Book Twelve

NOW THAT I have yammered on to you about English writers at the time when England gave me asylum, there is nothing left but to say something of England itself at that time, something of its appearance, its sites, its houses, its private and political manners.

The whole of England can be seen in the space of four leagues, from Richmond, above London, down to Greenwich and below.

Below London is industrial and commercial England, with its docks, warehouses, customhouses, arsenals, breweries, factories, foundries, and ships. At each tide, these ships sail up the Thames in three divisions: first the smallest, then the middle-sized, and lastly, the great vessels so large that their sails graze the columns of the Old Sailors Home and the tavern where foreigners dine.

Above London is agricultural and pastoral England, with its meadows, herds, country houses, and parks, where the waters of the Thames, driven back by the tide, bathe the shrubs and grasses twice a day. In the middle of these two opposing points, Richmond and Greenwich, London mixes all of this double England together: the aristocracy to the West, the democracy to the East, the Tower of London and Westminster, boundaries between which the whole history of Great Britain has taken place.

I spent part of the summer of 1799 in Richmond with Christian de Lamoignon, occupying myself with The Genius of Christianity. I went out in a rowboat on the Thames or for walks in Richmond Park. I might well have wished that Richmond-near-London were the Richmond of the treaty Honor Richemundiae, for then I would have found myself in my native land, and here’s how: William the Bastard made a present to his son-in-law Alain, a duke of Brittany, of four hundred and forty-two English lordships, which would later form the County of Richmond.* The Dukes of Brittany, Alain’s successors, enfeoffed these lordships to a few Breton knights, the younger sons of the families of Rohan, Tinteniac, Chateaubriand, Goyon, and Montboucher. But, despite my goodwill, I have to look in Yorkshire for the County of Richmond established as a Duchy of Brittany by Charles II for the benefit of his bastard son: Richmond on the Thames was formerly the town of Sheen.

It was there, in 1377, that Edward III died after being robbed by his mistress, Alice Pearce; not the same Alice, or Catherine, of Salisbury,[10] from the days when the victor of Crécy was young: you should not love at an age when you can no longer be loved. Henry VIII and Elizabeth also died in Richmond; but then, where can one not die? Henry took pleasure in this residence. English historians are quite embarrassed by this abominable man. On one hand, they cannot disguise his tyranny or the servility of the Parliament; on the other, if they were to speak too harshly against the leader of the Reformation, they would condemn themselves by condemning him:

You can still see the hill in Richmond Park that served Henry VIII as an observatory when he watched for news of Anne Boleyn’s execution. Henry must have shivered with pleasure when the signal was fired from the Tower of London. What delectation! To think of the ax cutting through the woman’s fragile neck, bloodying the lovely hair that the poet-king had only recently clasped in his fatal embrace.

Alone in empty Richmond Park, I awaited no homicidal signals and would not even have wished the slightest harm on whomever might have betrayed me. I took my strolls with a few peaceful deer. They were accustomed to running before a pack of hounds, stopping when they were tired, and then being carried back, quite cheerful and well pleased by the game, in a cart filled with straw. Several times, I went to Kew Gardens to see the kangaroos, ridiculous creatures, just the inverse of giraffes. These innocent quadruped-hoppers must have peopled Australia better than the old Duke of Queensbury’s prostitutes peopled the backstreets of Richmond. The Thames here bordered the lawn of a cottage, half hidden beneath a Lebanese cedar and among the weeping willows: a newly married couple had come to spend their honeymoon in this paradise.

One evening, as I was strolling quietly over the swards of Twickenham, Pelletier appeared out of nowhere, holding his handkerchief over his mouth: “What perpetual miscreant fog!” he cried, as soon as he was in earshot. “How in hell can you stay out here? Look, I have drawn up a list: Stowe, Blenheim, Hampton Court, Oxford. You go around drunk on dreams: you would live here in John Bull’s land in vitam aeternam and see nothing.”

