O gold, which I have so long despised and which I cannot love whatever I may do, I am nevertheless forced to admit thy merit: the source of liberty, thou arrangest a thousand things in our existence, in which all is difficult without thee! Excepting glory, what is there that thou canst not procure? With thee, one is handsome, young, adored; one enjoys consideration, honours, qualities, virtues. You tell me that with gold one has but the appearance of all that: what matter, if I believe what is false to be true? Deceive me well, and I will release you from the rest: is life other than a lie? When one has no money, one is dependent upon everything and everybody. Two creatures who do not suit one another could go each his own way; well, for want of a few pistoles, they must remain face to face, sulking, fuming, souring, bored to extinction, devouring each other's souls and the whites of their eyes, furiously sacrificing to one another their tastes, their inclinations, their natural methods of life: poverty presses them close together, and, in those beggars' bonds, instead of embracing, they bite each other, but not in the way in which Flora bit Pompey. Without money, there is no means of escape; one cannot go in search of another sun, and, with a proud soul, one wears chains without ceasing. O happy Jews, dealers in crucifixes, who to-day govern Christendom, who decide peace or war, who eat pig after selling old hats, who are the favourites of kings and beauties, ugly and dirty though you be: ah, if you would but change skins with me! If I could at least creep into your iron chests, to rob you of that which you have stolen from young men under age, I should be the happiest man in the world!
True, I might have a means of existence: I could apply to the monarchs; as I have lost all for the sake of their crown, it would be only fair that they should feed me. But this idea, which ought to occur to them, does not; and to me it occurs still less. Rather than sit at the banquets of kings, I should even prefer once more to begin the regimen which I kept in the old days, in London, with my poor friend Hingant. However, the happy times of garrets are past: not that I was not most comfortable there, but I should be ill at ease, I should take up too much room with the flounces of my reputation; I should no longer be there with my one shirt and the slender figure of an unknown person who has not dined. My cousin de La Boüétardais is there no more to play the violin on my truckle-bed in his red robes as a counsellor to the Parliament of Brittany, and to keep himself warm at night, covered with a chair by way of counterpane; Peltier is there no more to give us dinner with King Christophe's money; and, above all, the witch is there no more, Youth, who, with a smile, changes penury into a treasure, who brings you her younger sister, Hope, for a mistress: the latter also as deceptive as her elder, though she still returns when the other has fled for ever.
I had forgotten the distress of my first emigration and imagined that it was enough to leave France in order peacefully to preserve one's honour in exile: the larks fall ready roasted into the mouths only of those who reap the harvest, not of those who have sown it If I alone were concerned, I should do marvellously well in an alms-house: but Madame de Chateaubriand? And so I have no sooner become settled than, as I cast my eyes upon the future, anxiety seizes hold of me.
The value of money.
They wrote to me from Paris that there was no means of selling my house in the Rue d'Enfer save at a price which was not sufficient to pay off the mortgages with which that hermitage is loaded; that something might nevertheless be arranged if I were there. Acting on this communication, I have taken a useless journey to Paris, for I found neither goodwill nor a purchaser; but I saw the Abbaye-aux-Bois again and a few of my new friends. On the eve of my return here, I dined at the Café de Paris with Messieurs Arago, Pouqueville[357], Carrel and Béranger, all more or less dissatisfied and deceived by "the best of republics."
The Pâquis, near Geneva, 26 September 1831.
My Études historiques brought me into relations with M. Carrel, even as they made me acquainted with Messieurs Thiers and Mignet. I had copied into the Preface of those Studies a fairly long passage from the Guerre de Catalogne[358], by M. Carrel, and especially the following:
"Things, in their continual and fatal transformations, do not always carry every intelligence with them; they do not master every character with equal facility; they do not take the same care of all interests: this is what we must understand and make some allowance for the protests raised on behalf of the past. When a particular period is finished, the mould is shattered, and it is enough for Providence that it can not be made over again; but of the fragments left upon the ground, there are occasionally some that are beautiful to look upon."
After these fine lines, I myself added this summary:
"The man who was able to write those words has reasons for sympathy with those who have faith in Providence, who respect the religion of the past and who also have their eyes fixed upon fragments."