Chapitre V

Chateaubriand in Paris-His destitution-Introduction to Joubert-Revision of Le Génie du Christianisme at Joubert's advice-Pauline de Beaumont-Her relations with Joubert-Her salon -Her interest in Chateaubriand-He accepts her invitation to live with her at Savigny.

AN anecdote in the Mémoires illustrates the destitution attested by the letter to Fontanes quoted in the last chapter.

Walking about Paris, Chateaubriand came to a church which the Jacobins had turned into a place of profane entertainment. The announcement of " free admission" tempted him to enter. Acrobats were giving a performance on the tight-rope, and he sat down to look at them; but when a waiter came round with a tray, calling upon the spectators to "give their orders," he was obliged to get up and go. " I actually had not a penny," he writes, "with which to pay for my refreshments.

His friends, however, came to the rescue. Fontanes was an editor, and could employ him on the Mercure de France. His publisher was persuaded to advance him a small sum on account of his forthcoming book. It was arranged that he should live provisionally with Joubert, about whom a word or two may now be said.

He has already been introduced as an aphorist, but

his aphorisms were not, in fact, published until after his death¹.! For his contemporaries at this period he was merely a man of culture living on his means. Before the Revolution he had been, for a brief while, first a school-master and then a country magistrate; but he had abandoned both occupations, and now divided his time between Paris and his country place at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, reading, meditating, talking, and now and again, with grave wisdom, putting an aphorism on paper. Fourteen years older than Chateaubriand, he had sat, in his youth, at the feet of Diderot; but he had reverted from philosophy to Christianity, not with the enthusiasm of the neophyte, but with the solemnity of the sage. His friends-and he had many friends-esteemed him " the most amiable of eccentrics"; and his most remarkable eccentricity was his habit of Bowdlerizing his books. He used to tear out of them, and destroy, all the pages containing sentiments which he could not endorse, so that, in the end, he possessed a large but mutilated library, mainly composed of loose covers flapping about a few scattered sheets of text. Such was the man who now "took up" Chateaubriand, and collaborated with Fontanes in giving him good advice.

1 Chateaubriand edited them. He died in 1824. ↩

Fontanes and he were Chateaubriand's literary godfathers. Their attitude towards him suggests two school-masters coaching a clever boy for a Balliol scholarship. They do not seem to have regarded him as in any sense a rival. They were clever, but they knew their limitations, and had no expectation of ever setting the Seine on fire. On the other hand, they felt that Chateaubriand, if rightly guided, might go anywhere and do anything. He was their "dark horse" whom they had " spotted" and would back, sure to win the race for fame-" Eclipse first and the rest nowhere" if only they trained him for it properly and allowed no premature dissipation of his powers, but held him back until his hour was come and then launched him with éclat. They devoted all their care and all their energies to that.

They told him, first of all, that Le Génie du Christianisme, rich in promise as it was, must be rewritten. He accepted the decision with docility, and they stood over him, criticizing and encouraging, while he performed his task. He had meant to break with the eighteenth century, and thought that he had done so; but they showed him that he had not. "We must wash him clean," wrote Joubert, " of Rousseau, of Ossian, of the fogs of the Thames, of his revolutions ancient and modern, and leave him only the Cross, the Missions, the Ocean sunsets, and the American savannas. Then we shall see what a poet will arise to purify France from the mess of the Directorate, even as Epimenides, with his sacred rites and his poems, purified Athens from the plague « And Fontanes warned him: "It is open to you to place yourself at the head of the century that is now dawning, and, instead of that, you are hanging on to the skirts of the century that is coming to an end." He did not argue the point, but did as he was told; and then, as if to reward him for his obedience, his friends procured him a new source of inspiration by presenting him to Madame de Beaumont.

Pauline de Beaumont was by birth a Montmorin descendant of the François de Montmorin, Governor of Auvergne, who, at the time of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, wrote Charles IX the memorable letter: " Sire, I have received your Majesty's order to arrange that all the Protestants in my province shall be murdered. I respect your Majesty too much not to believe the order to be forged; and if-which God forbid-it be not forged, then I respect your Majesty too much to obey him." Her father, the Comte de Montmorin, had been French Ambassador at Madrid, and Foreign Minister in Necker's Administration. She and her husband, Comte Louis de Beaumont, whom she married when a mere child, had long since ceased to live together, or even to communicate; and all the fault, by all the accounts, was on his side, though he was the nephew of an Archbishop¹.'

1 Of Christophe de Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris, whom Rousseau demolished in controversy. ↩

Fate had been very cruel to her during the Terror. Her father was one of the victims of the September massacres; his body was impaled and carried in triumph to the National Assembly. Her mother and her brother perished on the scaffold on the day of the execution of Madame Elizabeth. Her sister, thrown into prison with them, only escaped the same fate by declaring herself enceinte, and so being allowed to live till Thermidor released her. She herself was arrested when they were at the Château de Passy, in the dead of winter; but she was ill and an encumbrance, so the Republican commissioners turned her out of the carriage and left her by the wayside in the snow.

