Memoirs of Chateaubriand Volume V — Book XIII Part 2

"MONSEIGNEUR, "Unable to communicate with your colleagues, Messieurs the French cardinals, confined in the Monte Cavallo Palace; obliged to provide for every thing to the advantage of His Majesty's service, and in the interests of our country; knowing how often unexpected nominations have been made in the conclaves, I find myself, to my regret, in the disagreeable necessity of confiding to Your Eminence a power of eventual exclusion.

"Although M. le Cardinal Albani appears to have no chance, he is none the less a man of capacity on whom, in case of a prolonged struggle, they might turn their eyes; but he is the cardinal charged at the Conclave with the instructions of Austria: M. le Comte de Lützow has already designated him in that quality in his speech.

Now it is impossible to allow the elevation to the Sovereign Pontificate of a cardinal openly belonging to a crown, whether it be the Crown of France or any other.

"Consequently, monseigneur, I charge you, by virtue of my full powers as His Most Christian Majesty's Ambassador, and taking all the responsibility upon myself alone, to give the exclusion to M. le Cardinal Albani, if, on the one hand, by a fortuitous juncture, or, on the other, by a secret combination, he should come to obtain the majority of the suffrages.

"I am, etc. , etc." [Sidenote: The letter of exclusion.

] This letter of exclusion, entrusted to a cardinal by an ambassador who is not formally authorized to that effect, is a piece of diplomatic temerity: it is enough to send a shudder through all stay-at-home statesmen, all the heads of departments, all the chief clerks, all the copiers at the Foreign Office; but, as the Minister knew so little about his business as not even to think of an eventual case of exclusion, needs must that I should think of it for him.

Suppose that Albani had been made Pope by accident: what would have become of me?

I

should have been ruined for ever as a politician.

I say this, not for myself, who care little for a politician's fame, but for the future generation of writers who would be browbeaten because of my accident and who would expiate my misfortune at the cost of their career, even as the whipping-boy is punished when M. le Dauphin commits a blunder.

But neither should my daring foresight, in taking the letter of exclusion upon myself, be too much admired: that which appears enormous, when measured by the stunted scale of the old diplomatic ideas, is really nothing at all, in the actual order of society.

I owed my audacity on the one hand to my insensibility to all disgrace, on the other to my knowledge of contemporary opinion: the world as it is to-day does not care two sous for the nomination of a pope, the rivalries of crowns, or the internal intrigues of a conclave.

DISPATCH TO M.

LE COMTE PORTALIS

_Confidential.

_ "ROME, 2 _April_ 1829. "MONSIEUR LE COMTE, "I have the honour to-day to send you the important documents which I promised you.

These are nothing less than the secret and official journal of the Conclave.

It is translated, word for word, from the Italian original; I have only removed any part of it which might point too precisely to the sources whence I drew it.

If the smallest atom of these perhaps unexampled revelations were to transpire, it would cost the fortune, the liberty and perhaps the lives of several persons.

This would be the more deplorable inasmuch as we owe these revelations not to interest and corruption, but to confidence in French honour.

This document, monsieur le comte, must therefore remain for ever secret after it has been read in the King's Council; for, in spite of the precautions which I have taken to keep names silent and to suppress direct references, it still says enough to compromise its authors.

I have added a commentary, to facilitate its perusal.

The Pontifical Government is in the habit of keeping a register on which its decisions, its acts and deeds are noted down day by day, and so to speak hour by hour: what an historical treasure, if one could delve into it, going back towards the earlier centuries of the Papacy!

I have been given a momentary glimpse of it, for the present period.

The King will see, through the documents which I am sending you, what has never been seen before, the inside of a Conclave; the most intimate sentiments of the Court of Rome will be known to him, and His Majesty's Ministers will not be walking in the dark.

"The commentary which I have made of the journal dispensing me from any other reflection, it but remains for me to offer you the renewed assurance of the high regard with which I have the honour to be, etc. , etc." The Italian original of the precious document announced in this confidential dispatch was burnt in Rome before my eyes; I have kept no copy of the translation of this document which I sent to the Foreign Office; I have only a copy of the "commentary" or "remarks" which I added to that translation.

But the same discretion which made me charge the Minister to keep the document for ever secret obliges me here to suppress my own remarks; for, however great the obscurity in which those remarks are enveloped, in the absence of the document to which they refer, that obscurity would still be daylight in Rome.

Now resentment is long in the Eternal City; it might happen that, fifty years hence, it should fall upon some grand-nephew of the authors of the mysterious confidence.

I shall therefore content myself with giving a general epitome of the contents of the commentary, while laying stress on a few passages which bear a direct relation to the affairs of France.

We see, first, how greatly the Court of Naples was deceiving M. de Blacas, or else how much it was itself deceived; for, while it was causing me to be told that the Neapolitan cardinals would vote with us, they were joining the minority or the so-called Sardinian faction.

The minority of the cardinals imagined that the vote of the French cardinals would influence _the form of our government.

_ How so?

Apparently by means of secret orders with which they were supposed to be charged and by their votes in favour of a hot-headed pope.

[Sidenote: A secret document.

] The Nuncio Lambruschini declared to the Conclave that the Cardinal de Latil had the King's secret; all the efforts of the faction tended to create the belief that Charles X. and his Government were not in agreement.

On the 13th of March, the Cardinal de Latil announced that he had a declaration purely of conscience to make to the Conclave; he was sent before four cardinal-bishops: the acts of that secret confession remained in the keeping of the Grand Penitentiary.

