Chapitre XXVI

The July Revolution-Chateaubriand's refusal to swear allegiance to Louis-Philippe-Retires to Geneva-Returns to Paris to raise money-Withdraws to Lucerne-Visited by Alexandre Dumas-Meets Madame Récamier at Constance-Visits Queen Hortense at Arenenberg-Goes again to Geneva-Is joined there by Madame Récamier-Hears of the arrest of the Duchesse de Berry in La Vendée-Hurries back to Paris.

THE political activities of Chateaubriand's later years may be passed over quickly.

When the July Revolution, which was in a sense and to some extent his work, broke out, he was at Dieppe with Madame Récamier. It is not impossible that Madame Récamier's desire that he should go to Dieppe with her was one of his reasons for advising Hortense to take a holiday in England; for, if Hortense had stayed in France, his competing obligations might have clashed. Hearing the news of the Revolution, however, he hurried back to Paris to see what was happening, and await developments.

Meaning to overthrow a ministry, he had overthrown, or helped to overthrow, a king. Charles X had retired to Rambouillet to play whist while his soldiers-or as many of them as remained loyalwere fighting for him in the streets of his capital. Persuaded at last that the situation was really serious, he interrupted his rubber and fled to England; and the Duc d'Orléans was chosen to succeed him as King, not of France but of the French, with the tricolour instead of the fleur-de-lys for his flag. Chateaubriand refused to swear allegiance to him, and refusing, found himself relegated at once to the position of a leader without followers.

His reasons for refusing were probably complex. A personal dislike for the Duc d'Orléans was certainly included among them. But he was also a Breton true son of the land of impossible loyalties. Though, as a leader of the Opposition, he had been carried in triumph on the shoulders of the populace, he felt for kings-and especially for princesses-in their misfortunes the sentiments which the chivalrous feel for beauty in distress. The man who laid his hand upon a king, save in the way of kindness, seemed to him unworthy of the name of a patriotic Frenchman. Just, therefore, as in 1792 he had fought for a king to whose cause he was, at the bottom of his heart, indifferent, so now he struck attitudes and wrote letters to the papers on behalf of a king who had treated him badly and had no claim on his attachment except his descent from Saint Louis.

Fighting, since the King himself did not propose to fight, was out of the question; but the case was distinctly one for a demonstration and a beau geste. Chateaubriand could at least tell Louis-Philippe and his ministers-Casimir-Périer and the rest-what he thought of them; and he could also resign all his offices and emoluments, and sell all his property, and threaten to shake the dust of France off his feet for ever.

He did so. He called the Orleanists usurpers whose authority rested neither upon divine right nor upon popular approval. He compared them to the thieves who avail themselves of the confusion of a fire to break into houses and steal. He said that they were "bourgeois," with no thoughts for anything but their money bags-" as devoted to their money bags as were Napoleon's soldiers to the tricolour, or the Huguenots to the white plumes in the helmet of Henry of Navarre." For his part, he said, he would have none of their pensions and none of their peerages. He would like even, if it were possible, to abandon the stipend attached to his seat in the Academy; and, in any case, he proposed to leave them, and live in Switzerland. Then, having fired these shafts, he set out for Geneva.

"I am too far from you already. I have never made so melancholy a journey," he wrote to Madame Récamier from Lyons. And to Ampere-the ardent Ampère who had settled down as a school-master and remained his friend after abandoning the pretension to be his rival-he wrote, soon after he arrived-

"The age of illusions is over for me. I have played my part, and my career is finished. ... The future beyond the grave is the youth of the men whose hair has turned white. I hope I shall make a better use of this second youth than I made of the first »

Then, writing again to Madame Récamier, he tells her of attempts that the local Protestants are making to engage him in theological disputes. A Protestant pamphlet has been advertised, and a local paper has exhorted the pamphleteer to stand firm because "the author of Le Génie du Christianisme is waiting for him." But what of that? The author of Le Génie du Christianisme has no time for Christianity at present. His chief thought is of his urgent need for money-

"I was left stripped as naked as a little Saint John," he writes in the Mémoires. " My gold lace, my sword knots, my shoulder straps, my epaulettes, sold to a Jew to be melted down, fetched only seven hundred francs. That was the net cash product of all my grandeurs."

And seven hundred francs is only £28-a sum which does not carry an extravagant man far; and other sources of supply were drying up. Chateaubriand wanted to sell his house; but it was mortgaged, and he could not obtain a price which would enable him to pay the mortgage off. His publisher, too, had gone bankrupt-a calamity not confined to modern times. That was one reason for not remaining long in exile; and the appeals of his friends and admirers furnished another. Béranger called him back in verse-

"Chateaubriand, pourquoi fuir ta patrie,

Fuir son amour, son encens, et nos soins?"

Then, on top of that, came the news that there was still work for him to do in politics. A law was to be proposed, banishing Charles X and his heirs from France for ever; and notice had been given of an amendment making the death penalty the sanction of that law. It was to combat those propositions that Chateaubriand returned; and though the former proposition was carried in spite of his sonorous rhetoric, he ultimately had his reward. Charles X sent him twenty thousand francs. He borrowed an equal amount from his nephew Louis, and set out for Lucerne, where Madame de Chateaubriand was to join him-" in quest," he writes, " of an asylum in which I might finish writing my Mémoires, and dragging with me an enormous load of luggage, composed of memoranda, diplomatic documents, confidential kings, and letters addressed to me by ministers and

That was in 1832--the year in which the Duchesse de Berry tried to raise a Legitimist insurrection in La Vendée. Chateaubriand had heard of her enterprise and had sent her a letter imploring her to abandon it on the ground that " civil war is always an awful thing," and would only, if attempted at that moment, "cause French blood to be shed in vain." He imagined, no doubt, since he was addressing a woman-albeit a princess-that he had only to speak to be obeyed; but the mother of Henri V nevertheless continued on her way, while he continued on his.

