Chapitre XXV

Chateaubriand and Hortense in Paris-Their secret meetings-Walks in the Jardin des Plantes-Dinners in unfrequented restaurants-Chateaubriand persuades Hortense to accept an invitation to visit London-She does so, falls in love with Sir Henry Bulwer, and throws Chateaubriand over-His indignation -His vain attempts to win her back.

"Two old women, his wife and another- « that is how Prudence (or Hortense) dismisses Mesdames de Chateaubriand and Récamier. She adds that she was not jealous: "they guarded him for me alone to love." For a moment, of course, there was also Marie; but Chateaubriand had found out that Marie was fifty, and was concerned about the "proprieties," whereas Hortense was only twenty-seven or twenty-eight, and was not concerned about them. She wrote to him-M. Léon Séché has recovered these scraps of her handwriting- "To-morrow, then, my illustrious friend! I trust you will be able to devote the whole evening to me."

" René! I am going to make myself beautiful, to please you »

And Prudence, in her retrospect, says- " René, more and more enamoured, told me he had never before met so affectionate a woman."

She had then just finished writing a novel, and he helped her to correct the proofs, throwing " tenderness" even into that task, and into his advice that she should write history instead of fiction. His educational methods, she tells us, were " divine"; and when he started for the Pyrenees, it was arranged that Hortense should meet him at Etampes.

"We dined there as if in the seclusion of the desert. He was happy; he laughed; he murmured a thousand tender and delightful nothings, for his manner of being happy was to love, and to flatter, and to tell me again and again how enchanted and grateful he was. I, too, was enamoured and grateful. . . . We made no haste, and would have liked to hold back the passing hours. Only he was impatient for night to come, and rallied me on my coldness."

But the coldness was only timidity. Chateaubriand was so great a man, and moved in so grand a way through the world, that it took Hortense a little while to realize that, where a pretty woman was concerned, he differed from other people only in being more ardent for his age. She did realize it presently, however, and so "attained the happiness which one so often seeks in vain." The time, after Chateaubriand's return and resignation of his Embassy, "passed only too quickly," and the reason why he wrote in his Mémoires that this year was the happiest of his life was perfectly clear to Hortense. The italics are hers, and she goes on to explain them.

" He used to come to see me regularly, and our affection established itself on a firm basis. My love assumed a new intensity, and became passionate and constant. It was the autumn-the season of tenderness and melancholy. His ideas, his genius, his appearance, his love took possession of my life. From sunrise till sunset my heart was full of tender thoughts, and of an increasing enchantment."

When she had nothing else to do, Hortense used to take the diligence into the country, and wander about the fields, thinking about her new lover. On other occasions Chateaubriand used to meet her in quiet corners of Paris. One of their favourite resorts was an unfrequented space in the neighbourhood of the Champ-de-Mars. There was an aged woman there with a cow, just as of old in our own St. James's Park, and they used to drink her milk, and talk to her. When they had more leisure, they met on the Pont d'Austerlitz, and found sheltered lovers' walks in the Jardin des Plantes. "I can see his charming smile," says Hortense, "and his air of a man out for a holiday;" and she also had a recollection, no less lively, of their tête-à-tête dinners in the cabinet particulier of a remote restaurant where no one knew them.

"It was always a gay and charming banquet. Chateaubriand was as happy as a child-as gentle and as affectionate. . . . He had a splendid appetite and everything amused him. We spoke of literature and public affairs, and I talked a lot of delightful nonsense. ... He spoke with emotion of his age, of death, of the inevitable end of all earthly pleasures, and of the imprudence of these delightful proceedings.

" He called for champagne, to cheer me up, as he said; and then I used to sing him some of Béranger's songs: 'Mon âme,' 'la bonne Vieille,' 'le Dieu des bonnes gens,' etc. He listened to me with rapture, melted to tenderness by the beautiful poetry and the voice of his mistress. Moved and enthralled, he spoke once more about himself, saying that he too had written songs and would have liked to be a poet. He went back to the song which I had just finished, and made me sing it again, repeating some fine line or some striking phrase-

«‹ Plaisirs de mon jeune age,

Que d'un coup d'aile a fustigés le temps.'