The other French cardinals knew nothing of the subject-matter of this confession, and Cardinal Albani sought in vain to find out: the fact is important and curious.

The minority consisted of sixteen compact votes.

The cardinals forming this minority called themselves the "Fathers of the Cross;" they placed a St. Andrew's cross on their doors as a sign that, having decided on their choice, they did not want to communicate with any one.

The majority of the Conclave displayed reasonable sentiments and a firm resolution in no way to mix in foreign politics.

The minutes drawn up by the protonotary of the Conclave are worthy of remark.

They conclude with these words: "Pius VIII.

determined to appoint Cardinal Albani Secretary of State, in order also to satisfy the Cabinet of Vienna."

The Sovereign Pontiff divides the lots between the two crowns: he declares himself the French Pope, and gives the secretaryship of State to Austria.

TO MADAME RÉCAMIER

"ROME, _Wednesday_ 8 _April_ 1829. "This day I have had the whole Conclave to dinner.

Tomorrow I receive the Grand-duchess Helen.

On Easter Tuesday, I give a ball for the closing of the session; and then I shall prepare to come to see you.

You can judge of my anxiety: at the moment of writing to you, I have no news yet of my mounted courier announcing the death of the Pope, and yet the Pope is already crowned; Leo XII.

is forgotten; I have begun again to transact affairs with the new Secretary of State, Albani; everything is going on as though nothing had happened, and I do not even know whether you in Paris know that there is a new Pontiff!

How beautiful that ceremony of the papal benediction is!

The Sabine Range on the horizon, then the deserted Roman Campagna, then Rome itself, then the Piazza San Pietro and the whole people falling on its knees under an old man's hand: the Pope is the only prince who blesses his subjects.

"I had written so far when a courier arrived from Genoa bringing me a telegraphic dispatch from Paris to Toulon, which dispatch, replying to the one I had sent, informs me that, on the 4th of April, at eleven o'clock in the evening, they received in Paris my telegraphic dispatch from Rome to Toulon announcing the election of Cardinal Castiglioni, and that the King is greatly pleased.

"The rapidity of these communications is prodigious; my courier left at eight o'clock in the evening on the 31st of March, and at eight o'clock in the evening on the 8th of April I received a reply from Paris."

"11 _April_ 1829. "To-day is the 11th of April: in eight days we shall have Easter with us, in fifteen days my leave, and then to see you!

Everything disappears before that hope; I am no more sad; I no longer think of ministers or politics.

To-morrow we begin Holy Week.

I shall think of all you have told me.

Why are you not here to hear the beautiful songs of sorrow with me!

We should go to walk in the deserts of the Roman Campagna, now covered with flowers and verdure.

All the ruins seem to become young with the new year: I am of their number."

[Sidenote: To Récamier and Portalis.

] _Wednesday in Holy Week_, 15 _April.

_ "I have just left the Sistine Chapel, where I attended Tenebræ and heard the _Miserere_ sung.

I remembered that you had talked to me of this ceremony, which touched me a hundred times as much because of that.

"The daylight was failing; the shadows crept slowly across the frescoes of the chapel, and one distinguished but a few bold strokes of Michael Angelo's brush.

The candles, extinguished one by one in turns, sent forth from their stifled flames a slender white smoke, a very natural image of life, which Scripture compares to a little smoke[71].

The cardinals were kneeling, the Pope prostrate before the same altar where a few days before I had seen his predecessor; the admirable prayer of penance and mercy, which succeeded the Lamentations of the prophet, rose at intervals in the silence of the night.

One felt overwhelmed by the great mystery of a God dying that the sins of mankind might be wiped out.

The Catholic Heiress was there on her seven hills with all her memories; but, instead of the powerful pontiffs, those cardinals who contended for precedence with monarchs, a poor old paralyzed Pope, without family or support, Princes of the Church, without splendour, announced the end of a power which has civilized the modern world.

The master-pieces of the arts were disappearing with it, were fading away on the walls and ceilings of the Vatican, that half-abandoned palace.

Inquisitive strangers, separated from the unity of the Church, assisted at the ceremony on their way and took the place of the community of the Faithful.

The heart was seized with a two-fold sadness.

Christian Rome, while commemorating the Agony of Jesus Christ, seemed to be celebrating her own, to be repeating for the new Jerusalem the words which Jeremias addressed to the old."

[Sidenote: To Récamier and Portalis.

] DISPATCH TO M.

LE COMTE PORTALIS

"ROME, 16 _April_ 1829. "MONSIEUR LE COMTE, "Things are developing here as I had the honour to foreshadow to you; the words and actions of the new Pope are in complete agreement with the pacificatory system followed by Leo XII.

: Pius VIII.

goes even further than his predecessor; he expresses himself with greater frankness on the Charter, of which he is not afraid to pronounce the word nor to advise the French to follow the spirit.

The Nuncio, having again written about our business, has received a dry intimation to mind his own.

All is being concluded for the Concordat with the Netherlands, and M. le Comte de Celles will complete his mission next month.

"Cardinal Albani, finding himself in a difficult position, is obliged to pay for it: the protestations which he makes to me of his devotion to France annoy the Austrian Ambassador, who is unable to conceal his ill-humour.

From the religious point of view we have nothing to fear from Cardinal Albani; himself troubled with very little religion, he will not feel the impulse to trouble us either with his own fanaticism or with the moderate opinions of his Sovereign.

