Book 5 — BOOK X[399]

BOOK X[399]

Conclusion—Historical antecedents from the Regency to 1793—The Past—The old European order expiring—Inequality of fortunes—Danger of the expansion of intellectual nature and material nature—The downfall of the monarchies—The decline of society and the progress of the individual—The future—The difficulty of understanding it—The Christian idea is the future of the world—Recapitulation of my life—Summary of the changes that have happened on the globe during my life—End of the Mémoires d'Outre-tombe.

25 September 1841.

I began to write these Memoirs, at the Vallée-aux-Loups, on the 4th of October 1811; I am about to finish reading and correcting them, in Paris, on the 20th of September 1841: I have, therefore, for thirty years, eleven months and twenty-one days[400], been secretly holding the pen while writing my public books, in the midst of all the revolutions and all the vicissitudes of my existence. My hand is tired: may it not have weighed upon my ideas, which have never wavered and which I feel to be as lively as when I started on my career! I had the intention of adding a general conclusion to my thirty years' work: I meant to say, as I have often mentioned, what the world was like when I entered it, what it is like now that I am leaving it. But the hour-glass is before me; I observe the hand which the sailors used to think that they saw come forth from the waves at the hour of shipwreck: that hand beckons to me to be brief; I will therefore reduce the scale of the picture, without omitting anything essential.

Louis XIV. died[401]. The Duc d'Orléans was Regent during the minority of Louis XV. A war with Spain broke out as the result of Cellamare's[402] conspiracy: peace was restored by the fall of Alberoni[403]. Louis XV. attained his majority on the 15th of February 1723. The Regent succumbed ten months later. He had communicated his gangrene to France; he had seated Dubois[404] in Fénelon's pulpit and raised Law[405] to power. The Duc de Bourbon[406] became Prime Minister to Louis XV., and he had as his successor the Cardinal de Fleury[407], whose genius lay in his years. In 1734, the war[408] broke out in which my father was wounded outside Dantzig[409]. In 1745 was fought the Battle of Fontenoy; one of the least warlike of our kings made us triumph in the only great pitched battle that we have won over the English: and the conqueror of the world has, at Waterloo, added one more disaster to the disasters of Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt. The church at Waterloo is decorated with the names of the English officers who fell in 1815; in the church at Fontenoy we find only a stone with these words:

Near this spot lies the body of Messire Philippe De Vitry, who, aged 27 years, was killed at the Battle of Fontenoy on the 11th of May 1715

No mark indicates the place of the action; but skeletons are taken from the ground with bullets flattened into their skulls. The French carry their victories written on their foreheads.

Later, the Comte de Gisors, son of the Maréchal de Belle-Isle[410] fell at Crefeld[411]. With him died out the name and the direct descent of Fouquet[412]. Things had passed from Mademoiselle de La Vallière to Madame de Châteauroux. There is something sad in seeing names come to their end, from century to century, from beauty to beauty, from glory to glory.

Historical antecedents.

In the month of June 1745, the second Stuart Pretender had begun his adventures: misfortunes on which I was brought up pending the time when Henry V. should replace the English Pretender in exile.

The end of those wars was the harbinger of our disasters in our colonies. La Bourdonnais[413] avenged the French flag in Asia; his dissensions with Dupleix[414], after the capture of Madras, undid all. The peace of 1748 suspended those misfortunes; hostilities broke out again in 1755; they opened with the earthquake of Lisbon[415], in which Racine's grandson perished. Under the pretext of a few plots of land at issue on the frontier of Acadia, England, without declaring war, seized upon three hundred of our merchant-ships; we lost Canada: facts immense in their consequences, above which floats the death of Wolfe and Montcalm. We were stripped of our possessions in Africa and India, and Lord Clive[416] began the conquest of Bengal. Now, during this time, the Jansenist quarrels were taking place: Damiens[417] had struck at Louis XV.; Poland had been partitioned, the expulsion of the Jesuits effected, the Court had descended to the Parc-aux-Cerfs. The author of the Family Compact[418] retired to Chanteloup, while the intellectual revolution was being completed under Voltaire. Maupeou's Plenary Court[419] was installed: Louis XV. left the scaffold to the favourite[420] who had degraded him, after sending Garat[421] and Sanson to Louis XVI., one to read, the other to execute the sentence.

This last monarch had married, on the 16th of May 1770, the daughter of Maria Theresa of Austria: we know what became of her. Next passed the ministers: Machault, old Maurepas, Turgot the economist, Malesherbes, with his ancient virtues and modern opinions, Saint-Germain[422], who destroyed the King's Household and gave a baleful order; Calonne and Necker lastly.

Louis XVI. recalled the parliaments, abolished forced labour, repealed the power of inflicting torture before the verdict had been given, restored Protestants to the enjoyment of civil rights and recognised their marriages as legal. The American War of 1779, although impolitic for France, the dupe, as always, of her generosity, was useful to the human race; it restored throughout the world the esteem in which our arms were held and the honour of our flag.

The Revolution sprang up, ready to give birth to the warlike generation which eight centuries of heroism had laid in its womb. The personal merits of Louis XVI. did not redeem the faults which his ancestors had left to him to expiate; but the blows of Providence fall on the evil, never on the man: God shortens virtue's days upon earth only to lengthen them in Heaven. Under the star of 1793, the sources of the great abyss were broken; all our glories of former days next united and made their last explosion under Bonaparte: he sends them back to us in his coffin.

When I was born.

I was born while these facts were being accomplished[423]. Two new empires, Prussia[424] and Russia[425], preceded me by scarcely half a century on the earth; Corsica became French at the moment when I appeared[426]; I arrived in the world twenty days before Bonaparte[427]. He brought me with him. I was about to enter the navy, in 1783, when the fleet of Louis XVI. put in to Brest[428]: it carried the birth certificate of a nation[429] that had been hatched under the wings of France. My birth is connected with the birth of a man and a people, pale reflection that I was of an immense light.

If we fix our eyes on the actual world, we see it, following the movement communicated by a great revolution, shaken from the East to China, which seemed closed for ever: so that our past subversions would be nothing and the noise of Napoleon's fame be hardly audible in the general topsy-turviness of the nations, even as he, Napoleon, drowned all the noises of our ancient globe.

The Emperor left us in a condition of prophetic agitation. We, the ripest and most advanced State, display numerous symptoms of decadence. Just as a sick man in danger becomes preoccupied with what awaits him in his grave, a nation which feels itself decaying grows restless as to its future fate. Hence the political heresies which succeed one another. The old European order is expiring; our present contests will appear puerile struggles in the eyes of posterity. Nothing more exists; authority of experience and age, birth or genius, talent or virtue: all are denied; a few individuals clamber to the top of the ruins, proclaim themselves giants and roll down to the bottom as pygmies. With the exception of a score of men who will survive and who were destined to hold the torch across the murky steppes upon which we are entering, with the exception of those few men, a generation which bore within it an abundant intelligence, acquired knowledge, germs of success of all kinds has stifled these in a restlessness as unproductive as its arrogance is barren. Nameless multitudes are agitated without knowing why, like the popular associations of the middle-ages: famished flocks which recognise no shepherd, which rush from the plain to the mountain and from the mountain to the plain, disdaining the experience of the herdsmen hardened to the wind and sun. In the life of that city, all is transitory: religion and morals cease to be admitted, or else each interprets them after his own fashion. Among things of an inferior nature, even in power of conviction and existence, a man's renown throbs for barely an hour, a book grows old in a day, writers kill themselves to attract attention: one more vanity; no one hears even their last breath.

From this predisposition of men's minds it results that we imagine no other means of touching people than scenes of the scaffold and tainted manners: we forget that the real tears are those which flow at the bidding of a beautiful poem and with which as much admiration as sorrow is blended; but at present, when talents feed upon the Regency and the Terror, what need was there of subjects for our tongues destined so soon to die? No more will fall from man's genius some of those thoughts which become the patrimony of the universe.

That is what everybody says and what everybody deplores, and yet illusions superabound, and the nearer a man is to his end the longer he thinks that he will live. We see monarchs who imagine that they are monarchs, ministers who believe that they are ministers, deputies who take their speeches seriously, landlords who, possessing property to-day, are persuaded that they will possess it to-night. Private interests, personal ambitions hide the gravity of the moment from the vulgar: notwithstanding the oscillations of the affairs of the day, they are but a wrinkle on the surface of the deep; they do not decrease the depth of the waters. Beside the paltry contingent lotteries, the human race is playing the great game; the kings still hold the cards and hold them for the nations: will the latter do better than the monarchs? A side issue, which does not alter the principal fact. What importance have children's amusements, shades gliding over the whiteness of a shroud? The invasion of ideas has succeeded on the invasion of the Barbarians; our actual decomposing civilization is becoming lost in itself; the vessel that contains it has not poured the liquid over into another vessel: it is the vessel that has been shattered.

At what period will society disappear? What accidents will be able to suspend its movements? In Rome, the reign of man was substituted for the reign of law: they passed from the Republic to the Empire; our revolution is being accomplished in a contrary sense; we are inclined to pass from the Royalty to the Republic, or, not to specify any form, to Democracy: this will not be effected without difficulty.

Property.

