Chapitre XVI. The Hundred Days-Chateaubriand at Ghent-The news of the

Battle of Waterloo-The scramble for offices-The return to Paris-Fouché and Talleyrand-The Duc de Richelieu-Chateaubriand's disappointment-His pecuniary troubles-He sells La Vallée-aux-Loups and starts Le Conservateur.

CHATEAUBRIAND would not go until he knew that the King had gone; and as the King was proposing to go secretly, he sat up all night with the horses ready and his luggage stowed away in the carriage. At four o'clock in the morning a messenger whom he had instructed to watch brought him word that the King had started. Then Madame de Chateaubriand, trembling for his safety, pushed him into the vehicle, and he drove off on the road to Tournai-the very route, he recalls, which he had taken when he went into exile for the first time and fought in the army of Condé with the manuscript of Atala in his knapsack. From Tournai he went to Brussels, and thence-thanks once again to the insistence of Madame de Duras-he was summoned to join the King at Ghent.

Louis XVIII had established himself in the Flemish town in the proud style of a Bourbon who can learn nothing and forget nothing, but must still, in the darkest hour of his fortunes, regard himself as the King of kings. When other kings-the kings who had propped up his tottering throne and lifted

P 209 him on to it-accepted his invitation to dinner, he haughtily preceded them to the refectory. When the Duke of Wellington, who was to be the chief instrument of his restoration, passed him in the street, he saluted him with a patronizing nod; and even in his precarious place of refuge, from which he might be driven at any moment, he abated no jot of his pretensions as a son of Saint Louis, but formed a cabinet and surrounded himself with a Court.

It was a dilapidated cabinet and a ragged Court. One member of the Court-the Duc de Lévis-was so ragged that he had to borrow Chateaubriand's stockings before he could enter the royal presence, and even so appeared before the King in wooden shoes. Still, there, in the midst of alarms, were all the paraphernalia of majesty. A small army of two hundred loyal French soldiers was encamped near Ghent, and could render the requisite military honours; and Chateaubriand himself, who carried the whole of his own and Madame de Chateaubriand's wardrobe in one valise, kissed hands on his appointment, ad interim, to the office of Minister of the Interior.

Of course there was no work to do, and, equally of course, there was no salary to draw, so Chateaubriand went fishing and dined out. He describes what we should nowadays call a " freak dinner" of nine courses, "beginning with jam and ending with cutlets." His favourite retreat, he says, was the garden of the béguage-" a calm enclosure sheltered from the storm like the land-locked gulfs of Africa," where, as author of Le Génie du Christianisme, he received the homage of the pious.

"Wherever I go among Christians," he writes, "the curés present themselves to me. Then come the mothers bringing their little ones and bidding them recite to me my chapter on the First Communion. My passage through a Catholic town is announced like that of a missionary or a doctor of the soul. This double reputation is very touching to me. It is my only pleasant recollection. All the rest is painful."

But one has one's doubts about that. For the moment, at any rate, religion was a matter of secondary importance, and Chateaubriand had other things to think of.

" Madame de Duras had come to join her husband, and was one of our party of exiles. I must complain no more of my misfortunes, seeing that I passed three months in the society of this excellent woman conversing of all the subjects suggested to upright hearts by a conformity of tastes, ideas, principles, and sentiments. Madame de Duras was ambitious on my behalf. She alone recognized from the first my potential capacity for politics."

The exiled Court, in fact, was a nest of political intrigue. In utrumque paratus was the motto of all but the most loyal; and while the King awaited the issue of the Waterloo campaign, with the Crown jewels packed in readiness for instant flight if Napoleon's cavalry should come raiding in that direction, the men who faced both ways, like Talleyrand and Fouché, were sending their confidential emissaries in the hope of extracting their personal profit from the issue, whatever it might be.

On the day of the great battle Chateaubriand pictures himself walking on the road from Ghent to Brussels, reading Cæsar's Commentaries, until a sound which he divined to be the distant roar of artillery fell upon his ears.

