Memoirs of Chateaubriand Volume V — Book I Part 1

PARIS, _October_ 1830. Out of the turmoil of the Three Days, I am quite surprised to find myself opening the fourth part of this work amid a profound calm; it seems to me that I have doubled the Cape of Storms and penetrated into a region of peace and silence.

If I had died on the 7th of August of this year, the last words of my speech in the House of Peers would have been the last lines of my history; my catastrophe, being that of a past of twelve centuries, would have augmented my memory.

My drama would have ended magnificently.

But I did not fall under the blow, I was not struck to the ground.

Pierre de L'Estoile wrote this page of his Journal on the day following the assassination of Henry IV.

: "And here I end with the life of my King the second register of my melancholic pastimes and my vain and curious researches, both public and private, interrupted often since the past month by the watches of the sad and irksome nights which I have suffered, similarly this last, for the death of my King.

"I had proposed to close my ephemerides with this register; but so many new and curious occurrences have presented themselves through this signal mutation, that I pass to another which also will go before God pleases: and I doubt 'twill not be very long."

L'Estoile saw the death of the first Bourbon; I have just seen the fall of the last: ought I not to "close here the register of my melancholic pastimes and of my vain and curious researches?"

Perhaps; "but so many new and curious researches have presented themselves through this signal mutation, that I pass to another register."

Like L'Estoile, I lament the adversities of the Dynasty of St. Louis;

nevertheless, I am obliged to admit, there mingles with my sorrow a certain inward satisfaction: I reproach myself with it, but I cannot prevent it; this satisfaction is that of the slave delivered from his chains.

When I abandoned the career of a soldier and a traveller, I felt a certain sadness; now I feel joy, freed convict that I am of the galleys of the world and the Court Faithful to my principles and my oaths, I have betrayed neither liberty nor the King, I carry away neither wealth nor honours; I go as poor as I came.

Happy to end a career which was hateful to me, I lovingly return to repose.

Blessed be thou, O my native and dear independence, soul of my life!

Come, bring me my Memoirs, that _alter ego_ whose confidant, idol and muse you are.

The hours of leisure are fit for story-telling: a shipwrecked mariner, I shall continue to relate my shipwreck to the fishermen on shore.

Returning to my primitive instincts, I become a free man and a traveller once again; I end my course as I began it.

The closing circle of my days brings me back to the starting-point.

On the road which I once took as a careless conscript, I am going to travel as an experienced veteran, with my furlough in my shako, the stripes of time upon my arm, a knapsack full of years upon my back.

Who knows?

Perhaps I shall, stage by stage, recover the reveries of my youth.

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shall call many dreams to my help, to defend me against that horde of truths which are begotten in old days even as dragons hide themselves in ruins.

It will depend but on myself to knot together again the two ends of my existence, to blend far-distant periods, to mingle illusions of different ages, since the Prince whom I met in exile on leaving my paternal home I now meet in banishment on my way to my last abode.

I rapidly wrote the little introduction to this part of my Memoirs in the month of October of last year[331]; but I was unable to continue this labour, because I had another on my hands: this was the work[332] which concluded the edition of my Complete Works.

From this work again I was diverted, first, by the trial of the ministers and, next, by the sack of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois.

[Sidenote: Trial of the ministers.

] The trial of the ministers[333] and the flurry in Paris made no great impression on me: after the trial of Louis XVI.

and the revolutionary insurrections, all is small in the matter of trials and insurrections.

The ministers, when coming from Vincennes to the Luxembourg and returning to Vincennes while sentence was being passed, went through the Rue d'Enfer: I could hear the wheels of their carriage from the back of my retreat.

How many events have passed before my door!

The defenders of those men did not rise to the level of their task.

None took a high enough view of the matter: the advocate predominated too greatly in the speeches.

If my friend the Prince de Polignac had chosen me for his second, with what an eye should I have looked upon those perjurers setting themselves up for judges of a perjurer!

"What!"

I should have said to them.

