My Memoirs, Vol. VI, 1832 to 1833

by Alexandre Dumas

I have already said that I have no intention of beginning over again my account of my peregrinations through Switzerland. However, I will ask my reader's leave to place before him three small extracts from my Impressions de Voyage, which are indispensable to the course of these Memoirs. They were published in 1834, and concern M. de Chateaubriand, Monseigneur le duc d'Orléans and Her Majesty Queen Hortense; they contain my own independent opinions; and some strange light will be shed now and then on the future of the poet. If a statesman had written what I am about to quote, he would have been looked upon as a prophet.

Let us follow the order of my visits to Lucerne, to Reichenau and to Arenenberg, and begin by M. de Chateaubriand.

A tout seigneur, tout honneur.

"M. DE CHATEAUBRIAND'S FOWLS

"The first news I learned on arriving at the Hôtel du Cheval blanc was that M. de Chateaubriand was living in Lucerne. It will be recollected that, after the revolution of July, our great poet, who had dedicated his pen to the defence of the fallen dynasty, voluntarily exiled himself, and did not return to Paris until he was recalled to it by the arrest of the Duchesse de Berry. He lived at the Hôtel de l'Aigle. I soon dressed myself with the intention of going to pay him a call. I did not know him personally: at Paris I had not dared to present myself, but, out of France, at Lucerne, isolated as he was, I thought it might be some pleasure to him to see a compatriot. I therefore boldly presented myself at the Hôtel de l'Aigle. I asked the hôtel waiter for M. de Chateaubriand. He replied that he had just gone out to feed his fowls. I made him repeat it, thinking I had heard wrongly; but he made me the same reply the second time. I left my name, at the same time asking the favour of being received the next day.

"Next morning a letter was handed to me from M. de Chateaubriand, sent the previous evening: it was an invitation to breakfast at ten o'clock; it was nine then, so I had no time to lose. I leapt out of bed and dressed. For a very long time I had wanted to see M. de Chateaubriand; my admiration for him was the religion of my childhood; he was the man whose genius had been the first to stray out of the beaten paths to mark out for our young literature the road it has since followed; he had alone excited more hatred than all the cenacula put together; he was the rock against which the jealous waves, still stirring against us, had beaten in vain for fifty years; he was the file on which the teeth were used which had tried to bite us.

"So, when I put foot on the first step of the staircase, my heart nearly failed me. Entirely unknown, I felt that I should be at least crushed under such immense superiority; for at that time the point of comparison was wanting by which to measure our respective heights, and I had not resource enough to say, as Stromboli might to Monte Rosa, 'I am only a hill, but I contain a volcano!' When I reached the landing I stopped.... I believe I should have hesitated less to knock at the door of a conclave. Perhaps at that moment M. de Chateaubriand thought I was keeping him waiting out of politeness, while I dared not go in from feelings of veneration. Finally, I heard the waiter coming up the stairs; I could not stay any longer outside the door, so I knocked. M. de Chateaubriand himself came and opened it; he must have formed a strange opinion of my manners if he did not attribute my embarrassment to its true cause. I stuttered like a country bumpkin; I did not know whether I ought to go in in front of him or behind. I think that, like M. Parseval before Napoleon, if he had asked me my name, I should not have known what to reply. But he did better than that: he held out his hand to me.

"During breakfast we talked. One after the other he reviewed all the political questions which were being discussed at that period, from the tribune to the club, with the lucidity of a man of genius who went to the bottom of things, and like a man who estimates principles and interests at their right value and has no illusions about anything. I was convinced that M. de Chateaubriand looked upon the party to which he belonged as henceforth lost, believing that the whole future rested in a socialistic Republicanism, and that he remained attached to his cause more because he saw it was unfortunate than because he thought it good. It is thus with all great souls: they must devote themselves to something; when it is not to women, it is to kings; when not to kings, then to God. I could not resist remarking to M. de Chateaubriand that his theories, though Royalist in form, were fundamentally Republican.

"'Does that surprise you?' he said, smiling. 'It surprises me still more! I have progressed without willing it, like a rock rolled along by the torrent; and now, behold! I find I am nearer to you than you are to me!... Have you seen the Lion of Lucerne?'

"'Not yet.'

"'Well, let us go and see it.... It is the most important monument in the town. You know upon what occasion it was erected?'

"'In memory of 10 August.'

"'That was it.'

"'Is it a beautiful thing?'

"'It is better than that: it is a beautiful idea!'

"'There is but one drawback: the blood shed for the monarchy was bought from a republic, and the dead Swiss Guards were but the strict payment of a bill of exchange.'

