Memoirs From Beyond The Grave by Chateaubriand

 

Book Six, I. Prologue

London, April to September 1822;

            Revised in December 1846


Thirty-one years after having set sail for America as a simple sub-lieutenant, I set sail for London with a passport conceived in the following terms: Laissez passer sa seigneurie le Vicomte de  Chateaubriand, pair de France, ambassadeur du Roi pres Sa Majeste Britanique, etc., etc. ‘Let pass his lordship the Vicomte de Chateaubriand, Peer of France, Ambassador of the King to His Majesty, the King of Britain.’ No description; my greatness was supposed to be enough to make my face familiar everywhere.

A steamboat, chartered for me alone, carried me from Calais to Dover. When I set foot on English soil, on April 5, 1822, I was saluted by the cannon of the fort. An officer came on behalf of the commandant to offer me an honor guard. Down at the Shipwright Inn, the owner and waiters of the place received me with deep bows and bare heads. Madame the Mayoress invited me to a soirée in the name of the loveliest ladies of the town. Monsieur Billing, an attaché of my embassy, was awaiting my arrival. A meal of enormous fish and monstrous quarters of beef restored Monsieur L’Ambassadeur, who had no appetite at all and who was not tired in the least. The townspeople, gathered beneath my windows, filled the air with their loud huzzahs. The officer returned and, despite my protest, posted sentries at my door. The next day, after distributing no small amount of my master the King’s money, I was on my way to London, to the booming of cannon, in a light carriage driven at full trot by a pair of elegantly dressed jockeys. My servants followed in other carriages, and couriers dressed in my livery rode alongside the cavalcade. We passed through Canterbury, drawing te gaze of John Bull and of every horse and rider that crossed or path. At Blackheath, a common once haunted by highwaymen, I found an entirely new village. Soon after, I saw the immense skullcap of smoke that covers the city of London.

Plunging into this gulf of carbon vapor, as though into one of the maws of Tartarus, and crossing the entire town, whose streets I well remembered, I landed at the embassy in Portland Place,. There the  chargé d’affaires, M. le Comte George de Caraman, the secretaries of the embassy, M. le Vicomte de Marcellus, M. le Elise Decazes, M.de Bourqueney, and other attaches welcomed me with dignified deferentiality. Every usher, porter, valet, and footman of the house assembled on the sidewalk. I was presented with the cards of the English ministers ad foreign ambassadors, who had already been informed of my upcoming arrival.

On May 17, in the year of grace 1793, I disembarked at Southampton in my way to this same city of London, an obscure and humble traveler coming from Jersey.  No Mayoress took notice of me,. On May 18, William Smith, the mayor of Southampton, handed me a travel permit for London to which a copy of the Alien Bill had been attached. My description read, in English: ‘Francois de Chateaubriand, French officer in the emigrant army, five feet four inches high, thin shape, brown hair and brown side whiskers.’ I modestly shared the least expensive carriage with a few sailors on leave. I changed horses at the most miserable inns. Poor, sick, and unknown, I entered a rich an opulent city, where Mr. Pitt reigned. I found lodgings, for six shillings a month, under the laths of a garret at the end of a little street off the Tottenham Court Road, which a cousin from Brittany had prepared for me:

Ah! Monseigneur, que votre vie,

D’ honneurs aujourd’ hui si remplie,

Differe de ces heureux temps!

Yet another sort of obscurity has come to darken my days in London. My political positon is overshadowing my literary fame, and there is not a fool in the three kingdoms who doesn’t prefer the ambassador of Louis XVIII to the author of The Genius of Christianity. I shall see how things turnout once I’m dead, or once I’ve ceased to fill M. le Duc Decazes’s post in the Court of  George IV – a succession as bizarre as the rest of my life.

Now that I am in London as the French ambassador, one of my greatest pleasures is to abandon my carriage in the corner of a square and go wandering on foot trough the backstreets I used to frequent; the cheap, working-class suburbs where sufferings refuge with similar sufferings; the unheralded shelters I haunted with my partners in distress, never knowing whether I would have enough bread to survive the morrow – I, whose table is laden with three or four courses today. In all those narrow and destitute doorways that were once open to me, I meet only unfamiliar faces. No longer do I see my compatriots wandering the streets, recognizable by their gestures, their gait, the state and cut of their clothes; no longer do I catch the sight of those martyred priests, wearing their little collars, their big three-cornered hats, and their long black threadbare frocks, to whom the English used to tip their hats a they passed by. Wide streets lined with palaces have been cut, brides built, and promenades laid; Regent’s Park occupies the site, close to Portland Place, where once meadows were covered with herds of cattle. A graveyard, which dominated the view from the window of one of my garrets, has disappeared into the confines of a factory. When I go to see Lord Liverpool, I am hard pressed to pick out the empty spot where Charles I’s scaffold once stood,. New buildings, closing in around the statue of Charles II, have encroached, along with forgetfulness, on memorable events.

