Chapitre VII

Delphine de Custine-Her adventures during the Reign of Terror-The beginning of her friendship with Chateaubriand-Chateaubriand's travels in the provinces-His visit to Delphine de Custine at Fervacques-His presentation to Napoleon-His appointment as Secretary of the Embassy at Rome-His correspondence with Delphine de Custine-His departure.

DELPHINE DE CUSTINE was thirty-three, a widow, and the most beautiful woman in France. Her eyes were deeply blue; her pink and white complexion was still as fresh as in the careless days when the Chevalier de Boufflers¹ had called her "the Queen of Roses" ; her golden hair, of which Chateaubriand speaks again and again with dazzled admiration, shone round her head like a veritable aureole. She looks out on us from Campana's picture with a gaze half passionate, half melancholy.

1 Son of the Marquis de Boufflers, brought up at the Court of Lunéville, chiefly famous as a wit, but also a successful Governor of Senegal. H 97 ↩

Her young husband, the Marquis de Custine, had perished in the Terror. So had his father, the General de Custine, who failed at Mayence and Valenciennes, "accused," writes Carlyle, " of many things; found guilty, we may say, of one thing: unsuccessfulness." Her presence in court, where she was privileged to sit on a low stool at his feet throughout his trial, came near to melting the hearts of his judges; and we read in the Bulletin National that Hébert had to appeal to them not to allow her tears or her beauty to influence their judgment. They did not; and she was herself threatened with violence by an angry mob as she descended the steps of the Palace of Justice. "C'est la Custine! C'est la fille du traitre," they yelled at her; but she faced them without flinching, and they let her pass unmolested.

A little later she herself was arrested on the vague but common charge of " intending to emigrate"; and, as she had before been saved by her courage, so now she was saved by her beauty.

She amused herself by caricaturing the members of the commission sent to interrogate her; and one of them—a master baker named Gérôme-was dazzled by the splendour of her presence, and fell, humbly and respectfully, in love with her. She should not perish, he vowed, if he could help it, and perhaps, if he were cunning, he might save her.

His official position gave him free access to Fouquier-Tinville's office; and he knew the dispatch box in which the public prosecutor kept, each on a separate slip of paper, the names and "dossiers" of all the prisoners awaiting trial. He knew too that it was Fouquier-Tinville's habit to withdraw the " dossiers" from the box at random, in the order in which they happened to be lying, and that those prisoners whose " dossiers" happened to be at the bottom of the heap were nearly always safe for another day. For six months, therefore, with a devotion which never relaxed, he made it the business of his life to keep Madame de Cusine's "dossier" out of reach. Night after night, never once missing a night, he stole into the office, searched for it, and, having found it, hid it underneath the others, so that Fouquier-Tinville never saw it until, at the end of the six months, the counter-revolution delivered his protégée trom peril.

That was in 1794, when Chateaubriand was teaching French and wooing Charlotte Ives at Bungay. After her release, Madame de Custine gradually, to some extent, recovered, if not her happiness, at least her fortune. She had powerful friends-Fouché was one of them-and their influence enabled her to get back some of her property. She travelled in Switzerland, where she visited Madame de Staël at Coppet, and met Lavater, the physiognomist, who threw up his hands in astonished admiration. "Your daughter is transparent!" he exclaimed to Madame de Sabran. "One can look through her skull into her brain. Never have I seen a face so candid." Then she returned to France, and bought a place at Fervacques in Calvados; and presently she met Chateaubriand.

