Chapitre XVIII. In London-A visit from Charlotte Ives-Subsequent relations with

Charlotte-Correspondence with Madame Récamier-and with Madame de Duras-The Verona Conference-Chateaubriand Foreign Minister-His disgrace and dismissal-His vows of vengeance-His return to journalism.

CHARLOTTE was now Mrs. Sutton¹,' the widow of an admiral. She came to London to call on the " magnificent Ambassador," asking, " My lord, do you remember me?" and, of course, Chateaubriand pro-

1 He writes " Lady Sutton," but the title is a vain invention of his own. In a later passage in his Mémoires in which he makes an incidental reference to her he calls her correctly Mrs. Sutton. ↩

And, of course, they talked of old times, asking-Do you remember this - and that? And then Mrs. Sutton introduced her sons, and asked whether, for the sake of those old times, the Ambassador would speak for them to Canning and Castlereagh, and so help them to appointments in the service of the East India Company; and, of course, the Ambassador would, and did.

Then they returned to their reminiscences, and Mrs. Sutton handed Chateaubriand a packet of papers which he had left behind him on the night of that precipitate departure from Bungay, for which he was now forgiven; and he asked her whether she found him altered. Not in the least, she said-he had not even aged; and he, in writing of her, returns the compliment in language of poetical sublimity. " Her beauty bore the imprint of the divine hand of the Creator;" and also: "Of the years which had passed over her head only those of the spring had left their traces." Whereupon M. de Marcellus comments-

"A somewhat exaggerated piece of gallantry. I myself, shortly after this interview, saw Lady Sutton and her four-and-forty years. She still retained, no doubt, as some Englishwomen do at her age, handsome features, and had a good complexion, though she was fat. But it was no longer the spring with her. The summer was nearly over, and the autumn was beginning.

Alas! Alas!

For perhaps, if we read between the lines, we may find confirmation of the testimony of M. de Marcellus in Chateaubriand's own declamatory farewell to his recollections-

"First love of my youth, you and your charms flee from me. I have just seen Charlotte again-but after an interval of how many years! Sweet ray of light from the past, pale pink of the twilight on the edge of night, lingering long after the sun has set."

Once more, alas ! alas !

For those who had once been lovers were to meet yet again, and to discover that, on Chateaubriand's side at all events, the last lingering traces of the old sentiment had altogether disappeared. Nor was that all. Chateaubriand, in telling the story in his Mémoires, was to prevaricate, suppress the true explanation of his coldness, and suggest a false one.

Charlotte, he tells us, came to Paris when he was Foreign Minister, and called on him at the Foreign Office. She found him "preoccupied with a war on which the fate of the French Monarchy depended." Consequently there was " something wanting" in the voice once so tenderly sympathetic, and Charlotte wrote a letter " complaining of the chilliness of her reception." Whereupon Chateaubriand protests that "if it were true that there had been any real ground for her complaints, then I would throw into the fire everything that I have written about my first sojourn on the other side of the Channel."

Perhaps; but the passage is one of those in which Chateaubriand writes, as has been said, "like a child crying over the toys which it has broken." It is perfectly true that Charlotte, at the date referred to, wrote him letters first of pained remonstrance, and then of dignified farewell, telling him that she knew she must not presume, and that she hoped he would be happy. The letters have been printed¹.! It may be argued, too, that Charlotte had no title to complain of Chateaubriand's coldness because she had established no claim to his affections. But it is very far from true that Chateaubriand was so harassed by the cares of office as to be deaf to the voice of sentiment. He was in love at the time-more passionately in love than he had ever been before. " Glory itself," he was then writing-on Foreign Office notepaper-" cannot for one single instant distract me from my love;" and it was this new passion-the story of which shall be told in its proper place-and not any excessive absorption in the cares of State, which now made him indifferent and unresponsive to the sentimental memories which Charlotte's call evoked.

1 In Les Annales Romantiques. 23I ↩

Even in London, however, Chateaubriand had only toyed with sentiment. At the time when he and Charlotte were reminding each other of what had been and speculating as to what might have been, he was in constant and affectionate correspondence with at least three other women: Mesdames de Custine, de Duras, and Récamier; and his chief thought was not of any of them, but of his unsatisfied ambitions and of the best means of bringing them to fruition.

An Embassy, though it was that of London, was not the goal of his desires. He felt, as he had felt at Berlin, that he was wasted and shelved in such a post. He wanted to direct, and not merely to help to execute, the foreign policy of France. He was jealous of Mathieu de Montmorency, whom he regarded, not unjustly, as his intellectual inferior-jealous of him not only as his rival in the affections of Madame Récamier, but also as his successful competitor for Cabinet office. He wanted to be-he had made up his mind to be-Foreign Minister in Mathieu de Montmorency's place. As a stepping stone to that honour he wanted to be sent, instead of Mathieu de Montmorency, to the coming Congress of Veronathe Congress at which the Powers were to consider the desirability of armed interference with the revolutionary movement which had broken out in Spain.