"These songs took him out of himself, aroused his genius, exalted him, and made him affectionate and melancholy. I never knew them fail to produce that powerful effect on him.

" In this condition he was more amorous than ever. He told me how I pleased and charmed him, and called me his temptress-and, in that lonely place, he did with me what he would. Then at last, to my great regret, he said that it was time to go; he had to do so because he was kept in leading strings at home. So we drove off together, with many expressions of tenderness, to the Place Maubert, where we separated. I really was in love with him ... and it was he who moderated the transports of my heart."

And then one day, when Hortense, instead of singing, read aloud to Chateaubriand some extracts from his own works--

"He was touched and grateful, and told me that he had never enjoyed anything so much, and called me by all the beautiful names that belong to the Muses. He persuaded himself that I was beautiful, and praised my eyes and my expression. He really believed, in his madness, that he had never seen anything like them before. Never in my life have I known a man to be so blinded and enchanted."

Hortense, when she wrote that, had had many experiences, and had acquired the right to draw comparisons and deliver judgments. Yet, as it happened, at this moment at which Chateaubriand's eyes seemed so completely blinded by his passion, the end of the passion was near.

It was in the spring of 1830, when the July Revolution was imminent. Chateaubriand was in the thick of the agitation, fighting shoulder to shoulder with Béranger and Thiers, whom Hortense had introduced to him. It would be an exaggeration to say that he was tired of her; but he found himself too busy to attend to her. Very possibly, too, he was embarrassed by her proposal to take a lodging in his immediate neighbourhood. So he persuaded her to accept an invitation which she had received to visit London- "an imprudent course," says Hortense, "if he was really in love with me, for he really ought to have known how rash it is to let youth go wandering in quest of adventures, especially in the languorous spring season."

Hortense departed, therefore, " without having yet known what love really was" ; and England completed her education. Henry Bulwer, afterwards Lord Dalling, a young man of her own age, then a candidate for Parliament, was introduced to her, and took Chateaubriand's place.

She does not call him Henry Bulwer in the Enchantements; she calls him Henry Warwick. In the letters to Saint-Beuve, however, there is no mystification. To her confidant Hortense says Bulwer boldly, so that Warwick can be identified with Bulwer beyond the possibility of denial. Bulwer, she assures us-and she says it so emphatically that we must needs believe her-was, of all her lovers, the one whom she loved best. She found him " a man of ambition, but a dandy, " and was in full sympathy with his view that "it was not necessary to be ponderous in order to be intelligent." He began by taking her to see the Tower, the National Gallery, and Westminster Abbey; but he had not known her many days before he had fallen at her feet, protesting that, though he could not marry her, as his mother would not hear of his doing so, he would like to treat her, in other respects, as his wife. She yielded, and wrote to Chateaubriand in verse- "Vous êtes offensé. La fortune jalouse

N'a pas en votre absence épargné votre épouse :

Indigne de vous voir et de vous approacher,

je ne dois desormais songer qu'à me cacher."

Which means- "You have been wronged. While absent from your side,

Fortune, grown envious, has not spared your bride.

Unworthy to approach you as before, I can but hide from you for evermore."

It was a cruel stroke of irony, and a quick punishment for indifference and neglect. Having fired her shaft, Hortense went on a honeymoon with Henry Bulwer to Saint Valéry-sur-Somme-a little wateringplace at the ends of the earth, where he was fairly sure of meeting no one who knew him-and travelled with him in Belgium, where he was sent on a diplomatic mission, and lived with him at Hampstead, at Brompton, at Putney, and elsewhere. It would be a long story if one told it all; but the details belong, of course, to a life of Lord Dalling, or of Hortense herself, rather than to a life of Chateaubriand. One might be tempted, indeed, to dwell upon Hortense's attempt to make Bulwer jealous by smiling on Charles Babbage, the inventor of the calculating machine ; for there is something very titillating to the fancy in the picture of Chateaubriand, Lord Dalling, and Charles Babbage as rivals for the favours of the same frail lady. But even that inquiry would be out of place, as would also any attempt to recount the vicissitudes of a liaison which lasted for about six years. It is enough to mention that the lovers ultimately separated, but remained friends, and were still in affectionate correspondence when Bulwer was in Washington negotiating the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, and that Chateaubriand, in the meanwhile, and for the first time in his life, knew the pains of jealousy.

