Monsieur le Chevalier,
I am writing to you after fourteen months in which I have stopped all correspondence. Meanwhile the Neva, which flows in front of me, seems to have swept me even farther away. Behind the taffeta curtains I catch the scent of Kamchatka.
My fury and intransigence—as you well know—coexist always with a native cheer that, beneath the yoke of vain and constant sorrow, is now almost gone. In the evening I am taken by carriage, almost by force, to those same women who used to charm me—and I feel my head overburdened, tired, flattened beneath the enormous weight of nothingness. I now talk almost entirely to myself, even though such incivility repels me. But I have to do something: so I close myself up and read, with a rapture that makes me shudder, often into the night, when I surprise myself by railing aloud at beings now dead and yet horridly alive. And this lugubrious practice emerges in my spirit, interferes with all my thoughts and turns them into venom. The most recent of my pleasures, several months ago, was to visit the remains of a mammoth found inside a block of ice, at the mouth of the Lena. Although white bears had partially devoured it, I was able to cherish this indisputable witness of the Flood, this promise of the Fire that pains us and moves us to pity in our anticipation. The ear was still covered with fur. I held my nose close to that flesh five or six times. Never has the most sensual of men inhaled the most exquisite Eastern scent with the sweet pleasure that I felt from the fetid odor of putrefied antediluvian flesh. Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus—What has been believed always, everywhere, by all: in front of that carcass I still sensed the sweet dogma gently resonating, which is the emerald spindle around which my every feeling is spun. Then I went back to talking with the cupboards. In front of the ineffable ridiculousness of modern philosophy, I feel my convictions are like that mammoth intact in its mountain of ice. Like him I let myself be torn apart by the white bears of my solitary days. Tell me just this, mon Chevalier: what is the talk, now, in Paris?
Your
Senator from St. Petersburg
Sainte-Beuve: how the bon mot became the fin mot, and the fin mot proved to be so bitter that, out of decency, people generally avoided saying it and confused it with too many other mots. Otherwise the laborious march of life might draw to a halt in desperate paralysis: “There has to be some degree of illusion in the progress of life: when you are too familiar with the fin mot, nature removes you from the stage, for the drama would be prevented from going ahead.”
“Start off every so often with some thoughts, to get them passed: ‘We read in Lichtenberg, in Meister, or in Mencius.’” Sainte-Beuve’s concern to “get them passed,” introducing into his articles those thoughts, those tiny phrases that are his own, but without attributing them to himself, so as not to make them too apparent.
Otherwise they would be too extreme—and too susceptible in their delicate constitution: and they await the reader who is capable of delving under their skin, of recognizing the hidden vibration. But time has reaped its revenge on this caution by Sainte-Beuve; the eye skims the surface of his writings, there’s a certain irritation about his deafness to writers he doesn’t know, writers he doesn’t wish to acknowledge (this is Proust’s claim), and meanwhile we forget to consider his work with the same farsightedness that he is accused of denying to the work of others.
No one had greater respect for the conventions of literary life than Sainte-Beuve. As he lay dying, he was still dictating a few polite lines of reply to an article by Elme-Marie Caro (“What sweetness! what comfort! how many filtered truths that bring light, not without some small remorse!”). In no one else did those conventions produce so much venom. Part of this venom went into his posthumous Cahiers, bitter accumulations of color. Another part of it, for three years between 1843 and 1845, went to Switzerland, where Juste Olivier’s Revue suisse published the scurrilous “Chroniques parisiennes,” written anonymously by Sainte-Beuve. In any event, the author insinuated wryly, “Paris only gets worried about what is printed in Paris.” And so, two weeks after having loyally praised Chateaubriand’s La Vie de Rancé in the Revue des deux mondes (“When it comes to M. de Chateaubriand, the critic is no longer such: he limits himself to collecting flowers along the way and filling his basket with them”), the same pen greeted it with sarcasm in the Revue suisse. Sainte-Beuve well recalled how the hollow sounds of Chateaubriand had echoed through his literary youth, how he used to see him beside Madame Récamier, who “each day had a thousand charming inventions for offering him new and fresh praise,” of which the melancholy old man never grew tired: “she gathered friends, new admirers on every side. She had us all bound to the feet of his statue with a golden chain.” Sainte-Beuve had long been a timid acolyte at the pretty sanctuary of the Abbaye-aux-Bois: the chairs were arranged in circles, like planetary orbits, and Chateaubriand used to enter with the manuscript of Mémoires d’outre-tombe wrapped in a silk handkerchief. During those years, awed by the fame of the master and by Madame Récamier, the young critic could never have suggested what to him seemed evident: that Chateaubriand didn’t have as much to do with religion, with politics, with thought as he had with the corrosive cult of just two, jealous powers: literature and women. And Sainte-Beuve shuddered all the more, since he recognized a similar vocation in himself: but closed up inside his study, or in a room of the Bibliothèque Mazarine, or lost in the forays of an anonymous Parisian rôdeur, though always camouflaged in a studious grisaille, with his housekeeper in the background holding his bag. And this vocation was carried on there for years, without American forests, or solid aristocratic walls, or journeys to the Holy Land and foreign lagoons. His soul, inspired by the prematurely wizened verses of Joseph Delorme, possessed “as its only journey that from Amiens to Paris, with perhaps the occasional excursion to Rouen during vacations from the École de Médicine.” But the moment had come when the English newspapers described Chateaubriand as “the good old man.” Sainte-Beuve translated it mischievously as “vieux bonhomme—simple old soul,” adding cruelly: “This means being crowned with laurel and with a nightcap at one and the same time.”
