London, from April to September 1822
THE DOCTOR could not get over his astonishment. He regarded my smallpox, which broke out and disappeared at intervals yet did not develop to its usual crises and kill me, as a phenomenon of which the annals of medicine furnished no examples. Gangrene had set into my wound, and it was dressed with quinine. As soon as I received these basic ministrations, I insisted on going to Ostend. Brussels was odious to me; I was ardent to leave it. It was filling up again with armchair heroes come back from Verdun in private calashes. I did not see these men in Brussels again when I returned there, with the King, during the Hundred Days.
I had an easy trip to Ostend on a canal-barge, aboard which I found a few Bretons, my companions in arms. We chartered a decked boat and careened down the Channel, sleeping in the hold, on boulders that served as ballast. My constitutional vigor was finally exhausted. I was no longer able to speak, and the swell of the rough seas was nearly the end of me. I could hardly swallow a few drops of lemon water, and when bad weather forced us to put in to Guernsey harbor, it seemed certain that I would die. An émigré priest read me the prayers for the dying. The captain, who did not want me breathing my last on his boat, ordered me carried down to the quay: I was set in the sunlight, with my back against a wall and my face turned toward the open sea, in sight of that island of Alderney where, eight months earlier, I had confronted death in another form.
I was apparently fated to arouse pity. The wife of an English pilot happened past. Moved by the sight of me, she called for her husband who, with the aid of two or three sailors, transported me to the house of a fisherman: I, who had always been a friend of the waves. They laid me on a good bed and draped me in cool white sheets. The young pilot’s wife took every possible care of her foreigner; I owe her my life. The next day, I was carried back aboard. My hostess almost wept when she was parted from her invalid. Women have a heavenly instinct to help the unfortunate. My lovely blond guardian looked as though she had stepped out of an old English engraving. When she pressed my swollen, burning hands between her long, cool fingers, I felt ashamed to be the cause of such hideousness brought so close to such beauty.
We set sail again and landed on the western point of Jersey. One of my companions, M. de Tilleul, went to Saint-Hélier to search out my uncle. The next morning, M. de Bedée sent him back in a carriage to fetch me. Together we rode across the entire island: deathly as I felt, I was charmed by its woodlands; but I could do nothing but rant and rave, having fallen deep into delirium.
For four months, I hovered between life and death. My uncle, his wife, his son, and his three daughters took turns sitting by my bed. I stayed in an apartment, in one of the houses that were then beginning to be built along the harbor. The windows of my bedroom went down to the floor, and beyond the foot of my bed I beheld the sea. My doctor, M. Delattre, had forbidden anyone to talk to me of serious things and especially of politics; but one day, late in January 1793, seeing my uncle enter my room dressed in mourning, I trembled, for I assumed we must have lost a member of the family. He told me of the death of Louis XVI. I was not surprised; I had foreseen it. I inquired if there was any news of my relatives and learned that my sisters and my wife had gone back to Brittany after the September Massacres, though they had a great deal of trouble leaving Paris. My brother, on his return to France, had taken refuge in Malesherbes.
I was beginning to leave my bed. The smallpox had gone; but my chest ached, and I would be weak and weary for a long time to come.
•
Jersey, the Caesarea of the Antonine Itinerary, has been subject to English dominion since the death of Robert, Duc de Normandie. Several times we have tried to take it back, but always without success. This island is a piece of wreckage from our ancient history. The saints who traveled from Hibernia and Albion to Armorica stopped over on Jersey. Saint Hélier, the hermit, lived among the rocks of Caesarea until the Vandals murdered him. And one discovers a sampling of the ancient Normans here: you can almost fancy that you are hearing the language of William the Bastard or the author of the Roman de Rou.
The island is fertile. It has two towns and twelve parishes, and it is covered over with country houses and herds of cattle and sheep. The ocean breezes, which on Jersey seem to belie their severity, give the island its exquisite honey, its extraordinarily sweet cream, and its dark yellow butter, which smells of violets. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre supposes that the apple tree came to us from Jersey, but in this he is deceived: we owe the apple and the pear to Greece, as we owe the peach to Persia, the lemon to Media, the plum to Syria, the cherry to Turkey, the chestnut to Castano, the quince to Crete, and the pomegranate to Cyprus.
I took great pleasure going out for walks in the first days of May. Spring preserves all its youthfulness on Jersey. There, it can still be called primavera, as in former times: a name that, having grown old, it has left to its daughter, the first flower in her crown.[7]
•
Here, I will transcribe for you two pages from my life of the Duc de Berry, for they tell you something of my own life also:
After twenty-two years of combat, the brazen barrier that enclosed France was broken; the hour of the Restoration was approaching, and our Princes left their retreats. Each of them made for a different point of the border, like travelers who, at the risk of their lives, seek to enter a country that is rumored to be rife with marvels. Monsieur left for Switzerland, the Duc d’Angoulême for Spain, and the Duc’s brother for Jersey. On this island, where some of Charles I’s judges died in obscurity, the Duc de Berry found French Royalists grown old in exile and as forgotten for their virtues as the English regicides had been for their crimes. He met with old priests, now dedicated to solitude, and at the sight of them realized the fiction of the poet who imagined a Bourbon landing on the island of Jersey, after a storm. One of these confessors and martyrs might have said to the heir of Henri IV, like the hermit of Jersey to the great king himself:
The Duc de Berry spent several months on Jersey; seas, winds, and policy kept him prisoner there. Everything thwarted his impatience, and he was on the point of renouncing his enterprise and setting sail for Bordeaux. A letter written by him to Madame la Maréchale Moreau gives a clear idea of his occupations on Jersey:
8 February, 1814
Here I am like Tantalus, in sight of ill-fated France, which has struggled so long to burst its chains. You whose soul is so lovely, so French, can imagine what my feelings are—how much it would cost me to distance myself from that shore which it would take me but two hours to reach! When the sun lights it, I climb the highest rocks and I scan the whole coast through my spyglass: I contemplate the rocks of Coutances. My imagination soars, I see myself leaping ashore, surrounded by Frenchmen wearing white cockades in their hats. I hear the cry of Long Live the King!—that cry which no Frenchman has ever heard with indifference. The most beautiful woman of the province throws a white scarf around my neck, for love and glory always go together. We march on Cherbourg, a wretched fort, which a garrison of foreigners vainly attempts to defend. We take it by storm, and a vessel puts out to fetch the King sporting a white flag that recalls the days of France’s glory and happiness! Ah, madame, when one is no more than a few hours from such a likely dream, how can one think of leaving it?
