Nevertheless, at the first going off, I thoroughly felt the intoxication of being once more in my native land. I had saluted Paris with the enthusiasm that causes the sailor to shout ‘Land, land!’ after a long absence. I was very young, but I had lived a good deal in a few years. Storms and hurricanes, privation and struggle, even hair-breadth escapes from death—I had known them all. And yet it seemed to me that as recently as the night before I had wandered under the chestnut-trees of the Tuileries, and in the galleries of the Palais-Royal, where I now found myself after a three years’ exile. I was very excited while traversing the Passages, the Places, the bridges, and I ran along them quickly as if in deadly fear of their escaping me once more. I looked at the Seine as if she were an old friend, and still everything was new to me, everything touched a chord of tenderness—even the discordant cries of the itinerant vendors with whom the streets of Paris swarmed. I felt as if I were taking possession of it once more. At sixteen there seems to be such a very long future before one. All that is probable seems possible. One feels unconsciously that by the right of one’s youth the command of the world must devolve upon one. The awakening from this dream was indeed very sombre.
I began by calling upon the business people whose addresses my ‘father’ had given me. Some were absent, others pretended to have lost all recollection of us. I took care not to call upon my school-fellows in order to arouse their pity, for I remembered the words Colville had constantly repeated to me at Hamburg: ‘Try to dispense with everything rather than ask a service of the man whom you consider your best friend.’ Consequently, as a rule, I ascended to my perch dead with fatigue, and not at all disposed to say with Pope ‘Whatever is, is right.’ It is true that I got some sympathy from our poor servant, Marie, to dispel the dejection plainly visible on my face. The excellent creature always chose stories calculated to make my blood curdle. ‘A few months ago,’ she said to me, ‘a young and handsome boy, named Denville, lived in this very room. From morn to night he wrote—he was a savant—and then, in order to get a little recreation, he sang, accompanying himself on the guitar. Besides being a savant he was an artist. All this was very well, but though he spent very little, the poor boy never settled his bill, and during the seven months he lodged at the hotel no one had ever seen the colour of his money. He promised well enough, but he wrote in vain to his family, who lived in Rheims. There is none so deaf as those who won’t hear, and not a cent came from Champagne. There are some very hard-hearted parents—very hard-hearted indeed. And that’s why the young fellow so often repeated that no parent comes up to a louis d’or, and that the staunchest friend is the pawnshop.
‘M. Chandeau, furious at getting nothing but promises, lost patience, and only waited a favourable opportunity to cease being made a dupe of, as he said. One evening, when M. Denville had gone downstairs in dressing-gown and slippers to buy some trifling thing at the stationer’s opposite, M. Chandeau promptly mounted the stairs, put a padlock on the door, and practically sequestrated in that way the whole of his lodger’s luggage. When the latter came back, purchase in hand, he found on the landing his pitiless creditor, telling him to seek shelter elsewhere.
‘It’s inhuman, isn’t it, monsieur, to send one’s debtor away like that, practically naked? Prayers, promises, threats were not of the slightest use. The young fellow was obliged to make the best of it, to go down into the street, to promenade up and down like a ghost, with the additional chance of perishing with cold, for it was the middle of November. It struck ten o’clock, and the shops began to close. The poor young man did not know where to look for a shelter, the only hope of such presenting itself to him being the arch of a bridge, or the guard-room of a military post. When he got as far as the Point St. Eustache he was accosted by a poor woman—a working woman—who, touched by the story of his deplorable situation, took him to her room, gave him some supper, and kept him like this for a month, sharing everything with him. But the most surprising part of the story is the end. The lover of this poor girl was the servant of a general. The general was looking out for a secretary. The servant was sufficiently interested in this protégé of Providence to share his clothes with him, just as the poor girl had shared her crust of bread, after which he presented M. Denville to his master. The general took a fancy to M. Denville’s face, and engaged him, and took him to the army in Italy, in which he was to command a division.
‘You must know, monsieur, that everybody who goes to Italy and doesn’t happen to be killed, comes back rich. That’s what happened to M. Denville. On his return, he was absolutely bursting with gold. He paid everything he owed to M. Chandeau. Better still, he bought, exactly opposite the hotel, a little mercer’s shop to make a present to the young girl who had so charitably picked him up.’
As may easily be imagined, that kind of picture did not give a particularly agreeable tinge to my dreams. This great man, expelled from the room that I was living in, and promenading down below in the street in white, grasping his roll of paper, appeared to me like the statue of the Commander to Don Juan. In my anxiety I now and again substituted the face and figure of my landlord, holding in one hand his little bill, and the padlock in the other. I no longer slept, and I scarcely ate. The mind was killing the body, and I was certainly getting the worst of this terrible struggle, of which I failed to see the end.
I had been to the Hôtel Choiseul, which had been inhabited by my family, and had been transformed into an auction-mart. I wandered through its rooms, every one of which was crowded with furniture and goods offered to the highest bidder. (Subsequently, part of the Opéra was built on the site.) Alas, throughout my wandering I did not find a stick that belonged to us; even the porter had changed, and, however improbable and romantic it may seem, my only friend of old was Castor, the poor watch-dog, who still occupied his kennel. Pricking up his ears and wagging his tail, Castor licked my hands when I began to stroke him.
Perhaps Castor’s friendliness directed my thoughts to the old friends of my family. Among them I had heard M. Récamier cited as the richest banker of his time, and his wife as the foremost woman of fashion. I knew Mme. Récamier before her marriage, and when she first came to Paris. When we both were children our parents lived in the same house. Our games and our studies were often interrupted by the scenes of the Revolution. I remembered the incidents of those first years most vividly; but would she remember them? I had lost sight of her completely during those six years so crowded with events. A kind of false shame kept me back. I could not make up my mind to go and see her, amidst all her opulence, in a condition bordering so closely upon a state of poverty as mine. The days went by meanwhile, and I had practically exhausted my last resources. In vain had I tried to borrow money on the portrait of Louis XVI., the last gift of the ill-fated prince to my ‘father,’ his faithful and devoted minister. What interest had those money-changers in a prince who was only great by his virtues, and who already belonged to history?
I informed my ‘father’ of my position; told him of my various unsuccessful attempts, and asked him for fresh instructions. I received in reply a letter dated from Holland. He told me to remain for a little longer in Paris, but if I did not succeed, to come back to Amsterdam, where M. Vandenberg, the landlord of our inn, would procure me the means to join him, my ‘father,’ in England, whither important affairs compelled him to proceed immediately.
I shall never forget the night I spent after that letter. There are situations too painful for description, griefs that may be conceived, but cannot be expressed. I already beheld myself without the slightest resources in Paris; without a mother, without relations or friends, and like those who seek but do not find, who cry and who are made sport of, who would fain attach themselves to some one, and are despised. I was told to start for Amsterdam. How could I? I could imagine what it must have cost my ‘father’ to write that letter. Perhaps he believed that experience had already given me the wisdom which, as a rule, only comes with years, and that the journey of a thousand leagues which I had made with him had taught me to vanquish obstacles. On that occasion, though, I was not alone: his courage sustained mine. In the present instance, his absence left me no other support than the future and God.