I publish Atala.
Atala became so popular that, with the Brinvilliers[386] she went to swell Curtius' collection[387]. The wagoners' inns were decorated with red, green and blue prints representing Chactas, Father Aubry, and the daughter of Simaghan. My characters were displayed in wax, in wooden boxes, on the quays, as images of the Virgin and the saints are displayed at the fair. In a boulevard theatre, I saw my savage woman, in a headdress of cock's feathers, talking to a savage of her own kind of "the soul of solitude," in a way that brought the sweat to my brow with confusion. At the Variétés, they played a piece in which a little girl and a little boy, leaving their boarding-school, went off by track-boat to get married in a small town; as, on landing, they spoke with a wild look of nothing but crocodiles, storks and forests, their parents thought that they had gone mad. I was overwhelmed with parodies, caricatures and ridicule. The Abbé Morellet, in order to confound me, took his maid-servant on his knees and was unable to hold the young virgin's feet in his hands, as Chactas held Atala's feet during the storm: if the Chactas of the Rue d'Anjou had had his portrait painted in this attitude, I would have forgiven him his criticism.
All this bustle served to increase the fuss attendant upon my appearance. I became the fashion. My head was turned: I was unaccustomed to the delights of self-love and became intoxicated with it I loved fame like a woman, like a first love. And yet, coward that I was, my affright equalled my passion: I was a conscript and stood the fire badly. My natural timidity, the doubts I have always had of my talent, made me humble in the midst of my triumphs. I shrank from my splendour; I wandered in lonely places, trying to extinguish the halo with which my head was crowned. In the evenings, with my hat thrust down over my eyes, lest the great man should be recognised, I went to a public smoking-room to read my praises in secret, in some small, unknown paper. Alone with my renown, I prolonged my walks as far as the steam-pump at Chaillot[388], on the same road where I had suffered so much on going to Court: I was no more at my ease with my new honours. When my superiority dined for thirty sous in the Latin Quarter it swallowed its food the wrong way, troubled as it was by the staring of which it thought itself the object. I watched myself, I said to myself:
"And yet it is you, extraordinary being, eating like any one else!"
In the Champs-Élysées was a café which I liked because of some nightingales which hung in a cage inside the coffee-room; Madame Rousseau, who kept the place, knew me by sight, without knowing who I was. At ten o'clock in the evening, they used to bring me a cup of coffee, and I looked for Atala in the Petites-Affiches, to the sound of the voices of my half-dozen Philomelas. Alas! I soon saw poor Madame Rousseau die; our society of the nightingales and of the fair Indian who sang, "Sweet habit of loving, so needful to life!" lasted but a moment.
If success had no power to prolong in me this stupid infatuation of vanity, or to pervert my reason, it was attended with dangers of another kind: those dangers increased on the appearance of the Génie du Christianisme and on my resignation after the death of the Duc d'Enghien. Then came thronging around me, together with the young women who cry over novels, the crowd of Christian women, and those other noble enthusiasts whose breast beats high at the sight of an honourable action. The young girls of thirteen or fourteen were the most dangerous; for, knowing neither what they want nor what they want with you, they enticingly mingle your image with a multitude of fables, ribbons and flowers. Jean Jacques Rousseau speaks of the declarations which he received on the publication of the Nouvelle Héloïse[389] and of the conquests which were offered him: I do not know if empires would have been thus yielded to me, but I do know that I was buried beneath a heap of scented notes; if those notes were not, to-day, notes from so many grand-mothers, I should be puzzled how to relate, with becoming modesty, how they fought for a line in my hand, how they picked up an envelope addressed by me, and how, blushing and with lowered head, they hid it beneath a flowing veil of long tresses. If I have not been spoilt, it must be because my nature is good.
And become the fashion.
Whether from genuine politeness or inquisitive weakness, I sometimes went so far as to think myself obliged to call and thank the unknown ladies who signed the flattery they addressed to me with their names. One day, I found a bewitching creature under her mother's wing, on a fourth floor, where I have never set foot since. A fair Pole received me in silk-hung rooms; half-odalisk, half-Valkyrie, she looked like a snowdrop with its white flowers, or like one of those graceful heather-blooms which replace the other daughters of Flora when the season of the latter has not yet come or has passed: that female chorus, varied in age and beauty, was the realisation of my former sylph. The two-fold effect upon my vanity and my feelings was so much the more to be dreaded inasmuch as, until then, excepting one serious attachment, I had been neither sought out nor distinguished by the crowd. At the same time I am bound to say that, even though it were easy for me to take advantage of a passing illusion, my sincerity revolted against the idea of a voluptuousness that would have come to me by the chaste paths of religion: to be loved through the Génie du Christianisme, loved for the Extrème Onction, loved for the Fête des Morts! I could never have been so shameful a Tartuffe.
I knew a Provençal physician, Dr. Vigaroux[390]; he had arrived at an age when every pleasure means the loss of a day, and he said "that he had no regret for the time thus lost; without troubling himself whether he gave the happiness which he received, he went towards the death of which he hoped to make his last delight." Nevertheless, I was a witness of his poor tears when he breathed his last; he could not hide his affliction from me; it was too late: his white hairs were not long enough to conceal and wipe away his tears. The only one to be really unhappy on leaving the earth is the unbeliever: for the man without faith, existence is terrible in this, that it carries a sense of annihilation; if one had not been born, he would not experience the horror of ceasing to be: the life of the atheist is a frightful lightning-flash, which serves but to reveal an abyss.