"It is you who dare to be my client's judges; it is you who, all sullied with your oaths, dare to impute it as a crime to him that he ruined his master when he thought he was serving him: you, the instigators; you who urged him to issue the Ordinances!

Change places with him whom you claim the right to judge: he who was accused becomes the accuser.

If we have deserved to be struck, it is not by you; if we are guilty, it is not towards you, but towards the people: they are waiting for us in the yard of your palace, and we shall take our heads to them."

After the trial of the ministers, came the scandal of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois[334].

The Royalists, full of excellent qualities, but sometimes stupid and often aggravating, never calculating the range of their measures, always thinking that they would restore the Legitimacy by affecting a colour in their cravats or a flower in their button-holes, occasioned deplorable scenes.

It was evident that the Revolutionary Party would profit by the service held in commemoration of the Duc de Berry to make a noise.

Now, the Legitimists were not strong enough to oppose this, and the Government was not settled enough to maintain order; and so the church was pillaged.

A Voltairean and progressive apothecary[335] triumphed fearlessly over a steeple of the year 1300 and a cross already overthrown by other Barbarians at the end of the ninth century.

Consequently upon the exploits of these enlightened pharmaceutics come the devastation of the Archbishop's Palace, the profanation of the sacred things, and the processions copied from those of Lyons.

The executioner and the victims were lacking; but there were plenty of buffoons, masks and diverse carnival delights.

The burlesque sacrilegious procession marched on one side of the Seine, while the National Guard, pretending to hasten in aid, defiled on the other.

The river separated order and anarchy.

It is stated that a man of talent was there as an onlooker and that he said, on seeing the chasubles and books floating on the Seine: "What a pity they did not throw the Archbishop in!"

A profound utterance, for indeed a drowned archbishop must be a pleasant sight; that makes liberty and enlightenment take so great a step forward!

We old witnesses of old deeds are obliged to tell you that you see here but pale and wretched copies.

You still possess the revolutionary instinct, but you no longer have its energy; you can be criminal only in imagination; you would like to do evil, but your heart lacks courage and your arm strength; you would like to see fresh massacres, but you would no longer set to work to commit them.

If you want the Revolution of July to be great and to remain great, do not let M. Cadet de Gassicourt be its real hero and "Mayeux" its ideal personage[336].

[Sidenote: My new pamphlet.

] PARIS, _end of March_ 1831. I was out of my reckoning when, after the Days of July were over, I thought that I was entering a region of peace.

The fall of the three Sovereigns had obliged me to explain myself in the House of Peers.

The proscription of those Kings forbade me to remain dumb.

On the other hand, Philip's newspapers were asking me why I refused to serve a revolution which consecrated the principles which I had defended and diffused.

I had needs to speak on behalf of the general truths and to explain my personal conduct.

An extract from a little pamphlet which will be forgotten, _De la Restauration et de la Monarchie élective_[337], will continue the thread of my narrative and that of the history of my times: "Despoiled of the present, possessing but an uncertain future beyond the tomb, I feel a need that my memory should not be injured by my silence.

I must not hold my peace touching a Restoration in which I have taken so much part, which is being daily outraged and which is at length being proscribed before my eyes....

In the middle-ages, at times of calamity, men used to take a religious and lock him in a tower, where he fasted on bread and water for the salvation of the world.

I am not unlike this twelfth-century monk: through the dormer-window of my expiatory jail, I have preached my last sermon to the passers-by..."

Here is the epitome of that sermon: "As I predicted in my last speech in the tribune of the Peers, the Monarchy of July is in an absolute condition of glory or of laws of exception; it lives by the press, and the press is killing it;

devoid of glory, it will be devoured by liberty; if it attack that liberty, it will perish.

It would be a fine thing if, after driving out three Kings with barricades, on behalf of the liberty of the press, we were to be seen erecting new barricades against that liberty!

And yet, what is to be done?

Will the redoubled action of the tribunals and the laws suffice to restrain the writers?

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new government is a child that can walk only in leading-strings.

Are we to put back the nation into swaddling-clothes?

Will that terrible nursling, which has sucked blood in the arms of victory at so many bivouacs, not burst its bandages?

