12. MEN OF LETTERS—PORTRAITS

Paris, June 1821

IN THE course of the two years that passed between my settling in Paris and the opening of the Estates-General, my social circle widened. I knew the Chevalier du Parny’s elegies by heart, as I know them still, and I wrote him, asking permission to meet a poet whose works delighted me. He sent me a courteous reply: I went to call on him in the rue de Cléry.

I found a still-youngish man, very proper, very tall and thin, with a face marked by smallpox. He returned my visit, and I introduced him to my sisters. He did not much care for society and was soon driven from it by his politics: he was then of the old party. I have never known a writer more similar to his works. A poet and a creole, he lacked for nothing but the Indian sky, a spring, a palm tree, and a wife. He recoiled from fame and tried to glide through life unnoticed. He sacrificed everything to his idleness and was never betrayed in his obscurity except by his pleasures, which played in passing on his lyre:

Que notre vie heureuse et fortunée

Coule en secret, sous l’aile des amours,

Comme un ruisseau qui, murmurant à peine,

Et dans son lit resserrant tous ses flots,

Cherche avec soin l’ombre des arbrisseaux,

Et n’ose pas se montrer dans la plaine. [12]

It was his inability to tear himself away from his indolence that turned the Chevalier de Parny from a frenzied aristocrat into a miserable revolutionary, attacking a persecuted religion and its priests on the scaffold, buying his peace at any price, and lending to the Muse that sang of Éléonore the language of those places where Camille Desmoulins went to haggle for his whores.

The author of the Histoire de la littérature italienne, who stole into the Revolution in Chamfort’s wake, came to meet us through that cousinage which exists among all Bretons: Ginguené lived in society on the reputation of a stylish enough piece of verse, La Confession de Zulmé, which earned him a pitiful place in M. de Necker’s offices; hence his piece on entering the Contrôle-Général. I don’t know who claimed that Ginguené hadn’t written La Confession de Zulmé, the title that won him his glory, but he was in fact responsible for it.

This poet from Rennes knew music well and composed ballads. His origins were humble, but the more he attached himself to well-known men, the more arrogant he became. Around the time that the Estates-General convened, Chamfort tasked him with scribbling some articles for the newspapers and some speeches for the clubs. Suddenly he was superior. At the first Federation he said, “What a lovely affair! But we could light the place better if we burned four aristocrats, one at each corner of the altar.” There was nothing original in his wish. Long before him, Louis Dorléans, the Leaguer, had written in his Banquet du Comte d’Arête, “We ought to stack the Protestant ministers like faggots on the Midsummer’s Night bonfire and drown Henri IV like a cat in a barrel.”

Ginguené had advance knowledge of the Revolutionary murders. Madame Ginguené warned my sisters and my wife about the massacre that was to take place at the Carmelite convent and gave them refuge. My sisters were then living in the cul-de-sac Férou, close to the place where so many throats were cut.

After the Terror, Ginguené became what might as well have been the Minister of Public Education of France. It was then that he sang “l’Arbre de la liberté” at the Cadran-Bleu, to the tune of “Je l’ai planté, je l’ai vu naître.”[13] He was judged philosophically smug enough to serve as an envoy to one of those kings that were dethroned. He wrote from Turin to M. de Talleyrand that he had “conquered a prejudice” because he had caused his wife to be received at Court en pet-en-l’air.[14] Tumbling from mediocrity into importance, from importance into foolishness, and from foolishness into ridiculousness, he ended his days as a distinguished literary critic and, what’s better still, an independent writer in the Décade Philosophique. Nature had carried him back to the place from which society had dragged him to no good purpose. His knowledge is secondhand, his prose heavy, his poetry correct and sometimes pleasant.

The poet Lebrun was Ginguené’s friend. Ginguené protected him as a man of talent, who knows the world, protects the simplicity of a man of genius; Lebrun, in his turn, shed his luster on the eminence of Ginguené. Nothing was more comical than the roles played by these two friends, rendering each other, by amiable commerce, every service that can be rendered by two men superior in different spheres.