I begged in vain to be excused, but I had to go. In the carriage, Pelletier enumerated his hopes to me. He had relays of hopes. If one died under him, he bestrode another, and so on, one leg here, one leg there, until the end of his days. One of his hopes, the most robust of them, eventually led him to Bonaparte, whom he took by the collar: Napoleon had the naiveté to cross swords with him. Pelletier had James Mackintosh as a second. Condemned before the tribunals, he made a new fortune (which he squandered directly) by selling the narrative of his trial.

Blenheim was odious to me. I found it the more painful to be reminded of my country’s old defeat because I had recently suffered a personal affront. A boat rowing up the Thames caught sight of me on shore, and the oarsmen, perceiving that I was French, began huzzahing. News of the naval battle at Aboukir had just reached town. These foreign successes, though they reopened the gates of France to me, were nonetheless odious in my eyes. Admiral Nelson, whom I had seen several times in Hyde Park, dragged his victories to Naples in Lady Hamilton’s shawl, while the lazzaroni played boules with human heads. Nelson died gloriously at Trafalgar; his mistress died miserably in Calais, having lost her beauty, her youth, and her fortune. And I, so outraged on the Thames by the English triumph of Aboukir, have seen the palm trees of Libya beside the calm and vacant sea that once was reddened by my countrymen’s blood.

The park in Stowe is famous for its buildings; but I prefer its shade. The cicerone of the place showed us, in a shadowy ravine, a copy of an Eastern temple whose original I would later admire in the bright valley of the Cephissus. A few lovely pictures done by the Italian school were pining away at the back of some uninhabited rooms where the shutters were always closed: poor Raphael, a prisoner in an old English castle, far from the sky of the Villa Farnesina!

Hampton Court still had its collection of portraits of Charles II’s mistresses: this was how the prince had done things after escaping a revolution that had felled his father’s head and that was destined to banish his race.

We went to Slough, where Herschel lived with his learned sister and his forty-foot telescope. He was looking for new planets; this made Pelletier, who held fast to the seven old ones, quite amused.

We stopped for two days in Oxford. I enjoyed my time in that republic of Alfred the Great; it represented, to my mind, the privileged freedoms and manners of literary institutions of the Middle Ages. We combed through the twenty-five colleges, the libraries, the museum, and the botanical garden. Among the manuscripts of Worcester College, I leafed through the pages of a life of the Black Prince, written in French verse by the Prince’s herald, with the utmost pleasure.

Oxford did not resemble the modest schools of Dol, Rennes, or Dinan, but it recalled them to my memory. I had translated Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”

. . . squilla di lontano,

Che paia ’l giorno pianger che si more[12]

Pelletier had hastened to publish my translation in his paper. Now, at the sight of Oxford, I remembered the same poet’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”:

Ah, happy hills, ah, pleasing shade,

Ah, fields beloved in vain,

Where once my careless childhood strayed,

A stranger yet to pain!

I feel the gales that from ye blow,

A momentary bliss bestow,

As waving fresh their gladsome wing,

My weary soul they seem to soothe, And, redolent of joy and youth,

To breathe a second spring.

Say, Father Thames . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

What idle progeny succeed

To chase the rolling circle’s speed,

Or urge the flying ball?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alas, regardless of their doom,

The little victims play!

No sense have they of ills to come,

Nor care beyond to-day.

Who has not experienced the feelings and regrets expressed here with all the sweetness of the Muse? Who has not been moved by the remembrance of the games, the studies, and the loves of past years? But can we bring them back to life? The pleasures of youth reproduced by memory are like ruins seen by torchlight.