There was but one old stock, deeply rooted in the past, which could have withstood with impunity the gales blowing from the liberty of the press.

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"To listen to the declamations of the moment, it seems that the exiles of Edinburgh are the poorest fellows living and that they are nowhere missed.

The present, to-day, lacks nothing but the past: a small thing!

As though the centuries did not make use of each other as pedestals, and as though the last comer could support itself in mid-air!...

It is useless for our vanity to take offense at memories, to erase the fleurs-de-lys, to proscribe names and persons: that family, the heir of a thousand years, has left an immense void by its withdrawal; one feels it everywhere.

Those individuals, so paltry in our eyes, have shaken Europe in their fall.

To however small a degree events produce their natural effects and bring about their rigorous consequences, Charles X. , in abdicating, will have made all those Gothic kings, the grand vassals of the past under the suzerainty of the Capets, abdicate with him.

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"We are marching towards a general revolution.

If the transformation which is being effected follows its inclination and meets with no obstacles, if popular reason continues its progressive development, if the education of the middle classes suffers no interruption, the nations will become levelled in a uniform liberty; if that transformation is stayed, the nations will become levelled in a uniform despotism.

This despotism will not last long, because of the advanced age of intelligence, but it will be harsh, and a long social dissolution will follow it.

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[Sidenote: Extracts from my pamphlet.

] "Preoccupied as I am with these ideas, it is clear why I was;

bound, as an individual, to remain true to what seemed to me; the best safeguard of the public liberties, the least perilous road by which to attain the complement of those liberties.

"It is not that I have the pretension to be a tearful preacher of sentimental politics, an eternal repeater of white plumes and commonplaces à la Henry IV.

Casting my eyes over the space that separates the tower of the Temple from the palace in Edinburgh, I should doubtless find as many calamities heaped up as there are centuries accumulated on a noble race.

A woman of sorrow, above all, has been loaded with the heaviest burden, as being the strongest; there is not a heart but breaks at the thought of her: her sufferings have risen so high that they have become one of the grandeurs of the Revolution.

But, when all is said and done, no one is obliged to be king: Providence sends particular afflictions to whom it pleases, always brief ones, because life is short;

and those afflictions are not counted in the general destinies of the peoples.

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"Even if the proposition which for ever banishes the deposed Family from French territory be a corollary of the deposition of that Family, that corollary carries no conviction for me....

I should in vain seek my place in the several categories of persons who have become attached to the actual order of things.

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"There are men who, after taking the oath to the Republic One and Indivisible, to the Directory of five persons, to the Consulate of three, to the Empire of one alone, to the First Restoration, to the Additional Act to the Constitutions of the Empire, to the Second Restoration, have something left to swear to Louis-Philippe: I am not so rich.

"There are men who flung their word on the Place de Grève, in July, like those Roman goat-herds who play at odd or even among ruins.

Those men...

treat as a fool and simpleton whosoever does not reduce politics to a question of private interests: I am a fool and a simpleton.

"There are timorous people who would have much preferred not to swear, but who saw themselves being butchered, together with their grand-parents, their grandchildren, and all the landlords, if they had not trembled out their oaths: this is a physical effect which I have not yet experienced; I shall wait for the infirmity and, if it comes to me, I shall consider.

"There!

are great lords of the Empire linked to their pensions by sacred and indissoluble bonds, whatever be the hand they fall from: a pension is in their eyes a sacrament; it stamps a character, like orders or marriage; no pensioned head can ever cease to be so: pensions being charged to the Treasury, they remain charged to the same Treasury.

As for me, I have the habit of divorce from Fortune: I am too old for her and abandon her, lest she should leave me.

"There are high barons of the Throne and the Altar who have not betrayed the Ordinances: no!

But the insufficiency of the means employed to carry out the Ordinances has excited their spleen: indignant to find shortcomings in despotism, they have gone to seek another antechamber.

It is impossible for me to share their indignation and their abode.

