Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 68, No. 417, July, 1850

CHATEAUBRIAND'S MEMOIRS

Mémoires d'outre Tombe. Par M. Le Vicomte de Chateaubriand. Tom. v. vi. vii. viii. et ix. Paris: 1849.

The great and honourable feature of Chateaubriand's mind, amidst some personal weaknesses, is its noble and disinterested character. It differs from what we see around us, but it differs chiefly in superior elevation. It united, to a degree which perhaps will never again be witnessed, the lofty feelings of chivalry, with the philanthropic visions of philosophy. In the tribune he was often a Liberal of the modern school; but in action he was always a paladin of the olden time. His fidelity was not to prosperity, but to adversity; his bond was not to the powerful, but to the unfortunate; reversing the revolutionary maxim, he brought the actions of public men to the test, not of success, but of disaster. He often irritated his friends when in power by the independence of his language, but he never failed to command the respect of his enemies when in adversity, by his constancy to misfortune. "Vive le roi quand-même," ever became his principle when the gales of adversity blew, and the hollow-hearted support of the world began to fail. Prosperity often saw him intrepid, perhaps imprudent in expression, but misfortune never failed to exhibit him generous and faithful in action; and his fidelity to the cause of royalty was never so strikingly evinced as when that cause in France was most desperate. He was the very antipodes of the hideous revolutionary tergiversation of Fontainebleau. A pilgrim in this scene of trial, he was ever ready, after having attained the summit of worldly grandeur, to descend at the call of honour; and, resuming his staff and scrip, to set out afresh on the path of duty. He was fitted to be the object of jealousy and spite to kings and ministers in power, whose follies he disdained to flatter or to overlook their vices, and of eternal admiration to the great and the good in every future age, whose hearts his deeds not less than his words will cause to throb. Such a character might pass for fabulous or imaginary, were it not clearly evinced, not only by words, but actions; not only in the thoughts of genius, but in the deeds of honour. His life, and the feelings by which it was regulated, are well worth examining, although we fear he will find but few imitators in these days, and is more likely, in a utilitarian and money-seeking age, to be classed with the mammoth and mastodon, as a species of existence never again to be seen in this world.

A character of this description naturally became enamoured of awful or heartstirring events, and was ever ready to find a friend in those capable of noble or heroic deeds in the ranks even of his enemies. Both qualities are evinced in the following graphic account of the appearance of the Grand Army when it arrived at Smolensko during the Moscow retreat: —

"On the 9th November, the troops at length reached Smolensko. An order of Buonaparte forbade any one to enter before the posts had been intrusted to the Imperial Guard. The soldiers on the outside were grouped in great numbers round the foot of the walls: those within were under cover. The air resounded with the imprecations of those who were shut out. Clothed in dirty Cossack cloaks, horse-cloths, and worn-out blankets, with their heads covered with old carpets, broken helmets, ragged shakos, for the most part torn by shot, stained with blood, or hacked in pieces by sabre-cuts – with haggard and yet ferocious countenances, they looked up to the top of the ramparts gnashing their teeth, with the expression of those prisoners who, under Louis the Fat, bore in their right hand their left cut off: you would have taken them for infuriated masques, or famished madmen escaped from Bedlam. At length the Old and Young Guard arrived, they were quickly admitted into the place which had been wasted by conflagration on occasion of our first passage. Loud cries of indignation were immediately raised against the privileged corps. 'Is the army to be left nothing but what it leaves?' was heard on all sides. Meanwhile the household troops, who had been admitted, rushed in tumultuous crowds to the magazines like an insurrection of spectres: the guards at the doors repulsed them; they fought in the streets: the dead, the wounded encumbered the pavements, the women, the children, the dying filled the waggons. The air was poisoned by the multitude of dead bodies; even old soldiers were seized with idiocy or madness; some whose hair stood on end with horror, blasphemed, or laughed with a ghastly air and fell dead. Napoleon let his wrath exhale in imprecations against a miserable commissary, none of the orders given to which had been executed.

"The army, a hundred thousand strong when it left Moscow, now reduced to thirty thousand, was followed by a band of fifty thousand stragglers; there were not eighteen hundred horsemen mounted. Napoleon gave the command of them to M. de Latour Maubourg. That officer, who had led the cuirassiers to the assault of the great redoubt of Borodino, had had his head almost cleft asunder by the stroke of a sabre; he afterwards lost a leg at Dresden. Perceiving his servant in tears when the operation was over, he said to him, 'Why do you weep? you will have only one boot to clean.' That general, who remained faithful to misfortune, became the preceptor of Henry V. in the first years of the exile of that prince. I lift my hat in his presence, as in that of the Incarnation of Honour." —Memoirs, vi. p. 116, 118.