"As for the political point of view, Italy is not at this day to be juggled away through police intrigues and a cypher correspondence;

to allow the Legations to be occupied or to place an Austrian garrison at Ancona on some pretext or other would mean stirring up Europe and declaring war against France: now we are no longer in 1814, 1815, 1816 and 1817; a greedy and unjust ambition is not to be satisfied before our eyes with impunity.

And so, that Cardinal Albani is in receipt of a pension from Prince Metternich; that he is a kinsman of the Duke of Modena[72], to whom he declares himself to be leaving his enormous fortune; that he is hatching a little plot with that Prince against the Heir to the Crown of Sardinia[73]: all that is true, all that would have been dangerous at the time when secret and absolute governments set soldiers dimly in movement behind the shelter of a dim dispatch; but, in these days, with public governments, with liberty of the press and of free speech, with the telegraph and general rapidity of communication, with knowledge of affairs spread through the several classes of society, we are protected against the conjuring tricks and artifices of the old diplomacy.

At the same time it cannot be denied that there are drawbacks attached to an _Austrian chargé d'affaires_ in the position of Secretary of State in Rome; there are even certain notes (those for instance relating to the imperial power in Italy) which it would not be possible to place in Cardinal Albani's hands.

"No one has yet been able to fathom the secret of an appointment which everybody dislikes, including even the Cabinet of Vienna.

Has this to do with interests foreign to politics?

They say that Cardinal Albani is at this moment offering to make the Holy Father an advance of 200,000 piastres of which the Roman Government stands in need; others pretend that this sum will be lent by an Austrian banker.

Cardinal Macchi told me on Saturday last that His Holiness, not wishing to re-appoint Cardinal Bernetti and desirous, nevertheless, of giving him a big place, found no other means of arranging things than to make vacant the Bologna Legation.

Wretched little difficulties often become the motives of the most important resolutions.

If Cardinal Macchi's version is the true one, all that Pius VIII.

is doing and saying for the _satisfaction_ of the Crowns of France and Austria would be only an apparent reason, by the aid of which he would seek to mask his own weakness in his own eyes.

For the rest, no one believes that Albania ministry will last.

So soon as he begins to enter into relations with the ambassadors, difficulties will spring up on every hand.

[Sidenote: The position of Italy.

] "As to the position of Italy, monsieur le comte, you must read with caution what will be written to you from Rome or elsewhere.

It is, unhappily, but too true that the Government of the Two Sicilies has fallen into the last stage of contempt.

The manner in which the Court lives in the midst of its guards, for ever trembling, for ever pursued by the phantoms of fear, presenting the sole spectacle of ruinous hunting-parties and gibbets, contributes more and more to debase royalty in this country.

Yet they take for _conspiracies_ what is only the general uneasiness, the product of the century, the struggle of the old society with the new, the contest between the decrepitude of the old institutions and the energy of the young generations: in fine, the comparison which everybody makes of that which is with that which might be.

Let us not blind our eyes to this fact: the great spectacle of a powerful, free and happy France, that great spectacle which strikes the eyes of the nations which have remained or relapsed under the yoke, excites regrets or feeds hopes.

The medley of representative governments and absolute governments cannot long continue; one or the other must go under, and politics must return to an even level, as in the time of Gothic Europe.

The custom-house on a frontier can henceforth not separate liberty from slavery; a man can no longer be hung on this side of a brook for principles reputed sacred on the other side of that brook.

It is in this sense, monsieur le comte, and in this sense alone, that there is any _conspiracy_ in Italy; it is in this sense too that Italy is _French.

_ On the day when she shall enter on the enjoyment of the rights which her intelligence perceives and which the progressive march of time is carrying to her, on that day she will be peaceful and purely Italian.

It is not a few poor devils of _Carbonari_, stirred up by the manœuvres of the police and mercilessly hanged, that will rouse the country to revolt.

Governments are given the falsest ideas of the true state of things; they are prevented from doing what they ought to do to ensure their safety by always having pointed out to them as the private conspiracies of a handful of Jacobins what is really the effect of a permanent and general cause.

"This, monsieur le comte, is the real position of Italy.

Each of her States, in addition to the common working of men's minds, is tortured with some local malady: Piedmont is delivered to a fanatical faction; the Milanese is being devoured by the Austrians;

the domains of the Holy Father are being ruined by bad financial administration; the taxes amount to nearly fifty millions and do not leave the landlord one per cent, of his income; the customs bring in hardly anything; smuggling is general; the Prince of Modena has established shops in his Duchy (a place of immunity for all ancient abuses) for the sale of prohibited merchandise, which he passes at night into the Bologna Legation[74].

"I have already, monsieur le comte, spoken to you of Naples, where the weakness of the government is saved only by the cowardice of the population.

"It is this absence of military valour that will prolong the death-agony of Italy.

Bonaparte did not have time to revive that valour in the land of Marius and Cæsar.

The habits of an idle life and the charm of the climate contribute still more to deprive the Southern Italians of the desire to agitate for an improved condition.

Antipathies arising from the territorial divisions add to the difficulties of an inside movement; but, if some impulse came from without, if some prince beyond the Alps granted a charter to his subjects, a revolution would take place, because all is ripe for such a revolution.

Happier than we and instructed by our experience, the people would be sparing in the crimes and miseries with which we were lavish.

"I have no doubt, monsieur le comte, that I shall soon receive the leave for which I asked you: I shall perhaps use it.

