Chapitre XIV

The Duchesse de Duras-Her life in exile-How she met Chateaubriand-She is warned against him by Madame de la Tour du Pin-The inward struggle-Chateaubriand and Madame de Duras agree to be "brother and sister" She interests herself in his financial difficulties-Formation of a joint stock company to pay his debts.

THE Duchesse de Duras was the daughter of the Comte de Kersaint, a Breton naval officer who distinguished himself in the West Indies and elsewhere, and whom Monge, when Naval Minister, promoted to the rank of vice-admiral in 1792. An enthusiast for the humanitarianism of the eighteenth century, he had written to Rousseau to denounce the iniquities of Clive in India. Embracing the principles of the Revolution, he drew the line at the execution of the King, and resigned his seat in the Legislative Assembly on the ground that he did not wish to be associated with "bloodthirsty men.' His own arrest, trial, and condemnation followed as a matter of course; and he was conducted to the guillotine on December 5, 1793.

His only daughter, Claire de Kersaint, was born at Brest on March 22, 1777, and received the usual convent education. She and her mother, a West Indian heiress, whom her father had lately divorced, were at Bordeaux when the news of his death reached them. They obtained passports and went to the United States, but soon returned to Europe, and, after a brief sojourn in Switzerland, settled in London in 1795. They were there, that is to say, at the same time as Chateaubriand, though, moving in wealthier circles, they never met him.

It was in London that Mademoiselle de Kersaint made the acquaintance of Amédée de Duras, a grand-son of the Maréchal de Duras, who commanded the troops during the riots at Rennes which preluded the Revolution. He himself had been sent by Louis XVI on a secret mission to Vienna, and warned not to return. Probably he was attracted by the fortune no less than by the charms of Mademoiselle de Kersaint, to whom the exiled Archbishop of Aix married him in 1797; but the union was more than ordinarily happy. Madame de Duras' letters to her husband are those of a devoted wife; and eleven years were to elapse before the old affection was to be clouded, in so far as it ever was clouded, by the new infatuation.

It was not until 1808 that the Duc and Duchesse de Duras returned to France and definitely settled at the Château d'Ussé in Touraine. Ussé was near Méreville ; and Méreville was the seat of the Laborde family, to which Natalie de Noailles-Mouchy belonged; and the Labordes were cousins of M. de Duras. It was inevitable that Madame de Duras should visit Méreville; and it was inevitable that she should meet Chateaubriand there, and be one of his audience when he read his unpublished works aloud. That was what happened; and then the struggle at once began in Madame de Duras' heart.

She had her confidante-her old school-fellow, Madame de la Tour du Pin, whose husband was Prefect

of Brussels, and was presently to be Prefect of Amiens. She confided freely in her friend, telling her how she was distracted between the conflicting claims of duty and desire; and she received in return many warnings, and even many entreaties, to be careful.

"When you tell me," wrote Madame de la Tour du Pin, " that, if you had no other duties, your one thought would be to please M. de Chateaubriand, I feel no uneasiness on your behalf. That expression came not from your heart, but from your head. But why do you accuse me of detesting him? I only object to him in so far as he is dangerous to you; and I shall not like him until I am undeceived or reassured on that point »

" Banish as an evil thought,' she wrote again, " all your boredom and all your disgust with your own home. Calm that excitable head which is the cause of your unhappiness. Find yourself some useful occupation. Remove from your table that eternal Génie du Christianisme, those Martyrs, and that Itinéraire which you know by heart. They are books to read through once or twice, not books to go on reading every day like the Imitatio »

" Friendship," we read in a third letter, " is something very different from the sentiment which you feel. Go away to Ussé, and avoid saying good-bye! This is what I hear from Pauline (Madame de Cosse). 'Claire,' she writes, 'is leaving us in the week of Quasimodo, terribly troubled that she has to depart before the great reception. She is happy, passionately in love, though she will not admit it even to herself, enjoying the full charm of her exalted sentiments, without allowing a single uneasiness or a single reproach to mingle with them. Her blindness saves her from all scruples, and her profound ignorance of herself assures her peace of mind and her happiness.' So you see how little pains you take to hide your feelings. Calm your heart if you can. Put away the thought of this man who is tormenting you. I am expecting time to do wonders for you »

And so forth; and it seemed at first as if things were happening, and would happen, in such a way as to give Madame de la Tour du Pin full justification for her fears.

