Chapitre III

The journey to Paris-Chateaubriand joins his regiment-Presented at Court-The beginning of the Revolution-Risks at Rennes-Acquaintance with Mirabeau-Departure for the United States. FROM Rennes to Paris Chateaubriand shared a carriage with a milliner, not because he was in quest of adventures, but because a relative had so arranged things for him. The lady was disappointed with him, he says-just as the maid Merceret was disappointed with the conduct of Jean-Jacques Rousseau when she took him for a walking tour. She wondered, he relates, why he kept to his own corner of the conveyance, instead of trying to sit as close by her as possible. Perhaps it was his first foretaste of the successes that were to come; but Madame Rose dropped him at his hotel, "in a hurry to get rid of her fool of an escort"; and so the incident ended.

A Parisian cousin fetched him from his hotel, and took him to call on an unknown Madame de Chastenay. Madame de Chastenay, a late riser, received him lying in her bed, and gave him her hand to kiss, telling him that he was a wild creature, but she would tame him. " But I did not kiss her hand," he writes. "I withdrew, full of embarrassment; " and that incident was also closed. Chateaubriand was only eighteen, and was still timid.

The coach took him to Cambrai, where he reported

himself to his colonel, the Marquis de Mortemart. The ascendency of his character, he says, was such that his brother officers did not venture to " rag" him, though ragging was usual in the French army at that period. He learnt the goose-step " amid the applause of the instructors." His rooms were the favourite vendez-vous of his seniors as well as of the subalterns. Already-or so it seemed to him in retrospect-the world was beginning to be his theatre.

Presently the news of his father's death compelled his return to Brittany to assist in the settlement of the family affairs and the division of the family fortune. Accorded a long leave of absence, he spent some months in visiting his three married sisters; but then a letter from his brother summoned him once more to Paris. He was to be presented at Court. The Maréchal de Duras had promised to be his sponsor.

He was presented, but nothing came of it. " Sire, the Chevalier de Chateaubriand," said M. de Duras, as Louis XVI passed down the corridor on the way to Mass; "but the King was more embarrassed than l on., could think of nothing to say to me, and walked

He had the chance of joining the Queen's card party in the evening, but he declined it; nor was he present, as he had been advised to be, when the King's hunting-boots were pulled off in the presence of the Court. Evidently he was no courtier, but was at once too proud and too shy for the rôle. He would be happy to meet kings and queens when he could meet them on what he could consider equal terms; but that was impossible for the eighteen-yearold subaltern from the country. Moreover, he had

C 2 other ambitions; he was writing poetry for the Almanach des Muses, and was absorbed in the study of Greek-a more usual relaxation with French than with English soldiers.

His next military station was Dieppe. He tells us that he drilled recruits there on the pebble beach, and acquired a taste for the profession of arms; but his taste for it did not prevent him from neglecting it. The laxity of discipline-it was lax, at any rate, for officers-allowed him to live pretty much as he liked, and he spent most of his time in Paris, frequenting the society of men of letters. The list of his literary acquaintances included Flins des Oliviers, Fontanes, Ginguené, the Chevalier de Parny, Le Brun, Chamfort, and La Harpe. The house in which he was most at home was that of M. de Malesherbes, whose granddaughter his brother, Jean-Baptiste, had married. He conversed with M. de Malesherbes, not of military matters, but of "botany and geography"-subjects then in vogue, in consequence of the writings of Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and the travels of Bougainville and La Perouse. Maps were spread on the table, and Chateaubriand said that he would like, above all things, to go to America and discover the North-West Passage. Sometimes, too, there were amateur theatrical performances, in which Lucile was once persuaded to play a part.

Another ambitious project was formed for Chateaubriand about this time. He was to become a Knight of Malta-a quasi-ecclesiastical position to which no duties, but substantial emoluments were attached. " I had a prospect," he writes, " of an income of 200,000 livres." A condition of eligibility was that he should receive the tonsure, and he did so. The objections of the Bishop of Saint Malo were overcome by the arguments of Madame de Chateaubriand. The Bishop was persuaded that the son might properly be ordained because the mother was pious. He " snipped off two or three hairs " from the crown of the young soldier's head, giving him, not too much tonsure, but just tonsure enough to qualify him for the material benefits in view.

