Chapitre III (suite 3)

Such was his first serious love affair, and it cannot be said that he comes out of it otherwise than badly; for he admits that Charlotte Ives had questioned him discreetly about his family affairs, and that he had returned evasive answers, saying nothing about the wife he had left behind him, but giving the impression that he was a bachelor and eligible. But he was none the less most seriously enamoured. " I cursed," he writes," "my marriage which had ' side-tracked' me, and so deprived me of happiness." He cherished the idea of wandering back to Bungay, and hiding behind a hedge, that he might peep unseen at Charlotte " on her way to church"; " a hundred times," he tells us, he was on the point of doing so. He also wrote long letters to Charlotte, though he tore them up instead of posting them; and her image haunted him in his despair. "It was at this time that the mad ideas depicted in René assailed my heart, making me the most miserable of men."

But then, just because he was-or was to be-a literary artist, the torturing memory became a stimulus and an inspiration. " I felt that, if I could only win renown, the Ives family would be less disposed to regret the interest which it had taken in me. Charlotte presided over my studies." And so he resumed his studies, finished and arranged for the publication of his Essai sur les Révolutions," which appeared, in England, in 1797.

It was a crude work. Abbé Sieyes described it, in a letter to Koederer, as a "hotch-potch of philosophical pretentiousness." Its author, indeed, proved himself to have acquired a considerable mass of undigested learning; but he had not yet found his point of view. The Chateaubriand who counts is the man of the Catholic and monarchical reaction; the Chateaubriand of the Essai had not yet broken with the eighteenth century. He was always a monarchist, indeed-a Breton could hardly fail to be that-though his attitude towards kings was always that of a disdainful patron rather than a loyal subject; but he was at this stage a freethinker, imbued with the ideas of the philosophers-more deeply imbued with them even than he permitted to appear. The proof is in a copy of the Essai, annotated in his own handwriting, for a long time in the possession of Sainte-Beuve, and bought back by the Chateaubriand family, at the sale of Sainte-Beuve's library, for & 120.

Wherever the text of the Essai is daring, the marginal notes put the dots on the is. We read in the book, for instance, that " God, matter, and destiny are one"; and a note adds: " This is my system; this is what I believe." A little further we find a comment on the doctrine of the fall of man, with the marginal gloss: "This objection is irrefutable, and completely demolishes the whole edifice of Christian doctrine. But in any case it is a doctrine which no one believes in now." And so forth. Chateaubriand said a good deal that was unchristian, and meant more than he said. His pious Breton relatives were pained; and the opinion of his friends among the émigrés was by no means unanimously enthusiastic.

His book, however, attracted some attention, and made him " almost a personage" in the French colony -which was what he chiefly wanted. Presumably, too, it brought him a little money. He moved to better lodgings, in the neighbourhood of Hampstead, and mixed with more distinguished people. He names, among others, the Comte de Montlosier, the Chevalier de Panat, Abbé Delille, Abbé Carron, who afterwards wrote the life of his sister Julie, the Duchesse de Gontaut and Madame de Boigne, and Christian de Lamoignon; and he tells us he was admitted to the salon of Madame Lindsay-the "last of the Ninons," as he calls her-who was, at a later date, to be one of the mistresses of Benjamin Constant. There were some among his new friends who divined that distinction was in store for him. " He will go farther than any of us," said some one who had already gone some distance.

He had some thought, at this time, of living, as Rousseau liked to live, in the corner of a protector's park in Suffolk. A note to that effect appears, in the midst of theological commentaries, in the annotated copy of the Essai above referred to-

"I might live happily at a very trifling cost. It is only a question of finding somebody who would be willing to put me up in the country. I could arrange to pay for my board after the war was over. There I could botanize, and write, and go for walks at my leisure, provided that I was not obliged to keep any one company, but was left free to live in my own wild way.

A curious scheme, but one, it appears, which was very nearly realized—

" Mr. Beding proposed to let me have a little temple in his own grounds; but his house was one in which too many visitors are received. 1 should have been beleaguered there by importunate callers. Besides, the women in that set have no common-sense. They are ignorant and ill-bred. So the plan did not suit me. I want a more obscure and tranquil retreat, among simple, amiable people, not among 'grandees.

The influence, not only of the eighteenth century in general, but of Jean-Jacques in particular, is very visible in that aspiration; but nothing came of it, and we have no means of knowing how far it was seriously entertained. Chateaubriand continued to live pretty much as before, mixing in the society that was open to him, making an impression there by his strong, original, gloomy, disdainful personality, indifferent as ever to the fortunes of Madame de Chateaubriand, now released from her prison, grieving as ever for the loss of Charlotte Ives, "wearing his heart," as an Irish girl told him, " in a sling," yet gradually living down the sentimental trouble which he thus persisted in nursing. And then things began to happen.

M. de Fontanes, with whom he had a slight acquaintance, arrived in London, and Chateaubriand became intimate with him. A letter from his sister gave him the unexpected news of his mother's death, startled him in the midst of his scepticism, and made him doubtful of his doubts. He wept, and was converted and resolved to chant his palinode-the palinode which was to take aesthetic shape, and win wide celebrity, as Le Génie du Christianisme.

Which is to say that the real Chateaubriand-the devout voluptuary-the Catholic Childe Harold, with a dash, and perhaps rather more than a dash, of Don Juan-was beginning to find himself at last.