La Vie de Rancé had been dictated by Chateaubriand, while sick with gout, from his iron bed in a room in rue du Bac, where the only furniture was a white wooden chest with a broken lock. He mixed quotations from seventeenth-century works, brought to him by a filthy Breton secretary, with his own irrepressible memories, which still poured forth in that further “afterlife,” since his Mémoires d’outre-tombe were now complete and his two faithful assistants, Madame de Chateaubriand and Madame Récamier, were worried their beloved’s imagination no longer had anything to which to apply itself. In the face of this spectral and yet sensual delirium, Sainte-Beuve was able to proclaim to the Swiss, with the brutality of a gossip columnist: “Chateaubriand’s Rancé has been a disappointment.” Then he explained: “We who are not as compelled as others to respect, due to the distance from which we are speaking, have to say frankly that this book, which we expected to be so simple and austere, has become, through lack of seriousness and through negligence, a real bric-à-brac; the author throws everything into it, jumbles everything, and empties all his cupboards.” He continued sardonically: “The most charming, the most extravagant images assail us at every moment and emerge in every corner, from behind every pillar of the cloister, which prompted one witty soul to comment the other day that it was indeed a temptation of Saint Anthony, such are the devils that we meet there, and what pretty devils! At certain points one might think there are passageways running from La Trappe straight to the wings of the Opéra.”
Nor were the Trappists very pleased: there was nothing pious about that book written for the glory of their great founder and for the author’s penitence. On the contrary, it hurled demons at La Trappe. The secretary of the abbey saw beneath it “the reckless belief in certain slanderous and improbable tales.” Abbé Dubois, the austere biographer of Rancé, accused Chateaubriand of perverse obstinacy in rejecting whatever “doesn’t fit in with his story.” And that was true: La Vie de Rancé, Chateaubriand’s last foray, has nothing of the edifying biography about it. They are pages that mark a final act of surrender to wild association, a corrupt rummaging among his own memories and a shuffling of shadows, among the debris of time. Their course is abrupt, intemperate, erratic. One finds there the effort of the virtuous pensum and the attraction of a flowing monologue. Its prose brings together stones—facts, quotations, and recollections—held together only by moss. With no concern for progression, it passes from undulating softness to cruel sharp perspectives. This book—dedicated to the person who had dared to write “We live to die; God’s design, when he gives us the joy of light, is to take it away from us”—expresses a consummate regret for every lost moment of life and leaves a sensation incompatible with tranquillity. It is a farewell that, behind the penitence, seeks out the recollection of sin. Nothing is as troubled as the restlessness and tedium of an old man.
