The Memoirs of François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand sometime Ambassador to England, Volume 1 (of 6) Mémoires d'outre-tombe, volume 1

The new solitude into which I entered in Brittany, after my presentation, was no longer that of Combourg; it was not so entire, nor so serious, nor, to tell the truth, so forced: I was free to leave it; it lost its value. An old armorial lady of the castle, an old escutcheoned baron, watching over their last son and their last daughter in a feudal manor, presented what the English call "characters:" there was nothing provincial, nothing narrow in that life, because it was not the common life.

With my sisters, provincial life went on as usual amid the fields: neighbours danced at each other's houses or acted plays, in which I performed occasionally and very badly. In the winter one had, at Fougères, to submit to the society of a small town, with its balls, assemblies, and dinners, and I could not live forgotten, as in Paris.

On the other hand, I had not seen the army, the Court, without undergoing a certain change in my ideas. In spite of my natural inclinations, an indefinite something struggled within me against obscurity, and besought me to emerge from the shadow. Julie detested country life, and the instinct of genius and beauty impelled Lucile towards a wider stage.

I thus felt a discomfort in my existence which warned me that that existence was not my destiny.

[Sidenote: Garrison life at Dieppe.]

Nevertheless, I continued, to love the country, and round about Marigny it was charming[221]. My regiment had moved its quarters: the first battalion was garrisoned at the Havre, the second at Dieppe. I joined the latter; my presentation at Court made a personage of me. I acquired a taste for my profession; I worked hard at my training; I was placed in charge of recruits, whom I drilled on the pebbly beach: the sea has been the background of almost all the scenes of my life.

La Martinière did not concern himself at Dieppe with his homonym of Lamartinière[222], nor with the Père Simon[223], who wrote against Bossuet, Port-Royal, and the Benedictines, nor with Pecquet[224] the anatomist, whom Madame de Sévigné[225] calls "little Pecquet;" but La Martinière was in love at Dieppe as at Cambrai: he pined away at the feet of a lusty woman of Caux[226], whose cap and head-dress were half a fathom high. She was not young: by an odd chance, her name was Cauchie, and she was apparently the grand-daughter of that other native of Dieppe, Anne Cauchie, who, in 1645, was one hundred and fifty years old.

In 1647, Anne of Austria, like myself watching the sea from the windows of her chamber, amused herself by seeing the fire-ships bum for her diversion. She allowed the nations which had been faithful to Henry IV. to guard young Louis XIV., and gave endless benisons to those nations "in spite of their villainous Norman speech."

At Dieppe there still prevailed some of the feudal fines which I had seen paid at Combourg: there were due to the burgess Vauquelin three pigs' heads, each with an orange between its teeth, and three marked sous of the oldest known coinage.

I went to spend a week at Fougères. There reigned a noble spinster, called Mademoiselle de La Belinaye[227], aunt to the Comtesse de Tronjoli of whom I have spoken. An agreeable, but ugly, sister of an officer in the Condé Regiment attracted my admiration: I was not bold enough to raise my eyes to beauty; I dared to risk a respectful tribute only by favour of a woman's imperfections.

Madame de Farcy, continuing in ill-health, at last resolved to leave Brittany. She persuaded Lucile to accompany her; Lucile, in her turn, overcame my repugnance: we set out for Paris; it was the sweet partnership of the three youngest birds of the brood. My brother was married; he lived with his father-in-law, the President de Rosanbo, in the Rue de Bondy. We agreed to settle in his neighbourhood: through the good offices of M. Delisle de Sales[228], who lived in the Pavilions de Saint-Lazare, at the top of the Faubourg Saint-Denis, we secured an apartment in these same "pavilions[229]."

[Sidenote: Delisle de Sales.]