How I mourn, amid my insipid pomp, that world of tribulations and tears, that time when my sorrows mingled with the sorrows of a whole colony of exiles! It’s true then that everything changes, that the poor die the same as the prosperous. And what has become of my brothers in emigration? Some are dead, and others have suffered various fates: like me, they have seen their family and their friends disappear, and they find themselves less at home in their own country than they were in a foreign land. Was it not in that land that we had our gatherings, our amusements, our celebrations, and above all our youths? Mothers and young maidens, starting their lives in adversity brought home the weekly fruit of their labors, then went out to revel in some hometown dance. Friendships were struck up in the small talk of the evenings, after the day’s work, on the grass of Hampstead or Primrose Hill. In chapels, decorated with our own hands in dilapidated rooms, we prayed together on January 21 and on the day of the Queen’s death, deeply moved by the funeral oration delivered by the emigrant curé of our village. We strolled along the Thames, gazing at the ships towering over the docks and loaded with the riches of the world, admiring the country houses of Richmond – we who were poor, we who were deprived of our fathers’ roofs. All these things were true happiness!

When I come home in 1822, instead of being greeted by my friend, trembling with cold, who opens the door of our garret calling me by my first name, who goes to bed on a pallet next to mine, covering himself with a thin coat and with nothing but moonlight for a lamp, I walk by torchlight between two lines of footmen ending in five or six respectful secretaries, and arriver, riddled along the way by the words Monseigneur, My Lord, Your Excellency, Monsieur, L’Ambassadeur, at a parlor draped in gold and silk.

- I’m begging you, young men, leave me be! Enough with these My Lords! What do you want me to do with you? Go and laugh in the chancery, as if I weren’t here! Do you think you can make me take his masquerade seriously? Do you think I am stupid enough to believe that my nature has changed because I’ve changed my clothes? The Marquess of Londonderry s coming to call, you say, the Duke of Wellington has left his card: Mr. Canning came looking for me; Lady Jersey expects me for dinner with Lord Brougham; Lady Gwydir hopes that I will join her in her box at the Opera at ten o’clock; Lady Mansfield, at midnight, a Almack’s .  .  .

Have mercy on me! After all, where can I hide? Who will deliver me? Who will rescue me from these persecutions? Come back, you lovely days of indigence and solitude! Rise up and live again, my companions in exile! Let us go, old comrades of the camp-bed and the pallet, let us go out into the country, into the little garden of some forgotten tavern, and drink a bad cup of tea on a wooden bench, talking of our foolish hopes and or ungrateful homeland, mulling over or troubles, looking for ways to help each other or one of our relations even worse off than ourselves.

This is how I’ve felt and what I’ve thought these first days of my embassy in London. Only by saturating myself in the less ponderous sadness of Kensington Gardens have I been able to escape the sadness that besieges me beneath my own roof. At least these gardens haven’t changed ( I assured myself of this again in 1843); the trees alone have grown taller: here, in perpetual solitude, the birds build their nests in peace. It’s no longer even the fashion to meet in this place, as it was in the days when Madame Recamier, the most beautiful of French women, used to walk here followed by a crowd. Now, from the edge of the deserted lawns of Kensington, I love to gaze at the running of the horses across Hyde Park and the high society carriages among which one might pick out my tilbury, standing empty, while I, become once again a poor little émigré, climb the path where the banished confessor not long ago recited his breviary.

It was in Kensington Gardens that I contemplated the Essai historique. It was there that, reading over the journal of my travels overseas, I drew from it the loves of Atala. I was there, too, after wandering in the country, under a low English sky, glowing, as though shot through with polar light, that I penciled the first sketches of the passions of René. By night, I stored the harvest of my daydreams in the Essai historique and The Natchez. The two manuscripts advanced side by side, though I often lacked the money to buy paper, and, for want of thread, fastened what sheets I had together with tacks pulled from the windowsill of my garret

These places where I had my first inspirations make me feel their power; they refract the sweet light of memories over the present – and I feel myself prodded to take up the pen again. So many hours are wasted in embassies! I have as much time here as in Berlin to continue my Memoirs, this edifice that I’m building from dry bones and ruins. My secretaries in London want to go picnicking in the morning and dancing at night, and I am glad to let them go. The men, Peter, Valentin, and Lewis, go to the tavern; the maids, Rose, Peggy, and Maria for a stroll on the sidewalks; and I am delighted. I have been left the key to the street door: Monsieur L’Ambassadeur is in charge of the house. If you knock, he shall open. Everyone is gone, and I am here alone. Let us get down to work.

It was twenty-two years ago, as I have just said, that I sketched The Natchez and Atala here in London; I am now at the precise moment in my Memoirs when I shall set sail for America: this coincidence suits me marvelously. Let us cancel out those twenty-two years, as they have in effect been canceled out of my life, and se off for the forests of the New World. The story of my embassy will be told when the time is right, if it pleases God; but as long as I remain here for a few months, I should have the leisure to proceed from Niagara Falls in New York to the Army of the Princes of Germany, and from the Army of the Princes to my refuge in England,. The Ambassador of the King of France can then recount the story of the French émigré in the same place where the latter was exiled.