Volume 5 — BOOK II[407]

BOOK II[407]

My arrest—I am transferred from my thieves' cell to Mademoiselle Gisquet's dressing-room—Achille de Harlay—The examining magistrate, M. Desmortiers—My life at M. Gisquet's—I am set at liberty—Letter to M. the Minister of Justice and his reply—I receive an offer of my peer's pension from Charles X.—My reply—Note from Madame la Duchesse de Berry—Letter to Béranger—I leave Paris—Diary from Paris to Lugano—M. Augustin Thierry—The road over the Saint-Gotthard—The Valley of Schöllenen—The Devil's Bridge—The Saint-Gotthard—Description of Lugano—The mountains—Excursions round about Lucerne—Clara Wendel—The peasants' prayer—M. Alexandre Dumas—Madame de Colbert—Letter to M. de Béranger—Zurich—Constance—Madame Récamier—Madame la Duchesse de Saint-Leu—Madame de Saint-Leu after reading M. de Chateaubriand's last letter—After reading a note signed "Hortense"—Arenenberg—I return to Geneva—Coppet—The tomb of Madame de Staël—A walk—Letter to Prince Louis Napoleon—Letters to the Minister of Justice, to the President of the Council, to Madame la Duchesse de Berry—I write my memorial on the captivity of the Princess—Circular to the editors of the newspapers—Extract from the Mémoire sur la captivité de madame la duchesse de Berry—My trial—Popularity.

Paris, Rue d'Enfer, end of July 1832.

One of my old friends, Mr. Frisell[408], an Englishman, had just lost, at Passy, his only daughter, aged seventeen years. I had gone, on the 19th of June, to the funeral of poor Eliza, whose portrait the pretty Madame Delessert was completing when Death put the finishing touch to it. Returning to my solitude in the Rue d'Enfer, I had hardly gone to bed, full of the melancholy thoughts that arise from the association of youth, beauty and the grave, when, at four o'clock in the morning, on the 20th of June[409], Baptiste, who had long been in my service, entered my room, came up to the bed and said:

"Sir, the court-yard is full of men who have placed themselves at all the doors, after compelling Desbrosses to open the carriage-entrance; and there are three gentlemen asking to speak to you."

As he finished these words, the "gentlemen" entered, and the chief of them, very politely approaching my bed, told me that he had an order to arrest me and take me to the Prefecture of Police. I asked him if the sun had risen, as the law demanded, and if he was the bearer of a legal warrant; he did not answer for the sun, but he showed me the following judicial notice:

"Copy

"Prefecture of Police

"In the King's name.

"We, counsellor of State, Prefect of Police[410],

"In view of information in our possession,

"By virtue of Article X. of the Code of Criminal Instruction,

"Call upon the commissary or, if he be prevented, another to repair to the house of M. le Vicomte de Chateaubriand, or elsewhere if need be, he being accused of plotting against the safety of the State, in order there to seek for and seize all papers, correspondence and writings containing provocations to crimes and offenses against the public peace or liable to examination, as well as any seditious objects or arms which may be in his possession."

While I perused the declaration of the great "plotting against the safety of the State," of which I, poor I was accused, the captain of the police-spies said to his subordinates:

"Gentlemen, do your duty!"

The duty of those gentlemen consisted in opening every cupboard, fumbling in every pocket, seizing all papers, letters and documents, reading the same, where possible, and discovering all arms, as appears from the warrant aforesaid.

I am arrested.

After reading over the document, addressing the worthy leader of those thieves of men and liberties:

"You know, sir," I said, "that I do not recognise your Government and that I protest against the violence which you are doing me; but, as I am not the stronger and as I have no wish to come to blows with you, I will get up and accompany you: pray take the trouble to be seated."

I dressed and, without taking anything with me, said to the venerable commissary:

"Sir, I am at your orders: are we going on foot?"

"No, sir, I took care to bring you a coach."

"You are very good, sir; let us start; but allow me to go to take leave of Madame de Chateaubriand. Will you permit me to enter my wife's room alone?"

"Sir, I will go with you to the door and wait for you."

"Very well, sir," and we went down.

Everywhere, on my road, I found sentries; a picket had been posted even on the boulevard, outside a little gate which opens at the bottom of my garden. I said to the leader:

"Those precautions were very useless; I have not the smallest wish to run away from you and escape."

The gentlemen had turned my papers topsy-turvy, but taken nothing. My big mameluke's sabre caught their attention; they whispered among themselves and ended by leaving the weapon under a heap of dusty folios, in the midst of which it lay beside a yellow-wood crucifix which I had brought from the Holy Land.

This dumb-show would almost have made me inclined to laugh, but I was cruelly distressed for Madame de Chateaubriand. Every one who knows her knows also the affection which she bears me, her ready alarm, the quickness of her imagination and the pitiful state of her health: this descent of the police and my removal might do her a terrible harm. She had already heard some noise and I found her sitting up in bed, listening quite terrified, as I entered her room at so unusual an hour.

"Ah, dear God!" she exclaimed. "Are you ill? Ah, dear God! What is happening? What is happening?"

And she was seized with a fit of trembling. I kissed her, with difficulty kept back my tears, and said:

"It is nothing; they have sent for me to make a statement as a witness in a matter that has to do with a newspaper trial. It will all be over in a few hours and I shall come back to breakfast with you."

The police-spy had remained standing at the open door; he saw this scene and I said to him, as I returned to place myself in his hands:

"You see, sir, the effect of your somewhat matutinal visit."

I crossed the court-yard with my bumbailiffs; three of them got into the coach with me, the rest of the squad accompanied the capture on foot and we reached the yard of the Prefecture of Police unmolested.

The gaoler who was to put me under lock and key was not up: they woke him by tapping at his wicket and he went to prepare my lodging. While he was busy with this work, I walked up and down the yard with the Sieur Léotaud, who was guarding me. He chatted and said to me, in a friendly way, for he was very civil:

"Monsieur le vicomte, I have the great honour of remembering you; I have often presented arms to you, when you were a minister and used to come to the King's: I used to serve in the Body-guards. But what would you have one do? One has a wife and children; one must live!"

"You are right, Monsieur Léotaud; how much does this pay you?"

"Ah, monsieur le vicomte, that depends on our captures .... The perquisites are sometimes good and sometimes poor, just as in war."

During my walk, I saw the spies return in different disguises like maskers on Ash Wednesday coming down from the Courtille: they came to report on the doings of the night. Some were dressed as vendors of green-stuff, as street-hawkers, as charcoal-sellers, as market-porters, as old-clothes'-men, as rag-men, as organ-grinders; others wore wigs under which appeared hair of a different colour; others had false beards, whiskers and mustachios; others dragged their legs like respectable invalids and wore a dazzling red ribbon at their button-holes. They disappeared into a small yard and soon returned in other clothes, without mustachios, without beards, without whiskers, without wigs, without baskets, without wooden legs, without arms worn in a sling: all these birds of day-break of the police flew away and vanished as the light increased.

My lodging was ready, the gaoler came to tell us, and M. Léotaud, hat in hand, led me to the door of my honest dwelling, saying, as he left me in the hands of the gaoler and his assistants:

"Monsieur le vicomte, I am your humble servant; I trust to have the pleasure of meeting you again."

And taken to prison.

The entrance-door closed behind me. Preceded by the gaoler, who carried his keys, and went before his two men, who followed me to prevent me from turning tail, I went up a narrow stair-case till I came to the second floor. A little dark passage led to a door: the turnkey opened it; I followed him into my box. He asked me if I wanted anything: I answered that I would have breakfast in an hour. He told me that there were a coffee-house and a tavern which supplied prisoners with all that they wanted for their money. I bagged my keeper to send me some tea and, if possible, some hot and cold water and towels. I gave him twenty francs in advance: he withdrew respectfully, promising to return.

Left alone, I inspected my den: its length was a little greater than its width, and its height was perhaps some seven or eight feet. The walls, stained and bare, were scribbled over with the prose and verse of my predecessors, and especially with the scrawl of a woman who said much that was insulting about the juste-milieu.[411] A pallet, with dirty sheets, took up half of my cell; a plank, supported by two brackets fastened against the wall, two feet above the pallet, served as a cupboard for the prisoners' linen, boots and shoes: a chair and a sordid article composed the rest of the furniture.

My faithful keeper brought me the towels and jugs of water that I had asked for; I besought him to take away from the bed the dirty sheets and the yellow woollen blanket, to remove the pail, which was choking me, and to sweep out my den after first sprinkling it All the works of the juste-milieu having been carried off, I shaved; I poured the water from my jug over myself, I changed my linen: Madame de Chateaubriand had sent me a little parcel; I set out all my things on the plank over my bed as though I were in the cabin of a ship. When this was done, my breakfast arrived, and I took my tea on my well-washed table, which I covered with a clean napkin. Soon they came to fetch the utensils of my matutinal feast and I was left alone, duly locked in.

My cell was lighted only by a grated window which opened very high up; I placed my table under this window and climbed on the table to breathe and to enjoy the light Through the bars of my thieves' cell, I saw only a yard, or rather a dark and narrow passage, with gloomy buildings with bats fluttering around them. I heard the clanking of keys and chains, the noise of policemen and spies, the foot-steps of soldiers, the movement of arms, the shouting, the laughter, the licentious songs of the prisoners, my neighbours, the yells of Benoît[412], condemned to death for the murder of his mother and his obscene friend. I caught these words uttered by Benoît between his confused exclamations of fear and repentance:

"Ah, my mother, my poor mother!"