"There are men of conscience who are perjurers only to be perjurers; who, while yielding to force, are none the less for the right: they weep over that poor Charles X. , whom they first dragged to his ruin by their advice and then put to death by their oaths; but, if ever he or his House revive, they will be very thunder-bolts of legitimacy.

As for me, I have always been devoted to death, and I am the funeral procession of the Old Monarchy, like the poor man's dog.

"Lastly, there are trusty knights who have dispensations from honour and permits of disloyalty in their pocket: I have none.

"I was the man of the _possible_ Restoration, of the Restoration accompanied by every kind of liberty.

That Restoration took me for an enemy; it is ruined: I must undergo its fate.

Shall I go to attach the few years that remain to me to a new fortune, like the hems of dresses which women drag from court to court for all the world to tread upon?

At the head of the young generations, I should be suspect; following them, is not my place.

I am fully aware that none of my faculties has aged; I understand my century better than ever; I penetrate more boldly into the future than anybody; but necessity has pronounced its decree; to end his life opportunely is a necessary condition for the public man."

[Sidenote: The _Études historiques.

_] Lastly, the _Études historiques_[338] have just appeared; I will quote the Introduction, which is a real page of my Memoirs, and contains my history at the very moment at which I am writing: INTRODUCTION

"Remember, so as not to lose sight of the pace of the world, that at that time[339]...

there were citizens engaged, like myself, in ransacking the archives of the past amid the ruins of the present, in writing the annals of the old revolutions to the uproar of the new revolutions; they and I taking as our table, in the crumbling edifice, the stone that had fallen at our feet, while awaiting that which was to crush our heads" (_Études historiques_).

"I would not, for the sake of the days that remain for me to live, begin again the eighteen months that have just elapsed.

None will ever have an idea of the violence which I have done on myself; I have been forced to abstract my mind, for ten, twelve and fifteen hours a day, from what was passing around me, in order childishly to abandon myself to the composition of a work of which no one will read a line.

Who would peruse four stout volumes, when it is already so difficult to read the _feuilleton_ of a newspaper?

I

was writing ancient history, and modern history was knocking at my door; in vain I cried, 'Wait, I am coming to you:' it passed on, to the sound of the cannon, carrying with it three generations of kings.

"And how marvellously the times agree with the very nature of these _Études!

_ Men are overthrowing the Cross and persecuting the priests, and the Cross and the priests occur on every page of my narrative; they are banishing the Capets, and I am publishing a history in which the Capets occupy eight centuries.

The longest and the last work of my life, that which has cost me most research, care and years, that in which I have perhaps stirred up most ideas and facts, appears at a time when it can find no readers; it is as though I flung it into a pit, where it will sink down under the mass of the rubbish that will follow it.

When a society is being composed and decomposed, when the existence of each and all is at stake, when one is not sure of a future of an hour's duration, who cares what his neighbour does, says, or thinks?

Men have something else to trouble their heads about than Nero, Constantine, Julian, the Apostles, the Martyrs, the Fathers of the Church, the Goths, the Huns, the Vandals, the Franks, Clovis, Charlemagne, Hugh Capet and Henry IV.

; they have something else to think of than the shipwreck of the old world at a time when we are all involved in the shipwreck of the new world!

Does it not argue a sort of dotage, a kind of feeble-mindedness, to busy one's self with literature at such a time?

That is true; but this dotage has nothing to do with my brain, it comes from the antecedents of my spiteful fortune.

If I had not made so many sacrifices to the liberties of my country, I should not have been obliged to contract engagements which are now being fulfilled under circumstances doubly deplorable to myself.

No author has ever been put to such a proof; thank God, it is nearly at an end: I have nothing left to do but to sit on ruins and despise that life which I scorned in my youth.

"After these very natural complaints, which have involuntarily escaped me, one thought comes to console me: I began my literary career with a work in which I considered Christianity in its poetic and moral aspects; I end it with a work in which I regard the same religion in its philosophical and historical aspects: I began my political career under the Restoration, I end it with the Restoration.

It is not without a secret satisfaction that I observe this consistency with myself."

PARIS, _May_ 1831. I have not abandoned the resolution which I conceived at the moment of the catastrophe of July.