"The silent and solitary auditor of this formidable settlement of our destinies, I should have felt far less emotion if I had found myself in the midst of the affray. The perils, the fire, the confusion would have left me no time to think. Alone under a tree, in the open country near Ghent, I was overwhelmed by the weight of my reflections. What battle was this? And was its issue to be final? Was Napoleon there in person? And were the Powers casting lots for the world as for the robe of Christ? Whoever won, or lost, would the result be the liberty of the peoples or their enslavement? Was this a new Crécy, a new Poictiers, a new Agincourt for the most implacable of enemies of France? If the allies triumphed, was not our glory lost? But if Napoleon won, where was our freedom ? »

So he meditated, and a courier galloped by and stopped to tell him that Napoleon had won and had entered Brussels in triumph. He hurried back to Ghent and found that the news had preceded him. The gates of the town were closed, and there was a general sauve qui peut. Those who were ready to go were going, and those who were not ready were hurrying their preparations. Horses had been harnessed to the wagon containing the royal jewels. Chateaubriand himself " stuffed his night-cap into his ministerial portfolio" and placed himself at the disposition of his sovereign. Not until the arrival of a letter from Pozzo di Borgo¹! was the truth known; and then the King turned his steps towards Paris, and the scramble for offices began.

1 A Corsican in the Russian service. After the Restoration he served as Russian Ambassador both in Paris and in London. ↩

It would be too long a business to enter into the details of that scramble; but the essential facts are these: Chateaubriand lacked the suppleness of a courtier and was too fond of repeating that it was his pamphlet that had recovered the Bourbons their crown. The King did not like him, and his hands were not quite free, for there were many applicants for the most responsible appointments. Some of the applicants were more necessary than others, and some of them succeeded in representing themselves as more necessary than they actually were. In the last category were included Fouché the regicide and Talleyrand the turncoat; and it was in their favour that Chateaubriand was pushed aside. He was furiously angry, and, nursing his indignation, avenged himself in a mordant phrase. He pictures himself, in the Mémoires, waiting in the King's antechamber for an audience- "No one was there. I sat down in a corner of the room and waited. Of a sudden a door opens. There silently enters Vice leaning on the arm of Crime-M. Fouché supporting M. de Talleyrand. The infernal vision passes slowly before me and disappears into the royal cabinet."

Decidedly it was not only in his religious writings that Chateaubriand was skilled in the use of " images," though, as it was under Talleyrand's administration that he was made a peer of France, one might have expected him to employ them more moderately in this instance.

As for his own policy, one may follow his career very carefully and yet fail to make head or tail of it unless one takes the personal equation for one's clue. He was an ultra-Royalist because he had written Bonaparte et les Bourbons; but he also desired the freedom of the Press because he was a journalist. As the author of Le Génie du Christianisme, he fought the battles of the Holy Alliance; but he drifted into Liberalism by opposing his personal enemies. For the rest, he seems sometimes to have taken his opinions from his epigrams, and sometimes to have allowed them, albeit unconsciously, to be determined by the necessities of his ambition. The one charge which cannot stand, though it has been made, is that he was influenced by his need of money. He was always more ready to ask for money than to do anything, or even to think anything, in return for it, and a coup d'éclat always tempted him more than the emoluments of an assured position.

It was for the sake of a coup d'éclat that he risked and lost his peerage and the pension attached to it. At first he had been both glad and proud to be a peer. His habits and his manners, he writes, adapted him for the distinction; but he found that he did not shine in the position and got little out of it but his stipend. He was a poor debater, and his florid speeches, carefully prepared and read from a manuscript, made little impression. The Duc de Richelieu, who succeeded Talleyrand as Prime Minister, did nothing for him. The feeling grew upon him that, unless he definitely asserted himself, he would be definitely shelved. He asserted himself in a sensational pamphlet: De la monarchie selon la Charte; and then the blow fell. The pamphlet was confiscated, and the pamphleteer lost his income.

He seems to have had the whim, for a day or two, to console himself for his political failures by travelling with Madame de Duras. " When shall we start? When shall we get away from it all?" he wrote. She took him at his word, and was perfectly willing, her health furnishing the pretext, to make an appointment with him in Italy; but the next letter ran: "My dear sister, how on earth can I come to you? Here I am, held fast by a thousand ties, without money, without liberty, without the power of making up my mind to anything. " Which clearly meant that he did not really want to go, unless he could go, as the next letter explains, in the character of Ambassador to Rome. "That,' he writes, "would be the very thing for me. They ought to be glad to give me the post in order to get rid of me."