To touch upon only one point in a thousand: will property, for instance, remain distributed as it is? The Royalty born at Rheims was able to keep that property going by tempering its severity by the diffusion of moral laws, even as it changed humanity into charity. Given a political state of things in which individuals have so many millions a year, while other individuals are dying of hunger: can that state of things subsist, when religion is no longer there with its hopes beyond this world to explain the sacrifice? There are children to whom their mothers give suck at their withered breasts for want of a mouthful of bread to feed their dying babes; there are families whose members are reduced to huddle together at night, for want of blankets to warm them. That man sees his many furrows ripen; this one will possess only the six feet of earth lent to his tomb by his native land. Now with how many ears of corn can six feet of earth supply a dead man?

As instruction comes down to those lower classes, the latter discover the secret sore which gnaws at the irreligious social order. The too great disproportion of conditions and fortunes was endurable so long as it remained concealed; but, so soon as this disproportion was generally perceived, it received its death-blow. Recompose the aristocratic fictions, if you can; try to persuade the poor man, when he shall have learnt to read correctly and ceased to believe, when he shall be as well-informed as yourself, try to persuade him that he must submit to every sort of privation, while his neighbour possesses superfluity a thousand times told: as a last resource, you will have to kill him.

When steam shall be perfected, when, joined to the telegraph and railways, it shall have caused distances to disappear, we shall see not only merchandise travel, but also ideas, restored to the use of their wings. When fiscal and commercial barriers shall have been abolished between the various States, as they already are between the provinces of the same State; when different countries entertaining daily relations shall tend to promote the unity of the peoples: how will you resuscitate the old manner of separation?

Society, on the other hand, is no less threatened by the spread of intellect than it is by the development of brute nature: suppose labour to be condemned to idleness by reason of the multiplication and variety of machinery; admit that one only and general mercenary, matter, replaces the mercenaries of the farm and the household: what will you do with the unemployed human race? What will you do with passions that are idle at the same time as, the intellect? The vigour of the body is maintained by physical occupation; when labour ceases, strength disappears; we shall become like those nations of Asia which fall a prey to the first invader and which are unable to defend themselves against a hand that bears the sword. Thus liberty is preserved only by work, because work produces strength; withdraw the curse pronounced against the sons of Adam, "In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread[430]," and they will die in servitude. The divine curse therefore enters into the mystery of our lot; man is less the slave of his sweat than of his thought: that is how, after making the circuit of society, after passing through the different civilizations, after supposing unknown perfections, we find ourselves once more at the starting-point, in the presence of the truths of Scripture.

The Monarchy.

At the time of our Monarchy of eight centuries, Europe had in France the centre of its intelligence, its perpetuity, its repose; when deprived of that Monarchy, Europe at once inclined towards democracy. The human race, for good or ill, has become its own master; the princes have enjoyed its property during its minority; now that the nations have come of age, they contend that they have no more need of guardians. From David to our time, the kings have been called: the vocation of the peoples is commencing. The brief and small exceptions of the Greek, Carthaginian, Roman Republics, with slaves, do not take away the fact that, in antiquity, the monarchic state was the normal state of the globe. The whole of modern society, since the banner of the French kings has ceased to exist, is laying aside the monarchy. God, to hasten the degradation of the royal power, has delivered the sceptres in different countries to infirm kings, to little girls in long-clothes[431] or in the white veils of their weddings[432]: those are the toothless lions, the clawless lionesses, the sucking babes, the marrying babes, whom grown men are to follow in this era of unbelief.

The boldest opinions are proclaimed in the face of the monarchs, who pretend to feel safe behind the three-fold hedge of a suspected guard. The flood of democracy is overtaking them; they climb from storey to storey, from the ground-floor to the attic roof of their palace, whence they will leap into the water through the dormer windows.

In the midst of this, observe a phenomenal contradiction: material conditions are improving, intellectual progress increases, and the nations, instead of profiting, are diminishing. Whence comes this contradiction?

It is because we have lost in the moral order of things. There have been crimes at all periods; but they were never committed in cold blood, as they are nowadays, because of the loss of the religious sentiment. At this hour, they no longer revolt us, they seem a consequence of the march of time; if formerly we judged them in a different manner, it was because we were not yet, as we dare to assert, sufficiently advanced in the knowledge of man; we analyze them at the present moment; we test them in the crucible, in order to see what useful thing we can obtain from them, even as chemistry finds ingredients in the sewers. The corruption of the mind, which is very much more destructive than that of the senses, is accepted as a necessary result; it no longer belongs to a few wayward individuals: it has become public property.

Many men would feel humiliated if it were proved to them that they have a soul, that beyond this life they will find another life; they would think that they were wanting in firmness and strength and genius, if they did not rise superior to the pusillanimity of our fathers; they admit annihilation, or, if you like, doubt, as a disagreeable fact perhaps, but as a truth which it is impossible to deny. Admire the stultification of our pride!

That is how the decline of society and the increase of the individual are explained. If the moral sense were developed in proportion to the development of the intellect, there would be a counterpoise, and humanity would grow up without danger; but the exact opposite is happening: our perception of good and evil becomes dimmer as our intellect becomes more enlightened; our conscience shrinks as our ideas expand. Yes, society will perish: liberty, which could save the world, will not make progress, for want of leaning on religion; order, which could maintain the observance of rules, will not be solidly established, because it is combated by the anarchy of men's ideas. The purple, which used formerly to confer power, will henceforth serve as a bed only for misfortune: none will be saved unless he be born on the straw, like Christ. When the monarchs were disinterred at Saint-Denis, at the moment when the trumpet sounded for the popular resurrection; when, taken from their crumbling tombs, they lay awaiting plebeian burial, the ragmen came to this Last Judgment of the centuries: they looked with their lanterns into the eternal night; they rummaged among the remains that had escaped the first pillage. Already the Kings were there no more, but the Royalty was there still: they snatched it from the womb of time and flung it into the rubbish-basket.

Old and young Europe.

So much for old Europe: it will never revive. Does young Europe offer better prospects? The present world, the world without consecrated authority, seems placed between two impossibilities, the impossibility of the past and the impossibility of the future. And do not go to think, as some imagine, that, if we are badly off at present, good will come out of evil: human nature, when disordered at its source, does not proceed with such correctness. For instance, the excesses of liberty lead to despotism; but the excesses of tyranny lead only to tyranny; the latter, in degrading us, makes us incapable of independence: Tiberius did not cause Rome to go back to the Republic; he left only Caligula to follow him.

To avoid explanations, we are satisfied to declare that the times may have hidden in their womb a political constitution which we do not perceive. Did the whole of antiquity, did the finest geniuses of that antiquity conceive a society without slaves? Yet we see it existing. We assert that, in this civilization as yet unborn, the human race will grow greater; I have advanced this theory myself: is it not to be feared, however, that the individual will grow less? We may become industrious bees occupied in common with the manufacture of our honey. In the material world, men unite for purposes of labour; a multitude attains sooner and by different roads the thing after which it strives; masses of individuals will raise pyramids; by dint of study, each on his own side, those individuals will light upon scientific discoveries and explore every corner of physical creation. But are things the same in the moral world? It will be vain for a thousand brains to combine: never will they compose the master-piece that issues from the head of a Homer.

It has been said that a city whose members enjoy an equal division of goods and education will present to the gaze of the Divinity a spectacle surpassing the spectacle of the city of our fathers. The madness of the moment tends to achieve the unity of peoples and to make but one man of the whole race: well and good; but, in acquiring general faculties, will not a whole series of private sentiments perish? Good-bye to the delights of the home; good-bye to the charms of the family: among all those beings, white, yellow and black, reputed as your fellow-countrymen, you would not be able to throw yourself on a brother's neck! Was there nothing in the life of old, nothing in that limited space upon which you looked out from your ivy-framed casement? Beyond your horizon, you suspected the existence of unknown lands of which the bird of passage, the only traveller that you had seen in autumn, scarce spoke to you. It was happiness to think that the hills which surrounded you would not disappear from before your eyes; that they contained your friendships and your loves; that the moaning of the night around your dwelling would be the only sound to which you would fall asleep; that never would your soul's solitude be disturbed; that you would always meet there the thoughts that await you to resume their familiar intercourse with you. You knew where you were born, you knew where your tomb lay; as you entered the forest, you were able to say:

Beaux arbres qui m'avez vu naître, Bientôt vous me verrez mourir[433]!

Man does not need to travel in order to grow greater: he carries immensity with him. The accents that escape from your bosom are not measured, they find an echo in thousands of souls: he who has not that melody within himself will ask it in vain of the universe. Sit down on the trunk of the tree felled in the depths of the wood: if in your profound forgetfulness of self, in your immobility, in your silence you do not find the infinite, it is useless for you to wander on the banks of the Ganges.

What would an universal society be that should have no particular country, that should not be French, nor English, nor German, nor Spanish, nor Portuguese, nor Italian, nor Russian, nor Tartar, nor Turkish, nor Persian, nor Indian, nor Chinese, nor American, or rather that should be all these societies at once? What would be the outcome for its manners, its science, its arts, its poetry? How would passions be expressed felt at the same time in the manner of different peoples in different climates? How would the language entertain that confusion of needs and images produced by the various suns that should have cast their light upon a common youth, manhood and old age? And what would that language be? Would an universal idiom result from this fusion of societies, or would there be a dialect of compromise, employed for daily use, while each nation would talk its own language, or else would the different languages be understood by all? Under what like rule, under what one law would this society have its being? How would one find one's place on an earth enlarged by the power of ubiquitousness and narrowed by the petty proportions of a globe tainted on every hand? There would be nothing for it but to apply to science for means to change one's planet.

Are you weary of private ownership and do you wish to turn the government into a sole proprietor, distributing to what will have become a mendicant community a share commensurate with the merit of each individual? Who shall judge of the merits? Who will have the strength and the authority to compel the execution of your decrees? Who will keep and make the most of that bank of living real estate?

Socialism.

Will you seek to bring about the association of labour? What will the weak, the sick, the unintelligent bring to the community left burdened with their unfitness?

Here is another contrivance: one might form, in place of wages, a sort of limited company or partnership between manufacturers and workmen, between mind and matter, to which the one would bring his capital and his idea, the others their industry and their labour; the eventual profits to be shared in common. That would be very good, admitting complete perfection among men; very good, if you meet with no quarrelling, avarice, nor envy: but, if a single partner protests, the whole crumbles to the ground; divisions and law-suits begin. This method, which seems a little more possible in theory, is quite as impossible in practice.

Would you, having modified your opinion, seek to build a city in which every man shall possess a roof, a fire, clothes and sufficient to eat? When you have succeeded in endowing every citizen, the good and bad qualities of each will disturb your division and make it an unjust one: this one requires more to eat than that; that one is unable to work as much as this: the economical and industrious will become rich men, the spendthrifts, the idlers, the cripples will relapse into poverty; for you cannot give all men the same temperament: natural inequalities will reappear in spite of your efforts.

And do not think that we should allow ourselves to be tied by the complicated legal precautions demanded by the organization of the family, patrimonial rights, wardships, recaptions by heirs and assigns, and so on, and so on. Marriage is notoriously an absurd oppression: we abolish all that. If the son kills the father, it is not the son, as is easily proved, who commits parricide but the father who, by living, sacrifices the son. Do not therefore let us go confusing our brains with the labyrinth of an edifice which we put down level with the ground; it is unnecessary to linger over those crazy trifles of our grandfathers.

This notwithstanding, there are some among the modern sectarians who, half seeing the impossibility of their doctrines, mix with them, to obtain sufferance for them, words of morality and religion; they think that, pending better things, we might first be brought up to the ideal mediocrity of the Americans; they close their eyes and are good enough to forget that the Americans are landlords and ardent landlords, which alters the question somewhat.

Others, still more obliging, who admit a sort of elegance of civilization, would be content to transform us into "Constitutional" Chinese, all but atheists, free and enlightened old men, sitting in yellow robes for centuries in our flowery seed-plots, spending our days in a state of comfort acquired to the multitude, having invented everything, discovered everything, vegetating peacefully in the midst of our accomplished progress and only going on board a railway-train, like a bale of merchandise, in order to travel from Canton to the Great Wall to chat about a marsh that wants draining or a canal that wants cutting with some other manufacturer of the Celestial Empire. In either supposition, American or Chinese, I shall be glad to have departed before so great a felicity happened to me.

Lastly, one solution remains: it might be that, in consequence of the complete degradation of the human character, the peoples would put up with what they have; they would lose the love of independence, replaced by the love of money, at the same time that the kings lost the love of power, bartered for the love of the Civil List. Hence would result a compromise between monarchs and subjects charmed to crawl promiscuously in a bastard political order of things; they would display their infirmities to one another at their ease, as in the old leper-hospitals or in those mud-baths in which sick people soak nowadays to obtain relief: one would dabble in a common mire like a peaceful reptile.

We misconstrue our times, however, when we desire, in the present condition of society, to replace the pleasures of our intellectual nature by the joys of our physical nature. The latter, we can understand, were able to occupy the life of the old aristocratic nations: masters of the world, they owned palaces, troops of slaves; they absorbed whole regions of Africa in their private possessions. But under what portico would you now air your paltry leisure? In what vast and decorated baths would you shut up the perfumes, the flowers, the flute-players, the courtezans of Ionia? One is not Heliogabalus[434] for the asking. Where will you find the wealth indispensable to those material delights? The soul is thrifty; but the body is extravagant.

Communism.

And now, a few words of a more serious character touching absolute equality. That equality would bring back not only the servitude of bodies, but the slavery of souls; it would be a question of nothing less than destroying the moral and physical inequality of the individual. Our will, administered under the general eye, would see our faculties falling into disuse. The infinite, for instance, is part of our nature: forbid our intellect, or even our passions to think of endless blessings, and you reduce man to the life of the snail, you transform him into a machine. For make no mistake: without the possibility of attaining all, without the idea of living eternally, you have nothingness everywhere; without individual property, none is free; whosoever has no property cannot be independent; he becomes a proletarian or a salaried servant, whether he live under the present condition of separate ownerships or in the midst of a common ownership. Common ownership would make society resemble one of those monasteries at whose door stewards used to stand distributing bread. Hereditary and inviolable property is our personal defense; property is nothing else than liberty. Absolute equality, which presupposes complete submission to that equality, would reproduce the harshest form of servitude; it would turn the human individual into a beast of burden subjected to the action which would constrain him and obliged to walk endlessly in the same path.

While I was arguing thus, M. de Lamennais[435], behind the bolts of his gaol, was attacking the same systems with his logical power, which is enlightened by the brilliancy of the poet. A passage borrowed from his pamphlet entitled, Du Passé et de l'avenir du peuple[436] will complete my arguments; listen to him, it is he now who speaks:

"Of those who put before them this object of strict, absolute equality, the most consistent, in order to establish it and maintain it, agree upon the use of force, despotism, dictatorship, under one form or another.

"The partisans of absolute equality are, at the out-set, compelled to attack the natural inequalities, in order to extenuate and, if possible, destroy them. Unable to affect the primary conditions of organization and development, their work begins at the moment when man is born or when the child leaves its mother's womb. The State then seizes upon it: behold it the absolute master of the spiritual as of the organic being. Mind and conscience, all depends upon the State, all is subject to the State. No more family, no more paternity, no more marriage henceforth; a male, a female, children whom the State handles, with which it does as it pleases, morally, physically: an universal servitude and so profound that nothing escapes it, that it penetrates to the very soul.

"Where material things are concerned, equality can never be established in ever so little a lasting manner by a simple partition. If it be a question of land only, one can understand that it can be divided into as many portions as there are individuals; but, as the number of individuals varies perpetually, it would also be necessary perpetually to vary that primitive division. All individual property being abolished, there is no lawful owner except the State. This mode of ownership, if it be voluntary, is that of the monk bound down by his vows to poverty as to obedience; if it be not voluntary, it is that of the slave, where nothing modifies the harshness of his condition. All human ties, sympathetic relations, mutual devotion, exchange of services, free gift of self, all that constitutes the charm of life and its greatness, all, all has disappeared, disappeared for ever.

"The methods hitherto proposed to solve the problem of the future of the people end in the negation of all the indispensable conditions of existence, destroy, either directly or by implication, duty, right, the family and would produce, if they could be applied to society, instead of the liberty in which all real progress is summarized, only a servitude with which history, however far we go back into the past, can offer nothing to compare."

There is nothing to be added to this logic.

The Abbé de Lamennais.

I do not go to see prisoners, like Tartuffe, to distribute alms to them, but to enrich my intelligence by contact with men who are worth more than I. If their opinions differ from mine, I am not afraid: stubborn Christian that I am, all the fine geniuses in the world would not shake my faith; I am sorry for them, and my charity protects me against seduction. If I sin through excess, they sin through deficiency; I understand what they understand, they do not understand what I understand. In the same prison where I used to visit the noble and unfortunate Carrel, I now visit the Abbé de Lamennais[437]. The Revolution of July has relegated to the darkness of a gaol the remnant of the superior men of whom it can neither appraise the merit nor endure the effulgency. In the last room as one goes up, under a slooping roof which we can touch with our heads[438], we silly believers in liberty, François[439] de Lamennais and François de Chateaubriand, talk of serious things. Struggle as he please, his ideas have remained in the religious mould; their form has remained Christian, even when their substance is furthest removed from dogma: his speech has retained the sound of Heaven.

A true believer professing heresy, the author of the Essai sur l'indifférence[440] talks my language with ideas that are not my ideas. If, after having embraced the popular evangelical teaching, he had remained attached to the priesthood, he would have preserved the authority which variations have destroyed. The parish priests, the new members of the clergy (and the most distinguished among those ecclesiastics) were going towards him; the bishops would have found themselves involved in his cause if he had clung to the Gallican liberties, while continuing to venerate the successor of St. Peter and defending unity.

In France, the youth of the country would have gathered round the missionary, in whom it found the ideas which it loves and the progress to which it aspires; in Europe, the attentive dissenters would have raised no obstacle; great Catholic nations, the Poles, the Irish, the Spaniards, would have blessed the preacher who had risen up. Rome herself would have ended by seeing that the new evangelist was causing the dominion of the Church to take new birth and supplying the oppressed Pontiff with the means of resisting the influence of the absolute kings. What power of life! Intellect, religion, liberty represented in a priest!

