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THE MEMOIRS OF FRANÇOIS RENÉ

VICOMTE DE CHATEAUBRIAND

SOMETIME AMBASSADOR TO ENGLAND

BEING A TRANSLATION BY ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS
OF THE MÉMOIRES D'OUTRE-TOMBE WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM CONTEMPORARY SOURCES. In 6 Volumes. Vol. IV


    "NOTRE SANG A TEINT
    LA BANNIÈRE DE FRANCE"


LONDON: PUBLISHED BY FREEMANTLE
AND CO. AT 217 PICCADILLY MDCCCCII




CONTENTS

VOLUME IV

BOOK VII 1-30

Changes in the world--The years 1815 and 1816--I am made a peer of
France--My first appearance in the tribune--Various speeches--The
_Monarchie selon la Charte_--Louis XVIII.--M. Decazes--I am struck
off the list of ministers of State--I sell my books and my Valley--My
speeches continued, in 1817 and 1818--The Piet meetings--The
_Conservateur_--Concerning the morality of material interests and that
of duty--The year 1820--Death of the Duc de Berry--Birth of the Duc de
Bordeaux--The market-women of Bordeaux--I cause M. de Villèle and M.
de Corbière to take office for the first time--My letter to the Duc
de Richelieu--Note from the Duc de Richelieu and my reply--Notes from
M. de Polignac--Letters from M. de Montmorency and M. Pasquier--I am
appointed Ambassador to Berlin--I leave for that embassy

BOOK VIII 31-63

The year 1821--The Berlin, Embassy--I arrive in Berlin--M.
Ancillon--The Royal Family--Celebrations for the marriage of the
Grand-duke Nicholas--Berlin society--Count von Humboldt--Herr von
Chamisso--Ministers and ambassadors--The Princess William--The
Opera--A musical meeting--My first dispatches--M. de Bonnay--The
Park--The Duchess of Cumberland--Commencement of a Memorandum on
Germany--Charlottenburg--Interval between the Berlin Embassy and
the London Embassy--Baptism of M. le Duc de Bordeaux--Letter to M.
Pasquier--Letter from M. de Bernstoff--Letter from M. Ancillon--Last
letter from the Duchess of Cumberland--M. de Villèle, Minister of
Finance--I am appointed Ambassador to London

BOOK IX 64-112

The year 1822--My first dispatches from London--Conversation with
George IV. on M. Decazes--The noble character of our diplomacy under
the Legitimacy--A parliamentary sitting--English society--Continuation
of the dispatches--Resumption of parliamentary labours--A ball
for the Irish--Duel between the Duke of Bedford and the Duke of
Buckingham--Dinner at Royal Lodge--The Marchioness Conyngham
and her secret--Portraits of the ministers--Continuation of my
dispatches--Parleys on the Congress of Verona--Letter to M. de
Montmorency; his reply foreshadowing a refusal--A more favourable
letter from M. de Villèle--I write to Madame de Duras--Death of
Lord Londonderry--Another letter to M. de Montmorency--Trip to
Hartwell--Note from M. de Villèle announcing my nomination to the
Congress--The end of old England--Charlotte--Reflexions--I leave
London--The years 1824, 1825, 1826 and 1827--Deliverance of the King
of Spain--My dismissal--The Opposition follows me--Last diplomatic
notes--Neuchâtel, in Switzerland--Death of Louis XVIII.--Coronation of
Charles X.--Reception of the knights of the Orders

BOOK X 113-146

I collect my former adversaries around myself--My public
charges--Extract from my polemics after my fall--Visit to
Lausanne--Return to Paris--The Jesuits--Letter from M. de Montlosier
and my reply--Continuation of my polemics--Letter from General
Sébastiani--Death of General Foy--The Law of Justice and Love--Letter
from M. Étienne--Letter from M. Benjamin Constant--I attain the
highest pitch of my political importance--Article on the King's
saint's-day--Withdrawal of the law on the police of the press--Paris
illuminated--Note from M. Michaud--M. de Villèle's irritation--Charles
X. proposes to review the National Guard on the Champ de Mars--I write
to him: my letter--The review--The National Guard disbanded--The
Elective Chamber is dissolved--The new Chamber--Refusals to
co-operate--Fall of the Villèle Ministry--I contribute towards forming
the new ministry and accept the Roman Embassy--Examination of a reproach

