Chapitre XXVIII

Last years-The reading of Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'Outre-tombe in Madame Récamier's salon-The hour of Chateaubriand's triumph-The gradual decline of his powers-Madame Récamier's affection for him-His last illness and death.

ONCE again at the age of sixty-five, Chateaubriand was driven to " earn his bread ' by working as " a publisher's hack." He translated Paradise Lost " at so much the yard." He also edited the aphorisms of his friend Joubert, and the collected works of his friend Fontanes ; and then he wrote his History of the Congress of Verona.

There were those who said that he had been no more than a fifth wheel of the coach at that great diplomatic gathering. The sneer is repeated in the Memoirs of Baron de Frénilly, lately published. He wished to prove that " his war" was really his, and had been made inevitable by his diplomacy, for the greater glory of France. Diplomatic historians must decide whether the demonstration is conclusive. Chateaubriand received forty thousand francs for it ; and it helped to pay his debts. The last of all his books is the Vie de Rancé ; but about that there is nothing to be said except that it is the tired work of a man of seventy-five.

Long before that, however, he had definitely insured himself against indigence by accepting a pension of twelve thousand francs from the Comte de Chambord, and by arranging for the posthumous publication of the Mémoires d'Outre-tombe. Just as in the old days when Madame de Duras took charge of his finances, his friends and some men of business formed a joint stock company to acquire his copyrights; and this time there was an element of permanence and stability in the arrangement. The work hypothecated was already in existence; and part of the purchase money was paid in the form of an annuity. Two hundred and fifty thousand francs down and an annuity of twelve thousand francs, to be continued to Madame de Chateaubriand, if she survived her husband, was the price agreed upon for the book rights; and for the serial rights a further sum of eighty thousand francs was subsequently paid.

In his old age, therefore, Chateaubriand was reasonably well provided for, enjoying a steady income of nearly f 100o a year, in addition to the interest derived from any sums which the claims of his creditors left him free to invest. His ability thus to endow himself from the prospective proceeds of his record of things seen and done and experienced -and above all, imagined-is the most eloquent of all proofs of the unique position which he had attained in the eyes of his contemporaries. He was the patriarch of letters, and the hungry generations could not tread him down.

Some of the younger men might laugh-some of them, in fact, did laugh-at his pomposity, his affectations, and the sustained magnificence of his funereal gloom. Sainte-Beuve, as soon as he felt free to do so, laughed at him all through a course of twenty-one literary lectures delivered at Liège. Alfred de Vigny declared that he spent the later years of his life as a weeping willow by the side of his own grave. Lamartine derided the court of women, who formed, he said, his " real public," and tried to screen him, with " smiles, and reverence, and caresses," from the "less feminine judgment of posterity." But the derision, after all, was rather envious than disdainful; and Chateaubriand, seated on his throne, with duchesses reclining at his feet, and looking up into his eyes, would have felt no difficulty in classing it with the crackling of thorns under a pot.

He had achieved great things; and the men who sneered, as well as the women who worshipped, had to admit it. Le Génie du Christianisme might not have done much for Christianity; but it had done a great deal for literature. It had revealed new possibilities in the harmonious use of language, and marked the opening of a new era as surely as did the storming of the Bastille. And the gorgeous style had been the expression of a gorgeous and forceful personality-a personality of the triumphant type which, with all its weaknesses and inconsistencies, commands admiration as a finished work of art.

The cruel could say that his life had been a pose. The just would think of it rather as a pageant to which a pose was a necessary adjunct. It was not a pose which Chateaubriand invented; but it seemed his own when he assumed it. He was in the very skin of the part of the world-weary Titan, who had had kingdoms at his feet, and had tasted all experiences, from the love of God to the love of women, and, after yawning his way through life, had earned the right to tell the world what was vanity and what was not. And, therefore, he imposed a glamour, and was interesting, and entitled to his place of honour in the centre of the stage. The very men who mocked were jealous, and would gladly have imitated him if they could. Sainte-Beuve himself -the man who mocked most bitterly-had tried to do so, and only recovered his sense of humour, and ceased trying, when he realized that he was not destined to succeed. Victor Hugo, as we all know, not only tried, but succeeded. " Chateaubriand ou rien " was his version of "aut Cæsar aut nullus" ; and he lived up to the motto to the last.

The culminating hour of triumph came when Chateaubriand assembled his friends to hear the reading of the Mémoires d'Outre-tombe. Rousseau, it will be remembered, had similarly assembled his friends to listen to his Confessions; and what a world of difference between the two historic scenes!

