Chapitre X

Domestic life in Paris-Madame de Chateaubriand's grievances-Visit to Joubert at Villeneuve-Lucile de Chateaubriand-Story of Chênedollé's love for her-Her insanity and death-Subsequent career of Chênedollé-Chateaubriand's travels-Visits to Coppet and to the Grande Chartreuse.

LEAVING his modest hotel in the Rue de Beaune, Chateaubriand hired a modest house in the Rue de Miromesnil. " Deprived‚ » he writes, " of my Alpine mission and of my Roman friendships, I did not know into what channel to turn my imagination and my sentiments »

The letters of his most intimate friends suggest that his imagination and sentiment flowed towards Madame de Chateaubriand. We find Joubert writing to Chênedollé that he seems "quite satisfied," and Molé writing to Joubert that he and his wife are " very loving ; but their testimony is not above suspicion. The reconciliation was their work ; and they were in a hurry to assure themselves of the success of the experiment. The verdict of observers who were only acquaintances is more critical, and no doubt more trustworthy. Madame de Boigne, for example, declares that Madame de Chateaubriand's « middleclass pride was wounded by the literary reputation of M. de Chateaubriand, which she considered derogatory" ; and she adds-

" Madame de Chateaubriand had plenty of talent, but used it to extract the bitter and disagreeable elements from every object. She did her husband much harm by continually irritating him and making his home unbearable, and, though he was always most considerate towards her, he could never secure domestic peace »

That is one point of view. M. Lenormant, in his work on Madame Récamier, presents another, writing of Madame de Chateaubriand as " the victim, faithful notwithstanding, of a hopeless egoism and a perpetual inconstancy."

Unquestionably she was all that, and apparently she knew it. The inference could be drawn, if there were no other proof, alike from her own letters and from her husband's. We find her, within a very few weeks of the reunion, appealing to M. Clausel de Coussergues to call and receive her confidences. "Come early," she writes. "M. de Chateaubriand will be out.

shall be able to tell you of ten thousand troubles that are tormenting me." In another letter she invites the same gentleman to dinner, beseeching him of his " charity" to relieve her "loneliness," and proposing

that, after dinner, he shall take her to a café and offer her ices. Chateaubriand himself, in a letter of approximately the same date, aspires for " a few hours of liberty," and describes himself as " a poor bird kept prisoner in a cage »

Nothing is more evident than that all cannot have been for the best in the best of all possible households, at the time when these letters were written. Infidelity, it is not less evident, must have followed very hard upon the heels of reconciliation. We know, in fact, that it did. Madame de Custine-but we will come to Madame de Custine presently. In the meantime we have to note that appearances were kept up, and that Madame de Chateaubriand, whatever she knew or suspected, presented a smiling face to the worldalways excepting M. Clausel de Coussergues, who was discreet. She and her husband had not rejoined each other for the purpose of making a public spectacle of their disagreements, and were at least agreed as to the desirability of deceiving their friend Joubert.

They visited Joubert at Villeneuve in the autumn of 1804, and made exactly the impression which both he and they desired. Their life is described by Joubert, in a letter to Molé, as " a spectacle," " a subject for contemplation," and " a model"; and Joubert's youngest brother, who was also in the house at the time, bursts into exclamations of almost lyrical enthusiasm.

"He' (Chateaubriand) "had only recently been reunited to Madame de Chateaubriand, and he found her much more charming, much more intelligent, than he can possibly have expected. ... A serious person who only knew M. de Chateaubriand by his works and who then saw the bard of Atala and the author of Le Génie du Christianisme unbending with perfect amiability and joining in frolicsome games of childish simplicity, would have been astonished at the spectacle; but he would have ended with the reflection: ' Really this man of genius must be a thoroughly good fellow ! »

He was hardly that, if one is to apply the strictest standards; but he kept up appearances successfully, with Madame de Chateaubriand's help; and no doubt this keeping up of appearances helped towards eventual harmony. Meanwhile, it is true, he was living his secret life; but he seems to have kept it as secret as he could. Possibly, indeed, he did not attach a vast amount of importance to it-for it was said of him by a shrewd observer that, in his love affairs, he

case, the emotions derived from it were interrupted by the tragic news, which reached him at Villeneuve, of the death of his sister Lucile.

