Bonaparte and Châteaubriand.

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think. For this reason, and in so far as René was true, it was not of a particular but of a general application. The reader might turn revolted from much of it; but in the vague aspirations of René in other respects, in his deep though ill-defined presentiments of the weariness of a purposeless life, few men could do other than recognise the type of French youth under the unparalleled social and political convulsions of France. For René, Châteaubriand took all his colours from himself; he expressed himself, and inasmuch as no man can escape the impress of his time, he expressed also what the time in which he lived had made of the generations around him.

Now his pamphlet on the state of France in 1813, which is falsely entitled a "pamphlet," but which is, in fact, an historical protest, has the same origin as René, but under another form and at another moment of time. Châteaubriand, as we hinted in the first words of this article, stood in a curious juxtaposition to Napoleon Bonaparte, and thought he stood in one far more curious and more important still. From youth upwards he only thought of Bonaparte in conjunction with, or relatively to, himself. "We were both," says Châteaubriand in his Memoirs (speaking of the year 1791), "we were both then, Bonaparte and I, but sorry sub-lieutenants, utterly unknown; we both started. from the same obscurity at the same epoch." !! The reader may be surprised at this preoccupation of M. de Châteaubriand's; and as Villemain truly says, "future generations will probably marvel at this ambitious comparison, at this perpetually recurring antagonism of two names," as if in all the age those two alone could stand upon the same level; but to know a man you must see, as Pascal says, "how he thought his thoughts," you must make yourself entirely familiar with his points de vue, or you cannot appreciate the value of his judgments or deductions now, though it may seem strange, the fact is, that M. de Châteaubriand believed in an intellectual rivalry between the "sub-lieutenant of artillery" and himself. He never judged Napoleon from any other save from this intensely personal point of view, and he never believed Napoleon's acts towards himself to be prompted by other motives save the wish to "get rid" of a man whom he placed highly enough in his esteem to think him an obstacle, and to be therefore anxious to suppress him.

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But antagonism was not the first feeling that arose between the Dictator and M. de Châteaubriand. It was one of sympathy; nor was it till this had become exhausted, and had turned to bitter enmity, that Châteaubriand resolved to bring his utmost efforts to bear upon the task of shaking Bonaparte's rule. His work of Bonaparte et les Bourbons was one of deep and active personal hatred, of deep and personal ambition, and of the

ardent desire to gain a personal and political end. Self prompted it, and consequently, unmindful of "fine writing," anxious to gain a point that was of high import to himself, Châteaubriand threw, to repeat our former words, "all he was into all he said ;" and, addressing the public as one man would address another, gave utterance to a species of harangue of surpassing energy and beauty, and did, as has been often said, "more for the Bourbon cause than could have done an army of 100,000 men.”

Speech, not to be vain, must be another form of action; and one of the highest, though not the absolutely highest, employment of thought is, when thought prompts to deeds. Now, it was exactly thus with Châteaubriand in the case we are stating. His "implacable pamphlet," as M. Villemain calls it, was an act, into the commission of which he threw every energy of which he was capable. Thirteen years had made M. de Châteaubriand very different from what he was at the outset, and his hatred of the Emperor was after all but the recoil of what had at first been a precisely contrary impulse. In 1800, when Châteaubriand returned from emigration, his sympathies were decidedly with Bonaparte. There exists an article in the Mercure of the date we mention, written by Châteaubriand, upon Madame de Stael's work of La Littérature, all but entirely forgotten now, but in which a very delicate flattery is contained to the First Consul, and which M. de Fontanes, the writer's undeviating admirer and friend, took care the First Consul should remark. This flattery was no other than a praise of Julius Cæsar, and a declaration of his having been "the finest literary genius that the world ever saw !" a judgment that, as M. Villemain observes, "might somewhat have troubled Cicero, but did not displease the ruler of the then Republic of France."

