BOOK V[218] (continued 2)

*

The sittings of the National Assembly offered a spectacle of an interest which our "Chambers" are far from approaching. One rose early to find room in the crowded galleries. The deputies arrived eating, talking, gesticulating; they formed groups in the various parts of the house, according to their opinions. The orders of the day were read; after that, the subject agreed upon was set forth, or else an extraordinary motion. There was no question of any insipid point of law; rarely did some scheme of destruction fail to form part of the proceedings. The members spoke for or against; each spoke extempore as best he could. The debates grew stormy; the galleries joined in the discussion, applauded and cheered, hissed and hooted the speakers. The president rang his bell, the deputies apostrophized each other from bench to bench. Mirabeau the Younger[371] took his competitor by the collar; Mirabeau the Elder cried:

"Silence, the 'thirty votes'!"

One day I was seated behind the royalist opposition; before me was a Dauphiné nobleman, swarthy of visage, short of stature, who jumped upon his seat with rage and said to his friends:

"Let us fall upon those ragamuffins, sword in hand!"

He pointed in the direction of the majority. The ladies of the markets, who sat knitting in the galleries, heard him, rose from their seats, and all cried at once, their stockings in their hands, and foaming at the mouth:

"To the lantern with them!"

The Vicomte de Mirabeau, Lautrec[372], and some younger nobles proposed to take the galleries by assault.

Soon this tumult was drowned by another: petitioners, armed with pikes, appeared at the bar:

"The people are starving," they said: "it is time to take measures against the aristocrats and to rise 'to the level of the situation.'"

The president assured these citizens of his respect:

"We have our eye upon the traitors," he replied, "and the Assembly will see justice done."

The National Assembly.

Thereupon a fresh din; the deputies of the Right cried that they were making for anarchy; the deputies of the Left replied that the people was free to express its will, that it had the right to complain of the abettors of despotism, seated in the very midst of the national representatives: they spoke thus of their colleagues to that sovereign people which was waiting for them under the street lamps.

The evening sittings surpassed the morning sittings in scandalousness: people speak better and more boldly by candlelight. At such times the Riding-hall became a veritable playhouse, in which was enacted one of the greatest tragedies in the world. The leading characters still belonged to the old order of things: their terrible substitutes, hidden behind them, spoke little or not at all. At the end of a violent discussion, I saw a common-looking deputy ascend the tribune, a man with a grey and impassive face, his hair neatly dressed, decently clad like the steward in a good house, or like a village attorney careful of his appearance. He read a long and tedious report; he was not listened to; I asked his name: it was Robespierre[373]. The men in leathern shoes were ready to leave the drawing-rooms, and already the wooden shoes were kicking at the door.

*

When, before the Revolution, I read the history of public disturbances among various nations, I could not conceive how it was possible to live in those times; I was surprised that Montaigne was able to write with such spirit in a castle which he could not go round without running the risk of being taken prisoner by bands of Leaguers or Protestants[374].

The Revolution made me understand the possibility of existence under such conditions. Moments of crisis produce a reduplication of life in men. In a society which is dissolving and Recomposing itself, the struggle of two geniuses, the clash of the past and the future, the mixture of old manners and new manners form a transient combination which does not leave a moment for weariness. Passions and characters, when at liberty, display themselves with an energy which they do not possess in the well-regulated State. The breaches of the laws, the emancipation from duties, social usages, and seemly manners, the very dangers, all add to the interest of this disorder. The human race making holiday perambulates the streets, having got rid of its schoolmasters and returned for a moment to a state of nature, and does not begin again to feel the need of social restraint until it bears the yoke of the new tyrants engendered by license.

The theatres.

I cannot better depict society in 1789 and 1790 than by comparing it with the architecture of the time of Louis XII. and François I., when the Greek orders began to be grafted upon the Gothic style, or rather by likening it to the collection of ruins and tombs of all ages heaped pell-mell, after the Terror, in the cloisters of the Petits-Augustins: only, the ruins of which I speak were alive and constantly changing. In every corner of Paris were literary sets, political societies, and spectacles; future celebrities wandered unrecognized in the crowd, like the souls on the shore of Lethe, before enjoying the light. I saw Marshal Gouvion-Saint-Cyr[375], play a part in Beaumarchais' Mère Coupable[376] at the Théâtre du Marais. One went from the Club des Feuillants to the Club des Jacobins, from the public ball-rooms and gaming-houses to the meetings in the Palais-Royal, from the gallery of the National Assembly to the gallery in the open air. The streets were filled with popular deputations, cavalry pickets, infantry patrols passing to and fro. Behind a man in a French coat, with powdered hair, a sword, a hat carried under his arm, pumps and silk stockings, walked a man wearing his hair short and without powder, an English frock and an American neck-cloth. At the theatres the actors gave out the news; the pit shouted patriotic ditties. Topical pieces drew crowds: an Abbé appeared upon the stage; the audience cried, "Jack-priest! Jack-priest!" and the Abbé answered:

"Gentlemen, long live the nation!"

