DAY-BREAK OF FORTUNE.
Meanwhile Lamartine was sadly awaiting events at his modest quarters and fearing for the fate and effects of his little publication. As he was in bed one morning in the first month of spring, the janitor’s daughter, a girl of twelve or fourteen years, opened the door of the room. It was too early for the morning newspaper. Smiling intelligently, she threw on the bed a little billet having an enormous seal of red wax. There was upon it, Lamartine remarks, “an imprint of a coat of arms that ought to be illustrious, for it was undecipherable.”
“Why do you smile so knowingly, Lucy?” he asked, as he broke the seal and tore off the envelope.
“Because,” said she, “mamma told me that the letter had been brought in the early morning by a chasseur all laced with gold, having a beautiful feather in his hat, and that he had urgently desired that the note should be delivered to you as soon as you awoke, because his mistress had told him: ‘Go quickly; we must not delay the joy and perhaps the fortune of the young man.’”
There were two separate epistles. One was written by the Polish Princess T.... She was a sister of the unfortunate Prince Poniatowski who was drowned while directing the retreat at the battle of Leipsic. Lamartine did not know her and the letter was not addressed to him but to M. Alain, his friend and physician. M. Alain had been for six years the physician and friend of M. de Talleyrand, and during Lamartine’s illness he had cared for him like a mother rather than as a medical attendant. He is depicted as being as tender as learned. Lamartine describes him as most true, good, and generous.
The letter of the princess had been written and despatched before daybreak, and was as follows:—“The Prince de Talleyrand sent me at my waking this note. I address it for your friend, in order that the pleasure which this impression of the great judge will bring you shall be doubled. Communicate this note of the Prince to the young man[[2]] and thank me for the pleasure which I am giving you, for I know that your sole delight is in the joy of those whom you love.”
Lamartine opened the second note. It was written upon a scrap of paper about five fingers in dimension, spotted with ink, and in a hand evidently hurried and showing signs of fatigue from want of sleep. It began as follows:—“I send you, princess, before I go to sleep the little volume which you lent me last night. Let it suffice you to know that I have not slept, and that I have been reading till four o’clock in the morning so as to read it over again.”
The rest of the note was a prediction of Lamartine’s success, in terms of the most fulsome character. Talleyrand was often oracular, and his foreknowledge seemed almost infallible.[[3]] “The soul of the old man has been said to be of ice,” Lamartine remarks, “but it glowed all one night with the enthusiasm of twenty years, and this fire had been kindled by certain pages of verses which were by no means complete but which were verses of love.”
“I read the letter of Prince Talleyrand twenty times over,” says Lamartine. “The young girl meanwhile was waiting and watching me as I read and read again, and she blushed with emotion as she beheld it in my face. ‘Come, my little Lucy, and let me kiss you,’ said I. ‘You will never bring me a message equal to this. In the lottery of glory children draw the successful lots. Tell your mother that you have brought me a quine.’”[[4]]
Lamartine’s book was thus placed in the lottery of fortune, and the name of Talleyrand had been called. The great statesman was not in public life at that time, but he was far-seeing, and his scent of public matters was well-nigh infallible. He had no interest to flatter the unknown writer, and Lamartine accepted his assurances as a favorable augury.
Surely enough, little Lucy, a quarter of an hour later, brought another letter in a large official envelope. Lamartine’s friends had been successful in their pleadings, and this was his nomination, signed by M. Pasquier, to the post which he desired on the Legation to Florence.
At the reading of this document, Lamartine was for a time unable to restrain his emotions. He leaped down from the bed, he tells us, and in other ways exhibited his delight. He was not content, however, to exult in his actual good fortune, but immediately began to extend his imagination further.
“I experienced what the shackled courser does when the course is opened,” says he. “I had little mind for the glory of verses, but I did have an unbounded passion for political activity. Already I began to look beyond the long years that separated me from the tribune and field of higher statesmanship.
“This was my true and entire vocation, although my friends think and my enemies say otherwise. I felt that mine was not the powerful creative organization that constitutes great poets; all my talent was of the heart only. But I did feel in me an accuracy of view, an effective power of reasoning, an energy of honest principle, which make statesmen. I had somewhat of the quality of Mirabeau in the reserved mental forces of my being. Fortune and France have since decided otherwise. But Nature knows more than Fortune and France; the one is blind, the other is jealous.”
Nevertheless, Lamartine continued to write verses, and his prose publications are more or less interspersed with poetic productions. He praised his friends, he commemorated those whom he loved in poems. Years afterward in his story of his journey to the Holy Land, he made this declaration: “Life for my mind has always been a great poem, as for my heart it has been love. God, Love and Poesie, are the three words which I shall desire to be engraved alone upon my monument if I ever deserve a monument.”
While he was sitting in a mystic reverie one evening at Florence, he heard a melodious voice murmur in his ear some lines from the Meditations, which are rendered as follows:
“Perchance the future may reserve for me
A happiness whose hope I now resign:
Perchance amid the busy world may be
Some soul responsive still to mine.”
He was also a member of the Legation to England and afterward became Secretary to the French Embassy at Naples. In 1824 he was appointed Chargé d’Affaires to Tuscany, and remained in that position five years. He made the acquaintance of Louis Bonaparte, the former King of Holland, who was a scientist and philosopher rather than a statesman. Queen Hortense also attempted to have an interview with him, but this he carefully evaded. His mother, however, was a relative of the wife of Lucien Bonaparte and he met several members of that family under circumstances somewhat romantic. Pierre Bonaparte was with him at Paris in the Revolution of 1848.
