London, April to September 1822
BRUSSELS was the headquarters of the High Emigration. The most elegant women of Paris and the most fashionable men—those who wouldn’t march except as aides-de-camp—were waiting in the lap of luxury for victory to arrive. The men wore handsome, newly bought uniforms and paraded them in all the rigor of their frivolity. In a matter of days they ate up considerable sums that could have sustained them for several years; but then, it wasn’t worth the trouble of economizing, since any day now they would find themselves back in Paris again. These brilliant knights were preparing for success on the battlefield by success in love: just the reverse of the old chivalry. They looked down disdainfully on all of us little gentlemen from the provinces and poor officers turned soldiers, tramping around afoot with rucksacks on our backs. At the feet of their Omphales, these Herculeans twirled the distaffs that they had sent us and that we returned to them the moment we arrived, contenting ourselves with our swords.[21]
In Brussels I found my trifling baggage, which had been smuggled there before me: it consisted of my uniform from the Navarre Regiment packed in with a few changes of linen and my precious manuscripts, from which I would not be parted. My brother and I were invited to dine at the Baron de Breteuil’s house, where I met the Baroness de Montmorency, then young and beautiful, and who is dying today; martyred bishops in mohair cassocks and gold crosses; young magistrates transformed into Hungarian colonels; and Rivarol, hom I saw only this once in my life. No one had mentioned his name, but I was struck by the language of this man who soliloquized at length and was listened to, with some reason, as though he were an oracle. Rivarol’s wit harmed his talents, as his words harmed the works of his pen. About revolutions, he said: “The first blow carries to God’s ear; the second strikes but a senseless slab of marble.”
By that time, I had resumed the shabby dress of an infantry sub-lieutenant. I was to depart at the end of dinner. My rucksack was behind the door. I was still bronzed by the American sun and the sea air. I wore my hair straight and unpowdered. Both my face and my silence bothered Rivarol, and the Baron de Breteuil, seeing his vexed curiosity, made to satisfy it. “Where is your brother the Chevalier coming from?” he asked my brother.
I replied, “From Niagara.”
Rivarol burst in: “From a waterfall!”
I fell silent.
He hazarded the beginning of a question: “Monsieur is going . . . ?”
“Where men are fighting,” I said, cutting him off.
We all stood up from the table.
These smug émigrés were odious to me. I couldn’t wait to meet my peers: émigrés with six hundred livres in income like myself. We were quite stupid no doubt, but at least our rapiers were at the ready, and, even if we had been successful, we never would have profited from the victory.
In the end, my brother stayed behind in Brussels with the Baron de Montboissier, who appointed him his aide-de-camp, and I set off alone for Coblenz.
Nothing is more historic than the route I followed; every place along the way recalled some memory or some splendid triumph of France. I passed through Liège, one of those municipal republics that rose so many times against its bishops and against the Counts of Flanders. Louis XI, an ally of the Liégois, was once obliged to help sack their city in order to escape his ridiculous imprisonment in Péronne.[22]
I was going to join ranks with men of war who sought glory in similar things. But in 1792, the relations between Liège and France were more peaceable: every year, the Abbé de Saint-Hubert was obliged to send two hunting dogs to the successors of King Dagobert.
In Aix-la-Chapelle, another gift, but from France. The mortuary sheet used in the burial of a truly Christian monarch had been sent there, to Charlemagne’s tomb, like a liege’s flag sent to the ruling fief.[23] Our Kings thus lent fealty and homage by taking possession of this heirloom of Eternity; they swore an oath of loyalty between the knees of Death, their Lady, and gave her a feudal kiss on the mouth: this was the sole suzerainty to which France considered itself a vassal. The cathedral of Aix-la-Chapelle was built by Charlemagne and consecrated by Leo III. Two prelates, having gone missing from the ceremony, were replaced by two bishops from Maastricht who had been dead for centuries and resurrected expressly for this purpose. Charlemagne, having lost a beautiful mistress, held her dead body in his arms and refused to be separated from it. His passion was attributed to a charm: the young corpse was examined and a small pearl was found beneath her tongue. The pearl was thrown into a marsh. Charlemagne, now madly in love with the marsh, ordered it drained, and in its place he built a palace and a church. In the first, he would spend his life; in the second, his death. The authorities here are Archbishop Turpin and Petrarch.[24]
In Cologne, I admired the cathedral. Had it been completed, it would have been the most magnificent Gothic building in Europe. The monks were the painters, the sculptors, the architects, and the masons of their basilica; they gloried in the title of caementarius, or “master mason.”
It is curious today to hear ignorant philosophers and blustery democrats rail against religion, as if those frocked proletarians and mendicant orders to whom we owe almost everything had been gentlemen.
Cologne put me in mind of Caligula and Saint Bruno: in my life, I have seen the remains of the dykes built by the former at Baiae and the empty cell of the second at the Grand Chartreuse.
I traveled up the Rhine as far as Coblentz (Confluentia), but the Army of Princes was no longer there. I crossed those ancient empty kingdoms, inania regna,[25] and saw that beautiful Rhine valley, the Temple of the Barbarian Muses, where ghostly knights once loomed around the ruined castles, and where at night one heard the clash of arms, whenever wartime was at hand.
Somewhere between Coblentz and Trèves, I fell in with the Prussian Army. I was making my way along the column of soldiers when, coming near the Guards, I saw that they were marching in battle formation with cannon in line. The King and the Duke of Brunswick occupied the center of the square formed by the men who had once been Frederick’s grenadiers. My white uniform caught the King’s eye, and he sent for me. He and the Duke of Brunswick doffed their hats and saluted the old French Army in my person. They asked my name, my regiment, and where I was bound. Their military welcome touched me, and I replied with great emotion that, having learned in America of the King’s misfortune, I had returned to shed my blood in his service. The officers and generals who surrounded Frederick William gave a general murmur of approval, and the Prussian monarch said to me, “Monsieur, one can always recognize the sentiments of the French nobility.”
He doffed his hat once more, and remained that way, uncovered and unmoving, until I had disappeared behind the mass of grenadiers. People now condemn the émigrés and say we were nothing but “a pack of tigers who clawed at their mother’s breast”; but in the epoch of which I am speaking, a man held fast to the old examples, and honor counted just as much as country. In 1792, loyalty to oaths was still seen as a duty; today, it has become so rare it is regarded as a virtue.
A bizarre exchange, which had already happened many times to others, almost forced me to turn back. I was refused admittance in Trèves, where the Army of Princes had already arrived: I was told I was “one of those men who wait for events to decide his future”; that I “ought to have been in camp three years ago”; that I was “arriving when victory was certain and my services were no longer needed”; that they “already had plenty of brave men ready to fight; whole cavalry squadrons were deserting every day, and even the artillery was leaving en masse, and, if this exodus continued, no one would know what to do with all these new men. . . .”
What a wonderful partisan delusion!
I found my cousin Armand de Chateaubriand, who took me under his wing and called a meeting of Bretons to plead my case. I was summoned and made to explain myself. I said that I had come back from America to have the honor of serving with my comrades, that the campaign was opened but not yet begun, and that I was still in time to face the first fire. Finally, I said that I would leave if they insisted, but only after I had been told the reasons for such an un-merited insult. The matter was soon settled. As I was a good fellow, the ranks opened to receive me, and I had nothing less than an embarrassment of choices.