People trooped to hear Mandini and his wife, Viganoni and Rovedino[377], sing at the Opera Buffa after hearing Ça ira roared in the streets; they went to admire Madame Dugazon[378], Madame Saint-Aubin[379], Carline[380], little Olivier[381], Mademoiselle Contat, Molé, Fleury, Talma at the commencement of his career, after seeing Favras hanged.

The walks on the Boulevard du Temple and the Boulevard des Italiens, or de Coblentz, the paths of the Tuileries Gardens were inundated with smartly dressed women: three young daughters of Grétry's[382] shone there, white and pink as their costumes; they soon died, all three.

"She fell asleep for ever," said Grétry, speaking of his eldest daughter, "seated on my knees, as beautiful as in life."

A multitude of carriages ploughed across the muddy spaces in which the sans-culottes plodded on foot, and one saw the beautiful Madame de Buffon[383] sitting alone in a phaeton belonging to the Duc d'Orléans, waiting at the door of some club.

All that was elegant and in good taste in aristocratic society met at the Hôtel de La Rochefoucauld[384], at the soirées of Mesdames de Poix, d'Hénin, de Simiane, de Vaudreuil, in the few salons that remained open of the upper magisterial circle. At M. Necker's, at M. le Comte de Montmorin's, at the houses of the different ministers gathered (in addition to Madame de Staël, the Duchesse d'Aiguillon, Mesdames de Beaumont[385] and de Sérilly[386]) all the new lights of France and all the liberties of the new manners. The shoemaker knelt to take the measure of your foot in the uniform of an officer of the National Guard; the monk who on Friday trailed his white or black gown along the ground appeared on Sunday in a round hat and a lay coat; the shorn Capuchin read the paper in the public-house, and in the midst of a circle of frivolous women, a nun appeared gravely seated: it was an aunt or a sister turned out of her monastery. The crowd visited these convents thrown open to the world like the travellers who, at Grenada, wander through the deserted halls of the Alhambra, or, at Tivoli, linger beneath the columns of the Sibyl's temple.

For the rest, many duels and love-affairs, prison attachments and political friendships, mysterious meetings among ruins, under a tranquil sky, amid nature's peace and poetry; silent, remote, solitary walks, mingled with undying oaths and indefinable affections, to the dull tumult of a fleeing world, to the distant noise of a crumbling society, which threatened in its fall to crush the happiness set at the foot of events. Those who had lost sight of each other for twenty-four hours were not sure of ever meeting again. Some went the revolutionary way; others contemplated civil war; others set out for Ohio, sending ahead plans for country-houses to be built among the savages; others went to join the Princes: all this cheerfully, often without a sou in their pockets, the Royalists declaring that the thing would come to an end one of these mornings by a decree of Parliament, the patriots, quite as airy in their hopes, foretelling the reign of peace and happiness together with that of liberty. People sang:

La sainte chandelle d'Arras, Le flambeau de la Provence, S'ils ne nous éclairent pas, Mettent le feu dans la France; On ne peut pas les toucher, Mais on espère les moucher[387].

And that was how people spoke of Robespierre and Mirabeau!

"It is as little within the power of any earthly faculty," wrote L'Éstoile[388], "to keep the French people from talking as to hide the sun in the ground or bury it in a hole."

The Palace of the Tuileries, a great gaol filled with sentenced prisoners, rose erect amid these festivals of destruction. The condemned themselves made merry while waiting for the "cart," the "shears," and the "red shirt" which had been put out to dry; and through the windows one saw the dazzling illuminations of the Queen's circle.

The newspapers.