This letter, which created a sensation, was followed by the publication of Atala, an episode extracted from the work M. de Châteaubriand was then preparing, Le Génie du Christianisme. The success of Atala was beyond what would seem possible to us now, but was, if we reflect for a moment upon the social and artistic conditions of France, perfectly explicable then. The unbearable affectation of Atala, the absence of all sincere emotion, of any real passion in it, the emptiness of the wouldbe sentiment, and the fatiguing and perpetual straining after effect in the style,-nothing of all this struck any one in the year 1800, and M. de Châteaubriand, like Byron after the Giaour, might have said, "I went to bed obscure, I awoke and found myself famous." Not to know the author of a work so universally popular,-not, at all events, to have seen and met him, was to argue yourself without the pale of that elite which in every country styles itself the "great world." great world." M. de Château

Cardinal Fesch and Châteaubriand.

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briand's fame, and M. de Fontanes' friendship for him, took the young author into the immediate circle of the Dictator. It was at a fête given by Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon's brother, that the First Consul and the young émigré were destined to meet. The manner of their meeting was certainly very curious, and might help to create a belief that Napoleon did not look upon Châteaubriand as upon the ordinary run of men. Châteaubriand was not presented to the First Consul, and it may be as well to recall some few incidents of the moment in order to award its full importance to the way in which the tyrant and the poet met. In 1800, it will be remembered, that any notion of religion, or of a religious establishment, was vague and faint in France. There was small doubt as to the Christian feelings of Châteaubriand; there was some doubt as to how Napoleon really thought upon the subject; consequently the manner of their meeting at Lucien's house derives interest from this fact. Bonaparte cast his eyes over the courtier crowd, appeared to single out by instinct the man whose recent fame made him an object of general attention, and, as though he knew him well, and were pursuing a conversation already begun, addressed him thus:" When I was in Egypt, I was much struck to see the Scheiks kneel down and worship their God with faces turned towards the east. Worship is everywhere man's instinct, for there lies truth; and this is what our Ideologues who fancy we can do without any form of worship, or any God, will not understand."

That this way of singling him out was very flattering to the vanity of a man who may have been said to have been "all vanity," is not to be disputed, nor can it be denied that he felt himself intensely flattered and delighted.

His royalism not having prevented him from approaching the chieftain whose ambition was to set royalty aside, there was no reason why M. de Châteaubriand should refuse to serve the government of Bonaparte, which still kept up the fiction of styling itself a Republican one. After three years passed in what some persons have held to be actual "expectation," the author of Atala consented to "serve his country," as he was pleased to call it. Cardinal Fesch was ambassador at Rome, and M. de Châteaubriand was nominated to the post of his first secretary. To Rome he went in the spring of 1803, and remained there till January 1804, returning to Paris in time to assist at the transformation (foreseen by every one) of the Republic into the Empire.

If space permitted, there is nothing we should like better than to initiate our readers into the details of what went on in the French Embassy at Rome, and between it and the Cabinet of the Tuilleries, during the time of the residence of M. de Châteaubriand in the Eternal City. It is an amusing picture of the way in which

diplomacy was practised under the Dictatorship; and, at first sight, you would be disposed to fancy its chief object was perpetual internal espionage. The Cardinal, whose natural religious indifference seems to have been one of his most marked characteristics, is quickly alarmed lest his more pious secretary should ingratiate himself too much with the Pope and the Papal court, and he is for ever writing home to assert that a great mistake has been made in sending M. de Châteaubriand to Rome. On the other hand, the secretary is for ever complaining of his ambassador, and for ever violating all the rules of etiquette. On one occasion, he presents at the Vatican five of his country people who have never been presented at their own embassy; on another, he informs the Pope that "his apparent position is not his real one," and gives him to understand that he, and not the Cardinal, is the principal agent of the policy of the French Government! To all these mistakes (all caused by his overweening vanity, which really did induce him to regard himself everywhere as of paramount importance), he added that of expediting secretly to Paris a long and confidential note, addressed to the First Consul, and in which he set down in succession all the reasons that made Cardinal Fesch such an exceedingly improper representative of France at the Papal See.

