London, April to September 1822
ON JULY 15, at six o’clock in the morning, we climbed into the diligence. My brother and I had secured our places in the cabriolet, beside the driver; the footman, whom we were supposed not to know, ensconced himself in the carriage among the other passengers. Now, I have not yet said that Saint Louis was a sleepwalker. In Paris he used to go looking for his master at night, eyes open, but sound asleep. He would undress my brother, put him to bed, all the while dozing and replying to everything that was said to him during these attacks: I know, I know. There was no way to wake him except to throw cold water in his face. He was a man of about forty, nearly six feet tall, and as ugly as he was large. This poor and extremely respectful servant had never worked for any master but my brother, and he was very troubled when he sat down to supper with us at the same table. The other passengers, all great patriots, were talking about hanging aristocrats from lampposts, which made him still more anxious. The idea that, at the end of all this, he would be obliged to brave the Austrian army and go fight for the Army of Princes must have completed his derangement. He drank a great deal and climbed back into the coach. My brother and I resumed our places in the cabriolet.
In the middle of the night, we heard the passengers shouting, sticking their heads through the carriage door: “Stop, postilion, stop!”
We stopped. The carriage door was thrown open and out came a clamor of male and female voices: “Out, citizen, out! You can’t stay here, you swine! Get out! He’s a brigand! Out! Out!”
We got out also and saw poor befuddled Saint Louis, who had been ejected from the coach, rise to his feet, look around him with wide-open, fast asleep eyes, and then set off at full tilt, and without his hat, in the direction of Paris. We could not call to him, for we would have betrayed ourselves: he had to be abandoned to his fate. Stopped and apprehended at the first village he entered, he declared that he was the servant of M. le Comte de Chateaubriand and that he lived in Paris in the rue de Bondy. The police transferred him from one brigade to another until he reached the house of President Rosambo. The deposition of this unlucky man was enough to prove that we had emigrated and to send my brother and his wife, by and by, to the scaffold.
The next morning, when the diligence stopped for breakfast, we had to hear the story of Saint Louis twenty times over.
“The man’s mind was disturbed,” they said. “He dreamed aloud and said such strange things. He was without doubt a conspirator, probably a murderer fleeing justice.”
The well-mannered lady citizens blushed and fluttered large green “Constitutional” fans.[19] We easily recognized in their accounts the effects of somnambulism, fear, and wine.
On arriving in Lille, we went to find the person who was to take us across the border. The Emigration had many agents of protection, who turned out in the end to be agents of perdition. The monarchical party was still powerful, the question undecided; the weak and the cowardly served it while they awaited the results.
We were gone from Lille before the gates were shut. We stopped at an isolated farmhouse and did not resume our journey until ten at night, when the sky was completely dark. We carried nothing with us except our walking sticks: it had been less than a year since I had followed my Dutchman through the American forests in this same manner.
We followed winding paths lightly traced across the wheatfields. French and Austrian patrols were scouring the countryside. At any moment, we could fall into the hands of one or the other, or find ourselves in range of a mounted sentry’s pistol. We caught glimpses of solitary horsemen in the distance, motionless, shouldering a gun. We heard the tread of horses in sunken lanes. Putting our ears to the earth, we listened to the steady sound of an infantry unit on the march. After three hours, sometimes running, sometimes going slowly on tiptoe, we arrived at a crossroads deep in the woods where a few nightingales belatedly sang. All of a sudden a company of soldiers ambushed us with sabers drawn. We cried out, “Officers come to join the Princes!” We asked to be taken to Tournay and declared that we had means of proving that we were who we claimed to be. The company commander positioned us between his horsemen and led us away.
When day dawned, the men caught sight of the National Guard uniforms we wore beneath our great coats, and they insulted the colors that France would make a subjugated Europe wear.
It was in Tournaisis, the ancient kingdom of the Franks, that Clovis resided during the first years of his reign. He left Tournay with his companions, called as he was to conquer the Gauls. “Arms claim every right for themselves,” Tacitus says. It was through this same city, which the first king of the first race left in 486, to found a powerful and lasting monarchy, that I passed in 1792, to join the princes of the third race on a foreign soil, and passed again in 1815, when the last King of the French abandoned the kingdom of the first King of the Franks: omnia migrant.[20]
On arriving in Tournay, I left my brother to contend with the authorities while I visited the cathedral in the custody of a soldier. In the old days, Odon d’Orléans, a scholastic of this cathedral, sat all night under the portal of the church, teaching his disciples the paths of the stars and pointing out the Milky Way and the constellations with his finger: I would much rather have found that simple eleventh-century astronomer in Tournay than the Pandours. I am enchanted by those days when, so the chronicles tell me, in an entry for the year 1049, a Norman man was metamorphosed into an ass: exactly what was thought to have happened to me when I was taken to the house of those hunchbacked Couppart sisters who first tried to teach me and my sister to read. In 1114, Hildebert records the existence of a girl who had wheatstalks growing from her ears: perhaps she was Ceres. The River Meuse, which I was about to cross, was seen suspended midair in 1118: Guillaume de Nangis and Albéric were there to witness it. Rigord assures us that in the year 1194, between Compiègne and Clermont-en-Beauvoisis, a storm of hail and crows fell upon the earth, dropping coals that set every thing they touched on fire. If no storm, Gervais of Tilbury tells us, was able to blow out a candle above the window of the Priory of Saint-Michel de Camissa, we also know, from the same source, that in the diocese of Uzès there was a pure and beautiful spring that changed location whenever any unclean thing was tossed into it. Consciences today are not so easily troubled.
—Reader, I swear, I’m not wasting time; I’m simply making conversation while we patiently wait for my brother to finish his negotiations. Ah! Here he is now. He has explained everything to the satisfaction of the Austrian commander, who has given us permission to travel on to Brussels. It is an exile purchased with too much care.