The Memoirs of François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand sometime Ambassador to England, Volume 4 (of 6) Mémoires d'outre-tombe volume 4

[Sidenote: The House of Hohenzollern.]

Frederic William I.[94], father of the great Frederic, a stern and eccentric man, was brought up by Madame de Rocoules, the refugee: he loved a young woman who was unable to soften him; his drawing-room was a smoking-room. He nominated the buffoon Gundling[95] President of the Royal Academy of Berlin; he shut up his son in the Citadel of Custrin, and Quatt had his head chopped off before the young Prince's eyes: that was the private life of that time. Frederic the Great, having ascended the throne, had an intrigue with an Italian dancer, the Barbarini, the only woman he ever approached: he contented himself on his wedding-night with playing the flute under the window of the Princess Elizabeth of Brunswick[96] when he married her. Frederic had a taste for music and a mania for verses. The intrigues and epigrams of the two poets, Frederic and Voltaire[97], disturbed Madame de Pompadour[98], the Abbé de Bernis[99] and Louis XV.[100] The Margravine of Bayreuth[101] was mixed up in all this with love, such as a poet might feel. Literary parties at the King's; next, dogs on unclean arm-chairs; next, concerts before statues of Antinous; next, great dinner-parties; next, a quantity of philosophy; next, the liberty of the press and blows with the stick; next, a lobster or an eel-pie, which put an end to the days of an old great man who wanted to live: these are the things with which private society occupied itself in that time of letters and battles. And, notwithstanding, Frederic renovated Germany, established a counterpoise to Austria, and altered all Germany's relations and all her political interests.

In the later reigns, we find the Marble Palace, Frau Rietz[102], with her son, Alexander Count von der Marck, the Baroness von Stoltzenberg, mistress to the Margrave Schwed, and formerly an actress; Prince Henry[103] and his suspicious friends, Fräulein Voss, Frau Rietz's rival; an intrigue at a masked ball between a young Frenchman and the wife of a Prussian general; lastly Madame de F------, whose adventure we can read in the _Histoire secrète de la cour de Berlin_[104]: who knows all those names? Who will remember ours? To-day, in the Prussian capital, octogenarians scarcely preserve the memory of that past generation.

[Sidenote: Berlin society.]

The habits of Berlin society suited me: people "went to evening-parties" between five and six; all was over by nine, and I used to go to bed just as though I had not been an ambassador. Sleep devours existence, which is a good thing:

"The hours are short and life is long," says Fénelon.

Herr Wilhelm von Humboldt[105], brother of my illustrious friend the Baron Alexander, was in Berlin: I had known him as minister in Rome; suspected by the Government because of his opinions, he led a retired life; to kill time, he learnt all the languages and even all the dialects of the world. He reproduced the peoples, the ancient inhabitants of a soil, by means of the geographical denominations of the country. One of his daughters talked ancient and modern Greek with equal ease; if one had happened on a good day, one might have chatted at table in Sanskrit.

Adelbert von Chamisso[106] lived in the Botanical Gardens, some way from Berlin. I visited him in that solitude, where the plants froze in the hot-houses. He was tall, with rather agreeable features. I felt an attraction towards that exile, a traveller like myself: he had seen the Polar seas to which I had hoped to penetrate. An Emigrant like myself, he had been brought up in Berlin as a royal page. Adelberg, travelling through Switzerland, stopped for a moment at Coppet. He took part in an excursion on the lake, where he was in danger of being drowned. He wrote that same day:

"I clearly see that I must seek my safety on the high seas."

Herr von Chamisso had been appointed professor at Napoléonville by M. de Fontanes; later Greek professor at Strasburg; he rejected the offer in these noble words:

"The first condition for working at the instruction of youth is independence; though I admire Bonaparte's genius, it is not to my taste."

In the same way he refused the advantages offered to him by the Restoration:

"I have done nothing for the Bourbons," he said, "and I cannot accept the price of the services and the blood of my fathers. In this age, every man must provide for his own existence."

In Herr von Chamisso's family this note is preserved, written in the Temple, in the hand of Louis XVI.:

"I recommend M. de Chamisso, one of my faithful servants, to my brothers."

The Martyr King had hidden the little note in his bosom to have it handed to his first page, Chamisso[107], Adelbert's uncle[108].

Herr von Chamisso embarked on the ship equipped by Count Romanzoff[109], and, in company with Captain Kotzebue[110], discovered the strait to the east of Behring's Straits and gave his name to one of the islands from which Cook had caught sight of the American coast. In Kamchatka he picked up a portrait of Madame Récamier on porcelain and a copy of his little tale, Peter Schlemihl, translated into Dutch. Adelbert's hero, Peter Schlemihl, sold his shadow to the devil: I would rather have sold him my body.

I remember Chamisso as I do the imperceptible breeze that lightly swayed the stalks of the heather through which I passed when returning to Berlin.