As Chateaubriand had declined office, and narrowly escaped death in consequence, when Napoleon murdered the Duke d'Enghien, his life, from that period to the Restoration of the Bourbons, was one of retirement and observation. The important part which he took in the Restoration, by the publication of his celebrated pamphlet De Buonaparte et des Bourbons, restored him to political life. The effect produced by that work was immense, and the placing of the ancient race of monarchs on the throne was in a great degree owing to it; for, at a crisis when the intentions of the Allies were yet undecided, and Austria openly supported the strong party in France which inclined for a regency with Marie Louise at its head, it swelled immensely the numbers of the decided Royalists, and gave a definite and tangible object to their hitherto vague and divided aspirations. It was written with prodigious rapidity, and bears marks of the haste of its composition in the vehemence of its ideas and the occasional exaggeration of its assertions; but it was the very thing required for a national crisis of unexampled importance, when every hour was fraught with lasting consequences, and every effort of genius was required for laying the foundation of a new order in European society. Of the first conception and subsequent completion of this remarkable work he gives the following account: —

"I had been permitted to return to my solitary valley. The earth trembled under the footsteps of stranger armies: I wrote like the last Roman, amidst the din of barbarian invasion. During the day, I traced lines as agitated as the events which were passing: at night, when the roar of cannon was no longer heard in my solitary woods, I returned to the silence of the years which sleep in the tomb, and to the peace of my earlier life. The agitated pages which I wrote during the day, became, when put together, my pamphlet On Buonaparte and the Bourbons. I had so high an idea of the genius of Napoleon, and the valour of our soldiers, that the idea of a foreign invasion, successful in its ultimate results, never entered into my imagination; but I thought that such an invasion, by making the French see the dangers to which the ambition of Napoleon had exposed them, would lead to an interior movement, and that the deliverance of the French would be the work of their own hands. It was under that impression that I wrote my notes, in order that, if our political assemblies should arrest the march of the Allies, and separate themselves from a great man who had become their scourge, they should know to what haven to turn. The harbour of refuge appeared to me to be in the ancient authority, under which our ancestors had lived during eight centuries, but modified according to the changes of time. During a tempest, when one finds himself at the gate of an old edifice, albeit in ruins, he is glad to seek its shelter." – Vol. vi. p. 196, 197.

Madame de Chateaubriand, in a note, has described the circumstances under which this memorable pamphlet was written, and the morbid anxiety with which she was devoured during its composition: —

"Had the pages of that pamphlet been seized by the police, the result could not have been a moment doubtful: the sentence was the scaffold. Nevertheless the author was inconceivably negligent about concealing it. Often, when he went out, he left the sheets on the table: at night he only placed them under his pillow, which he did in presence of his valet – an honest youth, it is true, but who might have betrayed him. For my part, I was in mortal agonies: whenever M. de Chateaubriand went out, I seized the manuscript, and concealed it on my person. One day, in crossing the Tuileries, I perceived I had it not upon me, and being sure I had it when I went out, I did not doubt that I had let it fall on the road. Already I beheld that fatal writing in the hands of the police, and M. de Chateaubriand arrested. I fell down in swoon in the garden, and some kind-hearted person carried me to my house, from which I had only got a short distance. What agony I endured when, ascending the stair, I floated between terror, which now amounted almost to a certainty, and a slight hope that I might have forgot the pamphlet. On reaching my husband's apartment, I felt again ready to faint: I approached the bed – I felt under the pillow; there was nothing there: I lifted the mattress, and there was the roll of paper! My heart still beats every time I think of it. Never in my life did I experience such a moment of joy. With truth can I say, my joy would not have been so great if I had been delivered at the foot of the scaffold, for it was one who was more dear to me than life itself whom I saw rescued from destruction." – Vol. vi. p. 206, 207.

On the entrance of Louis XVIII. into Paris, on the 3d May 1814, the Allied sovereigns, from a feeling of delicacy to that monarch, gave orders that none but French troops should appear in the procession. The Old Guard lined the streets next the palace, and Chateaubriand gives the following account of the way in which they received him: —

"A regiment of infantry of the Old Guard kept the ground, from the Pont Neuf to Notre Dame, along the Quai des Orfures. I do not believe that human figures ever expressed anything so menacing and so terrible. These grenadiers, covered with wounds, so long the terror of Europe, who had seen so many thousand bullets fly over their heads, who seemed to smell of fire and powder – these very men, deprived of their leader, were forced to salute an old king, enfeebled by time and not combats, guarded by an army of Russians, Austrians, and Prussians, in the conquered capital of Napoleon! Some, shaking their heads, made their huge bearskins fall down over their eyes, so as not to see what was passing: others lowered the extremities of their mouths, to express their contempt and rage: others, through their mustaches, let their teeth be seen, which they gnashed like tigers. When they presented arms, it was with a gesture of fury, as if they brought them down to the charge. The sound they made with the recover was like thunder. Never, it must be admitted, had men been subjected to such a trial, or suffered such a punishment. If, in that moment, they had been called to vengeance, they would have exterminated the last man, or perished in the attempt.