God did not wish it: the light suddenly failed him who was the light; the guide, stealing away, left his flock in darkness. But my fellow-countryman, though his public career has been interrupted, will always have his private superiority left and his pre-eminence in natural gifts. In the order of time, he ought to survive me; I summon him to my death-bed to agitate our great conquests at those gates through which there is no returning. I should like to see his genius shed upon me the absolution which once his hand had the right to call down upon my head. We were lulled at our birth by the same waves[441]; may my ardent faith and my sincere admiration be permitted to hope that I shall meet my reconciled friend once more on the same shore of eternal things[442].

On the upshot, my investigations lead me to conclude that the old society is giving way beneath itself, that it is impossible for whosoever is not a Christian to understand the future society pursuing its career and satisfying at one time either the purely republican or the moderate monarchical idea. In any hypothesis, you can derive the improvements which you desire only from the Gospel.

At the bottom of the actual sectarians, what we find is always the plagiarism, the parody of the Gospel, always the apostolic principle: that principle has entered into us so deeply that we use it as though it belongs to us; we presume it to be natural, even though it be not so to us; it has come to us from our old faith, to take the latter two or three steps in the ascending line above us. Many a man of independent mind occupied with the perfecting of his fellows would never have thought of it if the right of the peoples had not been laid down by the Son of Man. Every act of philanthropy in which we indulge, every system of which we dream in the interests of humanity, is but the Christian idea turned over, changed in name and too often disfigured: it is always the Word made Flesh[443]!

The Christian idea.

Do you say that the Christian idea is only the human idea in progression? I agree; but open the different cosmogonies, and you shall learn that a traditional Christianity preceded revealed Christianity upon earth. If the Messiah "had not come" and if He "had not spoken[444]," as He says of Himself, the idea would not have been disengaged, the truths would have remained confused, such as we see them in the writings of the ancients. However you interpret it, therefore, it is from the Revealer, or from Christ that you hold everything; it is from the Saviour, Salvator, from the Comforter, Paracletus, that you must always start; it is from Him that you have received the germs of civilization and philosophy.

You see, therefore, that I find no solution for the future except in Christianity and in Catholic Christianity; the religion of the Word is the manifestation of truth, even as the Creation is God made visible. I do not pretend that a general renovation will absolutely take place, for I admit that whole nations are vowed to destruction; I admit also that the faith is drying up in certain countries: but, if a single grain of it remain, if it fall upon a little earth, were it but in the remnants of a vase, that grain will spring up and a second incarnation of the Catholic spirit will revive society.

Christianity is the most philosophical and rational appreciation of God and the Creation; it contains the three great laws of the universe, divine law, moral law, political law: divine law, the unity of God in three Persons; moral law, charity; political law, that is, liberty, equality, fraternity.

The two first principles are fully developed; the third, political law, has not received its complements, because it could not flourish so long as the intelligent belief in the infinite being and universal morality were not firmly established. Now Christianity had first to clear away the absurdities and abominations with which idolatry and slavery had encumbered the human race.

Enlightened persons cannot understand how a Catholic like myself can persist in sitting in the shadow of what they call ruins; according to those persons, it is a wager on my part, an obstinate determination. But tell me, for pity's sake, where shall I find a family and a God in the individual and philosophical society which you offer me? Tell me that, and I follow you; if not, do not find it amiss that I lie down in the tomb of Christ, the only shelter which you have left to me while abandoning me.

No, I have made no wager with myself: I am sincere; see here what has happened to me: of my plans, my studies, my experiments, all that has remained to me is a complete disillusionment touching all the things which this world pursues. My religious conviction, as it grew greater, has swallowed up all my other convictions; there is no more believing Christian and no more incredulous man here below than I. Far from drawing near its end, the religion of the Deliverer has hardly entered upon its political period: liberty, equality, fraternity. The Gospel, the sentence of acquittal, has not yet been read to all; we have not gone beyond the curses pronounced by Christ:

"Wo to you ... because you load men with burdens which they cannot bear, and you yourselves touch not the packs with one of your fingers[445]."

Christianity is stable in its dogma and mobile in its enlightenment; its transformation involves the universal transformation. When it has reached its highest point, the darkness will become completely lightened; liberty, crucified on Calvary with the Messiah, will descend from it with Him; it will hand to the nations that new Testament written in its favour and hitherto trammelled in its clauses. Governments will pass away, moral evil will disappear, rehabilitation will proclaim the consummation of the centuries of death and oppression born of the Fall.

When will that longed-for day arrive? When will society reconstruct itself after the secret methods of the generating principle? None can say; it is impossible to calculate the resistance of the passions.

Christian liberty.

More than once will death enervate races of men and shed silence upon events even as snow falling during the night deadens the noise of the traffic. Nations do not grow up so rapidly as the individuals of whom they are composed, nor do they disappear so quickly. How long does it not take to attain a single thing sought after! The death-agony of the Lower Empire threatened to be endless; the Christian Era, already so extensive, has not sufficed to abolish servitude. These calculations, I know, do not suit the French temper; in our revolutions, we have never admitted the element of time: that is why we are always wonder-struck at results contrary to our impatience. Full of generous courage, young men rush onwards; they make straight for a lofty region which they see dimly and which they strive to reach: nothing could be worthier of admiration; but they will wear out their lives in those efforts and, coming to the end, after disappointment upon disappointment, they will consign the weight of the years of deception to other deluded generations, which will carry it on to the next tombs; and so on. The time of the desert has returned; Christianity is beginning over again, in the barrenness of the Thebaid, amid a formidable idolatry, the idolatry of man for himself.

There are two kinds of consequences in history: one is immediate and instantly known; the other distant and not seen at once. Those two consequences are often contradictory: the first come from our short wisdom, the others from long-continued wisdom. The providential event appears after the human event. God rises behind men. Deny the Supreme Counsel as much as you please; do not consent to its action; dispute about words; call what the vulgar call Providence the force of things or reason; but look at the end of an accomplished fact, and you shall see that it has always produced the contrary of what was expected of it, when it was not first established on morals and justice.

If Heaven has not pronounced Its last decree; if there is to be a future, a free and mighty future, that future is still far away, far beyond the visible horizon: we can reach it only with the aid of that Christian hope whose wings grow in proportion as all things seem to betray it, that hope which is longer than time and more powerful than misfortune.

Will the work inspired by my ashes and destined for my ashes be extant after me? It is possible that my work may be bad; it is possible that these Memoirs may fade into nothing on seeing the light: at least the things which I have told myself will have served to beguile the tedium of those last hours which no one wishes and which we know not how to employ. At the end of life is a bitter age: nothing pleases, because one is worthy of nothing; useful to none, a burden on all, near to our last resting-place, we have but a step to take to reach it: what would be the good of musing on a deserted shore? What pleasing shadows would one see in the future? Fie upon the clouds that now hover over my head!

One idea comes back to me and troubles me: my conscience is not reassured as to the innocence of my vigils; I dread my blindness and man's complacency towards his faults. Is what I am writing really in keeping with justice? Are morality and charity rigorously observed? Have I had the right to speak of others? What would it avail me to repent, if these Memoirs did any harm? O you unknown and hidden of the earth, you whose life, pleasing to the altars, works miracles, all hail to your secret virtues!

This or that poor man, destitute of knowledge, about whom none will ever trouble, has, by the mere doctrine of his manners, exercised upon his companions in suffering the divine influence which emanated from the virtues of Christ. The greatest book on earth is not worth so much as an unknown act of those nameless martyrs "whose blood Herod had mingled with their sacrifices[446]."

You have seen me born; you have seen my childhood, my idolatry of my singular creation in Combourg Castle, my presentation at Versailles, my attendance, in Paris, at the first spectacle of the Revolution. In the New World, I met Washington; I penetrated into the backwoods; shipwreck brought me back to the coast of my Brittany. Came my sufferings as a soldier, my wretchedness as an Emigrant. Returning to France, I became the author of the Génie du Christianisme. In a changed society, I counted and lost friends. Bonaparte stopped me and flung himself, with the blood-stained body of the Duc d'Enghien, across my path; I stopped myself in my turn and brought the great man from his cradle, in Corsica, to his tomb, in St. Helena. I shared in the Restoration and saw its end.

Thus I have known public and private life. I have four times crossed the sea; I have followed the sun in the East, touched upon the ruins of Memphis, Carthage, Sparta and Athens; I have prayed at the tomb of St. Peter and worshipped on Golgotha. Poor and rich, powerful and weak, happy and miserable, a man of action, a man of thought, I have placed my hand in the century, my mind in the desert; effective existence has shown itself to me in the midst of illusions, even as the land appears to sailors in the midst of mists. If those facts spread over my dreams, like the varnish that preserves fragile paintings, do not disappear, they will mark the place through which my life passed.

My several careers.

In each of my three careers, I placed an important object before myself: as a traveller, I aimed at discovering the polar world; as a man of letters, I have striven to reconstruct religion from its ruins; as a statesman, I have endeavoured to give the nations the system of balanced monarchy, to restore France to her rank in Europe, to give back to her the strength which the Treaties of Vienna had taken from her; I have at least assisted in winning that one of our liberties which is worth all the others: the liberty of the press. In the divine order of things, religion and liberty; in the human order, honour and glory (which are the human generation of religion and liberty): that is what I have desired for my country.

