Wherein I fail.
But, alas, where is my ambition? Where is my faculty of dissimulation? Where is my art of enduring constraint and boredom? Where is my capacity for attaching importance to anything whatsoever? I took up my pen two or three times, I began to draft two or three letters in obedience to Madame la Dauphine, who had ordered me to write to her. Soon, revolting against myself, I wrote at one dash and after my own manner the letter which was to break my neck. I knew it quite well; I weighed the results quite well: it matters little. And to-day, now that the thing is done, I am delighted at having sent the whole business to the devil and flung my "governorship " out of so wide a window. I shall be told:
"Could you not have expressed the same truths by stating them less crudely?"
Yes, yes, by diluting, beating about the bush, employing honeyed words, bleating, quavering:
Son œil tout pénitent ne pleure qu'eau béniste[53].
I cannot do that.
Here is the letter, abridged, however, by almost half its length, which will make the hair of our drawing-room diplomatists rise up in dismay: the Duc de Choiseul was somewhat of my humour; therefore he spent the end of his end at Chanteloup:
"Paris, Rue d'Enfer, 30 June 1833.
"Madame,
"The most precious moments of my long career are those which Madame la Dauphine permitted me to spend with her. It was in a humble house at Carlsbad that a Princess who is the object of universal veneration deigned to speak to me with confidence. Heaven has laid at the bottom of her soul a treasure of magnanimity and religion which the prodigality of misfortune has not been able to dry up. I had before me the daughter of Louis XVI. exiled anew; that orphan of the Temple whom the Martyr-King pressed to his heart before going to gather the palm! God's name is the only name that one can pronounce when one comes to plunge one's self in contemplation of the impenetrable counsels of His Providence.
"Praise is suspicious, when it is addressed to prosperity: with the Dauphiness, admiration knows no embarrassment. I have said it, Madame: your sorrows have attained so great a height, that they have become one of the glories of the Revolution. I shall therefore, once in my life, have met destinies so superior, so much apart, that I can tell them, without fear of offending them or of being misunderstood, what I think of the future state of society. One can discuss the fate of empires with you, who would, without regretting them, see pass at the feet of your virtue all those earthly kingdoms, many of which have already flowed away at the feet of your House.
"The catastrophes of which you have been the most illustrious witness and the sublimest victim, great though they appeared to be, are, nevertheless, but the particular accidents of the general transformation which is being operated in the human race; the reign of Napoleon, which shook the world, is but a link in the revolutionary chain. We must start from this truth to understand the possibilities of a third Restoration and what means that Restoration possesses of being included in the plan of social changes. If it did not enter into it as an homogeneous element, it would inevitably be rejected by an order of things contrary to its nature.
"Therefore, Madame, if I told you that the Legitimacy had a chance of returning through the aristocracy of the nobles and clergy, with their privileges; through the Court, with its distinctions; through the Royalty, with its attractions, I should be deceiving you. The Legitimacy, in France, is no longer a sentiment; it is a principle in so far as it guarantees property and interests, rights and liberties; but if it remained proved that the Legitimacy would not defend or was powerless to protect that property and those interests, those rights and those liberties, it would cease to be even a principle. When any one puts forward that the Legitimacy will necessarily come about, that it cannot be dispensed with, that it is enough to wait, for France to come crying mercy to it on her knees, he is putting forward an illusion. The Restoration may never return, or may last for but a moment, if the Legitimacy seeks its strength where it does not exist.
My letter to the Dauphiness.
"Yes, Madame, I say it sorrowfully, Henry V. might remain a foreign and banished Prince: a young and new ruin of an edifice already fallen, but, in short, a ruin. We old servants of the Legitimacy will soon have spent the small stock of years that is left to us; we shall shortly be resting in our graves, asleep with our old ideas, like the ancient knights with their ancient suits of armour into which rust and time have eaten, suits of armour which no longer shape themselves to the figure nor adapt themselves to the usages of the living.
"All that was militating, in 1789, for the preservation of the old order of things, religion, laws, manners, customs, property, classes, privileges, corporations, no longer exists. A general ferment has become manifest; Europe is hardly safer than ourselves; no form of society is entirely destroyed, none entirely established; all is worn or new, or decrepit or not yet rooted; all has the weakness of old age or childhood. The kingdoms that have sprung from the territorial limitations drawn by the last treaties are of yesterday; love of country has lost its force, because the country is an uncertain and fleeting thing to populations sold by auction, dealt in like second-hand furniture, now allotted to hostile populations, now handed over to unknown masters. Thus dug up, furrowed, tilled, the soil is prepared to receive the democratic seed which the Days of July have ripened.
