London, April to September 1822;
Revised in December 1846
I WROTE to my brother in Paris, relating the details of my crossing, explaining the reasons for my return, and imploring him to lend me the sum I needed to pay my passage.[1] My brother replied to me by forwarding this letter to my mother. Madame de Chateaubriand did not make me wait; she put me in a position to pay off my debts and leave Le Havre at once. She wrote to tell me that Lucile and my uncle de Bedée’s family were beside her. These particulars decided me to go to Saint-Malo, where I could consult my uncle on the question of my impending emigration.
Revolutions, like rivers, widen as they flow. I found the one I had left in France enormously enlarged and overflowing its banks. I had gone away from it with Mirabeau under the Constituent, and now I found it with Danton under the Legislative.
The treaty of Pillnitz, signed August 27, 1791, had been the talk of Paris. On December 14, 1791, while I was being tossed by storms at sea, the King announced that he had written to the Princes of the Germanic Corps (notably to the elector of Trèves) about Germany’s armaments. Louis XVI’s brothers, the Prince de Condé, M. de Calonne, the Vicomte de Mirabeau, and M. de La Queuille were almost immediately accused of treason. On November 9, a previous decree had attacked the other émigrés. It was in these already proscribed ranks that I hastened to install myself. Others perhaps would have recoiled, but the threats of the strongest always make me take the side of the weakest; to me, the pride of victory is insupportable.
On my way from Le Havre to Saint-Malo, I had a chance to observe the divisions and misfortunes of France for myself. Houses had been burned to the ground or abandoned. Their rightful owners had been sent distaffs and were gone;[2] the women had sought refuge in the towns. Hamlets and villages groaned under the tyranny of clubs affiliated with the central Club des Cordeliers, which would later be joined with the Club des Jacobins. The opposition—the Société Monarchique and the Société des Feuillants—no longer existed. The ignoble denomination of sans-culottes had become popular. The King was never called anything but Monsieur Veto or Monsieur Capet.
I was warmly welcomed by my mother and the rest of my family, who nevertheless deplored the bad timing of my return. My uncle, the Comte de Bedée, was arranging to emigrate to Jersey with his wife, his sons, and his daughters. Now there was also the matter of finding me the money to go join the Princes. My American voyage had made a gaping hole in my inheritance. My income as a younger son had been reduced almost to nothing by the suppression of feudal rights, and the small benefices that would have devolved to me as a member of the Order of Malta had fallen, together with all the other possessions of the clergy, into the hands of the nation. This concurrence of circumstances decided the gravest act of my life: I was married off, to procure me the means to go get killed for a cause that I did not love.
There lived in Saint-Malo one M. de Lavigne, Chevalier de St. Louis, who had formerly been the Commandant of Lorient. The Comte d’Artois had once been a guest at Lavigne’s house in Lorient when he visited Brittany, and the prince was so charmed by his host that he promised to grant him whatever favor he might later request.
This M. de Lavigne had two sons: one of them married Mademoiselle de La Placelière. Two daughters, the children of this marriage, were orphaned by their mother and father at a tender age. The eldest married the naval captain Comte du Plessis-Parscau, a son and grandson of admirals who today is a rear admiral and a commander at the Naval Academy in Brest; the youngest still lived with her grandfather. She was seventeen years old when, on my return from America, I arrived in Saint-Malo. She was pale, delicate, thin, and very pretty; she let her lovely blond hair hang down, like a child, in its natural curls. Her fortune was estimated to be five or six hundred thousand francs.
My sisters took it in their heads to make me marry Mademoiselle de Lavigne, who was strongly attached to Lucile. This business was conducted unbeknownst to me. I had set eyes on Mademoiselle de Lavigne no more than three or four times: I picked her out of the distant crowd on Le Sillon by her pink pelisse, her white dress, and her blond locks tangled by the wind, as I strolled along the beach, abandoning myself to the caresses of my old mistress, the sea. I did not feel myself ready to be a husband. All my illusions were vivid still; none had faded from me. If anything, my wanderings had doubled the very energy of my existence. I was tormented by the Muse. But Lucile loved Mademoiselle de Lavigne and saw the marriage as a means for me to acquire an independent fortune. “So be it!” said I. For if the public man in me is unshakable, the private man is at the mercy of whosoever wants to sway him, and in order to avoid the quarrel of an hour, I would sell myself into slavery for a century.