There was one excessively blasphemous superstition to which Chateaubriand paid credence in his book—and it was certainly to this that the secretary of the abbey was referring. It was a story that had been going around for nearly two centuries about the severed head of the Duchesse de Montbazon. She was the lover of the young Rancé and “one of the most beautiful beings ever to be seen.” “When dancing, she outshone all the rest,” Tallemant assures us, though she wasn’t to his taste, since she had “breasts twice the desirable size; and they were fine white and firm, but it was so difficult to hide them.” In describing her, Cardinal de Retz wrote that he had “never seen anyone who, in vice, had conserved so little respect for virtue.” She arrived at Court at a very young age, with all the frenzy of gallantry and money, which often came together—and then “greed cooled her pleasures without interrupting them.” She said that by the age of thirty she would no longer be good for anything and then they’d have to throw her in the river. She was thirty-five at the time of Princess Marie’s wedding, and still her beauty dominated all others. Armand Jean le Bouthillier de Rancé was fourteen years younger, and already an abbé, when he fell in love with her. He had long curly hair, wore an emerald at each wrist, a diamond on his finger, his sword at his side, two pistols on his saddle, with a violet doublet of finest cloth. In a pamphlet “on the true reasons for the conversion of the Abbé de La Trappe,” written by Daniel de Larroque to defame Rancé, published in 1685, it was suggested that the turning point in his life dated from the sudden death of Madame de Montbazon: “I have already told you how the Abbé de La Trappe was an amorous man and had various tender relationships. The last of these was with a duchess famous for her beauty, who, having narrowly avoided death while crossing a river, encountered it a few months later. The Abbé, who from time to time went out into the countryside, was there at the very moment when this sudden death occurred. His servants, who were not unaware of his passion, were eager to conceal this sad event from him, which he discovered on his return … He went straight up to the duchess’s apartment, where he was permitted to enter at any hour, and instead of the sweetness he expected to enjoy, the first object he saw was a coffin. He realized it was that of his lover on seeing her bloodstained head, which had accidentally fallen from beneath the cloth with which it had been most negligently covered, the head having been severed from the rest of the body in order to save on length and thus to avoid having to make a new coffin longer than the one they had used.” Others suggest that Madame de Montbazon’s head was then seized by Rancé and that it remained with him through the stages of his conversion and his cloistered existence, always beside him in his cell. Years later, it was claimed that the head of Madame de Montbazon was displayed at La Trappe in the room of Rancé’s successors. The skull that appears in portraits of Rancé, among papers, folios, and the crucifix, the skull that encapsulates the silence of the Trappist rule, is—it is said—not an image of death but the treasured fetish of the woman who “had so often bowed over the womb of life.”
The impudent Chateaubriand feigns to discuss the credibility of this legend with philological scrupulousness. And he even proposes a plausible solution: that the beheading was carried out not simply because of the meanness of those who wanted to save on a coffin but for reasons of anatomical study. The conclusion, however, is clear: “All poets have accepted Larroque’s version, all clergy have rejected it.” Here the waters divide: for his very last book, which was supposed to cast him as a penitent, Chateaubriand reserved the most irreverent revelation: he would stand, in this case, and forever, on the side of those who believe more in legend than in religion, and of those for whom religion itself is, most of all, a legend. At last he was admitting that he was, first and foremost, a writer. Before saying farewell, he deposited the head of Madame de Montbazon in the cell of the Trappist reformer. This time it was indeed his last piece of bric-à-brac. Then he closed up his cupboards.
“What have you been doing over these forty years?”
The lips of the Trappist opened for an instant to break the silence: “Annos aeternos in mente habui—I had in my mind the years of eternity.”
M. DE SAINT-LOUIS: I have always been a soldier. I still had my regiment, which served under Turenne, when I first went to La Trappe: it was in my part of the country, smothered by hills and ponds, in the old forest of Le Perche. Large solitary leaves slid over the water like on a pavement of lead. I had never come across such an absence of life, except at the Escorial. I had been told that Rancé, our Monsieur de La Trappe, was under threat from enemies of his reform that paid honor to silence. I offered him my services to defend him. He didn’t refuse, he didn’t accept, he didn’t even smile. Further time went by before I sold my regiment to the eldest son of Villacerf and went back to Rancé to ask to stay at La Trappe. He gave me lodging in a place he’d had built outside the wall of the abbey. One day he spoke the words that would determine my conduct for over thirty years: “Make a rule for yourself, as mild as you wish, provided you are faithful to it.” Once he also told me, with a hint of the gentleman who had loved Madame de Montbazon, the most beautiful woman of our time and the most shameless in vice, that I, with my long experience of the world, already knew the humiliations that awaited me: for the people next to whom we live in the midst of the world are the instruments chosen by God to humiliate us, so that in one single instant of that life one often suffers the mortifications that a monk encounters over the years. I despaired for a long time, in my lodging at the margins of the true rule. But one day, in that silence, I saw the world pass by in a gust of wind. It was light and insubstantial, empty. The rule had done its work. And then I was happy once more with my weapons, in a desolate garrison at the ends of the earth, hearing again the song of soldiers and tumble of casks, waiting for the noise to end.