[APPENDIX TO BOOK XI]
(By M. EDMOND BIRÉ)
THE CONGRESS OF VERONA AND THE SPANISH WAR
The Memoirs present a voluntary and compulsory gap. Nothing is said of the twenty months (October 1822 to June 1824) during which Chateaubriand was, first, French Ambassador at the Congress of Verona and, later, Minister of Foreign Affairs in Paris; nothing of the Spanish War, which was nevertheless his work. Certainly he had no intention of placing in the shade the very events to which the honour of his name as a statesman is attached. He wished, on the contrary, to speak of them at his ease. Of all the various periods of his life, it is this which assumed the greatest development under his pen: a development so great that this narrative at first formed four volumes, reduced later to two, under circumstances which I will presently relate. Those two volumes in reality form an integral portion of the Mémoires d'Outre-tombe. That they do not figure there is due to the fact that the author feared, by giving them a place in his Memoirs, to disturb the fine ordering of his book, in which the proportions are so well preserved, in which all the parts of the work harmonize among themselves with an art so perfect. For this reason, and also in order publicly to revenge the Restoration for the calumnies of which it was then the daily object, he decided, in 1838, to publish as a separate work all that he had written on the Congress of Verona and the Spanish War.
His manuscript, as I have just said, formed four volumes. This meant eighty thousand francs (twenty thousand francs per volume) which fell due to him, under the terms of his contract with the syndicate which possessed the right of publishing his future works. The four volumes were almost printed, when M. de Marcellus and M. de La Ferronnays, alarmed at seeing certain diplomatic documents brought to light which were destined, according to them, to remain secret, entreated Chateaubriand to sacrifice, here, there and everywhere, documents which, nevertheless, possessed the liveliest interest He consented to most of the curtailments asked for, and gave his friends such liberal measure that the original four volumes became reduced to two actual volumes.
"Well," said Chateaubriand to M. de Marcellus, when the sacrifice was consummated, "the two of you cost me forty thousand francs."
"Be it so," rejoined M. de Marcellus; "rather forty thousand francs than regrets when it is too late."
And Chateaubriand replied:
"The thing is done now; I have respected your scruples and La Ferronnays'; I have struck out a great deal to please you. But neither of you has placed himself sufficiently, in thought, outside his century and public affairs. To judge of an effect of tone, we should place ourselves at a distance. It is by saying all that one distinguishes one's self from the herd of buttoned-up and over-scrupulous statesmen. I have conceived diplomacy on a new plan; I speak out. You are wrong to dread my revelations; they could only do you credit. I tell you: you will do later, La Ferronnays or you, when you think the danger lessened, and for the same reasons, what you are preventing me from doing now. As far as I am concerned, I give you my authorization beforehand[494]."
Since Chateaubriand was induced to leave out of his Memoirs the Spanish War, which was "the great political event of his life," it is fitting that I should here remind the reader, if only in a few words, that this war was an act of high and great politics and not, as the enemies of the Restoration have repeated to satiety, an act of "servitude and subjection to the Northern Cabinets."