"At the extremity of the line was a young hussar on horseback, with his drawn sabre in his hand; his whole body literally quivered with a convulsive movement of wrath. He was deadly pale; his eyes rolled round in the most frightful manner; he opened his mouth alternately and shut it, grinding his teeth, and uttering inarticulate cries of rage. He cast his eyes on a Russian officer: no words can express the look which he gave him. When the carriage of the King passed before him, he made his horse leap forward, it was easy to see that he withstood with difficulty the temptation to precipitate himself on his sovereign.3

"The Restoration, at its very outset, committed an irreparable fault. It should have disbanded the army, preserving only the marshals, generals, military governors, and officers, in their rank, pay, and appointments. The soldiers, in this manner, would have gradually re-entered their ranks, as they have since done into the Royal Guard; but they would have done so isolated from each other. The legitimate monarch would no longer have had arrayed against him the soldiers of the empire in regiments and brigades, as they had been during the days of their glory, for ever talking to each other of times past, and comparing the conquests of Napoleon with their inglorious inactivity under their new master.

"The miserable attempt to reconstruct the Maison Rouge, that mixture of the military men of the old monarchy and the soldiers of the new empire, only augmented the evil. To suppose that veterans famous on a hundred fields of battle should not be shocked at seeing young men – brave without doubt, but for the most part unaccustomed to the use of arms – to see them wear, without having earned or deserved, the marks of high military rank, was to be ignorant of the first principles of human nature." – Vol. vi. p. 311-313.

These observations of Chateaubriand's are well founded, and the last, in particular, is very important; but it may well be doubted whether, by any measures that could have been adopted, the support of the army could have been secured, or the dynasty of the Bourbons established on a secure foundation. It was the fact of their having been replaced by the bayonets of the stranger which was the insurmountable difficulty; it was national subjugation, the capture of Paris, which had for ever stained the white flag. This original sin in its birth attended the Restoration through every subsequent year of its existence: it was the main cause of the revolution of 1830, and operated with equal force in bringing about the still more fatal one of 1848. Impatience of repose – a desire to precipitate themselves on foreign nations – an aversion to the employments and interests of peace, were the secret but principal causes of these convulsions. If either Louis XVIII. or Louis Philippe had been young and warlike princes, and the recollection of Leipsic and Waterloo, of the invasions of France, and the double capture of its capital, had not prevented them from engaging in the career of foreign warfare; if they had been enterprising and victorious, they would have secured the unanimous suffrages of the nation, and continued the honoured possessors of the throne of France. But this dazzling though perilous career was denied to Louis XVIII. To him there was left only the difficult, perhaps the impossible task, of reconciling irrevocable enmities, of closing irremediable wounds, of appeasing inextinguishable mortifications. They have been thus set forth in the eloquent words of genius: —

"The house of Bourbon was placed in Paris at the Restoration as a trophy of the European confederation. The return of the ancient princes was inseparably associated, in the public mind, with the cession of extensive provinces, with the payment of an immense tribute, with the occupation of the kingdom by hostile armies, with the emptiness of those niches in which the gods of Athens and Rome had been the objects of a new idolatry, with the nakedness of those walls on which the Transfiguration had shone with a light as glorious as that which overhung Mount Thabor. They came back to a land in which they could recognise nothing. The Seven Sleepers of the legend, who closed their eyes when the Pagans were persecuting the Christians, and woke when the Christians were persecuting the Pagans, did not find themselves in a world more completely new to them. Twenty years had done the work of twenty generations. Events had come thick; men had lived fast. The old institutions and the old feelings had been torn up by the roots. There was a new church founded and endowed by the usurper; a new nobility, whose titles were taken from the fields of battle, disastrous to the ancient line; a new chivalry, whose crosses had been won by exploits which seemed likely to make the banishment of the Emigrants perpetual; a new code, administered by a new magistracy; a new body of proprietors, holding the soil by a new tenure; the most ancient local distinctions effaced, the most familiar names obsolete. There was no longer a Normandy, a Brittany, or a Guienne. The France of Louis XVI. had passed away as completely as one of the Preadamite worlds. Its fossil remains might now and then excite curiosity; but it was as impossible to put life into the old institutions as to animate the skeletons which are imbedded in the depths of primeval strata. The revolution in the laws and the form of government was but an outward sign of that mightier revolution which had taken place in the minds and hearts of men, and which affected every transaction and feeling of life. It was as absurd to think that France could again be placed under the feudal system, as that our globe could be overrun by mammoths. Louis might efface the initials of the Emperor, but he could not turn his eyes without seeing some object which reminded him he was a stranger in the palace of his fathers."4

As a parallel to this splendid passage, though in an entirely different style, we gladly give place to a noble burst of Chateaubriand, on that most marvellous of marvellous events, the return of Napoleon from Elba. It was natural that so memorable a revolution should strongly impress his imaginative mind; but he seems to have exceeded himself in the reflections to which it gives rise. We know not whether to award the prize to the Englishman or the Frenchman, in these parallel passages. They are both masterpieces in their way. Perhaps the correct view is, that Macaulay is superior in graphic force and the accumulation of sarcastic images; Chateaubriand in lofty thought and imaginative images.