At the moment, therefore, of leaving Italy, I have thought it my duty to place a few general hints before you, in order to fix the ideas of the King's Council and to warn it against reports inspired by narrow minds or blind passions.

"I have the honour to be, etc. , etc." [Sidenote: Expensive visitors.

] DISPATCH TO M.

LE COMTE PORTALIS

"ROME, 16 _April_ 1829. "MONSIEUR LE COMTE, "Messieurs the French cardinals are very eager to know what sum will be allowed them for their expenses and their stay in Rome: they have repeatedly asked me to write to you on the subject; I shall therefore be infinitely obliged to you if you will inform me as soon as possible of the King's decision.

"As regards myself, monsieur le comte, when you were good enough to allow me an additional sum of thirty thousand francs, you were under the impression that none of the cardinals would stay with me.

Now M. de Clermont-Tonnerre put up here with his suite, consisting of two conclavists, an ecclesiastical secretary, a lay secretary, a valet, two men-servants and a French cook, besides a Roman groom of the chambers, a master of ceremonies, three footmen, a coachman and all the Italian establishment which a cardinal is obliged to keep up here.

The Archbishop of Toulouse, who is not able to walk[75], does not dine at my table; he requires two or three courses at different hours, and horses and carriages for his guests and friends.

My reverend visitor will certainly not pay his expenditure here; he will go, and leave the bills to me; I shall have to pay not only the cook, the laundress, the livery-stable keeper, etc. , etc. , but also the two surgeons who came to look at His Lordship's leg, the shoemaker who makes his white and purple slippers, and the tailor who has 'confectioned' the cloaks, cassocks, neck-bands, the whole outfit of the cardinal and his abbés. "If to this, monsieur le comte, you add my extraordinary expenses for costs of representation, which expenses have been increased by the presence of the Grand-duchess Helen, Prince Paul of Wurtemberg[76] and the King of Bavaria, you will no doubt find that the thirty thousand francs which you allowed me will have been much exceeded.

The first year of an ambassador's establishment is a ruinous one, the grants allowed for that establishment being far below its needs.

It requires a residence of almost three years for a diplomatic agent to find means to pay off the debts which he has begun by making and to keep his expenses on a level with his receipts.

I know all the penury of the budget of the Foreign Office; if I had any fortune of my own, I would not trouble you: nothing is more disagreeable to me, I assure you, than these details of money into which a rigorous necessity compels me to enter, much against my will.

"Accept, monsieur le comte, etc." I had given balls and evening-parties in London and Paris, and, although a child of a different desert, I had not passed too badly through those new solitudes; but I had had no glimmer of the nature of the entertainments in Rome: they have something of ancient poetry, which places death by the side of pleasures.

At the Villa Medicis, where I received the Grand-duchess Helen, the gardens themselves are an adornment, and the frame of the picture is magnificent: on one side, the Villa Borghese, with Raphael's house; on the other the Villa Monte-Maria, and the slopes edging the Tiber; below the spectator, the whole of Rome, like an old, abandoned eagle's nest.

Amid the groves thronged, together with the descendants of the Paulas and Corinnas, beauties come from Naples, Florence and Milan: the Princess Helen seemed to be their queen.

Boreas, suddenly descending from the mountain, tore the banqueting-tent and fled with shreds of canvas and garlands, as though to give us an image of all that time has swept away on this shore.

The Embassy staff were in consternation; I felt an indescribable ironical gaiety at seeing a breath from heaven carry off my gold of a day and my joys of an hour.

The mischief was promptly repaired.

Instead of lunching on the terrace, we lunched in the graceful palace: the harmony of the horns and oboes, spread by the wind, had something of the murmur of my American forests.

The groups disporting amid the squalls, the women whose tortured veils beat their hair and faces, the _saltarello_ which continued during the storm, the _improvisatrice_ declaiming to the clouds, the balloon escaping crooked-wise with the cypher of the Daughter of the North: all this gave a new character to those sports in which the customary tempests of my life seemed to take part.

What a fascination for any man who should not have counted his heap of years, and who should have asked illusions of the world and the storm!

It is difficult indeed for me to remember my autumn when, at my receptions, I see pass before me those women of spring-time who penetrate among the flowers, the concerts and the lights of my successive galleries: as who should sway swans swimming towards radiant climes.

To what _désennui_ are they going?

Some seek what they already love, others what they do not yet love.

At the end of the road, they will fall into those sepulchres, always open here, into those ancient sarcophaguses which serve as basins to fountains hanging from porticoes; they will go to swell so many light and charming ashes.

Those waves of beauties, diamonds, flowers and feathers roll to the sound of Rossini's music, which is re-echoed and grows feebler from orchestra to orchestra.

Is that melody the sigh of the breeze to which I listened in the savannahs of the Floridas, the moan which I heard in the Temple of Erechtheus at Athens?

Is it the distant wailing of the north winds, which rocked me on the ocean?

Could my sylph be hidden beneath the form of some of these brilliant Italian women?

No: my hamadryad has remained united to the willow of the meadows where I used to talk with her on the further side of the hedge at Combourg.

I have little in common with these frolics of the society which has attached itself to my steps at the end of my race; and yet this fairy-scene contains a certain intoxication that flies to my head: I get rid of it only by going to cool my brow in the solitary square of St. Peter's or in the deserted Coliseum.

Then the puny sights of the earth are lost, and I find nothing equal to the sudden change of scene but the old melancholy of my early days.

[Sidenote: The exiled Bonapartes.