I was seeing the under side of society, the sores of humanity, the hideous machines by which this world is moved.

I thank the men of letters, those great partisans of the liberty of the press, who formerly had taken me for their leader and fought under my orders: but for them, I should have left this life without knowing what prison was, and I should have missed this ordeal. I recognise in this delicate attention the genius, the goodness, the generosity, the honour, the courage of the placed penmen. But, after all, what was this short trial? Tasso spent years in a dungeon; and shall I complain? No; I have not the mad pride to measure my vexation of a few hours with the prolonged sacrifices of the immortal victims whose names history has preserved.

Moreover, I was not at all unhappy; the genius of my past grandeurs and of my thirty-year-old "glory" did not appear to me; but my Muse of former days, very poor, very unknown, came all radiant to kiss me through my window: she was charmed with my lodging and quite inspired; she found me again as she had seen me in my wretchedness in London, when the first visions of René were wafting in my head. What were we going to compose, the solitary of Mount Pindus and I? A song, in imitation of that poor poet Lovelace[413], who, in the gaols of the English Commons, sang King Charles I., his master? No; the voice of a prisoner would have seemed to me to be of ill-omen for my little King Henry V.: it is from the foot of the altar that hymns should be addressed to misfortune. I did not therefore sing the crown fallen from an innocent brow; I contented myself with telling of another crown, white also, laid on a young girl's bier: I remembered Eliza Frisell, whom I had seen buried the day before in the cemetery at Passy. I began a few elegiac verses of a Latin epitaph; but suddenly I was in doubt as to the quantity of a word: I quickly sprang from the table on which I was perched, leaning against the bars of the window, and ran to the door, on which I rained blows with my fist. The neighbouring dens rang out; the gaoler came up in dismay, followed by two gendarmes; he opened my wicket, and I cried, as Santeuil[414] would have done:

"A Gradus! A Gradus!"

My life in prison.

The gaoler opened his eyes, the gendarmes thought that I was revealing the name of one of my accomplices; they were quite ready to handcuff me; I explained; I gave them money to buy the book, and they went off to ask the astonished police for a Gradus.

While they were attending to my commission, I clambered up on my table again and, changing my ideas on that tripod, set myself to compose strophes on the death of Eliza; but, when I was in the midst of my inspiration, at about three o'clock, behold tipstaffs entering my cell and bodily apprehending me on the banks of Permessus: they took me to the examining magistrate, who sat drawing out instruments in a gloomy office, opposite my prison, on the other side of the yard. The magistrate, a fatuous and pompous young limb of the law, put the usual questions to me as to my surname, Christian names, age and place of residence. I refused to answer or sign anything whatever, declining to recognise the political authority of a government which was able to point neither to the ancient hereditary right nor the election of the people, since France had not been consulted and no national congress summoned. I was taken back to my mouse-trap.

At six o'clock, they brought me my dinner, and I continued to turn and turn over in my head the lines of my stanzas, at the same time improvising an air which I thought charming. Madame de Chateaubriand sent me a mattress, a bolster, sheets, a cotton blanket, candles and the books which I read at night. I arranged my room, and still humming:

Il descend le cercueil et les roses sans taches[415],

I found my ballad of the Young Girl and the Young Flower finished[416].

I began to undress; a sound of voices was heard; my door opened; and M. the Prefect of Police, accompanied by M. Nay,[417] appeared. He made a thousand apologies for the prolongation of my detention in custody at the police-station; he informed me that my friends, the Duc de Fitz-James and the Baron Hyde de Neuville, had been arrested like myself and that the Prefect's Offices were so full that they did not know where to put the persons who had to be examined by the justiciary.

"But," he added, "you shall come to me, monsieur le vicomte, and choose in my apartment whatever suits you best."

I thanked him and begged him to leave me in my hole; I was already quite charmed with it, like a monk with his cell. M. the Prefect declined my entreaties and I had to forsake my nest I saw again the rooms which I had not visited since the day when Bonaparte's Prefect of Police had sent for me to invite me to leave Paris. M. Gisquet and Madame Gisquet opened all their rooms for me, begging me to pick the one which I would like to sleep in. M. Nay offered to give up his to me. I was confused at so much politeness; I accepted a lonely little room which looked out on the garden and which was used, I think, by Mademoiselle Gisquet as a dressing-room; I was allowed to have my servant with me: he slept on a mattress outside my door, at the entrance of a narrow stair-case leading down to Madame Gisquet's large apartment Another stair-case led to the garden; but this one was forbidden me and, every evening, a sentry was placed at the foot against the railing which separates the garden from the quay. Madame Gisquet is the kindest woman in the world and Mademoiselle Gisquet is very pretty and an exceedingly good musician. I have every reason to be satisfied with the care shown me by my hosts; they seemed anxious to atone for the twelve hours of my first confinement.

The Disquiet family.

The day after my installation in Mademoiselle Gisquet's dressing-room, I rose quite pleased, as I remembered Anacreon's song on the toilet of a young Greek girl; I put my head to the window: I perceived a small, very green garden and a great wall concealed behind japanned varnish; to the right, at the back of the garden, offices in which one caught glimpses of agreeable police-clerks, like beautiful nymphs amid lilac-bushes; to the left, the quay along the Seine, the river and a corner of old Paris, in the parish of Saint-André-des-Arcs. The sound of Mademoiselle Gisquet's piano reached me with the voices of the police-spies calling for head-clerks to receive their reports.

How everything changes in this world! That little romantic English garden of the police was a ragged and queer-shaped strip of the French garden, with its closely-trimmed elms, of the mansion of the First President of Paris. This old garden, in 1580, occupied the site of that block of houses which stops the view to the north and west, and it stretched to the bank of the Seine. It was there that, after the day of the barricades, the Duc de Guise came to visit Achille de Harlay:

"He found the First President, who was walking in his garden, who was so little astonished at his coming, that he did not so much as deign to turn his head nor discontinue the walk which he had commenced, which having finished, and being at the end of his alley, he turned, and, in turning, he saw the Duc de Guise, who came to him; then that grave magistrate, raising his voice, said to him:

"'It is a great pity that the varlet should drive out the master; for the rest, my soul is God's, my heart the King's and my body is in the hands of the wicked: let them do with it what they please.'"

The Achille de Harlay who walks in that garden to-day is M. Vidocq[418], and the Duc de Guise is Coco Lacour; we have changed great men for great principles. How free we are now! How free was I especially at my window, watching that good gendarme standing sentry at the foot of my staircase and prepared to shoot me flying, if I had sprouted wings! There was no nightingale in my garden, but there were plenty of frisky, shameless, quarrelsome sparrows, which are to be found everywhere, in the country, in town, in palaces, in prisons, and which perch as gaily on the instrument of death as on a rose-bush: to one that can fly away, what matter earthly sufferings?

Madame de Chateaubriand obtained permission to see me. She had spent thirteen months, under the Terror, in the Rennes prisons, with my two sisters Lucile and Julie; her imagination, remaining under the impression, can no longer endure the idea of a prison. My poor wife had a violent attack of hysterics, on entering the Prefect's Offices, and this was an obligation the more which I owed to the juste-milieu. On the second day of my detention, the examining magistrate, the Sieur Desmortiers[419], arrived, accompanied by his clerk.

M. Guizot had obtained the appointment as attorney-general to the Royal Court at Rennes of one M. Hello[420], a writer and, consequently, an envious and irritable man, like all who spoil paper in a triumphing party.

M. Guizot's creature, finding my name and those of M. le Duc de Fitz-James and M. Hyde de Neuville mixed up in the proceedings that were being conducted against M. Berryer at Nantes, wrote to the Minister of Justice that, if he were the master, he would not fail to have us arrested and included in the trial, both as accomplices and as witnesses for the prosecution. M. de Montalivet had thought it his duty to yield to the advice of M. Hello: there was a time when M. de Montalivet used to come to me to ask my opinion and my ideas relating to the elections and the liberty of the press. The Restoration, which made M. de Montalivet a peer, was unable to make him a man of intelligence, and that is no doubt why it makes him "feel sick" to-day.

The examining magistrate.

So M. Desmortiers, the examining magistrate, entered my room; a mawkish air was spread like a layer of honey over a contracted and violent face:

Je m'appelle Loyal, natif de Normandie, Et suis huissier à verge, en dépit de l'envie[421].

M. Desmortiers formerly belonged to the Congregation[422]: a great communicant, a great Legitimist, a great partisan of the Ordinances, since become a furious juste-milieu man. I begged this animal to take a seat with all the politeness of the Old Order; I drew up an arm-chair for him; I put a little table, a pen and ink before his clerk; I sat down opposite M. Desmortiers and, in a mild voice, he read out to me the little accusations which, duly proved, would have tenderly got my head cut off: after which, he passed to his examination.

I declared again that, not recognising the existing political order, I had no answers to make; that I should sign nothing; that all these judicial proceedings were superfluous; that they might spare themselves the trouble and pass on; that, for the rest, I should always be charmed to have the honour of receiving M. Desmortiers.

