Paris, December 1821
THE YEAR 1790 brought to completion the measures outlined in 1789. Church property, put at first into the hands of the nation, was confiscated, the civil constitution of the clergy decreed, and nobility abolished.
I was not present at the Federation of July 1790: a rather serious illness kept me in bed. But I was amused beforehand to see the wheelbarrows on the Champ-de-Mars. Madame de Staël has described this scene marvelously. I will always regret not having seen M. de Talleyrand saying the Mass with Abbé Louis, as I regret not having seen him, saber at his side, granting an audience to the ambassador of the Grand Turk.
Mirabeau’s popularity plummeted in 1790: his connections with the Court were obvious. M. Necker resigned his office and retired from public life without anyone attempting to dissuade him. The King’s aunts left for Rome with a passport issued by the National Assembly. The Duc d’Orléans returned from England and declared himself the King’s most humble and obedient servant. Societies of Friends of the Constitution multiplied upon the earth and attached themselves to the mother society, from which they took inspiration and orders.
It turned out that my character was favorably inclined toward public life. What happened in the streets attracted me because, in the crowd, I kept my solitude and did not have to face my timidity. Salons, too, participating in the general agitation, seemed a little less foreign to my turn of mind, and I had despite myself made a few new acquaintances.
Among these was the Marquise de Villette. Her husband, whose reputation had been slandered, wrote with Monsieur, the King’s brother, in the Journal de Paris. Madame de Villette, still a charming woman, lost a sixteen-year-old daughter, even more charming than her mother, and for whom the Chevalier de Parny wrote a few verses worthy of the Anthologie:
Au ciel elle a rendu sa vie,
Et doucement s’est endormie,
Sans murmurer contre ses lois;
Ainsi le sourire s’efface,
Ainsi meurt sans laisser de trace
Le chant d’un oiseau dans les bois.[17]
My regiment, garrisoned at Rouen, maintained its discipline until fairly late. It had a brush with the people over the execution of the actor Bordier, who suffered the last sentence issued by parliamentary power: hanged one day, he would have been a hero the next, if only he had lived another twenty-four hours. But finally insurrection took hold among the soldiers of the Navarre. The Marquis de Mortemart emigrated, and the officers followed suit. I myself had neither adopted nor rejected the new ideas. As little disposed to attack them as to serve them, I wanted neither to emigrate nor to continue my military career, and I resigned my commission.
Cut loose from all ties, I had, on one hand, rather animated quarrels with my brother and the President de Rosambo; on the other, no less bitter discussions with Ginguené, La Harpe, and Chamfort. Ever since my youth, my political impartiality has pleased no one. What’s more, I attached importance to the questions at issue only when they concerned universal ideas of liberty and human dignity; personal politics bored me. My real life lay on higher ground.
The streets of Paris, clogged with people day and night, no longer permitted me my aimless strolls of old. In search of desert places, I found shelter in the theater: I tucked myself away in the back of the box and let my thoughts wander to the verse of Racine, the music of Sacchini, or the dances of the Opéra. I must have been intrepid enough to see Barbe-Bleu and the Sabot Perdu twenty nights running at the Italiens, boring myself in an effort to drive boredom away, perched like an owl in a hole in the wall. All the while the monarchy collapsed, I heard neither the cracking of the ancient vaults, nor the caterwauling of vaudeville, nor the thundering voice of Mirabeau at the tribunal, nor Colin singing to Babet of the theater:
Qu’il pleuve, qu’il vente ou qu’il neige,
Quand la nuit est longue, on l’abrège.[18]
Sometimes, Madame Ginguené sent M. Monet, the Director of Mining, and his young daughter to disturb my savage solitude: Mademoiselle Monet would take her seat at the front of the box, and I would sit down, half glad and half grouchy, behind her. I don’t know whether I liked or loved her, but I was certainly scared of her. When she had gone, I regretted her absence and rejoiced to be free of the sight of her. Yet I would sometimes go call on her, sweating at the brow, and take her for a stroll: I would give her my arm, and I believe that I may have squeezed hers a little.
•
One idea and one idea alone had begun to dominate me, and that was the idea of going to the United States. I needed only a practical purpose for my journey: I proposed to discover (as I have said in these Memoirs and in several of my works) the Northwest Passage. This plan was not out of keeping with my poetic nature. No one paid what I did any mind; I was then, like Bonaparte, a slim sublieutenant, completely unknown to the world. We emerged together, he and I, from the obscurity of the same epoch: I to seek my fame in solitude, he to seek his glory among men. Now, not having given myself to any woman, my sylph still obsessed my imagination, and I was ardent to realize my fantastic wanderings with her in the forests of the New World. Under the influence of another nature, my love flower, my nameless phantom of the Armorican woods, would become Atala, in the shade of a Floridian grove.
M. de Malesherbes made me dizzy with excitement about this voyage. I went to see him every morning. With our noses pressed to the maps, we compared different drawings of the Arctic Circle; we calculated the distances between the Bering Stait and the far end of Hudson Bay; we read the various narratives of English, Dutch, French, Russian, Swedish, and Danish sailors and travelers; we traced the routes to be followed overland in order to reach the shores of the Polar Sea; we discussed the difficulties to be overcome and the precautions to be taken against the severe climate, the attacks of wild beasts, and the dwindling of provisions. The great man said to me: “If I were younger, I would go with you and spare myself the sight of all the crimes, betrayals, and insanities of Paris. But at my age a man must die wherever he happens to be. Don’t forget to write me by every ship, and keep me abreast of your progress and your discoveries: I will show them to the ministers. It’s only too bad you don’t know a thing about botany!”
