London, April to September 1822
I WAS BEGINNING to turn my eyes toward my native land. A great revolution had taken place. Bonaparte, become First Consul, was restoring order through despotism. Many exiles were returning. The wealthy émigrés especially wasted no time in going home to gather up the debris of their fortunes: loyalty was dying at the head, while its heart went on beating in the breasts of a few half-naked provincial gentlemen. Mrs. Lindsay had gone. She wrote to Messrs. de Lamoignon, urging them to return, and she invited their sister, Madame d’Aguesseau, to cross the Channel. Fontanes appealed to me to finish the printing of The Genius of Christianity in Paris. Although I remembered my country, I felt no desire to see it again: gods more powerful than the paternal lares held me back. I no longer had possessions or a place to live in France. The country had become for me a stone bosom, a breast without milk. I would not find my mother there, or my brother, or my sister Julie. Lucile was still alive, but she had married M. de Caud and no longer shared my name. My young “widow” knew me only through a union of a few months and through the unhappiness and absence of eight years.
Had it been left up to me alone, I do not think I would have had the strength to leave; but I saw my little circle dissolving around me. When Madame d’Aguesseau offered to take me to Paris, I let myself go. The Prussian Minister procured me a false passport under the name of Lassagne, an inhabitant of Neufchâtel. Messrs. Dulau interrupted the pressing of The Genius of Christianity and gave me the sheets that had already been composed. I removed the sketches of Atala and René from The Natchez, locked the rest of the manuscript in a trunk which I entrusted to the care of my hosts in London,[15] and set out for Dover with Madame d’Aguesseau: Mrs. Lindsay would be waiting for us in Calais.
That was how I went away from England in 1800. My heart was taken up with different things than it is now, as I write these words, in 1822. I brought back nothing from the land of exile but regrets and dreams. Today my head reels with scenes of ambition, politics, grandeur, and royal courts: it is all so unbecoming to my nature. How many events have heaped up in my present existence! Pass on, men, pass on; my turn is coming. I have unfolded only a third of my story before your eyes. If the sufferings that I have endured weighed on my springtime serenity, now, as I enter a more fruitful age, the germ of René is about to develop and another kind of bitterness will be blended in my tale. What shall I not have to say when I speak of my country and her revolutions, which I have already begun to sketch; of the Empire and the giant man whose fall I have witnessed; of that Restoration in which I played such a part, so glorious today in 1822, but which I nevertheless seem to see only through a funereal mist?
I end this book here, having brought myself up to the spring of 1800. Having arrived at the close of my first career, the career of a writer is opening before me. Having been a private man, I am about to become a public man; I am leaving the hushed and virginal refuge of solitude for the dirt and clamor of the world, and broad daylight is going to illuminate my dreamy life with light enough to penetrate a kingdom of shadows. I cast a tender glance over these books that contain my immemorial hours. I seem to be saying a last goodbye to my father’s house, abandoning the thoughts and illusions of my youth like sisters or sweethearts whom I leave beside the family hearth and shall never see again.
We took four hours going from Dover to Calais. I slipped into my country under cover of a foreign name. Doubly hidden beneath the obscurity of the Swiss Lassagne and my own obscurity, I landed in France with the century.