] I will now set forth here my relations, as Ambassador, with the Bonaparte Family, in order to clear the Restoration of one of the calumnies that are incessantly being thrown at its head.

France did not act alone in banishing the members of the Imperial Family; she merely obeyed the hard necessity put upon her by the force of arms; it was the Allies who provoked that banishment: diplomatic conventions, formal treaties pronounce the exile of the Bonapartes, lay down the very places they are to live at, forbid a minister or ambassador to deliver a passport, by himself, to Napoleon's kinsmen;

the visa of the four other ministers or ambassadors of the four other contracting Powers is exacted.

To such a degree did the blood of Napoleon frighten the Allies, even when it did not flow in his own veins!

Thank God, I never submitted to those measures.

In 1823, without consulting anybody, in spite of the treaties, and on my own responsibility as Minister of Foreign Affairs, I delivered a passport to Madame la Comtesse de Survilliers[77], then in Brussels, to enable her to come to Paris to nurse one of her kinsmen, who was ill.

Twenty times over I called for the repeal of those laws of persecution; twenty times over I told Louis XVIII.

that I should like to see the Duc de Reichstadt captain of his Guards, and the statue of Napoleon put back on the top of the column in the Place Vendôme.

Both as minister and ambassador, I rendered all the services in my power to the Bonaparte Family.

That was the broad view I took of the Legitimate Monarchy: liberty can look glory in the face.

As Ambassador to Rome, I authorized my secretaries and attachés to appear in the palace of Madame la Duchesse de Saint-Leu; I threw down the barrier raised between Frenchmen who had all known adversity.

I wrote to M. le Cardinal Fesch to invite him to join the cardinals who were to meet at my house; I expressed to him my sorrow at the political measures which it had been thought necessary to take; I reminded him of the time when I had formed part of his mission to the Holy See; and I begged my old ambassador to honour with his presence the banquet of his old secretary of embassy.

I

received the following reply, full of dignity, discretion and prudence: [Sidenote: Fesch, Jerome Bonaparte.

] "PALAZZO FALCONIERI, 4 _April_ 1829. "Cardinal Fesch greatly appreciates M. de Chateaubriand's obliging invitation, but his position on returning to Rome was such as to recommend him to forsake the world and lead a life quite apart from any society except that of his family.

The circumstances that followed proved to him that this course was indispensable to his tranquillity; and, as the amenities of the moment are no safeguard against unpleasantness in the future, he is obliged not to change his mode of life.

Cardinal Fesch begs M. de Chateaubriand to be convinced that nothing can equal his gratitude, and that it is with much regret that he will not wait upon His Excellency as frequently as he would have desired.

'His very humble, etc. , "CARDINAL FESCH."

The phrase, "the amenities of the moment are no safeguard against unpleasantness in the future," is an allusion to the threat uttered by M. de Blacas, who had given orders for M. le Cardinal Fesch to be flung down his stairs if he presented himself at the French Embassy: M.

de Blacas was too much inclined to forget that he had not always been so great a lord.

I who, in order to be what I have to be, in so far as I can, in the present, am constantly recalling my past, have acted differently with His Eminence the Archbishop of Lyons: the little misunderstandings that existed between him and me in Rome oblige me to adopt a tone of propriety the more respectful inasmuch as I, in my turn, belong to the triumphant and he to the beaten party.

Prince Jerome, on his side, did me the honour to ask my intervention, sending me a copy of a request which he was addressing to the Cardinal Secretary of State; he says in his letter to me: "Exile is terrible enough, both in its principle and in its consequences, for that generous France which witnessed his birth [Prince Jerome's], that France which possesses all his affections and which he has served for twenty years, not to wish to aggravate his situation by permitting every government to abuse the delicacy of his position.

"Prince Jérôme de Montfort, confiding in the loyalty of the French Government and in the character of its noble representative, does not hesitate to believe that justice will be done him.

"He takes this opportunity, etc. "JÉRÔME."

In consequence of this request, I addressed a confidential note to the Secretary of State, Cardinal Bernetti; it ends with these words: "The motives inferred by Prince Jérôme de Montfort appearing to the undersigned to be founded on justice and reason, he could not refuse the applicant the intervention of his good offices, persuaded as he is that the French Government will always regret to see the severity of the political laws aggravated by measures likely to give umbrage.

"The undersigned would set an especial value upon obtaining, in this circumstance, the powerful interest of H. E.

the Cardinal Secretary of State.

"CHATEAUBRIAND."

At the same time I replied to Prince Jerome as follows: "ROME, 9 _May_ 1829. "The French Ambassador to the Holy See has received the copy of the note which Prince Jérôme de Montfort has done him the honour to send him.

He hastens to thank him for the confidence which he has been good enough to show him; he will make it a duty to write to His Holiness' Secretary of State in support of His Highness' just claims.

"The Vicomte de Chateaubriand, who has also been banished from his country, would be only too happy to be able to soften the fate of the Frenchmen who still find themselves placed under the blow of a political law.

The exiled brother of Napoleon, addressing himself to an Emigrant formerly struck off the list of outlaws by Napoleon himself, is one of those freaks of fortune which must needs have the ruins of Rome for witnesses.

"The Vicomte de Chateaubriand has the honour, etc." DISPATCH TO M.

LE COMTE PORTALIS

"ROME, 4 _May_ 1829. "I have had the honour to inform you, in my letter of 30 April, acknowledging the receipt of your Dispatch No. 25, that the Pope received me in private audience on the 29th of April at mid-day.