After a conversation such as this, I would leaf through Tournefort, Duhamel, Bernard de Jussieu, Grew, Jacquin, Rousseau’s Dictionary, and the Flores Élémentaires; I would rush to the Jardin du Roi, and soon considered myself a second Linnaeus.
Finally, in January 1791, I made up my mind in all seriousness. The chaos was intensifying. It was enough to bear an “aristocratic” name to be exposed to persecution: the more conscientious and moderate your opinions, the more suspect and prone to attack. I therefore resolved to strike my tent: I left my brother and sisters in Paris and made my way toward Brittany.
In Fougères I met the Marquis de la Rouërie and asked him for a letter of introduction to General Washington.[19] “Colonel Armand” (the name that the marquis was given in America) had distinguished himself in the American War of Independence. He was to become famous, in France, for his part in the Royalist conspiracy that made such poignant victims in the Désilles family. Having died while organizing this conspiracy, he was exhumed, identified, and caused misfortune to his hosts and friends. A rival of Lafayette and Lauzun, a forerunner of La Rochejaquelin, the Marquis de la Rouërie was more spirited than any of those men: he had fought more battles than the first; he had seduced as many Opéra actresses as the second; and he would have become the comrade-in-arms of the third. He used to go foraging with an American major in the woods of Brittany, accompanied by a monkey that perched on his horse’s rump. The law students of Rennes loved him for the boldness of his actions and the liberality of his ideas: he had been one of the twelve Breton gentlemen imprisoned in the Bastille. He was elegantly tall, well mannered, honest-looking, handsome, and bore a striking resemblance to the portraits of the young lords of the League.
I decided to embark from Saint-Malo, in order to embrace my mother. I have already said in the third book of these Memoirs how I passed through Combourg and what feelings oppressed me there: I stayed for two months in Saint-Malo, busy with preparations for my voyage, as I had done years earlier when I planned to go to India.
I struck a deal with a captain named Desjardins: he would take me as far as Baltimore with Abbé Nagot and several of the seminary students placed under his care. These traveling companions would have been better suited to me four years prior: I had since gone from being a Christian zealot to a freethinker, which is to say a very vacant thinker indeed. This change in my religious convictions came from the reading of philosophical books. Now I believed, in good faith, that a religious mind was partly paralyzed—that there were truths which would always escape it, no matter how superior it might be in other respects. This self-righteous arrogance led me to suppose that the religious mind suffered from a deficiency, which is exactly the deficiency suffered by the philosophical mind: a limited intelligence thinks it can see everything because it keeps its eyes open; a superior intelligence consents to close it eyes, for it perceives that everything is within. Finally, one other thing brought about the change in my thinking, and that was the bottomless despair I carried with me in the depths of my heart.
A letter from my brother has fixed the date of my departure in my memory. He wrote to my mother from Paris, informing her of Mirabeau’s death. Three days after the arrival of this letter, I went to board my ship in the harbor. My luggage was already stowed. We weighed anchor: a solemn moment among sailors. The sun was setting when the coast guard left us, having led us through the channels. The sky was dark, the breeze soft, and the waves beat heavily against the reefs only a few cable-lengths from the ship.
My eyes remained fixed on Saint-Malo; I had just left my mother there in tears. I could still make out the steeples and the domes of the churches where I had prayed with Lucile; the walls, the ramparts, the forts, the towers, and the beaches where I had spent my childhood with Gesril and my other companions. I was abandoning my fractured country at the very moment she had lost a man whom no one could replace; I was going away as uncertain about what destiny had in store for my homeland as for myself. Who would be lost to France, or to me? Would I ever see France or my family again?
As night fell, we were becalmed at the mouth of the roadstead; the beacons and the fires of town were kindled: those bright shapes that had glimmered beneath my father’s roof seemed simultaneously to smile at me and bid me farewell, lighting my way among the rocks, through the shadows of the night and the darkness of the waves.
I was taking nothing with me but my youth and my illusions; I was deserting a world whose dust I had trampled and whose stars I had counted for a world where the soil and the sky were unknown to me. What would have happened to me if by some chance I had reached my journey’s end? Bewildered on the hyperborean shores, the years of discord that have crashed over so many generations with so much noise would have broken in silence over my head. Society would have renovated its face in my absence. Probably I would never have had the misfortune to write. My name would have remained obscure, or it would have been linked with one of those quiet, less-than-glorious reputations which are disdained by envy and left in peace. Who knows if I would ever have re-crossed the Atlantic, or if I might not have settled a place in the vast solitudes, explored and discovered at my risk and peril, like a conqueror among his conquests?
But no! I would have to return to my country, to a change of misery, and I would then be something different from what I had been. The sea, in whose lap I was born, would be the cradle of my second life. I was carried by her, on my first voyage, as if at my nurse’s breast—as if in the arms of the first being who shared my pleasures and my tears.
The ebb tide, in the absence of a breeze, tugged us out to sea, and the lights on the shoreline dwindled little by little until they disappeared. Exhausted by reflections, vague regrets, and still vaguer hopes, I went down to my cabin: I lay swaying in my hammock to the noise of the waves that lapped against the ship’s side. The wind rose, the unfurled sails that had hung flapping from the masts began to swell, and, when I climbed on deck the next morning, the land of France was nowhere to be seen.
Here my destinies changed. As Byron says: Encore à la mer! Again to sea![20]