Exactly how and when she met him is not known. Apparently she wrote him one of those "perfumed notes" which, as we have read, were showered upon him when he woke up and found himself famous. A letter of his to Fontanes, preserved in the Geneva Public Library, and published by Abbé Pailhés,¹ speaks of a communication which has reached him " with the seal broken," and which he hopes that F- — (presumably Fouché) has not read. "I do not know what to do," he adds, "to prevent such indiscreet favours from reaching me by the high-road of the post." This may, as Abbé Pailhés thinks, have been the beginning of an acquaintance which Madame de Cusine's biographer, M. Bardoux, dates six months later; but rigorous proof is wanting, and the Mémoires do not help us. This is what we read in them-

1 In Chateaubriand, sa Femme et ses Amis. H 2 99 ↩

" Among the bees who were then restoring their hive was included the Marquise de Custine, inheritress of the long tresses of Marguerite de Provence, wife of Saint Louis, whose blood ran in her veins. I was with her when she took possession of Fervacques, and I had there the honour of sleeping in the bed of the Béarnais, just as at Combourg I had slept in the bed of Queen Christine. Our journey was a great business. We had to embark in our carriage Madame de Custine's child, Astolphe, his tutor, M. Berstoecher, an old Alsatian nurse who spoke no word of any language but German, Jenny the maid, and Trim, a famous dog who ate the provisions which we had taken for our own sustenance by the way. One would have said that this colony was about to settle at Fervacques for ever; and yet the furnishing of the house was hardly finished when the signal was given to depart.

" I was to see her again-this woman who had faced the peril of the scaffold with so sublime a courage. I was to see her again-paler than the fates, attired in black, her figure wasted by impending death, her head wearing no ornament but her silken tresses. She smiled on me with her pale lips and her beautiful teeth as she left Sécherons, near Geneva, to die at Bex, at the entrance of the Valais. I heard her hearse driven by night through the solitary streets of Lausanne to its everlasting resting-place at Fervacques. She was hastening to hide herself in the plot of earth the possession of which, as of her life, she had enjoyed for an instant only."

That is all, and it is little, as M. Bardoux remarks, seeing that Madame de Custine loved Chateaubriand for twenty years. But that is Chateaubriand's way. He never confessed his loves with the precision of Rousseau; and one would not wish him to. The grand style is better than the shameless style, even though it leaves the biographer to seek the truth elsewhere. It does so in this case; but the truth-the full truthis supplied by a bundle of old love letters, though we must go back a little before we come to them.

Ostensibly, on the return from Savigny, the life of the little group of friends was resumed on the same footing as before. They assembled, as of old, in Pauline de Beaumont's salon, and called each other by playful and familiar names. Joubert was "the stag," Fontanes " the wild boar," Chateaubriand " the cat," or, in allusion to his travels, "the great raven of the Cordilleras," Madame de Beaumont herself " the swallow." They continued, in their letters, to refer to each other by these " sobriquets"; and one would have supposed unless one knew-for no word in the Mémoires hints the contrary-that the old friendships persisted with the old intensity, and that Pauline was still, for Chateaubriand, the one woman in the world.

"I had promised myself," he writes, alluding to the Savigny honeymoon, "to begin it all over again.

Ioi

But," he adds, " the hands of the clock never go back to the hour at which one would like to set them." And that means many things.

What he intends us to take it to mean is that greatness was now thrust upon him-that he had become a public character, peremptorily called upon to serve his country on the staff of the French Embassy at Rome-that he sacrificed his inclinations to his duty-that he would not even have made that sacrifice, had he not hoped that Madame de Beaumont would follow or accompany him to Rome, and there seek health, under his care, in a warmer climate. But all that, alas! is an afterthought. The real meaning of the passage, read between the lines in the light of our other knowledge, is somewhat different.

It means that Chateaubriand was yielding to the temptations of glory, and that the vapour of the incense was mounting to his head. It means that, now that La Harpe had told him that his work " inaugurated a new age," he was living for flattery and was cherishing high ambitions. It means that he was, as he says, " making many new acquaintances," and that the " perfumed notes" already spoken of were very far from causing him displeasure. It means, finally, that the love of Pauline de Beaumont no longer sufficed for him. Already, before the visit to Fervacques, he was tiring of her, and neglecting her. The proofs of that are in their letters to Chênedollé, in whom they both confided, and also in Chateaubriand's travels-not only the journey to the house in which he slept in the bed of the Béarnais, but other progresses as well.

