Book Eleven

FROM TIME to time, the Revolution sent us émigrés of a new type and of a new opinion. Various strata of exiles were forming in London: the earth contains strata of sand and of clay, deposited there by the waves of the Flood. One of these waves brought me a man whose loss I still mourn today, a man who was my guide in the world of letters and whose friendship was one of the honors, and one of the consolations, of my life.

You have seen, in Book Four of these Memoirs, that I had met M. Fontanes in 1789; it was in Berlin last year that I heard news of his death. He was born in Niort, to a noble Protestant family. His father had had the horrible misfortune to kill his brother-in-law in a duel. The young Fontanes, raised by a very commendable brother, was sent to Paris. There he met the dying Voltaire, and that great representative of the eighteenth century inspired him to write his first verse; La Harpe took notice of these early poetic attempts. Fontanes undertook some works for the theater and made the acquaintance of a charming actress named Mademoiselle Desgarcins. Residing near the Odéon, wandering around the Chartreuse, he celebrated the neighborhood’s solitude. Already he had met a man destined also to become a friend of mine: M. Joubert.[11] When the Revolution arrived, the young poet involved himself in one of those static parties that always perish, torn in two by the party of progress that drags it forward and by the retrograde party that pulls it from behind. The Monarchists made M. Fontanes the editor of the Modérateur. When the bad days came, he sought refuge in Lyon, where he married. His wife gave birth to a son. During the siege of Lyon, which the Revolutionaries had declared a Freed Commune, as Louis XI had once declared Arras, by banishing its citizens, a Free City, Madame Fontanes was obliged to depart with the infant’s cradle to keep the child safe from the bombs. Returned to Paris on the 9th of Thermidor, M. Fontanes founded the Mémorial with M. La Harpe and Abbé de Vauxelles. Outlawed on the 18th of Fructidor, England became his safe haven.

M. Fontanes was, together with Chénier, the last writer of the classical school in the elder line. His prose and verse resemble one another and have similar merit. Yet his thoughts and images exhibit a melancholy unknown to the age of Louis XIV, which knew only the austere and holy sadness of religious eloquence. This melancholia mingled among the works of the bard of the Jour des Morts is, as it were, the imprint of the epoch in which he lived: it fixes the date of his arrival; it shows him to have been born after J.-J. Rousseau and to be connected, by his tastes, with Fénelon. Were someone to condense M. Fontanes’s writings into two very slender volumes (one of prose, the other of verse), they would form the most elegant funeral monument that could ever be placed on the tomb of the classical school.*

Among the papers that my friend left are several cantos of a poem called La Grèce Sauvée, a few books of odes, miscellaneous poems, etc. He never published anything else himself: for this critic, so fine, so perceptive, and, when not blinded by his political opinions, so impartial, was dreadfully afraid of criticism. He was supremely unjust toward Madame de Staël. An envious article by Garat on the Forêt de Navarre almost stopped him short at the start of his poetical career. Fontanes, as soon as he appeared, destroyed the artificial school of Dorat; but he was unable to reestablish the classical school, which was coming to an end together with the language of Racine.

If anything in the world was sure to be antipathetic to M. Fontanes, it was my style of writing. In my person, with the so-called Romantic school, there began a revolution in French literature. And yet my friend, instead of being revolted by my barbarity, became its passionate defender. I saw a look of amazement on his face when I read fragments from The Natchez, Atala, and René. He found it impossible to reduce these productions to the established critical rules, but he sensed that he was entering a new world; he beheld a new nature; he comprehended a language that he did not speak. I had some excellent advice from him, and I owe him whatever is correct in my style. He taught me to respect the ear, and he prevented me from falling prey to the extravagant inventions and uneven executions of my disciples.

It made me very happy to see him again in London, fêted by émigrés who crowded around him asking him to recite cantos from La Grèce Sauvée. His rooms were near mine, and there was a period when we never left each other’s company. We were present together at a scene worthy of that ill-fated epoch: Cléry, having recently landed in London, read to us from the manuscripts of his Memoirs. Let yourself imagine the emotion elicited from an audience of exiles listening to Louis XVI’s footman recounting, as an eyewitness, the sufferings and death of the prisoner of the Temple! The Directory, fearing the effects of Cléry’s Memoirs, later published an interpolated edition which had the author speaking like a lackey and Louis like a porter. Among all the Revolutionary turpitudes, this is perhaps one of the filthiest.

The Comte d’Artois’s London chargé d’affaires, M. du Theil, had hastened to seek out Fontanes, who in turn implored me to introduce him to this agent of the Princes. We found M. du Theil surrounded by all the defenders of the throne and the altar who loitered on the pavements of Piccadilly; by a crowd of parasites and spies who had escaped Paris under various names and disguises, together with swarms of Belgian, German, and Irish counter-revolutionary swindlers. At the edge of this crowd was a man of about thirty or thirty-two who locked eyes with no one, and who had fixed his gaze on an engraving depicting the death of General Wolfe. Struck by his appearance, I inquired after his name. “That’s no one,” someone said; “just a Vendean peasant, delivering a letter for his superiors.”