Jean-Jacques' reading had been the desperate act of a lunatic who believed himself to be a maligned and injured man-a rat, as it were, driven by imaginary pursuers into an imaginary corner. He was persuaded that he had only to asperse the characters of women who had been kind to him in order to unmask a conspiracy and confound his enemies. He tried the experiment, and the only result of it was that he pained and grieved his friends. They heard him in ominous silence, and sniggered, and took careful notes of those admissions as to the follies of his youth which were most damaging to his reputation as a philosopher and a man of sentiment.

No anti-climax of that kind lurked in wait for Chateaubriand, and he fell into no such pit of bathos. Proud of many things, he was specially proud, as he has told us many times, of the contrast between Jean-Jacques' paltry spite and his own magnanimous grandeur. There is more than a little arrogance in the frequency of the assertion, for Jean-Jacques, after all, could not help being a poor man and a parvenu; and much of the contrast lies in Chateaubriand's greater genius for stage effects; but the fact remains that the contrast was never more striking than on the occasion of these readings at the Abbaye-aux-Bois.

The audience, says Lamartine, was " carefully sifted and selected" so as to exclude all unsympathetic or irreverent elements. Madame Récamier would not have been Madame Récamier if she had not been eminently capable of seeing to that. There were dukes and duchesses present to represent the ultras of the ancien régime; old friends like Ballanche and Ampère; members of the family like Charles Lenormant, who had married Madame Récamier's niece; an occasional stranger with good introductions like Mrs. Trollope; an abbé or two; and such rising representatives of the press and the literature of the future as Edgar Quinet and Sainte-Beuve. Some of the latter were to laugh presently-but not yet-not for a good many years to come. Awe, for the moment, effectually checked all ribald inclinations. Madame Récamier saw to that, too; with the result that even Sainte-Beuve wrote of Chateaubriand as " the most illustrious of our contemporaries."

He sat on a conspicuous chair, like a king established on his throne. The court of women disposed themselves at his feet on stools; and the court of men stood ranged in serried ranks in the background. He arrived, when the stage was set and the house waiting, carrying his sheets of manuscript wrapped in a silk handkerchief, and handed them to Ampere or Lenormant, who took it in turns to read; while he listened with the air of a man to whom their elocution perpetually revealed fresh and unsuspected beauties in his own composition.

Rousseau had wearied his audience by readings which lasted, with brief intervals for refreshment, for seventeen hours at a stretch. Chateaubriand and Madame Récamier knew better. His readings were adjourned while his listeners were still eager for more; and the pleasure, thus extended from one reception day to another, lasted for many weeks, and formed the talk and the leading attraction of literary Paris.

There was nothing in the text to shock the taste of the fastidious-that was another of the respects in which Chateaubriand showed, and made a point of showing, his superiority to Rousseau. He had never stolen a piece of ribbon and thrown the blame upon a servant maid, and had no need to make ignominious admissions. He took away no woman's character; and it was well known that none of the women who had loved him had fared as badly as Madame de Warens. Perhaps some of the references to Madame Récamier were just a little ... Some of her friends came to her quietly afterwards and said so, reminding her that she was no longer so young as she had been, and that the code of propriety was stricter than in the days of her youth, and that a certain reference to a certain lonely walk at the dead of night in a dark and

Z 2 339 mysterious wood might lend itself to-well, to uncharitable misconstructions. But the allusion, after all, was made in the grand manner-so differently from Rousseau's account of his night in the wood with Madame d'Houdetot-and invested with so much poetry, and delicacy, and charm, that no qualms were felt and no questions raised until after the company had dispersed, and the newspaper men had begun to dispute for permission to print fragments of the promised masterpiece in the reviews and journals to which they were attached.

That was the apogee-René in his old age recalling memories of René in his youth, relating how he had " wept and believed," and also how he had sighed, and loved, and lost, and found consolation in friendship -and all this in an atmosphere of incense and amid a murmur of approbation, and the awed acknowledgment that there never had been such a man before, and never would be such a man again!

He had still a dozen years or so to live; but they were painful, uneventful years on which there is no necessity to dwell. The visits which he paid to the Duchesse de Berry at Venice and to the Comte de Chambord in London need not detain us. Still less need we trouble to follow him in his wanderings in search of health to various watering-places. All that matters is that he and his wife and Madame Récamier were growing old together.

He still had "his hour " in Madame Récamier's apartment. Except when he was travelling, he knocked at her door daily at half-past one, and sat tête-à-tête with her till half-past two. No one-not even the worthy Ballanche-was admitted to disturb him. Then, at the end of his hour, the callers were announced. A rug was thrown over his knees to hide his increasing infirmities from the world; and he talked, and inhaled incense, and received homage as of old. That was his life-or all that was essential in it-day after day, month after month, year after year.