Pamphlets and newspapers swarmed in thousands; the satires and poems, the songs of the Actes des Apôtres[389] replied to the Ami du peuple, or to the Modérateur[390] of the Club Monarchien, edited by Fontanes; Mallet Du Pan[391], on the political side of the Mercure, was in opposition to La Harpe and Chamfort on the literary side of the same journal. Champcenetz[392], the Marquis de Bonnay, Rivarol[393], Mirabeau the Younger (the Holbein of the sword, who levied on the Rhine the legion of the Hussars of Death), Honoré Mirabeau the Elder amused themselves by drawing caricatures at dinner and composing the Petit almanach des grands hommes: Honoré would subsequently go off to move martial law or the seizure of the property of the clergy. He spent the night at Madame Le Jay's[394], after declaring that he would not leave the National Assembly unless driven out at the point of the bayonet. Égalité consulted the devil in the Montrouge stone-quarries, and returned to the Jardin de Monceau to preside over the orgies prepared by Laclos[395]. The future regicide proved himself worthy of his race: he was twice prostituted; debauchery handed him over exhausted to ambition. Lauzun[396], already worn out, supped in his pleasure-house at the Barrière du Maine with dancers from the Opera, caressed indifferently by Messrs. de Noailles, de Dillon[397], de Choiseul, de Talleyrand[398] and other elegants of the time, of whom two or three mummies still survive.

The majority of the courtiers celebrated for their immorality at the end of the reign of Louis XV., and during the reign of Louis XVI., were enlisted under the tricolour banner: almost all of them had been through the American war and had besmirched their ribbons with the Republican colours. The Revolution employed them so long as it remained at a middling height; they even became the first generals of its armies. The Duc de Lauzun, the romantic lover of the Princess Czartoriska, the woman-hunter of the high-road, the Lovelace who "had" this one and then "had" that one, in the chaste and noble cant of the Court; the Duc de Lauzun, becoming Duc de Biron, and commanding the forces of the Convention in the Vendée: the pity of it! The Baron de Besenval[399], the lying and cynical revealer of the corruption of the upper classes, the fly on the wheel of the puerilities of the expiring old monarchy; that ponderous baron, compromised in the affair of the Bastille, and saved by M. Necker and Mirabeau only because he was a Swiss: the disgrace of it! What had such men to do with such events? When the Revolution had attained its full height, it scornfully abandoned these frivolous apostates from the throne: it had needed their vices, it now needed their heads; it disdained no blood, not even that of the Du Barry[400].

*

The year 1790 brought to completion the measures outlined by the year 1789. The property of the Church, first placed in the hands of the nation, was confiscated, the civil constitution of the clergy decreed, the nobility abolished.

The Federation of July.

I did not attend the Federation of July 1790: a somewhat serious illness made me keep my bed; but before that I had been much amused by the sight of the wheel-barrows on the Champ de Mars. Madame de Staël has written a wonderful description of that scene[401]. I shall always regret not to have seen M. de Talleyrand say Mass, served by the Abbé Louis[402], as I regret not to have seen him, sword at side, give audience to the Ambassador of the Grand Turk.

Mirabeau forfeited his popularity in the year 1790; his relations with the Court were obvious. M. Necker resigned office and withdrew into private life, none caring to restrain him[403]. Mesdames, the King's aunts, left for Rome with a passport from the National Assembly[404]. The Duc d'Orléans returned from England and declared himself the King's most humble and most obedient servant. Societies of Friends of the Constitution multiplied upon the soil and connected themselves with the parent society, receiving its suggestions and executing its orders.

Public life met with a favourable disposition in my character: I was attracted by what happened in public, because, in the crowd, I beheld my loneliness and had no occasion to combat my shyness. Nevertheless, the salons, sharing as they did in the universal agitation, had become a little less foreign to my mood, and I had made new acquaintances in spite of myself.

The Marquise de Villette I had met casually. Her husband[405], who bore a slandered reputation, wrote with Monsieur, the King's brother, in the Journal de Paris. Madame de Villette, still charming, lost a daughter of sixteen, more charming than her mother, upon whom the Chevalier de Parny wrote some verses worthy of the Anthology[406].

My regiment, which was in garrison at Rouen, preserved its discipline pretty late. It had an encounter with the mob on the subject of the execution of the actor Bordier[407], who underwent the last sentence pronounced by the parliamentary power; hanged one day, he would have been a hero the next, had he lived twenty-four hours longer. But at last the insurrection showed itself among the soldiers of the Navarre Regiment. The Marquis de Mortemart emigrated; his officers followed him. I had neither adopted nor rejected the new opinions; I was as little disposed to attack as to serve them, was unwilling either to emigrate or to continue in the military career, and I resigned my commission.

