Berlin, March 1821
THE FATAL day came, and I had to set off for Versailles more dead than alive. My brother accompanied me there on the eve of my presentation and brought me to the house of the Marshal de Duras, a gallant man, whose wit was so unremarkable that it made his fine manners seem somewhat bourgeois. This good man inspired me nonetheless with a horrible fear.
The next morning, I went to the palace alone. He has seen nothing who has not seen the pomp of Versailles, even after the dismissal of the King’s old entourage: the spirit of Louis XIV was still there.
Things went well so long as I only had to pass through the guard-rooms. Military pageantry has always pleased me and has never overawed me. But when I entered the Oeuil-de-Boeuf and found myself among the courtiers, my difficulties began. They peered at me; I heard them asking who I was. One must remember the former prestige of royalty to understand the importance of a presentation in those days. A mysterious sense of destiny attached itself to the debutant; he was spared the self-protective expressions of contempt, mixed with extreme politesse, which defined the inimitable manners of the grandees. Who knew whether this debutant would not became a favorite of the King? He was respected for the future servitude with which he might be honored. Today, we rush to the palace with even more enthusiasm than in former times and, what is strange, without illusions: a courtier reduced to living on truths is bound to die of hunger.
When the King’s levee was announced, the people who were not to be presented withdrew. I felt a touch of vanity: I was not proud of remaining, but I would have been humiliated to leave. The door to the King’s bedroom opened, and I saw the King, in accordance with custom, finishing his toilette, which is to say taking his hat from the first gentleman-in-waiting. The King approached on his way to Mass. I bowed, and the Marshal de Duras introduced me: “Sire, the Chevalier de Chateaubriand.”
The King looked at me, returned my bow, hesitated, and for a moment seemed as if he wanted to stop and say a word to me. I would have replied with a calm countenance: my timidity had vanished. Speaking to the general of an army or a head of state has always seemed quite simple to me, though I cannot explain why that has been my experience. The King, more embarrassed than I, found nothing to say to me and passed on. The vanity of human destinies! This sovereign, whom I was seeing for the first time, this profoundly powerful monarch was Louis XVI six years from the scaffold. And this new courtier whom he had scarcely looked in the eye, charged with sorting bones from bones, many years after being presented upon proof of nobility to the grandeurs of this descendant of Saint Louis, would one day be presented, upon proof of loyalty, to his dust.[8] A twofold mark of respect for the twofold royalty of the scepter and the pen! Louis XVI might have answered his judges as Christ answered the Jews: “Many good works I have shown you: for which of these works do you stone me?”
We hurried to the gallery to see the Queen as she came back from the chapel. She appeared, surrounded by a copious and radiant retinue. She made us a stately curtsy; she seemed enchanted by life. One day, those lovely hands, then carrying the scepter of a long line of kings with such grace, were destined, before being bound by the executioner, to mend the rags of a widow, a prisoner in the Conciergerie!
My brother had obtained a sacrifice from me, but it was not in his power to make me pursue my privileges any further. He begged me in vain to stay in Versailles to attend the Queen’s card game in the evening. “You will be presented to the Queen,” he told me, “and the King will speak to you.” He could not have given me a better reason to flee. I hastened to hide my glory in a furnished room, happy to have escaped the Court, but seeing before me the terrible day of the carriages, February 19, 1787.
The Duc de Coigny had sent a message informing me that I was to hunt with the King in the Forest of Saint-Germain. I set out early in the morning to meet my punishment in full debutant attire: a gray coat, red waistcoat and trousers, lace-topped riding boots, a hunting knife at my side, and a little gold-laced French hat on my head. There were then four debutants at the Palace of Versailles: myself, the two Messieurs de Saint-Marsault, and the Comte d’Hautefeuille.* The Duc de Coigny, whose name was so fatal to the Queen, gave us our instructions.[9] He warned us not to cross the scent, as the King became angry if anyone came between him and his game. The place of the meet was to be Laval, in the Forest of Saint-Germain, an estate leased by the Crown from the Marshal de Beauvau. The horses of the first hunt, in which the debutants took part, were to be provided, as tradition dictated, by the Royal Stables.†
The drummers beat the march: a voice gave the order to present arms. They cried: The King! And the King came out and climbed into his coach: we rode in carriages behind him. It was a long way from this hunting expedition with the King of France to my hunting excursions on the moors of Brittany, and an even longer way to my hunting expeditions with the savages of North America. But my life has been full of such contrasts.
We reached the rallying point, where a number of saddle horses, held in hand beneath the trees, were betraying signs of impatience. The carriages drawn up in the forest with their guards standing by; the groups of men and women; the packs of hounds barely contained by the huntsmen; the dogs barking, the horses neighing, and the sound of the horns: all this made for a lively scene. The hunts of our kings brought to mind both the old and the new customs of the monarchy: the primitive pastimes of Clodion, Chilpéric, and Dagobert, and the elegant amusements of François I, Henri IV, and Louis XIV.
I was too full of my reading not to see Comtesses de Chateaubriand, Duchesses d’Étampes, Gabrielles d’Éstrées, La Vallières, and Montespans everywhere. My imagination took this hunt historically, and I felt myself at ease. Besides, I was in a forest: I was at home.
