Bonaparte stooped to play the part of a teasing school-boy; he disinterred the Essai sur les Révolutions and delighted in the war which he brought down upon me on this subject. A certain M. Damaze de Raymond constituted himself my champion[82]: I went to thank him in the Rue Vivienne. He had a death's-head on his mantel-piece among his knick-knacks; some time later he was killed in a duel[83], and his charming features went to join the frightful face that seemed to call to him. Everyone fought in those days: one of the police-spies charged with the arrest of Georges received a bullet in the head from him.
To cut short my powerful adversary's unfair attack, I applied to that M. de Pommereul of whom I spoke to you at the time of my first arrival in Paris: he had become director-general of the State printing works and of the department of books. I asked him for leave to reprint the Essai in its entirety. My correspondence and the result of that correspondence can be seen in the preface to the 1826 edition of the Essai sur les Révolutions, vol. II. of the Complete Works. Moreover, the Imperial Government was exceedingly right to refuse its assent to the reprinting of the work in its entirety: the Essai was not, having regard both to the liberties and to the Legitimate Monarchy, a book which should be published while despotism and usurpation held sway. The police gave itself airs of impartiality by allowing something to be said in my favour, and it laughed while preventing me from doing the only thing capable of defending me. On the return of Louis XVIII., the Essai was exhumed anew: as, in the time of the Empire, they had wished to make use of it against me in a political respect, so, in the days of the Restoration, they tried to plead it against me in a religious respect. I have made so complete an apology for my errors in the notes to the new edition of the Essai historique, that there is nothing left wherewith to reproach me. Posterity will come and will pronounce on both book and commentary, if such old trash is still able to interest it. I venture to hope that it will judge the Essai as my grey head has judged it; for, as one advances in life, one assumes the equity of the future towards which one approaches. The book and the notes place me before the eyes of men such as I was at the commencement of my career and such as I am at the close of that career.
The Essai reprinted.
Moreover, this work which I have treated with pitiless rigour offers the compendium of my existence as a poet, a moralist and a future politician. The pith of the work is overflowing, the boldness of the opinions urged as far as it will go. It must needs be admitted that, in the various roads upon which I have embarked, I have never been guided by prejudice, that I have never been blind in whatsoever cause, that no interest has led me on, that the sides which I have taken have always been those of my choice.
In the Essai, my independence in matters of religion and politics is complete; I examine everything: a Republican, I serve the Monarchy; a philosopher, I honour religion. These are not contradictions: they are forced consequences of the uncertainty of theory and the certainty of practice among men. My mind, constructed to believe in nothing, not even in myself, constructed to despise everything, splendours and miseries, peoples and kings, has nevertheless been dominated by an instinct of reason which commanded it to submit to all that is recognised as fine: religion, justice, humanity, equality, liberty, glory. That which people to-day dream concerning the future, that which the present generation imagines itself to have discovered concerning a society yet to be born, founded upon principles quite different from those of the old society, is announced positively in the Essai. I have anticipated by thirty years those who call themselves the proclaimers of an unknown world. My acts have belonged to the ancient city, my thoughts to the new; the former to my duty, the latter to my nature.
The Essai was not an impious book; it was a book of doubt and sorrow. I have already said so[84].
For the rest, I have had to exaggerate my fault to myself, and to redeem with ideas of order so many passionate ideas strewn over my works. I fear lest, at the commencement of my career, I may have done harm to youth; I owe it a reparation, and at least I owe it other lessons. Let it learn that one can struggle successfully with a troubled nature; I have seen moral beauty, the divine beauty, superior to every earthly dream: it needs but a little courage to reach it and keep to it.
In order to finish what I have to say touching my literary career, I must mention the work which commenced it, and which remained in manuscript until the year in which I inserted it in my Complete Works.
At the beginning of the Natchez, the preface described how the work was recovered in England, thanks to the trouble and the obliging research of Messieurs de Thuisy.
A manuscript from which I have been able to extract Atala, René, and several descriptions included in the Génie du Christianisme, is not absolutely barren. This first manuscript was written in one piece, without sections; all the subjects were confused in it: journeys, natural history, the dramatic portion, etc.; but, besides this manuscript, composed in one stroke, there existed another, divided into books. In this second work, I had not only proceeded to the separation of the matter, but I had also changed the character of the composition, by altering it from the romantic to the idyllic.