LA VENDÉE.—CHARETTE.—LAMARQUE.—TRAGEDIES OF ÆSCHYLUS AND SOPHOCLES.—REAL TRAGEDIES AMONG THE ROMANS.—SENECA’S MEDEA.—SINGULAR FACT.
8th—To-day the Emperor dictated to one of his suite, by which we were very much gratified, for it was a proof that he felt himself better.
I attended him after dinner. The exertion of dictating seemed to have roused his spirits. He was in a very talkative mood; and we conversed together, walking backward and forward in his chamber. The troubles of La Vendée, and the men who had been distinguished in them, formed the principal topics of discourse.
Charette was the only individual to whom the Emperor attached particular importance. “I have read a history of La Vendée,” said he, “and if the details and portraits were correct, Charette was the only great character, the true hero, of that remarkable episode of our Revolution, which, if it presented great misfortunes, at least did not sacrifice our glory. In the wars of La Vendée, Frenchmen destroyed each other; but they did not degrade themselves: they received aid from foreigners; but they did not stoop to the disgrace of marching under their banners, and receiving daily pay for merely executing their commands. Yes,” continued he, “Charette impressed me with the idea of a great character. I observed that he on several occasions acted with uncommon energy and intrepidity. He betrayed genius.” I mentioned that I had known Charette very well in my youth; had been in the marines together at Brest, and for a long time we shared the same chamber, and messed at the same table. The brilliant career and exploits of Charette very much astonished all who had formerly been acquainted with him. We looked upon him as a common-place sort of man, destitute of information, ill-tempered, and extremely indolent; and we all, with one accord, pronounced him to belong to the class of insignificant beings. It is true that, when he began to rise into celebrity, we recollected a circumstance which certainly indicated decision of character. When Charette was first called into service, during the American war, and while yet a mere youth, he sailed from Brest in a cutter during the winter. The cutter lost her mast; and to a vessel of that class such an accident was equivalent to certain destruction. The weather was very stormy. Death seemed inevitable; and the sailors, throwing themselves on their knees, lost all presence of mind, and refused to make any effort to save themselves. Charette, notwithstanding his extreme youth, killed one of the men, in order to compel the rest to make the necessary exertions. This dreadful example had the desired effect, and the vessel was saved. “You see,” said the Emperor, “true decision of character always develops itself in critical circumstances. Here was the spark that distinguished the hero of La Vendée. Men’s dispositions are often misunderstood. There are sleepers whose waking is terrible. Kleber was an habitual slumberer; but, at the needful moment, he never failed to awake, a lion.”
I added that I had often heard Charette relate that, at a particular moment of extreme danger, the whole crew of the cutter, by a spontaneous impulse, made a vow to go in their shirts and barefooted, to carry a taper to our Lady of Recouvrance, at Brest, if she would vouchsafe to ensure their safety. “And you may believe it or not as you please,” added Charette with great simplicity: “but the fact is, they had no sooner uttered their prayer than the wind suddenly abated, and from that moment we were inspired with the hope of preservation.” On their return to land, the sailors, headed by their officers, devoutly fulfilled their vow. This was not the only miraculous circumstance connected with the little cutter. It was in the month of December, and the night was long and dark. The vessel had got among reefs, and, without mast or any nautical aid, she floated at random, and the crew had resigned themselves to the will of fate, when they unexpectedly heard the ringing of a bell. They sounded, and, finding but little depth of water, they cast anchor. What was their surprise and joy, when they found themselves, at day-break, at the mouth of the river of Landernau! The bell they had heard was that of the neighbouring parish church. The cutter had miraculously escaped the numerous rocks that are scattered about the entrance of Brest: she had been carried through the narrow inlet to the port, had passed three or four hundred ships that were lying in the roads, and had at length found a shelter precisely at the mouth of a river, in a calm and retired spot. “This,” said the Emperor, “shews the difference between the blindfold efforts of man, and the certain course of nature. That at which you express so much surprise must necessarily have happened. It is very probable that, with the full power of exerting the utmost skill, the confusion and errors of the moment would have occasioned the wreck of the vessel; whereas, in spite of so many adverse chances, nature saved her. She was borne onward by the tide; the force of the current carried her precisely through the middle of each channel, so that she could not possibly have been lost.”
