London, April to September 1822
I WAS BEGINNING to regain my strength. The rides that I took on horseback restored me a degree of health. The landscape of England, seen thus in detail, was melancholy, but charming; every place I went, it was the same thing and the same view. M. de Combourg was invited to every gathering. I owed the softening of my hard lot at this time to study: Cicero was right to recommend the camaraderie of letters as a balm for the sorrows of life. All the women were delighted to meet a Frenchman with whom to speak French.
My family’s misfortunes, which I learned from the newspapers, and which revealed my true name (for I could not hide my grief), made me all the more sympathetic to my neighbors. The public pages announced the death of M. de Malesherbes; the death of his daughter, Madame de Rosambo; the death of his granddaughter, Madame la Comtesse de Chateaubriand; and the death of his grandson-in-law, the Comte de Chateaubriand, my brother, all massacred together, on the same day, in the same hour, on the same scaffold. M. de Malesherbes was an object of admiration and veneration among the English, and my family connection with this defender of Louis XVI redoubled the benevolence of my hosts.
At this same time, my uncle de Bedée wrote to tell me of the persecutions experienced by the rest of my family. My aged and incomparable mother had been thrown in a cart with other victims of the Terror and taken from the heart of Brittany to the jails of Paris, where she was sentenced to share the fate of the son whom she had loved so well. My wife and my sister Lucile were in the dungeons of Rennes awaiting sentence; there had been some talk of imprisoning them in the Château de Combourg, which had become a fortress of the State. Despite their innocence, they were both accused of the crime of my emigration. What were our sufferings in a foreign land compared to the sufferings of the French who had remained at home? And yet how miserable it was to know that our exile itself was a pretext for persecuting our dear ones!
Two years ago, my sister-in-law’s wedding ring was picked up from the gutter of the rue Cassette and brought to me. It was broken: the two hoops of the ring had separated and hung loosely embracing each other, but the names engraved there were still perfectly legible. How was it that this ring had been retrieved? In what place and at what time was it lost? Had the victim, imprisoned in the Luxembourg, passed through the rue Cassette on the way to her punishment? Had she let the ring fall from the tumbrel? Or had it been tugged from her finger after the execution? The sight of this broken emblem, with its clear inscription, overwhelmed me; it called to mind unimaginable cruelties. Something mysterious and fateful clung to this ring, which my sister-in-law seemed to have sent me from the land of the dead, in memory of her and of my brother. I have handed it down to her son. May it not bring him misfortune!
Dear orphan, image of your mother,
From here below I ask the Lord
To give you the happy days denied your father
And the children that your uncle shall never have.
This bad stanza and two or three others were the only wedding gift I was able to give my nephew when he married.
One other token of these old misfortunes remains to me. Here is what M. de Contencin wrote me when, combing through the city archives, he discovered the order of the Revolutionary Tribunal which sent my brother and his family to the scaffold:
Monsieur le Vicomte,
There is a sort of cruelty in reawakening the memory of evils which have caused so much grief to a soul that has suffered as deeply as yours. This thought made me hesitate before offering to send you a very sad document which has fallen into my hands in the course of my research. It is a death warrant signed before execution, by a man who always showed himself as implacable as Death herself, whenever he found exemplary virtue and goodness together in the same head.
I hope, M. le Vicomte, that you shall not think too poorly of me if I add to your family archives a document which recalls such cruel memories. I supposed it would be of interest to you, since it had some value in my eyes, and this is why I thought to offer it to you. If I have not been indiscreet in doing so, I would be doubly pleased with myself, as this letter gives me occasion to express the feelings of profound respect and sincere admiration which you have long inspired in me, and with which I am, Monsieur le Vicomte,
Your very humble and obedient servant,
A. De Contencin
Hôtel de la Préfecture de la Seine
Paris, March 23, 1835
Here is my reply to this letter:
Monsieur,
I once had Saint-Chapelle scoured for the documents that record my poor brother’s trial, but nobody was able to find the order that you have had the kindness to send me. This order, along with so many others, with their erasures and their misspelled names, must be presented to Fouquier at God’s Tribunal: there, he will surely have to acknowledge his signature. Here is a relic of those times that people regret, and about which they write volumes in admiration! Yet I envy my brother: for many long years now, he has been out of this sad world. I owe you infinite thanks, Monsieur, for the esteem you show me in your good and noble letter, and I beg you to accept my assurance of the very distinguished consideration with which I have the honor of being, etc.