This man, “who was no one,” had witnessed the deaths of Cathelineau, the commander-in-chief of the Vendean Army; Bonchamp, in whom the spirit of Bayard lived again; Lescure, armored in a hair shirt that was no match for the ball; d’Elbée, shot in an armchair because his wounds did not permit him to face the firing squad on his feet; La Rochejaquelein, whose corpse the patriots had ordered “verified” in order to reassure the Convention, which was then at the height of its triumph.

This man, “who was no one,” had been present at the taking and retaking of two hundred towns, villages, and redoubts, seven hundred skirmishes, and seventeen pitched battles; he had fought against three hundred thousand regular troops and six or seven hundred thousand conscripts and National Guards; he had helped carry off five hundred cannon and fifty thousand rifles; he had passed through the “infernal columns” (those companies of arsonists commanded by members of the Convention); he had braved the ocean of fire which, on three separate occasions, rolled its waves over the woods of the Vendée. Finally, he had seen the death of three hundred thousand Hercules of the plough, his companions in labor, and five hundred thousand acres of fertile country changed into a desert of ashes.

The two Frances met on that soil which they themselves had razed. All that remained of the blood and the memory of the Crusades struggled, in the Vendée, against what there was of the new blood and hopes of Revolutionary France. The victor felt the greatness of the vanquished. Thureau, the Republican general, declared that “the Vendeans would go down in history as soldiering men of the first rank.” Another general wrote to Merlin de Thionville: “Troops who have conquered Frenchmen such as these can flatter themselves of being able to conquer all other nations.” The legions of Probus, in their song, said as much of our fathers.[12] Bonaparte called the battles of the Vendée “the battles of giants.”

In the crush of the parlor, I was the only one to gaze with admiration and respect at this representative of the ancient peasants who, under Charles V, repulsed a foreign invasion even as they broke free from the yoke of their Lords. I seemed to behold a child of the communes from the time of Charles VII which, in league with the provincial nobility, won back the soil of France foot by foot and furrow by furrow. This man, “who was no one,” wore the impassive expression of a savage; his eyes were as gray and unbending as an iron rod; his lower lip trembled over his clenched teeth; his hair curled down from his head like so many torpid serpents, ready to rise up and strike; his arms, hanging at his sides, gave his huge saber-scarred wrists a nervous tremor. One might have taken him for a sawyer. His physiognomy expressed a common rustic nature put to the service of interests and ideals contrary to that nature. In him, the native loyalty of the vassal and the simple faith of the Christian had been mixed with the crude independence of a plebeian accustomed to judging and meting out justice for himself. The feeling of liberty in him seemed merely the consciousness of the strength of his hands and the valor of his heart. He spoke no more than a lion; he scratched himself like a lion, yawned like a lion, lay down on his side like a bored lion, and appeared to be dreaming of blood and forests.

What men the French of all parties were in those days—and what a race we are today! But the Republicans had their principle within themselves, in the midst of themselves, whereas the principle of the Royalists lay outside of France. Vendeans sent deputies to the exiles like giants going to look for leaders among pygmies. The rustic messenger that I beheld had seized the Revolution by the throat and cried, “Come on, men, stand behind me! It shall do you no harm! It won’t so much as budge; I’ve got it.” But nobody wanted to move. Thus Jacques Bonhomme let the Revolution go, and Charette broke his sword.[13]

While I was lost in these reflections on this man of the soil, as I had previously been lost in reflections of another sort on Danton and Mirabeau, Fontanes had obtained a private audience with the man he jokingly called the Comptroller-General of Finances. He emerged very satisfied, for M. du Theil had promised him he would encourage the publication of my works, and Fontanes thought only of me. It would be impossible to find a better man. Timid in everything that concerned himself, he became brazen in defense of his friends. He proved this to me at the time of my resignation after the death of the Duc d’Enghien. In conversation, he would burst into ridiculous fits of literary anger. In politics, he was unreasonable. The crimes of the Convention had given him a horror of liberty. He hated newspapers, philosophizing, and ideologies, and he communicated this hatred to Bonaparte when he became close to the master of Europe.

We used to go for walks together in the country and rest side by side under one of those large elms that dotted the meadows. Leaning against the trunk of one of these elms, my friend told me about his travels in England many years before the Revolution and recited a few lines of verse that he had addressed to two young ladies who had since grown old in the shadows of Westminster’s towers. The towers he found standing as he had left them, but the hours and the illusions of his youth had long ago been buried at their base.

