Diversions at Ghent.
My "ministry" kept me at Ghent; Madame de Chateaubriand, less busy, went to see Ostend, where I had embarked for Jersey in 1792. I had travelled, a dying exile, down the same canals along whose banks I now walked, still an exile, but in perfect health: there has always been something fabulous in my career! The miseries and joys of my first emigration revived in my thoughts; I saw England again, my companions in misfortune, and Charlotte, whom I was to meet once more. There is no one like myself to create a real society by calling up shadows; it goes so far that the life of my memories absorbs the feeling of my real life. Even persons with whom I have never occupied myself, if they come to die, invade my memory: one would say that none can become my companion if he has not passed through the tomb, which leads me to think that I am a dead man. Where others find an eternal separation, I find an eternal union; when one of my friends departs this earth, it is as though he had come to make my home his own; he never leaves me again. According as the present world retires, the past world returns to me. If the actual generations scorn the generations that have grown old, they waste their disdain where I am concerned: I am not even aware of their existence.
My Golden Fleece had not yet reached Bruges[279], Madame de Chateaubriand did not bring it to me. At Bruges, in 1426, "there was a man whose name was John[280]," who invented or perfected the art of painting in oils: let us be grateful to John of Bruges[281]; but for the propagation of his method, Raphael's master-pieces would be obliterated to-day. Where did the Flemish painters steal the light with which they illumined their pictures? What ray from Greece strayed to Batavia's shore?
After her journey to Ostend, Madame de Chateaubriand took a trip to Antwerp. There she saw, in a cemetery, plaster souls in purgatory, smeared all over with fire and black. At Louvain, she recruited a stammerer, a learned professor, who came expressly to Ghent to gaze upon a man so out of the ordinary as my wife's husband. He said to me, "Illus... ttt... rr...;" his speech fell short of his admiration, and I asked him to dinner. When the hellenist had drunk some curaçao, his tongue became loosened. We got upon the merits of Thucydides, whom the wine made us find clear as water. By dint of keeping up with my guest, I ended, I believe, by talking Dutch; at least, I no longer understood what I was saying.
Madame de Chateaubriand spent a bad night at the inn at Antwerp: a young Englishwoman, recently confined, lay dying; during two hours she made her groans heard; then her voice weakened, and her last moan, which the stranger's ear could scarcely catch, was lost in an eternal silence. The cries of this traveller, solitary and forsaken, might be taken as a prelude to the thousand voices of death about to rise at Waterloo.
The customary solitude of Ghent was rendered more striking by the foreign crowd which was then enlivening it and which was soon to disperse. Belgian and English recruits were learning their drill on the squares and under the trees of the public walks; gunners, contractors, dragoons were landing trains of artillery, herds of oxen, horses which struggled in the air while they were being let down in straps; canteen-women came on shore carrying the sacks, the children, the muskets of their husbands: all these were going, without knowing why and without having the smallest interest in it, to the great rendez-vous of destruction which Bonaparte had given them. One saw politicians gesticulating along a canal, near a motionless angler, Emigrants trotting from the King's to "Monsieur's," from "Monsieur's" to the King's. The Chancellor of France, M. Dambray, in a green coat and a round hat, with an old novel under his arm, walked to the Council to amend the Charter; the Duc de Lévis[282] went to pay his court in a pair of old loose shoes, which dropped from his feet, because, brave man and new Achilles that he was, he had been wounded in the heel. He was very witty, as can be judged by the selection from his Reflexions.
The Duke of Wellington used to come occasionally to hold a review. Louis XVIII. went out every afternoon in a coach and six, with his First Lord of the Bed-chamber and his guards, to drive round Ghent, just as though he had been in Paris. If he met the Duke of Wellington on his road, he would give him a little patronizing nod in passing.
The dignity of Louis XVIII.
Louis XVIII. never lost sight of the pre-eminence of his cradle; he was a king everywhere, as God is God everywhere, in a manger or in a temple, on an altar of gold or of clay. Never did his misfortune wring the smallest concession from him; his loftiness increased in the ratio of his depression; his diadem was his name; he seemed to say, "Kill me, you will not kill the centuries inscribed upon my brow." If they had scraped his arms off the Louvre, it signified little to him: were they not engraved on the globe? Had commissioners been sent to scratch them off in every corner of the universe? Had they been erased in India, at Pondichéry; in America, at Lima and Mexico; in the East, at Antioch, Jerusalem, Acre, Cairo, Constantinople, Rhodes, in the Morea; in the West, on the walls of Rome, on the ceilings of Caserta and the Escurial, on the arches of the halls of Ratisbon and Westminster, in the escutcheon of all the kings? Had they been torn from the needle of the compass, where they seemed to proclaim the reign of the lilies to the several regions of the earth?