Chateaubriand's memoirs, IV, 12

Paris, June 1821.

During the two years which passed between establishing myself in Paris and the opening of the States-General this social network widened. I knew by heart the elegies of the Chevalier du Parny, and I even knew the author. I wrote to him to ask permission to meet a poet whose works delighted me; he replied politely: I went to his house in the Rue de Cléry.

I found quite a young man, dressed in very good taste, tall, thin, his face marked by smallpox. He returned my visit; I presented him to my sisters. He had little liking for society and he was soon driven from it by his politics: he was then of the ‘old’ party. I have never met a writer who conformed more closely to his work; a poet and a Creole, he only lacked the skies of India, a fountain, a palm-tree and a wife. He dreaded fame, sought to glide through life without being noticed, sacrificed everything to his idleness, and was only dragged from his obscurity by his pleasures which stroked the lyre in passing:

‘Let our life so fortunate and happy

Flow in secret ’neath the wings of love,

Akin to a barely murmuring stream

Constraining its waves within its bed,

That softly seeks the leaves’ shade overhead,

And dare not show itself to all the scene.’

It was the impossibility of escaping from his indolence that turned the Chevalier de Parny from furious aristocrat to wretched revolutionary, attacking persecuted religion and priests on the scaffold, purchasing his peace at any price, and lending to the Muse that sang of Eléonore the language of those places where Camille Desmoulins went to bargain for love.

The author of the Histoire de la litérature italienne, who wormed his way into the Revolution as a follower of Chamfort, met us through that cousinship that all Bretons share. Guinguené existed in the world on the reputation of a graceful enough piece of verse that was worth a minor appointment in Monsieur de Necker’s office to him; from there the piece assured his entry into the Office of Public Finance. I do not know who disputed with Ginguené his famous title, the Confession de Zulmé; but in effect it belonged to him.

The poet from Rennes was familiar with music and composed ballades. Humble as he was, we saw his pride grow, as he clung to someone well-known. Close to the time when the States-General were convened, Chamfort employed him to scribble articles for the journals, and speeches for the clubs; he became haughty. At the first Festival of the Federation he said: ‘What a lovely celebration! To shed more light we should burn four aristocrats at the four corners of the altar.’ He lacked originality in his wish; long before him, the Leaguer, Louis Dorleans, wrote in his Banquet du comte d’Arête: ‘that we must tie protestant ministers like faggots to the branches of the bonfire of Saint-Jean, and put Henry IV in the barrel where they put the cats.’

Ginguené had prior knowledge of the revolutionary atrocities. Madame Ginguené warned my sisters and my wife of the massacre which would take place at the Carmes, and gave them refuge: they were living in the Cul-de-sac Férou, near the place where throats were cut.

After the Terror, Ginguené became virtually the controller of public education; it was then that he sang l’Arbre de la liberté (The Tree of Liberty) to the crowd in the Cadran-Bleu restaurant, to the tune of; ‘Je l’ai planté, je l’ai vu naître’(I planted it, I have seen its birth.) One judges him to have admired philosophy too much to be an ambassador to one of those kings they deposed. He wrote from Turin to Monsieur Talleyrand that he had vanquished a prejudice: he had had his wife received at court in a short skirt. Tumbling from mediocrity into importance, from importance into foolishness, and from foolishness into ridicule, he ended his literary life as a noted critic, and, what is better still, an independent writer for the Décade: nature had returned him to the place from which society had dragged him at just the wrong moment. His knowledge was second-hand, his prose heavy, his poetry correct, and occasionally agreeable.

Ginguené had a friend, the poet Lebrun. Ginguené protected Lebrun, as a man of talent who knows society protects the simplicity of a man of genius; Lebrun in turn shed his rays on Ginguené’s heights. Nothing was more comical than the role of those two accomplices, providing, by means of gentile exchange, all the services that two superior individuals might render in diverse genres.

