The Memoirs of François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand sometime Ambassador to England. volume 3 (of 6) / Mémoires d'outre-tombe volume 3

by vicomte de François-René Chateaubriand

A Moniteur[276] had been started at Ghent: my report to the King of the 12th of May[277], inserted in that journal, proves that my feelings on the liberty of the press and on foreign domination have at all times been the same. I can quote the following passages to-day; they in no way belie my life:

"Sire,

"You were preparing to crown the institutions of which you had laid the foundation-stone.... You had fixed a period for the commencement of the hereditary peerage; the ministry would have gained greater unity; the ministers I would have become members of the two Chambers, according to the true spirit of the Charter; a law would have been brought in to allow the election of a member of the Chamber of Deputies before the age of forty, so that citizens might have had a real political career. It was proposed to discuss a penal code for press offenses, after the adoption of which law the press would have been entirely free, for that freedom is inseparable from all representative government....

"Sire, and this is the occasion solemnly to protest it: all your ministers, all the members of your Council, are inviolably attached to the principles of a wise liberty; they derive from you that love of laws, of order and of justice without which there can be no happiness for a people. Sire, let us be permitted to say that we are ready to shed the last drop of our blood for you, to follow you to the ends of the earth, to share with you the tribulations which it will please the Almighty to send you, because we believe before God that you will maintain the Constitution which you have given to your people, and that the sincerest wish of your royal heart is the liberty of Frenchmen. Had it been otherwise, Sire, we would all have died at your feet in defense of your sacred person; but we would have been only your soldiers, we would have ceased to be your councillors and your ministers....

"Sire, at this moment we share your royal sadness; there is not one of your councillors and ministers who would not give up his life to prevent the invasion of France. You, Sire, are a Frenchman, we are Frenchmen! Alive to the honour of our country, proud of the glory of our arms, admirers of the courage of our soldiers, we would be willing, in the midst of your battalions, to shed the last drop of our blood to bring them back to their duty or to share lawful triumphs with them. We can only look with the deepest sorrow upon the ills that are ready to break over our country."

Thus, at Ghent, did I propose to add to the Charter that which it still lacked, while displaying my sorrow at the new invasion which was threatening France: nevertheless, I was only an exile whose wishes were in contradiction with the facts which could again open the gates of my country to me. Those pages were written in the States of the allied sovereigns, among kings and Emigrants who detested the liberty of the press, in the midst of armies marching to conquest of whom we were, so to speak, the prisoners: these circumstances perhaps add some strength to the feelings which I venture to express.

The Rapport au Roi.

My report on reaching Paris made a great noise; it was reprinted by M. Le Normant the Younger, who risked his life upon this occasion, and for whom I had all the difficulty in the world to obtain a barren warrant of printer to the King. Bonaparte acted, or allowed others to act, in a manner unworthy of him: on the occasion of my report, they did what the Directory had done on the appearance of Cléry's Memoirs; they falsified fragments of it: I was made to propose to Louis XVIII. stupid ideas for the revival of feudal rights, for the tithes of the clergy, for the recovery of the national property, as though the printing of the original piece in the Moniteur de Gand at a fixed and known date, did not confound the imposture. The pseudonymous writer entrusted with the production of an insincere pamphlet was a soldier fairly high up in rank: he was dismissed after the Hundred Days; his dismissal was ascribed to his conduct towards me; he sent his friends to me; they begged me to intervene, lest a man of merit should lose his sole means of existence: I wrote to the Minister of War and obtained a retiring-pension for this officer[278]. He is dead: his wife has remained attached to Madame de Chateaubriand by a feeling of gratitude to which I was far from having any claim. Certain proceedings are too highly prized; the most ordinary persons are susceptible to such feelings of generosity. A name for virtue is cheaply acquired: the superior mind is not that which pardons, but that which has no need of pardon.

I do not know where Bonaparte, at St. Helena, discovered that I had "rendered essential services at Ghent:" if he judged the part I played too favourably, at least there lay behind his opinion an appreciation of my political value.

*

I avoided at Ghent, as far as I could, intrigues, which were opposed to my character and contemptible in my eyes; for, at bottom, I perceived in our paltry catastrophe the catastrophe of society. My refuge against the idlers and rogues was the Enclos du Béguinage. I used to walk round that little world of veiled or tuckered women, consecrated to different Christian works: a calm region, placed like the African quicksands on the edge of the tempests. There no incongruity shocked my ideas, for the sentiment of religion is so lofty that it is never irrelevant to the gravest revolutions: the solitaries of the Thebaid and the Barbarians, destroyers of the Roman world, are in no way discordant facts or mutually exclusive existences.

I was graciously received in the close as the author of the Génie du Christianisme: wherever I go, among Christians, the curates flock round me; next come the mothers bringing me their children: the latter recite to me my chapter on the First Communion. Then appear unhappy persons who tell me of the good I have had the happiness to do them. My passage through a Catholic town is announced like that of a missionary or a physician. I am touched by this dual reputation: it is the only agreeable memory of myself that I retain; I dislike myself in all the rest of my personality and my reputation.

I was pretty often invited to festive dinners in the family of M. and Madame d'Ops, a venerable father and mother surrounded by some thirty children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. At M. Coppens', a banquet which I was obliged to accept was prolonged from one in the afternoon to eight in the evening. I counted nine courses: they began with the preserves and finished with the cutlets. The French alone know how to dine methodically, just as they alone know how to compose a book.