London, April to September 1822
THOSE who read this part of my Memoirs will not notice that I have interrupted them twice: once, to give a grand dinner for the Duke of York, the King of England’s brother, and once again to give a banquet celebrating the anniversary of the King of France’s return to Paris on July 8, 1822. This banquet cost me forty thousand francs. Peers and peeresses of the British Empire, ambassadors, and distinguished foreigners filled my magnificently decorated rooms. My tables glittered with London crystal and the gold of Sèvres porcelain. The most delectable dishes, wines, and flowers were laid out in abundance. Portland Place was packed with brilliant carriages. Collinet and Almack’s orchestra charmed the fashionably melancholy dandies and the dreamily elegant ladies dancing pensively across my floors. The Opposition and the Ministerial majority declared a truce: Lady Canning chatted with Lord Londonderry, and Lady Jersey laughed with the Duke of Wellington. Monsieur, who lavished me with compliments for my sumptuous hospitality in 1822, was unaware that, in 1793, a future minister subsisted not far from him, awaiting his future grandeur, fasting for the sin of his fidelity in a room above a graveyard. I congratulate myself today for having been shipwrecked, having had a glimpse of war, and having shared in the suffering of the humblest class of society, even as I am pleased, in my days of prosperity, to have encountered injustice and slander. I have made the most of these lessons. Life, without the misfortunes that give it weight, is nothing but a baby’s rattle.
•
I was the man with one hundred and twenty louis d’or, but equality of wealth had not yet been established, and commodities were not less expensive. There was nothing to counterbalance my rapidly emptying purse. I could not count on further assistance from my family in Brittany, exposed as they were to the double scourge of the Chouannerie and the Terror, and I saw nothing before me except the poorhouse or the Thames.
Some of the émigrés’ servants, whom their masters could no longer feed, had transformed themselves into restaurateurs in order to feed their masters. God knows what merriment was made at those tables! And God knows what politics were heard there! All the victories of the Republic were changed into defeats, and if by chance someone doubted an immediate restoration he was declared a Jacobin. Two old bishops, who looked like animate corpses, were out walking one spring morning in Saint James Park.
“Monseigneur,” said the one, “do you think we shall be in France in the month of June?”
“But, Monseigneur,” replied the other, after ripe reflection, “I don’t see why not!”
Pelletier, the man of resources, came to disinter me, or rather to pluck me down from my eyrie. He had read in a Yarmouth paper that an antiquarian society was about to undertake a history of Suffolk: they were advertising for a Frenchman capable of deciphering some twelfth-century French manuscripts in the Camden collection. The parson of Beccles was in charge of this historical enterprise, and it was he to whom I needed to apply.
“This is perfect for you,” Pelletier told me. “Go, decipher some old papers! You can keep on sending copy to Baylis, and I shall force the coward to start printing it again. Then you’ll come back to London with two hundred guineas and your work finished—and let the chips fall where they may!”
I started to stammer my objections.
“Ah, go to the devil, why don’t you?” said Pelletier. “Do you count on staying here in this palace where I’ve already frozen half to death? If Rivarol, Champcenetz, Mirabeau-Tonneau, and I had been such simpering simpletons, we’d have made fine work of the Actes des Apôtres! Do you know that this story about you and Hingant made a hell of a racket? You would have liked to let yourselves die of hunger? Ha! Ha! Ha! Poof! . . . Ha! Ha! . . .”
Pelletier was doubled over and holding onto his knees, he was laughing so hard. He had recently sold a hundred copies of his paper in the colonies, and the guineas he had received in payment jingled in his pocket. He carried me away by force, together with the apoplectic La Bouëtardais and two other ragged émigrés we happened across, to dine at the London Tavern. He made us drink port wine and eat roast beef and plum pudding until we were fit to burst.
“Tell me, Monsieur le Comte,” Pelletier said to my cousin, “how did your muzzle get so twisted?”
La Bouëtardais, half shocked and half flattered, explained the thing as best he could. He told him how he had been stricken suddenly while singing the words: O bella Venere! My poor paralyzed cousin burbled these words in such a dead, numb, exhausted tone that Pelletier, overcome by a fit of deranged laughter, overturned the table by kicking it from below with both feet.
On reflection, the advice of my countryman (truly a character out of my other countryman Le Sage) did not seem so bad. Over the next three days I made inquiries, had myself clothed by Pelletier’s tailor, and left for Beccles with some money Deboffe lent me on the assurance that I would soon resume the Essai. I changed my name, which no Englishman could pronounce, to Combourg, which my brother had already adopted and which brought to mind both the pains and pleasures of my earliest youth. Alighting at an inn, I presented the village parson with a letter from Deboffe, who was highly regarded in the English book trade: the letter recommended me as a scholar of the first order. Made perfectly welcome, I was introduced to all the gentlemen of the county, and met two officers from our Royal Navy who were giving French lessons in the region.