I saw that this manner of acting was throwing the sainted man into a fury; that, having once shared my opinions, he thought my conduct a satire on his own. With this resentment was mingled the pride of a magistrate who believed himself wounded in his functions. He tried to argue with me; I was quite unable to make him grasp the difference that exists between the social order and the political order of things. I submitted, I told him, to the former, because it belongs to natural law: I obeyed the civil, military and financial laws, the laws of police and of public order; but I owed obedience to the political law only in so far as that law emanated from the royal authority consecrated by the ages or sprang from the sovereignty of the people. I was not silly enough, or false enough to believe that the people had been convoked, consulted, and that the established political order was the result of a national decree. If they prosecuted me for theft, murder, arson, or other social crimes or misdemeanours, I should reply to justice; but, when they instituted a political trial against me, I had nothing to reply to an authority which had no legal power and, in consequence, nothing to ask me.

A fortnight passed in this way. M. Desmortiers, whose fury I had heard of (a fury which he endeavoured to communicate to the judges), used to approach me with his sugary air, saying:

"Won't you tell me your illustrious name?"

In the course of one of the examinations, he read me a letter from Charles X. to the Duc de Fitz-James, containing a phrase complimentary to myself.

"Well, sir," I said, "what is the meaning of that letter? It is a matter of common knowledge that I have remained faithful to my old King, that I have not taken the oath to Philip. As for the rest, I am deeply touched by my exiled Sovereign's letter. In the time of his prosperity, he never said anything of that kind to me, and this phrase repays me for all my services."

*

Madame Récamier, to whom so many prisoners have owed consolation and deliverance, had herself brought to my new retreat. M. de Béranger came down from Passy to tell me in song, under the reign of his friends, what used to happen in the gaols in the time of my friends: he was no longer able to fling the Restoration in my face. My fat old friend M. Bertin came to administer the ministerial sacraments to me; an enthusiastic woman came hurrying from Beauvais in order to "admire" my glory; M. Villemain performed an act of courage; M. Dubois[423], M. Ampère[424], M. Lenormant[425], my generous and learned young friends, did not forget me; the Republicans' lawyer, M. Ch. Ledru[426], never left me: in the hope of a trial, he magnified the affair, and he would have given up all his fees for the honour of defending me.

Visits from my friends.

M. Gisquet, as I have told you, had offered me the run of his rooms, but I did not abuse his permission. Only, one evening I went down to hear Mademoiselle Gisquet play the piano. I sat between M. Gisquet and his wife. M. Gisquet scolded his daughter and maintained that she had executed her sonata less well than usual. This little concert which my host offered me in the bosom of his family, with myself for sole audience, was exceedingly singular. While the most pastoral scene was taking place in the intimacy of the home, policemen were bringing me colleagues from the outside with blows of musket-butts and loaded sticks; and yet what peace and harmony reigned in the very heart of the police!

I had the good fortune to obtain for M. Ch. Philipon[427] the grant of a favour exactly similar to that which I enjoyed, the favour of the gaol: sentenced, because of his talent, to some months' imprisonment, he spent them in an asylum at Chaillot; he was called to Paris as a witness in a law-suit, and availed himself of the opportunity not to return to his lodging; but he repented of it: in the place where he lay concealed, he was no longer able to see, in comfort, a child whom he loved. Regretting his prison and not knowing how to enter it again, he wrote me the following letter to ask me to arrange this matter with my host:

"Sir,

"You are a prisoner and you would understand me even if you were not Chateaubriand.... I also am a prisoner, a voluntary prisoner since the proclamation of martial law, at the house of a friend, a poor artist like myself. I wanted to escape from the justice of the courts-martial with which I was threatened by the seizure of my newspaper on the 9th of this month. But, in order to hide myself, I have had to deprive myself of the kisses of a child whom I idolize, an adopted daughter, five years old, my happiness and my joy. This privation is a torture which I could not endure any longer: it is death to me! I am going to give myself up and they will put me into Sainte-Pélagie, where I shall see my poor child only rarely, if they allow it at all, and at fixed hours, where I shall tremble for her health and where I shall die of anxiety, if I do not see her every day.

"I appeal to you, sir, to you a Legitimist I a whole-hearted Republican, to you a grave and parliamentary man I a caricaturist and a partisan of the bitterest political personalities, to you to whom I am quite unknown and who are a prisoner like myself, to persuade M. the Prefect of Police to allow me to return to the asylum to which I had been transferred. I pledge my word of honour to appear before justice whenever I shall be called upon to do so and I undertake not to flee from any tribunal whatever if they will leave me with my poor child.

"You will believe me, sir, when I speak of honour and when I swear not to run away, and I am persuaded that you will plead for me, even though profound politicians may see in this a new proof of alliance between the Legitimists and the Republicans, all men whose opinions agree so well.

"If to such a guest, to such an advocate, they refused what I ask, I should know that I have nothing more to hope for and I should see myself parted for nine months from my poor Emma.

"In any case, sir, whatever may be the result of your generous intervention, my gratitude will be none the less eternal, for I shall never doubt the urgent solicitations which your heart will suggest to you.

"Accept, sir, the expression of the sincerest admiration and believe me

"Your most humble and most devoted servant,

"Ch. Philipon,

"Proprietor of the Caricature (newspaper), sentenced to thirteen months' imprisonment."

"Paris, 21 June 1832.

Letters from Philipon.

I obtained the favour which M. Philipon asked: he thanked me in a note which proves, not the greatness of the service, which was limited to having my client guarded at Chaillot by a gendarme, but that secret joy of the passions which can be well understood only by those who have really felt it:

"Sir,

"I am leaving for Chaillot with my dear child.

"I wanted to thank you, but I feel that words are too cold to express the gratitude which I feel; I was right to think, sir, that your heart would suggest eloquent entreaties to you. I am sure that I am not deceived when I believe that it will tell you that I am not ungrateful and that it will depict to you better than I could the confusion of happiness into which your kindness has thrown me.

"Accept, sir, I beg, my most sincere thanks and deign to believe me the most affectionate of your servants.

"Charles Philipon."

To this singular mark of my credit, I will add this strange proof of my "fame:" a young Clerk[428] in M. Gisquet's offices addressed to me some very beautiful verses[429], which were handed to me by M. Gisquet himself; for, after all, we must be fair: if a government of literary men attacked me ignobly, the Muses defended me nobly; M. Villemain pronounced in my favour courageously, and, in the Journal des Débats itself, my fat friend Bertin protested, under his own signature, against my arrest.

Mademoiselle Noemi, which I presume must be Mademoiselle Gisquet's Christian name, used often to walk alone in the little garden, with a book in her hand. She would cast a stealthy glance towards my window. How sweet it would have been to be released from my irons, like Cervantes, by my master's daughter! While I was assuming a romantic air, handsome young M. Nay came to dispel my dream. I saw him talking with Mademoiselle Gisquet with that air which does not deceive us creators of sylphs. I tumbled down from my clouds, shut my window and abandoned the idea of growing my mustachios, bleached by the wind of adversity.

After fifteen days, an order of non-suit restored me to liberty, on the 30th of June, to the great happiness of Madame de Chateaubriand, who would have died, I believe, if my detention had been prolonged. She came to fetch me in a coach; I filled it with my little luggage as nimbly as I had formerly left the ministry, and I returned to the Rue d'Enfer with "that inexpressible finish which misfortune gives to virtue."

If history were to hand M. Gisquet down to posterity, perhaps he would arrive there in a rather bad plight; I want what I have just written to serve him here as a counter-poise to a hostile renown. I have nothing but praise for his attentions and his obligingness; doubtless, if I had been condemned, he would not have allowed me to escape; but, in short, he and his family treated me with a decency, a good taste, a feeling for my position, for what I was and for what I had been, which were not displayed by a literary Administration and by men of law who were the more brutal inasmuch as they were acting against the weak and had nothing to fear.

Of all the governments that have arisen in France during the last forty years, Philip's is the only one that threw me into the highwayman's cell; it laid its hand upon my head, upon my head respected even by an incensed conqueror: Napoleon raised his arm, but did not strike me. And why this anger? I will tell you: I dare to raise a protest in favour of right against might in a country in which I have asked for liberty under the Empire, for glory under the Restoration; in a country where, solitary that I am, I reckon not by brothers, sisters, children, joys, pleasures, but by tombstones. The last political changes have separated me from the rest of my friends: some have gone towards fortune and, all battered with their dishonour, pass by my poverty; others have abandoned their homes exposed to insults. The generations so greatly smitten with independence have sold themselves: from those generations, common in their conduct, intolerable in their pride, mediocre or mad in their writings, I expect nothing but scorn and I return it to them; they have not the wherewithal to understand me: they know nothing of loyalty to the sworn oath, love for generous institutions, respect for one's own opinions, contempt for success and gold, the felicity of sacrifice, the worship of what is weak and unhappy.

After the order of non-suit, one duty remained to me to perform. The offense with which I had been charged was connected with that for which M. Berryer was awaiting trial at Nantes. I was unable to explain my position to the examining magistrate, because I did not recognise the competency of the tribunal. To repair the harm which my silence might have done to M. Berryer, I wrote to M. the Minister of Justice[430] the letter which you will find below and which I made public through the medium of the newspapers:

Letter to M. Barthe.

"Paris, 3 July 1832.