The principal progress-the tone of the narrative compels the use of the high-sounding word-was undertaken, in the first instance, for the purpose of suppressing a pirated edition of Le Génie at Avignon. Migneret, of Paris, had sold, as a jubilant letter relates, "a thousand crowns' worth of copies in a single day. The " repeat order' of Dulau of London had been for 134 copies. But these sales would soon cease if a rival who paid no royalties were allowed to remain in the field. " If I am not to be ruined," wrote Chateaubriand, "I must be off to Avignon at once." He hurried there "secretly," with a letter of introduction from Lucien Bonaparte to the Prefect, and achieved his object; but though Madame de Beaumont was pining for him he did not hurry back.

"I am perfectly astounded," he wrote to Fontanes, "at the reception accorded to me wherever I arrive. My glory awakens echoes everywhere- in the newspapers, in the Clubs, in the Prefectures. My movements are chronicled as those of an important personage. If my book had been a treatise on philosophy, they would not even have known my name. But I have comforted unhappy souls. I have revived the principles which are dear to all hearts in the depths of the provinces. ... People are grateful to me for what I have said, and for what I have left unsaid; and the worthy folk receive me as the champion of their own thoughts, their own ideas."

Which means, again, that Chateaubriand, not content with a sip from the cup of homage, must drain the chalice to the dregs. What matter if Madame de Beaumont awaited him with sorrowful expectation, knowing that she had not long to live! He would return to her presently, but he must first make the tour of France, and show himself to all the religious people to whom his writings had been as balm poured upon a spiritual wound. So he proceeded upon his missionary journey, which was also a sentimental journey, and became a triumphal progress. He went to Vaucluse, to Marseilles, to Nîmes, to Montpellier, to Narbonne, to Toulouse, to Bordeaux, to Blaye, to Rochefort, and to Nantes. Finally he went to Brittany to show himself to Madame de Chateaubriand; and he wrote to Chênedollé to say that Madame de Beaumont was on no account to be told what he was doing: "Give her to understand that I am still at Avignon, and that I am coming straight home to Paris.

Perhaps it was the kinder course thus to deceive her. Her health, as all her friends knew, was failing, and she must be spared all the emotional shockseven the shock of hearing that her lover had been to see his wife. But she was wondering, wasting away, and grieving. "The country," she wrote to Chênedollé, from Madame Hocquart's country place at Luciennes, " is all dried up, and the society that I meet there only bores me. There is only one society that I care for now! The poor Swallow is living in a state of melancholy torpor."

Then came the news--it cannot have failed to come to her-of her lover's journey with Madame de Custine to Fervacques; and then she heard that Madame de Chateaubriand was coming to Paris; and then she learnt that Chateaubriand was going to Rome. Thus

he and she were drifting apart, and hope was dying in her breast.

The Mémoires, of course, tell quite a different story.

Chateaubriand had been presented to Napoleon at a reception at the Ministry of the Interior. The rest of the company had stood round them in a circle while they conversed of Christianity. The First Consul had " seen at a glance where and how I could be useful to him," for he was "a marvellous judge of men." He offered Chateaubriand, therefore, the post of Secretary to the newly-constituted Embassy at Rome; the Ambassador being his own maternal uncle, Cardinal Fesch. Abbé Emery " conjured " him to accept the office "in the name of the clergy and for the good of religion," adding, as a further inducement, that Cardinal Fesch was "a mediocrity," so that the Secretary would be to all intents and purposes Ambassador. The Abbe's insistence, Chateaubriand tells us, overcame him, and he continues-

"I accepted the post which he was instructed to offer me without feeling in the least convinced of my fitness for it, for I am no good when I have to play second fiddle. Perhaps even so I should have declined if the thought of Madame de Beaumont had not put an end to my scruples. M. de Montmorin's daughter was dying. It was thought that the climate of Italy might suit her. If I were to go to Rome, she too might be persuaded to cross the Alps. So I sacrificed myself to the hope of saving her. Madame de Chateaubriand made her preparations to join me. M. Joubert spoke of accompanying her, and Madame de Beaumont set out for Mont-Dore, meaning to complete her cure on the banks of the Tiber."