Of the French authors of my own period, I may be said to be the only one who resembles his works: a traveller, soldier, publicist, minister, it is amid forests that I have sung the forests, aboard ship that I have depicted the Ocean, in camp that I have spoken of arms, in exile that I have learnt to know exile, in Courts, in affairs of State, in Parliament that I have studied princes, politics and laws.

The orators of Greece and Rome played their part in the republic and shared its fate; in Italy and Spain, at the end of the Middle Ages and under the Renascence, the leading intellects in letters and the arts took part in the social movement. How stormy and how fine were the lives of Dante, of Tasso, of Camoens, of Ercilla, of Cervantes! In France, of old, our songs and stories came to us from our pilgrimages and battles; but, commencing from the reign of Louis XIV., our writers have too often been men leading detached lives, and their talents have perchance expressed the spirit, but not the deeds of their age.

I, as luck would have it, after camping in Iroquois shelters and Arab tents, after wearing the cloak of the savage and the caftan of the mameluke, have sat at the tables of kings only to relapse into indigence. I have meddled with peace and war; I have signed treaties and protocols; I have taken part in sieges, congresses and conclaves, in the restoration and overturning of thrones; I have made history and I could write it: and my solitary and silent life went on through the tumult and uproar in the company of the daughters of my imagination, Atala, Amélie, Bianca, Velléda, without speaking of what I might call the realities of my days, if they had not themselves been the seduction of chimeras. I am afraid lest I should have a soul of the nature of that which an ancient philosopher called a sacred sickness[447].

I have found myself caught between two ages, as in the conflux of two rivers, and I have plunged into their waters, turning regretfully from the old bank upon which I was born, yet swimming hopefully towards an unknown shore[448].

The whole of geography has changed since, according to the expression of our old customs, I was able to look at the sky from my bed. If I compare the two terrestrial globes, the one at the commencement, the other at the end of my life, I no longer recognise them. A fifth part of the world, Australia, has been discovered and populated[449]; French sails have recently caught sight of a sixth continent amid the ice-fields of the Antarctic Pole[450], and the Parrys, Rosses and Franklins have turned the coasts, on our own pole, that mark the limits of North America; Africa has opened its mysterious solitudes; in short, there is not a corner of our abode that is at present unknown. We are attacking all the necks of land that separate the world; soon, no doubt, we shall see ships pass through the Isthmus of Panama and, perhaps, the Isthmus of Suez[451].

The world of the future.

History has made parallel discoveries in the depths of time; the sacred languages have allowed us to read their lost vocabulary; on the very granite-blocks of Mezraim, Champollion[452] has deciphered those hieroglyphics which seemed to be a seal set upon the lips of the desert that answered for their eternal discretion[453]. If new revolutions have struck off the map Poland, Holland[454], Genoa and Venice, other republics occupy a part of the shores of the Pacific and Atlantic. In those countries, a perfected civilization would be able to lend assistance to a vigorous nature: steam-boats would ascend those rivers destined to become easy means of communication after having been invincible obstacles; the banks of those rivers would become covered with towns and villages, even as we have seen new American States spring from the deserts of Kentucky. Through those forests once reputed impenetrable would fly horseless chariots, transporting enormous weights and thousands of travellers. Along those rivers, along those roads, would descend, together with the trees for the construction of the ships, the wealth of the mines which would serve to pay for them; and the Isthmus of Panama would burst its barrier to give passage to those ships from one sea to the other.

The shipping which borrows movement from fire is not restricted to the navigation of rivers: it crosses the Ocean; distances are shortening: no more currents, monsoons, contrary winds, blockades, close-ports. It is a far cry from this romance of industry to the hamlet of Plancoët[455]: in those days, the ladies used to play at old-time games by their fireside; the peasant-women spun the hemp for their clothes; the meagre resin-torch lit up the village evenings; chemistry had not worked its wonders; machinery had not set all the waters and all the irons in motion to weave the wools or embroider the silks; gas, left to the fire-balls, did not yet supply the lighting for our theatres and streets.

Those transformations are not confined to our abodes: obeying the instinct of his immortality, man has sent his intellect on high; at each step that he has taken in the firmament, he has recognised miracles of the Unspeakable Power. That star, which seemed single to our fathers, is double and treble to our eyes; suns interposed before suns eclipse one another and lack space for their multitude. In the centre of the Infinite, God sees passing around Him those magnificent theories, proofs added to the proofs of the Supreme Being.

Let us picture, according to our enlarged knowledge, our paltry planet swimming in an ocean whose waves are suns, in that milky way, the raw matter of light, the molten metal of worlds which the hand of the Creator will shape. The distance of certain stars is so prodigious that their brightness will not be able to reach the eye that watches them until those stars are extinct: the focus before the ray. How small is man on the atom where he moves! But how great he is as an intellect! He knows when the face of luminaries is to be overcast with shadow, at what hour comets will return after thousands of years: he who lives but an instant! Microscopic insect though he be, lying unperceived in a fold of the robe of the sky, the globes cannot hide from him a single one of their movements in the depth of space. What destinies will those stars, new to us, shine upon? Is the revelation of those stars linked with some new phase of humanity? You will know, O races yet to be born; I do not know, and I am going.

Thanks to the exorbitancy of my years, my monument is finished. It is a great relief to me; I felt some one urging me: the skipper of the bark in which my seat is taken was warning me that I had but a moment left to go on board. If I had been the master of Rome, I should say, like Sulla, that I am ending my Memoirs on the very eve of my death; but I should not conclude my story with those words with which he concludes his:

"I have seen, in a dream, one of my children who showed me Metella, his mother, and exhorted me to come to enjoy repose in the breast of eternal happiness."

If I had been Sulla, glory could never have given me repose and happiness.

End of my Memoirs.

New storms will arise; men seem to have a presentiment of calamities that will surpass the afflictions with which we have been overwhelmed; already they are thinking of binding up their old wounds again in order to return to the field of battle. Still, I do not believe in the early outbreak of misfortunes; peoples and kings alike are tired out; no unforeseen catastrophe will fall upon France: what comes after me will be only the effect of the general transformation. No doubt, there will be painful stations; the world cannot change its aspect without causing suffering. But, once more, there will be no separate revolutions; it will be the great revolution approaching its end. The scenes of to-morrow do not concern me; they call for other painters: it is your turn, gentlemen!

As I write these last words, on the 16th of November 1841, my window, which looks west over the gardens of the Foreign Missions, is open: it is six o'clock in the morning; I see the pale and spreading moon; it is sinking over the spire of the Invalides scarce revealed by the first gold ray from the East: one would say that the old world was ending and the new commencing. I behold the reflections of a dawn of which I shall not see the sun rise. It but remains for me to sit down by the edge of my grave; and then I shall descend boldly, crucifix in hand, to Eternity.

THE END.

APPENDICES

I. THE MORGANATIC MARRIAGE OF THE DUCHESSE DE BERRY

II. UNPUBLISHED FRAGMENTS OF THE MÉMOIRES D'OUTRE-TOMBE

III. THE LAST YEARS OF CHATEAUBRIAND

IV. THE TRANSLATOR'S SECOND NOTE

APPENDIX I

(By M. Edmond Biré)

THE MORGANATIC MARRIAGE OF THE DUCHESSE DE BERRY

The Comte de La Ferronnays, in the course of his interviews with King Charles X. at Hradschin Castle[456], brought himself to say:

"If Madame has not yet complied with Your Majesty's wish, if she has hitherto refused to furnish the proof which is asked of her, it is because her advisers in Paris, M. Hennequin[457] among others, have frightened her as to the consequences that might ensue to her from the publicity which it may perhaps be intended to give to her marriage. She has been told that Your Majesty would not be satisfied until you had the original instrument in your hands. Now Madame, I fear, will never part with that document. But, if there were any other means of obtaining the certainty which Your Majesty desires to have, if a man honoured with all the King's confidence, such as M. de Montbel, for instance, could, on his word of honour, vouch for the existence and the perfect regularity of the marriage-deed, would the King then declare himself satisfied?"

Since the Emigration, Charles X. had the habit of addressing M. de La Ferronnays in the second person singular. He replied eagerly:

"Yes, certainly, I only ask to be convinced."

It was then arranged that M. de La Ferronnays and M. de Montbel should go to Florence to the Duchesse de Berry. The Comte de La Ferronnays continues his narrative in the following words:

"On returning to Prague, I found M. de Montbel's carriage standing ready harnessed before my door. He was waiting for my return to set out for Florence, where we were to join the Duchess. He purposed to pass through Vienna, where he had to supply himself with certain papers which he thought useful. I intended to go straight to Tuscany. Nevertheless, in spite of all the haste that I made, I did not arrive until twenty-four hours after him.