The honour was to come presently-but not yet, and not under that administration. In the meantime Chateaubriand needed money badly, and had to raise it as best he could. He obtained leave to organize a lottery for the sale of La Vallée-aux-Loups; but only four tickets were taken. Then he sold the house by auction-"just as the houses of the poor are sold"-and Mathieu de Montmorency bought it for fifty thousand one hundred francs. Of his other financial transactions we get a glimpse in the Memoirs of Baron de Vitrolles-the same Baron de Vitrolles who had given him thirteen thousand francs on account of his salary as Ambassador to Sweden on the day before the flight to Ghent, and who was presently to be associated with him in a journalistic enterprise.

M. de Vitrolles called to condole with him on his sudden reverse of fortune. He had hurried back from the country on hearing the news, and he hoped to persuade Chateaubriand's colleagues to subscribe towards a pecuniary testimonial of their esteem.

" I found him," he writes, "gloomy as he generally was, and as the circumstances gave him the right to be. He was much more concerned about the diminution of his dignity than about the loss of his dignities; and, of a sudden, he pointed to an enormous book-case, all the shelves of which were empty.

" Observe !'" he said in solemn accents. " I have this morning sold my books in order to pay my butcher ! »

It was impressive, and M. de Vitrolles was impressed; but he adds that his colleagues did not share his sentiments to a sufficient degree to be willing to subscribe to the testimonial, and he goes on to tell another story of an application for help made to the Comte d'Artois, afterwards Charles X.

" Having several times exhausted the credit of the entourage of the Comte d'Artois, he came one morning to see me. His manner, usually pensive, was even more sombre than usual. He took my inquiries after the health of Madame de Chateaubriand as the text for a discourse on his destitute condition.

"‹ She is very ill,' he said. 'The doctors order her to drink asses' milk, and I have not even fifty louis with which to buy an ass.'

"My first impulse was to assure him that it was unnecessary to buy an ass in order to procure a glass of ass's milk, and my second to go to my cash box and get him the sum which he required. After an instant's reflection, however, I realized that this was not what he wanted; and then he begged me to lay his melancholy case before Monsieur.

"I promised to do so, and I waited on the Prince the very same evening.

"' Well, my friend, what is your news to-day?' "' Nothing of importance, Monseigneur.?

" ' But what is it?' "'I saw Chateaubriand this morning' "' And what had Chateaubriand got to say?' " explained the nature of Chateaubriand's trouble.

" Bah!' replied Monsieur. ' It is every day the same story with him.'

"'But Monsieur knows that the necessity for eating recurs every day.'

"* True. But he's like a basket with a hole in the bottom of it.'

"A basket with a hole in the bottom of it, if Monsieur pleases; but when a basket is empty, it makes no difference whether there is a hole in the bottom of it or not.'

"'But you see, my friend, I don't like these continually repeated requests. It's as bad as paying any one a pension, and when I hear the word pension it makes me skip.?' ...

"On the following day, however, he sent Chateaubriand two thousand francs with which to buy an ass »

Such is M. de Vitrolles' presentation of the lighter side of serious things; and this was one of the moments of Chateaubriand's life at which he took sincerely serious views of nearly everything, and especially of political affairs. It is true that he already knew Madame Récamier-a branch of the subject to which it will be necessary to return; but womeneven the most fascinating of them-played a smaller part in his life than they had played in the past and were to play yet again in the future. The tasks immediately before him, which almost monopolized his time and energies, were to provide himself with an income, and to fight the Government through the newspapers. To this end, with the financial help of M. le Normant, and the collaboration of MM. de Villèle, de Corbière, de Vitrolles, de Castelbajac, and others, he founded Le Conservateur.

"And so,' he writes, "the royalists owed it to me that they were able to recover from the insignificance into which they had fallen in the eyes alike of peoples and of kings. I placed a pen in the hands of the noblest families of France. I turned scions of the house of Montmorency and Lévis into journalists. I called up the reserves, and I summoned feudalism to march to the rescue of the liberty of the Press."