Separated from the Continent by a long war, the English still preserved, at the last century’s end, their national character and manners. They were still a people, in whose name an aristocratic government exercised authority. Only two great classes existed, amiably united by common interests: the patrons and the clients. The jealous class which is called the “bourgeoisie” in France, and which has since begun to develop in England, did not yet exist. Nothing came between the rich landowners and the men who lived by their labor. All was not yet machinery in the manufacturing professions or folly in the privileged ranks. On the same sidewalks where today you see nothing but filthy faces and men in frockcoats, there used to be little girls in white cloaks, straw hats tied under their chins with ribbon, carrying a basket in which there were fruits or a book. They all kept their eyes lowered and blushed when anyone looked at them. “England,” says Shakespeare, “is a nest of swans amid the waters.”[13] Frockcoats were so rarely worn in the London of 1793 that a woman, weeping hot tears over the death of Louis XVI, paused to ask me, “But, my dear sir, is it true that the poor King was dressed in a frockcoat when he was beheaded?”

The “gentleman farmers” had not yet sold their patrimonies to take up residence in London. They still formed an independent faction in the House of Commons that, sometimes supporting the opposition and other times the government, maintained the ideas of liberty, order, and propriety. They hunted foxes and pheasants in the autumn, ate fatted geese at Christmas, shouted vivat roast beef, groused about the present, aggrandized the past, cursed Pitt and the war (which had raised the price of port wine), and went to bed drunk to start this same life again the next day. They were sure that the glory of Great Britain would never fade so long as they sang “God Save the King,” so long as the rottener boroughs were kept in check, so long as the game laws were enforced, so long as they were allowed to go on surreptitiously selling hares and partridges to the markets under the name of “lions” and “ostriches.”

The Anglican clergy were erudite, hospitable, and generous. They had received the French clergy with a charity worthy of Christians. Oxford University had printed, and freely distributed copies to foreign priests, of a New Testament according to the Roman Catholic text, with these words on the title page: A l’usage du clergé catholique exilé pour la Religion. As for English high society, I was a wretched exile and saw it only from the outside. When there were receptions at Court or in the drawing rooms of the Prince of Wales, ladies went past me seated sideways in sedan chairs, their enormous hoops projecting from the doors like the cloth-hangings of an altar. The ladies, seated on their petticoat altars, looked like Madonnas or pagodas. These fair women were the daughters of others just as fair, whom the Duc de Guiche and the Duc de Lauzun once worshipped; the same daughters who are today, in 1822, the mothers and grandmothers of the little girls who dance across my floor in short dresses, to the sound of Collinet’s flute—another swiftly passing generation of flowers.

Toward the end of the last century, the England of 1688 was at the height of its glory. A poor émigré living in London from 1792 to 1800, I listened to the speeches of Pitt, Fox, Sheridan, Wilberforce, Grenville, Whitebread, Lauderdale, and Erskine. A magnificent ambassador in London today, in 1822, I cannot begin to say how shocked I am when, instead of the great orators that I used to admire, I see men rising to the podium who were once their subordinates. The students are truly taking the place of the masters. Public ideas have penetrated this formerly private society. But the enlightened aristocracy that stood at the helm of English affairs for a hundred and forty years showed the world one of the finest and greatest societies to have honored mankind since the Roman patriciate. Perhaps some old family in the depths of one of the English counties will recognize the society I have just described, and will mourn the times whose loss I am here lamenting.

In 1792, Mr. Burke cut ties with Mr. Fox. The cause was the French Revolution, which Mr. Burke attacked and Mr. Fox defended. Never had the two orators, who were until then the best of friends, deployed such eloquence. The whole House was moved, and Fox’s eyes were wet, when Mr. Burke recapitulated the political questions upon which he had differed with “the right honorable gentleman” on former occasions, and concluded with these words: “The right honorable gentleman, in the speech which he has just made, has treated me in every sentence with uncommon harshness. He has brought down the whole strength and heavy artillery of his judgment, eloquence, and abilities upon me, to crush me at once by a censure upon my whole life, conduct, and opinions. Notwithstanding this great and serious, though on my part unmerited, attack and attempt to crush me, I will not be dismayed. I am not yet afraid to state my sentiments in this House or anywhere else, and I will tell all the world that the constitution is in danger. It certainly is an indiscretion at any period, but especially at my time of life, to provoke enemies, or give my friends occasion to desert me; yet, if my firm and steady adherence to the British constitution placed me in such a dilemma, I will risk all; and, as public duty and public prudence teach me, with my last words exclaim, Fly from the French Constitution!”[14]

