My circular to the press.
While I was writing this circular letter to the newspapers, I found means to have the following note handed to Madame la Duchesse de Berry:
"Paris, 23 November 1832.
"Madame,
"I had the honour to address to you from Geneva an earlier letter dated the 12th of this month. This letter, in which I begged you to do me the honour to choose me as one of your defenders, has been printed in the newspapers[481].
"Your Royal Highness' cause may be taken up by all those who, without being authorized to do so, might have useful truths to make known; but, if Madame wishes that it be carried on in her own name, it is not one man, but a council of men, of politicians and lawyers, that must be charged with this high affair. In that case, I would ask that Madame would consent to assign to me as coadjutors (with the persons whom she would have already selected) M. le Comte de Pastoret, M. Hyde de Neuville, M. de Villèle, M. Lainé, M. Royer-Collard, M. Pardessus[482], M. Mandaroux-Vertamy[483], M. de Vaufreland.
"I had also thought, Madame, that one might summon to this council a few men of great talent and of an opinion contrary to ours; but perhaps it would be to place them in a false position, to oblige them to make a sacrifice of honour and principle to which lofty minds and upright consciences do not readily lend themselves.
"Chateaubriand."
An old disciplined soldier, I was therefore hastening up to take my place in the ranks and to march under my captains: reduced by the will of the authorities to a duel, I accepted it I had scarcely expected to come, from the tomb of the husband, to fight by the tomb of the widow.
Supposing that I were bound to remain alone, that I had misunderstood what suits France, I was none the less in the path of honour. Nor is it of little use for men that a man should immolate himself to his conscience; it is good that some one should consent to ruin himself to remain steadfast to principles of which he is convinced and which have to do with what is noble in our nature: those dupes are the necessary contestants of the brutal fact, the victims charged to utter the veto of the oppressed against the triumph of might. We praise the Poles: is their devotion other than a sacrifice? It has saved nothing; it could save nothing: even in the minds of my opponents, will that devotion be barren of results for the human race?
I prefer a family before my country, they say: no, I prefer fidelity to my oaths before perjury, the moral world before material society; that is all: in so far as the family is concerned, I devote myself to it because it was essentially beneficial to France; I confound its posterity with that of the country and, when I deplore the misfortunes of the one, I deplore the disasters of the other: beaten, I have prescribed duties to myself, even as the victors have laid interests upon themselves. I am trying to withdraw from the world with my self-respect; in solitude we have to be careful whom we choose for our companion.
*
On the arrest of Madame.
In France, the land of vanity, so soon as an occasion offers for making a fuss, a crowd of people seize it: some act from good-heartedness, others from their consciousness of their own merits. I therefore had many competitors; they begged, as I had done, of Madame la Duchesse de Berry, the honour to defend her. At least, my presumption in offering myself to the Princess as a champion was a little justified by former services; though I did not fling the sword of Brennus[484] into the scale, at least I put my name there: however unimportant that may be, it had already gained some victories for the Monarchy. I opened my Mémoire sur la captivité de Madame la duchesse de Berry[485] with a consideration by which I am forcibly struck; I have often reprinted it, and it is probable that I shall reprint it again:
"We never cease," I said, "to be astonished at events; ever we imagine that we have come to the last; ever the revolution recommences. Those who, since forty years, are marching to reach the goal, repine; they thought they were sitting for a few hours by the edge of their tomb: vain hope! Time strikes those travellers gasping for breath, and forces them to move onward. How many times, since they have been on the road, has the Old Monarchy fallen at their feet! Scarce escaped from those successive crumblings, they are obliged once more to pass over its rubbish and its dust. Which century will see the end of the movement?...
"Providence has willed that the transient generations destined for unremembered days should be small, in order that the damage might not be great. And so we see that everything proves abortive, that everything is inconsistent, that no one is like himself or embraces his whole destiny, that no event produces what it contained and what it ought to produce. The superior men of the age which is expiring are dying away; will they have successors? The ruins of Palmyra end in sands."