This death warrant is especially remarkable as evidence of the frivolity with which the murders were committed: names are wrongly spelled and others half-erased. These formal defects, which should have been enough to annul the simplest sentence, did not stop the executioners. They were concerned only with the exact hour of death: at precisely five o’clock. Here is the authentic document, which I copy faithfully:
EXECUTOR OF CRIMINAL SENTENCES
REVOLUTIONARY TRIBUNAL
The executor of criminal sentences shall not fail to betake himself to the house of justice of the Conciergerie, where he shall execute the sentence condemning Mousset d’Esprémenil, Chapelier, Thouret, Hell, Lamoignon Malsherbes, the wife of Lepelletier Rosambo, Chateau Brian and his wife (the name itself is smudged, illegible), the widow Duchatelet, the wife of Grammont, formerly a Duke, the woman Rochechuart (Rochechouart), and Parmentier:—14, to the penalty of death. The execution shall take place today, at precisely five o’clock, in the Place de la Révolution, in this city.
The Public Prosecutor,
H.Q. Fouquier
Given at the Tribunal, Year III Floréal,
in the second year of the French Republic
—Two Carts
The Ninth of Thermidor saved my mother’s life; but she would be left forgotten in the Conciergerie. The commissaire under the National Convention found her there and asked her, “What are you doing here, citoyenne? Who are you and why are you still here?” My mother replied that, having lost her son, she gave no thought to the future, that she was indifferent whether she died in prison or out of it. “But perhaps you have other children?” said the commissaire. My mother gave the names of my wife and my sisters, who had been detained in Rennes. An order was sent to set them free, and my mother was constrained to leave the prison.
In histories of the Revolution, writers forget to set the picture of outer France beside the picture of inner France—to depict that great colony of émigrés who varied their labors and their sorrows according to diverse climates and different national customs.
Outside France, everything was brought about by individuals, altered conditions, obscure sufferings, soundless and unrewarded sacrifices; and in this plethora of individuals of every rank, age, and sex, one idea held fast: Old France traveled abroad with all its prejudices and loyalties intact, as in former times the Church of God wandered the earth with its virtues and martyrs.
Inside France, everything was brought about en masse: Barère announcing murders and conquests, civil wars and foreign wars; the colossal battles of the Vendée and the Rhine; thrones crumbling to the sound of our armies on the march; our fleets engulfed by the waves; the people disinterring the monarchs at Saint-Denis and throwing the dust of dead Kings in the face of living Kings, to blind them; the new France, glorious in its new liberties, proud even of its crimes, standing firm on its own soil, and all the while extending its frontiers, doubly armed with the executioner’s blade and the soldier’s sword.
In the midst of my family sorrows, some letters from my friend Hingant arrived, reassuring me of his fate, letters that were really quite remarkable. He wrote to me in September 1795:
Your letter of August 23 is full of the most moving sentiments. The few people to whom I have shown it were moved to tears as they read. I am almost tempted to say what Diderot said the day that J.-J. Rousseau came to weep for him in his cell at Vincennes: “See, how my friends do love me!”[14] My illness is nothing, in truth, but one of those nervous fevers which cause one a great deal of suffering and for which time and patience are the best remedies. During the fever, I was reading some extracts from the Phaedo and Timaeus. Those books make one yearn for death, and I said to myself, like Cato:
It must be so, Plato; thou reason’st so well![15]
I imagined my voyage as one might imagine a voyage to the Indies. I believed I would see a profusion of unfamiliar new sights in the “world of the spirits” (as Swedenborg calls it) and, above all, that I would be exempt from the torpor and the danger of the voyage.