Chapitre XXII

Chateaubriand at Neuchatel-Death of Charles X-Chateaubriand returns to Paris and publishes a pamphlet-Fall of Villèle's Cabinet-Martignac succeeds him-Madame Récamier returns to Paris and forgives Chateaubriand-His appointment as Ambassador at Rome- Life at the embassy depicted by M. d'Haussonville-References to a last love in a suppressed passage of the Mémoires d'Outre-tombe.

Ar Neuchatel, according to the Mémoires, Chateaubriand lived in " a cabin by the lake side." He lived, in fact, at 14 Faubourg du Crêt, in a house which is still standing, and looks comfortable if not luxurious

as one would expect, seeing that Madame de Chateaubriand chose it. Chateaubriand, however, had just vacated a mansion, and a cabin was the obvious opposite of a mansion; so that it was the obvious thing, if not to live in a cabin, at least to talk of one, and to remember the case of an earlier émigré, who had pined in the same town until he committed suicide by throwing himself out of window.

His one distraction, Chateaubriand continues, was to watch the proceedings of a half-starved black cat, which supported itself by catching fish in a bucket of lake water; and that is a recreation of which a man of active intellect tires quickly. Balzac, who, nine years later, came to lodge in the same house, was more agreeably occupied; for it was there that he made the acquaintance of his mysterious " Etrangère."¹ Chateaubriand had, for the moment, no such sentimental resource; and Neuchatel paid little attention to his presence. There was no " Mylord Maréchal" to make much of him, as Keith had made much of Rousseau; and Madame de Charrière, who had made much of his political ally, Benjamin Constant, was dead. He read her Lettres Neuchateloises, but was nevertheless bored, and felt relieved when the news of the King's death gave him an excuse for cutting short his stay and returning to Paris.

1 Mme. de Hanska. ↩

He hurried back and wrote his pamphlet: Le rot est mort; vive le roi! He believed that it was because his pamphlet urged the course that Charles X was crowned at Rheims. " Not," he explains, " that I had the faintest personal belief in the value of the ceremony; but as the Legitimacy was in a bad way, it seemed necessary to invoke all devices, for what they might be worth, for its support." He attended the ceremony, at which Béranger mocked so bitterly.² "All my duties," he tells us, " were then fulfilled. I left Rheims, and could say, like Jeanne d'Arc, ' My mission is completed. »

2 Béranger was sent to prison for deriding the coronation in a well-known song. ↩

Not that he had meant his mission to terminate so summarily, but that he could find no means of continuing it. The pamphlet had been a bid for office; but the bid had not been accepted. Charles X retained Villèle, but did not recall Chateaubriand. He said that he " regretted" him, and he spoke to him politely on the coronation day; but he made no further advances. Probably he could not have made any without quarrelling with Villele, with whom it was not politic to quarrel; and so Chateaubriand renewed his Press campaign. It was in those circumstances, he writes, that his political importance attained its culminating point.

"I had dominated Europe by means of my war with Spain; but I had had a violent opposition to contend against in France. After my fall I became the acknowledged leader of French opinion. Even those who declared that I had committed an unpardonable fault in taking up my pen were obliged to recognize that I had built myself an empire more powerful than the first. Young France was on my side to a man, and has never since deserted me. In many of the industries all the workmen were at my command, and crowds surrounded me whenever I showed myself in the streets. For what reason did I acquire this popularity? It was because I had read the true mind of France. I had commenced the combat with a single journal at my service, and I had become the master of the entire Press. My audacity was the result of my indifference. As I did not care whether I won or lost, I marched to success, unembarrassed by the fear of failure.

He exaggerates-but not extravagantly. Sainte-Beuve ranks his newspaper articles with the best of his writings; certainly they were not the least effective. If he swam with the tide, at any rate he swam strongly. The "true mind of France" at this time was Liberal, whereas the true mind of the King and the Court was clerical and reactionary. Chateaubriand had been cradled into Liberalism by disappointed hopes; and his destiny was to come in on the top of the Liberal wave. He satisfied such good Liberals as Lafayette, who sent him a wreath of laurel with his compliments, and Sebastiani, who told him that he combined "the elevation of Bossuet with the profundity of Montesquieu," and Benjamin Constant, who offered him " the homage of a sincere admiration and a profound esteem »

The gradual result of the struggle was to make both the royal family and the ministers unpopular. The Dauphine and the Duchesse de Berry were insulted on their way to a review of the National Guard. The King was greeted with cries of " A bas les Jésuites," and did not mend matters by saying that he proposed to receive "homage, not lessons," from his subjects. A crowd assembled outside the Ministry of Finance to shout " A bas Villèle." The National Guard was disbanded, and the censorship of the Press was re-established, with the result that barricades had to be stormed. Then Parliament was dissolved, and the new elections placed Villèle in a minority. A new Ministry was formed under Martignac, and once more something had to be done for Chateaubriand.