On the other hand, all his colleagues had taken for M. de Châteaubriand an ill-concealed aversion, and none of them could support the superiority of a man whose official rank made him their equal, and whose superiority not only came from himself, but was on most occasions openly assumed by himself. The Cardinal, far from countenancing him in any way, was occupied in also transmitting notes, touching his incommodious subordinate, to the one governing force in France, to Bonaparte himself. One of his latter ones contains this phrase: "Châuteaubriand is no friend of yours. If you do not cause him to be well watched wherever you send him, you will soon see that he does all he can to support those who dislike your government. This intriguer is a most dangerous man!" "Cet intrigant est encore un méchant homme!" We confess that this naïve expression of the Cardinal's vexation (and fear) appears to us all the more original, and we may say diverting, when we perceive to what an extent hypocrisy must have covered over all these warring feelings that were struggling beneath the surface. At about the same time when Cardinal Fesch pronounces his secretary "un méchant homme," his secretary writes to M. de Fontanes that he is so very pleasantly situated with his chief, that he has renounced all idea of tendering his resignation, as he had once intended to do. "The Cardinal," he says, "is so particularly kind to me, and has made me so thoroughly feel how prejudicial my retirement

Execution of the Duc d'Enghien.

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would be, that I have promised at all events to stay the year out. I am in great favour here, and be quite certain that I am not at all likely to leave! !" 1

It was not in M. de Châteaubriand's destiny, however, to remain, as he announces it, at Rome. The creation of a Legation to the Pays de Vaud is decided upon, and Cardinal Fesch's troublesome secretary is named minister. It was in allusion to this, that, on his return to Paris, it became his wont to praise Napoleon for the "sagacity" he declared him to have evinced in seeing at once that he (Châteaubriand) "belonged to that race of men who can only be of use in the highest and first places." But whether Napoleon's "sagacity" was or was not proved by this, M. de Châteaubriand was not to profit by it. He reached Paris to witness the establishment of the Empire, and, not that usurpation in itself caused the diplomatist Royalist to draw back (as he has sometimes sought to have it believed), but a circumstance of that usurpation, induced him to recede from all cooperation with the Imperialist monarchy.

On the 18th March, M. de Châteaubriand went to the Tuileries to take his formal leave of the Emperor, previously to starting for Switzerland, as chief of the new Legation to the Pays de Vaud. He, at the time, told those about him that he had been struck by the gloomy air of Napoleon, and by the lividness of his complexion. He concluded he must be ill. On the 20th of March, as M. de Châteaubriand was returning home towards evening by the Boulevard des Invalides, he suddenly heard what but too well explained the gloom and the livid complexion of the Emperor. A public crier was crying aloud the condemnation to death, and execution, of "Louis Antoine Henri de Bourbon, Duc d'Enghien!" At this, M. de Châteaubriand no longer hesitated. He went home, and, merely saying to his wife, "They have murdered the Duc d'Enghien," he sat down and wrote his resignation of the diplomatic office conferred upon him.

Perfectly simple and natural in the commission of this act, which was prompted by the inevitable feelings of the man, of the Royalist gentleman, M. de Châteaubriand lost this simplicity when, as an author, he came to tell the story of his conduct on this occasion. "The cry of that street-crier," he says in his Memoirs, "struck me like a thunder-bolt. It changed the tenor of my life, as it did that of Napoleon." Here we have once more the old preoccupation, and the desire to put himself always on a level with the man to whom (for evil or for good) the first place was awarded on the stage of the world's history at that epoch.

However, the preoccupation was not entirely on one side, and 'Villemain's Châteaubriand, chap. vi., p. 131.

VOL. XXIX. NO. LVII.

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