Freed from all bonds, I had, on the one side, somewhat animated discussions with my brother and the President de Rosanbo; on the other, discussions no less embittered with Ginguené, La Harpe, and Chamfort. From my early youth, my political impartiality pleased nobody. Besides, I attached importance to the questions then raised only through general ideas concerning the liberty and dignity of the human race; personal politics bored me; my real life lay in higher regions.

The streets of Paris, blocked with people night and day, were no longer suited to my lounging inclinations. To recover the desert, I took refuge in the theatre: I ensconced myself at the back of a box and allowed my thoughts to wander to the sound of Racine's[408] verses, Sacchini's[409] music, or the Opera ballets. I must have had the courage to see Barbe-bleue[410] and the Sabot perdu[411] twenty times in succession at the Italiens, courting tedium in order to dispel it, like an owl in a hole in a wall; while the monarchy fell, I heard neither the cracking of the venerable vaults nor the screeching of the vaudeville, neither Mirabeau's voice thundering in the tribune nor Colin's singing to Babet on the stage:

Qu'il pleuve, qu'il vente ou qu'il neige, Quand la nuit est longue, ou l'abrège[412].

Madame Ginguené sometimes sent M. Monet, the director of mines, and his young daughter to disturb my unsociable mood: Mademoiselle Monet took her seat in the front of the box; I sat, half pleased, half grumbling, behind her. I do not know whether she attracted me, whether I liked her; but I was very much afraid of her. When she was gone, I regretted her, while rejoicing at no longer seeing her. Still, I sometimes went, with the perspiration standing on my brow, to fetch her for a walk: I gave her my arm, and I believe I pressed hers a little.

One idea governed me, the idea of going to the United States: a useful object was wanting for my voyage; I proposed, as I have said in the Memoirs and in several of my works, to discover the North-West Passage. This plan was not out of keeping with my poetic nature. No one troubled himself about me; I was at that time, like Bonaparte, a slim sub-lieutenant, entirely unknown; both of us emerged from obscurity at the same period, I to seek renown in solitude, he to seek glory among mankind. I had not attached myself to any woman, and my sylph still possessed my imagination. I placed before myself the bliss of realizing my fantastic wanderings in her company in the forests of the New World. Through the influence of a new manifestation of nature, my flower of love, my nameless phantom of the woods of Armorica, grew into Atala beneath the shady groves of Florida.

The North-West passage.

M. de Malesherbes excited me on the subject of this voyage. I went to see him in the mornings: we sat, with our noses glued to maps; we compared the different plans of the Arctic Circle; we calculated the distances between Behring's Straits and the furthermost part of Hudson's Bay; we read the different narratives of the travellers and navigators, English, Dutch, French, Russian, Swedish, Danish; we enquired into the roads to be followed on land to reach the shores of the Polar Sea; we discussed the difficulties to be overcome, the precautions to be taken against the rigours of the climate, the attacks of wild animals, the scarcity of food. This illustrious man said to me:

"If I were younger, I would go with you, I would spare myself the sight of all the crimes, meannesses and madnesses which I see about me. But, at my age, a man must die where he stands. Do not fail to write to me by every ship, to keep me informed of your progress and your discoveries: I will commend them to the ministers. It is a great pity that you know no botany."

After these conversations, I would peruse Tournefort[413], Duhamel[414], Bernard de Jussieu[415], Grew[416], Jacquin, Rousseau's[417] Dictionary, the Flores élementaires; I ran to the Jardin du Roi, and before long thought myself a very Linnæus[418].

At last, in January 1791, I seriously made up my mind. The chaos was increasing: it was sufficient to bear an "aristocratic" name to be exposed to persecution: the more moderate and conscientious your opinions the more were you liable to suspicion and annoyance. I therefore resolved to strike my tents: I left my brother and my sisters in Paris, and made for Brittany.