He was offered first the Ministry of Public Instruction and then that of Marine; but he declined both appointments. He wanted to return to the Foreign Office; but his colleagues would not have him there, fearing his wilful ways and his habit of preferring his own policy to that of the Cabinet. Ultimately he was persuaded to accept the Embassy at Rome in succession to Mathieu de Montmorency's brother, the Duc de Laval, who was promoted to Vienna. " Perhaps," he comments, "it was useful to my country to get me out of the way;" but he makes haste to add: " This time, at any rate, my banishment was pleasing to me."

Meanwhile, however, Chateaubriand had made his peace with Madame Récamier-and made it so effectually that his rivals, divided between the desire to see her happy and to make her so, were once more jealous.

She came back to the Abbaye-aux-Bois while he was at Rheims, attending the coronation. As soon as he returned to Paris he came to call on her, just as if nothing had happened and he were unaware of any estrangement. Her friends professed to fear that the interview would be stormy; but it was not. "No word of reproach or explanation was uttered," says Madame Lenormant.¹ Chateaubriand simply took his place in the salon as of old, and as of right; and the other admirers had to give way as before.

1 Her niece, whom we have met as Mlle. Cyvoct. ↩

Mathieu protested with a sort of gentle petulance. He feared, he wrote, that, when she visited La Vallée-aux-Loups, Madame Récamier thought more of "the former proprietor" than of him. She did; she could not help it; and there was no more to be said. All that she could do was to promise to use undue influence to procure Mathieu's election to the Academy-a distinction to which his literary merits assuredly did not entitle him-and persuade Chateaubriand to promote the candidature.

Prince Augustus of Prussia also protested. He had once very nearly persuaded Madame Récamier to divorce her husband in order to marry him, so that he felt that he had a right to speak. He sent her a haunch of venison, and ten brace of pheasants, and stated in his covering letter that he had heard that she had undertaken the " conversion" of M. de Chateaubriand, and that he did not approve. There was a certain " novelty," he said, in her evangelical methods which would entitle her to take a unique position among missionaries if she succeeded; but he feared that " celestial happiness" was not the main objective of the sinners who availed themselves of her ministrations. It was true; and Madame Récamier knew it ; but she did not care. Her answers, though affectionate, were unsatisfactory. It was Chateaubriand's life, and not another's, that she wished to see "spread as a carpet of flowers," et cetera.

As for the ardent Ampère-the hardest hit of all the suitors-he dropped into poetry and fled. "Ne pleure plus," he wrote

"Ne pleure plus sur ta jeunesse

Et sur le coup qui t'a frappé:

Laisse du bonheur l'inutile promesse,

Mensonge vain qui t'a trompé."

Which means-

"No longer weep for your distress,

Nor for your youth which dies,-

Nor for your promised happiness,

Built on deceit and lies."

And having written that, and some further stanzas to the same effect, he went away to Bonn, and studied hard, and gradually became a learned man-which no doubt was the best thing that could have happened to

T 2 275 him; and Chateaubriand reigned thenceforward in undisputed supremacy at the Abbaye-aux-Bois until the time of his departure for Italy in July 1828.

Beyond the fact that he reigned in undisputed supremacy, there really is nothing to relate which would not be related more appropriately in Madame Récamier's biography than in his. The statement that he wrote a prayer for Madame Récamier's use on the occasion of the death of his rival Mathieu, though current, does not seem to be true. The prayer commonly quoted in this connection appears really to have been composed at the time of the death of Pauline de Beaumont. For the rest, there is nothing to be said except that Chateaubriand was the central figure and perennial attraction of a salon which Madame Récamier never allowed to become "political" and which Lamartine described as "an Academy holding its sessions in a convent."

He was not bored; he was much too busy and too angry. He was not in love-or not passionately so -for the same reason. It was difficult for him, now that he was verging on the sixties, to engage in too many simultaneous activities; and he once more, in the years of opposition, found homage more restful than intrigue. Passing from the newspaper office to the drawing-room, he read the company some extracts from the early portions of his Mémoires d'Outre-tombe; and though Marcellus has written that "M. de Chateaubriand never used to weep in public," there were those of his listeners who declared that he often " wiped away a tear" when thus evoking the memories of the days that were no more. And so the time passed until Villèle was overthrown, and he obtained not only his Embassy, but also some arrears of salary amounting to about £6,00o, and set out for Rome, accompanied not only by Madame de Chateaubriand, but also by a young attaché-M. d'Haussonville-who had it in his mind to take notes, and ultimately to print them.

