London, April to September 1822
I AMUSED Hingant with the story of my adventure, and we made plans to have ourselves shut up in Westminster Abbey together, but our poverty soon forced us to call on the dead in a less poetical fashion.
My funds were exhausted. Baylis and Deboffe had ventured, once they had received a note promising reimbursement in case of non-sale, to begin printing the Essai. Here, their generosity reached its end, as was only natural; indeed, I am still amazed by their daring. No more translations were forthcoming, for Pelletier, a man of pleasure, was bored by prolonged charity. He would gladly have given me what he had, if he had not preferred eating it up himself, but searching for work here and there, and patiently doing good deeds: such tasks could not hold his attention. Hingant, too, saw his savings shrinking day by day. Between the two of us, we soon possessed sixty francs. Like sailors on a voyage that had lasted longer than foreseen, we cut our rations. Instead of a shilling a head, we spent half a shilling on our dinners. In the mornings, with our tea, we halved the bread and eliminated butter. This abstinence frayed Hingant’s nerves. His mind began to wander. Out of nowhere he would prick up his ears as though listening to someone; then, in reply, he would burst into laughter or tears. Hingant believed in magnetism; he had clouded his brain with Swedenborg’s blather. Every morning, he would tell me about the noises that had stirred around him in the dark, and he would become furious whenever I dismissed his hallucinations. The anxiety he caused me kept me from dwelling on my own sufferings.
These sufferings were great, however. Our rigorous diet, combined with my work, aggravated the pain in my chest. I began to have difficulty walking, but still I went on spending my days and part of my nights outdoors, so that no one would suspect my destitution. One morning, down to our last shilling, Hingant and I agreed to keep the coin and merely make believe that we were breakfasting. We decided that we would buy a two-penny roll; we would have the hot water and the tea-kettle brought up as usual; but we would not eat any bread or take any tea: we would drink the hot water with some of the little crumbs of sugar stuck to the bottom of the sugar bowl.
Five days went by in this manner. I was devoured by hunger; my body was on fire; sleep had forsaken me. I sucked on pieces of linen that I had soaked in water, and I chewed on grass and paper. Whenever I passed a bakery, the torment was horrible. I remember one blustery winter evening I stood outside a shop that sold dried fruits and smoked meats, swallowing everything I saw with my eyes. At that moment, I would have eaten not only the food but also the boxes, the baskets, and the wooden bins.
On the morning of the fifth day, ready to collapse from inanition, I dragged myself to Hingant’s room. I knocked on the door and found it locked. I called for him, but Hingant was a long time responding. At last, he got up and opened the door. He had a demented smile on his face and his frock coat was buttoned to the throat. He went and sat down at the tea table. “Our breakfast is coming soon,” he said to me, in an extraordinary voice. I thought I saw blood stains on his shirt and brusquely unbuttoned his coat: he had stabbed himself with his pen knife, leaving a wound two inches deep in the lower part of his left breast. I called for help. The maid ran for a surgeon. The wound was dangerous.
This new misfortune forced me to take action. Hingant, who had been a councilor in the Parliament of Brittany, had been refusing to accept the payment which the English government accorded to former French magistrates, just as I had not wanted to accept the shilling a day doled out to every émigré in town. Now I wrote to M. de Barentin explaining my friend’s situation, and Hingant’s relations hastened to take him away to the country. At this same moment, my uncle de Bedée sent me one hundred and twenty livres d’or: a moving sacrifice from my persecuted family which seemed like all the gold of Peru to me. The donations of those prisoners of France helped keep the French in exile alive.
My poverty had by now become an obstacle to my work. As I was no longer providing manuscript, printing had been suspended. Deprived of Hingant’s company, I gave up my guinea-a-month lodging above Baylis’s shop, paid my rent to the expiry, and went away. Below the indigent émigrés who had been my first protectors in London, there were others even more in need. There are degrees of poverty as there are degrees of wealth. One can go from the man who survives the winter sleeping beside his dog to the man who shivers alone in torn rags. My friends found me a room more appropriate to my dwindling fortune (one is not always at the height of prosperity), and I was soon installed in the vicinity of Marylebone Street, in a garret with windows overlooking a graveyard. Every night, the watchman’s rattle told me that men had come to steal cadavers. At least I had the consolation of knowing that Hingant was out of danger.
My countrymen came to see me in my studio. Given our independence and our poverty, we might have been taken for painters seated on the ruins of Rome. In fact we were artists in misery seated on the ruins of France. My face served as a model and my bed as a seat for my pupils. This bed consisted of a mattress and a blanket. I had no sheets. My clothes and a chair, which I laid atop the blanket, kept me warm when nights were cold. Too weak to bother with my linens, they remained always as the Good Lord arranged them.
When my cousin La Bouëtardais was turned out from an Irish boarding house for failing to pay his rent, despite having pawned his violin, he came to me seeking shelter from the constable. Fortunately, a curate from Lower Brittany had loaned him a cot. Like Hingant, La Bouëtardais had been a councilor in the Parliament of Brittany, and like Hingant he did not have so much as a handkerchief to his name. But he had deserted with arms and baggage, which is to say that he had taken his black square cap and his red robe, and he slept beneath the purple at my side. He was a rascal, La Bouëtardais, and a good musician with a fine voice. On nights when neither of us could sleep, he would sit for hours completely naked on his cot, wearing his square cap and singing ballads while he strummed a guitar that was down to its last three strings. One night, as the poor man was singing Metastasio’s “Hymn to Venus,” Scendi propizia,[13] he was stricken by a draft, his mouth became twisted, and he died, but not right away, for I rubbed his cheeks with all my might. We held council in our high chamber, debated politics, and entertained ourselves with émigré gossip. In the evenings, we went to dance with our aunts and cousins, after the dresses had been trimmed with ribbons and the hats had been made.