"'That is no less remarkable in a time when there were many people who let their bills be protested.'

"As will be seen, we differed in our ideas on that point; that is the misfortune of opinions which are divided into two opposite principles; every time necessity brings them together, they understand one another in theory but they separate over facts.

"We reached the monument, which is situated at some distance from the town, in General Pfyffer's garden. It is a rock cut perpendicularly, with its base bathed by a circular pool; a grotto forty-four feet long by forty-eight feet high has been hollowed out in the rock, and in this grotto a young sculptor from Constance, named Ahrorth, has carved a colossal lion after a plaster model by Thorwaldsen. Pierced through by a spear, with the broken fragment left in the wound, the lion is dying, covering with its body the fleur-de-lis emblazoned shield which it can no longer defend. Above the grotto are the words, 'Helvetiorum fidei ac virtuti,' and below this inscription the names of the officers and soldiers who perished on 10 August. The officers numbered twenty-six and the soldiers seven hundred and sixty. This monument, moreover, acquired a greater interest from the fresh revolution which had just taken place, and from the renewed fidelity displayed by the Swiss. Yet it was an odd thing! the disabled soldier who watches over the lion spoke much to us of 10 August but did not say a word of 29 July. The more recent of the two catastrophes was that which he had already forgotten. It is quite simple: 1830 had but driven a king away, 1792 had driven out royalty. I pointed out to M. de Chateaubriand the names of those men who had done honour to their signature, and I asked him which names would be inscribed on the gravestone of royalty to balance these popular names if a similar monument were raised in France.

"'Not one!' he replied.

"'Do you really mean that?'

"'Perfectly; the dead do not get themselves killed.'

"The history of the July Revolution lay entirely in those words: 'Nobility is loyalty's true buckler; so long as she has worn it on her arm, she has driven back foreign warfare and smothered civil war; but, from the day when, in anger, she imprudently breaks it, she is defenceless. Louis XI. had slain the great vassals; Louis XIII. the grand seigneurs and Louis XIV. the aristocrats, so that, when Charles X. called to his aid the d'Armagnacs, the Montmorencys and the Lauzuns, his voice only called up shades and phantoms.'

"'Now,' said M. de Chateaubriand, 'if you have seen all you want to see, we will go and feed my fowls.'

"'By the way, that reminds me of something; when I called yesterday at your hôtel the waiter told me you had gone out to fulfil that country occupation. Does your scheme of retirement go so far as make you a farmer?'

"'Why not? A man whose life has been like mine, driven by caprice, poetry, revolutions and exile over the four quarters of the globe, will be happy, I think, to possess—if not a châlet among the mountains (I do not like the Alps)—a meadow in Normandy or a farm in Brittany. I am decidedly of opinion that this is the vocation for my old age.'

"'Allow me to doubt it.... You remember Charles Quint at Saint-Just; you are not one of the emperors who abdicate or one of the kings whom people dethrone: you are one of those princes who die under a canopy and are interred like Charlemagne, with his feet on a shield, his sword by his side, a crown on his head and a sceptre in his hand.'

"'Take care! it is so long since I have been flattered, and I am quite capable of letting myself be carried away by it. Come, let us go and give the chickens their food.'

"Upon my honour, I could have fallen on my knees before this man, so simple and yet at the same time so great was he. We went by the bridge of la Cour, which crosses an arm of the lake; after Rapperssweil's bridge, it is the longest covered one in Switzerland. We stopped about two-thirds of the way across, at some distance from a spot covered with reeds. M. de Chateaubriand drew a piece of bread from his pocket which he had put there after breakfast, and began to crumble it in the lake. Soon a dozen water-fowls came out from a kind of isle formed by the reeds, and began hastily to fight over the repast prepared for them by the hand that had written the Génie du Christianisme, les Martyrs and Le dernier des Abencerrages. For a long while, without saying anything, I watched the singular spectacle of this man leaning over the bridge, his lips curved in smiles, but with sad, grave eyes. Gradually his occupation became mechanical, his face assumed an expression of deep melancholy, his thoughts passed across his broad brow as clouds across a sky; among them were memories of country, family and tender friendships, more gloomy than others. I guessed that this moment was reserved by him wherein to meditate on France, and I respected his meditation as long as it lasted. In the end, he made a movement and heaved a sigh. I went nearer, and he remembered I was there and held out his hand.

"'But if you regret Paris so much,' I said to him, 'why not go back to it? Nothing exiles you from it, and everything calls you back.'