His Holiness appeared to me to be enjoying very good health.

He made me sit beside him and kept me nearly an hour and a quarter.

The Austrian Ambassador had had a public audience before me to hand over his new credentials.

"On leaving the closet of His Holiness at the Vatican, I called on the Secretary of State, and, frankly broaching the question with him, said: "'Well, you see what our newspapers are making you out to be!

You are "an Austrian, you hate France," you want to do her some bad turns: what am I to believe of all that?'

"He shrugged his shoulders and replied: "'Your newspapers make me laugh; I cannot convince you by my words if you are not convinced already; but put me to the test and you shall see if I do not love France, if I do not do what you ask me in the name of your King!'

"I believe, monsieur le comte, that Cardinal Albani is sincere.

He is profoundly indifferent in religious matters; he is not a priest;

he has even thought of giving up the purple and marrying; he does not like the Jesuits, who tire him with the noise they make; he is lazy, a glutton, a great lover of all kinds of pleasures; the weariness which bishops' charges and pastoral letters produce in him makes him extremely unfavourable to the cause of the authors of those charges and pastoral letters: that old man of eighty wants to die in peace and joyousness.

"I have the honour, etc." [Sidenote: Monte Cavallo.

] I often visit Monte Cavallo; there the solitude of the gardens is increased by the solitude of the Roman Campagna, in search of which one's eyes turn beyond Rome and up the right bank of the Tiber.

The gardeners are my friends; there are walks leading to the Panatteria, a poor dairy-farm, aviary, or poultry-yard, the occupants of which are as indigent and peaceful as the latter-day popes.

Looking down from the height of the terraces of the Quirinal enclosure, one sees a narrow street in which women sit working at their windows on the different storeys: some embroider, others paint, in the silence of this retired quarter.

The cells of the cardinals of the last Conclave do not interest me at all.

When St. Peter's was built, when master-pieces were ordered of Raphael, when at the same time the Kings came to kiss the Pontiffs slipper, there was something worthy of attention in the Temporal Papacy.

I would gladly see the cell of a Gregory VII.

[78], of a Sixtus V.

, just as I would look for the lions' den in Babylon; but dark holes, deserted by an obscure company of septuagenarians, represent to me only those _columbaria_ of Ancient Rome, which are empty to-day of their dust and from which a family of dead have fled.

I therefore pass rapidly by those cells, already half demolished, to walk through the rooms of the palace: there everything speaks to me of an event[79] for which one finds no precedent except by going back to Sciarra Colonna[80], Nogaret[81] and Boniface VIII.

[82] My first and my last visit to Rome are connected by memories of Pius VII.

, to whose story I have referred when speaking of Madame de Beaumont and of Bonaparte.

My two visits are two pendentives outlined under the vault of my monument.

My faithfulness to the memory of my old friends must give confidence to the friends who remain to me: for me nothing sinks into the tomb; all that I have known lives around me: according to the Indian doctrine, death, when it smites us, does not destroy us; it only makes us invisible.

TO M.

LE COMTE PORTALIS

"ROME, 7 _May_ 1829. "MONSIEUR LE COMTE, "I have at last received, by Messieurs Desgranges and Franqueville, your Dispatch No. 25. This rude dispatch, made out by some ill-bred Foreign-Office clerk, is not what I had the right to expect after the services which I had had the honour to render the King during the Conclave; and above all they might have remembered a little whom they were addressing.

Not an obliging word for M. Bellocq, who obtained such exceptional documents; nothing in reply to the request I made on his behalf; gratuitous comments on Cardinal Albania nomination, a nomination made in the Conclave which no one, therefore, could have foreseen or prevented, a nomination concerning which I have never ceased to send you explanations.

In my Dispatch No. 34, which has doubtless now reached you, I again offer you a very simple method of getting rid of this cardinal, if he causes France such alarm, and that method will already be half carried out when you receive this letter: to-morrow I shall take leave of His Holiness; I shall hand over the Embassy to M. Bellocq, as _chargé d'affaires_, in accordance with the instructions in your Dispatch No. 24, and leave for Paris.

"I have the honour to be, etc." This last note is a rude one, and puts an abrupt close to my correspondence with M. Portalis.

[Sidenote: To Portalis and Récamier.

] TO MADAME RÉCAMIER

"14 _May_ 1829. "My departure is fixed for the 16th.

Letters from Vienna arriving this morning announce that M. de Laval has refused the Foreign Office; is it true?

If he keeps to this refusal, what will happen?

God knows.

I hope that all will be decided before my arrival in Paris.

It seems to me that we have become paralyzed and that we have nothing free except our tongues.

"You think I shall come to an arrangement with M. de Laval; I doubt it.

I am inclined to come to an arrangement with nobody.

I was going to arrive in the most peaceful mood, and those people think fit to pick a quarrel with me.

So long as I had a chance of office, they could not praise and flatter me enough in their dispatches;

the day on which the place was taken, or thought to be taken, they drily inform me of M. de Laval's nomination in the rudest and at the same time the most stupid dispatch.

But, before becoming so flat and insolent between one post and another, they ought to have reflected a little whom they were addressing, and M. Portalis will have learnt as much from a word which I have sent him lately in reply.

It is possible that he merely signed without reading, just as Carnot signed hundreds of death-warrants on trust."

The friend of the great L'Hôpital[83], the Chancelier Olivier[84], in his sixteenth-century language, which set politeness at defiance, compares the French to monkeys which clamber to the tree-tops and never cease climbing until they reach the top-most branch, where they show what they ought to hide.

