Chapitre XII

Chateaubriand's return to France-His article in the Mercure-Napoleon's anger-The Mercure suppressed-Purchase of La Vallée-aux-Loups-The alleged persecution of Chateaubriand by Napoleon-The affair of the Decennial Prizes-Chateaubriand elected a member of the French Academy.

According to M. Villemain, it was "not without remorse" that Chateaubriand took Natalie de Noailles to the picture galleries of the Escurial and reviewed Murillo's virgins; but it is more likely that he discovered the remorse, and spoke of it, afterwards, than that he experienced it at the time. He continued, for some while longer, a devout lover as well as a devout man, though the circle of his interests, and also of his anxieties, was widening. His pilgrimage had been an event of importance to France as well as to himself; and so was his return. He had challenged attention, and had won it. The eyes not only of his friends, but also of his countrymen and his Emperor, were upon him.

Enthusiasts went forth to meet him on his way home. "Several men of letters," Abbé Pailhés tells us, waylaid him at Bordeaux. They may almost be said to have " interviewed" him, for their record of their impressions, which Abbé Pailhés quotes, is quite on the lines of the tribute which the modern reporter pays to a celebrity. They speak of themselves as

M 2 Iб3 " prepossessed in his favour" by the "frank cordiality of his greeting"; they find the tone of his writings faithfully reflected in the expression of his countenance. He looks "grave, religious, and softly and sweetly passionate," but " a tinge of melancholy overclouds his features." Questioned as to his plans, he declares that he seeks only quiet and repose. " What I want," he told us, " is a plot of land of my own, and shade to sit in."

He was to buy a plot of land presently; but first he bought a newspaper-the Mercure-which Fontanes was willing to sell for twenty thousand francs; and almost the first article which he wrote for it-a review of M. de Laborde's Voyage pittoresque en Espagnegot him into trouble with Napoleon.

The article, indeed, though in form a review, was in spirit a royalist manifesto. " It is vain," Chateaubriand wrote, " that Nero prospers, for his Empire has already given birth to Tacitus;" and that, of course, was a way of saying that Napoleon was as iniquitous an Emperor as Nero, and would fare as badly with posterity. He added an allusion of similar import, and equally irrelevant to the subject nominally under discussion, to the revolt of Sertorius against Sulla; and he introduced a passing tribute to the memory of two exiled Bourbon princesses by whose graves he had wept in Italy.

It was a deliberate challenge, deliberately thrown down, and it produced the effect which might have been expected. "If Napoleon had got rid of the kings," Chateaubriand writes, " he had not got rid of me ; « and he proceeds--

"No one who was not living at the time can form even the faintest idea of the effect produced by the voice that made itself heard alone in the midst of a silent world. The noble sentiments which had been crushed in men's hearts awoke once more; and Napoleon flew into a passion. . . . What! Was even his glory an object of contempt? Did I brave for the second time the wrath of him at whose feet the universe lay prostrate? ' Does Chateaubriand think I am a fool? ' he exclaimed. ' Does he flatter himself that I can't see the meaning of this? He shall be cut to pieces on the steps of the Tuileries. »

And then, descending from rhetoric to fact-

"He ordered that the Mercure should be suppressed, and that I should be arrested. My property perished, but my person escaped by a miracle. Bonaparte had the affairs of the world to think of, and he forgot me; but I remained crushed under the weight of his threat."

According to Madame de Chateaubriand, it was the ever hostile Cardinal Fesch who showed Napoleon the article, though of course he could hardly have failed to see it in any case. She adds that it was because of the Cardinal's indecent delight at Chateaubriand's disgrace that the order for his arrest was cancelled. M. Villemain, on the other hand, says that it was withdrawn at the entreaty of Fontanes, who pointed out that, when all was said and done, Chateaubriand's books were among the glories of the imperial régime. Napoleon himself, as we shall see

presently, esteemed his writings highly when his own prestige was not impugned by them; and it is on the whole more probable that his clemency was determined by that motive than by a desire to annoy his uncle.

Be that as it may, however, Chateaubriand, provisionally in disgrace, was ordered out of Paris. He sulked, and talked of leaving France and settling in the United States; but Fontanes reasoned with him. The Americans, he said, were " an even more barbarous and commercial people than the English," and grossly indifferent to the arts. Chateaubriand would never be happy with them. He had better sit down quietly at home, and write his book, and be careful to put nothing in it that could offend the ruling powers: "No topical allusions when one writes for immortality. Otherwise you will have the story of the Mercure over again. Lions have sharp teeth and should not be irritated »

Probably that was the advice that Chateaubriand desired to receive. At all events he took it, bought La Vallée-aux-Loups-a dilapidated house with a garden of about fifteen acres, in the country, but yet within an easy drive of Paris-and settled down there to write Les Martyrs, entertain his friends, and read them extracts from his work as it progressed. "1 enjoyed," he writes, " a never-ending series of enchantments;" and he enlarges on the pleasure which he took in planting trees, and in gardening. His enthusiasm was such that, M. de Latouche¹ tells us, he pursued his horticultural operations even in the worst December weather, wearing wooden shoes and protecting himself from the rain with an umbrella.

