CHATEAUBRIAND'S MEMOIRS.
Mémoires d'outre Tombe. Par M. Le Vicomte de Chateaubriand. Tom. v. vi. vii. viii. et ix. Paris: 1849.
The great and honourable feature of Chateaubriand's mind, amidst some personal weaknesses, is its noble and disinterested character. It differs from what we see around us, but it differs chiefly in superior elevation. It united, to a degree which perhaps will never again be witnessed, the lofty feelings of chivalry, with the philanthropic visions of philosophy. In the tribune he was often a Liberal of the modern school; but in action he was always a paladin of the olden time. His fidelity was not to prosperity, but to adversity; his bond was not to the powerful, but to the unfortunate; reversing the revolutionary maxim, he brought the actions of public men to the test, not of success, but of disaster. He often irritated his friends when in power by the independence of his language, but he never failed to command the respect of his enemies when in adversity, by his constancy to misfortune. "Vive le roi quand-même," ever became his principle when the gales of adversity blew, and the hollow-hearted support of the world began to fail. Prosperity often saw him intrepid, perhaps imprudent in expression, but misfortune never failed to exhibit him generous and faithful in action; and his fidelity to the cause of royalty was never so strikingly evinced as when that cause in France was most desperate. He was the very antipodes of the hideous revolutionary tergiversation of Fontainebleau. A pilgrim in this scene of trial, he was ever ready, after having attained the summit of worldly grandeur, to descend at the call of honour; and, resuming his staff and scrip, to set out afresh on the path of duty. He was fitted to be the object of jealousy and spite to kings and ministers in power, whose follies he disdained to flatter or to overlook their vices, and of eternal admiration to the great and the good in every future age, whose hearts his deeds not less than his words will cause to throb. Such a character might pass for fabulous or imaginary, were it not clearly evinced, not only by words, but actions; not only in the thoughts of genius, but in the deeds of honour. His life, and the feelings by which it was regulated, are well worth examining, although we fear he will find but few imitators in these days, and is more likely, in a utilitarian and money-seeking age, to be classed with the mammoth and mastodon, as a species of existence never again to be seen in this world.
A character of this description naturally became enamoured of awful or heartstirring events, and was ever ready to find a friend in those capable of noble or heroic deeds in the ranks even of his enemies. Both qualities are evinced in the following graphic account of the appearance of the Grand Army when it arrived at Smolensko during the Moscow retreat:—
"On the 9th November, the troops at length reached Smolensko. An order of Buonaparte forbade any one to enter before the posts had been intrusted to the Imperial Guard. The soldiers on the outside were grouped in great numbers round the foot of the walls: those within were under cover. The air resounded with the imprecations of those who were shut out. Clothed in dirty Cossack cloaks, horse-cloths, and worn-out blankets, with their heads covered with old carpets, broken helmets, ragged shakos, for the most part torn by shot, stained with blood, or hacked in pieces by sabre-cuts—with haggard and yet ferocious countenances, they looked up to the top of the ramparts gnashing their teeth, with the expression of those prisoners who, under Louis the Fat, bore in their right hand their left cut off: you would have taken them for infuriated masques, or famished madmen escaped from Bedlam. At length the Old and Young Guard arrived, they were quickly admitted into the place which had been wasted by conflagration on occasion of our first passage. Loud cries of indignation were immediately raised against the privileged corps. 'Is the army to be left nothing but what it leaves?' was heard on all sides. Meanwhile the household troops, who had been admitted, rushed in tumultuous crowds to the magazines like an insurrection of spectres: the guards at the doors repulsed them; they fought in the streets: the dead, the wounded encumbered the pavements, the women, the children, the dying filled the waggons. The air was poisoned by the multitude of dead bodies; even old soldiers were seized with idiocy or madness; some whose hair stood on end with horror, blasphemed, or laughed with a ghastly air and fell dead. Napoleon let his wrath exhale in imprecations against a miserable commissary, none of the orders given to which had been executed.
