Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb
François-René De Chateaubriand
MEMOIRS FROM BEYOND THE TOMB
Selected and translated by
ROBERT BALDICK
Introduction by
PHILIP MANSEL
Contents
Testamentary Preface
Introduction
MEMOIRS FROM
BEYOND THE TOMB
PART ONE
Monarchy and Revolution
1768–1800
1 Ancestors
2 Childhood
3 Youth
4 Manhood
5 Soldier and Courtier
6 The French Revolution
7 To America
8 With the Savages
9 With the Emigrant Army
10 Exile in England
PART TWO
Consulate and Empire
1800–1814
1 Madame de Beaumont
2 The Execution of the Duc d’Enghien
3 The Death of Lucile
4 Bonaparte and the Chateaubriands
5 Napoleon in Russia
6 The Fall of Napoleon
7 The Hundred Days
8 St Helena
PART THREE
Restoration and Revolution
1814–1841
1 Triumph and Disgrace
2 Madame Récamier
3 Rome
4 The July Revolution
5 The Plague in Paris
Conclusion
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CLASSICS
MEMOIRS FROM BEYOND THE TOMB
FRANÇOIS-RENÉ, VICOMTE DE CHATEAUBRIAND, was a brilliant representative of the reaction against the ideas of the French Revolution, and the most celebrated figure in French literature during the First Empire. He was born in Saint-Malo in 1768, and received a commission in the army in 1786. While living in Paris, he met the men of letters of whom he left remarkable portraits in his memoirs. Though not opposed to the Revolution in its first stages, Chateaubriand was disturbed by its excesses, and his restlessness caused him to depart for America in the spring of 1791. In 1792, after news of the arrest of Louis XVI brought him back to France, he married Céleste Buisson de Lavigne. His first publication, Essai historique, politique et moral sur les révolutions, in 1797, was written during his exile in England. His next work, Atala, ou les amours de deux sauvages dans le désert, appeared in 1801, and immediately made his reputation, thanks to its exquisite style, impassioned eloquence and glowing descriptions of nature. His Génie du christianisme, a defence of the Catholic faith, then appeared in 1802, on the eve of Napoleon’s re-establishment of the Catholic religion in France. His influence in French literature, on authors such as Alfred de Vigny, Alphonse de Lamartine and Victor Hugo, was incalculable. Chateaubriand died on the 4th of July 1848, after spending the last fifteen years of his life writing his controversial and celebrated Mémoires d’outre-tombe, which were published shortly after his death.
ROBERT BALDICK was a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford and of the Royal College of Literature, and joint editor of Penguin Classics (1964–72). He translated the works of a wide range of French authors, from Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Huysmans and Verne to Montherlant, Sartre, Salacrou and Simenon. He also wrote a history of duelling, a study of the Siege of Paris, and biographies of Huysmans, the Goncourts, Frédérick Lemaître and Murger. He was married to the American writer and translator, Jacqueline Baldick. Robert Baldick died in 1972.
PHILIP MANSEL is a historian of France and the Middle East. His books on French history include Louis XVIII (1981), The Court of France 1789–1830 (1989), and Paris Between Empires (2001). Six have been translated into French. In 2012 he won the London Library Life in Literature award. He is currently writing a life of Louis XIV and is editor of The Court Historian, journal of the Society for Court Studies (www.courtstudies.org).
Testamentary Preface
Sicut nubes … quasi naves … velut umbra (JOB)
Paris, 1 December 1833
As it is impossible for me to foresee the date of my death, and as at my age the days granted to man are only days of grace, or rather of hardship, I intend, for fear of being taken by surprise, to explain the nature of a work destined to beguile for me the boredom of those last, lonely hours which nobody wants and which one does not know how to employ.
The Memoirs at whose head this preface is to be placed span or will span the entire course of my life; they were begun as far back as 1811 and have been continued down to the present day. I recount in what has been completed, and will recount in what has so far only been sketched out, my childhood, my education, my youth, my entry into the service, my arrival in Paris, my presentation to Louis XVI, the initial scenes of the Revolution, my travels in America, my return to Europe, my emigration to Germany and England, my return to France under the Consulate, my pursuits and works under the Restoration, and finally the complete history of that Restoration and its fall.
I have met nearly all the men who in my time have played a great or small part in my own or other countries, from Washington to Napoleon, from Louis XVIII to Alexander, from Pius VII to Gregory XVI, from Fox, Burke, Pitt, Sheridan, Londonderry, and Capo-d’Istrias to Malesherbes, Mirabeau, etc; from Nelson, Bolivar, and Mehemet Ali, Pasha of Egypt, to Suffren, Bougainville, La Pérouse, Moreau, etc. I have formed part of a triumvirate without precedent: three poets of different interests and nationalities who, almost at the same time, found themselves Foreign Ministers, myself of France, Mr Canning of England, and Señor Martinez de la Rosa of Spain. I have traversed in succession the empty years of my youth and the full years of the Republican era, of the splendours of Bonaparte and of the reign of the Legitimacy.
I have explored the seas of the Old World and the New, and trodden the soil of the four quarters of the globe. After sleeping in the cabins of Iroquois and the tents of Arabs, in the wigwams of Hurons and the remains of Athens, Jerusalem, Memphis, Carthage, and Granada, in the homes of Greeks, Turks, and Moors and among forests and ruins; after wearing the bearskin cloak of the savage and the silk caftan of the Mameluke, and after enduring poverty, hunger, thirst, and exile, I have taken my place, as a minister and ambassador, trimmed with gold lace and plastered with ribbons and decorations, at the table of kings, at the festivities of princes and princesses, only to fall once more into indigence and to taste prison life.
I have had dealings with hundreds of notabilities in the armed services, the Church, politics, the judiciary, the sciences, and the arts. I possess enormous quantities of material, over four thousand private letters, the diplomatic correspondences of my various embassies and those of my period at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, including documents which are my private concern, unique and unknown to others. I have carried the soldier’s musket, the traveller’s stick, the pilgrim’s staff: as a sailor, my destinies have had the inconstancy of the winds, and like a kingfisher I have made my nest on the waves.
I have had a hand in the making of peace and war; I have signed treaties and conventions and in the meantime published numerous works of my own. I have been initiated in the secrets of parties, court, and state; I have seen from close at hand the rarest misfortunes, the greatest successes, the highest reputations. I have been present at sieges, at congresses, at conclaves, at the restoration and demolition of thrones. I have made history and had the opportunity to write it. And my lonely, reflective, poetic life passed through this world of realities, catastrophes, noise, and tumult, with the sons of my dreams, Chactas, René, Eudore, Aben-Hamet, and the daughters of my reveries, Atala, Amélie, Blanca, Velléda, Cymodocée. Living within and beside my times, I may have exerted upon them, without wishing or trying to do so, a triple influence: religious, political, and literary.
I have now only four or five contemporaries of long-standing fame around me. Alfieri, Canova, and Monti have disappeared; of its great days, Italy retains only Pindemonte and Manzoni; Pellico has spent his best years in the dungeons of the Spielberg; the talents of Dante’s homeland are condemned to silence or forced to languish on foreign soil.
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