"I immediately called at his hotel; it was six o'clock in the morning. Soon, Montbel joined me in a little sitting-room next to his bed-room:

"'We have made an useless journey,' he said to me at once; 'I much regret having undertaken it. I saw the Duchesse de Berry yesterday, one hour after my arrival. I found her more excited, more irritated against the King than ever. She is firmly decided to yield on no point and to risk all the consequences of a rupture by arriving in Prague, in spite of the measures taken to close the road to her. All my arguments, all my entreaties were useless. She ended by flying out against what she calls the partiality of my conduct. I can do no more. As for you, she expects you with impatience. She is persuaded that the letter which you are bringing her from the Emperor will give her the liberty to continue her journey. That letter, so different from what she expects, will increase her irritation two-fold. You will have a painful scene and it appears to me impossible that you should succeed in making her listen to reason.'"

As the Duchesse de Berry was not to receive M. de La Ferronnays until eleven o'clock, the latter, on leaving M. de Montbel, went to the Comte de Saint-Priest. M. de Saint-Priest was the Princess's most authorized adviser. The reception was perfect, but nevertheless wrapped up in every imaginable kind of reserve.

"At bottom, the question remains the same," said M. de Saint-Priest. "However affectionate the letter which M. de Montbel brought from the King may be, it makes no alteration in the first demands, nor, consequently, in the reasons which the Duchess has for rejecting them. The mere fact," concluded M. de Saint-Priest, "of handing over the marriage-deed, as Madame is asked to do, would be enough to deprive her of her rights as a mother, a princess of the Blood and Regent She refuses and will always refuse to hand it over."

This was brusquely broaching a question which M. de La Ferronnays meant to discuss only with the Duchess herself. He therefore left M. de Saint-Priest, not, however, without obtaining from him a promise of complete neutrality.

"At the appointed hour," he continues, in his narrative, "I called at the Poggio Imperiale, where Madame was staying. When I was announced, she was alone, in a small drawing-room, with Count Lucchesi, who at once withdrew.

"Her Royal Highness' first sentence was one of thanks. The second was to ask me for the Emperor's letter. She read it with ever-increasing excitement:

"'I see,' she at last said, angrily, 'that the party against me is firmly united. This letter of the Emperor's is evidently dictated by the King. They want to drive me to extremities. They want to be able to say to France and to my children that there is no Duchesse de Berry now, that there is only a foreigner entitled to neither protection nor pity! They are erecting a pillory and they want me to fasten myself to it.... They know me very little, if they think me capable of so mean-spirited an act. They who employ such lofty language to me have a false appreciation of their position and mine. They do not know the strength which public opinion can give me against them. They shall learn to know, for, as they want war, I accept it. I shall have everything printed, everything published. I shall prove that it is for me to impose conditions and not for me to accept any. I shall force the King to respect my rights and at last to give me back my children.'

"Madame la Duchesse de Berry's utterance was loud and short, her gestures abrupt; and, but for her extreme agitation, I might have thought that she was repeating a part which she had studied. I expected this outburst; I was also prepared with the language which I should have to hold; but I did not hurry to reply.

"Astonished at my silence:

"'But, after all,' she asked, 'don't you think that I am right?'

"'I shall dare to tell you everything, Madame, because my reasons for being absolutely sincere will justify the harshness of my words. All that Your Highness has just told me makes me fear that you are ill-informed, ill-advised or ill-inspired. I have listened to Madame with great attention and I am obliged to tell her that she is mistaken as to the King's intentions, but that she is also unfortunately mistaken as to her own position. The King, Madame, does not believe in Your Highness' marriage. He does not believe in it, because you refuse to give him the proof of it and because your friends continue to protest against the reality of this marriage. And yet it is important that the truth about this should be known. Too much has been said about it, or not enough. M. le Comte Lucchesi's presence about Your Highness is no longer to be explained. As long as this remains so, I am not afraid to say that the King, having his grand-children with him, cannot admit you into the interior of his family. Right, justice and reason are on His Majesty's side.'

"Here the Duchesse de Berry, whose agitation was extreme, was unable to contain herself any longer and cried:

"'But, monsieur, I give you my word of honour that I am married. The marriage-deed, which is perfectly regular, exists. It is deposited in safe hands, and I shall certainly not take it from them to place it in those of Charles X. and M. de Metternich.'

"'I beg Your Highness to observe that this is the first time that you have deigned to speak to me with such confidence. One declaration of this kind made to me in Naples with that accent of truth would, I dare to think, have been enough to enable me to fulfil in an entirely satisfactory manner the mission with which Your Royal Highness was pleased to entrust me. But what had I to oppose to the King's doubts? What could I tell him to reassure his conscience? Nothing, Madame, for you had told me nothing. My personal conviction could carry no weight Your friends, moreover, reproached me with it. To admit that one believed in Your Highness' marriage seemed to them almost an act of treachery. I could therefore say nothing and I was obliged to leave the King in the fulness of his doubts. Do not believe, Madame, that it is to Charles X.'s interest to stigmatize the widow of his son and the mother of his grandson. No, he shows himself only jealous of your honour as a widow and a mother, believe me. The King may have disapproved of a marriage contracted without his knowledge, he may even have become irritated at it; but to-day he asks only to set his conscience at rest and to shelter your honour. Your Royal Highness speaks of the strength which public opinion will give you. You seem to threaten the King and the Powers with your anger. Alas, all those outbursts would only be new and great misfortunes. It is very painful for me to be reduced to give utterance only to cruel words. But it is necessary that Madame should at last know the truth, so that she may resolve upon a necessary sacrifice. No, Madame is no longer in a situation to dictate terms or impose conditions: she still judges her position from the height of the pedestal upon which public opinion for some time placed her. No doubt, if Your Royal Highness had remained there; if, after the admiration inspired by her sublime courage, constancy, devotion, we had had to bemoan only her reverses and her captivity, not only would Madame have lost none of her spell, but she would have left Blaye even greater than when she entered it. She would not have had to dictate conditions, for she would have found none but submissive wills before her. But, unhappily for Madame and for France, the declaration made in the month of February has completely and cruelly changed all that. Believe, Madame, the voice of a friend who will never be able to give you a greater proof of his devotion than he is doing at this moment; or rather, listen only to your reason. It will make you understand why and to what extent your position is changed. You will admit how guilty is the want of reflection of those who advise you to resort to resistance and even threats. Everyone pities you, Madame, but no one is any longer afraid of you. The struggle which you are being urged to maintain is henceforth too unequal. Its prolongation can henceforth have fatal consequences for you alone.'

"While speaking, I saw the unhappy Princess turn red, then pale; tears poured down her cheeks, but she did not try to interrupt me. I was able to fulfil my sad duty to the end. She then looked at me with an indefinable expression of face:

"'If all that you have just told me is true, they are deceiving me and I am very unhappy. What do you want me to do? Can I send that original document which, before the courts, would be my condemnation?'

"'No, Madame, I am the first to tell Your Highness that you must in no case part with it. Only, the King's conscience desires to be reassured; there is no other motive in his demand. If the King could obtain the certainty of Your Highness' marriage, without your parting with the original, without your even giving a copy of it, should you see any danger, for yourself or your interests, in satisfying Charles X.?'

"The Princess tried to guess my thought.

"'But what means can you contrive that would satisfy the King, since he refuses to believe my word?'

"'The King does not believe it, because you have not given it him.'

"'But I tell you again that I am married. The deed is in Rome, in the Pope's hands.'

"'Well then, Madame, if a man honoured by your confidence and the King's, if M. de Montbel were to go to Rome, would you refuse to allow the holder of your marriage-deed to give him cognizance of it, or at least to certify its existence to him? I am certain that M. de Montbel's declaration would be immediately followed by the dispatch of the passports which Your Highness so impatiently desires.'

"Madame la Duchesse de Berry, at last conquered, came up to me and said, with a sad smile:

"'I see no harm in trying the method which you propose, but you understand that I cannot decide alone. Count Lucchesi's consent is as necessary as my own.'

"M. le Comte Lucchesi was in a neighbouring room, with Messieurs de Montbel and de Saint-Priest; I called him in. Madame herself repeated to him the proposal which I had just made. He did not hesitate to accept.

"I then asked that the two other gentlemen might be brought in. We all sat round a little table before which Madame la Duchesse de Berry was herself seated and, at her bidding, I gave an account of the explanation which I had just had with her. As I was finishing, I addressed the Comte de Montbel:

"'And now, monsieur, it is for you alone, who know the King's mind and who, so to speak, represent him here, to judge and declare if the method which I propose will be able to satisfy His Majesty and put an end to his opposition to Madame's journey to Prague.'

"'I give a formal undertaking to that effect,' cried M. de Montbel, with deep emotion. I Madame, how great is the gratitude that we owe you and how happy I shall be, if I can have contributed a little towards a reconciliation for which I long with all my soul!'

"I proposed to M. de Montbel himself to draw up, then and there, the rough draft of a letter to the Cardinal Vicar, which would then be copied out and signed by Madame and by Count Lucchesi. A few moments were enough to prepare this draft, which was approved of.

"It was arranged that the letter should be written during the day, and Madame invited us to meet again there at noon the next day; she added that M. de Montbel could then, set out for Rome and that she herself would leave Florence two days later to go to Bologna, where M. de Montbel would join her again.

"The next day, as arranged, we met, at the appointed time, at the Poggio Imperiale. Her Highness received us with an air of contentment which I, for my part, had not yet seen her display.

