London, April to September 1822
THESE conversations between me and the illustrious defender of the King took place at my sister-in-law’s house. She had just given birth to her second son, to whom M. de Malesherbes, the child’s godfather, gave the name Christian. I was present at the baptism of this boy, who would only know his mother and father at an age when life has no memories and which seems, at a distance, like a vague and shapeless dream. The preparations for my departure were meanwhile dragging on. My family had thought they were making me a wealthy marriage; they now discovered that my wife’s fortune was invested in Church securities, which the nation undertook to pay in its own fashion. Madame de Chateaubriand, moreover, had lent the scrip of the larger part of these securities to her sister, the Comtesse du Plessix-Parscau, who had already emigrated. There was still no money to be had. It would thus be necessary to borrow.
A notary procured ten thousand francs for us, and I was taking them home in assignats to the Cul-de-Sac Férou when I bumped into my old friend from the Navarre Regiment in the rue de Richelieu. This man, the Comte Achard, was a great gambler. He proposed that we go to the rooms of Monsieur X—, where we could chat. The devil pushed me onward. I went upstairs, gambled, and lost all but fifteen hundred francs, with which, full of remorse and confusion, I climbed into the first carriage that came along. I had never gambled in my life: the game had produced a sort of painful intoxication in me. I have no doubt that, if this passion had really taken hold of me, it would have conquered my brain. As it was, my mind was still half-deranged when I left the cab at Saint-Sulpice, and I forgot my pocketbook, which contained the residue of my former wealth. I rushed home to tell my family that I had left all 10,000 francs in the cab.
I went back out, turned down the rue Dauphine, crossed the Pont-Neuf, feeling tempted to throw myself in the Seine, and made my way to the Place du Palais-Royal, where I had climbed into the cursed vehicle. I questioned a few Savoyards busy watering the nags, described my cab to them, and was given a number seemingly at random. The commissaire de police of the quarter informed me that this number belonged to a coach-master who lived at the top of the Faubourg Saint-Denis. I hurried to this man’s house, where I stayed all night in the stables waiting for the cabs to return. A great number of them arrived one after another, but none of them was mine. Finally, at two in the morning, I saw my chariot come rolling in. I barely had time to recognize my two white steeds before the poor beasts, whipped to pieces, let themselves collapse, spent, on the straw, their bellies dis-tended and their legs splayed out as if dead.
The coachman remembered having driven me. After me, he had picked up a citizen who had asked to be taken down to the Jacobins; after the citizen, a lady whom he had brought to rue de Cléry, no. 13; after the lady, a man whom he had let out at the Recollects in the rue Saint-Martin. I promised the coachman a tip, and there I was, the moment day began to break, setting out to discover my fifteen hundred francs as though in search of the Northwest Passage. It seemed clear to me that the citizen had confiscated them by rights of his sovereignty, for the young lady of the rue de Cléry assured me that she had seen nothing in the cab. I arrived at my third stop feeling hopeless. The coachman had given me, as best he could, a description of the man he had driven. I repeated it, and the porter exclaimed, “Oh, that’s Father So-and-so!”
He led me through a series of hallways, past abandoned apartments, to the rooms of a Recollect who had stayed behind alone in order to make an inventory of the furniture of his monastery. This monk, in his dusty frockcoat, sitting on a heap of ruins, listened to the story that I had to tell him.
“Are you,” he asked me, “the Chevalier de Chateaubriand?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Here is your pocketbook,” he said. “I was going to bring it to you when the day’s work was done. I found your address inside.”
It was this hunted and despoiled monk, conscientiously counting up the relics of his cloister for the sake of those that had outlawed him, who restored me the fifteen hundred francs with which I would make my way toward exile. Without this small sum, I would never have emigrated, and what would have happened to me then? Everything in my life would have been different. I would be hanged today before I’d move a single step to recover a million.
Thus passed June 16, 1792.
•
Loyal to my instincts, I had come back from America to offer my sword to Louis XVI, not to involve myself in party intrigues. The disbanding of the new Royal Guard, in which Murat had served; the ministries of Roland, Dumouriez, and Duport du Tertre following one after another; the minor conspiracies of the Court, and the great popular uprisings—I was bored and contemptuous of all these events. I heard endless gossip about Madame Roland, but I never laid eyes on her; her Memoirs prove that she possessed an extraordinary strength of mind. She was rumored to be pleasant company, but I doubt whether she was pleasant enough to make the cynicism of her unnatural virtues tolerable. Certainly a woman who, at the foot of the guillotine, requests pen and ink to record the last moments of her journey, to jot down the discoveries she has made from the Conciergerie to the Place de la Révolution—such a woman shows a preoccupation with the future, and a disdain for life, of which there are few examples. But Madame Roland was a woman of character rather than of genius: the first may grant a person the second, but the second does not guarantee the first.
On June 19, I had gone to the valley of Montmorency, to visit J.-J. Rousseau’s Hermitage, not because it pleased me to remember Madame d’Épinay and all that depraved and artificial group, but because I wanted to say goodbye to the solitary retreat of a man who, although his morals and manners were antipathetic to mine, was endowed with a talent whose outpourings had stirred my youth. The next day, June 20, I was still at the Hermitage, and there, strolling in that wild place, on that day which would be fatal to the monarchy, I saw two men indifferent, as I thought they were and ever would be, to the affairs of the world: the one was M. Maret of the Empire, the other M. Barère of the Republic.[17] The gentle Barère had come far from the noise, as befitted his sentimental philosophy, to recite little Revolutionary sonnets to the shade of Rousseau’s Julie. The troubadour of the guillotine, on whose report the Convention declared that “Terror was the order of the day,” escaped from this same Terror by hiding himself in a basket of heads. From the bottom of this bloody vessel, he could be heard croaking: Death! Death! Barère must have been of that species of tigers which Oppian said were engendered by the light breath of the wind: velocis Zephyri proles.[18]
Ginguené and Chamfort, my old friends the men of letters, were delighted by the events of June 20. La Harpe, in the middle of his lectures at the Lycée, shouted in stentorian voice:
“Madmen! You replied to every protest that the people made with Bayonets! Bayonets! Well! Here are your bayonets!”
Though my voyage to America had made me a less insignificant personage in Paris, I was unable to rise to such transcendent heights of principle and eloquence. Fontanes’s life was in danger because of his former connection with the Société Monarchique. My brother was a member of a club of Enragés. The Prussians were on the march after an agreement made between the Cabinets of Vienna and Berlin, and already some rather heated skirmishes had taken place between the French and the Austrians, near Mons. It was high time for me to make a decision.
My brother and I procured two forged passports for Lille. We would be two wine merchants and National Guards of Paris (whose uniforms we wore) on our way to sign contracts to provision the Republican army. My brother’s footman, Louis Poullain, nicknamed “Saint Louis,” would be traveling under his own name: although from Lamballe, in Lower Brittany, he would be going to see relatives in Flanders. The day of our emigration was to be July 15, 1792, the day after the second Federation. We spent the Fourteenth in Tivoli Gardens with the Rosambo family, my sisters, and my wife. Tivoli then belonged to M. Boutin, whose daughter had married M. de Malesherbes. Late in the afternoon, we caught sight of a large number of Federalists wandering over the grounds, their hats chalked with the phrase “Pétion or Death!” Tivoli, the point of my departure into exile, would soon be a rendezvous for games and gatherings. Our relatives parted from us without any sad farewells; they were convinced that we were going on a pleasure trip. I was convinced that the 1,500 francs I had recovered would be more than enough to bring me back to Paris in triumph.