London, April to September 1822;
Revised in December 1846
MY RELATIONS with Deboffe regarding the Essai historique had never been completely broken off, and it was important, on my return to London, that I renew them as soon as possible to sustain my material life. But what had brought about my latest misfortune? My obstinate silence. To make sense of this, it is necessary to examine my character.
At no time has it been possible for me to overcome the spirit of restraint and inward solitude that prevents me from discussing what moves me. No one could attest without lying that I have ever uttered words such as most men utter in moments of pain, pleasure, or vanity. A name or a confession of any seriousness never, or almost never, escapes my lips. I do not talk with casual acquaintances about my interests, my plans, my works, my ideas, my friendships, my joys, or my sorrows, being persuaded of the profound boredom that we cause others by speaking of ourselves. I am sincere and truthful, but I am lacking in openness of heart. My soul tends constantly to close up. I stop in the middle of saying a thing, and I have never let on about my whole life except in these Memoirs. If I venture to begin a story, suddenly the thought of its length frightens me; after three or four words, the sound of my voice becomes intolerable to me and I hold my tongue. As I believe in nothing, outside of religion, I am leery of everything. Spite and disparagement are two distinctive qualities of the French mind; mockery and slander, the sure result of any confidence.
But what have I gained by my reserved disposition? Often, because I am so impenetrable, I have become for others a sort of fantastic being with no relation to my reality. Even my friends are wrong about me when, out of affection for me, they think to promote and embellish my reputation. All the mediocrities of antechambers, offices, newspapers, and cafés suppose I am rife with ambitions, yet I have none. Cold and dry in everyday matters, I have nothing of the enthusiast or the sentimentalist about me: my swift and exact perceptions cut to the heart of men and events and strip them of all importance. Far from dragging me away, or idealizing practical truths, my imagination swallows up the biggest events and perplexes even me. The petty and ridiculous side of things is always the first to strike me. Real genius and real greatness hardly exist in my eyes. Polite, congratulatory, and respectful toward pretenders who proclaim their superior intelligence, my hidden contempt smiles and places Callot’s masks on every one of those incense-wreathed faces.[1] In politics, the warmth of my opinions has never outlasted the length of my speech or my pamphlet. In my inward and theoretical life, I am the man of dreams; in my outward and practical life, I am the man of realities. Adventurous yet disciplined, passionate yet methodical, there has never been a being more visionary and more positive, more ardent and more frozen than I: a bizarre androgyne forged by the divergent bloods of my mother and my father.
The portraits that have been made of me bear me no resemblance, and this is chiefly due to my reticence. The crowd is too frivolous, too inattentive to give themselves the time, unless they’ve been warned beforehand, to see individuals as they are. Whenever, by chance, I attempt to redress some of these false judgments in my prefaces, no one believes me. The result, all things being equal, is that I have never insisted; an as you wish has always relieved me of the boredom of persuading anyone or of trying to assert a truth. I retreat into my heart like a hare into its form, and there I set myself to contemplating the motion of a leaf or the bending of a blade of grass.
I do not make a virtue of my invincible and quite involuntary circumspection. It is not duplicity, however it may appear, and it is inharmonious with happier, friendlier, more easygoing and naive natures. Often, it has injured me in matters of feeling and business, for I have never been able to suffer explanations, reconcilements brought about by clarifications and protests, verbosity and accusations, details and apology.
In the case of the Ives family, my obstinate silence about myself proved fatal to me in the extreme. Twenty times Charlotte’s mother had inquired after my relatives and put me on the road to revelation. Not foreseeing where my muteness would lead me, I contented myself as usual with a few vague words. If I had not been subject to this odious mental oddity, any misunderstanding would have been impossible, and I would not have seemed as though I had intentionally abused the most generous hospitality. The truth, spoken by me at the decisive moment, does not excuse me: real harm had been done.
I resumed my work in the midst of my grief and my well-deserved self-reproach. I even came to like my labors, for it had occurred to me that by acquiring some renown, I might make the Ives family less repentant of the interest they had shown me. Charlotte, with whom I thus sought to be reconciled through glory, came to preside over my studies. Her image sat before me as I wrote. When I raised my eyes from my paper, I fixed them on her venerable image as though the original were there in fact. The inhabitants of Ceylon were watching the sun rise in extraordinary splendor one morning when suddenly its orb divided, and out came a brilliant creature saying to the Ceylonese, “I come to reign over you.” Charlotte had come forth from a ray of light to reign over me.
But let us forsake these memories; memories grow old and fade like hopes. My life is about to change its course, to flow through other valleys, under other skies. First love of my youth, you vanish from me with all your charms! I have just seen Charlotte again, it’s true, but after how many years apart?[2] Sweet gleam of the past—pale rose of twilight edging into night—when the sun has set so long ago!