The apostate bishop stood surety for the oath.
Chateaubriand proves that, in France, Royalists could be at least as liberal and dynamic as revolutionaries. He was the best-selling author of his day, and had a world view, thinking that France should help install liberal Bourbon monarchies in Spain’s former colonies in South America. He warned the daughter of Louis XVI of the instability of thrones, and the unreliability of using guards and gendarmes to protect them from ideas. He deplored ‘the too great disproportion of fortunes and conditions’, and predicted ‘the old European order is expiring; society is dying’. Christianity, in his opinion, was the future of the world.
Memoirs From Beyond the Tomb is a case for the defence – of himself and the Bourbons. Eager to present himself as an innocent victim, he does not admit the driving ambition which made him such a successful writer and politician – and a ruthless negotiator with publishers. As his magnificent correspondence, now being published, makes clear, in his eagerness for office he would write to different female admirers on the same day, often using similar phrases: to Madame Récamier, Madame de Montcalm, Madame de Pisieux, the Duchesse de Duras. In his memoirs he writes at length about Madame Récamier, but does not mention more carnal mistresses, such as Madame Lafont or Hortense Allart.
This pious Catholic does, however, admit: ‘I do not possess evangelical perfection’ – he refused to turn the other cheek, and demanded revenge, even or especially on fellow Royalists. The book is full of embittered asides. Marriage is called ‘the high road to all misfortunes’. Money is ‘the source of freedom. With you one is young, beautiful, adored’. ‘Is life anything but a lie?’
Many of his contemporaries loathed him. Charles X’s adviser, the Duc de Blacas, called him ‘capable of everything except of repairing the harm he has done’ – in reference to his support of liberals duing their campaign, against the Royalist government of 1827, for freedom of the press. For Baron d’Eckstein and others, Chateaubriand, devoured by love of ‘the great chimaera’ success, and ‘the demon of publicity’, was one of the unhappiest men he knew (Balzac also found him ‘bien maussade, bien chagrin’ at Madame Récamier’s). We know Chateaubriand’s views of the Bourbons; unfortunately, due to the dispersion of their archives, we know little of their attitude to him. The French public, while loving his books, smiled at his pretensions to be a national leader.
Even if Chateaubriand could arouse smiles or envy, if Charles X had followed his advice, in an age when the press was, as Chateaubrinad wrote, ‘social electricity’ – and political dynamite – he could have protected the throne better than Polignac and Jean-Baptiste de Villèle. The interdependence of rulers and writers (Louis XIV and Racine, Louis XV and Voltaire, de Gaulle and Malraux) is a characteristic of French history and one of the themes of Memoirs From Beyond the Tomb.
As Chateaubriand minimizes his ambition and success, so he does that of his class. Far from ‘the last hour’ sounding for the French nobility, as he wrote, the nineteenth century was one of its golden ages. It was more ambitious after than before the revolution, since it had family fortunes and properties to restore. It provided France with prime ministers, marshals and geniuses, such as Chateaubriand himself (and Lamartine, de Tocqueville, de Vigny, de Maupassant, among many others). A French noble, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, would re-found the Olympics in 1896. Today the château of Combourg, where Chateaubriand spent his isolated youth, is still owned by descendants of his brother. And Chateaubriand’s work is still taught in French schools as a model of literary style.
Philip Mansel, 2014
Part One
MONARCHY AND REVOLUTION
1768–1800
One
Ancestors
La Vallée-aux-Loups, near Aulnay
4 October 1811
It is four years now since, on my return from the Holy Land, I bought a gardener’s house, hidden among the wooded hills near the hamlet of Aulnay, close to Sceaux and Châtenay. The sandy and uneven ground attached to this house was just a wild orchard with a ravine and a clump of chestnut trees at the far end. This narrow space seemed to me well suited to the containment of my far-ranging hopes; spatio brevi spem longam reseces. The trees which I have planted here are thriving; they are still so small that I provide them with shade when I stand between them and the sun. One day, giving this shade back to me, they will protect my old age as I have protected their youth. I have chosen them as far as possible from the various climes in which I have wandered; they remind me of my travels and nourish other illusions in the depths of my heart.
If ever the Bourbons return to the throne, all that I shall ask of them as a reward for my loyalty is to make me rich enough to join to my property the skirt of the surrounding woods: ambition has taken hold of me; I should like to extend the range of my walks by a few acres: knight-errant though I am, I have the sedentary tastes of a monk: since living in this retreat, I do not believe I have set foot outside my close as many as three times. If my pines, firs, larches, and cedars keep their promises, the Vallée-aux-Loups will become a veritable charterhouse.
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