The consent of her grandfather, her paternal uncle, and her other principal relations was easily obtained. Only a maternal uncle, a committed democrat named M. de Vauvert, could not be convinced, for he was opposed to his niece marrying an aristocrat like me, even if I wasn’t one at all. It was decided that the marriage should proceed without him, but my pious mother demanded that the religious ceremony be performed by a “non-juring” priest, which could only be done in secret. When M. de Vauvert got wind of this, he sicced the magistracy on us under the pretext of rape and violation of the law, contending that my fiancée’s grandfather, M. de Lavigne, had fallen into his second childhood. Mademoiselle de Lavigne, who had become Madame de Chateaubriand without my having spoken a word to her, was taken away in the name of justice and placed in the convent of La Victoire in Saint-Malo to await the decision of the courts.
There was no rape, no violation of the law, no adventure, and no love in any of this. My marriage had nothing but the disagreeable side of a novel: the truth. The case was pleaded, and the court judged the union legally valid. Seeing that the members of the two families were in agreement, M. de Vauvert withdrew his charges. The constitutional curate, lavishly bribed, no longer made a claim against the first nuptial blessing, and so Madame de Chateaubriand left the convent, where Lucile had been locked up with her.
I now had a new acquaintance to make, and she brought me everything I could desire. I doubt whether a keener mind than my wife’s has ever existed. She divines the thoughts and words of the people with whom she speaks as though these things were written on their brows. To deceive her in anything is impossible. Original and cultivated in her thinking, mordant in her writing, and a marvelous storyteller, Madame de Chateaubriand admires me without ever having read two lines of my work. She would dread finding ideas not her own in these pages, or discovering that the world has received me with less enthusiasm than I deserve. Although a passionate critic, she is learned and fair.
Madame de Chateaubriand’s defects, if she has any, stem from the superabundance of her good qualities; my very real defects result from the sterility of mine. It is easy to be resigned, patient, generally obliging and serene, when you don’t take to anything, you’re bored by everything, and you reply to bad luck and good luck alike with a desperate and despairing: “Well, what does it matter?”
Madame de Chateaubriand is better than I am, although she is less congenial company. Have I acted blamelessly toward her? Have I granted my companion all the feelings that she deserved and that were owed to her? Has she ever complained of this? What happiness has she tasted in return for her unfailing affection? She has suffered my adversities; she was plunged into the dungeons of the Terror, the persecutions of the Empire, the disgraces of the Restoration, and she has not had the joys of motherhood to counterbalance these sorrows. Without children, which she might have had in another marriage, and which she would have loved to distraction; without those honors and affections that come to the mother of a family and console her for the loss of her best years, she has proceeded, barren and alone, toward old age. Often separated from me, and averse to literature, the pride of bearing my name is hardly a compensation. Timorous and trembling for me alone, her incessantly resurgent anxieties rob her of sleep and of the time needed to recover from her illnesses: I am her chronic infirmity and the cause of her relapses. How can I compare the few little signs of irritation she has shown me to all the worries I have caused her over the years? How can I set my good qualities, such as they are, against her many virtues? She feeds the poor; she has helped establish the Marie-Thérèse Infirmary despite every obstacle. What are my labors beside these Christian good works? When the two of us appear before God, it is I who will be condemned.
All in all, when I consider the complexion and the imperfection of my nature, is it certain that marriage has spoiled my life? No doubt I would have enjoyed more leisure and rest; I would have been better received in certain circles and by certain great men of the earth; but in politics, though Madame de Chateaubriand has contradicted me, she has never held me back, for in political matters, as in matters of honor, I make my judgments based solely on my own feelings. Would I have produced a greater number of works if I had remained independent, and would these works have been better? Have there not been circumstances, as we shall soon see, where I might have married outside of France, ceased to write, and renounced my country? Yet if I hadn’t married, wouldn’t my weakness have made me prey to some undignified creature? Wouldn’t I have wasted and polluted my days like Lord Byron? Now that I’m sinking into old age, all my follies would be behind me; I would have nothing before me but emptiness and regrets: I would be an undignified old bachelor, deluded or un-deluded, an old bird repeating his worn-out song to ears that do not hear. The full indulgence of my desires wouldn’t have added another string to my lyre or a more poignant tone to my voice. The restraint of my feelings and the mystery of my thoughts may even perhaps have augmented the energy of my tongue and animated my works with an internal fever, a hidden flame that might have been blown out in the open air of love. Held fast by an indissoluble bond, I bought the sweet pleasures I taste today for the price of a short-lived bitterness: I retain only the incurable miseries of my existence. I therefore owe a tender and eternal debt of gratitude to my wife, whose fondness for me has been as touching as it has been deep and sincere. She has made my life more serious, more noble, and more honorable, and she always inspires me with a respect for, if not always the strength to perform, my duties.