The author of the Histoire de la literature italienne, who crept into the Revolution in Chamfort's wake, came to visit us, thanks to the cousinship that exists among all Bretons. Ginguené lived in society upon a reputation acquired through a rather graceful set of verses, the Confession de Zulmé, which obtained for him a paltry place in M. de Necker's[246] offices: hence his article upon his admission to the office of the Controller-General. Somebody disputed Ginguené's claim to the authorship of the Confession de Zulmé upon which his fame was based; but it was, as a matter of fact, his own.
The Rennes poet was a good musician and wrote ballads. Humble as he began by being, we saw his pride grow as he succeeded in hanging upon the skirts of some well-known man. About the time of the summoning of the States-General, Chamfort employed him to scribble articles for the newspapers and speeches for the clubs: he then became arrogant. At the first Federation he said: "There's a fine entertainment! In order to light it better, we ought to burn an aristocrat at each of the four corners of the altar!" There was nothing original in this aspiration; long before him, Louis Dorléans, the Leaguer, had written in his Banquet du Comte d'Arète that "one ought to fasten the Protestant ministers by way of faggots to the stake of the Midsummer's Night bonfires, and put King Henry IV. into the barrel where one put the cats."
Ginguené knew of the revolutionary murders before they took place. Madame Ginguené warned my sisters and my wife of the massacre planned at the Carmelites, and gave them shelter: she lived in the Cul-de-sac Férou, near the place where throats were to be cut.
After the Terror, Ginguené became a sort of head of the department of Public Instruction; it was then that he sang the Arbre de la liberté at the Cadran-Bleu, to the air of Je l'ai planté, je l'ai vu naître. He was considered sufficiently pious, philosophically, for an embassy to the Court of one of the kings who were being discrowned. He wrote from Turin to M. de Talleyrand that he had "overcome a prejudice:" he had caused his wife to be received at Court in a pet-en-l'air?[247] After falling from mediocrity to importance, from importance to silliness, and from silliness to absurdity, he ended his days as a distinguished critic, and what is better, as an independent writer in the Décade[248]: nature had restored him to the place whence Society had to such ill purpose taken him. His information is second-hand, his prose dull, his verse correct and sometimes agreeable.
Guinguené and Le Brun.
Ginguené had a friend, the poet Le Brun[249]. Ginguené protected Le Brun, in the way in which a man of talent, who knows the world, protects the simplicity of a man of genius; Le Brun in his turn cast his radiancy over Ginguené's eminence. Nothing more comical was seen than the part played by these two cronies who, by a gentle commerce, did each other all the services which two men excelling in different spheres are able to render one to the other.
Le Brun was simply a mock gentleman of the Empyrean; his poetic spirit was as cold as his transports were icy. His Parnassus was a top room in the Rue Montmartre, furnished with a pile of books heaped pell-mell on the floor, a trestle-bed, the curtains of which consisted of two dirty towels dangling from a rusty iron rod, and the half of an ewer propped up against a bottomless chair. It was not that Le Brun was in needy circumstances; but he was a miser and addicted to loose women.
At M. de Vaudreuil's "classical supper[250]," he impersonated Pindar. Among his lyrical poems are to be found energetic or elegant stanzas, as in the ode on the ship Vengeur or the ode on the Environs de Paris. His elegies issued from his head, rarely from his soul; his was a labored, not a natural, originality; he created only by sheer force of art: he toiled to distort the meanings of words and to unite them in monstrous alliances. Le Brun had only one real talent, that of satire; his epistle on La bonne et la mauvaise plaisanterie enjoyed a well-deserved renown. Some of his epigrams are worthy of mention with J. B. Rousseau's; La Harpe above all inspired him. One more justice should be done him: he retained his independence under Bonaparte, and has left trenchant verses directed against the oppressor of our liberties[251].
But unquestionably the most atrabiliary of the men of letters whom I knew in Paris at that time was Chamfort. Attacked with the disorder that produced the Jacobins, he was unable to forgive mankind for the accident of his birth[252]. He betrayed the houses to which he was admitted; he took the cynicism of his language for a picture of the manners of the Court. It would not be possible to deny that he had wit and talent, but wit and talent of the kind which does not reach posterity. When he saw that he was unable to attain to any position under the Revolution, he turned against himself the hands which he had raised against society. No longer to his vanity did the Phrygian cap appear as but another kind of crown, sans-culottism as a sort of nobility, of which Marat and Robespierre were the grandees. Furious at finding inequality of rank in the very world of sorrow and of tears, condemned to remain no more than a "villein" in the feudality of executioners, he tried to kill himself in order to escape from superiority in crime; he failed in his attempt: death laughs at those who summon it and who mistake it for annihilation.
I did not meet the Abbé Delille[253] until 1798, in London, and I never saw Rulhière[254], who lives through Madame d'Egmont[255] and makes her live, nor Palissot[256], nor Beaumarchais[257], nor Marmontel[258]. The same with Chénier[259], whom I never met, who has often attacked me, to whom I never replied, and whose place at the Institute was to be the cause of one of the crises of my life.