Chateaubriand's memoirs, VI, 1

London, April to September 1822. (Revised December 1846)

Thirty-one years after embarking, as a mere second-lieutenant, for America, I embarked for London with a passport conceived in these terms: ‘Allow passage,’ said this passport, ‘allow passage to His Lordship the Vicomte de Chateaubriand, Peer of France, Ambassador of the King to His Britannic Majesty, etc., etc.’ No description; my grandeur was apparently such as to make my face known everywhere. A steamship, chartered for my sole use, brought me from Calais to Dover. In setting foot on English soil, on the 4th April 1822, I was saluted by the guns of the fort. An officer arrived on behalf of the Commandant to offer me a guard of honour. Reaching the Ship Inn, the landlord and servants received me with bare heads and hanging arms. Madame the Mayoress invited me to a soiree, in the name of the most beautiful ladies of the town. Monsieur Billing, attaché to my embassy, was waiting for me. A dinner of huge fish and monstrous quarters of beef revived Monsieur l’Ambassadeur, who had no appetite and was not in the least tired. The locals, gathered under my windows, filled the air with loud hurrahs. The officer returned, and without asking posted sentries at my door. Next day, after a lavish distribution of my master the King’s money, I set off on the road to London, to the roar of canon, in a light carriage, drawn by four fine horses driven at a lovely trot by two elegant postilions. My staff followed in other coaches; couriers dressed in my livery accompanied the cavalcade. We passed through Canterbury, attracting the eyes of John Bull, and the carriages we overtook. At Blackheath, a common once frequented by highwaymen, I found a newly built village. Soon the immense cap of smoke that covers the city of London appeared.

Plunging into the gulf of dark vapour, as if into one of the mouths of Tartarus, and crossing the whole town, whose streets I recognised, I arrived at the Embassy in Portland Place. The chargé d’affaires, Monsieur le Comte Georges de Caraman, the Embassy secretaries, Monsieur le Vicomte de Marcellus, Monsieur le Baron Élisée Decazes, Monsieur de Bourqueney, and the attachés welcomed me with dignified politeness. All the ushers, porters, valets and footmen of the Embassy were assembled on the pavement. I was handed the cards of the English ministers and foreign ambassadors who had already been informed of my imminent arrival.

On the 17thof May in the year of grace 1793, I had disembarked at Southampton for this same city of London, as an obscure and humble traveller from Jersey. No Mayoress had noticed my arrival; the Mayor of the town, William Smith, gave me, on the 18th, a travel permit for London, to which was attached an extract from the Aliens Bill. My description read as follows: ‘François de Chateaubriand, French officer in the emigrant army, five feet four inches high, thin shape, brown hair and pitted with the smallpox.’ I humbly shared the cheapest of carriages with several sailors on leave; I changed horses at the meanest of inns; I entered poor, ill, and unknown, the rich and famous city where Mr Pitt reigned; I lodged, at six shillings a month, under the laths of a garret which a Breton cousin had found for me, at the end of a little street off the Tottenham Court Road.

‘Ah! Monseigneur, how your life

Today, with every honour rife,

Differs from those happy times!’

However a different kind of obscurity has enveloped me in London. My political status has overshadowed my literary fame; there is not a fool in the three kingdoms who has not preferred Louis XVIII’s ambassador to the author of Le Génie du Christianisme. We will see how things turn out after my death, or after I have ceased to fill Monsieur the Duc Decazes’ place at the Court of George IV, a succession as strange as the rest of my life.

Sine arriving in London as French Ambassador, one of my greatest pleasures has been to leave my carriage at the corner of the street, and wander on foot through the side streets that I once frequented, those poor working-class suburbs, where misfortune takes refuge under the protection of a like suffering, those obscure shelters which I haunted with my companions in distress, not knowing if I would have bread to eat next day, I whose table in 1822 groans under three or four courses. At all of those narrow, humble doors which in the past were open to me, I see only unfamiliar faces. I no longer meet my compatriots in the street, recognisable by their gestures; their walk; the age and style of their clothes; no longer notice those priestly martyrs, wearing their clerical collars; large three-cornered hats; and long threadbare black coats, whom the English would salute as they passed. Wide streets have been cut, lined with palaces, bridges constructed, walkways planted: Regent’s Park, near to Portland Place, occupies the site of the old meadows with their herds of cattle. A cemetery, seen from the window of one of my attic rooms, has vanished within the precincts of a factory. When I go to see Lord Liverpool, I find it hard to discover the place where Charles I’s scaffold stood; new buildings, closing in around the statue of Charles II, have encroached like forgetfulness itself on memorable events.