At Vesoul he met Augustin Thierry, and at Lucerne he received a passing visit from the great Alexandre Dumas, who was also travelling in Switzerland for reasons with which politics had quite as much to do as the dilapidated condition of his health. There is a graphic account of the interview in Dumas' Impressions de Voyage, more graphic, it may be, than faithful to the facts.

Dumas, we read, was nervous in the presence of so great a man: Obstupuit ... vox faucibus haesit; and one has a difficulty in picturing the ventripotent mulatto thus overwhelmed and awed even by the Defender of the Faith. Chateaubriand, however, composed him, if he needed to be composed, by affability, and led him out to look at Thorwaldsen's monument-Helvetiorum fidei ac virtuti-and to see him throw bread to the wild fowl from the bridge over the Reuss. His lips smiled, says Dumas, but his eyes were grave and melancholy. Sad thoughts passed over his brow as clouds are swept across the sky: "I divined that this was the moment of the day which he reserved for meditating about France."

Both Dumas and the wild fowl are mentioned in the diary incorporated in the Mémoires d'Outre-tombe ; but Chateaubriand's thoughts seem to have been less of France than of himself. He crossed the Saint Gothard, and had a vision of " the sylph of the woods of Combourg"; and he apostrophized the imaginary enchantress: "Come, sit on my knees! Have no fear of my white hairs, but caress them with your shadowy fairy fingers!" And then, standing on the summit of the pass, he thanked the revolutions that had set him free to follow the bent of his own nature-

"I have still enough vitality in my veins to recall my earliest dreams; still fire enough to renew my passion for the creature of my fancy and desires. The years and the world which I have passed through have been for me only a double solitude in which I have kept myself as Heaven made me. Why then should I lament the rapid flight of time, seeing that I have lived more in an hour than others in a lifetime : »

He descended into the golden sunshine of the Italian Lakes, and looked listlessly for a villa, considering whether it would please him to remain in this smiling place of exile-

" How if I were to finish my Mémoires at the gates of this classic land, in which Virgil and Tasso sangin which so many revolutions have been accomplished? How if I were to review my Breton destiny in sight of these Italian mountains? If their curtain lifted, it would reveal the plains of Lombardy-with Rome beyond-and beyond Rome, Naples, Sicily, Greece, Syria, Egypt, Carthage: those distant shores which I once trod-I who no longer own so much ground as the sole of my foot covers. And yet to die here? To end my days here? Perhaps it is what I wishwhat I am looking for. And yet I do not know."

He did not know; and, not knowing, he went back to Lucerne, and picked flowers on the banks of the Reuss, and gave them to the chambermaid. That was when "M. A. Dumas" came to call on him; and his intimate thoughts, it is evident, were other than M. A. Dumas supposed. Perhaps his vision of " the sylph of the woods of Combourg" had borne some resemblance to Hortense Allart-the one woman who had tired of him instead of waiting for him to tire of her-and so made his sense of the march of time more painful to him than he allows. At all events he became restless, and felt that he must once more move on ; and as Madame Récamier, in flight from the cholera, was coming to Constance, he decided to join her there at the end of August.

They walked by the lake side together, and sat down on a rustic bench. Madame Récamier was carrying one of those commonplace books, or albums, in which women of that period used to ask their friends to inscribe some thought or sentiment. The last entry was Rousseau's alleged dying speech: "Open the window, my wife, and let me see the light of the sun again" ; and Chateaubriand wrote underneath-

"That which I sought on the Lake of Lucerne, I have found on the Lake of Constance: the charm and intelligence of beauty. I do not want to die like Rousseau. I wish to go on seeing the sun for a long time yet, if my last days are to be spent with you. May my last years break and die away at your feet, like those waves whose murmuring ripple you hear."

On the following day Chateaubriand dined at Arenenberg with Queen Hortense and Louis Bonaparte, the future Napoleon III. His next stage was once again to Lucerne, where Madame de Chateaubriand had arranged to meet him. Lucerne, Madame de Chateaubriand discovered, was too damp for her ; so they moved, in the course of September, to Geneva, and formed vague plans of wintering there and afterwards visiting Italy.

Madame Récamier joined them-she could hardly do less after what Chateaubriand had written in her album. Her correspondence with Ballanche and Ampere shows her trying to persuade him to return to Paris, where, says Ballanche, "his world-wide fame will protect him better than anywhere else." He went with her to Coppet, where she wished to weep by the tomb of Madame de Staël, and sat, waiting and meditating, till she came out, "pale and in tears," from the dark clump of trees which surrounds the mausoleum. He walked with her in the meadows by the banks of the Rhone, and they conjured up the memory of "those years, so painful and so bitterly regretted, when the passions of our youth were at once our happiness and our torture."

And then came news. The Duchesse de Berry, who had gone her own way and raised the white flag in Vendée in defiance of Chateaubriand's advice, had been discovered and arrested; and once more Chateaubriand heard the call to action and decided to return to Paris.