"Monsieur le ministre de la justice,

"Permit me to perform with reference to yourself, in the interest of a man too long deprived of liberty, a duty prompted by conscience and honour.

"M. Berryer the Younger, when questioned by the examining magistrate at Nantes, on the 18th of last month, replied that 'he had seen Madame la Duchesse de Berry; that he had, with the respect due to her rank, her courage and her misfortunes, submitted to her his personal opinion and that of honourable friends on the actual situation of France and on the consequences of Her Royal Highness' presence in the West.'

"M. Berryer, developing this wide subject with his accustomed talent, summed it up thus:

"'No foreign or civil war, supposing it to be crowned with success, can either subdue or rally opinions.'

"Questioned as to the honourable friends of whom he had spoken, M. Berryer nobly said that, 'grave men having manifested to him an opinion on the present circumstances agreeing with his own, he had thought that he ought to strengthen his opinion with the authority of theirs; but that he would not give their names without their consent.'

"I, monsieur le ministre de la justice, am one of those men consulted by M. Berryer. Not only did I approve of his opinion, but I drew up a note in the sense of that very opinion. It was to be handed to Madame la Duchesse de Berry in the event that that Princess should really be on French soil, which I did not believe. As this first note was not signed, I wrote a second, which I signed and in which I still more earnestly entreated the intrepid mother of the grandson of Henry IV. to leave a country which has been torn by so many discords.

"This declaration was due from me to M. Berryer. The real culprit, if culprit there be, is I. This declaration will serve, I hope, for the prompt deliverance of the prisoner of Nantes; it will allow the guilt to rest upon my head alone of a fact, no doubt very innocent, of which, however, in the final result, I accept all the consequences.

"I have the honour to be, etc.

"Chateaubriand. "Rue d'Enfer Saint Michel, No. 84.

"I wrote on the 9th of last month to M. le Comte de Montalivet on a matter relating to M. Berryer, but M. the Minister of the Interior did not think it incumbent upon him even to inform me that he had received my letter: as it is very important to me to know what becomes of that which I have the honour to write to-day to M. the Minister of Justice, I shall be infinitely obliged to him if he will instruct his office to send me an acknowledgment of its receipt.

"Ch."

The reply of M. the Minister of Justice was not long in coming; here it is:

"Paris, 3 July.

"Monsieur le vicomte,

"As the letter which you have addressed to me contains information which may enlighten justice, I am forwarding it without delay to the King's Attorney to the Nantes Court[431], so that it may be added to the documents in the proceedings pending against M. Berryer.

"I am, with respect, etc.,

"Barthe, "Keeper of the Seals."

By this reply, M. Barthe graciously reserved to himself the right to institute a new prosecution against me. I remember the proud disdain of the great men of the juste-milieu when I allowed a glimpse to pass of the possibility of any violence exercised upon my person or my writings. What! Good Heavens! Why deck myself with an imaginary danger? Who troubled about my opinion? Who thought of touching a hair of my head? Trusty and well-beloved friends of the stew-pan, dauntless heroes of peace at any price, you have nevertheless had your Terror of the counting-house and the police, your martial law in Paris, your thousand press trials, your military commissions to condemn the author of the Cancans[432] to death; you nevertheless flung me into your gaols: the punishment applicable to my "crime" was nothing less than capital punishment With what pleasure would I yield you my head, if, thrown into the scales of justice, it made them lean on the side of the honour, the glory and the liberty of my country!

*

I prepare to depart.

I was more than ever determined to resume my exile; Madame de Chateaubriand, terrified at my adventure, would already have wished to be very far away; the only question was to seek the spot where we should pitch our tents. The great difficulty was to find some money with which to live on foreign soil and pay a debt which was drawing down upon me threats of law-suits and distress.

The first year of an embassy always ruins the ambassador: that is what happened to me in Rome. I resigned on the succession of the Polignac Ministry, and I went away adding to my ordinary afflictions sixty thousand francs of borrowed money. I had applied to all the royalist purses; none was opened to me: I was advised to ask Laffitte. M. Laffitte advanced me ten thousand francs, which I at once gave to the more pressing creditors. I recovered the sum on the proceeds of my pamphlets and repaid it to him with gratitude; but there still remained some thirty thousand francs to be paid, over and above my old debts, for I have some that have grown a beard, so aged are they: unfortunately that beard is a golden beard which has to be cut upon my chin once a year.

M. le Duc de Lévis, on his return from a journey to Scotland, had told me, on behalf of Charles X., that that Prince wished to continue to pay me my peer's pension: I thought it my duty to refuse the offer. The Duc de Lévis returned to the charge when he saw me, on leaving prison, in the most cruel difficulties, finding nothing left of my house and garden in the Rue d'Enfer, and harassed by a swarm of creditors. I had already sold my plate. The Duc de Lévis brought me twenty thousand francs, nobly saying that these were not the two years' peerage pension which the King admitted owing me and that my debts in Rome were simply a debt of the Crown. This sum set me free; I accepted it as a temporary loan and wrote the King the following letter[433]:

"Sire,

"In the midst of the calamities with which it has pleased God to hallow your life, you have not forgotten those who suffer at the foot of the throne of St. Louis. You deigned to send word to me, some months ago, of your generous intention to continue the peer's pension which I renounced when refusing to take the oath to the unlawful power; I thought that Your Majesty had servants poorer than I and worthier of your bounty. But the last writings which I have published have cost me damages and brought prosecutions down upon me; I have in vain tried to sell the little that I possess. I find myself obliged to accept, not the annual pension which Your Majesty proposed to allow me out of your royal poverty, but a provisional succour to free me from the difficulties which prevent me from reaching a refuge where I can live by my work. Sire, I must needs be very unhappy to make myself a burden, even for a moment, on a crown which I have supported with all my efforts and which I shall continue to serve for the rest of my life.

"I am, with the most profound respect, etc.

"Chateaubriand."

My nephew, the Comte Louis de Chateaubriand, on his side lent me a similar sum of twenty thousand francs. Thus rid of material obstacles, I made my preparations for my second departure. But a reason based upon honour stopped me: Madame la Duchesse de Berry was on French soil; what would become of her, and was I not bound to remain on the spot where her dangers might summon me? A note from the Princess, which reached me from the depths of the Vendée, set me completely free:

Letter from Madame.

"I was going to write to you, monsieur le vicomte, touching this 'Provisional Government' which I thought it my duty to form, when I did not know when nor even if I might return to France, and of which I am informed that you consented to form part. It did not exist in fact, because it never met, and some of the members came to an understanding only to communicate to me an opinion which I was not able to follow. I do not take it in the least unkindly of them. You judged in accordance with the report on my position and that of the country made to you by those who had reason to know better than I the effects of a fatal influence in which I was never willing to believe, and I am sure that, if M. de Ch. had been with me, his noble and generous heart would also have refused to do so. I rely therefore none the less on the good individual services and even the counsels of the persons who formed part of the Provisional Government and whose choice had been dictated to me by their enlightened zeal and their devotion to the Legitimacy in the person of Henry V. I see that it is your intention to leave France again: I should regret this greatly, if I could have you near me; but you have weapons which strike at a distance and I hope that you will not cease to fight for Henry V.

"Believe, monsieur le vicomte, in all my esteem and friendship.

"M. C. R."

With this note, Madame dispensed with my services and did not yield to the advice which I had ventured to give her in the note of which M. Berryer was the bearer; she even seemed a little hurt by it, although she admitted that a fatal influence had led her astray.

Thus restored to my liberty and released from all engagements, on this day, 7 August, having nothing left to do but go away, I wrote my letter to M. de Béranger, who had visited me in prison:

To M. de Béranger

"Paris, 7 August 1832.

"I wanted, monsieur, to go to say good-bye to you and thank you for your remembrance; time failed me and I was obliged to start without having the pleasure of seeing you and embracing you. I am ignorant as to my future: is there a clear future for anybody to-day? We are living not in a time of revolution, but of social transformation: now transformations are realized slowly, and the generations which find themselves placed in the period of metamorphosis perish obscure and miserable. If Europe, as might well be the case, has reached the age of decrepitude, it is another matter: it will produce nothing and will die out in an impotent anarchy of passions, morals and doctrines. In that event, monsieur, you will have sung over a tomb.

"I have fulfilled all my engagements, monsieur: I returned at the sound of your voice; I have defended what I came to defend; I have undergone the cholera; I am returning to the mountain. Do not break your lyre, as you threaten to do; I owe to it one of my most glorious titles to the memory of mankind. Continue to make France smile and weep: for it so happens, by a secret known to you alone, that, in your popular songs, the words are gay and the music plaintive.

"I recommend myself to your friendship and your muse.

"Chateaubriand."

I am to set out to-morrow. Madame de Chateaubriand will meet me at Lucerne.

I leave for Switzerland.

Basle, 12 August 1832.

Many men die without losing sight of their steeple: I cannot meet with the steeple which is to see me die. In quest of a refuge in which to finish my Memoirs, I am taking the road anew, dragging at my heels an enormous luggage of papers, diplomatic correspondence, confidential notes, letters from ministers and kings; it is history riding pillion with romance.