Again alluding to the war of La Vendée, the Emperor mentioned that he had been withdrawn from the army of the Alps, for the purpose of being transferred to that of La Vendée; but that he preferred resigning his commission to entering a service where he conceived he should only be concurring in mischief, without the probability of obtaining any personal benefit. He said that one of the first acts of his Consulate had been to quell the troubles in La Vendée. He did much for that unfortunate department, the inhabitants of which were very grateful to him; and when he passed through it, even the priests appeared to be sincerely favourable to him. “Thus,” continued the Emperor, “the late insurrections did not present the same character as the first. Their prominent feature was not blind fanaticism, but merely passive obedience to a ruling aristocracy. Be this as it may, Lamarque, whom I sent to La Vendée at the height of the crisis, performed wonders, and even surpassed my hopes.” What might not have been his influence in the great contest; for the most distinguished chiefs of La Vendée, those who are doubtless at this moment enjoying the favours of the Court, acknowledged, through Lamarque, Napoleon as Emperor, even after Waterloo, even after his abdication! Was it that Lamarque was ignorant of the real state of things, or was it merely a whim on the part[part] of the conqueror? At all events, Lamarque is in exile: he is one of the thirty-eight; “because it is easier to proscribe than to conquer.”
The Emperor dined with us to-day, for the first time since his illness, that is to say, for the space of sixteen days. Our dinner was therefore a sort of festival: but we could not help remarking, with regret, the change in the Emperor’s countenance, which presented obvious traces of the ill effects of his long confinement.
After dinner we resumed our readings, which had been so long suspended. The Emperor read the Agamemnon of Æschylus, which he very much admired for its great force and simplicity. We were particularly struck with the graduation of terror which characterizes the productions of this father of tragedy. It was observed that this was the first spark to which the light of the modern drama may be traced.
Agamemnon being ended, the Emperor asked for the Œdipus of Sophocles, which also interested us exceedingly: and the Emperor expressed his regret at not having had it performed at St. Cloud. Talma had always opposed the idea; but the Emperor was sorry that he had relinquished it. “Not,” said he, “that I wished to correct our drama by antique models. Heaven forbid! But I merely wished to have an opportunity of judging how far ancient composition would have harmonized with modern notions.” He said he was convinced that such a performance would have afforded pleasure; and he made several remarks on the impression that was likely to be produced on modern taste by the Greek Coryphæus chorusses, &c.
He next turned to Voltaire’s Œdipus, on which he bestowed high commendation. This piece, he said, contained the finest scene in the French Drama. As to its faults, the absurd passion of Philoctetes, for example, they must not, he said, be attributed to the poet, but to the manners of the age, and the great actresses of the day, to whose laws a dramatic writer is obliged to submit. This commendation of Voltaire rather surprised us: it was something novel and singular in the mouth of the Emperor.
At eleven o’clock, after the Emperor had retired to bed, he sent for me, and resumed his conversation on the ancient and modern drama; on which he made many curious remarks. In the first place, he expressed his surprise that the Romans should have had no tragedies; but then again he observed that tragedy, in dramatic representation, would have been ill calculated to rouse the feelings of the Romans, since they performed real tragedy in their circuses. “The combats of the gladiators,” said he, “the sight of men consigned to the fury of wild beasts, were far more terrible than all our dramatic horrors put together. These, in fact, were the only tragedies suited to the iron nerves of the Romans.”
However, it was observed that the Romans possessed some dramatic essays, produced by Seneca. By the by, it is a curious fact, that in Seneca’s Medea, the chorus distinctly predicts the discovery of America, which took place fourteen hundred years after that drama was written. In the passage here alluded to, it is said, “A new Tiphys, a son of the earth, will, in ages to come, discover remote regions towards the west, and Thule will no longer be the extremity of the universe.”[[5]]