His letters at the period are full of appeals to women to pull wires. He begged Madame Récamier to coax Mathieu de Montmorency and Madame de Duras to cajole Villele. The latter lady represented to the Prime Minister that Chateaubriand would at least be " somebody for the kings to talk to," and reported that the argument had appeared to impress him. Her efforts, moreover, were favoured by the trend of circumstances. Villele and the King did not want a war, whereas Mathieu de Montmorency did ; they were only moderately clerical, whereas he was regarded as a " Jesuite de robe courte." Consequently, though they could not dispense with his services without offending the ultras, they were afraid to allow him a free hand; and the upshot of the matter was that Chateaubriand was sent to Verona with him to check his bellicose tendencies, and allowed to remain as the chief French representative after his colleague had been recalled to Paris to report.

He was quite in his element there, with kings in abundance to talk to, and the most acute diplomatists of the day to pit his wits against. He met the Emperors of Austria and Russia, the Kings of Prussia and Sardinia, and many minor Italian potentates; he also met Metternich, Esterhazy, Nesselrode, Lieven, Pozzo di Borgo, Bernstorff, Humboldt, and the Duke of Wellington. He was entertained by comedians and interviewed by journalists. He attended horse races, and looked on at displays of fireworks. He was able to flatter himself that he had made a great impression; and he did so flatter himself, without any false modesty, when he afterwards sat down to write the history of the Verona Conference in two volumes¹,' congratulating himself, in particular, on his success in conciliating the Emperor Alexander.

1 Originally in four volumes, but reduced to two by the excision of indiscretions. ↩

"The Emperor of Russia,' he wrote, "had been warned against me. He had been told that, if once he saw me, I should exercise a fascination over him which he would find it very difficult to resist."

«M. de Montmorency,' he added, "when he came to take his leave of the Emperor, implored him not to be so frightened by the dignity of my presence."

"My indifference to princes," he went on, " is so great that I did not even suspect the coldness of character of him whom all my colleagues were respecttully beseeching to allow the light of his countenance to shine on them."

But he concluded- "Alexander became my friend in so far as princes have bowels of affection and in so far as friendship is possible between men of such widely different rank and station."

Socially, therefore, he triumphed; and diplomatically he got his way, though his way, as it turned out, was by no means that of Villèle and Louis XVIII.

Nominally there were several questions before the Conference; but one question overshadowed all the others: What was Europe to do in view of the fact that Ferdinand of Spain, the most abominable of the Bourbons, had been dethroned by the Cortes and was practically a prisoner in his palace?

Three lines of policy were possible. There was the policy of non-interference, favoured by England, and also, though perhaps less strongly, by Villèle. There was the policy of collective interference by the combined forces of the Holy Alliance, favoured by Austria, Russia, and Mathieu de Montmorency. Finally, there was the policy of separate interference by France, favoured by Chateaubriand. He cared for the Holy Alliance as little as he cared for popular liberty, and he cared for popular liberty as little as he cared for the Holy Alliance; but he recognized, and grasped at, the opportunity of conducting a safe and easy war which should redound to the glory of French arms and his own statesmanship. Napoleon had failed in Spain; but he would triumph there; and he succeeded in manœuvring his country into the war and himself into the Foreign Office to conduct it. His motives leap to the eyes when one reads the paragraph consecrated to it in the Mémoires-

" My Spanish war, the one great political event of my life, was a grand and glorious enterprise. The Legitimacy was to fight its first battle under the white flag and to fire its first cannon shots after those of the Empire which will sound in the ears of our most remote posterity. To march through Spain at a stride, and to succeed on the very soil on which the armies of a great conqueror had only known reverses -to accomplish in six months what he had failed to accomplish in seven years: who would ever have

Chateaubriand and bis Court of Women

believed in the possibility of this miracle? Yet I achieved it, though I had before me a France that did not love the Bourbons, and the hostility of two great foreign ministers, Prince Metternich and Mr. Canning »

It was a vainglorious boast, but not altogether untrue. Chateaubriand must at least be given the credit of having seen-what a good many of his contemporaries failed to see-that the conditions in Spain made interference easy, and that the invasion would amount to no more than a military promenade. On the other side of the balance, however, has to be set the fact that he brought France to the verge of a fresh war with England, and that Canning successfully defied him to interfere in Portugal and effectually extinguished his further projects of conquest by suggesting the Monroe doctrine and recognizing the independence of the Spanish American colonies. The record on the whole is bad; and though the Duchesse d'Angoulême welcomed his demonstration that " after all it is possible to deliver an unhappy king," Villèle and Louis were very angry with him for exceeding his instructions in order to gratify his vanity.