Lebrun was quite simply a pretender to the Empyrean. His vigor was as cold as his ecstasies were frozen. His Parnassus, an upper room on the rue Montmartre, was furnished exclusively with books piled pell-mell on the floor, a burlap bed with two dirty towels for curtains hanging from a rusty iron rod, and a broken water jug propped against a broken-down chair. It was not so much that Lebrun was poor, but that he was miserly and devoted to loose women.

At M. de Vaudreuil’s classical dinner, Lebrun played the character of Pindar. Among his lyric poems, one finds energetic and elegant stanzas, as in the ode to the ship Le Vengeur and in the ode to Les Environs de Paris. But his elegies emerged from his head, rarely from his soul; he possessed a studied rather than a natural originality, and he created nothing except by force of artifice. He wore himself out perverting the sense of words and conjoining them in monstrous combinations. His real talent was for satire, and his epistle on la bonne et la mauvaise plaisanterie has enjoyed well-deserved praise. A few of his epigrams are comparable to those of J.-B. Rousseau; in this regard, La Harpe in particular inspired him. And one more justice must be done to him: he remained independent under Bonaparte and has left some wrathful verses lambasting the oppressor of our freedoms.

But, without question, the most bilious man of letters I knew in Paris at that time was Chamfort. Infected by the same malady that made the Jacobins, he could not forgive mankind for the accident of his birth. He betrayed the confidence of the houses into which he was admitted. He mistook his own cynical language for an accurate description of the manners of the Court. No one can deny that he had wit and talent, but wit and talent of the kind that does not reach posterity. When he saw that he would come to nothing under the Revolution, he turned against himself those same hands that he had once raised against society. The red cap appeared to his pride as no more than another sort of crown and sans-culottism as another sort of nobility, of which the Marats and the Robespierres were high and puissant lords. Furious to find inequalities of rank persisting in this world of sorrow and tears, condemned to be no more than a vilain in the feudality of the executioners, he tried to kill himself to escape from the magnificos of crime. He failed. Death laughs at those who summon it and confuse it with nothingness.

I did not know the Abbé Delille until 1798, in London, and I never saw Rulhière, who lives through Madame d’Egmont and who makes her live, nor Palissot, nor Beaumarchais, nor Marmontel. The same goes for Chénier, whom I never met, who has attacked me (I never replied), and whose seat at the Institute would cause one of the crises of my life.[15]

When I reread most of the eighteenth-century writers today, I am puzzled by both the ruckus they raised and by my former admiration of them. Whether our language has progressed or retrogressed, whether we have marched toward civilization or beat a retreat toward barbarism, I know that I find something exhausted, passé, pallid, lifeless, and cold in these authors who were the delight of my youth. Even in the greatest writers of the Voltairean age, I find a poverty of feeling, thought, and style.

Who is to blame for my mistake? I am afraid that I have been the most at fault. I was a born innovator, and it may be that I have communicated to the new generations the same malady with which I was infected. Horrified, I have often yelled at the young, “Don’t forget your French!” They reply as the Limousin did to Pantagruel, “From alme, inclyte and celebrate academy, which is vocitated Lutetia.”[16]

The mania for Hellenizing and Latinizing our language is not really new, as we can discern: Rabelais cures it, it reappears in Ronsard, Boileau attacks it. In our days, it has been resuscitated by science. Our revolutionaries, great Greeks by nature, have obliged our shopkeepers and our peasants to learn hectares, hectoliters, kilometers, millimeters, and decagrams. Politics have “Ronsardized” everything.

I might have said something here about M. La Harpe, whom I still know and to whom I will return; I might also have added a portrait of Fontanes to my gallery; but, although my connection with that excellent man began in 1789, it was only in England that we formed a friendship which has always been intensified by bad fortune and has never been diminished by good. I shall tell you more about this later, and with the full effusions of my heart. In doing so, I will have nothing to describe except talents that no longer console the earth. My friend’s death came unexpectedly, at the very moment when my memories were leading me to retrace the beginning of his life. Our existence is so fleeting that if we do not record the events of the morning in the evening, the work overburdens us and we no longer have the time to bring it up to date. This doesn’t prevent us from wasting our years and scattering to the winds those hours that for man are the seeds of eternity.