Stepping down from the carriage, I presented my ticket to the huntsmen. I was destined for a mare named “l’Heureuse,” a light-footed beast, but hard-mouthed, skittish, and capricious: a fair enough image of my fate, which never ceases setting back its ears. The King mounted and rode off; the hunting party followed him by a different route. I was left in the dust to do battle with l’Heureuse, who was unwilling to let her new master straddle her. Finally, I somehow managed to launch myself on her back. The hunt was already far off.
I mastered l’Heureuse well enough at first. Forced to shorten her stride, she arched her neck, chewed the bit till it was white with foam, and bounded along sideways; but when she came near the action, there was no holding her. She thrust forth her head, jerked my hands past her withers, and galloped hard into a knot of hunters, sweeping aside everything in her path and stopping only when she collided with the horse of a woman who nearly tumbled to the ground, to the roaring laughter of some and the frightened shouts of others. I have tried in vain today to recall the name of this woman, who accepted my apologies graciously. Word quickly spread of the debutant’s “adventure.”
But I had not come to the end of my trials. About half an hour after my first blunder, I was riding across a wide clearing in a deserted part of the woods; there was a pavilion at the end of the clearing, and I began to think of the palaces scattered everywhere around the royal forests, recalling the longhaired kings and their mysterious pleasures, when suddenly a shot rang out. L’Heureuse veered abruptly, charged headfirst into a thicket, and carried me to the very spot where a stag had just been brought down. The King appeared.
I remembered then, but too late, the Duc de Coigny’s injunctions. The damned Heureuse had violated them all. I leapt to the ground, pushed back my mare with one hand, and held my hat low in the other. The King looked at me and saw only a debutant who had arrived at the kill before him. He felt he had to speak, but instead of losing his temper he laughed and said, in a good-humored voice, “He did not hold out long!” These were the only words that I ever had from Louis XVI. People swarmed in from every side, amazed to find me “chatting” with the King. The debutant Chateaubriand stirred up some rumors with his two adventures, but, as it has always been since, he did not know how to profit from either good fortune or bad.
The King brought down three more stags. Since debutants were only permitted to run after the first animal, I went back to Le Val with my companions to wait for the other hunters to return.
When the King arrived at Le Val, he was in good spirits and talked cheerfully about the mishaps of the hunt. We then took the road back to Versailles. Another disappointment for my brother: instead of going to get dressed for the King’s unbooting ceremony, a moment of triumph and favor, I threw myself into the depths of my carriage and returned to Paris, elated to be free of all honors and humiliations. I told my brother that I was determined to return to Brittany.
Content to have made his name known, and hoping one day to bring to term, by means of his own presentation, that which had been aborted in mine, he did not oppose the departure of his freakish younger brother.‡
Such was my first glimpse of the City and the Court. Society seemed to me even more odious than I had imagined it; but if it frightened me, it did not discourage me. I felt, in a confused way, that I was superior to what I had seen. I came away with an unconquerable disgust for the Court, and this disgust, or rather this contempt, which I have never been able to conceal, will prevent me from succeeding, or it will bring about my downfall at the high point of my career.
But if I judged the world without knowing it, the world, in its turn, knew nothing of me. No one present at my debut guessed what I was worth, and when I went back to Paris no one there guessed any better. Since my sad fame has spread, many people have said to me, “How we should have noticed you, if we had met you in your youth!” This friendly pretension is nothing but an illusion produced by an already established reputation. Men are all alike on the outside. In vain does Rousseau tell us that he had two small, very charming eyes. It makes us no less certain, in light of his portraits, that he looked like a schoolmaster or a grouchy cobbler.
To have done with the Court, I should say that, after returning to Brittany and then going back to Paris to live with my sisters Lucile and Julie, I plunged more deeply than ever into my solitary habits. One may ask what became of the story of my presentation. In truth, it went no further.
“Then you never hunted with the King again?”
“No more than I did with the Emperor of China.”
“And you never returned to Versailles?”
“I went as far as Sèvres a couple of times, but my heart failed me, and I turned back to Paris.”
“And you made nothing of your position?”
“Nothing.”
“So what did you do?”
“I got bored.”
“Then you felt no ambition?”
“I did indeed. By dint of much worry and intrigue, I achieved the glory of publishing an idyll in the Almanach des Muses. Its appearance nearly killed me with hope and fear. I would have given all the King’s carriages to have written the ballad ‘Ô ma tendre musette!’ or ‘De mon berger volage.’”
Good for anything where others are concerned, good for nothing when it comes to myself: there you have me.
*I have met M. le Comte d’Hautefeuille again. He is in the midst of translating a few selected poems by Lord Byron; and Madame la Comtesse d’Hautefeuille is the very talented author of the Exiled Soul, etc. etc.
† In the Gazette de France of Tuesday, February twenty-seventh, 1787, one may read: “Le Comte Charles d’Hautefeuille, le Baron de Saint-Marsault, le Baron de Saint-Marsault-Chatelaillon, and le Chevalier de Chateaubriand who had previously had the honor of being presented to the King, have received, on February nineteenth, the honor of riding in His Majesty’s carriages, and of following the hunt.”
‡ The Mémorial historique de la Noblesse published an unedited document, annotated in the King’s hand, pulled from the Royal Archives, section historique, register M 813 and box M 814. This document contains the “Entrances.” My name and my brother’s name appear in it: further proof that my memory has served me well regarding these dates. (Paris, 1840)