At Fougères I met the Marquis de La Rouërie: I asked him to give me a letter for General Washington[419]. "Colonel Armand" (the name by which the marquis was known in America) had distinguished himself in the American War of Independence. He made himself famous in France through the royalist conspiracy which made such touching victims in the Desilles[420] family. He having died while organizing this conspiracy, his body was disinterred and recognized, and caused the misfortune of his hosts and of his friends. The rival of La Fayette and Lauzun, the predecessor of La Rochejacquelein, the Marquis de La Rouërie was a more spirited person than they: he had fought oftener than the first; he had carried off opera-singers like the second; he would have become the companion in arms of the third. He swept the woods in Brittany in company with an American major[421], and with a monkey seated on his horse's crupper. The Rennes law-students loved him for his boldness of action and his liberty of ideas: he had been one of the twelve Breton nobles sent to the Bastille. His figure and manners were elegant, his appearance smart, his features charming, and he resembled the portraits of the young lords of the League.

I embark for America.

I selected Saint-Malo as my port of embarkation, in order to embrace my mother. I have told you in the third book of these Memoirs how I passed through Combourg and of the sentiments that oppressed me. I stayed two months at Saint-Malo, busying myself with preparations for my departure, as I had done before, when I was thinking of departing for the Indies.

I struck a bargain with a captain called Dujardin[422], who was to carry to Baltimore the Abbé Nagault[423], superior of the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, and several seminarists under the conduct of their head. These travelling companions would have been more to my liking four years earlier: from being a zealous Christian I had become "a man of strong mind[424]," in other words a man of weak mind. This change in my religious opinions had been brought about by reading philosophical books. I believed in good faith that a religious mind was in part paralyzed, that there existed truths which it was unable to comprehend, superior though it might be in other respects. This blessed pride imposed upon me; I inferred in the religious mind that very absence of a faculty which exists precisely in the philosophic mind: the narrow intelligence thinks that it sees everything because it keeps its eyes open; the superior intelligence consents to close its eyes, because it sees everything within. Lastly, one thing finished me: the groundless despair which I carried at the bottom of my heart.

A letter from my brother has fixed the date of my departure in my memory: he wrote to my mother from Paris, informing her of the death of Mirabeau[425]. Three days after the arrival of this letter, I joined the ship lying in the roads[426]; my luggage was already on board. The anchor was weighed, a solemn moment with mariners. The sun was setting when the coasting pilot left us, after putting us through the channels. The weather was overcast, the wind slack, and the swell beat heavily upon the rocks at a few cables' length from our vessel.

My eyes remained fixed upon Saint-Malo, where I had left my mother in tears. I saw the steeples and domes of the churches where I had prayed with Lucile, the walls, the ramparts, the forts, the towers, the beach where I had spent my childhood with Gesril and my other play-fellows; I was abandoning my distracted country at the moment when she had lost a man who could never be replaced. I was going away in equal uncertainty as to my country's destinies and my own: which of us was to perish, France or I? Should I ever see France and my family again?

With nightfall came a calm which kept us lying at the mouth of the roads; the lights of the town and the beacons were kindled: those lights which twinkled beneath my paternal roof seemed at once to smile to me and bid me farewell, while lighting me amid the rocks, the darkness of the night, and the blackness of the waves.

I carried with me only my youth and my illusions: I was deserting a world whose dust I had trod and whose stars I had counted for a world of which the soil and the sky were both unknown to me. What was to become of me if I attained the object of my voyage? While I roamed upon the polar shores, the years of discord which have crushed so many generations with so loud a noise would have fallen silently over my head; society would have renewed its aspect in my absence. It is probable that I should never have had the misfortune to write; my name would have remained unknown, or would have won only a peaceful renown of the kind which is less than glory, which is scorned by envy and left to happiness. Who knows whether I would have recrossed the Atlantic, whether I would not have settled down among the solitudes explored and discovered at my peril and risk, like a conqueror in the midst of his conquests!

We set sail.

But no, I was to return to my native land, there to undergo altered miseries, to become something quite different from what I had been! The sea in whose lap I was born was about to become the cradle of my second life; she bore me upon my first voyage as though in the bosom of my foster-mother, in the arms of the confidant of my first tears and my first pleasures.

The ebb-tide, in the absence of the wind, carried us out to sea; the lights of the shore grew smaller and smaller, and disappeared. Exhausted with my reflections, with vague regrets, with even vaguer hopes, I went below to my cabin: I lay down to rest, rocked in my hammock to the sound of the billows which caressed the side of the vessel. The wind rose; the unfurled sails, which hung flapping about the masts, filled out, and when, next morning, I went up on deck, the land of France was out of sight.

Here toy destinies changed: "Again to sea!" as Byron sings.