"No doubt the arrangement was an ecclesiastical abuse," he comments, "but it had its utility under the old régime; and surely it was better that a military endowment of this kind should be the guerdon of the soldier's sword than that it should be attached to the robe of an abbé who would doubtless proceed to eat up his rich benefice in the streets of Paris!"

Very possibly; but the point need not be argued, since, for all practical purposes, the Revolution solved the problem.

That Revolution, foreseen by so few, was now drawing very near. The year in which Chateaubriand received the tonsure was 1788-the year in which Arthur Young drove through Combourg inquiring, " Who is this Mons. de Chateaubriant? " The answer should have been that he was a young man who favoured reform in general, though he was prepared to profit from an ecclesiastical abuse, but who would not, like Mirabeau, desert his order when sides had to be taken. And that was to be soon-at the States-General elections at Rennes in January 1789.

The nobles, Chateaubriand among them, met in the Convent of the Jacobins in the Place du Palais. There was a riot in the town; and the rioters, led by Chateaubriand's school-fellow, the future General Moreau, then a student at the Rennes law school, blockaded them in their hall.

"Our president gave the signal, and we all drew our swords and shouted, 'Vive la Bretagne!' and, like a garrison reduced to the last extremity, we executed a furious sortie, meaning to pass over the bodies of our assailants. The populace received us with howls, and volleys of stones, and blows from their sticks, and shots from their pistols. We carved ourselves a passage through the flood of humanity, which closed again behind us. A number of noblemen were wounded, dragged in the mire till their clothes were torn, and much bruised and injured; we got clear of the mob, with the greatest difficulty, and dispersed."

That was the very first scene of violence arising out of or leading up to the Revolution, and Chateaubriand passed through it unscathed. Had he perished then, he reflects, the historian would merely have recorded the death of " a young gentleman named Chateaubriand." Instead of which-Private affairs detained him for some time in Brittany; he was back in Paris soon after the memorable day on which the Deputies, assembled in the Tennis Court at Versailles, dared the King to send his soldiers to disperse them. He saw the storming of the Bastille; the first heads carried on the first pikes; the triumphant procession which brought the royal family to Paris. He also witnessed some of the stormiest sittings of the Constituent Assembly. All this, however, merely as a spectator of scenes in which there was no part for him; so that his vivid wordpictures of the turmoil need not be quoted here. It is only in his recollections of his meetings with Mirabeau that his personality appears.

He met him twice, he says, at dinners or receptions. On the first occasion Mirabeau " enchanted" him with his "tales of love." On the second he looked at him "with his eyes full of pride and vice and genius," and slapped him on the back, exclaiming, with a side glance at his rivals and detractors: " Those fellows there will never forgive me for my superiority to them." Whereupon Chateaubriand characteristically comments

"When Mirabeau thus fixed his gaze upon a mute young man, had he, I wonder, any presentiment of the thing's which the future held in store for me? Did he suspect that he would one day appear before the tribunal of my reminiscences? It was my destiny to become the historian of exalted personages. They have defiled before me, but I did not hang on to their cloaks, nor have I descended to posterity as one of their train »

His own testimony to his life at this time stands almost alone; and perhaps, like his recollections of his childhood, it is not entirely to be trusted. Perhaps it is not even true that Mirabeau chose him for his confidant when he denounced the other revolutionists for their jealousy of his talents. He used the words cited, according to other versions of the story, but not in conversation with Chateaubriand, who added that touch for the sake of rhetorical effect. It may be so, but it makes little difference. The picture which Chateaubriand draws of himself is confirmed as a whole, if not in detail, by the two other witnesses whom his biographer, Villemain, cites.

A M. de Pommereul used to meet him sometimes at supper. Chateaubriand, he said, "had talent." But he "never spoke a word," though "you know what a noise he has since made in the world."

The Chevalier de Panat, then holding a commission as captain in the navy, knew him rather better.

