Chapitre IV. Chateaubriand's conversion - Commencement of Le Génie du

Christianisme--Difficulties in his version of the story-The advice of Dulau-The influence of Fontanes-Original title of Le Génie du Christianisme-Last years in London-The return to Paris.

CHATEAUBRIAND'S conversion appeared to him in retrospect to have been as sudden-and as dramatic the conversion of Saint Paul.

His sister Julie-Madame de Farcy-wrote to tell him of his mother's death. Once frivolous and worldly, Julie had found religion during the agonies of the Terror ; and therefore her melancholy piece of news was followed by this exhortation-

" If only you knew how many tears your errors have caused our excellent mother to shed, and how deplorable they seem to every one who reflects and makes profession not only of piety but of reason ; if you knew that, the knowledge would perhaps help to open your eyes and make you resolve that you would write no more."

England and France being then at war, communication between the two countries was slow and difficult. Letters had, as a rule, to be sent to Hamburg to be forwarded, and there was often considerable delay in their transmission. Consequently, as we read in the preface of Le Génie du Christianisme-

"By the time this letter had crossed the seas and been delivered to me, my sister herself had ceased to live; she had died as the result of her sufferings during her imprisonment. These two voices speaking from the grave-this death bringing the tidings of death-impressed my imagination. I became a Christian. I did not yield, I admit, to any shining supernatural light. My conviction came to me from my heart. I wept and I believed."

Only, of course, the voices of faith and conscience thus awakened by no means echoed Madame de Farcy's advice to Chateaubriand to " write no more." The impulse-the inevitable impulse of a writer-was to expiate his errors not by silence, but by speech: to write more-and at once-in order to retract and contradict himself and correct his philosophic sophisms. And that is what Chateaubriand did, setting to work without delay upon the book which we know as Le Génie du Christianisme, labouring at it "with the ardour of a son who would build his mother a mausoleum »

There is, one notes, no mention in all that of that other Madame de Chateaubriand who was his wife. On the contrary, he expressly tells us that his " kindling inspiration' was " the recollection of Charlotte"-Charlotte to whom he had made love, forgetting to inform her that he was a married man. And he was further inspired, he adds, by " my title which immediately occurred to me," and " the ambition of glory which stimulated my exalted imagination": "I wanted," he concludes, "to make a great noise in the world, that my mother might hear of me in heaven, and that the angels might lay my holy expiation at her feet."

The epithet "holy," it must be allowed, does not follow very aptly upon the sentimental allusion to a married man's amours, though it is characteristic of Chateaubriand, who was now beginning to be what he always continued to be-the devout voluptuary and the voluptuous saint; but that is not the only criticism that can be passed upon his story.

more effective criticism is to the effect that it is untrue.

It is untrue that Chateaubriand was inspired by his title, for he did not think of the title until after he had finished the book; and it is not true that Chateaubriand was moved to write the book by the news of his mother's death, for the first draft of his manuscript was nearly completed when he received that news. That can be proved to demonstration by the dated correspondence.

Madame de Farcy died on July 22, 1799. Chateaubriand could not possibly have heard of her death before the beginning of August. On August 19 he wrote a letter to Madame de Fontanes in which he stated that a volume of 430 pages " concerning the Christian religion in its relation to morality and the Fine Arts" is at the printer's. The length of time, therefore, in which Chateaubriand claims to have planned his masterpiece, "taken Hebrew lessons, consulted libraries and learned men, roamed in the country wrapped in meditation," and written 430 pages, appears, upon analysis, to have been somewhere between a fortnight and three weeks. Which is absurd; so that his story of the conception and execution of Le Génie du Christianisme must take its place with legends.

An alternative story was current among Chateaubriand's detractors, and was repeated by Napoleon at St. Helena. The conversion of Chateaubriand, according to that version, was due to the worldly counsel of Dulau the bookseller.

Dulau, it is related, was disappointed with the sales of the Essai; so he sent for Chateaubriand and told him so, and also told him why. Eighteenthcentury philosophy, Dulau said, was played out. The writer who wanted to succeed must look for his readers in the opposite camp. And Chateaubriand was impressed by the advice, and acted on it.

It may have happened so; for some booksellers and even some publishers, looking at literature from the commercial point of view, are a little prone to talk to authors in that tone; and authors eager for success-especially young authors in a hurry for success-are more than a little apt to listen to them. The whole of the truth, however, is no more likely to be contained in the second story than in the first; and the link between the two stories is probably to be found in the renewal of Chateaubriand's acquaintance with Fontanes.

Fontanes had already trodden in his quiet way the path which Chateaubriand was to tread with more sublime solemnity. He had been a philosopher-a Voltairian-and the Revolution had disgusted him with philosophy. He had fallen under the influence of Joubert-the idle aphorist whose pungent sayings have been made known to English readers by Matthew Arnold's eulogies and Mrs. Humphry Ward's translation. He and Joubert had tried to start a literary magazine together, and he had travelled in England to canvass, not very successfully, for subscribers. Joubert had found him a wife, though he already had a mistress -a Madame Dufresnoy, whom Chateaubriand had once met at his house at dinner. His habits were voluptuous, but his letters to Joubert were full of pious sentiments. " Believe me," he wrote, on hearing the news of his father's death, " it is only with God's help that we can console ourselves for our sorrows. Every passing day brings me the conviction that this is a belief that it is necessary to live with." And also: " Men need religion; otherwise all is lost."