"The kings think that, by keeping sentry around their thrones, they will stop the movements of intelligence; they imagine that, by giving a description of the principles, they will have them seized at the frontiers; they are persuaded that, by multiplying customs-officers, gendarmes, police-spies, military commissions, they will prevent them from circulating. But those ideas do not travel on foot: they are in the air, they fly, we breathe them. The absolute governments, which are establishing telegraphs, railways, steam-boats and trying, at the same time, to keep men's minds on the level of the political dogmas of the fourteenth century, are inconsistent; at once progressive and reactionary, they are lost in the confusion resulting from a contradiction of theory and practice. It is impossible to separate the industrial principle from the principle of liberty; one must needs stifle both or admit both. Wherever the French language is understood, ideas come with the passports of the age.
"You see, Madame, how essential it is that the starting-point should be carefully chosen. The child of hope under your guard, innocence taking refuge under your virtues and misfortunes as under a royal canopy: I know no more imposing spectacle; if there be a chance of success for the Legitimacy, it is there in its entirety. The France of the future will be able to bow, without descending, before the glory of the past, to stand in emotion before that great apparition in her history represented by the daughter of Louis XVI. leading the last of the Henrys by the hand. As the Queen-protectress of the young Prince, you will exercise over the nation the influence of the immense memories mingled in your august person. Who will not feel an unaccustomed confidence revive within him when the orphan of the Temple watches over the education of the orphan of St. Louis?
"It is to be desired, Madame, that this education, directed by men whose names are popular in France, should in a certain measure become public. Louis XIV., who otherwise justifies the pride of his motto[54], did a great injury to his House by isolating the Sons of France behind the barriers of an Oriental education.
"The young Prince appeared to me to be gifted with a quick intelligence. He will have to complete his studies by travels among the nations of the Old and even of the New Continent, so as to become acquainted with politics and to be alarmed at neither institutions nor doctrines. If he could serve as a soldier in some far-off foreign war, one ought not to dread to expose him. He has a resolute air; he seems to have in his heart the blood of his father and of his mother; but, if he could ever experience anything but the sense of glory in danger, let him abdicate: without courage, in France, there is no crown.
"Madame, on seeing me extend into a long future the thought of the education of Henry V., you will naturally suppose that I do not think him destined to ascend the throne so soon. I will endeavour impartially to deduct the opposite reasons for hopes and fears.
"The Restoration may take place to-day, to-morrow. There is something so sudden, so inconstant observable in the French character, that a change is always probable; it is always safe to wager a hundred to one, in France, that any particular thing will not last: it is at the moment when the Government appears most firmly seated that it falls. We have seen the nation worship Bonaparte and detest him, abandon him, take him back, abandon him again, forget him in his exile, raise altars to him after his death, and then relapse from its enthusiasm. That fickle nation, which never loved liberty save by fits and starts, but which ever dotes on equality; that multiform nation was fanatical under Henry IV., factious under Louis XIII., grave under Louis XIV., revolutionary under Louis XVI., gloomy under the Republic, warlike under Bonaparte, constitutional under the Restoration: to-day it is prostituting its liberties to the so-called Republican Monarchy, perpetually varying its nature in the spirit of its leaders. Its changefulness has increased since it has thrown off the habits of the home and the yoke of religion.
On the prospects.
"Therefore, a chance may bring about the fall of the Government of the 9th of August; but a chance may be delayed: an abortive child has been born to us, but France is a sturdy mother; she may, with the milk of her breast, be able to correct the vices of a depraved paternity.
"Although the present royalty does not seem as though it were likely to live, I continue to fear that it may live beyond the limit which one might assign to it. Since forty years, all governments have perished in France by their own fault alone. Louis XVI. could have saved his crown and his life twenty times over; the Republic died only of the excesses of its furies; Bonaparte was able to establish his dynasty, yet flung himself down from the height of his glory; but for the Ordinances of July, the Legitimist Throne would still be standing. The head of the present Government will make none of those mistakes that kill; his power will never commit suicide; all his cleverness is employed exclusively for his preservation: he is too intelligent to die by an act of folly nor has he enough in him to be guilty of the mistakes of genius or the weaknesses of honour or virtue. He has felt that he might be destroyed by war: he will not make war; it matters little to him, whether France be degraded in the eyes of foreigners: publicists will prove to him that disgrace is industry and ignominy credit.
