More than once will death enervate races of men and shed silence upon events even as snow falling during the night deadens the noise of the traffic. Nations do not grow up so rapidly as the individuals of whom they are composed, nor do they disappear so quickly. How long does it not take to attain a single thing sought after! The death-agony of the Lower Empire threatened to be endless; the Christian Era, already so extensive, has not sufficed to abolish servitude. These calculations, I know, do not suit the French temper; in our revolutions, we have never admitted the element of time: that is why we are always wonder-struck at results contrary to our impatience. Full of generous courage, young men rush onwards; they make straight for a lofty region which they see dimly and which they strive to reach: nothing could be worthier of admiration; but they will wear out their lives in those efforts and, coming to the end, after disappointment upon disappointment, they will consign the weight of the years of deception to other deluded generations, which will carry it on to the next tombs; and so on. The time of the desert has returned; Christianity is beginning over again, in the barrenness of the Thebaid, amid a formidable idolatry, the idolatry of man for himself.
There are two kinds of consequences in history: one is immediate and instantly known; the other distant and not seen at once. Those two consequences are often contradictory: the first come from our short wisdom, the others from long-continued wisdom. The providential event appears after the human event. God rises behind men. Deny the Supreme Counsel as much as you please; do not consent to its action; dispute about words; call what the vulgar call Providence the force of things or reason; but look at the end of an accomplished fact, and you shall see that it has always produced the contrary of what was expected of it, when it was not first established on morals and justice.
If Heaven has not pronounced Its last decree; if there is to be a future, a free and mighty future, that future is still far away, far beyond the visible horizon: we can reach it only with the aid of that Christian hope whose wings grow in proportion as all things seem to betray it, that hope which is longer than time and more powerful than misfortune.
Will the work inspired by my ashes and destined for my ashes be extant after me? It is possible that my work may be bad; it is possible that these Memoirs may fade into nothing on seeing the light: at least the things which I have told myself will have served to beguile the tedium of those last hours which no one wishes and which we know not how to employ. At the end of life is a bitter age: nothing pleases, because one is worthy of nothing; useful to none, a burden on all, near to our last resting-place, we have but a step to take to reach it: what would be the good of musing on a deserted shore? What pleasing shadows would one see in the future? Fie upon the clouds that now hover over my head!
One idea comes back to me and troubles me: my conscience is not reassured as to the innocence of my vigils; I dread my blindness and man's complacency towards his faults. Is what I am writing really in keeping with justice? Are morality and charity rigorously observed? Have I had the right to speak of others? What would it avail me to repent, if these Memoirs did any harm? O you unknown and hidden of the earth, you whose life, pleasing to the altars, works miracles, all hail to your secret virtues!
This or that poor man, destitute of knowledge, about whom none will ever trouble, has, by the mere doctrine of his manners, exercised upon his companions in suffering the divine influence which emanated from the virtues of Christ. The greatest book on earth is not worth so much as an unknown act of those nameless martyrs "whose blood Herod had mingled with their sacrifices[446]."
You have seen me born; you have seen my childhood, my idolatry of my singular creation in Combourg Castle, my presentation at Versailles, my attendance, in Paris, at the first spectacle of the Revolution. In the New World, I met Washington; I penetrated into the backwoods; shipwreck brought me back to the coast of my Brittany. Came my sufferings as a soldier, my wretchedness as an Emigrant. Returning to France, I became the author of the Génie du Christianisme. In a changed society, I counted and lost friends. Bonaparte stopped me and flung himself, with the blood-stained body of the Duc d'Enghien, across my path; I stopped myself in my turn and brought the great man from his cradle, in Corsica, to his tomb, in St. Helena. I shared in the Restoration and saw its end.
Thus I have known public and private life. I have four times crossed the sea; I have followed the sun in the East, touched upon the ruins of Memphis, Carthage, Sparta and Athens; I have prayed at the tomb of St. Peter and worshipped on Golgotha. Poor and rich, powerful and weak, happy and miserable, a man of action, a man of thought, I have placed my hand in the century, my mind in the desert; effective existence has shown itself to me in the midst of illusions, even as the land appears to sailors in the midst of mists. If those facts spread over my dreams, like the varnish that preserves fragile paintings, do not disappear, they will mark the place through which my life passed.
My several careers.
In each of my three careers, I placed an important object before myself: as a traveller, I aimed at discovering the polar world; as a man of letters, I have striven to reconstruct religion from its ruins; as a statesman, I have endeavoured to give the nations the system of balanced monarchy, to restore France to her rank in Europe, to give back to her the strength which the Treaties of Vienna had taken from her; I have at least assisted in winning that one of our liberties which is worth all the others: the liberty of the press. In the divine order of things, religion and liberty; in the human order, honour and glory (which are the human generation of religion and liberty): that is what I have desired for my country.