He had foreseen them, and in semi-scriptural language had predicted them. "I shall die on your breast," he had said. "You will betray me, and I shall pardon you." And that was what happenedultimately, though not at once.

At first Chateaubriand was not only hurt, but indignant. As soon as Hortense reached Paris, he hurried to see her-" proud, but quivering with excitement"-and protested. So she had come to her third lover already! A third lover at her time of life! And an Englishman too-the enemy of our country! That was the climax! In forsaking him for an Englishman Hortense was really behaving shamefully. Was her Englishman going to marry her? If marriage were what she wanted, well "he himself would be free some day." He would promise faithfully to marry her when Madame de Chateaubriand died, and they would go and live happily together in the Italy that she loved. In short, he " used every argument which he thought might move me"; and then, finding her inflexible to eloquence, he went away and wrote to her—

" I made no attempt to deceive him in my answers, and he protested that my sincerity was something terrible. All women deceived men, he said, and he would have much preferred to be deceived. When I did not answer him immediately, he imagined that I was meaning to yield, but at last he left me in peace and ceased to write. 'Hortense,' he wrote, 'you have betrayed me. I have done nothing to deserve to lose you.' He asked me to return his letters, and I gave them all back to him. He sent me some of mine, but kept those which pleased him best »

That is all-or nearly all-the story. Chateaubriand implored Hortense to consent to see him again, and she imposed the condition that he should promise to "make no attempt upon her virtue." He humiliated himself and gave the promise; and then a few other letters passed.

"Do not destroy my illusion, if illusion indeed it be. We will work together. I want to love your talent as I love yourself. You shall be my last Muse, my last enchantment, my last ray of sunshine. So do not say good-bye. I lay my soul at your feet."

"I write to you once more from the high road. I am always wandering, but you will always find me. If there is anything that I can do to make you happy ... if you think of me as somewhat different from ordinary men... then the snows and storms of the Alps will be quickly dissipated by your magic. My life is only an accident. I know I ought never to have been born. ... Write me more of those letters which kindle my emotions-such letters as you used to write in the early days of our love. Why do I no longer feel that you love me? I need your love so badly. I can give you more love in a day than others could give you in the course of many years. So let me see you soon. 1 kiss your hands and feet."

And then, two years later-

" I am just going to read Valentine.

'Vous vieillirez, ô ma jeune maitresse,

Vous vieillirez et je ne serai plus.'

" That is how I shall be avenged for your infidelity."

And that is really all; for the fact that Hortense and Chateaubriand still met from time to time, and occasionally wrote to each other, and were good friends, proves nothing and needs no commentary. That was his way-and hers-and the way of the world at the time: a small world in which sulking over such incompatibilities was an embarrassment to common friends and therefore a breach of etiquette.

So Hortense passes out of the story; and one says good-bye to her almost with a sense of personal loss, and with an irresistible temptation to linger over the parting words. She was so fair, so frail, so frank about her frailty-so firmly convinced that frailty was the way of salvation as well as the path to happiness! So disinterested too-so free from every mercenary taint; so grateful to her lovers, and so ready to forgive them; so sincere while she loved, and yet so quick to live a disappointment down and love again; so proud, so clever, so conscientious after her fashion; so complete a pagan, with such a dashing readiness to prove that she had the courage of her convictions! She forces one, whether one will or not, to take her paganism seriously, and wonder whether she was right when she said that the moralists were wrong, and whether, if her theories of right and wrong and love and camaraderie prevailed-But all that has nothing to do with Chateaubriand. He was sixty-four when he wrote the last letter quoted about vengeance for infidelity, and Hortense was only thirty-two. It still pleased him to revive memories and bask in them; he still continued to murmur the language of sentiment even when he hobbled upon the last stage of his pilgrimage with tottering steps. But he meant nothing by it. The words had ceased to bear any relation to action or even to ambition. The loosening hold of the passions had left him free for friendship. Madame Récamier had forgiven him both the infidelities which she had discovered and the infidelities which she had only guessed; and there was no longer any reason why he should not spread his life, as he had wished to do, as a carpet of flowers at her feet.