His eyes were, for a brief space, blinded by his glory. He saw visions and dreamed dreams, and defended dreaming as statesmanship. " To govern," he wrote, "is to foresee, and to foresee is to dream." "Kings, princes, and ministers,' he went on, " are dreamers no less than the poet." He dreamed of negotiating the reunion of the Eastern and Western Churches as "a worthy epilogue of Le Génie du Christianisme," and he drew the practical conclusion that " Villèle must henceforward leave me full control of his policy." But, at the very hour of his indulgence in these dreams, Villèle was planning and plotting to get rid of him.

Villele, indeed, though he had used Chateaubriand, and exploited him, had never quite believed in him or fully trusted him. He had pooh-poohed his contributions to the Conservateur with the remark that "the best phrase-makers are not always the best statesmen"; and he preferred safe men to brilliant men as his coadjutors. It was against his own better judgment that he had sent Chateaubriand to Verona, and Chateaubriand had abused his position and jockeyed him. He was resolved to be avenged, and a difference of opinion upon some matter of internal policy gave him his chance. He and the King put their heads together behind Chateaubriand's back, and a brutal rebuff was arranged. The story is told in the Mémoires d'Outre-tombe, and Madame de Boigne confirms it, with the addition of some piquant details-

«There had been no open dissension," Madame de Boigne writes, " between him and his colleagues, when, one Sunday, he presented himself at Monsieur's door in order to pay his court to him. The usher told him that he could not be allowed to enter. M. de Chateaubriand thought little of that. He was late, and assumed that the door had been closed and that Monsieur had already gone to join the King. He made haste down the stairs to take his place in the Cabinet Council.

" As he passed the first door, he observed some hesitation in the manner of the ushers and the royal body-guards. Finally the officer in command approached him and spoke with respectful regret- "'M. le Vicomte,' he said, ' we have received orders not to admit you.'

" He had not recovered from his astonishment when his friend, M. de Vitrolles, said to him- " You have not come here straight from your own house, I suppose?'

"' No, I left home about an hour ago.' "'Then you have missed a letter which is there waiting for you.'"

" Chateaubriand hurried back, and found the letter, and tore it open. It ran as follows-

Monsieur le Vicomte

" 1 obey the orders of the King in transmitting to Your Excellency a decree which His Majesty has just issued :

" The Comte de Villele, President of our ministerial council, is entrusted ad interim with the portfolio of foreign affairs in place of the Vicomte de Chateaubriand." › »

No more-and no less--than that. The sun of Chateaubriand's political glory had set even more suddenly than it had risen. Madame de Boigne continues-

"M. de Chateaubriand signed the receipts for the letter with his own hand, and sent for six hackney carriages. He flung his belongings into them higgledypiggledy, and before the clock had struck the next hour he had written to M. de Villele to say that the King's orders had been executed, and that the Foreign Office, as well as the portfolio, was at the disposition of the President of the Council."

So that phase ended, on Whit Sunday, 1824; and Chateaubriand was once more in opposition, and more convinced than ever that the function of an Opposition was to oppose, and doing his best to justify Louis XVIII's verdict that he seemed determined to make it impossible to govern either with him or without him. He would crush Villèle, he announced, with his pen; and he began, in the Journal des Débats, a series of philippics which did not cease until the Villèle Cabinet was overthrown in 1828. They are admirable as journalism, though they took four years to produce their effect; but it would be wearisome to reproduce them here. Strange as it may seem, we have Chateaubriand's word for it that neither the battle which he now had to fight nor the glory which he had been driven to relinquish were the interests which most deeply touched his heart.

" It often happens," he writes in his account of the Verona Conference, " that one is more disturbed by a secret weakness of one's own than by the destinies of empires. In the depths of one's heart one feels that trifles are the really serious things. Could the spectator but perceive the puerilities which flash across the brain of the man of genius at the hour of his greatest achievement, he would be overwhelmed with amazement. And yet, when all is said and done, he would be wrong. Nothing is important absolutely and in itself; and a kingdom is of no more account and value than a pleasure »

A remarkable passage truly, intended to be enigmatical, and to convey the vague suggestion that Chateaubriand, the statesman of fifty-five, on whose glorious doings the eyes of all Europe were enviously fixed, was still, in his heart of hearts, René! And so, no doubt, he was, at times, up to a point, and in a sense. But the confession, as we shall see, has its particular as well as its general bearing; and, in order to understand its exact significance, we must turn back and recover the story of Chateaubriand's private life and passions during the years in which he climbed to power and fell from it.

Madame Récamier.