" I soon saw what stuff he had in him, ," he said to Villemain. "I talked to Fontanes about him, and he agreed with me. In 1789, when Lally and Mounier left France, I tried to induce him to join the emigration. He hesitated; he was in love; and he already suffered from the melancholy which is sister to inaction. Afterwards, however, in some walks that we took together, and once when I met him together with Fontanes and Rivarol¹ at Saint Cloud, he impressed me as a man of genius, although half mad."

1 Rivarol, who afterwards joined the emigration and lived at Hamburg, was reputed the most brilliant talker of his day. ↩

The love story to which the Chevalier alludes was not of any moment, though a paragraph is consecrated to it in the Mémoires d'Outre-tombe. A M. Monet, a mine manager, and his daughter used to take Chateaubriand to the theatre. "I do not know," he says, "whether I was in love with her. I do know that I was afraid of her. Sometimes, however, I used to call, in a great state of nervousness, and take her for a walk. She took my arm, and I think I sometimes squeezed her hand »

No more than that. Chateaubriand as yet was in the very early days of his apprenticeship to love. It was in travel that he proposed to seek sentiment and adventure.

His regiment, then stationed at Rouen, had mutinied. He had not been with it, so far as one can make out, for nearly a twelvemonth; and now he was free even from the theoretical obligation to rejoin it. His brother officers went to join the army of Condé, which was gathering at Coblentz to reconquer France for Louis XVI; but he stayed on in Paris, going, as we have just seen, to the theatre, and for walks, with Mademoiselle Monet, but at the same time pondering a more ambitious scheme.

" He unfolded to me," says the Chevalier de Panat, "his project of discovering the North-West Passage. I offered such objections as naturally occurred to a man who had sailed the seas, and was acquainted with the charts. His answer was: 'The thing I am looking for is novelty. There is nothing to be done here. The King is lost, and there will be no counter-revolution. The step which I propose to take is like that of the Puritans who emigrated, in the seventeenth century, to Virginia. I am going to the forests; that is better than going to Coblentz. What is the good of emigrating merely from France? I, for my part, am an emigrant from the world. Either I shall die on my way, or else I shall return a different man from him who now departs. »

And so saying, Chateaubriand went down again into Brittany, made his preparations, collected letters of introduction, and arranged for his passage on the Saint-Pierre, a brig of 160 tons, which left St. Malo on April 8, 1791.

The vessel carried several passengers besides Chateaubriand-seminarists sent across the ocean to found a Catholic establishment at Baltimore. One of them, M. de Mondésir, wrote out, in later life, his recollections of the voyage, and of his illustrious companion; and his manuscript is still in the library of the Seminary of Saint Sulpice. It is a less poetical narrative than Chateaubriand's own, but more circumstantial, and one can better trust the picture which it draws. It shows us Chateaubriand beginning to act upon the guiding principle of his life-that he who would create an effect must strike an attitude; and we gather that his attitude was at once that of the " esprit fort" and that of the man of soul and sensibility.

As " esprit fort"-a rationalist disciple of rationalist philosophers-he persuaded one of the seminarists, a young English convert named Tulloch, to abandon his orders and return to the ampler life of the world. On the other hand, in the character of man of soul and sensibility, he prayed and even preached.

"The ebullient Chateaubriand," writes the ecclesiastical chronicler, " was much fonder of reading works of piety aloud than of listening to them in seemly silence. He read much oftener than it was his turn to read; and M. Nagot had one day to tell him that an austere devotional meditation ought not to be declaimed like a tragedy."

And on Good Friday—

" After the service, M. de Chateaubriand asked M. Nagot's permission to speak a few words to the sailors, who were good Bretons and good Catholics. The Superior consented, and our new missionary took a large crucifix in his hands, and proceeded to harangue the crew, delivering himself of such forcible phrases and such burning words that, if only there had been a Jew on board, I feel sure the sailors would have thrown him overboard."