It was three years ago that I wrote these pages in Paris; I had landed on Jersey, the city of exile, twenty-two years before the Duc de Berry. I was to leave my name on the island: Armand de Chateaubriand was married there and his son Frédéric was born there.
•
The spirit of joy had not abandoned my uncle de Bedée’s family. My aunt still doted on a large dog (a descendant of one of those whose virtues I have already extolled); but, as he bit everyone and was often mangy, my cousins had him secretly hanged, despite his nobility. Madame de Bedée was persuaded that some English officers, charmed by the beauty of Azor, had stolen him, and that now he lived a life of honors and banquets in the richest castle of the three kingdoms. Alas! Our present laughter was prompted only by our past gaiety: by telling old stories from Monchoix, we found the means to laugh on Jersey. The case is unusual, for in the human heart pleasures do not preserve the same intimate relations that sorrows do; new joys do not renew the springtime feeling of old joys, though recent sorrows revive even those which are long past.
At least the émigrés then excited general sympathy. Our cause seemed to be the cause of European order; and a misfortune honored, as ours was, is a rare thing.
M. de Bouillon was the protector of the French refugees in Jersey. He dissuaded me from my plans to go to Brittany: I was in no state, he said, to endure a life lived in forests and caves. He advised me to go to England and look for an opportunity to enter the regular service. My uncle, who had very little money to his name, was beginning to feel ill at ease on account of his large family. He had already been forced to send one of his sons to London to survive on misery and hopes. Fearing that I was a burden on M. de Bedée, I made up my mind to relieve him of my presence.
Thirty louis d’or, delivered to me by a Saint-Malo smuggler, put me in a position to execute my plan, and I booked passage on a packet boat bound for Southampton. Saying goodbye to my uncle, I was deeply moved: he had cared for me as a father cares for his son; with him, I associated the few happy moments of my childhood; he knew everyone I loved. I rediscovered the close resemblance between his and my mother’s face: I had left behind this excellent mother, whom I would never see again; I had left behind my sister Julie and my brother, and I was condemned never to see them again either. Now I was leaving my uncle, whose openhearted countenance would never more gladden my eyes. A few months had been enough to bring about all these losses: for the death of our friends is not to be reckoned from the moment they die, but from the moment when we cease to live beside them.
If we could say to Time, “Hold on!” we would stop it in our hours of delight; but since we cannot, let us not tarry here below. Let us depart before we have seen all our friends disappear, together with those years which the poet says are uniquely worthy of life: Vita dignior aetas.[9] What is enchanting in the days of connection becomes an object of suffering and regret in these days of isolation. A man no longer wishes for the smiling months to return to earth; he dreads them. The birds, the flowers, the beautiful evenings at the end of April, the beautiful nights that begin with the dusk’s first nightingale and end with the dawn’s first swallow, these things that make you need and crave happiness—you snuff them out. You still feel their charm, but they are no longer for you. Youth tastes them at your side and you gaze at her disdainfully; you feel jealous, and are made better to understand the depths of your desolation. The freshening grace of nature, which reminds you of your past joys, makes your miseries uglier. You are nothing but a stain upon the earth. You spoil nature’s harmony and sweetness with your presence, your words, and even with the feelings that you dare express. You may love, but you can no longer be loved. The vernal spring has renewed its waters without giving you back your youth, and the sight of everything that has been reborn, everything that is blessed, reduces you to the painful memory of your pleasures.
The packet boat on which I embarked for England was crowded with émigré families. On board I made the acquaintance of M. Hingant, a former colleague of my brother’s in the High Court of Brittany, a man of taste and intelligence of whom I shall soon have much to say. In the captain’s cabin I caught sight of a naval officer at a game of chess: I was so altered in appearance that he did not recognize me, but I recognized Gesril straightaway. We had not seen each other since my days in Brest, and we would take our leave again in Southampton. But as we crossed the waters, I told him of my travels and he told me of his. This young man, born so near to me among the waves, would embrace his first friend for the last time among those waves that would soon bear witness to his glorious death. Lamba Doria, the Genoese admiral, having outmaneuvered the Venetian fleet, learned that his son had been killed in battle: “Let him be thrown into the sea,” said this father, like an ancient Roman. It was as though he had said: “Let him be thrown into victory.” Gesril was willing to leave the waves into which he had hurled himself only the better to show them his “victory” on their shore.
At the beginning of the sixth book of these Memoirs, I have already given the certificate of my disembarkation in Southampton. There I landed in 1793, after my excursions through the forests of America and the camps of Germany, a poor émigré, alone in the same country where, in 1822, I am writing all this, and where today I am the magnificent ambassador.