At Vesoul, I saw M. Augustin Thierry, living with his brother the prefect[434] When, formerly, in Paris, he sent me his Histoire de la conquête des Normands, I went to thank him. I found a young man in a room with half-closed shutters; he was almost blind; he tried to rise to receive me, but his legs no longer carried him and he fell into my arms. He blushed when I expressed to him my sincere admiration; it was then that he replied that his work was mine and that it was when reading the Battle of the Franks in the Martyrs that he had conceived a new idea of writing history[435]. When I took leave of him, he then made an effort to follow me and dragged himself to the door, leaning against the wall: I went out quite affected by so much talent and so much misfortune.

At Vesoul, after a long banishment, appeared Charles X.[436], now setting sail for the new exile which will be for him the last.

I passed the frontier without accident with all my rubbish: let us see if, on the other side of the Alps, I may not enjoy the liberty of Switzerland and the sun of Italy, the needs of my opinions and my years.

At the entrance to Basle, I met an old Swiss, a custom-house officer; he made me undergo "a liddle quarandine of a quarder of an hour;" my luggage was taken down into a cellar; they set in movement something or other which made the same sound as a stocking-frame; there rose a vinegary fume; and, thus purified from the contagion of France, I was released by my good Swiss.

I have said, in the Itinéraire, speaking of the storks of Athens:

"From the height of their nests, which revolutions cannot reach, they have seen the race of mortals change beneath them: while impious generations have risen on the tombs of the religious generations, the young stork has always nourished its old father."

I find again at Basle the storks nest which I left there six years ago; but the hospital in whose roof the stork of Basle has built its nest is not the Parthenon, the sun of the Rhine is not the sun of the Cephissus, the Council is not the Areopagus, Erasmus[437] is not Pericles; nevertheless, the Rhine, the Black Forest, Roman and Germanic Basle are something. Louis XIV. extended France to the gates of that city and three hostile monarchs[438] passed through it, in 1813, to come to sleep in the bed of Louis the Great, defended by Napoleon in vain. Let us go to see Holbein's[439] Dance of Death; it will tell us a tale of human vanities.

The Dance of Death (always presuming that it was not even then a real painting) took place in Paris, in 1424, in the Cimetière des Innocents: it came to us from England. The performance of this spectacle was recorded in pictures: these were exhibited in the cemeteries of Dresden, Lübeck, Minden, of the Chaise-Dieu, Strasburg and Blois in France; and Holbein's pencil immortalized these joys of the tomb at Basle.

These dances of death of the great artist have in their turn been carried away by death, which does not spare its own follies: there remain at Basle, of Holbein's labour, only six pieces sawn from the stones of the cloisters and lodged in the library of the University. A coloured drawing has preserved the harmony of the work.

Those grotesque figures on a terrible back-ground partake of the genius of Shakespeare, a genius blended of comedy and tragedy. The persons bear a lively expression: rich and poor, old and young, men and women, popes, cardinals, priests, emperors, kings, queens, princes, dukes, nobles, magistrates, warriors, all struggle and argue with Death; not one accepts it with a good grace.

Death is infinitely various, but always clownish, like life, which is only a serious piece of buffoonery. This Death of the satirical painter goes one leg short, like the wooden-legged beggar whom it accosts; it plays the mandoline behind its back-bone, like the musician whom it drags away. It is not always bald: tufts of fair, brown, or grey hair flutter on the skeleton's neck and make it more frightful by making it nearly alive. In one of the cartoons, Death has almost hair, it is almost young, like a young man, and it carries off a young girl who is looking at herself in a glass. Death has in its wallet the tricks of a crafty schoolboy: with a pair of scissors, it cuts the string of a dog which leads a blind man, and the blind man is at two steps from an open pit; elsewhere, Death, in a short mantle, accosts one of its victims with the gestures of a Pasquin. Holbein may have taken the idea of this formidable gaiety in nature itself: enter a reliquary, all the death's-heads seem to grin, because they uncover their teeth; that is laughter. What are they grinning at? At death or at life?

Basle.

I liked the cathedral at Basle and especially the ancient cloisters. As I passed through the latter, filled with funeral inscriptions, I read the names of some Reformers. Protestantism chooses its place and takes its time badly when it sets itself in Catholic monuments; one sees less what it has reformed than what it has destroyed. Those dry pedants who thought that they would re-make a primitive Christianity within an old Christianity which had created society for fifteen centuries were unable to raise a single monument. To what would that monument have responded? What connection would it have had with the manners of the day? Men were not made like Luther[440] and Calvin in the time of Luther and Calvin; they were made like Leo X.[441] with the genius of Raphael, or like St. Louis with the Gothic genius; the few believed in nothing, the many believed in everything. And so Protestantism has as its temples only school-rooms, or as churches only the cathedrals which it has devastated: it has there established its nudity. Jesus Christ and His apostles, no doubt, did tot resemble the Greeks and Romans of their age, but they did not come to reform an old creed; they came to establish a new religion, to replace the gods by a God.

*

Lucerne, 14 August 1832.

The road from Basle to Lucerne through Aargau presents a series of valleys, some of which resemble the Valley of Argelès, minus the Spanish sky of the Pyrenees. At Lucerne, the mountains, differently grouped, shelved, profiled, coloured, end, as they withdraw one behind the other and sink away into the perspective, in the snows bordering on the Saint-Gotthard. If one suppressed the Righi and Mount Pilatus and kept only the hills, with their surfaces of grass and rabbit-warrens, which run down directly to the Lake of the Four Cantons, one would reproduce an Italian lake.

The arcades of the cloister of the cemetery surrounding the cathedral are like boxes from which this spectacle can be enjoyed. The monuments of this cemetery have for standards small iron crosses bearing a gilt Christ. In the rays of the sun, these are so many points of light escaping from the tombs; from space to space, there are holy-water fonts in which soaks a twig with which one can bless mourned ashes. I wept none there in particular, but I sprinkled the lustral dew upon the silent community of the Christians and unfortunates, my brothers. One epitaph said to me, "Hodie mihi, cras tibi;" another, "Fuit homo;" a third, "Siste, viator; abi, viator." And I await to-morrow; and I shall have been a man; and a traveller I stop; and a traveller I go away. Leaning against one of the arcades of the cloister, I long contemplated the theatre of the adventures of William Tell and his companions: the theatre of Helvetian liberty so well sung and described by Schiller and Johann von Müller[442]. My eyes sought in the vast picture for the presence of the most illustrious dead and my feet trod on the most unknown ashes.

When I saw the Alps again, four or five years ago, I asked myself what I had come to seek there: what, then, shall I say to-day? What shall I say to-morrow and again tomorrow? Woe to me who cannot grow old and who am always growing old!

*

Lucerne, 15 August 1832.

The Capuchins went this morning, according to the custom on the Feast of the Assumption, to bless the mountains. Those monks profess the religion under whose protection Swiss independence was born: that independence still endures. What will become of our modern liberty, all accursed by the blessing of the philosophers and the hangmen? It is not forty years old and it has been sold and sold again, bishoped and dealt in at every street-corner. There is more liberty in the frock of a Capuchin blessing the Alps than in all the frippery of the legislators of the Republic, the Empire, the Restoration and the Usurpation of July.

Lucerne.

A French traveller in Switzerland is touched and saddened; our history, for the misfortune of those regions, is too closely connected with their history; the blood of Helvetia has been shed for us and by us; we wasted the hut of William Tell with fire and sword; we engaged in our civil wars the peasant warrior who guarded the throne of our kings. The genius of Thorwaldsen has fixed the memory of the 10th of August at the gate of Lucerne. The Helvetian Lion lies dying, pierced by an arrow, and covering with its drooping head and one of its paws the escutcheon of France, of which we see only one of the fleurs-de-lys. The chapel consecrated to the victims, the clump of green trees which accompanies the bas-relief sculptured in the rock, the soldier escaped from the massacre of the 10th of August who shows the monument to strangers, the note from Louis XVI. ordering the Swiss to lay down their arms, the frontal presented by Madame la Dauphine to the expiatory chapel, upon which that perfect model of sorrow has embroidered the image of the immolated Lamb of God!... By what counsel does Providence, after the last fall of the throne of the Bourbons, send me to seek a refuge near this monument? At least, I can look upon it without blushing, I can lay my feeble but not perjured hand upon the shield of France, even as the lion covers it with its mighty claws, now distended in death.

Well, a member of the Diet has proposed to destroy this monument! What does Switzerland demand? Liberty? She has enjoyed it for four centuries. Equality? She has it. The republic? It is her form of government. The lightening of taxes? She pays hardly any. What does she want then? She wants to change, it is the law of beings. When a people, transformed by time, is no longer able to remain what it has been, the first symptom of its malady is a hatred of the past and of the virtues of its fathers.

I returned from the monument to the 10th of August by the great covered bridge, a kind of wooden gallery hung over the lake. Two hundred and thirty-eight triangular pictures, set between the rafters of the roof, adorn this gallery. They are popular annals in which the Swiss, as he passed, used to learn the story of his religion and his liberty.

I have seen the tame moor-fowl; I prefer the wild moor-fowl of the pond at Combourg.

In the town, I was struck by the sound of a choir of voices; it issued from a Lady-chapel. I entered that chapel and thought myself carried back to the days of my childhood. In front of four devoutly-decked altars, women were reciting the rosary and the litanies with the priest. It was like the evening-prayer by the sea-shore in my poor Brittany, and I was on the shore of the Lake of Lucerne! Thus did a man knot together the two ends of my life, the better to make me feel all that had been lost in the chain of my years.