BOOK XI 147-219

Madame Récamier--Childhood of Madame Récamier described by M. Benjamin
Constant--Letter to Madame Récamier from Lucien Bonaparte--Continuation
of M. Benjamin Constant's narrative: Madame de Staël--Madame
Récamier's journey to England--Madame de Staël's first journey to
Germany--Madame Récamier in Paris--Plans of the generals--Portrait
of Bernadotte--Trial of Moreau--Letters from Moreau and Masséna to
Madame Récamier--Death of M. Necker--Return of Madame de Staël--Madame
Récamier at Coppet--Prince Augustus of Prussia--Madame de Staël's
second journey to Germany--The Château de Chaumont--Letter from
Madame de Staël to Bonaparte--Madame Récamier and M. Mathieu de
Montmorency exiled--Madame Récamier at Châlons--Madame Récamier at
Lyons--Madame de Chevreuse--Spanish prisoners--Madame Récamier in
Rome--Albano-Canova: his letters--The Albano fisherman--Madame Récamier
in Naples--The Duc de Rohan-Chabot--King Murat: his letters--Madame
Récamier returns to France--Letter from Madame de Genlis--Letters from
Benjamin Constant--Articles by Benjamin Constant on Bonaparte's return
from Elba--Madame de Krüdener--The Duke of Wellington--I meet Madame
Récamier again--Death of Madame de Staël--The Abbaye-aux-Bois

BOOK XII 220-304

My Embassy to Rome--Three kinds of materials-Diary of the road--Letters
to Madame Récamier--Leo XII. and the Cardinals--The ambassadors--The
old artists and the new artists--Old Roman society--Present manners
of Rome--Town and country--Letter to M. Villemain--Letter to Madame
Récamier--Explanation concerning the memorandum I am about to
quote--Letter to M. le Comte de La Feironnays--Memorandum on Eastern
Affairs--Letters to Madame Récamier--Letter to M. Thierry--Dispatch to
M. le Comte de La Ferronnays--More letters to Madame Récamier--Dispatch
to M. le Comte Portalis--Death of Leo XII.--Dispatch to M. le Comte
Portalis--Letter to Madame Récamier




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

VOL. IV


    George IV
    The Duc Decazes
    The Duc de Berry
    Frederica Queen of Hanover
    The Duc de Richelieu
    The Marquess of Londonderry
    Madame Récamier
    Pope Leo XII



[Illustration: GEORGE IV.]




THE

MEMOIRS OF CHATEAUBRIAND

VOLUME IV

BOOK VII[1]

Changes in the world--The years 1815 and 1816--I am made a peer of
France--My first appearance in the tribune--Various speeches--The
_Monarchie selon la Charte_--Louis XVIII.--M. Decazes--I am struck
off the list of ministers of State--I sell my books and my Valley--My
speeches continued, in 1817 and 1818--The Piet meetings--The
_Conservateur_--Concerning the morality of material interests and that
of duty--The year 1820--Death of the Duc de Berry--Birth of the Duc de
Bordeaux--The market-women of Bordeaux--I cause M. de Villèle and M.
de Corbière to take office for the first time--My letter to the Duc
de Richelieu--Note from the Duc de Richelieu and my reply--Notes from
M. de Polignac--Letters from M. de Montmorency and M. Pasquier--I am
appointed Ambassador to Berlin--I leave for that embassy.


To fall back from Bonaparte and the Empire to that which followed them
is to fall from reality into nothingness, from the summit of a mountain
into a gulf. Did not everything finish with Napoleon? Ought I to have
spoken of anything else? What person can possess any interest beside
him? Of whom and of what can there be any question after such a man?
Dante alone had the right to associate himself with the great poets
whom he meets in the regions of another life. How can one speak of
Louis XVIII. in the stead of the Emperor? I blush when I think that, at
the present moment, I have to cant about a crowd of petty creatures, of
whom I myself am one, dubious and nocturnal beings that we were on a
stage from which the great sun had disappeared.

The Bonapartists themselves had shrivelled up. Their members had become
bent and shrunk; the soul was lacking to the new universe so soon as
Bonaparte withdrew his breath; objects faded from view from the moment
when they were no longer illuminated by the light which had given them
colour and relief. At the commencement of these Memoirs, I had only
myself to speak of: well, there is always a sort of paramountcy in
man's individual solitude. Later, I was surrounded by miracles: those
miracles kept up my voice; but at this present moment there is no more
conquest of Egypt, no more Battles of Marengo, Austerlitz and Jena, no
more retreat from Russia, no more invasion of France, capture of Paris,
return from Elba, Battle of Waterloo, funeral at St. Helena: what
remains? Portraits to which only the genius of Molière could lend the
gravity of comedy!