Lucile, as we know, was Chateaubriand's favourite sister-his fellow-dreamer at Combourg in his melancholy youth. " Describe it," she had said to him when he told her of the strange delight he found in solitude; and so it was at her bidding that he took his pen and tried to put on paper the thoughts that were stirring in his mind. It was she, too, who had contrived his marriage, though for that, no doubt, he was less grateful. During the Revolution she had married the Marquis de Caud, her senior by many yearsprobably for the sake of his protection rather than his love; but she had now been a widow for many years. She had written a little-just enough to suggest, though not to prove, that she had the temperament of genius; but she had also the characteristic melancholy of the Chateaubriands, without the physical vigour which enabled her brother to be René with impunity. Every one liked her, though every one must have seen that she hovered on the border line of insanity.

Even from the Mémoires one hardly gets to know

her-except by sight. There emerges only a vague impression-perhaps intentionally vague-of a wild, untamed creature, self-centred, never speaking out, destined to spring surprises on those who thought they knew her best. Her history, so far as we know it, is merely that she came to Paris, and that Chênedollé fell in love with her, and sought her hand in marriage, and was rejected.

He has figured, so far, in these pages, merely as Chateaubriand's friend, and as one of the three "ravens"¹ of the Joubert circle. Perhaps one may describe him most exactly as a lesser and simpler Chateaubriand, without the great man's genius, but also without his pose-terribly in earnest in his gloom, but also terribly in earnest in his affections: an honest, serious, but subsidiary man, living in the shadow of his friends, imitating them, and making his interests subservient to theirs. He was the only man, for instance, whom Chateaubriand, who was not given to confidences, entrusted with the secret of his passion for Madame de Custine; and he kept it, regarding himself as a henchman who must not presume to criticize.

The depth and sincerity of his feeling for Lucile is beyond all question; and his passion was as pure as it was intense. "In the presence of that heavenly woman," he wrote in a reminiscence which Sainte-Beuve has published, "I felt no sensual desires. I was as pure as she was. It was happiness enough to see her, and to feel that I was near her-the sort of happiness that I might have felt by the side of an angel." Nor can we doubt that she, on her part, loved her lover, though she refused to marry him, but would only promise to remain unmarried for his sake. This promise, she writes to him, "has a charm for me because I regard it almost as a binding tie, and as a way of pledging myself to be yours."

1 The others were Chateaubriand himself and Gueneau de Mussy. I34 ↩

Which means . . . ?

Well, in the case of any ordinary woman, it would, no doubt, be enigmatic language, implying, in so far as it implied anything, a wish to retain, and trifle with, a love that she could not reciprocate; but another passage in the same letter shows that Lucile's meaning is very different from that. " If the thought is in your mind," she writes, " that we may some day be united, you must abandon it. I am not the woman to allow you to sacrifice your destiny to mine." And that protest, in the light of our knowledge of the facts, can carry one meaning only. It means-it can mean nothing else-that Lucile, a prey to illusions, realized her mental peril, and, foreseeing the long, dark shadows of the calamity that impended, was resolved that it should not involve her lover.

Of course, the lover protested and cried out. He pleaded for interviews, which were granted; he appealed for "a line in your handwriting to tell me that you still love me," and he did not appeal in vain. But the shadows were lengthening and darkening, though he did not know. The proof was in the letters which Lucile wrote him, though he did not recognize it, and took quite seriously her insistence upon secrecy and her complaint that her footsteps were being dogged by spies. He heard from Chateaubriand that she was very ill, but did not guess the nature of

illness; and the time came when even he himself became an object of suspicion to her. There exists a letter from her to her brother demanding " protection from any fresh impertinence on the part of M. de Chênedollé." Some critics have seen in it a proof of inconstancy to her vows. In truth, it only proves that the madness which she dreaded had overtaken her at last.

In the autumn of 1804 she came to Paris. Chateaubriand took an apartment for her in the Rue Caumartin, " deceiving her," he writes, "as to the rent and the arrangements which I made with a restaurateur for her board." She soon left that address and went to live at a convent with the Dames de Saint-Michel. " My brother," she there wrote, "neither my letters nor my presence should weary you, for you will soon be delivered from my importunities for evermore. My life is shedding its last ray, like a lamp that has burnt itself out in the darkness of a long night, and can only last until the dawn in which it is to be extinguished."