I have been considering the ways and means of living abroad: difficult ways and means, because I have nothing; the purchaser of my works has all but made me a bankrupt, and my debts prevent me from finding anyone willing to lend me money.

[Sidenote: I leave for Geneva.

] Be this as it may, I shall go to Geneva[340] with the sum that has accrued to me from the sale of my last pamphlet[341].

I am leaving a procuration to sell the house in which I write this page for the sake of the order of dates.

If I find a customer for my bed, I can find another bed outside France.

In these uncertainties and movements, it will be impossible for me, until I am settled somewhere, to resume the sequence of my Memoirs at the place where I interrupted them[342].

I shall continue, therefore, to write down the things of the actual moment of my life; I shall communicate these things by means of the letters which I may happen to write on the road or during my different stoppages; I shall afterwards join the intermediary facts by a "journal" which will fill up the intervals between the dates of those letters.

[Sidenote: I leave for Geneva.

] TO MADAME RÉCAMIER[343]

"LYONS, _Wednesday_ 18 _May_ 1831. "Here I am, too far away from you.

I have never made so sad a journey: wonderful weather, nature all arrayed, the nightingale singing, a starry night; and all this for whom?

I shall indeed have to return to where you are, unless you be willing to come to my aid[344]."

TO MADAME RÉCAMIER

"LYONS, _Friday_ 20 _May.

_ "I spent the day, yesterday, in wandering beside the Rhone; I contemplated the town where you were born, the hill upon which rose the convent where you were chosen as the fairest: an expectation which you did not disappoint; and you are not here, and years have elapsed, and you have since been exiled to your birth-place, and Madame de Staël is no more, and I am leaving France!

One singular personage[345] belonging to those old days has appeared before me: I send you his note, because of its unexpectedness and its surprise.

This personage, whom I had never seen, is planting pines in the mountains of Lyonnais.

It is a long cry from there to the Rue Feydeau and the _Maison à vendre_: what different parts men play on earth!

"Hyacinthe has told me of the regrets and the newspaper articles: I am not worth all that You know that I sincerely think so for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four; the twenty-fourth is dedicated to vanity, which, however, is of slight duration and soon passes.

I wanted to see nobody here; M. Thiers, who was on his way to the South, forced my door."

NOTE ENCLOSED IN THE ABOVE LETTER

"A neighbour, your fellow-countryman, who has no other claim upon you than a profound admiration for your glorious talent and your admirable character, would like to have the honour of seeing you and offering you the homage of his respect.

This next-door neighbour at your hotel, this fellow-countryman is called "ELLEVIOU."

TO MADAME RÉCAMIER

"LYONS, _Sunday_ 22 _May.

_ "We leave to-morrow for Geneva, when I shall find more memories of you.

Shall I ever see France again, after I have once crossed the frontier?

Yes, if you will, that is to say, if you remain there.

I do not wish for the events which might offer me another chance of returning; I shall never allow the misfortunes of my country to enter among the number of my hopes.

I shall write to you on Tuesday, the 24th, from Geneva.

When shall I again see your little hand-writing, the younger sister of mine[346]?"

[Sidenote: Letters to Madame Récamier.

] "GENEVA, _Tuesday_ 24 _May.

_ "We arrived here yesterday and are looking at houses.

We shall probably make shift with a little summer-house on the edge of the lake.

I cannot tell you how sad I feel as I busy myself with these arrangements.

Again another future!

Again to begin anew a life which I thought I had ended!

I mean to write you a long letter when I am a little at rest: I dread that rest, for then I shall be contemplating without distraction those dim years upon which I am entering with a heart so much oppressed."

9 _June_ 1831. "You know that a 'reformed' sect has been established in the midst of the Protestants.

One of the new pastors of the new church has been to see me and has written me two letters worthy of the first Apostles.

He wants to convert me to his faith, and I want to turn him into a 'Papist.'

We argue as though living in Calvin's[347] day, but loving each other in Christian brotherhood and without burning one another.

I do not despair of his salvation; he is quite shaken by my arguments in favour of the Popes.