On the Lake of Lucerne, 16 August 1832, noon.

Alps, lower your crests, I am no longer worthy of you: young, I should be solitary; old, I am merely isolated. I would certainly depict nature again; but for whom? Who would care for my pictures? What arms, other than those of time, would, in reward, embrace my "genius," with its stripped forehead? Who would repeat my songs? What Muse should I inspire with any? Under the vault of my years, as under that of the snowy heights which surround me, no ray of sun will come to warm me. What a pity to drag across those heights tired footsteps which no one would care to follow! What a misfortune not to find myself free to wander anew until at the end of my life!

Two o'clock.

My bark has stopped at the landing-stage of a house on the right bank of the lake, before entering the Bay of Uri. I climbed up to the orchard of that inn and came to sit under two walnut-trees which give shelter to a stable. Before me, a little to the right, on the opposite bank of the lake, the village of Schwyz unfolds itself among orchards and the inclined planes of those pastures called "Alps" in this part; it is surmounted by a rock broken into a semi-circle, the two points of which, the Mythen and the Haken, the Mitre and the Hook, owe their names to their shapes. This horned capital rests upon turfy slopes, as the crown of the rude Helvetian independence rests on the head of a nation of shepherds. The silence around me is interrupted only by the tinkling of the bells of two heifers left in the neighbouring stable; they seem to ring out to me the glory of the pastoral liberty which Schwyz has given, with its name, to a whole people: a little canton in the neighbourhood of Naples, called "Italia," has in the same way, but with less sacred rights, communicated its name to the land of the Romans.

Three o'clock.

We are starting; we are entering the Bay or Lake of Uri. The mountains grow taller and darker. There is the grass-grown ridge of the Grütli and the three fountains at which Fürst, Arnold von Melchthal and Stauffacher[443] swore to deliver their country; there, at the foot of the Achsenberg, is the chapel that marks the place at which Tell, jumping from Gessler's[444] bark, pushed it back with his foot to the midst of the billows.

On the Lake of Lucerne.

But did Tell and his companions ever exist? Might they not be only persons of the North, born in the songs of the Scalds, whose heroic traditions are to be found on the shores of Sweden? Are the Swiss to-day what they were at the time when they won their independence? Those bear-paths see cal-ashes roll along where Tell and his companions used to bound, bow in hand, from peak to peak: am I myself a traveller in harmony with these regions?

A storm comes luckily to assail me. We are landing in a creek, at a few paces from Tell's chapel: it is always the same God that raises the winds and the same confidence in that God that reassures men. As in former days, when crossing the Ocean, the lakes of America, the seas of Greece, of Syria, I am writing on drenched paper. The clouds, the waves, the rolling of the thunder blend better with the ancient liberty of the Alps than the voice of that effeminate and degenerate nature which my century has placed in my bosom despite myself.

*

Altdorf.

I have disembarked at Flüelen and reached Altdorf, where the absence of horses will keep me one night at the foot of the Bannberg. Here, William Tell shot the apple from his son's head: the bow-shot was of the length that separates those two fountains. Let us believe, in spite of the fact that the same story was told by Saxo Grammaticus[445], as quoted first by myself in my Essai sur les révolutions[446]; let us have faith in religion and liberty, the two great things about man: glory and power are brilliant, not great.

To-morrow, from the top of the Saint-Gotthard, I shall greet once again that Italy which I have greeted from the summit of the Simplon and the Mont-Cenis. But of what avail is that last look cast upon the regions of the South and the Dawn? The pine-tree of the glaciers cannot descend among the orange-trees which it sees below it in the flowery valleys!

Ten o'clock in the evening.

The storm is beginning again; the lightning-flashes twist around the rocks; the echoes swell and prolong the sound of the thunder; the roaring of the Schœchen and the Reuss welcome the bard of Armorica. It is long since I found myself alone and free; nothing in the room in which I am locked: two beds for a waking traveller who has neither loves to put to sleep, nor dreams to dream. Those mountains, that storm, this night are treasures lost for me. What life, nevertheless, I feel in the depths of my soul! Never, when the most ardent blood flowed from my heart into my veins, did I speak the language of the passions with such energy as I might do at this moment. It seems to me as though I saw my sylph of the Combourg woods issue from the flanks of the Saint-Gotthard. Hast thou come to see me again, O charming phantom of my youth? Hast thou pity for me? Thou seest, I am changed only in face: ever chimerical, devoured by a causeless and unfed fire. I am leaving the world, and I was entering it when I created thee in a moment of ecstasy and delirium. This is the hour at which I invoked thee in my tower. I can still open my Window to let thee in. If thou art not satisfied with the charms which I lavished upon thee, I will make thee a hundred times more seductive; my palette is not exhausted; I have seen more beauties and I know how to paint better than I did. Come to sit upon my knees; do not be afraid of my hair, stroke it with thy fairy or shadowy fingers: it will turn brown again under thy kisses. This head, which these falling hairs do not make wiser, is quite as mad as it was when I gave thee being, eldest daughter of my illusion, sweet fruit of my mysterious loves with my first solitude! Come, we will once more mount the clouds together; we will go with the lightning to plough, illumine, set fire to the precipices by which I shall pass to-morrow. Come! Carry me away as in former days, but do not carry me back again.

A knock at my door: it is not thou, it is the guide! The horses have arrived, we must start. Of this dream all that remains is the rain, the wind and I, an endless dream, an eternal storm.

*

17 August 1832 (Amsteg).

From Altdorf to here, a valley between mountains close together, as one sees everywhere; the noisy Reuss in the middle. At the Hart Inn, a little German student, who has come from the Rhone glaciers and who said to me:

"You gome vrom Altdorf this morning? You go vast!"

He thought I was on foot, like himself; then, seeing my char-à-bancs:

"Oh! Horses! Dat's tifferent!"

If the student were willing to "swap" his young legs for my char-à-bancs and my even worse car of glory, with what pleasure would I take his stick, his grey blouse and his blonde beard! I should go to the Rhone glaciers; I should talk the language of Schiller to my mistress; and I should ponder deeply on Teutonic liberty: he would go his way old as time, bored as one dead, undeceived by experience, having fastened round his neck, like a bell, a fame by which he would be more wearied after a quarter of an hour than by the din of the Reuss. The exchange will not take place: good bargains are not for my use. My scholar is going; he said to me, taking off and putting back his Teuton cap, with a little nod of the head:

"Permis!"

One more shadow vanished. The scholar does not know my name; he will have met me and will never know it: I am delighted with this idea; I yearn for obscurity with more eagerness than formerly I longed for light; the latter worries me either as making my miseries visible or as showing me objects which I can no longer enjoy: I am in a hurry to pass the torch to my neighbour.

Three little boys are drawing the cross-bow: William Tell and Gessler are everywhere. Free peoples retain the remembrance of the foundations of their independence. Ask a poor little boy in France if he has ever thrown the hatchet in memory of King Hlodwigh or Khlodwig or Clovis!

The new Saint-Gotthard road, on leaving Amsteg, goes to and fro in a zig-zag for two leagues, now joining the Reuss, now quitting it when the fissure of the torrent grows wider. On the perpendicular reliefs of the landscape, slopes flat or tufted with beech-clumps, peaks shooting into the sky, domes topped with ice, summits bald or retaining a few stripes of snow, like locks of white hair; in the valley, bridges, posts made of blackened planks, walnut-trees and fruit-trees which gain in luxury of branches and leaves what they lose in succulence of fruits. The Alpine nature forces those trees to become wild again; the sap breaks through in spite of the grafting: a vigorous character bursts the bonds of civilization.

A little higher, on the right margin of the Reuss, the scene changes: the stream flows with cascades in a pebbly rut, under a double and triple avenue of pines; this is like the valley of Pont d'Espagne at Cauterets. On the skirts of the mountain, the larch-trees grow on the sharp edges of the rock; holding fast by their roots, they resist the shock of the tempests.

The road and a few potato-patches alone bear witness to man's presence in this spot: he must eat and he must walk; that sums up his history. The herds, consigned to the pasture-lands in the loftier regions, do not appear in sight; birds, none; eagles, no question of them: the great eagle fell into the ocean when crossing to St. Helena; there is no flight so high or so strong but falters in the immensity of the skies. The royal eaglet has just died.[447] Other eaglets of July 1830 were announced to us; apparently they have come down from their eyry to nestle with the feather-legged pigeons. They will never carry off chamois in their talons: weakened by the domestic light, their blinking glance will never contemplate from the summit of the Saint-Gotthard the free and dazzling sun of France's glory.

*

After crossing the Pfaffensprung Bridge and passing round the pap of the village of Wasen, one again takes the right bank of the Reuss; at either extremity, cascades gleam white among the sods, spread like green tapestries on the travellers' passage. Through a defile, one perceives the Ranz glacier, which joins the Furka glaciers.

At last, one makes one's way into the Valley of Schöllenen, where the first ascent of the Saint-Gotthard commences. This valley is a notch two thousand feet in depth, cut out of a solid block of granite. The faces of the block form gigantic overhanging walls. The mountains no longer present aught save their flanks and their ardent and reddened crests. The Reuss thunders down its vertical bed, lined with stones. The ruin of a tower bears witness to a former time, even as nature here points to unremembered ages. Supported in the air by walls along the granite masses, the road, an immobile torrent, winds parallel to the mobile torrent of the Reuss. Here and there, stone-work vaults form a shelter for the traveller against the avalanche; one turns for yet a few more paces in a sort of tortuous gallery, and suddenly, at one of the volutes of the shell, finds one's self face to face with the Devil's Bridge.

