Chapitre XIII

Publication of Les Martyrs-The hostility of the Press-Eulogistic verses by Fontanes-Chateaubriand's literary position-René compared with Obermann-and with Adolphe-The court of women-Madame de Chateaubriand and the " Madames."

LES MARTYRS-Chateaubriand's highly-coloured picture of the clash of the Christian and pagan worldsappeared in 1809 and, in spite of the gorgeous " images" of the Orient, fell flat. He attributed its failure, as lesser men have attributed the failure of lesser works, to the dead set made at it by the critics. The Emperor, he says, gave the word, and the reviewers fell upon him savagely.

Some of them certainly did so. One review was published under the title " Radotage"-an expression of which " Tommy-rot" seems a fairly adequate rendering; and Hoffmann, in the Journal de l'Empire, assailed the work with sprightly malice as " a bad book by a clever man." Not all the reviews, however, were hostile-Guizot, for one, praised it in the Publicisteand not all the hostility was " inspired." Benjamin Constant, who was one of the recipients of presentation copies, had no reason to love, or to take his literary opinions from, Napoleon; but he complains, in his Journal Intime of the " sustained pomposity" of Les Martyrs, and sustained pomposity may be quite as grave an impediment to popular success as an unfavourable review.

" A few of my friends," Chateaubriand writes, "consoled me." Guizot was one who did so, and " the worthy Ballanche" was another. Ballanche, it is said, could not even mention the name of Chateaubriand's heroine without being moved to tears. Fontanes went further, and wrote a poem for his consolation, comparing him to Tasso seeking comfort at the tomb of Virgil-the famous lines beginning-

"Le Tasse, errant de ville en ville,

Un jour, accablé de ses maux,

S'assit pres du laurier fertile

Qui sur la tombe de Virgile

Etend toujours ses verts rameaux."

And containing the cheering stanzas -

" Chateaubriand, le sort du Tasse

Doit t'instruire et te consoler ;

Trop heureux qui, suivant sa trace,

Au prix de la même disgrâce,

Dans l'avenir peut l'égaler !

" Contre toi du peuple critique

Que peut l'injuste opinion ?

Tu retrouvas la Muse antique

Sous la poussière poétique

Et de Solime et d'Ilion."

The verses doubtless cheered the author in his despondency, the more so as Fontanes had always been his severest critic; and he derived more substantial comfort from the success of the Itinéraire, published in 1811.

He attached, he tells us, far less importance to this work than to Les Martyrs. It certainly cost him far less trouble to write. But he also put far more of himself into it ; and, in Chateaubriand's work, it is always the personal note, not the profundity of the impersonal thought that counts. His readers-especially his feminine readers-admired him in the same spirit in which he admired Christianity. His invented narratives of early Christian heroes left them cold; but they rejoiced in the romantic figure of the Man of Sentiment stalking through the Promised Land to a romantic rendez-vous at the Alhambra. If, therefore, the Itinéraive is, in one sense, the supplement and complement of Le Génie du Christianisme, it is also, in another sense, the supplement and complement of René-to which work, while the personal note and the fascination exercised by it is in question, it may be proper, for a moment, to go back.

It was an article of faith with contemporary readers -with the women among them, at all events-that René was Chateaubriand himself; and it was an article of faith with Chateaubriand that René was unique. He takes that line even in the Mémoires d'Outre-tombe, in which, as has been said, he " recreates" René in his old age. There is a germ of truth in both dogmas; but neither of them can be left unqualified.

René was Chateaubriand in one of his moods; but Chateaubriand had more moods than one. If, . like René, he had lost his illusions before he had really begun to live, he was unlike René in his readiness to renew them and give life a second, and even a third, chance. If he sometimes cherished Rene's passion for solitude, he also, at more frequent times cherished a passion unknown to René for society, for power, and for playing to the gallery in the limelight. It has been written of him that he " sometimes embraced his enemies, but always on the balcony." When one of his friends was told that he would be content to live in a garret, the answer was: " Yes, I have no doubt that M. de Chateaubriand would be satisfied to live in a garret-provided that the garret were on a stage."

That to begin with; and in the second place René was not unique. The type, as in all great works of art, was individualized; but he was typical none the less: typical of the melancholy and malaise that lurks in wait for the " intellectuals," who are also men of sentiment, at almost all periods of history; typical, in particular, of the melancholy and malaise which followed upon the supposed failure of the " so-called eighteenth century." He had had his predecessors in the Preacher, Lucretius, Virgil, Saint Augustine, Hamlet, Werther; he was to have his successor-his imitator and plagiarist, as he fancied-in Childe Harold ; he had his contemporaries-victims of the same century as himself-in Adolphe and Obermann.