That was the religious system-piety without Puritanism-which Fontanes brought to London on his second visit. It was just the sort of religious system-a religious system that did not interfere unduly with a man's private life-that Chateaubriand, living apart from his wife, and in love with Charlotte Ives, was then in the mood to adopt. He wanted a consoling faith which carried no uncomfortable obligation in the way of works, self-denials, or austerities; and Fontanes could supply him with it. They were constantly together during Fontanes' sojourn, exploring London and the suburbs, talking of literature, of France, of common friends, of whatever deeper thoughts were stirring in their minds. They read the Essai together, and talked of that. Fontanes, who was nine

F 65 years Chateaubriand's elder, admired but disapproved. He was quite of Dulau's opinion, though for different reasons, that Chateaubriand had better desert philosophy and address himself to the religious public. We may take it that both influences, and both reasons, had their weight; and that the news of Madame de Chateaubriand's death only set the seal of tears, and in some degree of sincerity, upon a conversion already half-effected from more or less interested motives.

We have, indeed, only to turn to the letters to see the process of conversion passing through these stages, and a change in the writer's point of view reflected in a change in the title of his book.

The first letter which concerns us is addressed to Madame Fontanes. It is a dry business letter, relating chiefly to dates of publication and the price-one hundred and sixty louis-which Chateaubriand asks for his manuscript. He gives the book the title cited above : "Concerning the Christian religion in its relation to morality and the Fine Arts." In a second letter, written a little later to her husband, he calls it: "Concerning the poetical and moral beauties of the Christian religion and its superiority to all other cults." The second title certainly has the air of taking religion more seriously than the former; and many passages in the letter bear witness to the writer's spiritual progress. Egoism, indeed, remains; but faith illuminates it. Chateaubriand has begun to believe in God as well as in himself. He is persuaded that God, moving in His mysterious way, has worked a wonder in order to touch his heart.

"God," he writes, " perceiving that my heart did not walk in the evil paths of ambition, and was indifferent to the abominations of the lust for gold, knew how to strike and how to move me. He understood, having moulded the clay, what was the strength and what the weakness of His handiwork. He knew that I loved my relatives, and was proud of them to the point of vanity; and therefore he deprived me of them that I might lift up my eyes to Him. God and you shall henceforward divide my thoughts, and such gifts as He has bestowed upon me shall, for the future, be consecrated to His glory »

God, that is to say, has chastened him whom He loved-vicariously-and has shortened the days of two devout women, His faithful servants, in order that their son and brother-a sinner who is also a man of genius-may be brought kneeling to the throne of grace. That is the unctuous thesis, and Chateaubriand maintains it with unction and conviction, and with the air of a man who pats Divine Providence approvingly on the back. Divine Providence, he seems to say, did well, and there should indeed be joy in heaven over the sinner who not only repented, but also wrote Le Génie du Christianisme; and so, confusing his memories in his survey, he crystallizes the story of his conversion in the graphic phrase: " I wept and I believed."

Chateaubriand's new-born faith, however, was not to bring him fame immediately. Difficulties arose, delaying the publication of his new book in France; and he was to spend yet another eighteen months in

F 2 67 comparative poverty in exile-partly in London and partly in the suburbs.

In Hyde Park, he tells us, he often caught a glimpse of Pitt, who " cast a disdainful glance" at him and the émigrés, his companions, and " walked on with his nose in the air." He rambled out to Harrow, where Byron, he reminds us, was then at school-Byron¹! whose personality, he insisted, was an unscrupulous plagiarism of his own. He took rooms at Richmond for the summer, and visited Kew Gardens to see the newly-imported kangaroos, and, at Strawberry Hill, was picked up by his old friend Peltier, who took him for a driving tour in the Thames valley. At Slough he saw Herschel and his telescope. At Windsor he bribed a servant to hide him so that he could see the King². At Blenheim he heard the news of Nelson's victory in Aboukir Bay. Elsewhere he meditated in a country churchyard, and made a translation of Gray's " Elegy." And so the time passed until he was advised that he would run no great risk if he returned to France.

1 Byron, while still at Harrow, wrote him a letter which he neglected to answer; and he believed that Byron, for that reason, deliberately refrained from acknowledging his indebtedness to his inspiration. ↩

2 He speaks of the King as then "blind and mad," but George I did not become either mad or blind until many years later. Probably, therefore, his story is another figment, based on a passage in Fanny Burney's Diary. ↩

He had, he says, no overwhelming desire to do so. Death had severed the closest of his family ties. " Divinities more powerful than those of the paternal hearth"-another allusion, one can not help guessing, to his hopeless passion for Charlotte Ives- " detained me where I was"; and, as for his wife: " My young widow only knew me through a union of a few months' duration, through misfortune, and through eight years' absence." But, on the other hand, the general stream of the émigrés was flowing homewards; and so Chateaubriand, exhorted by Fontanes, flowed with it. He obtained a Prussian passport in the assumed name of La Sagne, an alleged citizen of Neuchatel, and crossed to Calais in May 1800.

It was not Madame de Chateaubriand, but Madame Lindsay, who was waiting for him on the quay. He did not turn aside to visit Madame de Chateaubriand, but drove straight on to Paris in the carriage of the "last of the Ninons," who put him up for the night, and then engaged him a poor room in a cheap inn, whence he wrote to Fontanes to come and see him.

The manuscript which was to make his fame and fortune was in his trunk; but, otherwise, he was destitute. He had to appeal to Fontanes not only to visit him, but to help him :-

" Pray render me two services:

" In the first place send me a doctor.

" In the second place try to lend me twenty-five louis.

"I have heard bad news from my family, and do not know how I am to get along until Migneret¹ makes my fortune. It is very hard that I should have to be uneasy as to my means of livelihood while I am doing the Lord's work. ... Get me out of the mess if you can. Twenty-five louis will enable me to live until the publication of the book which is to decide my fate. Then the book will pay for everything, if that be the will of God who, up to the present, has not treated me very well.

1 His publisher. ↩

" Always yours,

La sagne

Pauline de Beaumont (Reproduced by permission of M. Paut Raynat)