He suffered from gout; and the gout was presently to show symptoms hardly distinguishable from those of paralysis. The vigour of his intellect presently declined. He lost his interest in everything-in everything, at all events, except the one friendship to which he never ceased to cling. He ceased to write, or to read, or to concern himself with politics, and dwindled away into a mere shadow of his old triumphant self. We have a picture of him in those days from the pen of Maxime du Camp, who did not know him, but sometimes saw him wandering in the streets. He was, we read, "the very image of ennui-a man bowed down beneath the burden of an intolerable weariness « He had boasted of his ennui in his youth; and the boasts, like curses, had come home to roost.

The time came when he could no longer climb the stairs at the Abbaye-aux-Bois, but had to be carried by two footmen from his carriage to Madame Récamier's door, and thence wheeled into her apartment on an easy-chair that ran on castors. He thought that no one knew, and that his infirmities were hiddenthere was a conspiracy to let him think so. The care taken of him was the more necessary because Madame Récamier herself was also failing, and, being nearly blind, sat in a darkened room, so that her visitors had

much ado not to trip on the carpet and tumble among the furniture.

A few more months passed, and Chateaubriand, weakening further, could no longer leave his house; and then it was Madame Récamier's turn, in spite of her infirmities, to visit him. That was the hour, Sainte-Beuve says, of Madame de Chateaubriand's triumph and revenge. She would not let them be alone, but sat through all their interviews and embarrassed them, exacting that penalty for fifty years' sublime infidelity and elaborately courteous neglect. In February 1847 she died; and there are witnesses who declare that "the grief of Chateaubriand was profound." It may be that he missed her-for the habit even of onerous ties is sometimes strong; and it may also be-but there are some secrets of the human soul into which it is better not to pry.

"There is nothing for me to do now," Chateaubriand wrote to one of his friends, "but to sit by the side of my grave, and wait. Presently I shall descend into it with a good heart, and set out for eternity, holding my crucifix in my hand."

None the less, however, the thought of spending his few remaining days alone oppressed him. He was free at last, as he had predicted to Hortense Allart that he would some day be; but Hortense had long since passed out of his life, and it was not to her, but to Madame Récamier, that his thoughts now inevitably turned. He begged her to marry him; but though she was devoted to him, she would not.

"What would be the use of that?" she asked. "At our age propriety can have no word to say about the cares that I am giving you. If your loneliness troubles you, I am quite willing to come and live in the same house with you. The world, I am sure, will do justice to the purity of our friendship and approve of any step which makes it easier for me to crown your last years with peace and happiness and affection. If we were younger, I would not hesitate, but would accept with joy the right of consecrating my life to you. But my age and my blindness have given me that right already. We must do nothing to alter the character of such a perfect friendship »

She was right, and he allowed himself to be persuaded. His strength slipped from him by imperceptible degrees; and she sat by him with the slow tears dropping from her old blind eyes, and watched the ebbing of the tide.

There were moments-rare moments-when the failing flame flashed up, and the old vitality seemed to be reviving. He quoted the poets at such moments with something of the old rich intonation; and once he sent for his friends, and read them a few final extracts from his Mémoires. It was as if a dying man should sit up in bed to read his will.

That only happened once, however. He soon relapsed into taciturnity, and even into coma, hardly aware of the stormy events of February 1848, which sent his old enemy Louis-Philippe flying in ignominy from his kingdom, barely understanding when he was told that the French had got their republic at last; thinking only, in so far as he was capable of thought, of Madame Récamier; praying only, in so far as he was capable of prayer, that he might die before her, and that she might be with him when he died.

They had both lived and loved, and each of them had many memories which the other did not share; but the memories which they did share were the only memories which mattered. The rest was vanity and vexation of spirit; but this friendship, which had stood the test of lapses and infidelities, was firm and real, and would endure. So they lived in it, forgiving and forgiven, as happy as the old and infirm and dying may be; and the days dripped by until Chateaubriand's prayer was answered.

On July 2, 1848, he sent for the priests and "the paraphernalia of death," and " with profound sentiments of humility and faith" received the last sacraments of the Church. Then, two days later, he died in Madame Récamier's arms, without an effort or a struggle-so quietly and peacefully that she, unable to see him, sat on, holding his hand, not knowing that he was dead until they broke it to her and gave her blind eyes leave to weep for him.

The end

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