He writes of her death pathetically, as the saddest event of his life. He had been loved and cherished by her with a devotion made sublime by its absolute self-abnegation. His first lessons in books and knowledge had been given by her, and he was endowed personally with her most prominent characteristics. She had seemed to know instinctively when and why he suffered, and she possessed a power of divination to foresee his career. Her death, the result of a terrible accident, was to him like the rending violently away of a vital part of his body.
“I hardly thought that I could survive the shock,” he wrote in the Souvenirs. “I was absent from home when the accident occurred which cut short her days. I came back in haste, arriving in time to follow the coffin in which her remains were enshrouded, to the cemetery of the village where we had lived during our infancy.”
The weather was bitterly cold, but this he did not feel. He returned to the house at Milly, now empty for the winter and a thousand times more empty since she who had given it life and soul was sleeping the eternal sleep. Overcome by his grief, he made his way to the little room where the papers of the family were kept, and threw himself down on the floor. There he lay for hours in an ecstasy of woe. The moaning of the wind and the ticking of the clock seemed to be repeating the funeral hymn.
JOURNEY TO THE EAST.
One desire that the mother of Lamartine had instilled into him was that of visiting the East. As she read to him, a boy of eight years, from the Bible about the places where wonderful events had taken place, he resolved that he would some time behold them with his own eyes. Now that he was disengaged from public life there was an opportunity. There was much, however, to persuade him to remain at home; his father and sisters, and besides, he had a beautiful residence at Saint-Point with a wife and daughter to whom he was fondly attached. But he felt that imagination had likewise its necessities and passions.
“I was born a poet,” he pleads. “When young, I had heard the word of Nature, the speech which is formed of images and not of sounds. I had even translated into written language some of those accents that had stirred me, and that had in their turn stirred other souls. But these accents did not now satisfy me.”
“Besides, I was, I had almost always been, a Christian in heart and in imagination; my mother had made me such.” This pilgrimage though not as of the Christian, at least of the man and the poet, would delight her in the celestial abode where he saw her, and she would be to them as a second Providence between them and dangers.
His duty to his country was likewise considered. He had sacrificed to it this dream of his for sixteen years. There was need for heaven to raise up new men; the present politics made man ashamed and angels weep. “Destiny gives an hour in a century for humanity to be regenerated; that hour is a revolution; and men let it pass to tear one another to pieces: thus they give to revenge the hour given by God for their regeneration and progress.”
All was duly made ready for the journey. He set sail from Marseilles, in the brig Alceste, on the eleventh of July, 1832, expecting to be absent two years. His wife and daughter and three friends, one of them a physician, composed the party. The voyage was full of incident, and his journal abounds with adventures and predictions. Lamartine was what imaginative persons term a visionary. He was really oriental and tropical in temperament, and ready to catch the spirit of the region to which he was sailing; for Syria, Arabia and Palestine have always been renowned for mystics, seers and prophets.
As the vessel passed the coast of Tunis, he wrote his impressions. He had never loved the Romans nor taken the least interest in behalf of Carthage; but he sympathized with Hannibal. “I love or I abhor, in the physical sense of the word,” says he. “At first sight, in the twinkling of an eye, I have formed my judgment of a man or woman for always.” He adds that “this is the characteristic of individuals with whom instinct is quick, active, instantaneous, inflexible. What, it will be asked, what is instinct? It is to be cognized as the highest reason—the innate reason, the reason that does not argue, the reason such as God has made and not what man finds out. It strikes us like the lightning without which the eye would have difficulty of searching it out. It illuminates everything at the first flash. The inspiration in all the arts, as upon the field of battle, is as this instinct, this reason that divines. Genius also is instinct and not logic and labor.”