You cannot conceive the pitch of exaltation to which he has risen, and his candour is admirable.

If you come to me, accompanied by my old friend Ballanche, we shall do wonders.

In one of the Geneva newspapers, a Protestant controversial book is advertised, and the authors are urged to 'stand firm' because 'the author of the _Génie du Christianisme_ is close at hand.'

"There is a certain consolation in finding a little free people, administered by the most distinguished men, among which religious ideas form the basis of liberty and the chief occupation of life.

"I lunched at M. de Constant's[348], beside Madame Necker[349], who is unfortunately deaf, but a woman of rare qualities and the greatest distinction: we spoke only of yourself.

I had received your letter and I told M. de Sismondi the amiable things you had said for his benefit.

You see I am taking your lessons.

"Lastly, here are some verses.

You are my 'star' and I am waiting for you to go to that enchanted island.

"Delphine[350] married: O Muses!

I have told you in my last letter why I could write neither on the peerage nor on the war: I should be attacking a contemptible body to which I have belonged and preaching honour to those who no longer possess it.

"It needs a sailor to read the verses and understand them.

I put myself in M. Lenormant's hands.

Your intelligence will suffice for the last three stanzas, and the key to the riddle is at the foot[351]."

"GENEVA, 18 _June_ 1831. "You have received all my letters.

I am constantly expecting a few words from you; I can see that there will be nothing for me, but still I am always surprised when the post brings me only newspapers.

Not a soul writes to me, except yourself; not a soul remembers me, except yourself, and that is a great charm.

I love your solitary letter, which does not arrive as it used to arrive in the days of my magnificence, in the midst of packets of dispatches and of all those letters of attachment, admiration and meanness which vanish with fortune.

After your little letters, I shall see your fair self, if I do not go to join you.

You shall be my testamentary executrix; you shall sell my poor retreat; the price will enable you to travel towards the sun.

At this moment, the weather is admirable: as I write to you I can see Mont Blanc in its splendour; from the top of Mont Blanc one sees the Apennines: it seems to me as though I have but three steps to take to arrive in Rome, where we shall go, for all will get settled in France.

"Our glorious country lacked but one thing in order to have passed through every form of wretchedness: to have a government of cowards; she has it now, and her youth is about to be swallowed up in doctrine, literature and debauch, according to the particular character of the individual.

The chapter of accidents remains;

but, when a man drags along life's road, as I do, the most likely accident is the end of the journey.

"I do no work, I can do nothing more: I am bored; it is my nature, and I am like a fish in water: nevertheless, if the water were a little less deep, perhaps I should be better pleased in it" [Sidenote: Geneva.

] JOURNAL FROM THE 12TH OF JULY TO THE 1ST OF SEPTEMBER 1831

THE PÂQUIS, NEAR GENEVA.

I am settled at the Pâquis[352] with Madame de Chateaubriand; I have made the acquaintance of M. Rigaud, Chief Syndic of Geneva: above his house, by the edge of the lake, going up the Lausanne Road, you find the villa of two clerks of M. de Lapanouze[353], who have spent 1,500,000 francs in building it and laying out their gardens.

When I pass on foot before their dwelling-house, I wonder at Providence, which has placed witnesses of the Restoration at Geneva in them and in me.

What a fool I am!

What a fool!

The Sieur de Lapanouze went through royalism and misery with me: see to what his clerks have risen for having favoured the Conversion of the Funds, which I had the simplicity to oppose and by virtue of which I was turned out Here are the gentlemen: they drive up in an elegant tilbury, hat on ear, and I am obliged to step into a ditch lest the wheel should carry off a skirt of my old frock-coat.

And yet I have been a peer of France, a minister, an ambassador, and in a cardboard box I have all the principal Orders of Christendom, including the Holy Ghost and the Golden Fleece.

If the clerks of the Sieur César de Lapanouze, now millionaires, cared to buy my box of ribbons for their wives, they would do me a lively pleasure.

