London, April to September 1822
PELLETIER, the author of Domine salvum fac Regem and chief editor of the Actes des Apôtres, continued in London the enterprise he had started in Paris. He was not exactly a vicious man; but he was gnawed at by a verminous horde of little defects of which he could not be cleansed. He was a libertine and a rogue, who made a great deal of money and then ate it all up; he was at the same time a slave to the Legitimacy and an ambassador of the Negro King Christophe to George III, a diplomatic correspondent of the Comte de Limonade and a man who drank in champagne whatever was paid to him in sugar. This specious M. Violet, playing the grand airs of the Revolution on a pocket fiddle, came to me as a Breton, offering his services. I mentioned my plan for the Essai to him, and he loudly approved. “This shall be superb!” he cried, and immediately proposed that I take a room with his printer, Baylis, who would put the work to press piece by piece as I composed it. Deboffe’s bookshop would manage its sale, and he, Pelletier, would blow its horn in his paper, l’Ambigu; it might also be introduced to the Courrier de Londres, whose editorship was about to pass to M. de Montlosier. Pelletier was not a man for doubts: he used to talk about having me given the Cross of St. Louis for my part in the Siege of Thionville. My Gil Blas: tall, thin, rambunctious, with his powdered hair and balding brow, forever shouting and guffawing, he pulled his round hat over one ear, took me by the arm, and led me to Baylis the printer, who rented me a room above his shop without any fuss, for the price of one guinea a month.
I could see my golden future; but by what plank was I to cross the present abyss? Pelletier procured me some work translating Latin and English. I labored by day over these translations, and by night I turned to the Essai historique, into which I inscribed a part of my travels and my dreams. Baylis furnished me with books, and I squandered a few shillings buying others on display in the shops.
Hingant, whom I had met on the packet boat from Jersey, became my close friend in London. He was devoted to literature; he was well read, and secretly wrote novels from whose pages he read aloud to me. His rooms were not far from Baylis’s print shop, at the bottom of a street that gave onto Holborn. Every morning at ten o’clock I breakfasted with him; we talked of politics and above all of my work. I told him how much I had built of my nocturnal edifice, the Essai, and then I returned to my daytime toil of translation. We met again for dinner, in a tavern where the meal cost a shilling a head; from there, we often went to walk together in the fields. Just as often, though, we would go it alone, for we both loved to lose ourselves in dreams.
On these evenings, I would wend my way toward Kensington or Westminster. Kensington pleased me: I could wander in the empty part of the garden even while the part bordering Hyde Park teemed with the glittering crowd. The contrast between my poverty and their wealth, my isolation and their multitude, was agreeable to me. I would gaze at the young English girls going by in the distance with the same desirous confusion that I had in former times felt for my sylph, after I had dressed her to suit my follies and hardly dared raise my eyes to my work. Death, which I believed I was fast approaching, added mystery to this vision of the world I was about to abandon. Did anyone ever cast a glance at the foreigner sitting at the foot of a pine? Did some beautiful woman divine the invisible presence of René?
In Westminster, I had another pastime. In its labyrinth of tombs, I thought of mine ready to be opened. The bust of an unknown man like me would never take its place among all those illustrious effigies! I meditated on the sepulchers of the monarchs: Cromwell was no longer there, and Charles I was not there either. Yet the ashes of a traitor, Robert d’Artois, rested below the flagstones that I trod with my loyal feet. In those days, the fate of Charles I had only recently been extended to Louis XVI, and every day the iron blade was reaping its harvest in France, where my family’s graves had already been dug.
The songs of the chapel-masters and the chatter of strangers disrupted my solitary reflections. I could not multiply my visits, for I was obliged to give the guardians of those who were no longer living the shilling that I needed to survive. At times, I would take my turns outside the abbey with the crows, or I would pause to contemplate the towers, those twins of unequal size, which the fires of the setting sun streaked blood red against the black backdrop of the city’s smoke.
One evening, however, it happened that, wishing to see the interior of the basilica in the fading light, I forgot myself in marveling at its spirited and whimsical architecture. Overcome by a feeling for the “somber immensity of Christian churches” (Montaigne),[11] I wandered around by slow steps and was benighted. When I went to leave, I discovered the doors were locked. I looked for an exit; I called for the usher and rattled the gates; but all this noise, spreading and thinning into silence, was wasted. I had to resign myself to lying down with the dead.
After hesitating a few minutes over the choice of my burrow, I paused beside the tomb of Lord Chatham, at the base of the rood-loft and the double staircase to the Chapel of the Knights and Henry VII. At the foot of these stairs leading up to those aisles enclosed by railings, a sarcophagus, built into the wall opposite a marble figure of Death armed with her scythe, offered me shelter. The fold of a winding-sheet, likewise made of marble, served me for a nook. Following the example of Charles V, I reconciled myself to my interment.
Now I found myself in the ideal position to see the world as it is. What a heap of grandeur is shut up beneath those domes! And what remains of it? Sufferings are no less vain than joys. What is the difference between the unfortunate Jane Grey and the fortunate Alys of Salisbury? Lady Jane’s skeleton is the less horrible because it is headless; her carcass was beautified by her execution and by the deprivation of that which gave her beauty. The tournaments of the victor of Crécy and the games of Henry VIII on the Field of the Golden Cloth shall never be renewed in this theater of funereal pomp. Bacon, Newton, and Milton are as deeply buried and as fully passed as the most obscure of their contemporaries. Would I, an exile, a vagabond, a pauper, have traded being the sad little forgotten thing I was for the glory of being one of those famous dead men, powerful and sated with pleasures? Oh, but there is more to life than that! If, from the shores of this world, we do not discern divine things clearly, we should not be surprised. Time is a veil between ourselves and God, as our eyelids are a veil between our pupils and the light.
Hidden beneath my marble sheet, my mind redescended from these lofty thoughts to the simple impressions of time and place. My disquiet, mixed with rapture, recalled what I felt in my turret at Combourg when I listened to the howling of winter winds. A gust of air and a shadow are of the same nature.
Little by little, my eyes adjusting to the dark, I distinguished the figures on the tombs. Inside that Cathédral St. Denis of England I studied the corbels, from which one might have said that past events and vanished years hung down like Gothic lamps. The entire edifice was like a monolithic temple of petrified centuries.
I had counted ten hours, then eleven by the clock. The hammer that rose and fell upon the old bronze was the only thing living, besides me, in those regions. Outside, a carriage happened past, a watchman cried; and that was all. The distant noises of the earth reached me as if in a world within a world. Fog from the Thames and smoke from the coal-fires infiltrated the church and spread through it like a second darkness.
At last, a pane of twilight appeared in a corner of the deepest shadow, and I watched the quickening progress of the morning light transfixed, as though it emanated from Edward IV’s sons, murdered by their uncle. “Thus lay the gentle babes,” the great tragedian writes,
girdling one another
Within their alabaster innocent arms:
Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,
Which in their summer beauty kiss’d each other.[12]
God did not send me these sad and charming souls; but the slender phantom of a barely adolescent girl appeared, carrying a candle sheathed in a sheet of paper which had been folded into the shape of a shell: the little one had come to ring the bells. I heard the sound of a kiss, and the clocks rang out the break of day. The bell-ringer was quite terrified as I went out with her through the abbey door. I told her of my adventure, and she told me that she had come to fulfill the duties of her sick father. We did not speak of the kiss.