We need not stop to criticize the century, or consider whether it has been maligned. It was a very miscellaneous century, seeing that it produced Kant as well as Hume, and Chateaubriand as well as Voltaire. But there certainly was something in it-whether its early intellectual aridity or its final scenes of violence which disappointed the hopes and blighted the hearts of a good many representative men of the time. They did not know exactly what was the matter with them, or what they wanted; but they felt vaguely that the world had missed its way and wandered with them into a sort of cul-de-sac in which nothing was worth

while and life itself was no more than an eddy of purposeless dust. The number of those who thus felt their hearts bowed down was large; but only a few of them were articulate; and each of those who did speak out supposed that his own case stood alone and that none but he suffered from a disease which really was epidemic.

The first sufferer was probably Rousseau in the days of Rêveries d'un Promeneur Solitaire; but he was mad. The second may have been Goethe; but he made a quick and complete recovery. Ramond de Carbonnière, the pioneer of Pyrenean mountaineering, was sad as night, for no particular reason, in imitation of Goethe, when he wrote Dernières aventures du jeune Olbon; but he, after a long walking tour in the Alps, learnt to consume his own smoke, and went over to the scientific camp. But then, a little later, in the first years of the nineteenth century, appeared the men with whom the malady was, or appeared to be, chronic; the men with whom melancholy was either a fixed idea or a permanent pose of which they acquired the habit; the men to whom life was always a thing to escape from, whether in the solitude of the wilderness or in the quiet of the library or in some kind of feverish activity which left no room for thought. Sénancour, Benjamin Constant, and Chateaubriand were the chief of them; and we need not concern ourselves with any others. Obermann, Adolphe, and René are the three manifestoes to be compared.

Obermann has the truest ring, and yet is the most tedious to read. Sénancour has no definite story to tell, and no definite charge to bring against life. He writes of it merely, though at great length, as an evil

N 2 ı79 dream which he cannot shake off. One may know, if one has read his life, that he made a foolish early marriage, and lost his fortune, and failed in all his undertakings; and one may, if one likes, find in these causes a partial explanation of the sincerity of his despair. He says nothing of that himself, however, from youth to age, and chooses for the motto on his tombstone the famous : " Eternité, deviens mon asyle." There is no pose there, but the real gloom of a real René, pursued unflinchingly to its logical conclusion.

Adolphe is more definite; and Adolphe, as we know from the Journal Intime, as well as from other sources, is the true story, save for the local colour, of the most passionate passage in Benjamin Constant's life-his intimacy with Madame de Staël. " Here am I," the author seems to say, " an emotional bankrupt, and these are the precise circumstances which caused me to file my petition." At any rate, we know that he filed it, and that, to continue the metaphor, he never obtained his discharge. His life was always, as he put it, " unarrangeable," even when he was a great Parliamentary leader, and even when he was married to a devoted wife who did her best to make him happy. Failing to arrange it, he sought his escape from it in gambling. But he never posed; he never boasted; he never struck attitudes or invited the world to look and see what a miserable wretch he was-exceptionally miserable because of his exceptional sensibility! Chateaubriand in René, and not only in René, did all these things.

George Sand has pictured René as " the wounded eagle which will presently resume its flight." It is a sound criticism, though easy to pass in the light of Chateaubriand's subsequent career; but it does not cover all the ground. René, coming of a sturdy race of Breton sailors, was assuredly stronger than either Adolphe or Obermann; but he differed from them in other ways as well. He differed from Adolphe in regarding the sorrows of his soul from the outside, in the spirit of the spectator of a theatrical performance. He differed from Obermann in the fact that the world was with him in the wilderness, and that, even in the solitude of North American forests, he still kept his finger on the beating pulse of life.

Hence his recovery. The forest itself, he found, was not an escape from life, but one of life's culs-de-sac; and he realized the fact readily, and acted on it at once. He needed scope for his abounding energy; and he also needed an audience to play to and a gallery to applaud. It was by reading a newspaper that he perceived his chance; and he returned to Europe to act, to think, and to develop-to fight for the Bourbons, and preach, though hardly to act upon, the Christian creed. He was René still in certain moods; but he was René with a difference: a René who had done things, and meant to do them; a converted René followed by "a complete militia of drawing-room Christians"; a René who could smile, and seemed willing to give a fair trial to the illusions which, in the pessimism of his youth, he had affected to dismiss untried. His temperamental gloom, that is to say, was a barrier more apparent than real between himself and the rest of the world. There seemed more than a chance that, if it could not be taken by assault, it might at least be sapped and undermined.