While expressing myself upon our worthlessness, I taxed my conscience
home: I asked myself whether I did not purposely incorporate myself
with the nullity of these times, in order to acquire the right to
condemn the others, persuaded though I were _in petto_ that my name
would be read in the midst of all these obliterations. No, I am
convinced that we shall all fade out: first, because we have not in
us the wherewithal to live; secondly, because the age in which we are
commencing or ending our days has itself not the wherewithal to make
us live. Generations mutilated, exhausted, disdainful, faithless,
consecrated to the annihilation which they love, are unable to bestow
immortality; they have no power to create a renown; if you were to nail
your ear to their mouth, you would hear nothing: no sound issues from
the heart of the dead.

One thing strikes me, however: the little world to which I am now
coming was superior to the world which succeeded it in 1830; we were
giants in comparison with the society of maggots that has engendered
itself.

The Restoration offers at least one point in which we can find
importance: after the dignity of one man, that man having passed, there
was born again the dignity of mankind. If despotism has been replaced
by liberty, if we understand anything of independence, if we have lost
the habit of grovelling, if the rights of human nature are no longer
disregarded, we owe these things to the Restoration. Wherefore also I
threw myself into the fray in order, as far as I could, to revive the
species when the individual had come to an end.

Come, let us pursue our task! Let us descend, with a groan, to myself
and my colleagues. You have seen me amid my dreams; you are about to
see me in my realities: if the interest decreases, if I fall, reader,
be just, make allowance for my subject!


[Sidenote: I am made a peer of France.]

After the second return of the King and the final disappearance of
Bonaparte, the Ministry being in the hands of M. le Duc d'Otrante and
M. le Prince de Talleyrand, I was appointed president of the electoral
college of the Department of the Loiret. The elections of 1815 gave
the King the _Chambre introuvable._[2] I was carrying all the votes
at Orleans, when I received the Order which called me to the House
of Peers[3]. My active career had hardly commenced, when it suddenly
changed its course: what would it have been if I had been sent to the
Elective Chamber? It is fairly probable that that career would, in
the event of my success, have ended in the Ministry of the Interior,
instead of taking me to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. My habits and
manners were more in touch with the peerage, and, although the latter
became hostile to me from the first moment, by reason of my Liberal
opinions, it is nevertheless certain that my doctrines concerning the
liberty of the press and against the vassalage to foreigners gave the
Noble Chamber the popularity which it enjoyed so long as it suffered my
opinions.

I received, at my entrance, the only honour which my colleagues ever
did me during my fifteen years' residence in their midst: I was
appointed one of the four secretaries for the session of 1816. Lord
Byron met with no more favour when he appeared in the House of Lords,
and he left it for good: I ought to have returned to my deserts.

My first appearance in the tribune was to make a speech on the
irremovability of the judges[4]: I applauded the principle, but
censured its immediate application. At the Revolution of 1830, the
members of the Left who were most devoted to that revolution wished to
suspend the irremovability for a time.

On the 22nd of February 1816, the Duc de Richelieu brought us the
autograph will of the Queen. I ascended the tribune, and said:

"He who has preserved for us the will of Marie-Antoinette[5] had bought
the property of Montboisier: himself one of Louis XVI.'s judges, he
raised in that property a monument to the memory of the defender of
Louis XVI., and himself engraved on that monument an epitaph in French
verse in praise of M. de Malesherbes. This astonishing impartiality
shows that all is misplaced in the moral world."

On the 12th of March 1816, the question of the ecclesiastical
pensions[6] was discussed:

"You would," I said, "refuse an allowance to the poor vicar who
devotes the remainder of his days to the altar, and you would accord
pensions to Joseph Lebon[7], who struck off so many heads; to François
Chabot[8], who asked for a law against the Emigrants of so simple a
character that a child might lead them to the guillotine; to Jacques
Roux[9], who, refusing at the Temple to receive Louis XVI.'s will,
replied to the unfortunate monarch:

"'My only business is to take you to your death.'"

A bill had been introduced into the Hereditary Chamber relating to the
elections. I declared myself in favour of the integral renewal of the
Chamber of Deputies. It was not until 1824, being then a minister, that
I passed it into law.

It was also in this first speech on the law governing elections, in
1816[10], that I said, in reply to an opponent:

"I will not refer to what has been said about Europe watching our
discussions. Speaking for myself, gentlemen, I doubtless owe to the
French blood that flows in my veins the impatience which I experience
when, in order to influence my vote, people talk to me of opinions
existing outside my country; and, if civilized Europe tried to impose
the Charter on me, I should go to live in Constantinople."