"The army, a hundred thousand strong when it left Moscow, now reduced to thirty thousand, was followed by a band of fifty thousand stragglers; there were not eighteen hundred horsemen mounted. Napoleon gave the command of them to M. de Latour Maubourg. That officer, who had led the cuirassiers to the assault of the great redoubt of Borodino, had had his head almost cleft asunder by the stroke of a sabre; he afterwards lost a leg at Dresden. Perceiving his servant in tears when the operation was over, he said to him, 'Why do you weep? you will have only one boot to clean.' That general, who remained faithful to misfortune, became the preceptor of Henry V. in the first years of the exile of that prince. I lift my hat in his presence, as in that of the Incarnation of Honour."—Memoirs, vi. p. 116, 118.
As Chateaubriand had declined office, and narrowly escaped death in consequence, when Napoleon murdered the Duke d'Enghien, his life, from that period to the Restoration of the Bourbons, was one of retirement and observation. The important part which he took in the Restoration, by the publication of his celebrated pamphlet De Buonaparte et des Bourbons, restored him to political life. The effect produced by that work was immense, and the placing of the ancient race of monarchs on the throne was in a great degree owing to it; for, at a crisis when the intentions of the Allies were yet undecided, and Austria openly supported the strong party in France which inclined for a regency with Marie Louise at its head, it swelled immensely the numbers of the decided Royalists, and gave a definite and tangible object to their hitherto vague and divided aspirations. It was written with prodigious rapidity, and bears marks of the haste of its composition in the vehemence of its ideas and the occasional exaggeration of its assertions; but it was the very thing required for a national crisis of unexampled importance, when every hour was fraught with lasting consequences, and every effort of genius was required for laying the foundation of a new order in European society. Of the first conception and subsequent completion of this remarkable work he gives the following account:—
"I had been permitted to return to my solitary valley. The earth trembled under the footsteps of stranger armies: I wrote like the last Roman, amidst the din of barbarian invasion. During the day, I traced lines as agitated as the events which were passing: at night, when the roar of cannon was no longer heard in my solitary woods, I returned to the silence of the years which sleep in the tomb, and to the peace of my earlier life. The agitated pages which I wrote during the day, became, when put together, my pamphlet On Buonaparte and the Bourbons. I had so high an idea of the genius of Napoleon, and the valour of our soldiers, that the idea of a foreign invasion, successful in its ultimate results, never entered into my imagination; but I thought that such an invasion, by making the French see the dangers to which the ambition of Napoleon had exposed them, would lead to an interior movement, and that the deliverance of the French would be the work of their own hands. It was under that impression that I wrote my notes, in order that, if our political assemblies should arrest the march of the Allies, and separate themselves from a great man who had become their scourge, they should know to what haven to turn. The harbour of refuge appeared to me to be in the ancient authority, under which our ancestors had lived during eight centuries, but modified according to the changes of time. During a tempest, when one finds himself at the gate of an old edifice, albeit in ruins, he is glad to seek its shelter."—Vol. vi. p. 196, 197.
Madame de Chateaubriand, in a note, has described the circumstances under which this memorable pamphlet was written, and the morbid anxiety with which she was devoured during its composition:—
"Had the pages of that pamphlet been seized by the police, the result could not have been a moment doubtful: the sentence was the scaffold. Nevertheless the author was inconceivably negligent about concealing it. Often, when he went out, he left the sheets on the table: at night he only placed them under his pillow, which he did in presence of his valet—an honest youth, it is true, but who might have betrayed him. For my part, I was in mortal agonies: whenever M. de Chateaubriand went out, I seized the manuscript, and concealed it on my person. One day, in crossing the Tuileries, I perceived I had it not upon me, and being sure I had it when I went out, I did not doubt that I had let it fall on the road. Already I beheld that fatal writing in the hands of the police, and M. de Chateaubriand arrested. I fell down in swoon in the garden, and some kind-hearted person carried me to my house, from which I had only got a short distance. What agony I endured when, ascending the stair, I floated between terror, which now amounted almost to a certainty, and a slight hope that I might have forgot the pamphlet. On reaching my husband's apartment, I felt again ready to faint: I approached the bed—I felt under the pillow; there was nothing there: I lifted the mattress, and there was the roll of paper! My heart still beats every time I think of it. Never in my life did I experience such a moment of joy. With truth can I say, my joy would not have been so great if I had been delivered at the foot of the scaffold, for it was one who was more dear to me than life itself whom I saw rescued from destruction."—Vol. vi. p. 206, 207.