The most vivid picture of all, however, is of Chateaubriand's conduct in the storm-

"We met several gales while crossing, and once we encountered a veritable hurricane. M. de Chateaubriand, full of his Greek authors, and disposed to take Homer's heroes for his models, caused himself to be lashed, like Ulysses, to the mainmast, where the winds buffeted him and the waves swept over him. He bravely faced both winds and waves, however, and kept up his courage by apostrophizing the tempest: 'O tempest,' he kept exclaiming, 'beautiful as thou art, thou art less beautiful than Homer's picture of thee.i

And so, after some delay at the Azores (where Chateaubriand says that he sat up all night drinking with the monks in a monastery, and at the island of Saint-Pierre (where he tells us that a pretty girl fled precipitately from him because he offered to present her with a corset of Parisian style and cut), to Baltimore, where he landed on July I0.

Chpter IV

The journey through America-Chateaubriand's veracity impugned

M. Joseph Bédier's analysis of his itinerary-Did he really meet George Washington?

CHATEAUBRIAND, says Sainte-Beuve,¹ " made a romance of" his adventures in the United States.

1 In Chateaubriand et son Groupe Littéraire sous l Empire. ↩

He did-there can be no question whatsoever about that. It was suspected from the beginning, and now it can be proved. In this section of the Mémoires, and in the more formal Voyage en Amérique, he gives us warheit und dichtung in the guise of the relation of a journey. How much of that relation was romance, and how little was reality, not even Sainte-Beuve, with all his malice, and scepticism, and acumen, guessed.

It was a journey which Chateaubriand never forgot -on which, to the end of his days, he never ceased to insist.

There were many Frenchmen who crossed the ocean at about the same period, and who did not insist. Most of them hung on to the skirts of civilization, and comported themselves accordingly. The brothers d'Orléans called on Washington, and were announced as "three Equalities." The Comtesse de la Tour du Pin took a farm, and brought her own butter and eggs to market. Moreau de Saint Méry opened a stationer's shop. The Vicomte de Noailles became a partner in the banking house of Bingham and Company of Philadelphia. The Bishop of Autun¹ paraded the streets of the same city with a negress of light reputation on his arm. It is intelligible that the Bishop of Autun, when he had become an ambassador, did not insist upon that.

1 Talleyrand. ↩

But Chateaubriand did insist. He, for his part, had forsaken civilization and plunged into the forests. He had roamed the continent-so he would have us think, and so he almost came to believe-from North to South, and from East to West, from Niagara to Florida, and from Philadelphia almost to New Orleans. He came to see himself, and to present himself, not as a traveller, but as the traveller, whose style had been coloured, and whose mind had been stored, by his unique experiences in the wilderness. " Atala,' he tells us, "was written in the huts of the savages." The shores of Egypt reminded him of "the Floridan lagunes." "Never," he says, reporting some conversation with Madame Joubert and Madame de Beaumont, "never did I describe the wilds of the New World so graphically;" while his later travels in Italy call forth the comment: " My name is written in the wigwams of the savages of Florida, and now it is recorded in the book of the hermit of Vesuvius. .." And so forth, and so forth, in defiance of the demonstrable facts.

There were whispers of scepticism even when Atala appeared. That romance related that bears " intoxicated themselves with grapes and walked with staggering steps upon the branches of the elms." Abbé Morellet and Marie-Joseph Chénier boggled at that statement, but Chateaubriand defended himself in the grand style, and silenced them. Atala had been translated into English. The translations had been read by the Americans. There had been no protest, no contradiction: "Atala has returned to the wilderness, and his fatherland has recognized him as a true child of its solitudes." In the face of that, Morellet and Chénier had nothing more to say.

America, however, had not accepted Atala, or had only accepted it provisionally. It was precisely trom America that the first effective criticism came. In December 1827 the American Quarterly Review published an article on Chateaubriand's collected works, in the course of which the writer said- "He is evidently willing to have it thought that he had lived long and travelled much in our wilderness, and among our Indians, and, in particular, that he was well acquainted with Louisiana, the Mississippi, and Florida. But this cannot be. His descriptions of scenery in Atala and in The Natchez are thoroughly false. A person capable of peopling the banks of the Mississippi with parrots, monkeys and flamingoes, can never have been there."