Following a rule of Frederic II., the Princes and Princesses of the Blood in Berlin do not see the diplomatic body; but, thanks to the carnival, to the marriage of the Duke of Cumberland with the Princess Frederica of Prussia, sister to the late Queen[111], thanks also to a certain relaxation of etiquette which they permitted themselves, it was said, because of my person, I had occasion to be oftener with the Royal Family than my colleagues. As from time to time I visited the Great Palace, I there met the Princess William[112]: she liked taking me over the apartments. I never saw a sadder expression than hers: in the uninhabited rooms at the back of the palace, on the Spree, she showed me a chamber haunted on certain days by a white lady, and, pressing herself against me with a certain terror, she looked like that white lady herself. On the other hand, the Duchess of Cumberland told me that she and her sister the Queen of Prussia, when both still very young, had heard their mother[113], who had recently died, talk to them from under her closed curtains.

[Sidenote: Frederic William III.]

The King, into whose presence I came as I finished my sight-seeing, took me to his oratories: he called my attention to the crucifixes and pictures, and ascribed the honour of those innovations to me, because, said he, having read in the Génie du christianisme that the Protestants had stripped their cult too bare, he had thought my remark just: he had not yet reached the excess of his Lutheran fanaticism.

In the evening, at the Opera, I had a box next to the Royal Box, situated facing the stage. I talked with the Princesses; the King went out between the acts; I met him in the corridor: he would look round to see that no one was near us and that we could not be overheard; then he would confess to me, in a whisper, his detestation of Rossini[114] and his love of Gluck[115]. He branched out into lamentations on the decadence of art, and, above all, on those gargling notes destructive of dramatic singing: he confided to me that he dared say this only to me, because of the people who surrounded him. If he saw any one coming, he hurried back into his box.

I saw a performance of Schiller's[116] Joan of Arc; the Cathedral of Rheims was perfectly copied. The King, who was seriously religious, with difficulty endured the representation of Catholic worship on the stage. Signor Spontini[117], composer of the Vestal, was manager of the Opera. Madame Spontini, daughter of M. Érard[118], was pleasant, but she seemed to atone for the volubility of the language of women by her own slowness in speaking: any word divided into syllables died away on her lips; if she had tried to say to you, "I love you," a Frenchman's love would have had time to fly between the commencement and the end of those three words. She was unable to finish my name, and she did not come to the end without a certain grace.

A public musical assembly took place two or three times in the week. In the evening, on returning from their work, little work-women, their baskets on their arms, journeymen artisans, carrying the tools of their trades, crowded promiscuously into a hall; on entering, they were given a written sheet of music and they joined in the general chorus with astonishing precision. It was something surprising to hear those two or three hundred blended voices. When the piece was finished, each resumed his homeward road. We are very far from this feeling for harmony, a powerful means of civilization; it has introduced into the cottage of the German peasants an education which our rustics lack: wherever there is a piano, there is no more grossness.

About the 13th of January, I opened the series of my dispatches with the Minister of Foreign Affairs. My mind easily accommodates itself to this kind of work: why not? Did not Dante[119], Ariosto[120] and Milton[121] succeed as well in politics as in poetry? No doubt I am not Dante, nor Ariosto, nor Milton; nevertheless, Europe and France have seen by the Congrès de Vérone what I could do.

My predecessor in Berlin treated me, in 1816, as he treated M. de Lameth[122] in his little verses at the commencement of the Revolution. When one is so amiable, he should not leave minute-books behind him, nor have the orderliness of a clerk when he has not the capacity of a diplomatist. It happens, in the times in which we live, that a gust of wind sends into your place the man against whom you rose up; and, as the ambassador's duty is first to make himself acquainted with the archives of the embassy, behold him coming upon the notes in which he is dealt with in masterly fashion. What would you have? Those profound minds, which worked for the success of the good cause, could not think of everything.

[Sidenote: Minute-book revelations.]

EXTRACTS FROM THE MINUTE-BOOK OF M. DE BONNAY

No. 64. "22 November 1816.

"All Europe has taken cognizance and approved of the words which the King addressed to the newly-formed bureau of the Chamber of Peers. I have been asked if it was possible that men devoted to the King, that persons attached to his person and holding places in his Household or in those of our Princes had indeed been able to give their votes to put M. de Chateaubriand into the secretaryship. My reply was that, as the balloting was secret, no one could know how individual votes went.

"'Ah,' exclaimed a leading man, 'if the King could be assured of it, I hope that the access to the Tuileries would be forthwith closed to those faithless servants.'

"I thought it my duty to make no answer, and I made no answer."

"15 October 1815.

. . . . . . . . . .

"It will be the same, monsieur le duc, with the measures of the 5th and of the 20th of September: both meet with nothing but approval in Europe. But what is astonishing is to see that very pure and very worthy Royalists continue to be smitten with M. de Chateaubriand, notwithstanding the publication of a book which lays down the principle that the King of France, by virtue of the Charter, is no longer more than a moral entity, essentially null, and without a will of his own. If any other than he had put forward a similar maxim, the same men, not without apparent reason, would have qualified him as a Jacobin."