" I had hardly set out," Chateaubriand writes, " in Madame de Chateaubriand's company, than my natural melancholy rejoined me on the road;" and M. d'Haussonville gives us his reasons for supposing that the presence of Madame de Chateaubriand was not unconnected with his gloom. When Chateaubriand complained of the heat, says the attaché, Madame de Chateaubriand made a point of throwing fresh logs of wood on the fire; and when Chateaubriand complained of the cold, Madame de Chateaubriand always rang for the servants and told them to open the windows. It is a small matter, but eloquent of much. Wandering affections are more likely to be driven further afield than to be recovered by such means; and so it happened in this case.

The principal political event of the period was the assembling of a Conclave for the election of a new Pope. There was, as at all Conclaves, a good deal of intrigue; and Chateaubriand flattered himself that he had defeated the machinations of the Jesuits and secured the selection of his own nominee. We find him speaking of " my Pope" as proudly as we have found him speaking of " my war"; and it was in order to exploit his success that he presently returned to Paris. That, at all events, was his principal motive, though he had others. His prize, he thought, if he pulled the wires, and had them pulled for him properly, might be the Foreign Office. He had miscalculated-but we shall come to that. Meanwhile he had very little to do; and though he had now passed his sixtieth birthday, he did not feel himself too old for gallantry.

M. d'Haussonville pictures him standing for hours before the mirror, with his elbow on the mantelpiece, and, speculating as to his thoughts, decides that he was thinking only of himself. He adds that he hardly ever heard the name of Madame Récamier mentioned at the Embassy, and that that surprised him. M. d'Haussonville, however, was only nineteen; and it was scarcely to be expected that his Ambassador would take him into his confidence as to his selfcommunings and secret sentiments. Nor is it reasonable to attach importance to the fact that the Ambassador sometimes instructed the attaché to deliver bouquets on his behalf at Italian ladies' doors. A bouquet as a rule means less than a single rose or a tiny bunch of forget-me-nots. The Comtesse del Drago, who received the bouquets-or most of them-is of very little account in Chateaubriand's life; and, if the Ambassador did not discuss Madame Récamier with his attaché, at least he wrote to her regularly three times a week.

She had charge alike of his business interests and of his political fortunes. Many of the letters relate to the proposed production of his poetical play Moïse. Supported by the advice of his political friends, she persuaded him to withdraw it; and he consented to do so, though he absolutely refused to refund the sum which he had received in advance of royalties. He appealed to her to procure his recall to France-and, of course, to Cabinet office. He implored her, in other moods, to come to Rome and stay with him; addressing her as his " beautiful angel," and doing everything in his power, so far as letter-writing went, to wipe out her recollection of past infidelities. His letters fascinated her so much that she regularly copied out the most affectionate passages, and forwarded the copies to the Duc de Laval-his late rival Mathieu's brother-at Vienna. It really seemed as if, at last, all was for the best in the best of all possible romances. And yet, as it happened-For Chateaubriand was not even yet, as George Sand says of Chopin, "exclusive in his affections." When Madame de Chateaubriand replied to his complaints of draughts by throwing the windows open, he felt the need of more immediate and intimate consolation than his correspondence with Madame Récamier could afford; and he found it, though Madame Récamier never knew.

There exists in manuscript a discarded fragment of the Mémoires d'Outre-tombe-discarded presumably for fear lest Madame Récamier's feelings should be hurt by it-belonging to this period of his life, and showing us pretty clearly on what thoughts Chateaubriand's mind was dwelling when his attaché observed him gazing into the mirror, and imagined that he was only thinking of himself. It is too long to be quoted in full; but the concluding lines may be given-

"Now that I have grown old in the world, without losing any of my dreams, my mad passions, and my vague moods of melancholy; now that I am still in quest of that which is nowhere to be found; now that there is added to my misfortunes the disenchantment of experience, the loneliness of longing, the weariness of the heart, and the shameful burden of the yearsdo I not present the devils of Hell with the picture of a punishment not yet conceived of in the region of eternal pains? ...

"Charming flower which I refuse to pluck, it is to you that I address the last incantations of my melancholy. You will not hear them till I am dead and my life has gone to join the rubbish heap of broken lyres »

Which means, of course, that Chateaubriand realized at last, in the sixties, that old age was coming, and so uttered his swan song-a farewell to the dreams and passions and ideals of youth. But it also means that, in spite of, and independently of, his renewed devotion to Madame Récamier, whose hair was white, he had allowed himself to fall in love again. It means that two "inconnues" had entered into his life-two "inconnues" and also Hortense Allart de Méritens.

Marquise de V....

By pormision of Miss Brein or is