It was impossible for her to return to her home, for the seals of the Republic were affixed to the doors and barred the entrance; so she wandered helplessly until, at last, she found shelter with a vine-dresser named Paquereau, who had once been one of her father's servants. For several months she lived in his cottage -ill in bed most of the time-raising small sums of money for her more urgent needs by sending a few articles of jewellery to be sold at Sens. Joubert was living in the neighbourhood at the time, with nothing to do, as usual, except to look on at life, and criticize it, and seek out new friends and serve them. The story of her distress reached him. He knocked at the door of the cottage, and offered her a shelter in his house. She declined that offer, fearing that she might be a dangerous guest, and not wishing to alarm Madame Joubert; but at least she was no longer quite alone in the world. She had a new friend, whose friendship was only to grow in the subsequent years of comparative prosperity and calm.

The friendship was a great event-perhaps, if we knew the truth, the greatest of all events-in Joubert's life. He was not quite a gentleman, according to the estimates of the period, by birth or up-bringing; and his wife was homely. Pauline de Beaumont was a great lady, intellectual as well as charming, gifted with all the graces of the ancien régime. She descended like an angel from heaven upon his homely hearth, causing him to realize how very homely it was. Probably the liaison that ensued was only intellectual. Joubert was that sort of man; but still-

Madame Joubert, writes Mrs. Humphry Ward, "knew neither selfish passions nor small jealousies"; and that, on the whole, was fortunate for the peace of the household. The aphorist was at least guilty of intellectual infidelity; and some of his aphorisms about his wife which appear in his letters to other ladies would hardly have pleased her if she had been aware of them. "I knew that she had merit and some charms," he wrote. " The charms are gone; the merit remains." And he also apologized for her to Madame de Beaumont, saying, " I count on your discernment to discover the feelings and the merit which she has the bad habit of not showing enough." An attachment, albeit only intellectual, must have gone rather far when it finds expression in such aphorisms uttered in such circumstances; and there are a few letters which, if when reading them we read between the lines, do seem to indicate-Those letters, however, belong to a later date, and we shall come to them in due course. For the moment, the intellectual passion was unruffled, and even in some degree returned. Religion was mixed up with it; religion nearly always was mixed with the affections, whether intellectual or carnal, of these Catholic reactionaries of the early days of the nineteenth century. Apparently it made little difference to them. They behaved in temporal matters very much like the philosophers of old, though they found comfort in envisaging things spiritual differently. It was thus, at any rate, with Pauline de Beaumont and her friends.

Her conversion to Catholicism did not hinder her from divorcing her husband, though divorce is forbidden to Catholics; and her Catholic friends did not criticize her action otherwise than by continuing to call her Madame de Beaumont after she had obtained her decree. Then-or perhaps a little sooner-she returned to Paris, and opened her salon in the Rue Neuve de Luxembourg.

The word " salon," however, must not mislead us. To an English reader it probably suggests grandeur and glittering lights, glorious apparel and sparkling jewellery, a fashionable mob on a wide staircase, powdered footmen bawling the names of guests, a weary hostess interminably shaking hands with a long procession of people whom she scarcely knows by sight. There was no such display, and no such crush in the salon of Madame de Beaumont. She merely received a few friends every night in her "apartment," without luxury or ostentation. They came, not to flirt, nor to play cards, nor to show themselves and pass on to some other entertainment, but to talk.

We have had many salons in England-Lady Holland's, Lady Blessington's, George Eliot's, Mrs. Grote's-but never a salon at once so distinguished and so simple. Our clever women have been too Sibylline, and too fond of homage; our pretty women too anxious each to monopolize a man; our frivolous women too ready to interrupt the play of wit with irrelevant observations; our dull women too reluctant to be left at home. Again and again these difficulties have perplexed and baffled the English salonière; but they seem to have been quite inoperative when Madame de Beaumont " received" in Paris.

The homely Madame Joubert, for instance, did not always accompany her husband, the aphorist, to the receptions, which would, no doubt, have bored her; and no offence was taken when brilliant ladies were invited to come without their husbands. The occasional guests included Madame de Staël, her cousin, Madame Necker de Saussure, and Madame de Vintimille. The regular attendants, who seldom missed an evening, were Joubert, Fontanes, and MM. de Bonald,¹ Molé,² Pasquier,³ and Chênedollé.⁴ They assembled regularly in their hostess's dimlylighted drawing-room, for no other purpose, as has been said, than to talk brilliantly about religion, politics, literature and the drama; and the day came when Fontanes-or perhaps it was Joubertbrought and introduced his young protégé, Chateaubriand.