Women, one knows, are exceedingly apt to look upon such a man as what missionaries call " a field of usefulness." They are not, indeed, attracted by the melancholy disillusion which they believe to be sincere and impervious to argument; they call that misogyny, and they pass it by on the other side. But the pose which can be regarded as a mask or a challenge is a different matter-especially if the wearer of the mask be a man of striking presence, grand manners, unimpeachable genius, and undeniable distinction. Such a man, it is felt, needs and deserves the help of beautiful women in bearing the burden of his sorrows. It is offered to him freely, and he rarely refuses to accept it, even though he professes to attach little value to it. He has but to smile, and the women rally round him, even though they know, from their own and each other's experience, that his love, or what passes for such, is not a gift, but a loan that will presently be called in.

They rallied in that way round Rousseau, who was ugly and very far from a gentleman, and was known to be living connubially with a servant maid. "All the women of Paris," says Hume, "ran after him;" and Madame de Genlis reports a fashionable lady's opinion that " a woman would have to be very virtuous indeed not to be willing to devote her life to Rousseau if she were fully persuaded that he loved her." In the case of Chateaubriand, who had all the advantages which nature and education had withheld from Rousseau, devotion was not even qualified by that proviso. Women did not wait to see whether he loved them sincerely or not before electing to sit at his feet. They sat at his feet and waited for his love; they

continued to sit at his feet after it had been made clear that his love, if ever bestowed on them, had been withdrawn.

The years now under review are the years in which that homage was most steadily paid and most amiably and gratefully received-partly, no doubt, because Chateaubriand, at the apogee of his literary renown, had nothing to do but to receive it, but partly also because the homage of beautiful women was a means of consolidating his influence, and a stepping stone in the ascent of that pedestal from which Madame de Boigne saw him looking down upon his age.

These admirers of her husband appear in Madame de Chateaubriand's correspondence as " the madames." It is not easy to make out either how much she knew about their devotion or how much she cared. Apparently she did not go very far out of her way to ascertain anything that was not thrust actually under her eyes; and her general tone is merely one of contempt for a frivolous society of which she cannot see the charm. She is not actually angry, but she is a little-just a very little-spiteful. She cannot imagine what Chateaubriand sees in his " madames," but still-so one seems to read between the lines-if he will run after them, he must.

"There is nothing to be made of my Chat," she writes in one letter. " Yesterday he had promised to go and see the Stag (Joubert), and invite him to a delightful dinner of calf's liver. But not a bit of it. He ran about, calling on one madame after another, until five o'clock, and never gave a thought to his errand until I flew into a temper and reprimanded him."

"The Chat," she writes again, "has rheumatism. In spite of that he is having his hair curled in order to visit certain madames called du Lionfort. However, while in the act of beautifying himself, he charges me to tell you. • • •

Et cetera. The citations makes Madame de Chateaubriand's attitude tolerably clear; but the situation as a whole is clearer in the sparkling and critical pages of Madame de Boigne-

" It was at the time that Madame de X (Natalie de Noailles-Mouchy) began her retirement that the Society of the Madames was definitely formed. The chief members were the Duchesses de Duras and de Lévis¹,' and Madame de Bérenger; the other ladies are too unimportant to mention. These three ladies had each of them their special hour: M. de Chateaubriand was received, and they were at home to no one else; and goodness only knows what he had to suffer if he gave one of them some minutes that belonged to another. They were so proud of their success that their porters had orders to inform visitors that they were not at home because it was M. de Chateaubriand's hour, and it is said that the announcement was often prolonged beyond the due time, to make the greater impression. The scenes which these ladies made by their mutual reproaches became a source of general amusement. But every evening all recovered their good temper, and went off to pay the most assiduous attention to Madame de Chateaubriand, whom they overwhelmed with care and kindness. One day when she had caught a slight cold, she asserted that she had received five possets on one morning, accompanied by the most charming notes, which she displayed with amusing sarcasms."

1 The Duc de Lévis had fought at Quiberon. Louis XVIII made him a peer of France. I84 ↩

Such is the most vivid contemporary picture of Chateaubriand's life-of one important aspect of it, at all events-during the years between the publication of Les Martyrs and the fall of the Empire. One of the women named-the Duchesse de Duras-played a very important part in his life; and to her a special chapter may be devoted.