That was the beginning of doubt. We find an echo of it-and something more than an echo-in a letter signed René de M—, dated from New York in 1832, and published in the Fribourg magazine L'Invariable, under the title " Découverte d'une petite mystification." We are here given an imaginary conversation between " an old settler" and a traveller whose anticipations of America are derived from Chateaubriand's writings. The charges of ignorance brought in the American Quarterly Review are quoted and supplemented. Chateaubriand, says the settler, describes the Ohio and applies the description to the Mississippi, makes two rivers, the Wabash and the Tennessee, flow in the wrong direction, places mountains where there are only occasional bluffs to be found, lakes where there are only rivers, and forests where there are only prairies, falls into gross errors about the fauna as well as the flora, and, at Niagara, mistakes the bearings of both the American and the Canadian falls. And his conclusion is—

The traveller's veracity could not have been more formally impugned; but the challenge provoked no answer, and produced no perceptible effect. Probably, since the publications of Fribourg are little read in Paris, Chateaubriand never even heard of it. Sainte-Beuve, who was acquainted with it, gave it less attention than it deserved. The inaccuracies noted were for him merely illustrations of Chateaubriand's " grand style and careless methods." Doubtless, he says, Chateaubriand travelled fast, impelled by that ennui which always, throughout his long life, pursued him from place to place and from emotion to emotion. And so the matter rested-doubts being hinted rather than openly expressed, and the narrative as a whole being taken on trust-until in 1903 M. Joseph Bédier 1 analyzed the itinerary, and demonstrated that Chateaubriand was no bona fide explorer, but, on the contrary, "a sublime Tartarin," if not actually a sublime Munchausen. For it appears-I. Chateaubriand could not have covered the ground which he professes to have covered in the time which he had at his disposal, even if he had been, all the time, in flight from Indians hunting for his scalp.

2. Chateaubriand unscrupulously annexed the adventures of other earlier travellers, and represented them as his own.

3. In the one instance in which Chateaubriand's story can be checked from other sources-in the case, that is to say, of his alleged interview with Washington-it is demonstrable that he does not speak the truth.

The initial deception is in the matter of dates. "I left France," we read in the Introduction to the Voyage en Amérique, "at the beginning of 1791;" and the date of the return is given approximately as " July 1792." One would infer, therefore, that Chateaubriand's travels extended over a period of something like eighteen months; and in eighteen months he would doubtless have had time to go to all the places to which he tells us that he went. His statements, however, can be checked by the records of the ships on which he embarked; and from these

1Études critiques. Par Joseph Bédier (Armand Colin).

it can be determined that he landed at Baltimore on July 10, 1791, and re-embarked at Philadelphia on the roth of the following December. The duration of his sojourn, therefore, was not eighteen months, but five, and into those five we have to fit the following itinerary—

Baltimore to Philadelphia-Philadelphia to New York-New York to Boston-Boston to New York -New York to Albany and Niagara-Exploration of the Lakes of Canada-Journey down the Ohio from Lake Erie to Pittsburg-Descent of the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans-Exploration of Louisiana and Florida-Journey north by Nashville, Knoxville, Salem, Chillicothe-Chillicothe to Philadelphia.

The journey would be of no importance, of course, in these days of trains and steamers. But those were the days of stage coaches and canoes. It was not only improbable that Chateaubriand would get over the ground in the time. It was physically impossible for him to do so. That is what M. Bédier has shown. Following the traveller stage by stage, and computing the minimum time required for the accomplishment of each stage by reference to authentic contemporary road-books, we come to this conclusion-Supposing that Chateaubriand raced through the United States as if bent upon making a "best on record" time; supposing that there were no hitches and no delays; supposing that he never stopped to pay a visit or to see a sight, other than the one or two sights which he specifies; supposing that, wherever he arrived, he invariably found coaches, horses, canoes, and guides awaiting his pleasure; supposing that he never lost his way, or stuck in the mud, or was held up by bad weather; supposing that, when he journeyed on horseback, he rode fifty miles a day, day after day -supposing all these incredibly favourable conditions, he would not have completed his circular tour and arrived at Philadelphia until a fortnight after the boat by which we know him to have returned to France had sailed.