Lebrun was quite simply an artificial Empire man; his wit was as cold as his enthusiasms were frozen. His Parnassus, an upper room in the Rue Montmartre, offered as its only furniture books piled haphazardly on the floor, a bed made of webbing whose curtains, formed from two dirty sheets, flapped across a rail of rusty iron, and half a water jug resting against an armchair without stuffing. It was not that Lebrun was financially embarrassed, but he was miserly and devoted to loose-living women.

At Monsieur de Vaudreuil’s classical suppers, he played the role of Pindar. Among his lyric poems, one finds vigorous and elegant verses, as in the ode on the ship Le Vengeur and his ode on Les Environs de Paris. His elegies emerged from his brain, rarely from his soul; he had a studied rather than a natural originality; he only created by virtue of artistic strength; he exercised himself in perverting the sense of words and combining them in monstrous alliances. Lebrun’s only true talent was for satire; his epistle on La bonne et la mauvaise plaisanterie has enjoyed well-merited renown. Some of his epigrams are worthy of comparing with those of Jean-Baptiste Rousseau; Laharpe influenced him particularly. One must also do him the justice to say that he remained independent during Bonaparte’s time, and there are some blood-stained verses of his, written in opposition to that oppressor of our freedoms.

But, without question, the testiest man of letters I met in Paris at that time was Chamfort; suffering from that malady that created the Jacobins, he could not forgive mankind for the misfortune of his origins. He betrayed the trust of the houses to which he was admitted; he took the cynicism of his own language for a portrait of Court morals. One could not quarrel with his being a man of wit and talent, but of that kind of wit and talent that has no impact on posterity. When he realised he was achieving nothing during the Revolution, he turned against himself those hands which he had raised against society. The red cap appeared to his pride to be another sort of crown, sans-culottisma sort of nobility, of which Marat and Robespierre were great lords. Furious at finding inequality of rank even in a world of grief and tears, condemned to being no more than a serf among feudal tormentors, he wished to kill in order to escape from criminal oppression; he bungled his suicide; death mocks those who summon it and who confuse it with nothingness.

I did not meet l’Abbé Delille except in London in 1798, and have not seen Rulhière, who existed thanks to Madame d’Egmont, and who in turn gave her existence, nor Palissot, Beaumarchais, or Marmontel. So it is that I have never met Chénier either, who attacked me frequently, to whom I never responded, and to whose place at the Institute I owe one of the crises of my life.

When I re-read the writers of the eighteenth century, I am amazed at the fame they acquired, and at my old enthusiasms. Whether the language has advanced, or retreated, whether we have marched towards civilisation, or beat a retreat towards barbarism, what is certain is that I find something worn, faded, dull, inanimate, and cold in the authors that were the delight of my youth. I find in even the greatest writers of the age of Voltaire poverty of sentiment, in thought and style.

Who is to blame for my own lapses? I am fearful of having been the guiltiest party: a born innovator, perhaps I have communicated to new generations the malady with which I was infected. Terrified, I have shouted at my children: ‘Do not forget your French!’ They reply as the Limousin did to Pantagruel: ‘that they come from the alma, inclita, and celebrated academy that one vocite Lutetia.’

This mania for Graecizing and Latinizing our language is nothing new, as we see: Rabelais cures it, it reappears in Ronsard; Boileau attacks it. In our time it has been resuscitated by Science; our revolutionaries, noble Greeks by nature, have required our shopkeepers and peasants to understand hectares, hectolitres, kilometres, millimetres, decagrams: politics has been Ronsardised.

I might have spoken here of Monsieur de Laharpe, whom I still know and whom I will return to; I might have added to my portrait gallery that of Fontanes; but though my relationship with that excellent man had its birth in 1789, it was only in England that I forged a friendship with him that has grown with bad fortune, and never diminished with good; I will tell you about him later accompanied by all the outpourings of my heart. I can only describe talents that no longer solace the world. My friend’s death occurred at a moment when my memories were urging me to retrace the commencement of his life. Our existence flies past so swiftly, that if we do not write in the evening the events of the morning, the effort burdens us and we no longer have time to bring them to light. That does not prevent us wasting our lives, scattering to the winds those hours that for mankind are the seeds of eternity.