Mr. Fox having whispered that there was no loss of friendship, Burke cried out: “Yes, I regret to say there is. I know the price of my line of conduct: I have done my duty at the price of my friend; our friendship is at an end. I would warn the right honourable gentlemen who were the great rivals in that House, that whether they should in future move in the political hemisphere as two flaming meteors, or walk together as brethren, that they should preserve and cherish the British constitution; that they should guard against innovation, and save it from the danger of these new theories.” A memorable epoch of the world!

Mr. Burke, whom I knew toward the end of his life, was overwhelmed with grief after the death of his only son. He had founded a school dedicated to the children of impoverished émigrés. I went to see what he called his “nursery.” He was pleased by the vivacity of this foreign race growing up under his paternal genius. Watching the carefree little exiles hopping about, he said to me, “Our boys could not do that,” and his eyes were wet with tears. No doubt he was thinking of his own son, gone into a longer exile.

Pitt, Fox, and Burke are no more, and the English Constitution has suffered the influence of the “new theories.” One would need to have experienced the seriousness of the old Parliamentary debates, to have heard those orators whose prophetic voices seemed to proclaim an impending revolution, in order to form an idea of the scenes I recall. Liberty, contained within the limits of order, seemed to do battle at Westminster under the influence of anarchical liberty, which spoke to a rostrum still bloody from the Convention.

Mr. Pitt was tall and thin, and wore a sadly sneering expression. His speech was cold, his intonation monotonous, his gestures spiritless. Yet the lucidity and fluidity of his thought, together with the logic of his arguments, which would suddenly be lit by flashes of eloquence, made him somehow extraordinary.

I saw Mr. Pitt fairly often, as he went on foot across St. James’s Park from his house to the King’s palace. George III, for his part, had perhaps just come home from Windsor, where he had drunk beer from a pewter pot with the local farmers: he would cross the ugly court of his ugly palace in a gray carriage, followed by a scattering of equestrian guards. This was the master of the Kings of Europe, in the sense that five or six city merchants are the masters of India. Mr. Pitt, dressed all in black, with a steel-hilted sword at his side and a hat beneath his arm, would climb the stairs, taking two or three steps at a time. Along his way he found only three or four idling émigrés: favoring us with a disdainful gaze, he walked on, with his nose in the air, and his face very pale.

This great financier kept no order at home: he had no regular hours for meals or sleep. Riddled with debts, he repaid nothing and could never bring himself to draw up a memorandum of the sum owed. A footman ran his house. Badly dressed, without passions or pleasures, avid only for power, he held honorifics in contempt and wished to be called nothing but “William Pitt.”

Lord Liverpool, in the month of June 1822, took me to dine at his country house. As we crossed Putney Heath, he pointed out to me the tiny house where the son of the Earl of Chatham, the statesman who had all of Europe on his balances and who distributed all the earth’s billions with his own hands, died insolvent.

George III outlived Mr. Pitt, but he had lost his reason and his sight. At the opening of each session of Parliament, the ministers read out a Report on the King’s Health to the silent and commiserating members. One day, I went to visit Windsor. For a few shillings I obtained the obliging services of a doorman who hid me so that I could see the King. The monarch appeared, white-haired and blind, wandering his palace like King Lear, groping his way along the walls of the rooms. He sat down before an old piano, whose place he knew, and played a few fragments of a sonata by Handel. It was a beautiful end to Old England!

5. ENGLAND, FROM RICHMOND TO GREENWICH—A TRIP WITH PELLETIER—BLEINHEIM—STOWE—HAMPTON COURT—OXFORD—ETON—MANNERS, PRIVATE AND POLITICAL—FOX—PITT—BURKE—GEORGE III