The Devil's Bridge.

This bridge to-day intersects the arch of the new bridge, which is higher, built behind it and overlooks it; the old bridge thus debased no longer resembles anything but a short two-storeyed aqueduct. The new bridge, when one comes from Switzerland, conceals the cascade at the back. To enjoy the rain-bows and the leaping of the cascade, one must stand upon the bridge; but, when one has seen the Falls of Niagara, no water-fall remains. My memory is constantly contrasting my journeys with my journeys, mountains with mountains, rivers with rivers, forests with forests, and my life destroys my life. The same thing happens to me with respect to societies and men.

The modern roads, which the Simplon has taught us to make and which the Simplon effaces, have not the picturesque effect of the old roads. The latter, bolder and more natural, avoided no difficulty; they scarcely deviated from the course of the torrents; they rose and descended with the ground, surmounted the rocks, plunged into the precipices, passed under the avalanches, taking nothing away from the pleasure of the imagination and the joy of danger. The old Saint-Gotthard Road, for instance, was adventurous in quite a different way from the present road. The Devil's Bridge deserved its reputation, when, on approaching it, one saw the cascade of the Reuss above, and when it marked out an obscure arch, or rather a narrow path, through the gleaming spray of the fall. Then, at the end of the bridge, the road ascended perpendicularly to reach the chapel of which we still see the ruin. At least, the inhabitants of Uri have had the pious thought of building another chapel at the cascade.

Lastly, it was not men like ourselves who crossed the Alps in former days: it was hordes of Barbarians or Roman legions; caravans of merchants, knights, condottieri, freebooters, pilgrims, prelates, monks. Strange adventures were related. Who built the Devil's Bridge? Who flung the Devil's Rock into the Wasen Thal? Here and there rose castle-keeps, crosses, oratories, monasteries, hermitages, preserving the memory of an invasion, a meeting, a miracle, or a misfortune. Each mountain tribe kept its language, its dress, its manners, its customs. It is true, one did not find, in a desert, an excellent inn; one drank no champagne there; one read no newspapers; but, if there were more robbers on the Saint-Gotthard, there were less cheats in society. What a fine thing is civilization! I leave that "pearl" to the "handsome first lapidary."

Suwaroff[448] and his soldiers were the last travellers in this defile, at the end of which they met Masséna.

After passing out from the Devil's Bridge and the Urner Loch tunnel, one reaches the Urseren Thai, closed by redans like the stone benches of an arena. The Reuss flows peacefully in the midst of the verdure; the contrast is striking: it is thus that society seems tranquil after and before revolutions; men and empires slumber at two steps from the abyss into which they are about to fall.

At the village of Hospital commences the second ascent, leading to the summit of the Saint-Gotthard, which is overrun by masses of granite. Those voluminous, swollen, broken masses, festooned at their tops with a few garlands of snow, resemble the fixed and frothy waves of an ocean of stone upon which man has left the undulation of his road.

Au pied du mont Adule, entre mille roseaux, Le Rhin, tranquille et fier du progrès de ses eaux, Appuyé d'une main sur son urne penchante, Dormait au bruit flatteur de son onde naissante[449].

The Saint-Gotthard.

Very fine lines, but inspired by the marble rivers of Versailles. The Rhine does not spring from a bed of reeds: it rises from a bed of hoar-frost; its urn, or rather its urns are of ice; its origin is congenerous with those peoples of the North of which it became the adopted stream and the martial girdle. The Rhine, born of the Saint-Gotthard in the Grisons, sheds its waters into the sea of Holland, Norway and England; the Rhone, also a child of the Saint-Gotthard, bears its tribute to the Neptune of Spain, Italy and Greece: sterile snows form the reservoirs of the fecundity of the ancient world and the modern world.

Two pools, on the Saint-Gotthard table-land, give birth, one to the Ticino, the other to the Reuss. The source of the Reuss is lower than the source of the Ticino, so that, by digging a canal of a few hundred paces, one would throw the Ticino into the Reuss. If one were to repeat this work in the case of the principal tributaries of those streams, one would produce strange metamorphoses in the regions at the foot of the Alps. A mountaineer can afford himself the pleasure of suppressing a river, of fertilizing or sterilizing a country: there is something to take down the pride of power.

It is a marvellous thing to see the Reuss and the Ticino bid each other an eternal farewell and take their opposite ways down the two sides of the Saint-Gotthard: their cradles touch; their destinies are separate: they go to seek different lands and different suns; but their mothers, always united, do not cease, from the height of solitude, to feed their disunited children.

There was formerly, on the Saint-Gotthard, a hospice served by Capuchins; now one sees only the ruins of it; there remains of religion but a cross of worm-eaten wood with its Christ: God remains when men withdraw.

On the Saint-Gotthard upland, a desert in mid-sky, one world ends and another commences: the German names are replaced by Italian names. I take leave of my companion, the Reuss, which had brought me, as I went up, from the Lake of Lucerne, to go down to the Lake of Lugano with my new guide, the Ticino.

The Saint-Gotthard is hewn perpendicularly on the Italian side; the road which plunges into the Val Tremola does credit to the engineer obliged to trace it in the narrowest gorge. Seen from above, this road is like a ribbon folded and folded again; seen from below, the walls supporting the embankments give the impression of the works of a fortress, or resemble those dykes which are built one above the other to resist the invasion of the waters. Sometimes, also, the double row of mile-stones planted regularly on both sides of the road suggests a column of soldiers descending the Alps once more to invade unhappy Italy.

Saturday, 18 August 1832 (Lugano).

During the night I passed Airolo, Bellinzona and the Val Levantina: I did not see the ground, I only heard the torrents. In the sky, the stars rose among the cupolas and needles of the mountains. The moon was not at first above the horizon, but her dawn spread before her by degrees, like those "glories" with which the fourteenth-century painters used to surround the head of the Virgin: she appeared at last, scooped out and reduced to a quarter of her disc, on the denticulated top of the Furca; the tips of her crescent were like wings, one would have said of a white dove escaping from its nest in the rocks: by her light, enfeebled and rendered more mysterious, the hollowed-out luminary revealed to my eyes the Lago Maggiore at the end of the Val Levantina. Twice I had seen that lake, once when proceeding to the Congress of Verona, and again when going on my embassy to Rome. I then contemplated it in the sun, on the high-way of prosperity; now I caught a glimpse of it at night, from the opposite bank, on the road of misfortune. Between my journeys, separated by only a few years, a monarchy fourteen centuries old had passed away.

It is not that I bear those political revolutions the smallest grudge; by restoring me to liberty, they have restored me to my own nature. I have still pith enough to reproduce the first fruit of my dreams, fire enough to renew my connexion with the imaginary creature of my desires. The time and the world which I have traversed have been for me but a double solitude in which I have kept myself such as Heaven made me. Why should I complain of the swiftness of the days, since I lived in one hour as much as those who spend years in living?

*

Lugano.

Lugano is a little town of Italian aspect: porticoes as at Bologna, people keeping house in the streets as at Naples, Renascence architecture, roofs without cornices, long and narrow windows, bare or adorned with a pediment and pierced up to the architrave. The town leans against a vine-grown hill-side commanded by two superposed mountain plains, one covered with pastures, the other with forests: the lake lies at its feet.

On the topmost summit of a mountain to the east of Lugano, exists a hamlet whose women, tall and fair-skinned, have the reputation of the Circassians. The eve of my arrival was the festival of that hamlet; people had gone on a pilgrimage to beauty: that tribe is doubtless some remains of a race of northern Barbarians preserved unmixed above the populations of the plain.

I have been taken to the different houses that had been mentioned to me as likely to suit me: I found one of them charming, but the rent was much too high.

To see the lake better, I took a boat. One of my two boatmen spoke a Franco-Italian jargon interlarded with English. He told me the names of the mountains and of the villages on the mountains: the San Salvator, from the summit of which one discovers the dome of Milan Cathedral; Castagnola, with its olive-trees, of which the visitors put little twigs in their button-holes; Gandria, the boundary of the Canton of Ticino on the lake; the San Giorgio, crowned with its hermitage: each of those places had its history.

Austria, who takes all and gives nothing, retains at the foot of Monte Caprino a village enclosed in the Ticino territory. Facing this again, on the other side, at the foot of the San Salvator, she possesses a sort of promontory on which stands a chapel; but she has graciously lent this promontory to the Luganese to execute their criminals upon and erect their gallows. Some day she will use this "high jurisdiction," exercised by her permission upon her territory, as a proof of her suzerainty over Lugano. Nowadays the condemned are no longer subjected to the penalty of the rope: their heads are chopped off; Paris has supplied the instrument, Vienna the scene of execution: presents worthy of two great monarchies.

These images were pursuing me when, on the azure water, to the breath of the breeze scented by the amber of the pines, there came to pass the boats of a brotherhood which flung bouquets of flowers into the lake to the sound of horns and hautboys. Swallows sported around my sail. Among those travellers, shall I not recognise those which I met one evening as I wandered along the ancient Tibur Road and by the house of Horace? The Lydia of the poet was not then with those swallows of the plain of Tibur; but I knew that, at that very moment, another young woman was furtively taking a rose laid in the abandoned garden of a villa of Raphael's century, seeking naught but a flower on the ruins of Rome.