Madame de Farcy had become acquainted, I know not how, with Delisle de Sales, who had formerly been sent to Vincennes for some philosophical nonsense or other. At that time, one became a celebrity if he had scribbled a few lines of prose or published a quatrain in the Almanack des Muses. Delisle de Sales, a very worthy man, most decidedly under the average, suffered from a serious relaxation of the intellect, and allowed his years to slip from under him. The old man had got together a handsome library consisting of his own works, which he dealt in abroad, and which nobody read in Paris. Every year, in spring, he went to Germany to renew his stock of ideas. He wore a greasy, unbuttoned coat, and carried a roll of dirty paper which one saw protruding from his pocket: on this he would jot down his thoughts of the moment at the street-corners. On the pedestal of his own bust in marble he had himself placed the following inscription, borrowed from the bust of Buffon: "God, man and nature: he explained them all." Delisle de Sales explaining everything! These boasts are very pleasant, but very discouraging. Who is in a position to flatter himself that he possesses real talent? May we not all, such as we are, be under the sway of an illusion similar to that of Delisle de Sales? I would wager that some author will read this phrase who believes himself a genius and is none the less a blockhead.

If I have expatiated at too great length on the subject of the worthy man of the Pavilions de Saint-Lazare, the reason is that he was the first man of letters I met. He introduced me to the company of others. The presence of my two sisters made life in Paris less unbearable to me; my love of study still further overcame my distaste. Delisle de Sales I considered an eagle. I met at his rooms Carbon Flins des Oliviers[230], who fell in love with Madame de Farcy. She laughed at him; he put a good face upon it, for he prided himself upon being a man of breeding. Flins introduced me to his friend Fontanes, who became mine.

Flins was the son of an administrator of woods and forests at Rheims, and had received a neglected education; he was for all that a man of sense, and sometimes of talent. It was impossible to imagine anything uglier than he: short and bloated, with large, prominent eyes, bristling hair, dirty teeth, and yet a not over-vulgar air. His manner of life, which was that of nearly all the men of letters in Paris at that time, deserves to be told. Flins occupied a lodging in the Rue Mazarine, pretty near La Harpe, who lived in the Rue Guénégaud. He was waited upon by two Savoyards, disguised as flunkeys by means of livery cloaks; they followed him at night, and opened the door to his visitors in the day-time. Flins went regularly to the Théâtre Français, which at that time was situate in the Odéon and excelled particularly in comedy. Brizard[231] had only just retired; Talma[232] was commencing; Larive[233], Saint-Phal, Fleury[234], Molé[235], Dazincourt, Dugazon[236], Grandmesnil[237], Mesdames Contat[238], Saint-Val[239], Desgarcins, Olivier[240] were in the full vigor of their talent, pending the arrival of Mademoiselle Mars[241], daughter of Monvel[242], who was preparing to make her first appearance at the Théâtre Montansier[243]. The actresses protected the authors, and sometimes became the occasion of their fortune.

Flins, who had only a small allowance from his family, lived on credit. When Parliament was not sitting, he pawned his Savoyards' liveries, his two watches, his rings and underclothing, paid his debts with the amount thus raised, went to Rheims, spent three months there, returned to Paris, redeemed, with the money his father had given him, the articles which he had pledged at the pawnshops, and resumed his round of life, ever gay and popular.

In the course of the two years that elapsed between my settling in Paris and the opening of the States-General, the circle in which I moved increased. I knew the elegies of the Chevalier de Parny by heart, as I know them still I wrote to him to ask leave to set eyes upon a poet whose works delighted me; I received a civil reply, and called upon him in the Rue de Cléry. I found a man still fairly young in years, of very pleasant manners, tall, spare, with a face pitted with the small-pox. He returned my visit; I introduced him to my sisters. He cared little for society, and was soon driven from it on account of his politics: at that time he belonged to the old party. I have never known a writer who more closely resembled his works: poet and Creole[244] as he was, all he needed was the Indian sky, a fountain, a palm-tree, and a woman by his side. He dreaded noise, tried to glide unnoticed through life, sacrificed everything to his idleness, and, amid the obscurity in which he dwelt, was betrayed only by his pleasures, which played upon his lyre as they passed[245].

It was this inability to escape from his indolence which turned the Chevalier de Parny from the furious aristocrat that he was into a wretched revolutionary, insulting persecuted religion and priests on the scaffold, purchasing repose at all costs, and foisting upon the muse that had sung Éléonore the language of the houses where Camille Desmoulins went to haggle for the pleasures of love.