So far, so good; but even that is not all. For Chateaubriand, it must be noted, makes no claim to having travelled with the rapidity of a personallyconducted excursionist. He pictures himself as rambling rather than racing, as divagating, and lingering to observe. He "explored,' he says, " the savage ruins of Scioto"; he made "geodesic observations" ; he made "botanical notes to be shown to M. de Malesherbes"; he studied the manners and customs, rites and ceremonies, modes of government, and methods of agriculture of the Indians; and he also kept a diary and wrote two books. Atala, he assures us, was written "in the huts of the savages"; and so was a certain History of a Savage Canadian Tribe, of which the manuscript was lost, "a kind of novel, with an entirely new setting which would have been worthy of the reader's attention." All this in five months. To state the claim is to confute it, and we have no need of further witnesses.

Yet, if further witnesses were wanted, we might call no less a witness than George Washington.

Chateaubriand, we read, had a letter of introduction to Washington, was received by him, and was "unmoved by his presence." The description of the

D 2 _ 35 alleged interview is one of the most eloquent passages in the Mémoires d'Outre-tombe."

" Neither grandeur of soul nor greatness of fortune or estate ever impresses me unduly. 1 can admire the former without being overwhelmed by it; the latter inspires me with pity rather than respect; and I never feel troubled by the gaze of any man."

Let that pass. The proposition is too vague and general to lend itself to specific confutation. It is otherwise when we come to details and particulars.

"When I arrived at Philadelphia," writes Chateaubriand, "General Washington was not there. I had to wait a fortnight for him. At the end of that time he returned »

But Washington's movements, as it happens, can be fixed from his correspondence, and from the newspapers of the period-the Gazette of the United States, the Federal Gazette, etc. He was at Philadelphia on the day of Chateaubriand's arrival, and he remained there after Chateaubriand's departure. It is almost certain that he never left the city at all between July 6 and September 6, and it is quite certain that he never left it for more than a day or two. The alleged fortnight's absence is demonstrably a figment of Chateaubriand's imagination, a circumstantial detail introduced apparently for the purpose of giving "verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative," but actually affording the strongest circumstantial evidence that the narrative is untrue.

Chateaubriand, then-the inference is irresistiblenever saw Washington at all, or saw him only, as any one might have seen him, from a Philadelphian sidewalk, as he was driving through the streets. Those were the circumstances in which he was "unmoved by his presence," and " passed before him as an absolutely unknown young man"; and that view of the case is further strengthened by the alleged visitor's errors in his description of his alleged host's household. He says that the President kept no menservants, whereas he kept several, including a French cook. And so forth; the veracity of Chateaubriand's story collapsing completely in the one instance in which it can be arraigned at the bar of proved historical fact.

The discovery prepares the mind for further scepticism, and for the further discovery that, even in writing his autobiography, Chateaubriand took his good things where he found them, and that his " sources" were the writings of earlier travellers who had really visited the regions of which he wrote with the air of a man who, hungry for new experiences, had been the first to burst into the fastnesses of the virgin forest, to consort with Iroquois and Seminoles, and to explore the Lakes of Canada and the Floridan lagunes.

The sources of Chateaubriand's narrative of his travels-Florello-Charlevoix-Bartram-Proofs of plagiarism-Ennui-Return to France-Marriage-The army of Condé-Arrival in England. " A PREDECESSOR of René"-and René is always Chateaubriand, though Chateaubriand is not always René-was recently introduced to the public by M. Baldensperger in the Revue de philologie française et de littérature.

This predecessor's name is Joseph-Marie Loaisel de Tréogate. The title of his book, reviewed in the Mercure de France in July 1776, is Florello: histoire méridionale. M. Baldensperger describes it as " a rough, halting outline of Les Natchez," with the scene laid, not in North America, but in South, on the banks, not of the Mississippi, but of the Oronoko. "A worthy ancient named Kadorg" has lived for forty years in the wilds there-just like Chactas. One evening, taking his walks abroad, he meets a young European "whose outward appearance indicates the sorrows of his soul." The young European is Florello; and Florello is an earlier René.