All that has happened in France from 1789 to our own time proves the correctness of the simile: every man, as he ascends through life, becomes like the Chancellor's ape; he ends by shamelessly exposing his infirmities to the passers-by.

See, at the end of my dispatches I am seized with a desire to boast: the great men who swarm at this present time prove that a man is a dupe if he does not himself proclaim his immortality.

Have you read, in the archives of the Foreign Office, the diplomatic correspondence relating to the most important events at the period of that correspondence?

"No." At least you have read the printed correspondence: you know the negociations of Du Bellay, of d'Ossat, of Du Perron, of the Président Jeannin[85], the State Memoirs of Villeroi[86], the _Économies royales_ of Sully[87]; you have seen the Memoirs of the Cardinal de Richelieu[88], numbers of letters of Mazarin, the papers and documents relating to the Treaty of Westphalia[89], to the Peace of Munster[90]?

You know Barillon's[91] Dispatches on English affairs; the negociations on the Spanish Succession are not unfamiliar to you; the name of Madame des Ursins has not escaped you; M. de Choiseul's[92] Family Compact has come under your notice; you are not unacquainted with Ximenes[93], Olivarez[94] and Pombal[95], Hugo Grotius on the liberty of the seas[96], his letters to the two Oxenstierns[97], the Negociations of the Grand Pensionary de Witt[98] with Peter Grotius[99], the second son of Hugo; in fine, the collection of diplomatic treaties has perhaps attracted your attention?

"No." [Sidenote: My diplomatic dispatches.

] So you have read none of those sempiternal lucubrations?

Well then, read them; when you have done so, pass over my Spanish War, the success of which troubles you, although it forms my chief claim to be classed as a statesman; take my dispatches from Prussia, England and Rome, place them beside the other dispatches which I have mentioned: and then, with your hand on your conscience, tell me which have bored you most; tell me if my work and the work of my predecessors are not quite similar; if the grasp of small things and of "practical" matters is not as manifest on my part as on that of the past ministers and defunct ambassadors.

First of all, you will notice that I have an eye for everything;

that I occupy myself with Reshid Pasha[100] and M. de Blacas; that I defend my privileges and rights as Ambassador to Rome against all comers; that I am crafty, false (an eminent quality!

) and cunning to such an extent that, when M. de Funchal, in an equivocal position, writes to me, I do not reply to him, but go to see him with astute politeness, so that he is unable to show a line in my handwriting and is nevertheless satisfied.

There is not an imprudent word to be criticized in my conversations with Cardinals Bernetti and Albani, the two secretaries of State; nothing escapes me; I descend to the pettiest details; I restore the accounts of the affairs of the French in Rome in such a way that they still exist on the basis on which I have placed them.

With an eagle's glance, I perceive that the Treaty of Trinità de' Monti, between the Holy See and the Ambassadors Laval and Blacas, is irregular, and that neither party had the right to conclude it.

Mounting higher, and coming to the greater diplomacy, I take upon myself to give the exclusion to a cardinal, because a minister of foreign affairs has left me without instructions and exposes me to seeing a creature of Austria elected Pope.

I procure the secret journal of the Conclave: a thing that no ambassador has ever been able to obtain; day by day I send the list of names and votes.

Nor do I neglect Bonaparte's family: I do not despair, by means of good treatment, of persuading Cardinal Fesch to send in his resignation as Archbishop of Lyons.

If a _Carbonaro_ stirs, I am informed of it and able to judge how much truth there is in the conspiracy; if an abbé intrigues, I am aware of it, and I baffle the plans that had been formed to separate the French cardinals from the French Ambassador.

Lastly, I discover that a great secret has been deposited by the Cardinal de Latil in the bosom of the Grand Penitentiary.

Are you satisfied?

Is that a man who knows his trade?

Very well, and now see: I dispatched all this diplomatic business like the first ambassador that comes, without its costing me an idea, in the same way as a booby of a Lower Norman peasant knits his stockings while watching his sheep: my sheep were my dreams.

Now here is another point of view: if you compare my official letters with the official letters of my predecessors, you will see that mine treat of general affairs as well as private affairs, that I am drawn by the character of the ideas of my century into a loftier region of the human mind.

This may be observed more particularly in the dispatch in which I speak to M. Portalis of the state of Italy, in which I set forth the mistake of the cabinets which take for private conspiracies that which is only the development of civilization.

The _Memorandum on the War in the East_ also exposes truths of a political order which are out of the common.

I have talked with two Popes of other things than cabinet intrigues; I have obliged them to speak to me of religion, liberty, the future destiny of the world.

My speech delivered at the door of the Conclave has the same character.

I dared to tell old men to go forward and place religion once again at the head of the march of society.

[Sidenote: My political successes.

] Readers, wait for me to end my boasting so as next to come to the object, in the manner of the philosopher Plato making a circuit round his idea.

I have become old Sidrac; age prolongs my weary road[101].

I continue: I shall be a long while yet.

Several writers of our time have a mania for disdaining their literary talent in order to follow their political talent, which they value far above the former.

Thank God, I am governed by a contrary instinct: I make little of politics, for the very reason that I have been lucky at the game.

To succeed in public life, it is not a question of acquiring qualities, but a matter of losing them.

I shamelessly admit my aptitude for practical things, without cherishing the smallest illusion touching the obstacle within myself which opposes my complete success.

That obstacle has nothing to do with the Muse; it arises from my indifference to everything.

