CHAPTER Ia

ROME, JUNE 20, 1832.

TO WHILE AWAY MY LEISURE HOURS IN THIS FOREIGN LAND, I have thought of writing a short memoir of my experiences during my last sojourn in Paris, from June 21, 1821, to November . . . , 1830, a period of nine and a half years. For two months, ever since the novelty of my position here has worn off, I have been prodding myself to undertake some project or other. Without work, the vessel of life has no ballast.

I confess that I should lack the courage to write if not for the belief that some day these pages would appear in print and would be read by someone I admired, such as Mme. Roland or M. Gros, the mathematician.¹

Did I make the most of my chances for happiness during the nine years I have just spent in Paris? What kind of man am I? Am I a man of good sense? A man of good sense with some depth?

Have I a remarkable mind? To tell the truth, I do not know. Moreover I rarely ponder over these basic questions because I live for the moment, and besides my judgments vary with my moods. My judgments are no more than fleeting impressions.

As I begin this self-examination, pen in hand, let us see whether I shall arrive at something positive, something that will remain true for a long time in my own eyes. How shall I react to what I am writing about now when rereading it, say, in 1835, if I live till then? Will it be the same as in the case of my printed works? A deep feeling of melancholy comes over me whenever, for want of other books, I read my own again.

For the last month, since I have given the subject some thought, I have felt a genuine reluctance to write only in order to talk about myself, or of the number of my shirts, or of my wounded pride. On the other hand, I am far from France, and I have read all the amusing books that have reached this country. At heart I should have preferred to write a book of imagination, based on a love affair that took place in Dresden in August 1813, in the house next door to the one in which I was living, but the humdrum duties of my office break in upon me rather frequently; or, to put it better, when taking up my pen I can never be sure of an hour without interruptions. Petty annoyances of this sort discourage the imaginative faculty, and when I return to my tale, I find my earlier thoughts tasteless. To which a wise man will answer that one must master oneself. But I reply: It is too late, I am 49 years old. After so many adventures it is high time for me to think of ending my days in as unobjectionable a manner as possible.

My principal objection to writing the story of my life was not the vanity that it required. A book on such a subject is like any other; it is quickly forgotten if it is dull. But I dreaded spoiling the happy moments I had known by describing them, by dissecting them. Now that is precisely what I shall not do; I shall leave out happiness altogether.

The genius of poetry is dead, but the demon of suspicion is come into the world. I am firmly convinced that the only antidote for this, the only thing that might make the reader forget the eternal I of the author, is complete sincerity.

Shall I have the courage to tell of humiliating incidents without extenuating them by lengthy apologies? I hope so.

Although my ambitions have miscarried, I do not believe that men are evil, nor do I consider myself to have been persecuted by them. I regard them as automatons driven by vanity in France, and elsewhere by all the passions, vanity included.

I do not really know myself, after all, and it is this that sometimes saddens me in the middle of the night, when I brood over it. Am I good, bad, intelligent, stupid? Was I wise enough to take advantage of the opportunities presented to me by the absolute power of Napoleon (whom I always adored) in 1810, or by our downfall in 1814, or by our later efforts to pull ourselves out of the mire in 1830? I fear not; I acted according to my mood of the moment, in a haphazard way. If another man had asked my advice about a similar situation, I might have given him counsel of great value. Friends who were my intellectual rivals have often complimented me on this talent.

In 1814 Count Beugnot, then prefect of police, offered me the post of commissary of the city of Paris.²

I was in an admirable position to accept, since I had not solicited any office, and yet I answered in such a way as not to give him any encouragement. To M. Beugnot, a man with vanity enough for two Frenchmen, this must have come as a great shock. The man who took the post retired after four or five years, weary of making money hand over fist, which, it is said, he managed to do without stealing. The supreme contempt I felt for the Bourbons—whom I then considered foul scum—made me quit Paris a few days after turning down M. Beugnot’s obliging offer. My heart, torn by the triumph of all I despised and could not hate, was comforted only by the faint stirrings of love that I was beginning to feel for Countess Dulong, whom I saw every day at the home of M. Beugnot, and who ten years later was to play a great part in my life.³

At that time she singled me out, not as a likable man, but as a strange one. She looked on me as the friend of a woman who was extremely ugly but of a noble character, Countess Beugnot. I have always reproached myself for not having been in love with Mme. Beugnot. What a pleasure it would have been to exchange confidences with a woman of such comprehension!

For the last three pages I have felt that this preface is too long, but I must begin with a subject so sad and so painful to me that even now my spirits flag, and I am half-inclined to drop the pen. But at the first moment of solitude I should regret it.

I left Milan for Paris on the . . . of June, 1821, with a sum of 3,500 francs, as I remember, convinced that the only pleasure I could look forward to was to blow out my brains when that money was spent. After three years of intimacy, I was parting from a woman I adored, a woman who loved me in return, but had never given herself to me.

Even after the passage of so many years, I am still at a loss to unravel the motives for her conduct. She was in deep disgrace in Milan, although she had never had but one lover; this was how the women of good society there avenged themselves for her superior qualities. Poor Metilda never knew how to outwit or disconcert her enemies.⁴

Some day, perhaps when I am very old and desiccated, I may have the courage to write of the years 1818, 1819, 1820 and 1821.

In 1821 it was only with the greatest difficulty that I resisted the temptation to shoot myself. I used to draw the picture of a pistol in the margin of a paltry love-story I was scribbling at the time (it was when I was living in the Acerbi house). It seems to me that what prevented me from ending it all was my curiosity in political matters. Perhaps too, without my suspecting it, I had some fear of hurting myself.