Often we dined in some solitary tavern in Chelsea, by the Thames, talking for hours of Milton and Shakespeare. They had seen what we were seeing; they had sat like us on the bank of this river: for us a foreign river, for them a native stream. At night, we would go back to London by the faint light of the stars, which were submerged one after another in the city’s fog; we reached our lodgings, guided by uncertain glimmers that scarcely showed the way through the coal smoke hovering red around every lamp. In this way, the poet’s life rolls by.

We saw London in detail. As a seasoned exile, I served as cicerone to the new recruits of banishment which the Revolution demanded. Some were young and some were old: there is no legal age for misfortune. In the middle of one of these excursions through the city, Fontanes and I were surprised by a violent thunderstorm and took refuge in an alley behind a wretched house, the door of which just happened to be open. There we met the Duc de Bourbon: it was the first time I laid eyes on this prince who was not yet the last of the Condés.

To think of it: the Duc de Bourbon, Fontanes, and I, all three outlawed, seeking shelter from the same storm, in a foreign land, under the same humble roof! Fata viam invenient.[14]

When Fontanes was called back to France, he embraced me and promised we would soon see each other again. On arriving in Germany, he wrote me the following letter:

July 28, 1798

If you have felt some regrets at my departure from London, I swear to you that mine have not been less real. You are the second person in whom, during the whole course of my life, I have found an imagination and a heart similar to my own. I shall never forget the consolation I have had in knowing you during my exile in a foreign land. My tenderest and most constant thoughts since I took leave of you have turned upon The Natchez. What you read to me, especially in the very last days, is admirable, and will not leave my memory. But the charm of the poetical ideas with which you impressed me immediately disappeared on my arrival in Germany. There has been most frightful news from France. I have spent the last five or six days in the cruelest perplexities: I have lived in fear that my family might be persecuted. My terrors have been allayed somewhat today. The evil has been very slight (the threat greater than the blow), and anyhow it is not against people of my birth date that the executioners want. The last courier has just brought me assurances of peace and goodwill. I can continue my journey, and should be traveling by the beginning of next month. I will be staying in a house near the forest of Saint-Germain, holing up with my family, my Grèce, and my books—would I could say with The Natchez!

The unexpected storm that has just taken place in Paris was the result, I am sure, of the blunders of agents and leaders whom you already know. I have very clear proof of this in my hands. Being now certain, I am writing to Great Pulteney Street (where M. du Theil lived) with all possible politeness, but also with all the caution that prudence demands. I am trying to avoid correspondence in the coming month, and I leave it in the deepest doubt whom I am taking with me, and the dwelling place I shall select.

But I speak to you in a tone of friendship, and I wish from the bottom of my heart that you will know that I am honored to be of any use to such a fine person with such distinguished talents. Work—work, my dear friend, and became illustrious. It is in your power; the future is yours. I hope the promise so often made by the Comptroller-General of Finances will be fulfilled, at least in part. This consoles me, for I can’t stand the idea that a fine work might be stopped for lack of some assistance.

Write to me. Let us communicate our hearts. Let our muses always be friends. Have no doubt that, so long as I can go about freely in my native land, I shall be making ready a beehive and a bed of flowers beside my own. My affection is unalterable. I will be lonely so long as I am not with you. Tell me of your labors. I wish you the joy of completing them. I have done half of a new poem here on the banks of the Elbe and am more satisfied with it than with all the rest.

Adieu—I embrace you tenderly, and am always your friend,

Fontanes

Fontanes lets me know that he is writing verse even as he changes his place of exile. A poet can never be robbed of everything: he carries his lyre with him. Leave the swan his wings, and every evening, from whatever distant river, he shall chant those melodious lamentations that would be better understood on the banks of the Eurotas.[15]

“The future is yours,” Fontanes writes; but did he speak the truth? Should I congratulate myself on having fulfilled his prophecy? Alas! The future of which he spoke is already past. Will I have another? This first affectionate letter I received from one of my first friends, a man who for twenty-three years walked side by side with me on the earth, serves as a sad reminder of my progressive isolation. Fontanes is gone. A profound grief, following his son’s death, sent him to an early grave. Almost everyone I mention in these Memoirs has vanished; it is a Registry of Deaths. A few more years, and I, who have been condemned to catalogue the dead, shall leave no one to inscribe my name in the Book of the Absent.

But if I must remain alone, and if no being who loved me shall survive me and lead me to my final sanctuary, perhaps I have less need of a guide than others: I have inquired about the way, I have studied the places through which I must pass, I have desired to see what transpires in the last moment. Often, standing at the edge of a grave into which the coffin is being lowered with ropes, I have listened to the death-rattle of these ropes. Next, I have heard the sound of the first shovelful of earth falling on the coffin. With each successive shovelful, the hollow noise diminishes, and the earth, filling the burial ground, raises eternal silence up to the surface of the grave.

*This monument was recently raised by the filial piety of Madame Christine Fontanes; M. Saint-Beuve has adorned its base with an ingenious introduction. (Paris, 1839)

3. FONTANES