At Lyons, we again found M. Ballanche: he made the excursion to Geneva and Mont Blanc with us. He went wherever one took him, without having the smallest business there. At Geneva, I was not received at the gate of the city by Clotilda, the betrothed of Clovis: M. de Barante, senior[675], had become Prefect of the Léman. At Coppet, I went to see Madame de Staël: I found her alone, buried in her castle, which was built round a melancholy court-yard. I spoke to her of her fortune and of her solitude as a precious means of independence and happiness: I offended her. Madame de Staël loved society; she looked upon herself as the most wretched of women, in an exile with which I should have been enchanted. Where in my eyes was the unhappiness of living on one's property with all the comforts of life? Where was the misfortune of enjoying fame, leisure, peace, in a sumptuous retreat within sight of the Alps, in comparison with those thousands of breadless, nameless, helpless victims, banished to all the corners of Europe, while their parents had perished on the scaffold? It is sad to be attacked by an ill which the crowd cannot understand. For the rest, that ill is therefore only the more intense: it is not lessened by being confronted with other ills; one is not judged by another's pain; that which afflicts the one rejoices the other; hearts have varied secrets, incomprehensible to other hearts. Let us deny none his sufferings; it is with sorrows as with countries: each man has his own.
Madame de Staël called the next day on Madame de Chateaubriand at Geneva, and we left for Chamouny. My opinion on the scenery of the mountains caused it to be said that I was seeking to make myself singular. It will be seen, when I come to speak of the Saint-Gothard, that I have kept to my opinion. In the Voyage au Mont-Blanc appears a passage which I will recall as linking together the past events of my life and the events of that same life then still future, and to-day also past:
"There is one circumstance alone in which it is true that the mountains produce an oblivion of earthly troubles: that is when one withdraws far from the world to consecrate himself to religion. An anchorite devoting himself to the service of mankind, a saint wishing to meditate in silence on the greatness of God, may find peace and joy on desert rocks; but it is not then the tranquillity of the spot that passes into the soul of those solitaries: it is, on the contrary, their soul that diffuses its serenity through the region of storms....
"There are mountains which I would still visit with extreme pleasure: those, for instance, of Greece and Judæa. I should like to go over the spots with which my new studies lead me daily to occupy myself: I would gladly seek, upon the Tabor and Taygetus, other colours and other harmonies, after painting the unfamed mountains and unknown valleys of the New World."
The last phrase foretold the voyage which, in fact, I performed in the next year, 1806.
The Comte de Forbin.
On our return to Geneva, without being able to see Madame de Staël again at Coppet, we found the inns crammed. But for the cares of M. de Forbin[676], who arrived unexpectedly and procured us a bad dinner in a dark waiting-room, we should have left the birth-place of Rousseau without eating. M. de Forbin was at that time in a state of beatitude; he displayed in his looks the inner felicity with which he was inundated; his feet did not touch the ground. Wafted on his talent and his blissfulness, he came down from the mountain as though from the sky, with his close-fitting painter's jacket, his pallet on his thumb, his brushes in a quiver. A good fellow, nevertheless, although excessively happy, preparing to imitate me one day, when I should have made my voyage to Syria, wishing even to go as far as Calcutta, to make his loves return to him by an uncommon road, when they failed him on the beaten track. His eyes showed a protecting pity: I was poor, humble, uncertain of myself, and I did not hold the hearts of princesses in my mighty hands. In Rome, I have had the honour of returning M. de Forbin his lake-side dinner; I had the merit of having become an ambassador. In these days one sees the poor devil whom one has left that morning in the street turned into a king by evening.
The noble gentleman, a painter in right of the Revolution, began that generation of artists who dress themselves up like sketches, grotesques, caricatures. Some wear prodigious mustachioes: one would think they were going to conquer the world; their brushes are halberds, their erasing-knives sabres: others have huge beards, and hanging or puffed-out hair; they smoke a cigar by way of vulcano. These "cousins of the rainbow," as our old Régnier[677] says, have their heads filled with deluges, seas, rivers, forests, cataracts, tempests, or else with carnages, executions and scaffolds. In their rooms they have human skulls, foils, mandolines, morions, and dolmans. Bragging, pushing, uncivil, liberal (as far as the portrait of the tyrant whom they are painting), they endeavour to form a separate species between the ape and the satyr; they are anxious to make it understood that the secrecy of the studio has its dangers, and that there is no safety for the models. But how handsomely do they not redeem these oddities by a fevered existence, a suffering and sensitive nature, an entire abnegation of self, an incalculable devotion to the miseries of others, a delicate, superior, idealized manner of feeling, a poverty proudly welcomed and nobly endured; lastly, sometimes by immortal talents: the offspring of work, passion, genius, and solitude!
Leaving Geneva at night to return to Lyons, we were stopped at the foot of the Fort de l'Écluse, waiting for the gates to be opened. During this stay of the witches in Macbeth on the heath, strange things passed within me. My dead years came to life again and surrounded me like a band of phantoms; my burning seasons returned to me in their flame and sadness. My life, hollowed out by the death of Madame de Beaumont, had remained empty: airy forms, houris or dreams, issuing from that abyss, took me by the hand and led me back to the days of the sylph. I was no longer in the spot which I occupied, I dreamed of other shores. Some secret influence urged me to the regions of the Dawn, whither I was drawn besides by the plan of my new work and the religious voice which released me from the vow of the village woman, my foster-mother. As all my faculties had extended, as I had never misused life, it superabounded with the pith of my intelligence, and art, triumphing in my nature, added to the poet's inspirations. I had what the Fathers of the Thebaïde called "ascensions" of the heart. Raphael—forgive the blasphemy of the simile—Raphael, before the Transfiguration only sketched upon the easel, could not have been more electrified by his master-piece than was I by Eudore and Cymodocée, whose names I did not yet know and whose images I dimly saw through an atmosphere of love and fame.
Thus does the native genius which tormented me in the cradle sometimes return on its steps after deserting me; thus are my former sufferings renewed; nothing heals within me; if my wounds close instantly, they open again suddenly like those of the crucifixes of the Middle Ages, which bleed on the anniversary of the Passion. I have no alternative, to obtain relief during these crises, but to give a free course to the fever of my thoughts, in the same way as one has his veins lanced when the blood rushes to the heart or rises to the head. But of what am I speaking! O religion, where then are thy powers, thy restraints, thy balsams! Am I not writing all these things at a distance of countless years from the hour at which I gave birth to René? I had a thousand reasons to believe myself dead, and I live! 'Tis a great pity. Those afflictions of the isolated poet, condemned to suffer the spring in spite of Saturn, are unknown to the man who does not go outside the common laws; for him the years are ever young:
"The young kids," says Oppian, "watch over the author of their being; when he comes to fall into the huntsman's net, they offer him in their mouths the tender, flowering grass, which they have gone to gather from afar, and bring him in their lips fresh water, drawn from the adjacent brook[678]."