The Essai offers the compendium of my existence as a poet, a moralist, a publicist, and a politician. To say that I hoped, in so far at least as I am capable of hoping, to make a great success with the work, goes without saying: we authors, petty prodigies of a prodigious era, make a claim to keep up intelligence with future races; but we do not, I firmly believe, know where posterity lives, and we put the wrong address. When we grow numb in our graves, death will freeze our words, written or sung, so hard that they will not melt like the "frozen words" of Rabelais.
The Essai was to be a sort of historical encyclopædia. The only volume published is in itself a fairly wide inquiry; I had the sequel in manuscript; then came, beside the researches and annotations of the annalist, the lays and roundelays of the poet, the Natchez, and so on. I am hardly able to understand to-day how I could give myself up to such extensive studies amid an active wandering life, subject to so many reverses. My obstinacy in working explains this fertility: in my young days I often wrote for twelve or fifteen hours without leaving the table at which I sat, scratching out and recommencing the same page ten times over. Age has not caused me to lose any part of this faculty of application: to this day my diplomatic correspondence, which in no way interrupts my literary composition, is entirely from my own hand.
The Essai made a stir among the Emigration: it was opposed to the opinions of my companions in misfortune; in the different social positions which I have occupied, my independence has nearly always offended the men with whom I went. I have by turns been the leader of different armies of which the soldiers did not belong to my side: I have led the Old Royalists to the conquest of the public liberties, and especially of the liberty of the press, which they detested; I have rallied the Liberals, in the name of that same liberty, to the standard of the Bourbons, whom they hold in abhorrence. As it happened, Emigrant opinion attached itself to my person through self-love: the English reviews having spoken of me with praise, the commendation was reflected over the whole body of the "faithful."
I had sent copies of the Essai to La Harpe, Ginguené, and de Sales. Lemierre[198], nephew of the poet of the same name[199], and translator of Gray's Poems, wrote to me from Paris, on the 15th of July 1797, that my Essai had had the greatest success. One thing is certain, that, if the Essai became for a moment known, it was almost immediately forgotten: a sudden shadow swallowed up the first ray of my glory.
Mrs. O'Larry.
As I had become almost a personage, the upper Emigration began to seek me out in London. I made my way from street to street; I first left Holborn and Tottenham Court Road, and advanced as far as the Hampstead Road. Here I stopped for some months at the house of Mrs. O'Larry, an Irish widow, the mother of a very pretty daughter of fourteen, and tenderly devoted to cats. Linked by this common passion, we had the misfortune to lose two beautiful kittens, white all over, like two ermines, with black tips to their tails.
Mrs. O'Larry was visited by old ladies of the neighbourhood with whom I was obliged to drink tea in the old-fashioned style. Madame de Staël has depicted this scene in Corinne at Lady Edgermond's:
"'My dear, do you think the water has boiled long enough to pour it on the tea?'
"'My dear, I think it is a little too early[200].'"
There also came to these evenings a tall and beautiful young Irishwoman, called Mary Neale, in the charge of her guardian. She noticed a wound lurking in my gaze, for she said to me: