Notes

[1] In Latin, in Chateaubriand’s hand: “Sicut nubes. . . quasi naves. . . velut umbra.” These three quotations are from three non-consecutive chapters of the Book of Job, 30:15 (“Terrors are turned upon me: they pursue my soul as the wind: and my welfare passeth away as a cloud”), 9:26 (“They are passed away as the swift ships: as the eagle that hasteth to the prey”), and 14:2 (“He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not”).

[2] In the 1830s, Chateaubriand fell deeply in debt. Knowing that he did not want the Memoirs published until fifty years after his death, no publisher would offer him an advance. Then, in February–March 1834, Chateaubriand’s longtime mistress and ally, Madame Récamier, organized three weeks of private readings, which were held in her rooms in the Abbaye-aux-Bois, near the rue de Sèvres, in Paris. A small group of carefully selected guests had been invited. These readings were so well received that Chateaubriand soon after agreed to let several chapters of the Memoirs appear in journals and reviews. But the money earned from these pieces was not enough to sustain him.

In 1836, again with Madame de Récamier’s help, a society of shareholders was formed around the booksellers H.-L. Delloye and Adolphe Sala. This society sold shares in Chateaubriand’s Memoirs, providing him with an immediate payment of 155,000 francs and a lifetime annuity of 12,000 francs, which was raised to 25,000 francs after the publication of his successful Congrès de Vérone. “In effect,” as Paul Auster sums up this bizarre situation in his novel The Book of Illusions, “Chateaubriand mortgaged his autobiography to finance his old age.”

[3] The word translated as “troubles” here is ennuis, a sort of keyword in Chateaubriand’s writing (and life). “Ennui is my element,” Chateaubriand once wrote his friend the Comte de Marcellus; “I began to be bored [m’ennuyer] in my mother’s womb, and since then I have never been anything but bored [dèsennuyé.”

BOOK ONE

[1] “Cut your long hopes down to the brief space of life.” Horace’s Odes, Book 1, Poem 11.

[2] Literally, “I scatter gold” or “I sow gold,” though also, in a sense probably unintended in the eleventh century, “I squander gold.”

[3] Red, as one of the heraldic colors.

[4] “To him and his heirs, Saint Louis, King of the French, for his valor in battle, conferred golden fleurs-de-lys placed beside the golden pine-cones.”

[5] In other words, the members of Chateaubriand’s immediate family.

[6] Malesherbes (b. 1721), a lawyer, a statesman, and a correspondent of J.-J. Rousseau, was a mentor to the young Chateaubriand, whom he encouraged to travel to America. In the 1750s and ’60s, he advocated for the publication of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia. As Secretary of State of the Maison du Roi, he rallied for the freedom of the press and the emancipation of Protestants and Jews. In 1792, he had the misfortune to defend Louis XVI at his trial. All Malesherbes’s Republican sympathies and Enlightenment credentials couldn’t save him from the Terror. On April 23, 1794, he was guillotined along with several members of his family, including his daughter and her husband, Chateaubriand’s brother, Jean-Baptiste.

[7] “No stranger to misfortune, I have learned to help the wretched,” Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 1, line 630.

[8] Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Commentaries on the Gallic War), Book 3, Chapter 7.

[9] Cedron, a ravine east of the Old City of Jerusalem, between the Temple Mount and the Mount of Olives, is the site of one of the earliest Christian monasteries, founded by Saint Sabbas in 483 CE.

[10] La Chatolais (1701–1785), a French nobleman and jurist, was arrested in 1765 for conspiring against Louis XV. During the La Chatolais affair (now usually called “the Brittany Affair”) he was imprisoned in the Château de Saint-Malo, where he wrote his Memoirs with a toothpick dipped in a mixture of water and soot.

[11] “I would like to speak with you, my mind: / You have some faults I cannot hide.” Nicolas Boileau’s “À Mon Esprit.”

[12] Monsieur Després’s insult in the original is tête d’achôcre. This phrase is still used in parts of Brittany and Normandy to describe a klutz, a know-nothing, a boor, a brute. It probably has no etymological connection with the quasi-homophonic Greek word Άχώρ, meaning dandruff, as Chateaubriand seems to think, nor with the French word gourme, which most immediately refers to “strangles” or “equine distemper” (a bacterial disease that affects young horses) but has various other connotations: a snot-nosed kid, a scab-picker, a dunderhead.

[13] In English, “the Furrow.”

[14] Dante’s Paradiso Canto 17, lines 58–65, 67–69.

[15] The Notitia Imperii, or Notitia dignitatum imperii Romani, is a Roman government document of the fourth or fifth century CE, containing detailed information about the empire’s provinces, officials, and the locations of its military forces.

[16] “in sight of Tenedos.” Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 2, lines 21–22.

[17] “on the lands of Machutis.”

[18] “Asylum, which in this city is most inviolable.”

[19] Minihi is a Breton word meaning “sanctified.” The minihis of Brittany were places consecrated by a saint and therefore considered beyond the reach of human law. Criminals who sought asylum within them could not be arrested. Some of these places were quite large: the city of Saint-Malo, which had been visited by several saints, was considered one long minihi.

[20] Gilles de Bretagne, a Baron de Chateaubriand and a Prince of Brittany, was the son of Jean V of Brittany and Jeanne de France, the daughter of King Charles VII of France. When, in 1444, his brother, François I of Brittany, denied his claim to a larger share of the family inheritance, Gilles made an alliance with King Henry VI of England. In July 1445, his brother intercepted a letter from Gilles to Henry. Accused of treason, he was captured in 1446. After several years of intrigue and incarceration, on April 25, 1450, in the Château de Moncontour, Gilles’s jailers strangled him to death in his cell.

[21] Coutumes (literally, customs) were regional laws established during the medieval era which continued to form the basis of many French judicial procedures under the Ancien Régime.

[22] The Falkland Islands.

[23] Delos, a Greek island, was the birthplace of Apollo and the site of the meetings of the Delian League, an assembly of city-states founded in the fifth century BCE.

[24] Book 6, Chapter 1 of Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights (Noctes Atticae): “It is worth mentioning that Scipio Africanus did very frequently, at the end of the night, before the break of day, go to the Capitol and order the shrine of Jupiter opened. There he would remain a long time alone, consulting with Jupiter about the state of the republic. The guardians of the temple were greatly astonished that, despite his coming to the Capitol by himself, and at that early hour, the dogs, who were always ferocious toward other people, neither barked nor bit at Scipio.”

[25] Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Book 9.

[26] “I place my faith, Virgin, in your aid; / Serve as my defense and watch over my days; / And when my final hour / Comes to seal my fate, / Grant that I die / A good death.” This hymn, which is still sung today, is called “Notre-Dame de Bons Secours.”

[27] In July 1795, more than ten thousand Royalist émigrés, led by Charles Eugène Gabriel de Sombreuil, landed on the Quiberon peninsula in an attempt to invade Brittany. At least half of these men were killed in battle or, like Gesril and Sombreuil, captured and executed by Republican troops.

[28] Armorica was the Gallo-Roman name for Brittany. Its roots seem to be the Celtic ar (on or before) and the Latin mare (the sea). Hence: the Land beside the Sea.

[29] Wace’s Roman de Rou, lines 6395–6420. “The forest of Brécheliant, about which the Bretons tell many tales, is a deep, wide forest, famous throughout Brittany. In one part of the forest, the fountain of Barenton springs up from beneath a stone, and the hunters go there in sultry weather, and draw water with their horns, and douse the stone to summon the rain, which is then wont to fall, they say, over the whole forest; but I know not why. Here, too, fairies are to be seen, if the Bretons are to be believed, and many other wonders besides. Once there were many hawk-nests and huge herds of stag in this forest, but the peasants have destroyed them all. I went there in search of marvels. I saw the forest and the countryside and looked for marvels everywhere, but I found none. A fool I went, and a fool I returned. I sought folly, and was taken for a fool.”

[30] Pliny’s Natural History Volume 1, Book 4. “Gallia Lugdunensis has . . . a celebrated river, the Loire, and also a very remarkable peninsula (Paeninsulam spectatiorem) which extends into the ocean.”

[31] In a letter sent September 2, 1671, Madame de Sévigné wrote her daughter: “I’m dying to be alone again. I find solitude very beautiful. Combourg is not so beautiful.”

BOOK TWO

[1] Étienne Bézout (1730–1783) was a gifted mathematician whose textbooks were widely taught in late eighteenth-century France.

[2] The Saut des Poissonniers was a Maundy Thursday tradition in which every man who had sold fish during Lent had to jump in the pond.

[3] Du Cange (1610–1688) was a French philologist who compiled the Glossarium mediae et infimae Latinitatis. This glossary traces the origins of the Quintaine to the thirteenth century, when jousters first began lancing a Turk, named Quintain, in effigy.

[4] Most gladly and gallantly did he go

Into the woods and over the river;

For no men take to the woods so

Gladly or so gallantly as the French.

These lines are from a thirteenth-century historical poem called the Chroniques rimée, by Philippe Mouskes (d. 1282), which Chateaubriand would have come across in Du Cange’s Glossarium. (See book two, note 3.)

[5] Michel de Montaigne’s “Of Liars.”

[6] The first line of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura.

[7] Elegies of Tibullus, Book 1, line 45.

[8] Synderesis is a scholastic term that Chateaubriand derives from Plato, via Saint Jerome, used to refer to the innate human impulse toward the good.

[9] “Have courage, boy of noble birth!” A quotation from a line of Statius’s Silvae (macte animo, generose puer; sic itur ad astra, “Have courage, boy of noble birth; it is thus that you shall reach the stars”), which is itself a recasting of Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 9, line 641 (macte nova virtute, puer, “be proud, boy, in your newfound manhood”).

[10] Montaigne’s “Of War Horses.” “[The Romans] also had desultorios equos, horses trained in such a way that, while they were galloping at top speed, yoked side by side, without bridle or saddle, the Roman nobles, even fully armed, could launch themselves back and forth from one to the other.”

[11] Quoted from Racine’s Spiritual Canticle 4, “On the Vain Occupations of Men in this Century”:
The bread I offer you
Serves as food for the angels;
God himself has made it
From the finest of his wheat.

[12] Charles Rollin (1661–1741) was a teacher, and a historian well known for his books about ancient Egypt and Rome.

[13] “O Terpsichore, O Polyhymnia, / Come, come fill up our voices; / Reason Herself invites you here!”

[14] Limoëlan (1768–1826), a French military officer, conspired to assassinate Napoleon in 1799. This assassination attempt, which involved an explosive device consisting of a barrel loaded with gunpowder, was referred to as la Machine Infernale.

[15] La Fontaine Book 9, Fable 16, “The Monkey and the Cat.”

[16] An allusion to the mystical hymns of Orpheus, which were called “perfumes” (thymiamata).

[17] Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars, Chapter 2, Section 16.

[18] Job 38:11.

BOOK THREE

[1] Montaigne’s “Of Diversion.”

[2] The Abbé de Marolles (1600–1681) was a monk, a translator, and a memoirist. Chateaubriand here refers to a passage in his Memoirs in which Marolles recalls how his father, while away in Hungary during the Long War of 1591–1606, sent home four horses and a light chariot, in which he and his mother used to ride to church.

[3] Following this passage in the manuscript of 1826, Chateaubriand wrote two paragraphs that he subsequently deleted:

A single occurrence varied these evenings which might otherwise figure in a romance of the eleventh century. Sometimes, it happened that my father would interrupt his stroll and come sit down beside us at the hearth, telling us stories about the trials of his childhood and the travails of his life. He spoke of storms and dangers, a journey to Italy, a shipwreck on the coast of Spain.

He had seen Paris, and he spoke of it as a place of abomination and as a foreign country: Bretons felt that China was in their neighborhood, but Paris seemed to them the end of the world. I listened attentively to my father. When I heard this man, who was so hard on himself, regret not having done enough for his family, and complain in curt, bitter words of his destiny; when I saw him, at the end of his account, rise abruptly, wrap himself in his cloak, and resume his stroll, at first hastening his steps, then slowing them to match the movements of his heart, filial love brought tears to my eyes. In my mind, I went over my father’s sorrows again, and it seemed to me that the sufferings undergone by the author of my days should have fallen on me and me alone.

[4] Montaigne’s “Of the Education of Children.”

[5] Laures in Chateaubriand’s hand, but typically spelled lares: local deities of ancient Rome, their shrines were housed at crossroads.

[6] On August 10, 1792, a riot inaugurated the downfall of the constitutional monarchy. The September massacres followed. One hundred and seventy-two priests and other residents of the Carmelite convent were killed.

[7] “A dream appearing and wandering by day,” Aeschylus’s Oresteia (trans. Christopher Collard).

[8] Book of Job 10:1, 14:1; Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, Book 5, line 223.

[9] Ismen, a Saracen sorcerer, and Armida, a Saracen sorceress, are characters in Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered.

[10] Tavernier (1605–1689), a Huguenot merchant and frequent traveler to the East, published a very popular account of his travels, The Six Voyages of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, in 1675.

[11] “The fields where Troy once stood,” Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 3, line 11.

[12] “Unto the waves on the horizon,” paraphrased from Abelard’s Historia Calamitatum: “ad horrisoni undas oceani.” Remembering the beaches of Brittany, Abelard writes: “I went from danger to danger with eyes wide open, and there, by the waves of the dread-sounding ocean where no spit of land now could offer me flight, I called out in my prayers again and again” (trans. William Levitan).

[13] Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book 12, line 646: “and the world was all before them.”

BOOK FOUR

[1] On February 13, 1820, Charles-Ferdinand, Duc de Berry, was stabbed to death on the steps of the Opéra by a Bonapartist named Louis Pierre Louvel. Later that same year, Chateaubriand would compile a biography of the murdered man, titled Mémoires, lettres et pièces authentiques touchant la vie et la mort de S. A. R. Monseigneur Charles-Ferdinand d’Artois, fils de France, duc de Berry.

[2] The “false Julian” is King Frederick the Great (1740–1786), who built his summer palace, the Schloss Sanssouci, in Potsdam, a “false Athens.”

[3] Martin Luther (1483–1546) is the “defrocked schismatic.” Frederick II (1712–1786) is “the sophist to the crown.”

[4] “Editha Swanes-Hales, which is to say, the Swan-necked.” The first two words are Old English. Chateaubriand borrows this line from Augustin Thierry’s History of the Conquest of England by the Normans, Book 3. “They went to the heap of dead bodies,” Thierry writes, “and examined them carefully one after another, but that which they sought was so much disfigured by wounds that they could not recognize it. Sorrowful, and despairing of succeeding in their search by themselves, they applied to a woman whom Harold, before he was king, had kept as his mistress, and entreated her to assist them. She was called Edith Swanes-Hales, which is to say, the Swan-necked. She consented to follow the two monks, and succeeded better than they had done, in discovering the corpse of the man whom she had loved” (trans. Charles Claude Hamilton).

[5] An apocryphal story told by Abbé Maury about an episode in the life of the writer François Fénelon (1651–1715). Fénelon sits down one day beside a young Cambrai farmer who tells him that his cow has been commandeered by soldiers and taken to the next town over. Hearing this, he goes to fetch the cow himself and leads it back to the poor peasant (quoted in La Harpe’s Cours de littérature, Volume 13).

[6] This passage from Marshal de Montluc’s Memoirs is quoted in Montaigne’s “Of the Affection of Fathers to Their Children.”

[7] Rabelais’s Gargantua, Book One.

[8] In January 1815, Chateaubriand was present at the exhumation of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, which took place in the Cimetière de la Madeleine.

[9] François-Henri de Franquetot, Duc de Coigny (1737–1821), was one of Marie-Antoinette’s most favored male companions. In the early years of the Revolution, he was rumored to have fathered the Queen’s sons.

[10] This is a slight exaggeration on Chateaubriand’s part. In 1645, a woman named Anne Cauchie, a native of Dieppe, was reported to be one hundred and five years old and still “of very sound mind.” Chateaubriand would probably have encountered this report either in Ludovic Vitet’s Histoire des anciennes villes de France (1833) or his Histoire de Dieppe (1838).

[11] Madame de Motteville’s Mémoires sur Anne d’Autriche et sa cour (1723), Volume 1, Chapter 16.

[12] Évariste de Parny, Poésies érotiques, 1778, lines from “Le Raccommodement”:
Oh, let our happy, well-appointed life
Run in secret, beneath the wing of love,
Like a brook that, just barely murmuring,
And guarding all the ripples within its bed,
Cautiously searches out the willow’s shade,
And doesn’t dare appear upon the plains.

[13] “Je l’ai planté, je l’ai vu naître” (“I have planted it, I have watched it grow”) was a love song by Alexandre Deleyre; the tune was attributed, though the attribution is questionable, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Many songs of the Revolution were set to this tune, including Ginguené’s “L’Arbre de la Liberté” (“The Tree of Liberty”). The Cadran-Bleu was a café on the boulevard du Temple frequented by the men behind the insurrection of August 10, 1792.

[14] “in a short jacket.” Ginguené, appointed in 1798 as ambassador to Turin, was quickly ordered back to France by Talleyrand, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, after his wife caused a scandal at the Court of Turin by appearing in this liberated Republican attire.

[15] The Chénier mentioned here is not André Chénier but his younger brother, Marie-Joseph Chénier. When the latter died in January 1811, Chateaubriand’s friends nominated him to inherit his seat in the Académie française (which had been incorporated into the Republican Institut de France in 1795). Despite paying his ceremonial visits to the other members of the Academy flippantly, often without dismounting from his horse, Chateaubriand was elected by a narrow margin on February 20. He wrote a very long speech. It wisely ended with several paragraphs praising Napoleon, but only after many pages obliquely but vigorously criticizing Marie-Joseph Chénier, not only as a poet but as a man. (“What! After a revolution that caused us to live through the events of several centuries in a few brief years, shall the writer be forbidden to consider all lofty moral considerations? Should he be forbidden from examining the serious side of things? Should he fritter away a frivolous life with grammatical quibbles, rules of taste, petty literary judgments?”) Napoleon, outraged, returned the speech to Chateaubriand “marked ab irato with parentheses and pencil marks,” but Chateaubriand refused to rewrite it. He was consequently refused entrance to the Academy and fell further out of favor with the Emperor.

[16] Rabelais’s Pantagruel, Book 2, Chapter 6 (trans. Urquhart and Motteux).

[17] In ancient Roman religion, manes are the deified souls of dead ancestors.

BOOK FIVE

[1] Madame de Sévigné’s Letter to Madame de Grignan, August 5, 1671 (trans. Leonard Tancock).

[2] Ker is a slur or sobriquet for a Breton. A number of old Breton names begin with “Ker.”

[3] In this elusively allusive paragraph, Chateaubriand refers to a duel which took place about the year 1735 between two gentlemen: Jean François de Kératry (a younger son, or cadet, from La Cornuaille, not Morbihan as Chateaubriand says) and the Marquis de Sabran. Saint Corentin was appointed the first Bishop of Quimper sometime late in the fifth century CE. While it is possible that “three hundred years before Christ” is a misprint on Chateaubriand’s part, more likely it is a parody of the ridiculous braggadocio under discussion.

[4] “Now the baying waves of Scylla.” A Latin line attributed to Virgil by some commentators, but probably apocryphal. Chateaubriand may be remembering the Aeneid, Book 1, line 200: “Vos et Scyllaeam rabiem penitusque sonantis,” “You sailed by Scylla’s rage, her echoing crags.”

[5] Valkyries are powerful female figures in Norse mythology who decide the fate of warriors and lead the dead to Valhalla. Canephori (literally, “basket bearers”) were those virginal young noblewomen of ancient Athens charged with carrying the implements of ritual sacrifice in baskets atop their heads. They are often depicted in procession on vases and the entablatures of temples.

[6] Monsieur, the Comte de Provence, was one of Louis XVI’s brothers. Under the Restoration, he would become Louis XVIII.

[7] Foulon was the Comptroller of Finances under Louis XVI. He and his son-in-law Bertier, a civil servant, were beheaded in front of the Hôtel de Ville on July 22, 1789.

[8] The Marquis de Favras (b. 1744) was hanged for conspiring against the Revolution on February 19, 1790.

[9] An allusion to Paradise Lost, Book 2, lines 894–897.

[10] Sabots, wooden clogs worn by the peasants of northern France, came to be associated with working-class insurrection. It’s from this association that we get the words saboteur and sabotage.

[11] The word calotin is used to refer to anyone sporting a calotte, the black skullcap worn by Catholic ecclesiastics.

[12] “The holy candle of Arras, / The torch of Provence, / Though they do not shed their light for us, / They set fire to France; / They cannot be touched, / But they may be snuffed.” The holy candle of Arras refers to Robespierre, who was born in Arras; the torch of Provence to Mirabeau, whose family had roots in Marseilles.

[13] Pierre L’Estoile (1546–1611) was a royal secretary and a diarist who lived during the reigns of Henri III and IV.

[14] The royal family were imprisoned in the Tuileries, but at this stage they still went to the theater and threw parties. “This evening we are going to have another illumination,” wrote Madame Elisabeth on September 25, 1789: “The garden will be superb, all hung with lamps and those little glass things which for two hundred years no one has been able to name without horror” (Imbert de Saint-Amand’s Marie-Antoinette at the Tuileries, 1789–1791, trans. Elizabeth Gilbert Martin).

[15] “Equality” is a reference to the Duc d’Orléans, who, in 1792, renamed himself “Phillippe-Égalité.” He was guillotined in 1793.

[16] Madame du Barry (1743–1793) had been Louis XV’s maîtresse-en-titre (that is, his official mistress). She died under the guillotine.

[17] “She gave up her life to heaven, / And softly went to sleep, / Without a murmur against its laws; / So it was her smile faded, / So she died, leaving no more trace / Than birdsong in the woods.” Évariste de Parny’s “Sur la mort d’une jeune fille.”

[18] “Whether it rains, or snows, or blows / It makes the long nights shorter.” From Jean Cazotte’s comic opera Sabot perdu.

[19] This letter, dated March 22, 1791, reads as follows: “Mr. le Chevalier de Combourg, a nobleman of the State of Brittany and a neighbourg [sic] of mine, is going over to North America. The purpose of that journey, I presume, is to inrich [sic] his mind by the active contemplation of such a moving and happy country and to satisfy his soul by seeing the extraordinary man and thoses [sic] respectable citizens who, led by the hand of virtue through the most difficult contest, have made their chief counsellor of her in establishing and enjoying their liberty—his relations, for whom I have a very high regard, desire me to recommend him to the notice of your excellency. I do it with pleasure, because that gentleman has always appeared to me to have a good right to the commendable reputation which he does enjoy—he is a man of wit and much of his time is taken up by the cultivation of that natural gift.”

[20] A translation and a paraphrase of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto 3, Part 2, line 1: “Once more upon the waters! yet once more!”

BOOK SIX

[1] Chateaubriand alters this description slightly. The original document apparently reads: “brown hair and fritted with the small Pox.”

[2] Voltaire’s “Epistle to Phillis”:
Ah, Your Grace, how your life today,
Marked by honors and great cachet,
Differs from those happy times!

[3] An image that Chateaubriand revisits in Book 29, Chapter 5: “Madame Récamier went to Kensington Gardens with Marquess Douglas, later the Duke of Hamilton, who has since entertained Charles X at Holy Rood, and with his sister the Duchess of Somerset. The crowd followed behind the beautiful foreigner. This effect was repeated every time she showed herself in public. The newspapers rang with her name; her image, engraved by Bartollozi, spread over all of England. The author of Antigone, M. Ballanche, reports that ships carried it as far as the islands of Greece: beauty was returning to the places where its image had been invented. There is a sketch of Madame Récamier by David, a full-length portrait by Gérard, and a bust by Canova. The portrait is Gérard’s masterpiece; but it doesn’t satisfy me, because in it I recognize the model’s features without recognizing her expression.”

[4] “The first glimmer of M. de Chateaubriand’s love of cats,” his friend the Comte de Marcellus writes in his eccentric book Chateaubriand et son temps: “‘I love the cat,’ he once told me, ‘for his independent and almost ingrate character. I love the indifference with which he descends from salons to his native gutters. He lets himself be pet; he arches his back; but what he feels is pure physical pleasure—not, like the dog, a silly satisfaction to adore and be loyal to his master, who thanks the beast with a kick. The cat lives alone, obeys when he feels like it, goes to sleep to get a better view, and claws at everything he can claw.’” The affinity between Chateaubriand and cats was both spiritual and semiotic: his wife, in her letters, often referred to her husband as “the Cat” (le Chat).

[5] A verse from Stephen Storace’s comic-opera Pirates (1792). As can be seen throughout the Memoirs, Chateaubriand cherished the lyrics of popular songs at least as much as the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost.

[6] Captain Cook (1728–1779), killed in Hawaii, and Captain La Pérouse (1741–1788), lost in the South Seas, were dead men by the time of Chateaubriand’s voyage to America.

[7] Shakuntala, the daughter of the sage Vishvamitra, is celebrated in the Sanskrit epic the Mahābhārata.

[8] “All the water was silent.” A scrambled quotation of Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 1, line 164: Aequora tuta silent.

[9] Genesis 1:31 “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”

[10] Psalms 19:1 “The heavens declare the glory of God.”

[11] Psalms 19:5 “as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race.”

[12] Guillaume Le Breton’s Philippide, Book 1, line 30: “Muse, help me show that I know the sea on which I now spread my sails.”

[13] Psalms 107:27 “They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits’ end.”

[14] The Aeneid, Book 5, lines 614–615.

[15] “Though my ardor burns immortal / Yet my love’s for God alone.”

[16] “Now you see before you the Fortunate Isles,” Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, Canto 15, Stanza 35.

[17] The Delaware River runs along Philadelphia’s east bank. A case in which Chateaubriand relies on his memory even for an easily verifiable fact.

[18] In 1791, there were at least ten thousand French émigrés in Philadelphia, some of them priests and aristocrats fleeing the Revolution in France, some of them colonists fleeing the revolutions in Santo Domingo and other French colonies. Many of these people were planning to join the colony of French aristocrats centered around the town of Gallipolis, on the banks of the Ohio River, which had been settled by some eight hundred (predominantly aristocratic) families only a few months earlier.

[19] It is unclear whether Chateaubriand ever met Washington. Several historians have argued that the two men missed each other by a day. In July 1791, when he first arrived in Philadelphia, Chateaubriand was eager to get to Niagara Falls, and Washington, who had just come home after a tour of the southern states, was laid up in bed, as George D. Painter records, “by a recurrence of the carbuncle on his left buttock that had made the physicians despair of his life at New York two years before.”

Painter for one is convinced that Chateaubriand did meet Washington, despite the many Chateaubriandists who “have rashly concluded . . . that the interview and dinner which he describes so vividly never happened. On the contrary there can be no doubt that they did occur,” he contends, not in July, as Chateaubriand remembered it, but in late November or early December 1791, when he returned to Philadelphia from the wilderness.

[20] Alonso d’Ercilla (1533–1596) was a Spanish soldier and the author of the epic poem La Araucana. In Cantos 32 and 33, the poet entertains his fellow soldiers with the “true story” of Dido.

[21] Corneille’s Attila, Act 1, Scene 1.

BOOK SEVEN

[1] Inscription on the tomb of Leonidas and his companions. In a footnote to the Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem appended to a long account of his fruitless search for Leonidas’s tomb in Sparta, Chateaubriand confesses that he had forgotten this tomb is not in Sparta but Thermopylae.

[2] Charles Asgill was not arrested along the Hudson, nor was he executed. The ballad that the Quaker girl sings is most likely “Major André’s Complaint,” in which each verse ends with the refrain “But who can tell if thou, my dear, wilt e’er remember me?,” and which tells the tale of Major John André, hanged for treason in 1780, in Tappan, New York. Curiously, Chateaubriand does not make the same mistake the first time he records this story, in a footnote to his Essai historique (1797). In this earlier remembrance, a passenger calls out, “Over there is the place that Major André was executed.” Then “a very pretty American girl” sings the ballad of the doomed young man in a “timidly voluptuous and emotional voice.”

[3] The Erie Canal.

[4] Antar (525–608 CE) was an Arab warrior and poet; but Chateaubriand here is alluding to the poem Antar, believed to have been written down by Al-Asma’i (c. 740–828 CE), which recounts Antar’s heroic life. Antar was first translated into French, from an English translation of the Arabic, in 1819. The horse is described in Job 39:19–25.

[5] The story of Phocion’s ashes is from Plutarch, The Life of Phocion, Book 11. Phocion, an Athenian statesman, was sentenced to death for treason: he drank hemlock, but his corpse was banished from Attica. A poor man took the body away and burned it in Megara, whereupon a local woman collected the bones, carried them in her apron to her house, and buried them beneath the hearth.

[6] Homer’s Odyssey, Book 7, lines 146–147.

[7] “And the swift Anio and the sacred grove of Tibur.” Horace’s Carmen Saeculare, Book 7, line 13.

[8] Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals.”

[9] Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, Book 10, Chapter 59. “Agrippina, the wife of Claudius, had a thrush that could imitate human speech, a thing that was then unheard of. Today, the young Caesars have a starling and some nightingales that are being taught words of Greek and Latin.”

[10] Chateaubriand’s riff on Bossuet’s once famous funeral oration for the Prince de Condé: “Accept these last efforts of a voice that you once knew well. You put all my orations to an end.”

[11] Lady Conyngham, Francis Conyngham’s mother, was King George IV’s mistress. She was fifty-two years old in 1822.

BOOK EIGHT

[1] Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, Book 2, line 578.

[2] Ximena, the wife of El Cid, was the subject of many Spanish ballads.

[3] Pierre Ronsard, “To Mary Stewart”:
In such garb were you appareled
The day you left this beauteous land
(Whose scepter you once held in hand),
When you strolled, o’erburdened with cares,
Bathing thy breast with crystal tears,
In the gardens of that royal house
That bears the name of a fountain.

[4] Julie and Saint-Preux are the fictional lovers whose letters make up J.-J. Rousseau’s epistolary novel Julie, or the New Héloïse (1761). (The old Héloïse is Héloïse d’Argenteuil, who exchanged letters of love with Pierre Abelard.)

[5] Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, Canto 7, Stanza 68.

[6] “Beside a brook, thin replica of Simois, Andromache made an offering to the ashes [of Hector],” Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 3, lines 302–303 (trans. Robert Fitzgerald).

[7] In the text you have my rendition of Chateaubriand’s own very free prose translation of George Hill’s Ruins of Athens, Cantos 2 and 17.
Here are the lines in the original:
Alas! for her, the beautiful, but lone,
Dethroned queen!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
There sits the queen of temples—grey and lone. She, like the last of an imperial line,
Has seen her sister structures, one by one, To time their gods and worshippers resign.

[8] La Fontaine, Book 11, Fable 8, “The Old Man and the Three Young Men.” Chateaubriand is probably remembering that, of the three young men that the old man outlives, one drowns near the harbor on his way to America.

[9] Herodotus, in Book 3 of the Histories, speaks of a species of ant “smaller in size than dogs but larger than foxes” which brings up gold from its underground burrows. The story about Hercules and the golden vessel (the golden cup, in most translations) is told in Book 2 of Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae.

[10] Farid ud-Din (1173–1266) was a Persian poet, dervish, and Sufi saint, murdered by Mongols invading Persia. Chateaubriand would likely have encountered Farid ud-Din’s mystical poem Pend-Nameh in Silvestre de Sacy’s translation, Le Livre des Conseils, published in 1819.

BOOK NINE

[1] An allusion to La Fontaine’s Book 1, Fable 1, “The Ant and the Grass-hopper”: “He went crying famine / To his neighbor the ant, / Im- ploring him to lend him / Some wheat to sustain him / Until the next spring.”

[2] Emigrated French aristocrats sent distaffs to aristocrats at home in an attempt to shame them into defending their honor abroad in the Royalist armies. Thomas Carlyle writes of this practice in Book 3, Chapter 1 of his History of the French Revolution: “Captain after Captain, in Royalist mustachioes, mounts his war-horse or his Rozinante war-garron, and rides minatory across the Rhine; till all have ridden. Neither does civic Emigration cease; Seigneur after Seigneur must, in like manner, ride or roll; impelled to it, and even compelled. For the very Peasants despise him, in that he dare not join his order and fight. Can he bear to have a Distaff, a Quenouille sent to him: say in copper-plate shadow, by post; or fixed up in wooden reality over his gate-lintel: as if he were no Hercules, but an Omphale?”

[3] These lines were composed by Claude-Carloman de Rulhière (1735–1791):
D’Egmont and Love once visited this shore:
An emblem of its beauty
Shone a moment on its fleeting waters.
Now D’Egmont is gone; Love alone remains.

[4] Lyrics from Flins des Oliviers’s verse-comedy Le Réveil d’Épiménide:
Our brave defenders’ glory
No foreign foes can rob,
But I detest the fury
Of a sanguinary mob!
Let Europe be almighty, Let us stay forever free,
But let us stay forever righteous
Defending France’s unity!

[5] François-Joseph Talma (1763–1826) was a famous French actor much admired by Chateaubriand, who devotes most of Book 13, Chapter 9 of the Memoirs to singing his praises. Why was Chateaubriand fascinated by Talma? Because, he says, Talma “was a man of his century and of ancient times”; he had taken on the “deranged spirit of the Revolution through which he had lived”; and, without him, “certain marvels in the work of Corneille and Racine would have remained unknown forever.”

[6] Tricoteuses were women who knitted while the tribunals and the guillotine went about their work.

[7] An allusion to La Fontaine’s Book 8, Fable 13, “Damon and Phillis.”

[8] Sanson (1739–1806) was the Royal Executioner under Louis XVI and the High Executioner under the Republic. Apparently, his only loyalty was to his métier. Mademoiselle Théroigne de Méricourt (1762–1817) was a popular entertainer first celebrated by the Revolutionary crowds and then abused by them. She died insane in the Hospice de la Salpêtrière. “Colin” and “Babet” were stock names for lovers in French pastoral poems and plays.

[9] Chateaubriand here refers to an oft-repeated, apparently factual episode recounted in Jules Michelet’s History of the French Revolution, Book 2, Chapter 2: “Major Belzunce was a handsome, witty officer, but also impertinent, violent, haughty. He made no secret of his contempt for the National Assembly, for the people, the rabble; he used to walk through town armed to the teeth with a ferocious-looking servant. His looks were provoking. The people lost patience and threatened and besieged the barracks; an officer had the impudence to fire, and then the crowd went to get the cannon; Belzunce surrendered or was surrendered to be taken to prison, but he was not allowed to reach it; he was fired upon and killed, his body torn to pieces: a woman ate his heart.”

[10] Francis II, to whom Chateaubriand earlier refers as “Francis II of Germany,” was king of Hungary, Croatia, and Bohemia. He was elected Holy Roman Empire on July 5, 1792.

[11] The Sixteen was a sort of Committee of Public Safety avant la lettre, representing each of the sixteen neighborhoods of Paris and established by a group of priests and middle-class Parisian Catholics in 1588.

[12] An allusion to Paradise Lost, Book 2, lines 790–798.

[13] According to Chateaubriand’s source (Michaud’s Biographie Universelle of 1820), Marat’s ashes were deposited in a chamber pot and dumped in the gutter of the rue Montmartre shortly after the Ninth of Thermidor (July 1794).

[14] Jacques Clément was the Leaguer who assassinated King Henry III—an act Pope Sixtus V praised as proof of Clément’s devotion to the true faith.

[15] A reference to the killing of Henry I of France, sometimes called Henry the Scarface, or Le Balfré, who was murdered by the King’s Bodyguard, according to Chateaubriand’s source, the diaries of Pierre L’Éstoile, in the “lower courtyard” (not “an upper room”) of the Château de Blois in 1588.

[16] Montaigne’s “Of Physiognomy.”

[17] “M. Maret of the Empire,” or the Duc de Bassano, served as Secretary of State and, later, Minister of Foreign Affairs under Napoleon Bonaparte. “M. Barère of the Republic,” who later became a member of the Committee for Public Safety, escaped execution as Chateaubriand says, and lived (in prison, in exile, and finally in Paris under the July Monarchy) until 1841.

[18] “[Swift-footed tigers,] the offspring of rapid Zephyrs.” Oppian’s Cynegetica, Book 1. Although he here refers to the ancient notion that there were no male tigers and that all tigers were fathered by the West Wind, Oppian himself gave this notion no credence, as the Cynegetica itself lets us know.

[19] In the 1790s, some citoyennes took to sporting green fans printed with articles of the new Constitution; the slogan Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité; or portraits of famous Republican heroes.

[20] “Everything changes.” Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, Book 5, line 830.

[21] Omphale was the queen of the ancient kingdom of Lydia, in Asia Minor. According to myth, the Delphic Oracle punished Hercules for having murdered Iphitus, King Eurytus’s son, by making him Omphale’s slave for a year. In depictions of the myth, Hercules (dressed in women’s clothes and often performing traditionally feminine tasks such as spinning or weaving) is shown at the feet of Omphale (dressed in manly Herculean garb: typically a lionskin).

[22] Louis was negotiating with Charles the Bold in the town of Péronne in 1468 when news came that the Liégeois, who were under Louis’ secret protection, had assassinated several of Charles’s Burgundian allies in Liège. Louis XI, now imprisoned in the Château de Peronne, avoided execution only by signing a humiliating treaty which required him to travel with Charles and help put down the Liégeois rebellion.

[23] A reference to Louis XI, who propagated the Charlemagne legend in France. In 1483, Louis presented the cathedral at Aix-la-Chapelle with a gold reliquary to hold the bones of Charlemagne’s right arm. He also instituted an annual rent of 4,000 livres, which every French king thereafter would pay to the Chapter of Aix-la-Chapelle. In return, every time a new French king was coronated, the previous king’s mortuary sheet was sent to Aix-la-Chapelle to be draped over Charlemagne’s tomb.

[24] Chateaubriand’s own source here seems to be Étienne Pasquier’s Recherches de la France, Book 5, Chapter 16, which adapts the tale of Charlemagne and the Corpse first related in Petrarch’s Familiar Letters.

[25] “Vacant kingdoms,” Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 6, line 269. A description of the underworld.

[26] Salvian’s De Gubernatione Dei, Book 6. After Trèves was ravaged by barbarian invaders, the few nobles left alive petitioned Rome to reestablish the theater and the circus. Said Salvian: “Do you then ask for theaters, and demand a circus from our emperors? For what condition, I ask, what people and what city? A city burned and destroyed, a people captive and killed, who have perished, or mourn their dead; a city of which nothing survives but sheer calamity. . . . So great are the miseries of the survivors that they surpass the ill fortune of the dead” (trans. Eva M. Sanford).

[27] Lucius Cary, the Viscount Falkland (1610–1643), felt duty-bound to serve in Charles I’s army during the first English Civil Wars, though he was a staunch believer in liberty. “Endowed with a threefold genius for literature, arms, and policy; faithful to the Muses, even in the tent, and to Liberty, even in a palace; devoted to an ill-fated monarch, although by no means blind to his faults,” Chateaubriand wrote in his study of English literature and history, “Falkland should be remembered with a mixture of melancholy and admiration.”

[28] General Georges Félix de Wimpffen (1744–1814), the Commandant of Thionville.

[29] This sentence, as confusing in French as it is in English, seems to suggest that even if the Army of Princes did not triumph at Thionville, like the Great Condé (1621–1686) at the Battle of Rocroi, at least it was not annihilated, like Feuquières (b. 1590), who was killed during the Siege of Thionville of 1640.

[30] “To whom a glorious victory has been granted with our help,” Guillaume Le Breton’s Philippide, Book 12, line 782.

[31] Hugues Métel (1080–1157) was a French priest and poet. The allusion is to his apologue “Of the Wolf Who Became a Hermit.”

[32] “The victor seized the chariots and a new wife.” These words, which Chateaubriand had previously quoted in his Études historiques, come from the fifth-century Gaulish writer Sidonius Apollinaris’s Panegyrics. Apollinaris here is recounting how the Roman Emperor Majorian’s troops successfully attacked the Franks while the latter were celebrating the marriage of one of their chieftains.

[33] Homer’s Odyssey, Book 4, line 606.

[34] “Menelaus, lord of the great war-cry,” Homer’s Iliad, Book 17, line 656.

[35] “the beautiful waters / of the Moselle, gliding by in quiet murmurings,” from the Roman writer Ausonius’s poem Mosella, line 21.

[36] The Cimetière du Père Lachaise was established under Napoleon in 1804. In a notebook, Chateaubriand made the following entry: “Père Lachaise: / 27 thousand tombstones / 230 thousand bodies / Battlefields are everywhere / ‘And the worm in the grave has alone found his heart’ / Talma, Abbé Delille, Fontanes at Père Lachaise / Centralization of death.”

[37] Morellet was a virulent critic of Atala. In a review published in May 1801, he would say that the book violated the rules of classical art and modern decorum alike.

[38] Honoré Jean Riouffe was the author of Mémoires d’un détenu, pour servir à l’ histoire de la tyrannie de Robespierre (Memoirs of a Prisoner, Being a History of the Tyranny of Robespierre), from which this passage is taken.

[39] The Vendean general is Charles de Bonchamps, one of the leaders of the Royalist Insurrection in the Vendée. “Old France made no appearance during the Revolution,” Chateaubriand wrote in an article published in September 1819, “except in Condé’s Army and in the western provinces.”

[40] A reference to the Memoirs of Antoine Arnauld (1616–1698), who was in Verdun in 1639, during the same Siege of Thionville at which Feuquières was killed.

[41] Dysentery.

[42] Allusion to a passage in Volume 12 of Piganiol de La Force’s Nouvelle Description géographique et historique de la France: “Jean Balue was the son of a Miller in Verdun. A wandering Monk took him away very young from his father’s house, & made him carry his sack. In return for this service, Jean learned some scraps of bad Latin & some seeds of guile that did not fall on barren ground. He was cunning, rough, anxious, full of a thousand kinds of ruses & tricks; in a word, he was capable of doing anything & of saying anything. He became, by and by, the Comptroller General of Finances & Secretary of State; in 1464 the Bishop of Évreux; & on June fifth, 1467, was made a Cardinal, & Bishop of Angers the eighteenth of the same year. Louis XI, having discovered his disloyalty, had him arrested and imprisoned him for fourteen years in the Château de Montbazon or in that of the Bastille.”

[43] According to the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française of 1789, “Doctors say confluent smallpox to indicate smallpox that are extremely widespread, as opposed to discrete smallpox, which indicates that the spots do not overlap.” George D. Painter, in The Longed-for Tempests, suggests that, though Chateaubriand “naturally assumed he had smallpox, as did all who saw him . . . from his symptoms it seems more likely to have been a typical case of chicken-pox, aggravated by his wound and by weakness from dysentery and hardship.”

BOOK TEN

[1] The italicized imagery of this passage is taken from La Fontaine, Book 7, Fable 17, “The Cat, the Weasel, and the Little Rabbit.”

[2] The opening lines of Jacques Cazotte’s “Ballad of Sir Enguerrand,” which tells the story of a wandering knight who dares to stay from dusk till dawn in a castle haunted by the ghost of a Lady, murdered by her jealous husband. When the Lady appears, Sir Enguerrand makes the sign of the cross, and the ghost vanishes.

[3] A reference to Book Two of Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (rather than Ariosto’s quixotic sequel, Orlando Furioso), in which Orlando, tricked into the Ardennes forest by wicked magic, sees a crystal palace at the bottom of a spring. He is so excited by the sight of the ladies dancing underwater that he dives in, armor and all. Rosalind and “the exiled Duke” are from Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

[4] A reference to the legend of the Wandering Jew, common all over Europe from the thirteenth century on, and more specifically to the Wandering Jew’s last appearance, in Brussels, in the Duchy of Brabant, on April 22, 1774. The ballad Chateaubriand quotes was penned by Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780–1857).

[5] Allusion to Book 18 of the Odyssey, in which, before slaughtering the suitors, Odysseus returns to Ithaca in a beggar’s guise.

[6] “as a starving man chews bread,” Dante’s Inferno, Canto 32, line 127.

[7] The primrose.

[8] Voltaire’s Henriade, Canto 1.

[9] Nisus speaks these words to Euryalus in Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 9, 212: “Your age is more deserving of life.”

[10] “. . . my health, disturbed by long voyages and many cares, vigils, and studies, is so deplorable I fear I shall not be able to fulfill the promise that I made, concerning the other volumes of the Essai historique.”

[11] Montaigne’s “Apology for Raymond Sebond.”

[12] Shakespeare’s Richard III, Act 4, Scene 3.

[13] “Come down from propitious [skies].” A line from the Italian poet Pietro Metastasio’s “Epithalamium.”

[14] Quoted from Rousseau’s Confessions, Book 8. Diderot had been imprisoned in the Vincennes for having published his Lettre sur les aveugles (1749).

[15] Addison’s Cato, Act 5. These are the first lines of a monologue spoken directly before Cato kills himself.

[16] Charlotte, born March 9, 1781, was sixteen or seventeen years old at the time.

[17] Madame (Giuditta) Pasta (1797–1865) was an Italian opera singer.

[18] Madame Récamier.

[19] Dante’s Inferno, Canto 1, line 74.

BOOK ELEVEN

[1] Jacques Callot (1592–1663), a printmaker, was well known for his images of masked grotesque figures.

[2] This is not the last time Charlotte appears in the Memoirs. In Book 27, Chapter 11, Chateaubriand recounts her visit to France in 1823, when Chateaubriand was Minister of Foreign Affairs under the Restoration:

By one of those inexplicable miseries of man, I was then preoccupied by a war on which the fate of the French monarchy depended, and something was no doubt missing from my voice, for Charlotte, on returning to England, sent me a letter in which she showed herself wounded by the coolness with which I received her. I did not dare either to respond to her or to send her back the literary fragments that she had given me and to which I had promised to make some additions. If it is true that she had good reason to complain of my behavior, I should burn what I told of my first sojourn overseas in the fire [. . .]. The desire to burn that which regards Charlotte, although I may have treated her with religious respect, is at one with my desire to destroy these Memoirs. If they still belonged to me, or if I were in a position to buy them back, I might well yield to the temptation. I have such a disgust for everything, such scorn for the present and the immediate future—such a firm conviction that from now on men, taken together as the public (this shall go on for several centuries), will be pathetic—that I blush to use my final moments on earth writing about things past, describing a ruined world of which they will no longer know either the language or the name.

[3] An abbreviated quotation of Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 1, lines 353–354, in somnis inhumati venit imago / Conjugis: “in a dream came the image of her unburied / spouse.” The dreamer here is Dido; the unburied spouse her husband, Sychaeus, who was murdered by her brother, Pygmalion.

[4] Book Four of Rabelais’s Pantagruel.

[5] In Act 5, Scene 2 of As You Like It, Rosalind, disguised as Ganymede, says to Orlando: “O, my dear Orlando, how it grieves me to see thee wear thy heart in a scarf!”

[6] Guillaume de Lamoignon (1617–1677), Christian’s ancestor, was the first President of the Paris Parliament.

[7] In the days of Louis XIV, Ninon de Lenclos (1616–1706) was, like Mrs. Lindsay, a demi-mondaine. In London, Mrs. Lindsay, whose French husband had died shortly after their marriage, had become Christian de Lamoignon’s mistress.

[8] In defense of the endowment of Catholic bishops, Montlosier had addressed the Constituent Assembly, saying: “Drive them from their palaces and they will seek refuge in the huts of those indigents whom they have fed; rob them of their golden crosses, and they will take up wooden ones in their stead. It was a wooden cross which saved the world!”

[9] All these men, like Montlosier, hailed from the province of Auvergne.

[10] Claire de Duras (1777–1820) was the author of several novels, including Ourika (1823). In 1809, she became Chateaubriand’s close friend, faithful correspondent, and eventually his political ally under the Restoration.

[11] Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) was one of Chateaubriand’s closest literary friends. In 1802, when he was first contemplating the Memoirs, he outlined his plan in a letter to Joubert, who encouraged him to pursue the project. In Book 13, Chapter 7, Chateaubriand memorializes him as follows:

Full of crazes and originality, M. Joubert will be forever missed by those who knew him. He had an extraordinary hold on the mind and the heart, and once he had taken possession of you his image was there like a fact, like a fixed idea, like an obsession that you could not shake. His great pretension was to tranquility, and yet no one could have been more anxious: he kept an eye on himself, hoping to guard against those soulful emotions that he believed harmful to his health, but his friends were always disrupting the precautions he took to stay well, for he could not help being moved by their sadness or joy: he was an egotist who occupied himself only with others. To regain his strength, he deemed it necessary to close his eyes as often as possible and to go without speaking for hours at a stretch: God knows what noise and commotion went on inside him during these periods of self-prescribed silence. M. Jou-bert also changed his diet and his regimen from one moment to the next, so that one day he’d be living on milk and the next on ground beef; one day he’d go bounding at a grand trot over the roughest roads, and the next he’d be dawdling with short steps on freshly paved avenues. When he read a book, he would tear out the pages that displeased him and consequently came to possess a private library composed of cored works bound in overlarge covers.

A profound metaphysician, his philosophy, following an elaboration all its own, became painting or poetry. A Plato with the heart of a La Fontaine, he had adopted an idea of perfection that prevented him from finishing anything. In the manuscripts discovered after his death, he says: “I am like an Aeolian harp that makes beautiful sounds and plays no tune.” Madame Victorine de Chastenay claimed that “he had the look of a soul that has encountered a body by accident and was muddling through as best it could.” A true and charming statement.

[12] According to Chateaubriand in The Martyrs, this song began: “When we have conquered a thousand Frankish warriors, how could we fail to conquer a thousand Persians!”

[13] Jacques Bonhomme was the moniker that fourteenth-century aristocrats gave Guillaume Cale and other peasants who participated in the violent uprising known as the Jacquerie (1358). François de Charette (1763–1796) was a Royalist leader in the Vendée who commanded a troop of peasants in battles against the Republicans: he was forced to surrender in 1796 and was executed by firing squad.

[14] “The Fates find their way.” Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 3, line 395.

[15] Virgil’s Eclogues, 6, lines 82–83: “[Silenus] sings all the airs heard on the fortunate banks of the Eurotas, when old Apollo mused upon the lyre.”

[16] Catullus’s Poem 65, lines 9–12.

[17] Ovid’s Fasti, Book 6, line 772.

NOTES