Nevertheless all is not roses for the Messieurs B---: they are not yet Genevese nobles, that is to say, they have not yet reached the second generation; their mother still lives in the lower part of the town and has not risen to the Saint-Pierre quarter, the Faubourg Saint-Germain of Geneva; but, with God's help, nobility will follow on money.

It was in 1805 that I saw Geneva for the first time.

If two thousand years had elapsed between the dates of my two journeys, would they be further separated from each other than they are?

Geneva belonged to France; Bonaparte was shining in all his glory, Madame de Staël in all hers; there was no more question of the Bourbons than if they had never existed.

And Bonaparte, and Madame de Staël, and the Bourbons: what has become of them?

And I, I am still there!

M.

de Constant, a cousin of Benjamin Constant, and Mademoiselle de Constant, an old maid full of wit, virtue and talent, live in their cottage of "Souterre" on the bank of the Rhone; they are overlooked by another country-house, which was formerly M. de Constant's: he sold it to the Princesse Belgiojoso[354], a Milanese exile, whom I saw pass like a flower through the fête which I gave in Rome for the Grand-duchess Helen.

During my boating excursions, an old oarsman tells me of the deeds of Lord Byron, whose house we see standing on the Savoyard side of the lake.

The noble peer would wait for a tempest to rise before setting sail; from the deck of his felucca, he leapt into the waves and swam in the midst of the gale to land at the feudal prisons of Bonivard: he was always the actor and the poet.

I am not so eccentric: I also love the storms; but my loves with them are secret, and I do not confide them to the boatmen.

I have discovered, behind Ferney[355], a narrow valley, in which runs a tiny stream some seven or eight inches deep; this rivulet waters the roots of a few willows, hides itself here and there under patches of water-cress and shakes rushes on whose tips perch blue-winged dragon-flies.

Did the man of trumpets ever see this refuge of silence right up against his resounding house?

No, without a doubt: well, the water is there; it still flows; I do not know its name; perhaps it has none: Voltaire's days are spent; only his fame still makes a little noise in a little corner of our little world, even as that streamlet can be heard at a dozen paces from its banks.

Men differ from one another: I am charmed with this deserted water-furrow; within sight of the Alps, the palm-leaf of a fern which I gather delights me; the murmuring of a ripple over pebbles makes me quite happy; an imperceptible insect, seen only by myself, which plunges into the moss, as into a vast solitude, occupies my gaze and makes me dream.

These are intimate trifles, unknown to the fine genius who, disguised as Orosmane[356], played his tragedies, wrote to the princes of the earth and forced Europe to come to admire him in the hamlet of Ferney.

But were not those trifles too?

The transitions of the world are not equal to the passing of those waters; and, as for kings, I prefer my ant.

[Sidenote: Memoires of Voltaire.

] One thing always astonishes me, when I think of Voltaire: although gifted with a superior, rational, enlightened mind, he remained completely foreign to Christianity; he never saw what every one sees: that the institution of the Gospel, to consider only the human aspect of it, is the greatest revolution that ever took place on earth.

It is true to say that, in the age of Voltaire, this idea had come into the head of nobody.

The theologians defended Christianity as an accomplished fact, as a verity based upon laws emanating from spiritual and temporal authority; the philosophers attacked it as an abuse springing from priests and kings: they went no further.

I have no doubt that, if one could suddenly have presented the other side of the question to Voltaire, his quick and lucid intelligence would have been struck with it: one blushes to think of the mean and limited manner in which he treated a subject which embraces nothing less than the transformation of peoples, the introduction of morality, a new principle of society, another law of nations, another order of ideas, the total change of humanity.

Unfortunately, the great writer who ruins himself in spreading baleful ideas drags many minds of lesser capacity with him in his fall: he is like those old Eastern despots on whose tombs men immolated slaves.

There, to Ferney, which no one visits now, to that Ferney around which I come to roam alone, how many celebrated personages at one time hastened!

They sleep, gathered together for all time at the bottom of Voltaire's letters, their hypogæan Temple: the breath of one century grows weaker by degrees and dies away in the eternal silence, as one begins to hear the respiration of a new century.