"'I have,' she said, 'done all that you asked. I hope that they will be pleased at last.'

"At the same time, she showed us her letter to the Cardinal Vicar; this letter agreed exactly with the copy as given by M. de Montbel. Madame's signature and Count Lucchesi's were at foot, and the signatures had been witnessed by the Grand-duke of Tuscany and his minister, Fossombroni[458]. M. de Montbel set out the same evening for Rome, and I left Florence two days later.

"At a stage at Viterbo, I met M. de Montbel, who had already fulfilled his mission; he had stayed only half a day in Rome. He had seen no one but the Cardinal Vicar, who, after taking the Pope's instructions, had hastened not only to give him a declaration in writing of Madame la Duchesse de Berry's marriage to Count Lucchesi, but had shown him the deed itself, which was perfectly regular. M. de Montbel had decided to travel without stopping and was convinced of the definite success of his mission."

APPENDIX II

UNPUBLISHED FRAGMENTS OF THE MÉMOIRES D'OUTRE-TOMBE[459]

Maintenon, September 1836.

I resume my pen at the Château de Maintenon, through whose gardens I stroll by the autumnal light: peregrinæ gentis amænum hospitium.

When passing in front of the coasts of Greece, I used to ask myself what had become of the four acres of the garden of Alcinous, shaded with pomegranate-trees, apple-trees, fig-trees and adorned with two fountains? Goodman Laertes' vegetable-garden in Ithaca no longer had its two and twenty pear-trees when I was sailing before that island, and they were not able to tell me if Zante was still the home of the hyacinth. The pleasure-ground of Academus, in Athens, offered a few stumps of olive-trees to my view, as did the Garden of Gethsemane at Jerusalem. I have not wandered in the gardens of Babylon, but Plutarch teaches us that they still existed in the time of Alexander. Carthage presented to me the aspect of a park strewn with the vestiges of Dido's palaces. At Granada, looking through the doorways of the Alhambra, I could not take my eyes from the groves in which the romance of Spain had placed the loves of the Zegris. From the top of David's house at Jerusalem, the King-Prophet saw Bethsabee bathing in Urias' gardens; I saw none pass there save a daughter of Eve, a poor Abigail, who will never inspire me with the magnificent Penitential Psalms.

During the Conclave of 1828, I strolled in the Gardens of the Vatican. An eagle, plucked of its feathers and imprisoned in a den, presented the emblem of Pagan Rome overthrown; an emaciated rabbit was delivered as a prey to the bird of the Capitol, which had devoured the world. Monks have shown me, at Tusculum and Tibur, the waste fruit-groves of Cicero and Horace. I have shot wild-duck in Pliny's Laurentinum; the waves came to die at the foot of the wall of the dining-room, where, through three windows, one descried as it were three seas: quasi tria maria.

In Rome herself, as I lay among the wild anemones of Bel Respiro, between the pine-trees that formed a vault above my head, the Sabine Range opened to the view in the distance; Albano enchanted my eyes with its azure mountain, whose lofty denticulations were fringed with gold by the last rays of the sun: a sight that became more admirable still when I came to think that Virgil had contemplated it, as I was doing, and that I was seeing it again, from the midst of the ruins of the city of the Cæsars, across the vine-branch of the Tomb of the Scipios[460].

If, from these Gardens of the Hesperides of poetry and history, I descend to the gardens of our days, how many have I seen born and die? Without speaking of the woods of Sceaux, Marly, Choisy, now razed to the level of the corn-fields, without speaking of the thickets of Versailles, which they purpose to restore to their festal condition! I too have planted gardens; my little water-furrow, which served as a passage for the winter rains, was in my eyes equal to the ponds of the Prædium rusticum.

Seen from the side of the park, the Château de Maintenon, surrounded by moats filled from the waters of the Eure, presents on the left a square tower of bluish stone, on the right a round tower of red brick. The square tower is connected, by a block of buildings, with the surbased archway which opens from the outer yard to the inner yard of the castle. Above this, archway rises a mass of turrets from which starts a building which is attached transversely to another block coming from the round tower. These three lines of buildings contain a space closed on three sides and open only on the park.

The seven or eight towers of different thickness, height and shape are capped with priests' bonnets, which mix with a church-window, placed outside, towards the village.

The façade of the castle on the village side is of the Renascence period. The fancifulness of this style of architecture gives the Château de Maintenon a special character, as who should say of a town of olden time or a fortified abbey, with its spires and steeples, grouped at hap-hazard.

To complete the medley of periods, there is a great aqueduct, the work of Louis XIV.; one would think it a labour of the Cæsars. One goes down from the drawing-room of the castle into the garden by a bridge, lately put up, which partakes of the architecture of the Rialto. Thus are Ancient Rome and the Italian Cinquecento associated with the French sixteenth century. Memories of Bianca Capello[461] and de' Medici, of the Duchesse d'Étampes[462] and Francis I. rise up through memories of Louis XIV. and Madame de Maintenon, while all this is swayed and completed by the recent catastrophe of Charles X.

The castle was rebuilt by Jean Cottereau[463] Treasurer to Louis XII. Marot, in his Cimetière, maintains that Cottereau was too honest a man for a financier. One of Cottereau's daughters brought the Maintenon domain into the d'Angennes family. In 1675, this domain was bought by Françoise d'Aubigné, who became Madame de Maintenon. Maintenon reverted to the Noailles family, in 1698, through the marriage of a niece[464] of the wife of Louis XIV. with Adrien Maurice Duc de Noailles[465].

The park has something of the calm and gravity of the Great King. Near the middle, the first tier of arcades of the aqueduct crosses the bed of the Eure and connects the two hills on opposite sides of the valley, so that at Maintenon a branch of the Eure would have flowed in the air above the Eure. "In the air" is the word: for the first arcades, as they exist, are eighty-four feet high and they were to have been surmounted by two other tiers of arcades.

The Roman aqueducts are nothing beside the aqueducts of Maintenon; they would all go under one of those arches. I know only the Aqueduct of Segovia, in Spain, which recalls the massiveness and solidity of this one; but it is shorter and lower[466]. If you picture to yourself some thirty triumphal arches linked laterally one with the other and more or less resembling the Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile in height and width of opening, you will have an idea of the Maintenon Aqueduct; but even then you must remember that what you see is only a third of the perpendicular and of the perforation which would have been formed by the treble gallery destined for the passage of the waters.

The fallen fragments of this aqueduct are compact blocks of rocks; they are covered with trees around which hover crows fat as doves: they flit to and fro under the curves of the aqueduct like little black fairies performing fatidical dances under garlands.

At the sight of this monument, one is struck with the imposing character with which Louis XIV. imprinted all his works. It is for ever to be regretted that this gigantic conduit was not finished: the water carried to Versailles would have fed the fountains there and created a new marvel by making their waters play perpetually; from there it might have been brought to the suburbs. It is a pity, no doubt, that the camp formed for the works at Maintenon in 1686 caused the death of a large number of soldiers[467]; it is a pity that many millions should have been spent on an uncompleted undertaking. But, certainly, it is a still greater pity that Louis XIV., driven by necessity, astounded at the cries of economy which frustrate the loftiest schemes, should have lost patience: otherwise, the greatest monument on earth would to-day have belonged to France.

Say what we may, a nation's fame increases that nation's power, and that is no vain thing. As for the millions, their value would have been represented at high interest by an edifice as useful as it was wonderful; as for the soldiers, they would have fallen as the Roman legions fell in building their famous "roads," another kind of battle-field, no less glorious for the country.

It was in this alley of old willow-trees, where I was strolling a moment ago, that Racine, after the triumph of Pradon's[468] Phèdre, sighed his last songs[469].

Madame de Maintenon, having attained the summit of greatness, wrote to her brother[470]:

"I am done up, I would that I were dead."

She wrote to Madame de La Maisonfort:

"Do you not see that I am dying of melancholy.... I have been young and pretty; I have tasted pleasure... and I protest to you that every condition leaves a horrid void."

Madame de Maintenon exclaimed:

"What a torment to have to amuse a man who is no longer capable of amusement!"

It has been reckoned as a crime against the daughter of a simple nobleman[471], against the widow of Scarron[472], that she should speak in this way of Louis XIV., who had raised her to his bed; but I see in this the accent of a superior nature, which was above the exalted fortune to which she had attained. Only I would have preferred that Madame de Maintenon had not left the dying Louis XIV., especially after hearing these grave and tender words:

"I regret only you; I have not made you happy, but I have always had for you all the sentiments of esteem and friendship which you deserve: the only thing that vexes me is to leave you[473]."

The last years of that Monarch were an expiation offered to the first. Stripped of his prosperity and his family[474], he allowed his eyes to roam from this window over that garden. He no doubt fixed them on that water-conduit already abandoned since twenty years: great ruins that they were, an image of the ruins of the Great King, they seemed to foretell the exhaustion of his House and to await his great-grandson. The time in which Le Nôtre[475] designed the gardens of Versailles for Mademoiselle de La Vallière was past; the time was also past, more than a century earlier, of Olivier de Serres[476], who said to Henry IV., when planning gardens for Gabrielle:

"We can cultivate sugar-canes, so that, coupled with the orange-tree and its companions, the garden shall be perfectly ennobled and rendered most magnificent."

