[THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE][1]
Sicut nubes ... quasi naves ... velut umbra.—Job.[2]
As it is not possible for me to foresee the moment of my end; as at my age the days accorded to man are but days of grace, or rather of reprieve, I propose, lest I be taken by surprise, to make an explanation touching a work with which I intend to cheat the tedium of those last forlorn hours which we neither desire, nor know how to employ.
The Memoirs prefaced by these lines embrace and will embrace the whole course of my life: they were commenced in the year 1811 and continued to the present day. I tell in that portion which is already completed, and shall tell in that which as yet is but roughly sketched, the story of my childhood, my education, my youth, my entrance into the service, my arrival in Paris, my presentation to Louis XVI., the early scenes of the Revolution, my travels in America, my return to Europe, my emigration to Germany and England, my return to France under the Consulate, my employment and work under the Empire, my journey to Jerusalem, my employment and work under the Restoration, and finally the complete history of the Restoration and of its fall.
I have met nearly all the men who in my time have played a part, great or small, in my own country or abroad: from Washington to Napoleon, from Louis XVIII. to Alexander, from Pius VII. to Gregory XVI., from Fox, Burke, Pitt, Sheridan, Londonderry, Capo d'Istrias to Malesherbes, Mirabeau and the rest; from Nelson, Bolivar, Mehemet Pasha of Egypt to Suffren, Bougainville, La Pérouse, Moreau and so forth. I have been one of an unprecedented triumvirate: three poets of different interests and nationality, who filled, within the same decade, the post of minister of Foreign Affairs—myself in France, Mr. Canning in England, Señor Martinez de la Rosa in Spain. I have lived successively through the empty years of my youth and the years filled with the Republican Era, the annals of Bonaparte and the reign of the Legitimacy.
I have explored the seas of the Old World and the New, and trod the soil of the four quarters of the globe. After camping in Iroquois shelters and Arab tents, in the wigwams of the Hurons, amid the remains of Athens, Jerusalem, Memphis, Carthage, Grenada, among Greeks, Turks and Moors, in forests and among ruins; after wearing the bearskin of the savage and the silken caftan of the mameluke; after enduring poverty, hunger, thirst and exile, I have sat, as minister and ambassador, in a gold-laced coat, my breast motley with stars and ribbons, at the tables of kings, at the feasts of princes and princesses, only to relapse into indigence and to receive a taste of prison.
I have been connected with a host of personages famous in the career of arms, the Church, politics, law, science and art. I have endless materials in my possession: more than four thousand private letters, the diplomatic correspondence of my several embassies, that of my term at the Foreign Office, including documents of an unique character, known to none save myself. I have carried the soldier's musket, the traveller's cudgel, the pilgrim's staff: I have been a sea-farer, and my destinies have been as fickle as my sails; a halcyon, and made my nest upon the billows.
I have meddled with peace and war; I have signed treaties and protocols, and published numerous works the while. I have been initiated into secrets of parties, of Court and of State: I have been a close observer of the rarest miseries, the highest fortunes, the greatest renowns. I have taken part in sieges, congresses, conclaves, in the restoration and overturning of thrones. I have made history, and I could write it. And my life, solitary, dreamy, poetic, has gone on through this world of realities, catastrophes, tumult, uproar, in the company of the sons of my dreams, Chactas, René, Eudore, Aben-Hamet, of the daughters of my imagination, Atala, Amélie, Blanca, Velléda, Cymodocée. Of my age and not of it, I perhaps exercised upon it, without either wishing or seeking to do so, a three-fold influence, religious, political and literary.
There are left to me but four or five contemporaries of established fame. Alfieri, Canova and Monti have disappeared; Italy has only Pindemonte and Manzoni left over from her brilliant days. Pellico has wasted his best days in the cells of the Spielberg: the talents of the land that gave Dante birth are condemned to silence or driven to languish on foreign soil; Lord Byron and Mr. Canning have died young; Walter Scott is no longer with us; Goethe has left us, full of years and glory. France has scarce anything remaining from her abundant past; she is commencing a new era, while I linger behind to bury my period, like the old priest who, in the sack of Béziers, was to toll the bell before falling himself when the last citizen had expired.