With this defect, it is impossible to achieve anything completely, in practical life.

Indifference, I admit, is one of the qualities of statesmen, but of statesmen without conscience.

They have to know how to look dry-eyed upon any event, to swallow bitter pills like malmsey, and, where others are concerned, to set at nought morality, justice, sufferings, provided that, in the midst of revolutions, they know how to find their own particular fortune.

For, to those transcendent minds, the accident, be it good or bad, is bound to bring something; it must pay at the rate of a throne, a coffin, an oath, an outrage; the tariff is made out by the Mionnets[102] of catastrophes and affronts: I am not an expert in these numismatics.

Unfortunately my indifference is a double one;

I grow no more excited about my person than about facts.

Contempt for the world came to St. Paul the Hermit[103] from his religious faith;

contempt for society comes to me from my political incredulity.

This incredulity would carry me high in a sphere of action, if, more careful of my foolish self, I were able at the same time to humiliate it and to clothe it.

Do what I may, I remain a numskull of a decent man, naively stupid and quite bare, unable either to cringe or to help myself.

D'Andilly[104], speaking of himself, seems to have described one side of my character: "I have never had any ambition," he says, "because I had too much, being unable to endure the dependence which confines within such narrow limits the effects of the inclination which God gave me for great things, glorious to the State, and capable of procuring the happiness of peoples, without its being possible for me to consider my private interests in all that.

I was fit only for a king who would have reigned by himself and who would have had no other desire than to render his glory immortal."

In that case, I was not fit for the kings of the day.

Now that I have led you by the hand through the most secret winding ways of my merits, that I have made you feel all that is rare in my dispatches, like one of my colleagues at the Institute who is incessantly singing his own fame and teaching men to admire him, now I will tell you what I am leading up to with my boasting: by showing what they are able to do in public life, I wish to defend the men of letters against the men of diplomacy, the counting-house and the offices.

The latter must not be allowed to take it into their heads to think themselves above men the smallest of whom overtops them by a head: when one knows so many things, like these practical gentlemen, one should at least not display gross ignorance.

You talk of "facts;" well then, recognize "facts:" the majority of the great writers of antiquity, of the middle ages, of Modern England have been great statesmen, when they have deigned to descend to public life: "I did not wish to give them to understand," says Alfieri, refusing an embassy, "that their diplomacy and their dispatches seemed to me and certainly were for me less important than my tragedies or even those of others; but it is impossible to reclaim that kind of people: they cannot and must not be converted."

[Sidenote: Other literary diplomatists.

] Who in France was ever more literary than L'Hôpital[105], the reversioner of Horace, than d'Ossat[106], that capable ambassador, than Richelieu, that great head, who, not content with dictating "controversial treaties," with writing "Memoirs," and "histories," constantly invented dramatic subjects, and rhymed with Mailleville and Boisrobert[107], and gave birth, by the sweat of his brow, to the Academy[108] and the _Grande Pastorale?

_[109] Is it because he was a bad writer that he was a great minister?

But the question is not one of the possession of more or less talent; it is one of the passion for paper and ink: and M. de L'Empyrée[110] never showed more ardour nor incurred greater expense than did the cardinal to snatch the palm from Parnassus, seeing that the staging of his "tragi-comedy" of _Mirame_ cost him two hundred thousand crowns!

If, in one who is both a political and a literary personage, the mediocrity of a poet caused the superiority of the statesmen, one would have thence to conclude that the weakness of the statesman would result from the strength of the poet: yet did the literary genius destroy the political genius of Solon[111], an elegist equal to Simonides[112]; of Pericles stealing from the Muses the eloquence with which he subjugated the Athenians; of Thucydides[113] and Demosthenes[114], who carried to so great a height the glory of the writer and the orator, while devoting their days to war and the public places?

Did it destroy the genius of Xenophon[115], who effected the retreat of the ten thousand while dreaming of the _Cyropœdia_; of the two Scipios[116], one the friend of Lælius[117], the other associated in the fame of Terence[118]; of Cicero[119], king of letters, as he was the father of the country; of Cæsar[120], lastly, author of works of grammar, astronomy, religion, literature, of Cæsar, rival of Archilochus[121] in satire, of Sophocles[122] in tragedy, of Demosthenes in eloquence, whose _Commentaries_ are the despair of historians?

In spite of these examples and a thousand others, literary talent, which is very eminently the first of all, because it excludes no other faculty, will always in this country be an obstacle to political success.

Of what use, indeed, is a high intelligence?

It serves no purpose whatever.

The block-heads of France, a special and wholly national type, grant nothing to the Grotiuses, the Frederics, the Bacons[123], the Thomas Mores[124], the Spensers[125], the Falklands[126], the Clarendons[127], the Bolingbrokes[128], the Burkes and the Cannings of France[129].

[Sidenote: Envy of the common herd.

] Never will our vanity recognise in a man even of genius aptitudes and the faculty of doing common things as well as they are done by a common mind.

If you overpass the vulgar conception by a hairbreadth, a thousand imbeciles exclaim, "You're losing yourself in the clouds," delighted as they feel at dwelling underneath, where they insist upon thinking.

Those poor envious people, by reason of their secret misery, kick against merit; they compassionately dismiss Virgil, Racine, Lamartine[130] to their verses.

But, proud sirs, to what are we to dismiss you?

To oblivion, which awaits you at twenty steps from your doors, while twenty verses of those poets will carry them to the furthermost posterity.