Preface

CHATEAUBRIAND belonged to the small class of great men whose personalities are more interesting than their achievements. He knew it, and was content that it should be so. Any one who desires the proof has only to read his Mémoires d Outre-tombe.

It is the greatest of his works-the only one of them which has fully stood the test of time, because it is the only one of them in which we find the genius of the man of letters unaided, and untrammelled, by the cunning journalist's felicitous instinct for the apropos. And the Mémoires d'Outre-tombe is only secondarily a chronicle of events. Primarily it is the manifesto of a personality.

Not, indeed, that the events chronicled are without importance-on the contrary.. Chateaubriand was an Ambassador, an Envoy Extraordinary, and a Foreign Minister with a policy of his own, who pushed his colleagues, against their better judgment, into a war for an idea-" my war," as he was proud to call it long after the idea for which it was waged had gone the way ot all obsolescent conceptions. He was also the most brilliant, and the most influential, of the writers who carried out the work, begun by Rousseau and continued by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, of breaking up the stiff classical prose style of the eighteenth century; and he was furthermore a potent force in stimulating and

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bringing to a head the Catholic reaction which followed upon the dry deism and blatant atheism of the revolutionary and pre-revolutionary periods.

Nor did he under-rate the significance of his successes in any of these fields of activity. He was equally proud of all of them; but he was prouder still of himself as the source from which they flowed.

has been written that " as Malebranche saw all things in God, so M. Necker saw all things in Necker." It might just as well be written that M. de Chateaubriand similarly " saw all thing's in Chateaubriand."

Or in René; for the Mémoires d' Outre-tombe has been well described¹ as " the re-creation of René."

1 By Sainte-Beuve. ↩

So far as the world of observers was concerned, the heart-searchings, weariness, and disillusions of René had, at the time of the writing of the Mémoires d Outre-tombe, been thrown into shadow by the dazzling truculence of the pamphleteer and the magnificence of the statesman and diplomatist. The central proposition of the Mémoires was that the changes had only been apparent, and that the essential René had persisted through them all-that René, in short, had been the permanent reality, and the rest a shadowy illusion.

And René, of course-there can be no argument about that-was interesting solely as a personality: interesting, that is to say, not for what he did-for he did nothing-but for what he was. He was the "fatal man," born to weariness, divining satiety before he had tasted pleasure, blighted by the disastrous passions which he inspired, oppressed by his irresistible sense of the transitoriness of human things, condemned to regard his life, if not always to conduct it, as a

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magnificent but melancholy pageant, with the grave for its goal, and the goal never hidden from his eyes.

Once, in conversation with a young woman, Chateaubriand said that René was " a perfect idiot"; but the purpose of that remark was probably to suppress an undesired and importunate admirer. Passage after passage might be quoted from the Mémoires d'Outre-tombe to show that Chateaubriand identified himself with René-or rather, perhaps, that he considered his own life to have been the conspicuously realized ideal of which Rene's life was the instinctive and imperfect adumbration. He used to wonder whether any of the women who passed him in the Park in the days of his obscurity had "divined the invisible presence of René" ; and he spoke of the women who loved him in the days of his grandeur and renown as forming a "long funeral procession."

Such, then, was Chateaubriand's personality as Chateaubriand himself conceived it. How far he succeeded in imposing his conception on his contemporaries may be questioned; but even those of them who knew enough about him to feel compelled to make their reservations were deeply interested and almost awestruck when he asserted himself in his majestic accents. Joubert had called him " the Enchanter" in his youth, and he could still enchant in his old age. At the time when, nearly a septuagenarian, he read his Mémoires to the privileged guests in Madame Récamier's salon, he was regarded, not indeed as the greatest, but certainly as the most interesting man in Europe. The proof is in the fact that, when he sold the Mémoires for posthumous publication, he got nearly £20,000 for them.

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There is no adequate life of Chateaubriand in any language; and there is no life at all in English. Possible biographers probably avoided the subject because they felt that Mémoires d'Outre-tombe covered the ground and blocked the way.

The objection might properly be regarded as insuperable as long as biographers had access to no other materials than those which Chateaubriand had supplied. For a long while that was the case; but in recent years a great deal of fresh material has been unearthed and accumulated. Many letters and other documents previously unpublished have appeared successively in M. Raynal's Les correspondants de Joubert, in Abbé Pailhés' Chateaubriand sa femme et ses amis, in M. Chédieu de Robéthon's Chateaubriand et Madame de Custine, in M. Agénor Bardoux's delightful lives of Madame de Beaumont, Madame de Custine, and the Duchesse de Duras, and in an anonymous work entitled Un dernier amour de René. The gross inaccuracies in Chateaubriand's narrative of his travels in the United States has been demonstrated by M. Joseph Bédier. M. Anatole Le Braz in the Revue de Paris and M. Dick in the Histoire littéraire de la France have corrected in several essential particulars his account of his sojourn in the County of Suffolk. Last, but by no means least, M. Léon Séché, in Les Annales Romantiques and in his recent monograph on Hortense Allart de Méritens, has brought to light new and hitherto unsuspected chapters in Chateaubriand's career.

It seems to follow that the time has come when a synoptic view of that career may at last be taken with some hope that the resulting picture will at once

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approximate to exactitude, and bring into due relief those romantic episodes in it to which Chateaubriand himself appears to have attached the most importance. What those episodes were may be inferred from the fact that, alike as a pilgrim to the Holy Land and as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, he wrote that his sole ambition was to "win glory" in order that he might "lay it at a woman's feet."

Francis gribble

P.S.-Thanks are due to M. Raynal for permission to reproduce the portrait of Mme. de Beaumont; to M. Bardoux for leave to use the portrait of Mme. de Custine; to M. Perrin for the portrait of the Marquise de V— - ; and to the Société du Mercure de France for the portrait of Hortense Allart de Méritens.

Contents

Chapitre III

The journey to Paris-Chateaubriand joins his regiment-Presented at Court-The beginning of the Revolution-Risks at Rennes-Acquaintance with Mirabeau-Departure for the United States I8