At last I took leave of Metilda.

“When will you return?” she asked.

“Never, I hope.”

There followed a last hour of tergiversation and fruitless talk; a single word of hers might have changed the course of my life, but alas, not for very long. That angelic soul, contained in so fair a body, left this world in 1825.

At length, on the . . . of June, I departed, in what state of mind can well be imagined. I journeyed from Milan to Como, at every step fearing, nay believing, that I would be obliged to turn back.

I felt that I could not remain in Milan without dying, and yet I could not leave it without feeling my heart torn from me. It seemed as if I were leaving my life behind me, but what am I saying? what was life compared to her? I expired with every step I took that led away from her. Like Shelley, I breathed only in sighs.⁵

I was in a sort of stupor, conversing with the postilions and giving sober answers to their comments on the price of wine, weighing all the factors that might make it go up or down a penny. What was most fearful for me was to look into my own mind. The road led through Airolo, Bellinzona, Lugano (these names make me shudder even today—June 20, 1832).

When I reached Saint-Gothard, then an abominable place (similar to the Cumberland Mountains in the north of England, except that there were precipices here) I insisted on riding through the pass on horseback, with some little hope that I might fall and be flayed alive, by way of distraction. Although I was once a cavalry officer, and have spent my life falling from horses, in reality I am terribly afraid of having my mount slip on loose stones and crush me beneath his hooves.

The courier who accompanied me at last stopped me and said that he was not greatly concerned for my life, but that if I were killed it would reduce his profit, as no one would ever want to come with him over the mountains when it became known that one of his travelers had fallen into the abyss.

“What! Haven’t you guessed that I have the pox?” I said. “I am unable to go on foot.”

At last we reached Altdorf, the courier cursing his lot all the way. I gazed at everything about me as if in a trance. I am a great admirer of William Tell, although according to the official version in all countries, no such man ever existed. At Altdorf, as I remember, I was much moved on seeing a bad statue of William Tell in a stone smock, all the more touching for the very reason that it was so bad.

There now, I said to myself, lapsing into a mood of gentle melancholy that for the first time supplanted my hopeless grief, there one sees what becomes of the most beautiful things in the eyes of vulgar people. Such art thou, Metilda, in Mme. Traversi’s drawing-room!⁶

The sight of this statue softened me a little. I inquired about the location of Tell’s chapel.

“You will see it tomorrow,” I was told.

But the next day I set off on my travels again in very bad company, that of some Swiss officers attached to the guard of Louis XVIII, who were returning to Paris.^b

I have never cared for France, particularly the region around Paris, which proves that I am a bad Frenchman and a wicked man, as Mlle. Sophie . . . the stepdaughter of M. Cuvier, told me later.⁷

I was therefore in extremely low spirits as I traveled from Basle to Belfort, leaving the high if not beautiful mountains of Switzerland for the flat and dreary Champagne country.

The women are ungainly, to be sure, in the village of . . . , where I saw them in their wooden shoes and coarse blue stockings. But later I was struck by the politeness, the affability and precision of their rustic speech.

Langres has the same situation as Volterra, a city I adored at that time because it had been the theatre of one of the most daring exploits in my war against Metilda.⁸

In Langres I was reminded of Diderot, who, as everyone knows, was the son of a cutler of that town. I thought of his Jacques le Fataliste, the only one of his works that I admire. I rate it much more highly than his Voyage d’Anacharsis, the Traité des études, and a hundred other books esteemed by the pedants.

The worst misfortune that could befall me, I exclaimed to myself, would be that my friends in Paris, those cold-blooded men amongst whom I was going to live, should learn of my passion for a woman I had not even possessed!

I said this to myself in June 1821, and I see now, in June 1832, for the first time, while writing these words, that this fear recurred again and again, and was in fact the dominant motive of my life for ten years. It was because of this that I came to have wit, something that I used to scorn utterly in Milan in 1818 when I was madly in love with Metilda.

I arrived in Paris, which I found worse than ugly, in fact insulting in my unhappy mood, with that one idea: not to be found out.

At the end of a week, seeing that political activity was at a standstill, I decided to profit by my suffering to t L 18.⁹

Thereupon I lived somehow for several months of which I can remember nothing. In order to obtain some word of Metilda indirectly, I overwhelmed my friends in Milan with letters, but those who disapproved of my folly never mentioned her name to me when they replied.

In Paris I took lodgings at No. 47 rue de Richelieu, in the Hotel de Bruxelles, kept by a M. Petit, former valet de chambre of one of the Damas brothers. The civility, the grace, the punctilio of M. Petit, his complete lack of sentimentality, his aversion to any display of excessive feeling, his keen recollection of the triumphs of vanity thirty years earlier, his scrupulous honesty in money matters, all made him in my eyes the perfect model of the Frenchman of the old regime. I hastened to entrust him with the 3,000 francs still left to me, and against my will he handed me a scrap of a receipt that I promptly lost. This circumstance annoyed him considerably several weeks or months later when I asked for my money back in order to go to England, driven there by the mortal loathing I felt for everything in Paris.

I have very few recollections of that time of storm. Objects slipped past me without catching my eye, or were disregarded even if they came within range of my vision. My thoughts were on the Piazza Belgiojoso in Milan. I must pull myself together now and try to remember the homes in Paris at which I used to call regularly.