The mountains which surround the Lake of Lugano, scarce joining their bases except on the level of the lake, resemble islands separated by narrow channels; they reminded me of the grace, the form and the verdure of the archipelago of the Azores. Was I then going to consummate the exile of my last days under those smiling porticoes where the Princesse de Belgiojoso allowed a few days to slip by of the exile of her youth? Was I then to finish my Memoirs at the entrance to that classic and historic land where Virgil and Tasso sang, where so many revolutions have been accomplished? Was I to recall my Breton destiny at the sight of those Ausonian mountains? If their curtain were to be raised, it would lay bare to me the plains of Lombardy; beyond that, Rome; beyond that, Naples, Sicily, Greece, Syria, Egypt, Carthage: distant shores which I have measured, I who do not possess the extent of ground which I press under the soles of my feet! But yet, to die here, to end here? Is it not what I want, what I am looking for? I cannot tell.

*

Lucerne, 20, 21 and 22 August 1832.

I left Lugano without sleeping there; I have re-crossed the Saint-Gotthard, I have seen again what I had seen: I have found nothing to correct in my sketch. At Altdorf, everything was changed since twenty-four hours ago: no more storm, no more apparition in my lonely room. I came to spend the night in the inn at Flüelen, having twice covered the road the ends of which come out upon two lakes and are held by two nations joined by the same political bond and separate in every other respect I crossed the Lake of Lucerne; it had lost a portion of its merit in my eyes: it is to the Lake of Lugano what the ruins of Rome are to the ruins of Athens, the fields of Sicily to the gardens of Armida.

For the rest, it is vain for me to exert myself to attain the Alpine exaltation of the mountain authors: I waste my pains.

Physically, that virgin and balmy air, which is supposed to revive my strength, rarefy my blood, clear my tired head, give me an insatiable hunger, a dreamless sleep, produces none of those effects for me. I breathe no better, my blood circulates no faster, my head is no less heavy under the sky of the Alps than in Paris. I have as much appetite in the Champs-Élysées, as on the Montanvers, I sleep as well in the Rue Saint-Dominique as on the Mont Saint-Gotthard, and, if I have dreams in the delicious plain of Montrouge, the fault lies with the sleep.

Morally, in vain do I scale the rocks: my mind becomes no loftier for it, my soul no purer; I carry with me the cares of earth and the weight of human turpitudes. The calm of the sublunary region of a marmot is not communicated to my awakened senses. Poor wretch that I am, across the mists that roll at my feet I always perceive the full-blown face of the world. A thousand fathoms climbed into space change nothing in my view of the sky; God appears no greater to me from the top of a mountain than from the bottom of a valley. If, to become a robust man, a saint, a towering genius, it were merely a question of searing over the clouds, why do so many sick men, miscreants and fools not take the trouble to clamber up the Simplon? Surely they must be very obstinately bent upon their infirmities.

A plague upon mountains!

The landscape is created only by the sun; it is the light that makes the landscape. A Carthaginian shore, a heath on the edge of Sorrento, a border of dried canes in the Roman Campagna are more magnificent, when lit up by the rays of the setting sun or the dawn, than all the Alps on this side of the Gauls. Those holes which they call valleys, where one sees nothing at full noon-day; those high fixed screens dubbed mountains; those soiled torrents which bellow with the cows on their banks; those violet-coloured faces, those goitrous necks, those dropsical bellies: a plague upon them!

If the mountains of our climes can justify the panegyrics of their admirers, it is only when they are wrapped in the night of which they thicken the chaos: the effect of their angles, their protuberances, their sweeping lines, their immense projected shadows is heightened by moonlight. The stars carve and engrave them on the sky in pyramids, cones, obelisks, in an architecture of alabaster, now casting over them a gauzy veil and harmonizing them with uncertain tints, faintly washed with blue; now sculpturing them one by one and separating them by lines of great precision. Every valley, every reduct, with its lakes, its rocks, its forests, becomes a temple of silence and solitude. In winter, the mountains offer us the image of the polar zones; in autumn, under a rainy sky, in their different shades of darkness, they resemble grey, black, bistre lithographs: the tempests also suit them, as do the vapours, half mists, half clouds, which roll at their feet or hang suspended at their flanks.

But are the mountains not favourable to meditations, to independence, to poetry? Do fine deep solitudes, mingled with sea, receive nothing from the soul, add nothing to its delights? Does a sublime nature not render us more susceptible to passion, and does passion not make us better understand a sublime nature? Is an intimate love not increased by the vague love of all the beauties of the senses and the intelligence which surround it, even as similar principles attract and blend with one another? Does not the feeling of the infinite, entering through a vast spectacle into a limited feeling, grow and spread to the boundaries at which commences an eternity of life?

I admit all this; but let us well understand one another: it is not the mountains that exist such as we think that we see them then; it is the mountains as the passions, the talents and the muses have drawn their lines, coloured their skies, their snows, their peaks, their declivities, their irised cascades, their "soft" atmosphere, their light and tender shadows: the landscape is on Claude Lorrain's palette, not on the Campo Vaccino. Make me to love, and you shall see that a solitary apple-tree, weather-beaten, flung crooked-wise amid the wheat-fields of the Beauce; the flower of an arrow-head in a marsh; a little water-course in a road; a scrap of moss, a fern, a tuft of maiden-hair fern on the side of a rock; a moist, smoky sky; a tomtit in a vicarage garden; a swallow, flying low, on a rainy day, under the thatch of a barn or along a cloister; even a bat taking the place of the swallow around a country steeple, fluttering on its gauzy wings in the last gloaming of the twilight: all these little things, attached to a few memories, will become enchanted by the mystery of my happiness or the sadness of my regrets. On the upshot, it is the youth of life, it is the persons that make fine sites. The ice-floes of Baffin's Bay can be smiling, with company after one's heart: the banks of the Ohio and the Ganges mournful, in the absence of all affection. A poet has said:

La patrie est aux lieux où l'âme est enchantée[450].

It is the same with beauty.

Here is too much about mountains: I love them as great solitudes; I love them as the frame, the border and the distance of a fine picture; I love them as the rampart and refuge of liberty; I love them as adding something infinite to the passions of the soul: equitably and reasonably, that is all the good to be said of them. If I am not to settle down on the other side of the Alps, my journey across the Saint-Gotthard will remain a disconnected fact, an optical view in the midst of the pictures of my Memoirs: I will put out the lamp and Lugano will relapse into darkness.

Lucerne cathedral.

Scarce arrived at Lucerne, I quickly hastened once more to the cathedral, the Hofkirche, built on the site of a chapel dedicated to St. Nicholas[451], the patron saint of sailors: this primitive chapel served also as a beacon, for, during the night, it was seen lighted up in a supernatural manner. It was Irish missionaries that preached the Gospel in the almost desert country of Lucerne; they brought it the liberty which their unhappy mother-land has not enjoyed. When I returned to the cathedral, a man was digging a grave; in the church, they were finishing a service around a bier, and a young woman was having a child's cap blessed at an altar: she placed it, with a visible expression of joy, in a basket which she carried on her arm, and went away laden with her treasure. The next day, I found the grave in the cemetery closed up, a vessel of holy water placed on the fresh earth, and some fennel-seed sprinkled for the little birds: already they were alone, beside that corpse of a night.

I took some walks in the neighbourhood of Lucerne, in magnificent pine-woods. The bees, whose hives are placed above the farm-doors, under the shelter of the overhanging roofs, live with the peasants. I saw the famous Clara Wendel[452] go to Mass behind her companions in captivity, in her prison dress. She is very common; I found in her the look of all those brutes in France who are present at so many murders, without for that reason being more distinguished than a fierce beast, in spite of all that the theory of crime and the admiration of slaughter would attribute to them. A simple foot-soldier, armed with a carbine, here takes the convicts to perform their day's work and brings them back to the prison.

This evening, I prolonged my walk along the Reuss, to a chapel built on the road: one goes up to it by a little Italian portico. From this portico, I saw a priest praying alone on his knees inside the oratory, while, on the top of the mountains, I saw the last gleams of the setting sun. On returning to Lucerne, I heard women saying the rosary in the cottages; the voices of children made the responses to the maternal adoration. I stopped, I listened through the twining vines to those words addressed to God from within a hut. The comely and graceful young girl who waits on me at the Golden Eagle also most regularly says her Angelus as she draws the curtains of the windows in my room. When I come in, I give her a few flowers which I have gathered; she says to me, gently patting her breast with her hand:

"Per me?"

I answer:

"For you."

There our conversation ends.

*

Lucerne, 26 August 1832.

Madame de Chateaubriand has not yet arrived: I shall take a trip to Constance. M. A. Dumas[453] is here; I had already seen him at David's, while he was being modelled by the great sculptor. Madame de Colbert[454], with her daughter Madame de Brancas, is also passing through Lucerne[455]. It was at Madame de Colbert's, in Beauce, that, nearly twenty years ago, I wrote, in these Memoirs, the story of my youth at Combourg[456]. The places seem to travel with me: they are as mobile, as fleeting as my life.