1 A Catholic reactionary, author of Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux dans la Societé Civile, made a Minister of State at the Kestoration. ↩

2 A Cabinet Minister under Louis-Philippe. ↩

3 Foreign Minister when Chateaubriand was Minister at Berlin. ↩

They had already spoken to her of him as the young man of genius who was about to put the philosophers to shame and restore religion with a blare of trumpets; and he looked the part and could sustain it. He was thirty-two, broad-shouldered, handsome, with a head that was by universal testimony^* magnificent." His voice was rich and sympathetic ; his smile, when he chose to smile, was " irresistible." His broad brow bore the stamp of intellect; and melancholy-the disdainful melancholy of the proud man whom fate has persecuted-had marked him for its own. He instinctively struck the pose, in short, of l'homme fatal. Napoleon, indeed, with his cynical way of putting things, declared at a later day that he looked like " a conspirator who had come down the chimney"; but Madame de Beaumont did what the Englishwomen in Kensington Gardens had failed to do-she " divined the invisible presence of René.

* A poet, author of Le Genie de l'homme, a work not without merit though it made no mark. He ultimately, thanks to Fontanes, became a School Inspector at Caen. ↩

René, from the very first, was favoured beyond her other guests- beyond even Joubert, who, until then, had been favoured above the rest. The aphorist was, after all, an aphorist, and was some fifteen years her elder, and lived with the wife for whom he apologized to her. She was deeply grateful to him, and very much attached to him; but still- She was thirty, and she had never loved, and now-She knew, of course, that Chateaubriand was married. Though he had concealed the fact from Charlotte Ives, he did not conceal it from her. Since everybody in Paris knew it, he could hardly have done so if he had wished, and perhaps he did not wish. But Madame de Chateaubriand was in Brittany; and Brittany was a long way from Paris; and Chateaubriand had not seen his wife for ten years, and did not seem to wish to see her; and Madame de Beaumont, knowing Chateaubriand, and having fallen under the spell of "the Enchanter," as they all called him, concluded that there were reasons for this of which he was too chivalrous to speak. What else could she conclude when he told her that he hoped to restore religion in France? Moreover, she was in the grip of a disease¹ which does not spare; and, knowing that she had not long to live, she wanted to love and be loved before she had to die. This was her chance, and she snatched at it.

1 She was in consumption. ↩

In order to be near Chateaubriand, she stayed in Paris at seasons of the year when it was her general custom to go into the country; and she was always at home to him when she was at home to no one else. The others, including Joubert, came to see her, at the most, only once a day; but he came twice. In the evenings he joined in the general talk in the salon, or read the burning pages of Atala and René to an applauding company; but in the mornings and the afternoons he sat alone with her, exchanging confidences, hypnotizing her with his caressing voice, sympathizing with the sufferings which had left her almost alone in the world, telling her stories of his picturesque childhood in the solitary Breton castle, and speaking of that relentless ennui which had followed him like a shadow in his wanderings-mostly imaginary wanderings, as we have seen-on the shores of the Canadian lakes, " in the huts of the savages," and on the still bosoms of the Floridan lagunes.

No doubt he was in love-he tells us so, and we may believe him. He was in love with her, though he was also in love with himself, and with the new attitude that he was striking. He did not foresee, for lovers never foresee-but that can wait.

And Pauline de Beaumont, it is equally apparent, was even more in love with him, loving him without "arrière pensée," and without any thought of herself. She had never loved before, and she was too ill to flatter herself that she would ever love again. This was to be the one love of her life, and she must make the most of it; and, in order that she might make the most of it, she and her lover must be alone. Not alone in the midst of the crowds of Paris, where they were daily interrupted by the claims of politeness and the salon, but alone in the country among woods and meadows. No one and nothing must stand in the way-neither Joubert, nor Madame de Chateaubriand, nor the fear of what people might say; and she must make haste before her lover became too famous.

His fame was already beginning. A newspaper controversy with Madame de Staël, the details of which need not trouble us, had first caused him to be talked about; and Madame de Staël had actually called on Madame de Beaumont to complain of the way in which Chateaubriand was treating her. Then he had published Atala, and readers had realized that a new sun was about to rise in the hemisphere of letters. Le Génie du Christianisme had been announced, and the world was eagerly waiting for it. Chateaubriand was rewriting it, as he had been told to do, under the critical eyes of Fontanes and Joubert. Might he not write faster-might he not also write better-in the quiet of the country, with only the woman who loved him by his side?

So Madame de Beaumont argued; and she planned her coup. She hired a furnished house for seven months at Savigny, and, in May 1801, carried Chateaubriand off there to live with her. He tells us, in the Mémoires, that he was there "with M. Joubert and our other friends"; but that is not the case, as the correspondence with Joubert and the other friends most

G 8ı amply proves. A few of the friends, including Joubert and Chateaubriand's sister, Lucile, did pay them a visit; but they did not remain very long. During the greater part of the seven months in which Chateaubriand was finishing his work on the genius of Christianity, he and Pauline de Beaumont were alone together-on their honeymoon; and that was what Pauline de Beaumont had intended.

"Every morning,' she said to Madame de Vintimille, " I shall hear the sound of his voice; and I shall sit and watch him while he works."