Les Martyrs shows Chateaubriand's weakest side as an author. Such a scene as that described with the best intentions by Madame Allart de Méritens shows his weakest side as a man. And yet this outburst of human passion makes almost a satisfactory impression upon us compared with the artificiality by which he is so often distinguished. God and the king are too constantly in his mouth. We must not, however, allow this artificiality to blind us to what is really great in the talent and in the life of this remarkable personage.
In order to get a complete impression of Chateaubriand it is necessary to read the twelve volumes of Mémoires d'outre-tombe, as also those by which they are supplemented. Just as Rousseau's Confessions form the most interesting of his books, so the Mémoires constitute Chateaubriand's most impressive work. In them we find a complete personality—a whole man, and that a man of mark. This important personage, who possesses no great acuteness of observation as far as humanity in general is concerned, who, in fact, occupies himself very little with humanity in general, has focussed all his acuteness upon the one subject which really interests him, his own ego, and has half consciously, half unconsciously, but in any case very completely, revealed and exhibited it to us. It is an ego proud to the verge of arrogance, melancholy to the verge of despondency, sceptical to the verge of indifference, without faith in progress of any kind, profoundly persuaded of the vanity of even those things which afford it temporary pleasure, such as love, fame, worldly position, and, as time goes on, ever more saturated with ennui and ever more absorbingly occupied with itself. It is an ego which owns a warm, prolific imagination and great artistic talent, and which, at a period (the end of the eighteenth century) when taste was all in favour of the light, the pretty, the small, felt itself solitary in its love of the grand, of the beauty of magnitude.
In a certain sense Chateaubriand was like no other man of his day. He satisfied, as we saw, the requirement of the moment so exactly with his Génie du Christianisme that, as a sort of intellectual standard-bearer, he acquired an importance out of proportion to his character and talent.
In so far the moment at which he made his appearance magnified him.
But, looking at the matter from the other side, it may be maintained with equal certainty that the moment at which he entered upon his career forced on him a part which, for half a century, brought him into conflict with his own inmost nature. That nature was always rebelling against the part; the man's independence and uncontrollableness were in perpetual collision with the politico-religious orthodoxy which it had become his life-task to give expression to and champion. In other words, his position in the world involved him in incurable discord with himself.
In his old age he sometimes plainly confesses this. Towards the conclusion of his work on the congress of Verona he says openly: "As an officer of the regiment of Navarre I had come back from the forests of America to join legitimate monarchy in its exile and to fight under its banner against my own judgment (contre mes propres lumières)—all this without conviction, simply from a soldier's sense of duty, and because I, having had the honour of driving in the royal carriages from and to Versailles, considered myself peculiarly bound to support a prince of the blood royal."[8] We find him, however, only two pages farther on in the same book ascribing the fortunate issue of the war in Spain, which he had forced on against the desire of France, Spain, and England, less to his own ability, which he is not at all given to undervaluing, than to "one of the latest miracles performed by Heaven for the race of St. Louis."
Here, as in all his later works, he makes a marked difference between monarchy as an idea and the person of the monarch. He tries to reconcile avowed, unaltered loyalty to ideas with a frank contempt for the capacities and characters of kings.
There is no doubt that the foolish ingratitude of the Bourbons towards the man to whom they owed so much added largely to this contempt. But in his Memoirs he shows that it began early; he would have us believe that it dated from his earliest acquaintance with Louis XVIII, and his environment. He soon perceived that King Louis did not favour him, and it wounded his pride to find that the King's brother, the future Charles X., had not read one of his books, not even Le Génie du Christianisme. Looking back on his past life he writes: "Louis the Eighteenth and his brother did not understand me at all. The latter said of me: 'Good-hearted and hot-headed!' These hackneyed words ... were completely misapplied. My head is very cool, and my heart has never beat very warmly for kings."
The old monarchy, unless it actually felt itself so self-dependent as to be indebted to no one, was bound to regard itself as under obligation to Chateaubriand, not only because, as an officer in Condé's army, he had fought and suffered in its cause, not only because, under Napoleon, he had stopped midway in his career and defied the mighty potentate by sending in his resignation after the execution of the Duke of Enghien, but also because, in 1814, even before Napoleon's abdication at Versailles, he had influenced public opinion in favour of the Bourbons by means of a pamphlet which Louis XVIII himself declared to have been as useful to him as a hundred thousand soldiers.
The pamphlet in question, Buonaparte et les Bourbons, is perhaps the most passionate, most vindictive, most venomous, and most artificially enthusiastic party work written by Chateaubriand. It is an insane shriek of hatred of the fallen Napoleon, who is stripped of every fragment of his glory, and a hurrah of hollow enthusiasm for sunken-chested Louis XVIII, who is deified. In no other work does Chateaubriand display so much vindictive stupidity. He goes so far as to deny Bonaparte's ability as a general. He describes him as an incompetent officer, who could do nothing but command his troops to go forward, and who gained his victories simply by the excellence of these troops and not by his conduct of them, as a commander who never ensured and never knew when to make a retreat, and who, far from improving the art of war, led it back to its infancy again.[9] The Marquise de Seiglière in Sandeau's famous comedy does not talk greater nonsense about Napoleon.