That M. de Chateaubriand was my father; the residence which seemed so hideous to the ill-humoured agriculturist is none the less a fine and stately home, sombre and grave though it may be. As for me, a feeble ivy-shoot commencing to climb at the foot of those fierce towers, would Mr. Young have noticed me, he who was interested only in inspecting our harvests?
Lord Byron.
Give me leave to add to the above pages, written in England in 1822, the following written in 1824 and 1840: they will complete the portion relating to Lord Byron; this portion will be more particularly perfected when the reader has perused what I shall have to say of the great poet on passing to Venice.
There may perhaps be some interest in the future in remarking the coincidence of the two leaders of the new French and English schools having a common fund of nearly parallel ideas and destinies, if not of morals: one a peer of England, the other a peer of France; both Eastern travellers, not infrequently near each other, yet never seeing one another: only, the life of the English poet has been connected with events less great than mine.
Lord Byron visited the ruins of Greece after me: in Childe Harold he seems to embellish with his own pigments the descriptions in the Itinéraire. At the commencement of my pilgrimage I gave the Sire de Joinville's farewell to his castle: Byron bids a similar farewell to his Gothic home.
In the Martyrs, Eudore sets out from Messenia to go to Rome:
"Our voyage was long," he says; "... we saw all those promontories marked by temples or tombstones.... My young companions had heard speak of nought save the metamorphoses of Jupiter, and they understood nothing of the remains they saw before them; I myself had already sat, with the prophet, on the ruins of devastated cities, and Babylon taught me to know Corinth[309]."
The English poet is like the French prose-writer, following the letter of Sulpicius to Cicero[310]: a coincidence so perfect is a singularly proud one for me, because I anticipated the immortal singer on the shore where we gathered the same memories and celebrated the same ruins.
I have again the honour of being connected with Lord Byron in our descriptions of Rome: the Martyrs and my Lettre sur la campagne romaine possess, for me, the inestimable advantage of having divined the aspirations of a fine genius.
The early translators, commentators and admirers of Lord Byron were careful not to point out that some pages of my works might have lingered for a moment in the memory of the painter of Childe Harold; they would have thought that they were depreciating his genius. Now that the enthusiasm has grown a little calmer this honour is not so consistently refused to me. Our immortal song-writer[311], in the last volume of his Chansons, says: