully of my increasing isolation. Fontanes is no more; a profound grief, the tragic death of a son, sent him to the grave before his time. Almost all the people I have spoken of in these Memoirs have vanished; it is a Register of Deaths that I hold. A few more years, and I, condemned to catalogue the dead, will leave no one behind to inscribe my name in the book of absentees.
But if I must remain alone, if no other being who loves me remains to conduct me to my last refuge, I need a guide less than others: I am making my enquiries about the road, I have studied the places I must pass through, I have sought to know what happens at the last. Often, at the edge of a grave into which the coffin is lowered by means of ropes, I have heard the ropes groan; then I have heard the sound of the first spade-full of earth fall on the coffin: at each new spade-full the hollow noise diminished; the earth in filling up the hole, made the eternal silence above the surface of the coffin deepen, little by little.
Fontanes! You wrote to me: Let our muses always be friends; you did not write in vain.
London, April to September 1822.
‘Alloquar? audiero numquam tua verba loquentem?
Nunquam ego te, vita frater amabilior,
Aspiciam posthac? at, certe, simper amabo!’
‘Am I never to speak to you? Never to hear your voice? Never to see you, brother more beloved than life? Ah! I will always love you!’
I had just lost a friend, I then lost a mother: it was necessary to repeat the lines Catullus addressed to his brother. In our valley of tears, just as in hell, there is some unknown eternal lament, which represents the lowest depth or the dominant note of human grief; one hears it ceaselessly, and it would continue if all created pain should chance to fall silent.
A letter from Julie which I received shortly after that of Fontanes, confirmed my sad remark regarding my progressive isolation: Fontanes urged me to work, to become illustrious; my sister pressed me to renounce writing: one proposed glory, the other oblivion. You have seen from my account of Madame de Farcy that she was prone to such ideas; she had grown to hate literature, because she regarded it as one of her life’s temptations.
Saint-Servan,
‘My dear, we have just lost the best of mothers; it is with regret that I tell you of this sad blow. We shall have ceased to live, when you cease to be the object of our solicitude. If you knew how many tears your errors have caused our venerable mother to shed, how deplorable they appear to all who think and profess not only piety but reason; if you knew this, perhaps it would help to open your eyes, and induce you to renounce writing; and if Heaven, moved by our prayers, permits our reunion, you will find all the happiness among us that can be enjoyed on earth; you would grant us that happiness also, since there is none for us, as long as we lack your presence, and have reason to be anxious about your fate.’
Ah! Why did I not follow my sister’s advice! Why did I go on writing? If my times had lacked my writings, would anything of the events and spirit of those times have altered?
Thus, I had lost
my mother; thus I had troubled her last hours! While she was breathing her last
sigh far from her last living son, praying for him, what was I doing, here in
The filial affection I retained for Madame de Chateaubriand went deep. My childhood and youth were intimately linked to the memory of my mother; all I knew came to me from her. The idea that I had poisoned the last days of the woman who carried me in her womb, made me despair: I threw my copies of the Essai into the fire, as the instrument of my crime; if it had been possible for me to annihilate the work, I would have done so without hesitation. I did not recover from this grief until the idea came to me of expiating the effect of my first work by a religious work: this was the origin of Le Génie du Christianisme.
‘My mother,’ I wrote in the first preface to that work, ‘after being locked in jail at the age of seventy-two, imprisoned there still when one of her sons died, expired eventually on the pallet to which her misfortunes had brought her. The memory of my errors cast a great bitterness over her last days; at her death, she charged one of my sisters with recalling me to the religion in which I was raised. My sister sent me details of my mother’s last desire. When that letter reached me across the sea, my sister herself was no more; she too had died of the effects of her imprisonment. Those two voices from the tomb, that death which acted as Death’s interpreter, impressed me powerfully. I became a Christian. I did not yield, I must admit, to great supernatural enlightenment: my conviction came from the heart; I wept and I believed.’
I exaggerated my faults; the Essai was not an impious book, but a book of doubt and sorrow. Through the shadows of that book, glides a ray of the Christian light that shone on my cradle. It required no great effort to return from the scepticism of the Essai to the certainty of Le Génie du Christianisme.
London, April to September 1822.
When, after the sad news of Madame de Chateaubriand’s death, I resolved to make a sudden change of course, the title Le Génie de Christianisme, which I thought of instantly, inspired me; I set to work; I laboured at it with the ardour of a son building a mausoleum to his mother. My material was that which my previous studies had been gathering and rough-hewing for some time. I knew the works of the Fathers better than they are known these days; I had studied them in order to oppose them and having entered on that path with ill intentions, instead of leaving it as victor, I left it vanquished.
As to history proper, I had occupied myself with it specifically in composing the Essai sur les Révolutions. The Camden antiquities I had recently examined had made me familiar with the institutions and manners of the Middle Ages. Finally my daunting manuscript of Les Natchez, of two thousand three hundred and ninety-three folio pages contained all the Génie du Christianisme might need in the way of nature description: I could draw heavily on that source, as I had already for the Essai.
I wrote the first part of the Génie du Christianisme. Dulau, who had become booksellers to the émigré French clergy, agreed to publish it. The first sheets of the first volume were printed.
The work thus begun in
As one item of study leads to another, I could not occupy myself with French scholarship, without taking account of the people and literature amongst which I was living; I was drawn towards this other research. My days and nights were spent in reading, writing, taking lessons in Hebrew from a knowledgeable priest, the Abbé Caperan, consulting the libraries and men of learning, roaming the fields with my endless daydreams, and in making and receiving visits. If there are retroactive effects, ones symptomatic of future events, I ought to have been able to detect the noise and tremor of the work which was to make me famous, in the seething of my spirit and the palpitations of my muse.
A few readings of my
first sketches served to inform me.
‘This Monday.
‘Goodness! What a fascinating reading, this morning, which I owe to your extreme kindness! Our religion has counted among its defenders great geniuses, illustrious Fathers of the Church: those athletes handled all the weapons of reason with vigour; unbelief was vanquished; but that was insufficient; it was necessary to demonstrate all the charms of that admirable religion; it was necessary to show how suited it is to the human heart, and reveal the magnificent pictures it offers to the imagination. It is not here a theologian of the schools, but a great painter and man of feeling who reveals a fresh horizon. Your work was missed, and you were called to do it. Nature has endowed you liberally with the fine qualities it demanded: you belong to another century…
Ah! If the truths of feeling come first in the order of nature, no one will demonstrate those of our religion more adequately than you; you will confound impiety at the door of the temple and you will introduce sensitive spirits and feeling hearts to the inner sanctuary. You picture again for me those ancient philosophers who gave out their teachings their heads crowned with flowers and their hands full of sweet perfumes. That is indeed a weak representation of your spirit, so tender, classical and pure.
I congratulate myself
every day on the happy circumstance that brought me close to you; I cannot ever
forget that it was through Fontane’s
generosity; I love him the more, and my heart will never distinguish between
two names which fame must unite, if
Chevalier de Panat.’
The Abbé Delille also heard
the reading of several extracts from Le
Génie du Christianisme. He seemed surprised, and he did me the honour, a
little later, of versifying the prose that had pleased him. He naturalised my
savage flowers of
The incomplete edition
of Le Génie du Christianisme, which I
had begun in
London, April to September 1822.
Before continuing these literary considerations, I must interrupt them a moment, to take leave of my uncle Bedée: alas, that is to take leave of my life’s first joys: freno non remorante dies: there is no bridle to curb the flying days. Consider the ancient tombs in ancient crypts themselves conquered by age, blank and lacking titles, having lost their inscriptions, they are forgotten like the name of those they enclose.
I
had written to my uncle on the subject of my mother’s death; he replied to me
in a long letter, in which were touching words of regret; but three quarters of
his double folio pages were dedicated to my genealogy. Above all he recommended
me, when I returned to
When the émigrés returned, my uncle Bedée retired to Dinan, where he died, seven miles from Monchoix, without seeing it again. My cousin Caroline, the eldest of my three cousins, is still alive. She remains an old maid, despite the respectful advances made to her former youth. She writes me letters devoid of spelling, where she addresses me as tu, calls me Chevalier, and talks of the good old days: in illo tempore: in those times. She was blessed with beautiful dark eyes and a pretty waist; she danced like La Camargo, and she thinks she remembers that in secret I bore her a shy love. I reply in the same tone, setting aside, as she has, my age, my honours and my fame: ‘Yes, dear Caroline, your Chevalier etc.’ It is thirty or so years since we met: Heaven be praised! For, God knows, if we ever came to embrace to each other, what a figure we should cut!
Gentle, patriarchal, innocent, honourable family friendship, your age has passed! We are no longer tied to the earth by a multitude of roots, shoots and flowers; we are born and die now, one by one. Those living are urged to hurl the dead into Eternity, and dispose of the corpse. Among friends, some attend the coffin to the church, muttering about the loss of time and the disturbance to their routine; others take their devotion as far as following the procession to the cemetery; the grave filled, all memory is effaced. You will never return, days of religion and tenderness, when the son died in the same house, the same chair, close to the same hearth where his father and grandfather had died, surrounded, as they had been, by weeping children and grandchildren, on whom the last paternal blessing descended!
Adieu, my dear uncle! Adieu, my mother’s family, which is vanishing like the rest of my family! Adieu, my long ago cousin, you who love me still, as you loved me when we listened to our good aunt Boisteilleul lamenting over The Sparrow-hawk, or when you assisted at the repetition of my nurse’s prayer, in the Church of Notre-Dame de Nazareth! If you survive me, accept the share of gratitude and affection I bequeath you here. Never think the smile that shaped itself on my lips, in speaking of you, was a false one: my eyes, I assure you, are full of tears.
End of Book XI