1 The Latouche who afterwards gave George Sand her chance on the Figaro. I66 ↩

Abbé Pailhés assures us that he was happy, and that it was Madame de Chateaubriand who made him so; but the greater of these propositions does not necessarily include the less. Madame de Chateaubriand was nicknamed "the cat" because of her "feline amenities"; and these, though they delighted her friend Joubert, seem to have been less pleasing to her husband, who, according to Madame de Boigne, only tolerated her because she believed in his genius and his star, and professed to have discovered a prediction of his coming fame in the Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine. That comforting feat of scriptural exegesis was, so far as one can make out, her sole contribution to his felicity; and he found various other ladies far more assiduously devoted. They sent him plants and saplings for his groves. They read his books, whereas Madame de Chateaubriand openly boasted that she did not read them. They invited him to their country houses and sat at his feet. One of them, as we shall see presently, lent him money when he needed it; so that it seems a fair inference that his happiness during these yearsfrom 1807 to 1814-was far more due to them than to his wife.

He was thirty-nine at the beginning of the period, and forty-six at the end of it. It was the period in which his literary renown attained its culminationthe end of it being marked, as shall be noted later,

by his first effective incursion into party politics. It was also the period of his long " duel," as he regarded it, with Napoleon.

Napoleon, Madame de Boigne assures us, classed Chateaubriand with the "idealists"; but she makes haste to add that " this was a mistake."

" M. de Chateaubriand,' she says, " cared nothing about the human race; he was entirely occupied with his own personality, and with the task of creating a pedestal from which he could look down upon his age. This was a difficult place to assume side by side with Napoleon, but he worked incessantly, and his memoirs will show the world with what toil, with what perseverance, and with what hopes of success. He succeeded so far that he always made himself a little atmosphere of his own of which he was the sun. As soon as he left this environment the outer air affected him so painfully that he became unbearably morose. But while he was in his own atmosphere no one could be kinder or more amiable, or send forth his beams with more grace »

That, we may take it, is a representative view of critical contemporaries; but when we turn, as Madame de Boigne directs us, to the memoirs, we find Chateaubriand exaggerating, if not his own importance, at all events the bitterness of Napoleon's hostility towards him. He says, in a passage quoted, that Napoleon " forgot" him. He implies elsewhere that Napoleon hated and feared and persecuted him. The truth is that Napoleon sometimes lost his temper with him, but was, on the whole, as indulgent, and even as

sympathetic, as Chateaubriand would allow him to be-an attitude widely different from that which he adopted towards Chateaubriand's illustrious contemporary, Madame de Staël.

Two principal instances of persecution are cited. Napoleon rejected Chateaubriand's petition for the pardon of his cousin, Armand de Chateaubriand, who had been arrested while conveying treasonable communications from the Bourbons abroad to the royalists in France; and he gave orders to the newspapers to review Les Martyrs unfavourably. The latter act was certainly petty; but in the former case considerations of policy were at stake, and it was hardly to be expected that the treatment meted out to a traitor would be solely determined by the wishes of the traitor's relatives. On other occasions the Emperor showed a genuine interest in Chateaubriand and a sincere desire that the achievements of his genius should receive the reward of merit.

There is the story, for instance, of his portrait by Girodet, which was exhibited in the Salon of 1808. Denon, the director, had been obliged to accept it on account of the painter's reputation, but, understanding that Chateaubriand was in bad odour at Court, he had hidden it in a cupboard, so that it might not attract Napoleon's attention. The Emperor, however, had heard of it, was curious to see it, and demanded that it should be shown to him. It was brought forth from its hiding-place, and he examined it with a smile. "Aha! M. de Chateaubriand looks like a conspirator who has just come down the chimney," he commented blandly, as he continued his progress through the rooms.

That incident, if it stood alone, might be held, of course, to indicate interest rather than sympathy; but there is open and avowed sympathy, and even the wish to do a good turn, in Napoleon's championship of Chateaubriand's title, first to receive a literary prize from the Academy¹,' and then to be elected to membership.

1 The Academy, nominally abolished, had been practically reconstituted as one of the sections of the Institut de France. ↩

The so-called Decennial Prizes were established by a decree of September 10, 1804. There were to be nine first prizes, each of the value of ten thousand francs, and thirteen second prizes, each of the value of five thousand francs; and the first distribution was to take place on November 9, 1810. The Report of the Committee appointed to recommend candidates was drawn up by Marie-Joseph Chénier and presented to the Emperor early in 1808, on the eve of his departure for Bayonne to dethrone the King of Spain. Chateaubriand's name was not mentioned in naturally enough, seeing that the Academicians in possession were, for the most part, eighteenth-century men, enamoured of chaste prose and irreligious opinions, equally opposed to Christianity and to florid rhetoric.

