The hero of Les Martyrs is peculiarly interesting to us because Chateaubriand has painted him with many of the features of his own expressive countenance. So great is the similarity of their circumstances that the words and the reflections with which Chateaubriand and Eudore begin to tell the stories of their lives are almost identical. Eudore says: "Born at the foot of Mount Taygetus, the melancholy murmur of the sea was the first sound that fell upon my ear. On how many shores have I since then watched those waves break that I am now gazing on! Who could have told me a few short years ago that I should hear the waves moaning on the beaches of Italy, on the shores of the Batavians, the Britons, and the Gauls, which I then saw laving the bright sands of Messenia?" And Chateaubriand, in his Voyage en Italie, writes: "Born on the rocky shores of Brittany, the first sound which fell on my ear when I came into the world was the roar of the sea; and on how many shores have I since then seen the billows break on which I am now gazing! Who could have told me a few short years ago that I should hear moaning by the graves of Scipio and Virgil the waves that rolled at my feet on English beaches and the shores of Maryland?" &c.
Both these heroes are, thus, far-travelled and sorely tried men of the type of Odysseus and Æneas. Common to both are astonishment at the many and strange adventures of their own lives, and admiration of themselves, who have been protected throughout all these dangers by higher powers. But more significant is another feature which they have in common. Eudore, like Chateaubriand, is the hero who brings about the triumph of Christianity upon earth. Chateaubriand does in the reign of Napoleon what Eudore did in the reign of Galerius; and it is not his fault that he is not a martyr; the thought of martyrdom was one which often occupied him in his youth; he repeatedly said to friends that he would not have drawn back if his life had been required of him. The heroic figure always present to his imagination as a pattern is nothing less than the sacrificial victim who atones for the ungodliness and apostasy of the age, and who by his life-work and his sufferings appeases an angry God. In the first edition of Les Martyrs Eudore is plainly called a lesser Christ. In writing of him the author uses the expression that the Almighty demanded "une hostie entière." In the later editions this particular expression was, on religious grounds, omitted, but in another place the same idea has been inadvertently retained, with an almost comic effect. In the account of Eudore's martyrdom we read: "The chair of fire was now ready. Seated on its glowing bars, the Christian teacher preached the Gospel more eloquently than before. Seraphims shed the dew of heaven on him, and his guardian angel sheltered him with his wings. Il paraissait dans la flamme comme un pain délicieux préparé pour les tables célestes."
We have here the fundamental idea that distinguishes the type. The first sacrifice, the first saviour, the first "host," is not enough. Although he is a Christian, Chateaubriand does not believe that the sacrificial death of Christ has been a complete atonement, has done all that was required. To ensure the triumph of religion minor saviours, such as Chateaubriand himself and his hero Eudore, are still needed. In German Romanticism even a miserable creature like Golo in Tieck's Genoveva is understood to have a resemblance to Christ; the same is the case with Eudore.[2] Though he errs in his youth and for a short time treads the path of destruction in beautiful Naples (Chateaubriand knew by experience that the best resolutions are no security against such backsliding), he reforms, stands steadfast in every trial, and dies a shining light.
His love for Velléda is one of these trials.
Velléda is undoubtedly the most remarkable and most influential female character in the French literature of this period. She is a Gallic maiden of the third century, and in her Chateaubriand depicts the French national type. "This was no ordinary woman. She had that attractive waywardness which distinguishes the women of Gaul. Her glance was quick and keen, the expression of her mouth slightly satirical, her smile peculiarly gentle and expressive. Her bearing was now proud, now voluptuous. Her whole personality was a mixture of gentleness and dignity, of artlessness and art." But Velléda is not simply French; she bears the distinct impress of the age of her creation; she is an ideal of 1808. She is a priestess, and belongs to the family of the Arch-Druid. In the first decade of the nineteenth century the feminine character was not perfect unless it was marked by religious enthusiasm. It was also obligatory that Velléda should not be purely and simply the child of nature; she is so only to the same extent as were the ladies of 1808. We are expressly and somewhat pedantically told of her that in the family of the Arch-Druid she had been "carefully instructed in the literature of Greece and in the history of her own country." Velléda is the last priestess of the Druids, as Cymodocée is the last priestess of Homer. A short time ago Corinne had been the model of the ambitious young Frenchwoman, now she was supplanted by Velléda; and, literature not being merely a medium of expression for society, but also an important agent in remoulding it, we see the type pass from the world of imagination into the world of reality. What is Madame de Krüdener, standing in front of the Russian army, but a Christian Velléda?
