6. REGRETS—WOULD MY FATHER HAVE APPRECIATED ME?

Berlin, March 1821

I WEPT for M. de Chateaubriand. His death showed me more clearly what he was worth. I remembered neither his strictures nor his failings. I could still see him taking his evening stroll in the great hall at Combourg, and I was moved by the thought of those familial scenes. If my father’s affection for me was curbed by the severity of his character, deep down it was nonetheless real. The fierce Marshal de Mont-luc, whose nose was mutilated by terrible wounds, and who was reduced to hiding the horror of his glory beneath a shroud, this man of carnage reproached himself for the harsh treatment of a son whom he had lost.

“This poor boy,” he writes, “having never seen me except with a scowling and scornful countenance, lived in the belief that I neither knew how to love him nor how to esteem his merits. To what purpose did I curb the singular affection that I bore him in my soul? Was it not he who ought to have had all the pleasure and all the obligation of that affection? I have constrained myself and scourged myself in order to keep this vain mask in place, and I have thereby lost the pleasure of his conversation and his will, likewise, which could not have been other than ill-borne toward me, as I had never treated him in anything but a harsh and tyrannical fashion.”[6]

My “will was not at all ill-borne” toward my father, and I do not doubt, despite his own “tyrannical fashion,” that he loved me tenderly. He would, I am sure, have mourned my loss had Providence called me away before him. But if he had remained on earth beside me, what would he have thought of all the clamor that has come of my life? A literary reputation would have wounded his gentlemanly pride; he would have seen nothing in his son’s aptitudes but degeneration. Even my embassy in Berlin, won by the pen, not the sword, would have given him but middling satisfaction. His Breton blood made him a political reactionary, a great opponent of taxation and a violent enemy of the Court. He read the Gazette de Leyde, the Journal de Francfort, the Mercure de France, and the Histoire Philosophique des Deux Indes, whose declamations particularly charmed him; he called the author, Abbé Raynal, a “mastermind.” In diplomatic matters he was anti-Mussulman: he declared that forty thousand “Russian wretches” would crush the Janissaries and conquer Constantinople. Turk-hater though he was, my father had an equally heartfelt loathing of the “Russian wretches,” due to his encounters at Danzig.

I share M. de Chateaubriand’s feeling about reputations, literary or otherwise, but for reasons different from his. I am not aware of any kind of fame in history that would tempt me. Should I have to stoop, in order to pick up at my feet, and to my advantage, the greatest glory in the world, I would not give myself the inconvenience. If I had molded my own clay, perhaps I would have made myself a woman, out of passion for them, or, if I had made myself a man, I would have bestowed myself with beauty first of all; then, as a safeguard against boredom, that tenacious enemy of mine, it might have suited me to be a superior artist, but unknown, putting my talent to use only for the good of my solitude. In this life, weighed by its light poundage, measured by its short distance, and with all the loaded dice thrown away, there are only two true things: intelligent religion and youthful love, which is to say the future and the present. The rest is not worth the trouble.

With my father’s death, the first act of my life came to a close. The paternal hearth was empty, and I pitied it, as though it were capable of feeling its abandonment and its solitude. Henceforth I would be masterless and enjoy my own fortune; but such liberty frightened me. What was I going to do with it? To whom should I give it? I distrusted my strength, and I recoiled from myself.