Chateaubriand had asked leave to call, and the leave had been accorded. Madame de Duras had invited him to dinner to meet the Duc and Duchesse de Laval and other aristocratic celebrities. He had declined, pleading that he was of a shy and retiring disposition, and asked if he might be permitted to lunch alone with her instead. " Let there be no ceremony," he wrote. " A cup of tea is all I want.' It must certainly have looked, to impartial observers, as though the reign of Natalie de Noailles-Mouchy was over and a rival had usurped her place.

Perhaps, if Madame de Duras had been beautifulbut she was not. She was plain, and she was also scrupulous. Her head was turned; her heart was touched; but she remembered (or at least did not altogether forget) what was due to her husband, and also what was due to her friend. It may be-the tone of the correspondence suggests as much-that

Chateaubriand did not insist very vehemently; and it may also be that it was Madame de Duras' lack of beauty that induced him to moderate his claims. He accepted, at all events, her offer to be a "sister" to him; and it is as " sister" that he addresses her in his letters. Even in that character she was able to do a great deal for him.

The letter has already been quoted in which he replies to her fears that his friendship for her may cause pain to Madame de Mouchy. She seems to have been convinced by his arguments-rather because she wished to be convinced than because they were conclusive; and they began a long correspondencemore or less brotherly and sisterly-on all imaginable subjects: first on Chateaubriand's work, then on his mental troubles, disillusions, and disappointments, and finally on his pecuniary difficulties.

A letter written while the Itinéraire was at the printer's must be quoted for the sake of an allusion contained in it. Madame de Duras, it seems, had feared that it would contain too pointed references to the climax of the pilgrimage by the Fountain of the Lions; but Chateaubriand reassures her-

"No, I have not put in the book anything that I ought not to have put in it. It is the history of my thoughts and emotions during a year of my life among the ruins of Athens and Jerusalem; but nothing that I ought to keep for myself and my own heart will appear in it, and if this Itinéraire brings me no glory, it will at least, I think, win the love of generous souls capable of appreciating elevated sentiments."

That is the most direct reference to Natalie de Noailles-Mouchy; and Madame de Duras seems to have been brought round to the view that she could discharge her obligations to Natalie by feeling sorry for her, and that her duty towards Chateaubriand was more urgent. She may have found a reason (or an excuse) in the " strangeness" of Natalie's manner, and have felt (or persuaded herself that she felt) sorry for Chateaubriand also. Here is a letter in which we find him asking for his " sister's" sympathy on these as well as other grounds-

" When I find that I have failed, at the age which I have reached, in spite of all my efforts, to win the devotion of a heart of which I can be sure, or to create a career for myself, or to attain either to peace of mind or to fortune, I cannot help abandoning myself to melancholy. Really I do not know what will become of me, or how I shall end my days. Some day or other I shall come to the end of my resources, and, as the ties that might have held me bound are ready to break at any moment, I shall have no choice but to commit myself to the hazards of a fresh destiny.

Which means apparently that Chateaubriand wants money, and also wants to love again. We find a fresh reference to his love affairs in a letter of January 20, 1813—

" A thousand troubles worry, distress, and trouble me. Yesterday-to name but one of them-1 received my formal dismissal; and I accepted it, for, in truth, everything has to come to an end. I do not know whether I shall be recalled; but I do know that I have had to put up with more of this sort of thing than I can stand »

And then, a few days later, after he has been "recalled," evidently against his will, and after Madame de Duras has, apparently, taken it upon herself to admonish him-

" What I want above all things is a quiet life. The young sailors love the winds and the tempests; but the old slaves who have toiled at the oar in the galley, as I have, know that the calm is better. I hope my sister will not scold me any more."

In other letters Chateaubriand speaks of his disgust with life, his desire for solitude, and the difficulty which he finds in making friends. He is only, he says, " a machine for turning out books." He desires nothing except "a desert, a library, and a lady companion." At all events, he desired such things in the past, though he is not so sure that they would make him happy now. Anyhow, it is useless for his sister to lecture him. For " men of letters"-whose society his sister seems to have implored him to cultivate he feels " the most profound hatred and contempt." He carries his disdain for them to the point of leaving unanswered "three-fourths of the letters of admiration which I get from them"; and he is " moved to tears" whenever he receives news of "a baptism or a marriage." But he cherished one aspiration. If only he could have his sister for his private secretary! If only, failing that, she would at least come and live near him !