When we make the acquaintance of the young priestess she is seated in a boat which is tossing on the waves of a tempestuous sea, trying to still the storm with her incantations; for she, like Fouqué's Undine, has, or believes she has, a certain power over the sea. Later we hear her, in an eloquent speech, calling on her countrymen to take up arms against the Romans and reconquer their liberty. We see her, as the priestess of Teutates, sharpening her sickle to offer a human sacrifice. How beautiful she is as her creator describes her to us—tall and straight, scantily clothed in a short, black, sleeveless tunic, her golden sickle hanging from a girdle of steel! Her eyes are blue, her lips rose-red; her fair flowing hair is bound with a slender oak-branch or a wreath of verbena.
Hardly has she seen Eudore than she loves him. But such simple and natural passion is not enough for the age; it demands that Velléda shall be a devotee of Vesta, shall have taken the oath of eternal virginity. "I am a virgin, the virgin of the island of the Seine; whether I keep my oath or break it I die—die for your sake." Eudore admires her, but does not love her. His relation to her is that of the pious Æneas to Dido, a fact to which the author makes him draw our attention. The unfortunate Velléda tries all her magic arts. At one time she determines to steal her way in to Eudore on the moonbeams; at another she is preparing to fly into the tower which he inhabits and win his love in the shape of another woman, but the very thought arouses her jealousy and causes her to desist. Eudore, though he does not return her passion, feels himself, as it were, infected by its atmosphere when he is beside her. As a Christian he shrinks with horror from the temptation. "At least twenty times while Velléda was telling me of her sad and tender feelings, I was on the point of throwing myself at her feet, announcing her victory, and making her happy by the acknowledgment of my defeat. At the moment when I was about to succumb, the compassion with which the unhappy woman inspired me saved me. But this very compassion, which saved me at first, in the end proved my destruction; for it deprived me of the last remnant of my strength." Looking at the matter from the purely artistic point of view, it offends our taste to hear a man dilate thus upon his struggles to preserve his virtue; Eudore's outbursts of shame and remorse do not become him well. "O Cyrille," he says, "how can I go on with such a story! I blush with shame and confusion." When at last, after Velléda has attempted to kill herself, this knight of the doleful countenance has yielded and is lying at her feet, nothing less will serve him than to set all the powers of hell loose on the occasion. "I fell at Velléda's feet. ... Hell gave the signal for these terrible nuptials; the spirits of darkness howled from their abyss, the chaste spouses of our forefathers turned away their faces, my guardian angel hid his with his wings and returned to heaven." Even at the supreme moment this depressing hero is incapable of self-surrender; he is ashamed; he resembles a boy who, with a feeling compounded of gluttony and fear of flogging, devours a stolen apple. "My happiness resembled despair, and any one seeing us in the midst of our rapture would have taken us for two criminals who had just received their sentence of death. From that moment I felt that I was stamped with the seal of divine wrath. Thick darkness spread like a smoke-cloud in my soul; I felt as if a host of rebellious spirits had suddenly taken possession of it. Thoughts filled my mind which until this moment had never occurred to me; the language of hell poured from my lips; I uttered such blasphemies as are heard in the place where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth."
It is, thus, on a background of hell-fire that Chateaubriand depicts the love of the Christian confessor and the heathen prophetess. In Atala, where we have a kindred representation of combined suffering and pleasure, the insincere anathema against earthly love was not yet launched.
We come upon much the same idea in one of Alfred de Vigny's youthful works, Eloa, a beautiful and notable poem which describes the seduction of a charming young angel of the female sex by the Prince of Darkness. The Satan of Les Martyrs was a revolutionist, but De Vigny's Satan is hardly to be distinguished from the Eros of the ancients. Without telling who he is, he ensnares the fair angel with his personal charms and his eloquence, and draws her with him into the abyss. He himself describes his power in the following words:
Je suis celui qu'on aime et qu'on ne connaît pas.
Sur l'homme j'ai fondé mon empire de flamme
Dans les désirs du cœur, dans les rêves de l'âme,
Dans les liens des corps, attraits mystérieux,
Dans les trésors du sang, dans les regards des yeux.
C'est moi qui fait parler l'épouse dans ses songes;
La jeune fille heureuse apprend d'heureux mensonges;
Je leur donne des nuits qui consolent des jours,
Je suis le Roi secret des secrètes amours.