That is his story; and reference to our bundle of letters shows that it is another tissue of falsehoods, with no word of truth in it beyond the bald fact that Chateaubriand did go, as Secretary of the Embassy, to Rome.

It is probably untrue that he ever had any thought of declining the distinction; for, in the correspondence with Fontanes, we read of "great projects" being entertained, and the allusion is almost certainly to this particular appointment. It is clearly untrue that he thought of taking Madame de Chateaubriand with him ; for, upon that point, one of the letters to Fontanes is explicit. "Observe‚ « he writes to him, "to what a pass my domestic chagrins have brought me. The fear of having to rejoin my wife has, for the second time, driven me out of the country." And as for the suggestion that Madame de Beaumont was then uppermost in his thoughts, that point is set at rest by another letter of a still more intimate kind. " The thought of leaving you is killing me," Chateaubriand wrote-not to Madame de Beaumont, but to Madame de Custine. And more: it is actually to Madame de Custine, and not to Madame de Beaumont, that we find him writing: " Promise me that you will come to Rome »

Several of his letters to her, written between the dates of his nomination to the Secretaryship and his departure, have been preserved. They are brief notes; but the writer of them is in love, if ever a man was. They tell no story-evidently there was none but the old, old story to tell-but one cannot pass them without quoting. For example-

"You cannot imagine how I have suffered since yesterday. They wanted me to start to-day, but I have, by special favour, obtained leave to postpone my departure until Wednesday. I assure you I am half mad, and I think I shall end by tendering my resignation. The thought of leaving you is killing me. The climax of my unhappiness is that I shall not see you before two o'clock this afternoon. So, in Heaven's name, don't leave Paris. Let me meet you just once more »

"The only thing that I live for is the hope of seeing you again. For pity's sake send me a line single lineto help me to get through the day. All the rest of yesterday afternoon I roamed through the streets of Paris, not knowing whither I was going. Ah! promise me the chateau of Henri IV.! Promise me that you will come to Rome!

"Nothing is yet settled as to the date of my departure »

"Yet another day that I must pass without a glimpse of you! You will pass the time quietly enough. You will go out sketching; you will caress Trim; you will forget that there are people in the world who love you. My cell is very melancholy . . . a room emptied of all its furniture, and already announcing my departure. A little while ago all

Fervacques.

that would have mattered nothing to me. But a holy vision of beauty that came to me in my lodging has made the thought of separation insupportable. Think, I beg you, of the chateau of Henri IV; then I may be consoled. I shall be with you to-morrow at eleven »

" At midnight I received orders to attend at Saint-Cloud this morning; and I was so happy in the hope of seeing you to-day. Can you see me and invite me to lunch at eleven to-morrow? One thing, however, rejoices me; the date of our departure seems to become every day more uncertain. Love me at least as well as you love M. B——"¹

1 Her child's tutor, a M. Berstœcher. I08 valley of the shadow did it return and triumph. ↩

" I shall be with you to-morrow at eleven, but I am in a state of great anxiety, expecting a letter from the terrible Cardinal. What will be its contents?

" Good-bye till to-morrow."

And so forth, with all the impatience, the repetitions, the playful affectations of jealousy that one remarks in the love letters of simpler and less-gifted men.

The curtain fell, for the time being, on the episode when Chateaubriand at last received, and obeyed, the long-awaited order to set out for Rome; and we can see exactly what was his mood and what the state of his affections when he departed. He was very anxious to be near Madame de Custine; but he was even more anxious to get away from his wife. The "cause of religion" did not weigh with him as he represents; nor did his tenderness for Pauline de Beaumont. That tenderness had been killed by a fresh fascination. Not until he saw that Pauline de Beaumont walked with faltering steps towards the