For life without her is a weariness and a burden. The days are long, and " seem as if they would last for ever." He is growing old and "growing bald," and " falling into his dotage"-

"I am a nuisance to others, and a nuisance to myself. One of these fine mornings, I shall catch a fever and be carried off; and who, dear sister, will remember me then? A few books which I shall have left behind me, and which people will have ceased to read, will arouse a little controversy at the moment of my departure. Some people will say that they are valueless and will not survive me; others that perhaps, after all, there was something in them; and that will be the conclusion of the whole matter. The readers will close the books, and go out to dinners and dances; and brothers and sisters will write each other letters on all sorts of subjects without any thought of me. My valley will be sold to a bourgeois who will make wine where I have planted trees-and such is the life of man »

This from a man of forty-four, whose literary reputation stood higher than that of any other living Frenchman-who stood upon a pedestal, worshipped by women, and looking down upon his age. Madame de Duras, like the practical sister that she was, read a meaning into the tirade, and saw by what line of approach she could best come to the rescue. An active career-that was the chief thing needful. Chateaubriand must be pushed, as soon as possible, into politics; and, as that, for the moment, was not possible, his debts must, in the meanwhile, be paid for him.

There is a calumnious story to the effect that Chateaubriand's debts were paid for him by the Government, related in the Mémoires of Comte Ferrand, who was Minister of State under Louis XVIII. It is told as a partial explanation of the King's dislike of him-

" A few years previously," writes Comte Ferrand, "there had been some question of his nomination to the French Academy. The question was treated as if he were being solicited to grant a favour, and he himself viewed it in that light. He demanded, as a condition of consenting to be nominated, that his debts should be paid for him; they amounted to 70,00o francs. The payment was agreed to, and was made in two instalments by Maret, Duc de Bassano."

The story is improbable on the face of it. There is no tittle of evidence in favour of it, and there is abundant evidence against it. At the very moment of the alleged payment we find Chateaubriand writing to his friend M. Frisell that he is " penniless." We find him at the same date " pawning" the manuscript of Le dernier Abencérage, and then borrowing money from M. de Tocqueville in order to take it out of pawn. We find him further writing to Madame de Duras that he is " not gay," for-

" My affairs are in a very bad way. I can come to no arrangement; and the future before me is so troubled and so dark that I can see no means of escaping the catastrophe with which I am threatened."

Those were his circumstances when early in 1812 Madame de Duras came to the rescue in a manner which proved her to be, not only a sympathetic sister, but also a woman of sound common-sense and remarkable business ability.

The debts were variously estimated by the debtor, according to his moods and his memory, at anything from twelve to forty thousand francs; probably the latter figure was the nearer to accuracy. His devoted nephew, Christian de Chateaubriand, offered to get married and pay them out of his wife's dowry; but Chateaubriand would not accept that sacrifice. Marriage, he said, was "the worst of all calamities," and Christian had better remain single. He expected, he told Madame de Duras, "a serious offer from a foreign country less ungrateful and more generous than my own"; he proposed to close with it and escape from his embarrassments in that way. But Madame de Duras would not hear of such a step. She had thought out a more practical and ingenious plan, and conceived the idea, commonly supposed to be modern and Gilbertian, of floating an author as a joint stock company.

It was not a scheme to be carried through in a day. Chateaubriand was sceptical of its success. "What!" he writes, " you are really going to find me fifteen thousand francs! It is incredible;" and he depicted his necessities in many painful letters while the negotiations were pending. He will be "the happiest man in the world," he vows, if only he is enabled to retain possession of his piece of land and his books. Meanwhile he doubts whether he will be able to afford to pay certain promised visits to his friends, "for I am so poor that I do not know whether I shall have the money for my travelling expenses." And then, again, in 1813- "For want of money I have had to give up my visit to a watering-place, and all my plans of travel. I am here, confined to my desert, and working at my history. ... I have no news to send you of our little coterie, and I never hear anything of any human being except that some of my creditors from time to time show signs of life. It helps to pass an hour or two, as some one said of his experiences in the torture chamber »

But meanwhile Madame de Duras was working, wheedling, corresponding, and arranging. She got together ten shareholders, including herself, Christian and Louis de Chateaubriand, and the Duc and Duchesse de Laval. They paid up their subscriptions and their calls, securing themselves by a mortgage on Chateaubriand's future work. The more pressing creditors received something on account at once; the whole of the debts were eventually extinguished; and Chateaubriand was able to sit down at La Vallée-aux-Loups, in such peace as a vexatious Government allowed him, and write historical studies and a tragedy based on the life of Moses, while the Battle of the Nations raged at Leipzig, and the subsequent invasion of France by the allied armies brought about the downfall of the Empire.