At least our Breton nobility did not succumb without honour. It refused to send deputies to the States-General, because it had not been convoked in accordance with the fundamental laws of the constitution of the province; it joined the army of the Princes in vast numbers, and was decimated in Condé's Army, or with Charette in the wars of the Vendée. Would it have made any difference in the majority in the National Assembly if it had joined that assembly? That is scarcely likely: in great social transformations, cases of individual resistance, however creditable to personal character, are powerless against facts. Nevertheless it is difficult to say what might not have been effected by a man of Mirabeau's genius, but of opposite principles, if one had been found in the order of the Breton nobility.
Young Boishue and my schoolfellow Saint-Riveul had been killed in these encounters, on their way to the chamber of the nobles: the former was in vain defended by his father, who served as his second[307].
Reader, pause: see flow the first drops of blood which the Revolution was to shed. Heaven decreed that they should issue from the veins of a companion of my childhood. Suppose that I had fallen instead of Saint-Riveul; it would have been said of me, merely changing the name, as was said of the victim with whom commenced the great immolation:
"A gentleman called Chateaubriand was killed on his way to the assembly-room of the States."
Those few words would have taken the place of my long history. Would Saint-Riveul have played my part on the earth? Was he destined for fame or for silence?
And now, reader, pass on; cross the river of blood which for all time separates the old world, whence you are issuing, from the new, at the entrance to which you shall die.
*
The year 1789, so famous in our history and in the history of the human race, found me on the moors of my Brittany; I was not even able to leave the country until rather late, and did not reach Paris until after the sack of the Maison Reveillon[308], the opening of the States-General[309], the constitution of the Third Estate into a National Assembly, the oath of the Tennis Court[310], the Royal Speech of the 23rd of June, and the joining of the clergy and the nobles to the commons[311].
There was a great stir along my road: in the villages the peasants stopped the carriages, asked to be shown passports, interrogated the travelers. The nearer we approached to the capital, the more the excitement increased. Passing through Versailles, I saw troops quartered in the orangery, trains of artillery parked in the court-yards, the provisional hall of the National Assembly erected on the Place du Palais, and deputies moving to and fro amid sight-seers, people of the palace, and soldiers.
Disturbances in Paris.