"'What would you have me do?' he replied. 'I was at Cauterets when the July Revolution took place. I returned to Paris: I behold one throne in blood and another in the mud, lawyers drawing up a charter and a king shaking hands with rag-and-bone men.... It was sad unto death, especially when, as in my case, one is filled with great traditions of the monarchy. I went away from it all.'

"'From some words you let drop this morning, I believe you recognise popular sovereignty?'

"'Yes, there is no doubt it is good from time to time for royalty to be tempered again at its source, which is election; but, this time, they knocked off a bough of the tree, a link of the chain: it was Henri V. they should have elected and not Louis-Philippe.'

"'You are wishing but a sad wish for the poor child,' I replied. 'Kings of the name of Henri are unlucky in France: Henri I was poisoned, Henry II. killed in a tournament, Henris III. and IV. were assassinated.'

"'Very well, but, at all events, it is better to die by poison than in exile; it is sooner over and one suffers less!'

"'But shall you not return to France?'

"'If the Duchesse de Berry, after having committed the madness of returning to la Vendée, commits the foolishness of letting herself be captured there, I shall return to Paris to defend her before her judges, if my advice has not prevented her from appearing there.'

"'If not?'

"'If not,' pursued M. de Chateaubriand, crumbling up a second piece of bread, 'I shall continue to feed my birds.'"

Two hours after this conversation, I left Lucerne in a boat rowed by two rowers. Some time afterwards, I was at the Grisons, not far from the little town of Reichenau, whose name awakened in my memory a singular recollection.

During my term in the offices of the Duc d'Orléans I had been for a long time instructed to give tickets to persons desirous of visiting the apartments of the Palais-Royal or of walking in the park at Monceaux. They could see the rooms on Saturdays and walk in the park on Thursdays and Sundays. On the days when the apartments were visited, the duke and duchess and Madame Adélaïde and the rest of the princely family kept themselves to one or two rooms, where they lived in retirement from ten in the morning till four in the evening, and yet it often happened that some inquisitive visitor, whilst the footman was engaged in another direction, would turn a key, half open the door, stretch out his head and plunge into the ducal retreat. The first thing people went to see above everything else was the picture gallery—not that all the pictures were good, far from it, indeed! but there were several which were the cause of talk at the time; these were the battle-pictures by Horace Vernet, four masterpieces, marvellous productions, to which I have already referred—the battles of Montmirail, Hanau, Jemmapes and of Valmy. There was one point particularly in the Battle of Montmirail which attracted attention: in the background, under a grove of trees, hidden in the mist, was a horseman trotting on a white horse. Horse and rider between them were only four inches in breadth by two in height, and yet that little white-and-grey spot had been enough to exclude the picture from the Salon of 1821. The microscopic cavalier was, as we said when we were specially occupied with Horace Vernet, no other than the Emperor Napoleon.

When they had looked well at these four battle-pictures, for which they had come on purpose to the Palais-Royal, the footman said, "Messieurs et mesdames, will you come this way, please?" They followed him, and he took the inquisitive ones to a little genre painting, representing a handsome young man in a blue coat and leather breeches, with his eyes raised to heaven, pointing out, to a dozen children who surrounded him, the word France written on a terrestrial globe. This fine youth was the exiled Duc d'Orléans, giving geography and mathematical lessons at the Reichenau College.

I saw that small picture by Couder once again; I was, as I have said, a few miles from Reichenau, and I decided to go and see the room in which the actual King of France had spent one of the most honourable years of his life, earning 5 francs per day. I have often heard it said that, in spite of his sixteen millions from the Civil List, and his Château des Tuileries, perhaps even because of these, he at times would murmur, "O Reichenau! Reichenau!..."

I therefore did those few miles—two or three followed the banks of the Rhine, which is slate colour at this spot and yet blue in Germany—and I reached Reichenau. I wrote the following letter the same day to the Duc d'Orléans, which will be found produced in its entirety in my Impressions de Voyage:—

"MONSEIGNEUR,—The date of this letter and the place from whence it is sent will readily explain the sentiment to which I am yielding in addressing Your Highness. I am not speaking to the royal hereditary prince of the crown of France, of His Majesty King Louis-Philippe, now reigning, but to the Duc de Chartres, pupil of Henri IV., of the Duc d'Orléans, teacher at Reichenau. I write to Your Highness from the very room in which your exiled father taught arithmetic and geography; or, rather, from that same room, pressed by the post time, I send to Your Highness the page I have just torn from my album."