Napoleon said nothing, but cancelled the decree and substituted a new one. There should be thirtyfive prizes, he decided, instead of twenty-two, and one of them should be awarded to " the author of the literary work which combines in the highest degree novelty of ideas, talent in composition, and elegance of style." This necessitated the preparation of a new Report. It was prepared and delivered, but, like the previous one, it ignored Chateaubriand's claims; whereupon, though the announcement had already been made that the prizes would be distributed "by the very hand of him who is the source of all true glory," the Academicians received the following letter from the Minister of the Interior-

" His Majesty desires to know the reason why the Institute makes no mention, in its report on the decennial prizes, when speaking of the tenth or eleventh prize, of Le Génie du Christianisme, by M. de Chateaubriand-a work which has been much spoken of and is now in its seventh or eighth edition. I beg you, therefore, to convoke the Committee and invite it to explain the motives which determined its silence with regard to this book."

There, at last, was a deliberate challenge. The Academicians took it up, and responded to it as best they could. Some of them went further than others. One of them even went so far as to say that he regarded Le Génie du Christianisme as a " ridiculous " composition; but the majority contented themselves with wrapping up in careful periphrases the diplomatic answer that they had not recommended the book because they had not thought it good enough to merit exceptional recognition. Its undeniable "beauties of detail," they urged, did not compensate for its lack of " form" and " philosophic basis.' Napoleon respected their decision, but took his ironical revenge by promoting Chateaubriand's candidature for the vacancy in the Academy caused by Marie-Joseph Chénier's death in 1811.

Chateaubriand, it is true, tells the story differently. He says, in the Mémoires, that he presented himself as a candidate at the solicitation of his " friends" and in the belief that membership of so respectable a body would protect him from " the hostility of the Chief of the State and the suspicions and annoyances of the police"; but his letters show that this was not the case. " The Duc de Rovigo," he wrote to M. Abel, in 1815, " ordered me to come forward as a candidate under pain of being locked up at Vincennes for the remainder of my days, if I failed to do so; and, though that is a jocular way of putting things, and not to be taken literally, the truth clearly is that the Chief of the Police received orders from his master not only to press Chateaubriand to present himself, but also to see that he did not present himself in vain.

He did present himself, and was helped not only by the police, but by the ladies. Madame de Vintimille took him to call on Abbé Morellet, who had fallen asleep while reading the Itinéraire, and awoke with a start, exclaiming that it was " tedious, very tedious." Sophie Gay persuaded Népomucène Lemercier '-the very Academician who had described Le Génie du Christianisme as " ridiculous"-to vote for him. Where he had no such introductions to the electors, and no previous acquaintance with them, he conducted his canvass with disdainful nonchalance, merely leaving his card instead of asking to be received. One of the electors is said, in consequence, to have cast his vote for "M. de Chateaubriand's horse," declaring that the horse and not the rider had

1 The dramatist. His most famous work is Le Tartufe révolutionnaire.

called on him; but, in spite of his contemptuous proceedings, the influences in his favour prevailed, and he was elected. He tells us himself that he secured "a fairly strong majority"; but, according to the Journal de l'Empire, only twenty-five of the forty Academicians took part in the voting, and only thirteen of them voted for Chateaubriand.

Be that as it may, however, Chateaubriand was elected; but, though elected, he was not " received." His proposed inaugural speech had to be submitted for censorship, and failed to give satisfaction. He was summoned to Saint-Cloud, where his manuscript was handed back to him with suggested alterations in the Emperor's own handwriting. He refused either to adopt them or to substitute a new speech for the old one, and when his colleagues pressed him on the point, he addressed the following letter to the President—

Monsieur le président

" My occupations and my indifferent health preventing me from working, it is impossible for me, at the present moment, to fix a date at which it will be convenient to me to enjoy the honour of being received by the Academy.

" 1 am, with respect, etc.,

De Chateaubriand

So the reception was postponed indefinitely, and did not take place until after the Empire had fallen. The discourse, however, created hardly less sensation than if it had actually been delivered. Copies were made of it, passed round, and read surreptitiously in drawing-rooms. Chateaubriand professes to believe that he was once more in danger and that fashionable women "interposed their beauty" and protected him. However that may be, he was certainly the idol of the hour in his own circle, exalted to a pinnacle of literary renown, and basking in the smiles and flattery of a court of women, some of whom, when he was poorand he wrote of himself at this date as " penniless"- laid even their purses at his feet.