His older uncle died in 1823, and he became heir of the estates. This uncle was known as M. de Lamartine de Monceau and was by seniority the head of the family. He had never married because his parents opposed the choice he had made. He was thrifty and had increased the value of his property. Lamartine now took his uncle’s designation.
The marriage of Lamartine took place during this period. The bride was Miss Marianne Birch, an English lady of beauty and fortune. She was of amiable disposition and Lamartine’s mother became warmly attached to her.
Neither the accession of wealth, his aristocratic rank, nor diplomatic engagements deterred him from literary composition. In 1823 the Nouvelles Meditations were published, and two years later, The Last Canto of Childe Harold. Lamartine afterward described this latter work as a servile imitation in which his enthusiasm as a copyist and its success were alike “mediocre”—a punishment for feigning an admiration which was not altogether sincere. He had, likewise, another penalty to encounter. Two lines in it are versified in English as follows:
“I seek elsewhere (forgive, O Roman shade!)
For men, and not the dust of which they’re made.”
For this apparent slur he was involved in a controversy leading to a duel and dangerously wounded. At his solicitation to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, his antagonist, Colonel Pepé, was not prosecuted.
Louis XVIII. was succeeded in 1824 by the Count d’Artois as Charles X. The attempt was now made to reinstate the Government as it existed before the Revolution.
In 1829, at the instance of Chateaubriand, then a member of the Coalition Ministry, Lamartine was recalled. He never ascertained the reason, but attributed it to the influence of Madame Recamier, with whom Chateaubriand was intimate. That lady, however, took an early opportunity to set the matter right by visiting the mother and sisters of Lamartine and inviting him and them to a drawing-room entertainment.
The reactionist Ministry under M. de Polignac was formed in the autumn of that year. It was the final separation of the men of the former century from the men of the time. A portfolio was offered to Lamartine but declined. He was attached to the dynasty, but he had the prescience of its overthrow. “I had seen it coming from afar,” says he. “Nine months before the fatal day, the fall of the new monarchy had been written for me in the names of the men whom it had commissioned to carry it on.”
He was sent on a special mission to Prince Leopold, then Duke of Saxe-Cobourg, and afterward King of Greece;[[5]] and had received the appointment of ambassador to that country when the Revolution of July overthrew the dynasty. The ministry of Louis-Philippe then offered him his choice of the embassies to Vienna and London. The King visited him to solicit his acceptance, but he was inexorable. The title of Louis-Philippe was legally defective; he was not the next heir to the throne, and he had not been placed on it by the choice of the people of France. For these reasons it was important to him that the supporters of Charles X. should accept places under him and thus strengthen his pretensions. But says Lamartine: “One should not take part gratuitously in a fault which he did not himself commit.”
M. de St. Aulaire was at that time Minister at Vienna, but greatly desired to be transferred to England. He also waited upon Lamartine, anxious to find out which place he was going to accept. Lamartine quickly assured him.
“If,” said he, “I had the ambition to be ambassador to London, I would instantly sacrifice it without hesitation, in remembrance of the good offices which you did to me at the time of my entrance into the great world. But you can go to London without any indebtedness to me, except good will.”
The same year Lamartine was elected one of the “Immortals,” in the French Academy.
The same year he visited England. He there made the acquaintance of Talleyrand. The old statesman received him cordially, and in one interview predicted his career. Lamartine, he remarked, was reserving himself for something more sound and grand than the substituting of an uncle for a nephew upon a throne that had no stable foundation. “You will succeed in it,” he added. “Nature has made you a poet; poetry will make you an orator; tact and thinking will make you a statesman. I know men somewhat; I am eighty years old. I see farther than the objects in sight. You are to have a grand part to perform in the events which will succeed to the present state of affairs. I have witnessed the intrigues of Courts; you will see the movements of the people deceptive in other ways. Let verses go; you know that I adore yours. They are not for the age in which you are now living. Improve yourself in the grand eloquence of Athens and Rome. France will yet have scenes like those of Rome and Athens in her public places.”
From this period Lamartine spent much of his time abroad. He never forgot that he was a citizen of France, but he entertained a strong dislike for the Orleans dynasty. Yet his mother had been educated in the family with the King, and this somewhat increased his perplexity.
He writes of her death pathetically, as the saddest event of his life. He had been loved and cherished by her with a devotion made sublime by its absolute self-abnegation. His first lessons in books and knowledge had been given by her, and he was endowed personally with her most prominent characteristics. She had seemed to know instinctively when and why he suffered, and she possessed a power of divination to foresee his career. Her death, the result of a terrible accident, was to him like the rending violently away of a vital part of his body.
“I hardly thought that I could survive the shock,” he wrote in the Souvenirs. “I was absent from home when the accident occurred which cut short her days. I came back in haste, arriving in time to follow the coffin in which her remains were enshrouded, to the cemetery of the village where we had lived during our infancy.”
The weather was bitterly cold, but this he did not feel. He returned to the house at Milly, now empty for the winter and a thousand times more empty since she who had given it life and soul was sleeping the eternal sleep. Overcome by his grief, he made his way to the little room where the papers of the family were kept, and threw himself down on the floor. There he lay for hours in an ecstasy of woe. The moaning of the wind and the ticking of the clock seemed to be repeating the funeral hymn.