Alloquar? audiero nunquam tua facta loquentem?
Nunquam ego te, vita frater amabilior,
Aspiciam posthac? At certe semper amabo[248].
I have just taken leave of a friend, I am about to take leave of a mother: one has constantly to repeat the verses which Catullus addressed to his brother. In our vale of tears, as in Hell, there is a strange, eternal wailing, which forms the accompaniment or the prevailing note of human lamentations; it is heard unceasingly, and it would continue when all other created sorrows had come to be silent.
A letter from Julie, which I received soon after that from Fontanes, confirmed my sad remark on my gradual isolation: Fontanes urged me to "work, to become illustrious;" my sister begged me to "give up writing:" one put glory before me, the other oblivion. This train of thought is described in the story of Madame de Farcy; she had grown to hate literature, because she regarded it as one of the temptations of her life.
"Saint-Servan, 1 July 1798.
"Dear, we have just lost the best of mothers: I grieve to inform you of this fatal blow. When you cease to be the object of our solicitude, we shall have ceased to live. If you knew how many tears your errors had caused our venerable mother to shed; how deplorable they appear to all who think and profess not only piety, but reason: if you knew this, perhaps it would help to open your eyes, to induce you to give up writing; and if Heaven, moved by our prayers, permitted us to meet again, you would find in the midst of us all the happiness one is allowed on earth; you would give us that happiness, for there is none for us so long as you are not with us and we have cause to be anxious as to your fate."
Ah, why did I not follow my sister's advice? Why did I continue to write? Had my age remained without my writings, would anything have been changed in the events and spirit of that age?
And so I had lost my mother; and so I had distressed the last hour of her life! While she was drawing her last breath far from her last son, and praying for him, what was I doing in London? Perhaps I was strolling in the cool morning air at the moment when the sweat of death covered my mother's forehead without having my hand to wipe it away!
The Génie du Christianisme.
The filial affection which I preserved for Madame de Chateaubriand was deep. My childhood and youth were intimately linked with the memory of my mother. The idea that I had poisoned the old days of the woman who bore me in her womb filled me with despair: I flung copies of the Essai into the fire with horror, as the instrument of my crime; had it been possible for me to destroy the whole work, I should have done so without hesitation. I did not recover from my distress until the thought occurred to me of expiating my first work by means of a religious work: this was the origin of the Génie du Christianisme.
*
"My mother," I said, in the first preface to that work, "after being flung, at the age of seventy-two years, into dungeons where she saw part of her children die, expired at last on a pallet to which her misfortunes had reduced her. The recollection of my errors cast a great bitterness over her last days; when dying, she charged one of my sisters to call me back to the religion in which I was brought up. My sister acquainted me with my mother's last wish. When the letter reached me across the sea, my sister herself was no more; she too had died from the effects of her imprisonment. Those two voices from the tomb, that death which acted as death's interpreter impressed me. I became a Christian. I did not yield, I admit, to great supernatural enlightenment: my conviction came from the heart; I wept and I believed."