In the absorption of those dreams which sometimes confer second sight, Louis XIV. might have discerned his immediate successor hastening the fall of the arches in the Eure Valley to take from them the materials for the mean pavilions of his ignoble mistresses[477]. After Louis XV, he might have seen yet another shadow kneel down, bow its head and lay it silently on the pediment of the aqueduct, as though on a scaffold raised in the sky. Lastly, who knows if, in one of those presentiments attached to royal Houses, Louis XIV. might not, one night, in that Château de Maintenon, have heard a knock at his door:

"Who goes there?"

"Charles X., your descendant."

Louis XIV. did not wake up to see Madame de Maintenon's corpse dragged with a rope round its neck around Saint-Cyr.

Maintenon, September 1836.

My host[478] has described to me the half-a-night which Charles X., banished, spent at the Château de Maintenon. The Monarchy of the Capets ended in a castle-scene of the middle-ages; the Kings of the past had gone back into their centuries to die. As in the time of Cæsar, "the gods announce a great change and revolution in affairs[479]."

The manuscript of one of M. le Duc de Noailles's nieces[480], which he was good enough to show me, relates the incidents which that young lady witnessed. He has permitted me to make the following extracts:

"My uncle, anticipating that the King was going to come to ask him for shelter, gave orders to have the castle made ready.... We got up to receive the King and, while awaiting his arrival, I went to a window in the turret which comes before the billiard-room, to watch what was happening in the court-yard. The night was calm and clear, the half-veiled moon made every object visible in a pale, sad light, and the silence, as yet, was disturbed only by the hoofs of the horses of two regiments of cavalry defiling across the bridge; after them, over the same bridge, defiled the artillery of the Guard, with matches lighted. The dull sound of the guns, the appearance of the black ammunition-wagons, the sight of the torches amid the shadows of the night oppressed my heart terribly and presented the image—alas, too true!—of the funeral procession of the Monarchy.

"Soon, the horses and the first carriages arrived; next, M. le Dauphin and Madame la Dauphine, Madame la Duchesse de Berry, M. le Duc de Bordeaux and Mademoiselle; lastly, the King and all his suite. As the King alighted from his carriage, he seemed extremely dejected: his head had fallen on his chest; his features were drawn and his face distorted with sorrow. This almost sepulchral march of four hours, at a foot's pace[481] and in the midst of the darkness, had also helped to depress his spirits; and, besides, did not the crown weigh heavily enough, at that moment, on his brow? He had some difficulty in ascending the stair-case. My uncle showed him to his apartment, which had been that of Madame de Maintenon; he remained there a few moments alone with his family, after which each of the Princes withdrew to his own room. My uncle and aunt[482] then went in to the King. He spoke to them with his ordinary kindness, told them how wretched he was at not having succeeded in rendering France happy, that that had always been his dearest wish:

"'My one despair is,' he added, 'to see the state in which I am leaving her; what is going to happen? The Duc d'Orléans himself is not sure that his head will be on his shoulders a fortnight hence. All Paris is there, on the road, marching against me; the commissaries have assured me so. I did not trust their report entirely; I called Maison, when they had gone out, and said to him, "I ask you on your honour to tell me, on your word as a soldier, is what they have told me true?" He answered, "They have told you only half the truth[483].'"

"After the King had retired, we all returned to our rooms in succession. I would not go to bed, and I went back to the window to watch the sight that lay before my eyes. A foot-guard was standing sentry at the little door of the grand stair-case, a body-guard was posted on the outer balcony which leads from the square tower to the part where the King was sleeping. In the first rays of the dawn, that warlike figure was outlined in a picturesque manner on the walls darkened by time and his steps resounded on those time-worn stones, as did, perhaps, in former days, those of the steel-clad gallants who had trodden them....

"At half past seven, I went to dress in my aunt's room and, at nine o'clock, I went down, with Madame de Rivera, to M. le Duc de Bordeaux's, where Mademoiselle came soon after. M. le Duc de Bordeaux was amusing himself, with my aunt's children, in throwing bread to the fish and tumbling with the others on mattresses spread out in the room. Nothing was so heart-rending as the sight of those children thus laughing at the misfortunes that struck them. At ten o'clock, the King went to Mass in the castle chapel. It was in that little chapel that the unfortunate Monarch made his sacrifice to God and laid at His feet that brilliant crown which had been so grievously snatched from him, with that admirable, but useless virtue of resignation which is an hereditary heroism in his unhappy family.

"It was, in fact, at Maintenon that Charles X. really ceased to reign; it was there that he disbanded the Royal Guard and the Swiss, keeping only the body-guards for his escort. From that moment, he gave no more orders and in some measure constituted himself a prisoner: the commissaries settled his road to Cherbourg.

"After Mass, the King went back for a moment to his room, and then the sinister procession started off again, at half-past ten. The departure was heart-breaking: every misfortune and the noblest resignation were depicted on the face of Madame la Dauphine, so long accustomed to sorrow. She spoke a few words to me; then, stepping towards the guards who were drawn up in the court-yard, she held out her hand to them; they flung themselves upon it, shedding tears; her own eyes were full, and she uttered these words, in a firm voice:

"'It is not my fault, my friends, it is not my fault.'

"M. le Dauphin embraced M. de Diesbach, who commanded the guards, and mounted his horse. M. le Duc de Bordeaux and Mademoiselle each climbed into a separate carriage. The King went last; he spoke for some time to my uncle, in a manner full of kindness, and thanked him for the hospitality which he had shown him; then he went up to the troops and took leave of them with that accent of the heart which belongs to him:

"'I hope,' he said, 'that we shall soon meet again.'

"A rural gendarme threw himself at his feet and kissed his hand sobbing; he gave it to several others and, turning to the foot-guard who was on sentry and who presented arms to him:

"'Come,' he said, 'I thank you, you have done your duty well. I am pleased with you; but you must be very tired.'

"'Ah, Sire,' answered the old soldier, while great tears trickled down upon his white mustachios, 'it's nothing to be tired: if only we had been able to save Your Majesty!'

"A grenadier, at that moment, made his way through the crowd and came up and stood in front of the King:

"'What do you want?' asked His Majesty.

"'Sire,' answered the soldier, raising his hand to his bear-skin, 'I wanted to look at you once more.'

"The King, deeply moved, threw himself into his carriage, and the whole scene disappeared."

Maintenon, September 1836.

Calamities extend their effect by the fate of him who describes them: this narrative is the work of Madame de Chalais-Périgord, née Beauvilliers-Saint-Aignan. The Duc de Beauvilliers[484] was, under Louis XIV., the governor of the Prince who was the stock of the family outlawed to-day. The last daughter of Fénelon's friend came unexpectedly upon the Duc de Bordeaux on his road and hastened to go to tell her father that she had seen the last heir of the Duc de Bourgogne pass. In the young princess, beauty, rank and fortune were combined; she had first turned her thoughts to the world, in search of pleasure; her hope, like the dove after the Deluge, finding the earth soiled, flew back to the Ark of God.

When, in 1816, I passed this spot, on my way to write the eleventh book of the first part of these Memoirs at Montboissier[485], Maintenon Castle stood empty; Madame de Chalais was not yet born: since, she has spread out and reckoned her whole life over twenty-six years of mine. Thus have the shreds of my existence composed the spring-time of a number of women who have fallen after their month of May. Montboissier is now deserted and Maintenon inhabited: its new occupiers are my hosts.

M. le Duc de Noailles, who, if nothing stops him, will achieve a brilliant career, was not of an age to vote when I was in the House of Peers: I did not hear him deliver those speeches in which he has pleaded, with the authority of arguments and the power of words, the cause of France and of the royal misfortunes. His part in life began when mine had finished: he took the oath to misfortune in a more useful way than I.

Madame la Duchesse de Noailles is a niece of M. le Marquis de Mortemart, my old colonel in the Navarre Regiment; she bears a sad and gentle likeness to my sister Julie[486].

The rivalries of Madame de Maintenon and Madame de Montespan have been resolved by the marriage of M. le Duc de Noailles and Mademoiselle de Mortemart[487]. At this present time, who troubles his brain about a sovereign's heart? That heart has been chilled these hundred and twenty years; and, in the decrial and vilification of monarchies, are the attachments of a king, even though it were Louis XIV., events? What can one measure by the huge scale of our modern revolutions that does not contract to an imperceptible point? Do the new generations care about the intrigues of Versailles, which is no longer anything but a crypt? What matters to our transformed society the end of the enmities of blood of some women once destined, in bowers or palaces, to lie on beds of flowers or down?

And yet, around the general interests of history, would there not be historical curiosities? If some Aulus Gellius, some Macrobius, some Strabo, some Suidas, some Athenasus of the fifth or sixth century, after describing to me the sack of Rome by Alaric, were, by chance, to tell me what became of Berenice after Titus had repudiated her; if he were to show me Antiochus returning to that Cæsarea, the "charming spot where his heart" ...had adored her who loved another; if he were to take me to a castle in the Lebanon inhabited by a descendant of the Queen of Palestine, in spite of the destruction of the Eternal City and the invasion of the Barbarians, it would still please me to come across the memory of Berenice in the "desert East."