A mad letter if ever there was one-as mad throughout as in the passage quoted; and it brought Chateaubriand hurrying to the convent to inquire what was the matter. Nothing was the matternothing or everything, as one likes to put it. A mood had passed and been forgotten, and there remained no grievance to be straightened out. The brother could only beseech the sister to be calm and to control herself; she, on her part, could only say that convent life did not suit her, and that she thought it would be better for her to live alone.

It was arranged that she should do so. Her

maid was dismissed, and Chateaubriand placed her in the charge of his own confidential servant, the old Saint-Germain, formerly in the service of Pauline de Beaumont. Then he left her, joining Madame de Chateaubriand at Vichy, and proceeding with her to Villeneuve. No further letters passed-for what reason it is impossible to say-and for three months Chateaubriand was left without information as to his sister's movements. At the end of the three months came the servant's letter, telling him that Lucile was dead, adding that she had died friendless and solitary, and that he alone had followed her to the grave. Saint-Germain himself, however, by an unaccountable oversight, gave no address; and before Chateaubriand could find him, he too had died, so that all trace of Lucile was lost. She had been buried, without a memorial, in a pauper's nameless, undiscoverable grave.

Such, at all events, is Chateaubriand's story; and it is the vexed, embarrassed narrative of a man who seems conscious that his conduct needs excuses. He speaks of an "alarming illness" of Madame de Chateaubriand, which detained him at Villeneuve when he should have been in Paris pushing his inquiries; but Joubert's letters mention no such illness, so that the probability is strong that he is keeping something back. There may have been a quarrel, of which he does not choose to speak; or he may have feared to disinter some painful story of insanity culminating in self-destruction, and so have preferred to mourn without trying to probe the mystery. But speculation is as idle as the field for conjecture is wide. He mourned her, of course, and most sincerely; and so did Madame de Chateaubriand, though with the pious addition that death, in this case, was " a happy release"; but the real mourner, after all, was Chênedollé-the good, honest, simple-minded, devoted, inadequate Chênedollé. For three entire months, we read in one of the letters of one of the group of friends, Chênedollé went out into the fields with a spade, and worked from dawn till dusk, feeling that the fatigue induced by manual toil was his only means of subduing grief and achieving a little peace of mind.

In the end, of course, after a good many years, he lived his trouble down. Fontanes-that powerful patron of the little group of friends-made him first a Professor at Rouen, and then an Inspector of Schools at Caen, so that he was provided with an occupation suitable to his talents, and more or less congenial. He even persuaded himself-or was persuaded-that "it is not good for man to live alone lest he should eat his heart out and so kill himself or go mad"; the reflection appears in the midst of the notes which he consecrated to Lucile's memory. So he got married, and perhaps he loved his wife; but we may be quite sure that he did not love as he had loved Lucile-or as he might have loved her if he had never known Lucile. "Some things are impossible to some men;" and this was impossible to him.

Chateaubriand's grief, as always, was more of the nature of a pageant. Like a pageant it was splendid, and like a pageant it passed by. He wrote to a friend that the death of Lucile, like the death of Pauline, left him with the feeling that he was, once

more, alone in a lonely world. He did not make the transparently false pretence that the society of Madame de Chateaubriand consoled him for his sorrows. But he kept up appearances, and took her with him on a sentimental journey to the Alps.

He visited Madame de Staël at Coppet, and found that she "regarded herself as the most miserable of women in an exile in which I should have been entranced." He went on to Chamonix, and was there inspired to write his famous depreciation of mountain scenery. Horrible in itself, he felt it had a certain consoling grandeur as the favourite resort of anchorites and other holy men whose presence exhaled sentimental sanctity in the midst of frozen deserts. He turned aside, on the way home, to make a pilgrimage to the Grande Chartreuse, where he apostrophized the monks of old: " Happy you who passed through the world without noise and did not even turn your heads to look at it as you passed!" And so forth, and so forth, Madame de Chateaubriand counting for nothing in it all, and the impression which disengages itself being that of a solitary man of genius trailing the pageant of his bleeding heart, while his wife trots after him like an intelligent little dog, indulgently permitted to follow at his heels.

And so back to Paris, and Madame de Custine, and the secret life, of which it is now time to speak.