"On the 1st March, at three o'clock in the morning, Napoleon approached the coast of France in the Gulf of Juan; he disembarked, walked along the shore, gathered a few violets, and bivouacked in an olive wood. The inhabitants withdrew in a state of stupefaction. He left Antibes to his left, and threw himself into the Mountains of Grasse in Dauphiny. At Sisterone the road passes a defile where twenty men might have stopped him; he did not meet a living soul. He advanced without opposition among the inhabitants who the year before had wished to murder him. Into the void which was formed around his gigantic shade, if a few soldiers entered, they straightway yielded to the attraction of his eagles. His fascinated enemies seek him and find him not; he shrowds himself in his glory, as the lion in the Sahara desert conceals himself in the rays of the sun to dazzle the eyes of his pursuers. Enveloped in a burning halo, the bloody phantoms of Arcola, Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Friedland, Eylau, the Moskwa, Lützen, and Bautzen, form his cortege amidst a million of the dead. From the midst of that column of smoke and flame, issue at the gates of towns some trumpet-notes mingled with tricolor standards, and the gates fly open. When Napoleon passed the Niemen, at the head of four hundred thousand foot, and a hundred thousand horse, to blow into the air the palace of the Czars at Moscow, he was less wonderful than when, breaking his ban, casting his fetters as a gauntlet in the face of kings, he came alone from Cannes to Paris, to sleep peaceably in the palace of the Tuileries." – Vol. vi. p. 359, 360.

To a mind like that of Chateaubriand, reposing in solitude when Napoleon was acting with such marvellous effect in the world, the character and qualities of that wonderful man could not fail to be a constant object of solicitude and observation. It has been already noticed that he braved the Emperor in the plenitude of his power, and essentially contributed, in the crisis of his fate, to his dethronement, and the re-establishment of the ancient line of princes. But, as is not unusual with persons of his highly wrought and generous temper of mind, his hostility to the Emperor declined with the termination of his authority, and his admiration for his genius rose with the base desertion of the revolutionary crowd who had fawned upon him when on the throne. The following observations on the style of his writings, indicate the growth of this counter feeling, and are in themselves equally just and felicitous: —

"His partisans have sought to make of Buonaparte a perfect being; a model of sentiment, of delicacy, of morality, and of justice – a writer like Cæsar and Thucydides, an orator like Demosthenes, a historian like Tacitus. The public discourses of Napoleon, his sonorous phrases in the tent and at the council board, are the less inspired by the spirit of prophecy, that many of the catastrophes which he announced have not been accomplished, while the warlike Isaiah himself has disappeared. Prophecies of doom which follow without reaching states become ridiculous. It is their accomplishment which renders them sublime. During sixteen years, Napoleon was the incarnation of destiny. Destiny now is mute, and he, too, should be so. Buonaparte was not a Cæsar; his education had neither been learnedly nor carefully conducted: half a stranger, he was ignorant of the first rules of our language, and could hardly spell it; but what did it signify, after all, that his expression was defective? – he gave the law to the universe. His bulletins have the most thrilling of all eloquence – that of victory. Sometimes, during the intoxications of success, they affected to be written on a drum-head: in the midst of the most lugubrious accents, something emerged which excites a smile. I have read all that Napoleon has written – the first manuscripts of his infancy, his love-letters to Josephine, the five volumes of his discourses, bulletins, and orders; but I have found nothing which so truly portrays the character of that great man, when in adversity, as the following autograph note left at Elba: —

"'My heart refuses to share in ordinary joys as ordinary sorrows.

"'Not having given myself life, I am not entitled to take it away.

"'My bad genius appeared to me and announced my end; which I found at Leipsic.

"'I have conjured up the terrible spirit of innovation, which will overrun the world.'

"Certes, there is Napoleon to the very life. His bulletins and discourses have often great energy; but it was not his own; it belonged to the age; he only adopted it. It sprang from the revolutionary energy, which he only weakened by moving in opposition to it. Danton said, 'The metal is fused; if you do not watch over the furnace, you will be consumed.' St Just replied, 'Do it if you dare.' These words contain the whole secret of our Revolution. Those who make revolutions by halves, do nothing but dig their own graves." – Vol. vii. p. 101.