"REICHENAU

"The little Grisons village is in no way remarkable except for the strange story with which its name is associated. Towards the end of last century burgomaster Tscharner, from Coire, had set up a school at Reichenau. They were looking out in the canton for a teacher in French, when a young man presented himself to M. Boul, headmaster of the establishment, bearing a letter of recommendation signed by bailie Aloys Toost of Zizers. The young man was French, spoke his mother tongue, English and German, and, besides these three languages, could teach mathematics, physics and geography. The find was too marvellous and too rare for the headmaster of the college to let him escape; besides, the youth was modest in his claims. M. Boul settled with him to come at 1400 francs per annum, so the new professor was immediately installed and entered upon his duties. This young professor was Louis-Philippe d'Orléans, Duc de Chartres, to-day King of France.

"It was, I admit, with emotion intermingled with pride that, in this very place, in the room situated in the middle of the corridor, with its folding door, its flower-painted side doors, its corner chimney-places, its pictures of Louis XV. surrounded with gilt arabesques and its decorated ceiling; it was, I say with keen emotion, that, in this room, where the Duc de Chartres had taught, I gathered information concerning the strange vicissitudes of a royal personage who, not wishing to beg the bread of exile, worthily bought it with his work.

"One single teacher, a colleague of the Duc d'Orléans, and a single scholar, one of his pupils, still lived in 1832, the period at which I visited Reichenau. The teacher was, the novel-writer Zschokke, and the scholar was burgomaster Tscharner, son of the man who had founded the school. The worthy bailie Aloys Toost died in 1827, and was buried at Zizers, his native village. Now, there remains nothing more of the college where a future King of France had taught save the schoolroom we have described and the chapel adjoining the corridor with its reading-desk and altar surmounted by a crucifix painted in fresco. The rest of the buildings have been turned into a kind of villa belonging to Colonel Pastalluzzi, and this memorial, so honourable for every Frenchman that it deserves to rank among our national memorials, threatens to disappear with the generation of old men who are dying out, were there not living a man of artistic feeling, who is noble and great, who will not, we hope, let anything be forgotten which is honourable for himself and for France. That man is yourself, Monseigneur Ferdinand d'Orléans, who, having been our schoolfellow, will also be our king; you who, from the throne which you will one day ascend, will lay one hand on the old monarchy and the other on the young republic; will inherit the galleries which contain pictures of the battles of Taülebourg, Fleurus, Bouvines and of Aboukir, of Agincourt and of Marengo; you who are ignorant that the fleurs-de-lis of Louis XIV. are the lance-heads of Clovis; you who know so well that all the glories of a country are glorious no matter when they saw birth, or what sun made them flourish; you, in fact, who by your royal fillet can bind together a thousand years of memories, and assume the consular dignity of the lictors who will march in front of you!

"So it will be a delight to you, monseigneur, to recall the little lonely port, the voyager beaten by the sea of exile, the sailor driven by the wind of proscription, where your father found a noble shelter against the tempest; it will be worthy of you, monseigneur, to give orders that the hospitable roof shall be again raised for hospitality, and, on the very site where the old building fell in ruins shall be erected a new one, destined to receive every son of exile who shall come, staff of exile in hand, to knock at its doors as your father came, irrespective of his opinions and country; whether he be threatened by the anger of peoples or pursued by the hatred of kings; for, monseigneur, the future, though serene and blue for France, which has accomplished its revolutionary work, is big with storms for the rest of the world! We have sowed the seeds of liberty so broadcast in our excursions through Europe that, on all sides, they spring up like corn in May; so well that it only needs a ray of sunshine to ripen the most distant harvests.... Throw your glance back over the past, monseigneur, and then concentrate it upon the present. Have you ever felt more shaking of thrones, or encountered more discrowned travellers on the highways? You see, indeed, that it will be necessary, some day, to found an asylum, were it but for the sons of kings whose fathers cannot, like yours, be teachers at Reichenau!"

I wish to return from Reichenau by way of Arenenberg. The comparison of a teacher of mathematics King of France with an exiled Queen of Holland pleases the imagination of poets. Besides, indeed, when quite a child, I had heard much ill spoken of Napoleon and much good of Joséphine! Now what did I see in Queen Hortense but Joséphine's case over again? I persisted, therefore, in seeing Queen Hortense, and any détour, however long, was but nothing compared with that desire. But, since I do not wish these lines to be taken for tardy flattery—I insist on being thought incapable of flattering any one but exiles or dead people—I will write here what I wrote about Queen Hortense in 1832. I copy the following passage from my Impressions de Voyage:—