When death lowers the curtain between me and the world, it shall be found that my drama was divided into three acts.
From my early youth until 1800, I was a soldier and a traveller; from 1800 to 1811, under the Consulate and the Empire, my life was given to literature; from the Restoration to the present day, it has been devoted to politics.
During each of my three successive careers, I have always placed some great task before myself: as a traveller, I aimed at discovering the polar world; as a man of letters, I have striven to reconstruct religion from its ruins; as a statesman, I have endeavoured to give to the people the true system of representative monarchy, accompanied with its various liberties: I have at least assisted in winning that liberty which is worth all the others, which replaces them and serves in stead of any constitution, the liberty of the press. When, frequently, I have failed in my enterprises, there has been in my case a failure of destiny. The foreigners who have succeeded in their designs were aided by fortune; they had powerful friends behind them and a peaceful country. I have been less lucky.
Of the modern French authors of my own period, I may be said to be the only one whose life resembles his works: a traveller, soldier, poet, publicist, it is amid forests that I have sung the forest, aboard ship that I have depicted the sea, in camp that I have spoken of arms, in exile that I have learnt to know exile, in Courts, in affairs of State, in Parliament that I have studied princes, politics, law and history. The orators of Greece and Rome played their part in the republic and shared its fate. In Italy and Spain, at the end of the Middle Ages and at the Renascence, the leading intellects in letters and the arts took part in the social movement. How stormy and how fine were the lives of Dante, of Tasso, of Camoëns, of Ercilla, of Cervantes!
In France our ancient poets and historians sang and wrote in the midst of pilgrimages and battles: Thibaut Count of Champagne, Villehardouin, Joinville borrow the felicity of their style from their adventurous careers; Froissart travels the highways in search of history, and learns it from the mouths of the knights and abbots whom he meets, by whose side he rides along the roads. But, commencing from the reign of François I., our writers have been men leading detached lives, and their talents have perchance expressed the spirit but not the deeds of their age. If I were destined to live, I should represent in my person, as represented in my Memoirs, the principles, the ideas, the events, the catastrophes, the idylls of my time, the more in that I have seen a world end and a world commence, and that the conflicting characters of that ending and that commencement lie intermingled in my opinions. I have found myself caught between two ages as in the conflux of two rivers, and I have plunged into their waters, turning regretfully from the old bank upon which I was born, yet swimming hopefully towards the unknown shore at which the new generations are to land.
These Memoirs, divided into books and parts, have been written at different times and in different places: each section naturally entails a kind of prologue which recalls the occurrences that have arisen since the last date and describes the place in which I resume the thread of my narrative. In this way the various events and the changeful circumstances of my life enter one into the other; it happens that, in moments of prosperity, I have to tell of times of penury, and that, in days of tribulation, I retrace my days of happiness. The diverse opinions formed in diverse periods of my life, my youth penetrating into my old age, the gravity of my years of experience casting a shadow over my lighter years, the rays of my sun, from its rise to its setting, intercrossing and commingling like the scattered reflections of my existence, all these give a sort of indefinable unity to my work; my cradle bears the mark of my tomb, my tomb of my cradle; my hardships become pleasures, my pleasures sorrows, and one no longer knows whether these Memoirs proceed from a dark or a hoary head.
I do not say this in self-praise, for I do not know that it is good; I say what is the fact, what happened without reflection on my part, through the very fickleness of the tempests loosed against my bark, which often have left me but the rock that caused my shipwreck upon which to write this or that fragment of my life.
I have applied to the writing of these Memoirs a really paternal predilection; I would wish to be able to rise at the ghostly hour to correct the proofs: the dead go fast.
The notes accompanying the text are of three kinds: the first, printed at the end of each volume, consist of explanatory documents, proofs and illustrations; the second, printed at the foot of the pages, are contemporary with the text; the third, also printed as foot-notes, have been added after the text was written, and bear the date of the time and place at which they were written. A year or two of solitude spent in some corner of the earth would suffice to enable me to complete my Memoirs; but the only period of rest that I have known was the nine months during which I slept in my mother's womb: it is probable that I shall not recover this antenatal rest until I lie in the entrails of our common mother after death.
Several of my friends have urged me to publish a portion of my story now: I could not bring myself to accede to their wish. In the first place, I should be less candid and less veracious, in spite of myself; and then, I have always imagined myself to be writing seated in my grave. From this my work has assumed a certain religious character, which I could not remove without impairing its merit; it would be painful to me to stifle the distant voice which issues from the tomb, and which makes itself heard throughout the course of this narrative. None will be surprised that I should preserve certain weaknesses, that I should be concerned for the fate of the poor orphan destined to survive me upon earth. Should Minos judge that I had suffered enough in this world to become at least a happy Shade in the next, a little light thrown from the Elysian Fields to illumine my last picture would serve to make the defects of the painter less prominent. Life does not suit me; perhaps death will become me better.