[Sidenote: The Chamber of Peers.]

On the 9th of April 1816, I introduced a motion to the Chamber relating
to the Barbary Powers. The house decided that there was cause for its
discussion. I was already thinking of combating slavery, before I
obtained that favourable decision from the Peers, which was the first
political intervention of a great Power on behalf of the Greeks:

"I have seen the ruins of Carthage," I said to my colleagues; "I have
met among those ruins the successors of the unhappy Christians for
whose deliverance St. Louis sacrificed his life. Philosophy can take
its share of the glory attached to the success of my motion and boast
of having obtained in an age of light that for which religion strove in
vain in an age of darkness."

I found myself in an assembly in which my words, for three-fourths of
the time, turned against myself. One can move a popular chamber; an
aristocratic chamber is deaf. With no gallery, speaking in private
before old men, dried-up remains of the old Monarchy, of the Revolution
and of the Empire, anything that rose above the most commonplace seemed
madness. One day, the front row of arm-chairs, quite close to the
tribune, was filled with venerable peers, one more deaf than the other,
their heads bent forward, and holding to their ears a trumpet with the
mouth turned towards the tribune. I sent them to sleep, which is very
natural. One of them dropped his ear-trumpet; his neighbour, awakened
by the fall, wanted politely to pick up his colleague's trumpet; he
fell down. The worst of it was that I began to laugh, although I was
just then speaking pathetically on some subject of humanity, I forget
what.

The speakers who succeeded in that Chamber were those who spoke
without ideas, in a level and monotonous tone, or who found terms of
sensibility only in order to melt with pity for the poor ministers. M.
de Lally-Tolendal thundered in favour of the public liberties: he made
the vaults of our solitude resound with the praises of three or four
English Lord Chancellors, his ancestors, he said. When his panegyric
of the liberty of the press was finished, came a "but" based upon
"circumstances," which "but" left our honour safe, under the useful
supervision of the censorship.

The Restoration gave an impulse to men's minds; it set free the thought
suppressed by Bonaparte: the intellect, like a caryatic figure relieved
of the entablature that bent its brow, lifted up its head. The Empire
had struck France with dumbness; liberty restored touched her and gave
her back speech: oratorical talents existed which took up matters where
the Mirabeaus and Cazalès had left them, and the Revolution continued
its course.


My labours were not limited to the tribune, so new to me. Appalled at
the systems which men were embracing and at France's ignorance of the
principles of representative government, I wrote and had printed the
_Monarchie selon la Charte._ This publication marked one of the great
epochs of my political life: it made me take rank among the publicists;
it served to determine opinion on the nature of our government. The
English papers praised the work to the skies; among us, the Abbé
Morellet even could not recover from the transformation of my style and
the dogmatic precision of the truths.

The _Monarchie selon la Charte_ is a constitutional catechism: from
it have been taken the greater part of the propositions which are put
forward as new to-day. Thus the principle that "the King reigns but
does not govern" is found fully set forth in Chapters IV., V., VI. and
VII. on the Royal Prerogative.

The constitutional principles having been laid down in the first part
of the _Monarchie selon la Charte_, I examine in the second the systems
of the three ministries which till then had followed upon one another,
from 1814 to 1816; in this part are brought together predictions
too well verified since and expositions of doctrines at that time
unperceived. These words appear in Chapter XXVI., in the Second Part:


    "It passes as unquestionable, in a certain party, that a
    revolution of the nature of our own can end only by a change
    of dynasty; others, more moderate, say by a change in the
    order of right of succession to the Crown."


As I was finishing my work, appeared the ordinance of the 5th of
September 1816[11]: this measure dispersed the few Royalists assembled
to reconstruct the Legitimate Monarchy. I hastened to write the
_Postscript_, which caused an explosion of anger on the part of M. le
Duc de Richelieu and of Louis XVIII.'s favourite, M. Decazes.

[Sidenote: Seizure of my pamphlet.]

The _Postscript_ added, I ran to M. Le Normant, my publisher's. On
arriving, I found constables and a police-commissary making out
instruments. They had seized parcels and affixed seals. I had not
defied Bonaparte to be intimidated by M. Decazes: I objected to the
seizure; I declared that, as a free Frenchman and a peer of France, I
would yield only to force. The force arrived and I withdrew. I went
on the 18th of September to Messieurs Louis-Marthe Mesnier and his
colleague, notaries-royal; I protested in their office and called upon
them to register my statement of the fact of the apprehension of my
work, wishing to ensure the rights of French citizens