London, April to September 1822
Alloquar? audiero nunquam tua verba loquentem?
Nunquam ego te, vita frater amabilior,
Aspiciam posthac? at, certe, semper amabo![16]
“AM I NEVER to speak to you again? Never to hear you speak? Am I never to see you again, oh my brother more dear to me than life itself? Oh, but I shall love you forever!”
I have just lost a friend and I am about to lose a mother: it falls to me to repeat these lines that Catullus addressed to his dead brother. In our valley of tears, as in hell, there is an eternal lamentation, impossible to describe, which forms the groundwork, or the presiding note, of human grief; the sound is endless, and it would continue even if all the pains of Creation fell silent.
A letter from Julie, which I received not long after the letter from Fontanes, confirmed my sad remark about my progressive isolation. Fontanes urged me to “work, and become illustrious”; my sister entreated me to “renounce writing altogether”: the one proposed glory and the other oblivion. You have seen, in my account of Madame de Farcy, that she tended toward such thoughts. She had taken a dislike to literature because she regarded it as one of the temptations of her life.
Saint-Servan, July 1, 1798
My dear brother, we have just lost the best of mothers; it is with deep sorrow that I write to you of this mortal blow. When you cease to be the object of our solicitude, we shall have ceased to live. If you know how many tears your errant ways have caused our honorable mother to weep, and how deplorable they appear to anyone of a thoughtful mind, to anyone who lays claim, not only to piety, but to reason; if you knew this, it would perhaps persuade you to open your eyes and make you renounce writing altogether; and if Heaven, touched by our prayers, permits us to meet again, you shall find among us all the happiness that is to be had here on earth; you would give us this happiness, for there is nothing but sorrow for us so long as you are absent, and so long as we have so many reasons to be anxious about your fate.
Ah! Why didn’t I follow my sister’s advice? Why did I keep writing? Subtract my writings from my century, and would there have been any difference in the events or the spirit of that century?
So it was that I had lost my mother; so it was that I had distressed her in the final hours of her life! When she was breathing her last sigh, far from her last surviving son, when she was praying for him, what was I doing in London? I was taking a walk perhaps in the fresh morning dew, at the very moment when the death-sweat drenched my mother’s brow, without my hand there to wipe it away!
The filial tenderness I felt for Madame de Chateaubriand was profound. My childhood and youth were intimately linked with the memory of my mother: everything I knew I had learned from her. The thought of having poisoned the last days of the woman who carried me in her womb cast me into despair. I flung my copies of the Essai into the fire, for it was the instrument of my crime. If it had been possible to erase the work from existence, I would have done so without hesitation. I did not recover from this disturbance until the thought came to me of expiating my first work by composing a religious work. Such were the origins of The Genius of Christianity.
“My mother,” I wrote in the first preface to this book, “after being thrown, at the age of seventy-two, into dungeons where she saw her children perish, at last came to die on the pallet to which her misfortunes had consigned her. The memory of my errors embittered her final days, and on her deathbed she charged one of my sisters with calling me back to the religion in which I had been raised. My sister communicated my mother’s last wish to me. But when the letter arrived from across the sea, the sister who had written it was no more; she too had died from the effects of her imprisonment. These two voices issuing from the grave, the dead serving as interpreter of the dead, made a deep impression on me. I became a Christian. I did not yield, I admit, to any great supernatural light: my conviction issued from the heart. I wept and I believed.”
I exaggerated my faults. The Essai was not an impious book but a book of doubt and desolation. Through the gloom of that book there glides a ray of the Christian light that shone upon my cradle. No great effort was needed to return from the skepticism of the Essai to the certitude of The Genius of Christianity.