"The sham Legitimacy wants all that the Legitimacy wants, with the exception of the Royal Person: it wants order; it can obtain that through 'arbitrariness' more easily than the Legitimacy. To perpetrate acts of despotism with words of liberty and pretended royalist institutions, that is all that it wants; each accomplished fact brings forth a recent right which combats an ancient right, each hour commences a legality. Time has two powers: with one hand it overthrows, with the other it builds up. Lastly, time acts upon men's minds by the mere fact that it progresses; they sever violently from those in power, attack them, sulk with them; then lassitude supervenes; success reconciles people to its cause: soon none remains outside, save a few lofty souls, whose perseverance confounds those who have failed.
"Madame, this long statement obliges me to make a few explanations to Your Royal Highness.
"If I had not raised a free voice in the day of fortune, I should not have felt the courage to speak the truth in the time of misfortune. I did not go to Prague of my own accord; I would not have ventured to trouble you with my presence; the dangers of devotion do not lie about your august person, they lie in France: that is where I have sought them. Since the Days of July, I have never ceased to fight for the legitimist cause. I was the first to proclaim the kingship of Henry V. A jury of Frenchmen, which acquitted me, left my proclamation in force. I long for nothing but rest, the need of my years; yet I did not hesitate to sacrifice it when the decrees extended and renewed the proscription of the Royal Family. Offers were made to me to attach me to the Government of Louis-Philippe: I had not earned that proof of good-will; I showed how incompatible it was with my nature by claiming my share in my old King's adversity. Alas, I had not brought about that adversity and I had tried to prevent it! I am not recalling these circumstances to give myself an importance or create for myself a merit which I do not possess; I have done no more than my duty; I am only explaining my position, in order to excuse the independence of my language. Madame will pardon the frankness of a man who would joyfully accept a scaffold to restore to her a throne.
"When I appeared before Your Majesty at Carlsbad, I may say that I had not the happiness to be known to you. You had scarcely done me the honour to address a few words to me in my life. You were able to see, in our solitary conversations, that I was not the man that had perhaps been described to you, that the independence of my mind did not take away from the moderation of my character and, above all, did not break the chains of my admiration and respect for the illustrious daughter of my Kings.
Of the Legitimate Monarchy.
"I again beseech Your Majesty to consider that the order of the truths developed in this letter, or rather in this memorandum, is what constitutes my strength, if I have any; it is that which enables me to reach men of different parties and bring them back to the royalist cause. If I had rejected the opinions of the age, I should have had no hold upon my time. I am seeking to rally round the ancient throne those modern ideas which, from being hostile, become friendly in passing through my loyalty. If the liberal opinions which abound ceased to be diverted to the profit of the reconstructed Legitimate Monarchy, Monarchical Europe would perish. It is a fight to the death between the two principles, monarchical and republican, if they remain distinct and separate: the consecration of a single edifice built up again out of the various materials of two edifices would belong to you, Madame, to you who have been admitted into the highest as into the most mysterious of initiations, undeserved misfortune, to you who are marked at the altar with the blood of the spotless victim, to you who, in the contemplation attendant upon a saintly austerity, would open with a pure and blessed hand the portals of the new temple.
"Your sagacity, Madame, and your superior reason will throw light upon and correct all that may be doubtful or erroneous in my opinions touching the present state of France.
"My emotion, as I end this letter, passes all that I can say.
"And so the palace of the sovereigns of Bohemia is the Louvre of Charles X. and of his pious and royal son! And so Hradschin is young Henry's Pau Castle! And you, Madame: in what Versailles do you live? With what can your piety, your greatnesses, your sufferings be compared, if not with those of the women of the House of David who wept at the foot of the Cross? May Your Majesty see the Royalty of St Louis rise radiant from the tomb! May I exclaim, recalling the century which bears the name of your glorious ancestor; for, Madame, nothing becomes you, nothing is contemporaneous with you but what is great and sacred:
O jour heureux pour moi!
De quelle ardeur j'irais reconnaître mon roi[55]!"I am, Madame, with the most profound respect,
"Your Majesty's most humble and most obedient servant,
"Chateaubriand."
After writing this letter, I resumed the habits of my life: I found my old priests again, the lonely corner in my garden, which seemed to me much finer than Count Chotek's garden, my Boulevard d'Enfer, my Cimetière de l'Ouest, my Memoirs reminding me of my past days and, above all, the select little society of the Abbaye-aux-Bois. The kindness of a serious friendship makes the thoughts abound; a few moments of the commerce of the soul suffice for the needs of my nature; I afterwards make up for this expenditure of intelligence by twenty-two hours of inaction and sleep.