How I regret, in the midst of my insipid grandeur, that world of tribulation and tears, those times when my sorrows mingled with those of a colony of unfortunates! It is true then that everything changes, that misfortune ends even as prosperity does! What has become of my émigré brothers? Some are dead, others have suffered various fates: they have seen their friends and families vanish; they are less happy in their native country than they were in a foreign land. Had we not, in this country, our reunions, our diversions, our celebrations, above all our youth? Mothers, and young girls beginning their life in adversity, brought home the fruits of their labours, and went to join in some dance of their homeland. Attachments were formed after work, during the evening conversations, on the grass at Hampstead or Primrose Hill. In chapels, decorated by our own hands in old tumbledown buildings, we prayed together on the 21st of January and on the day of the Queen’s death, moved by a funeral oration given by the emigrant priest from our village. We strolled beside the Thames, to watch vessels charged with the world’s riches entering the docks, or to admire the country houses at Richmond, we so poor, we deprived of our paternal roof: all these things were true happiness!

When in 1822 I return home, instead of being met by a friend, shivering with cold, who opens the door of an attic to me familiarly, who beds down on a pallet next to mine, covering himself with a thin coat, with the moonlight for his lamp – I pass between two rows of lackeys, to the light of torches, to reach five or six respectful secretaries. I arrive, riddled with words along the way: Monseigneur, Milord, Your Excellency, Monsieur the Ambassador, at a drawing room draped with gold and silk.

– I beg you, Gentlemen, leave me! A truce to these Milords! What do you wish me to do? Go away, laugh in the Chancery, as if I were not here. Do you imagine you can make me take this masquerade seriously? Do you think me such a fool as to believe that I have changed my nature because I have changed my coat? The Marquis of Londonderry is coming to visit, you say; the Duke of Wellington has asked for me; Mr Canning is seeking me; Lady Jersey expects me to dinner with Lord Brougham; Lady Gwydir expects me at ten in her box at the Opera; Lady Mansfield at midnight at Almack’s –

Mercy! Where can I hide? Who will deliver me? Who will rescue me from this persecution? Return, you lovely days of misery and solitude! Live once more, companions of my exile! Come, old comrades of pallet and camp-bed, come to the countryside, to the little garden of some quiet tavern, drink a cup of bad tea on a wooden bench and talk of our foolish hopes, and our ungrateful land, speaking of our troubles, searching for ways to help one another, or to succour a relative of ours even more deserving than ourselves.

This is what I have felt, and what I have said to myself in these first days of my London embassy. I can only escape the melancholy that assails me beneath my own roof by saturating myself in the less oppressive melancholy of KensingtonGardens. The gardens have not changed, as I was able to reassure myself in 1843; only the trees have grown; always a solitary place, the birds build their nests here in peace. It is not even the fashion to meet here any more, as in the days when that loveliest of Frenchwomen, Madame Recamier, walked here accompanied by a throng. From the edge of the deserted lawns of Kensington, I love to watch the files of horses crossing Hyde-Park, and the carriages of fashionable young men, among which in 1822 appears my empty Tilbury, while I, once more the poor little émigré gentleman walk the path where the exiled confessor used to say his breviary.

It was in Kensington Gardens that I planned the Essai Historique; it was there where, re-reading the journal of my travels overseas, I drew on it for the loves of Atala; it was there too, after wandering far and wide over the fields under a lowering sky, which turned yellow as if filled with polar light, that I pencilled out the first sketch of René’s passions. At night I deposited the fruit of my daydreams in the Essai Historique and Les Natchez. The two manuscripts advanced side by side, though I often lacked the money to buy writing paper, and for want of thread fastened the pages together with tacks pulled from the battens in my attic.

The site of my early inspirations commands me to feel its power; it casts the gentle light of my memories over the present: – I feel like taking up my pen once more. So many hours are wasted in embassies! I have no less time than in Berlin to continue my Memoirs, this edifice I am constructing from dead bones and ruins. My secretaries here in London want to go on picnics in the mornings and to balls at night; gladly! The footmen, Peter, Valentine, Lewis, in their turn head for the tavern, and the maids, Rose, Peggy, Maria, go for a walk through the streets; I am delighted. They have left me the key of the outer door: Monsieur the Ambassador remains in charge of the house; if anyone knocks, he will open for them. Everyone has gone; here I am, alone: let us set to work.

It was twenty-two years ago, as I have said, that I sketched out Les Natchez and Atala; I am at the precise point in my Memoirs at which I sailed for America: it is a perfect fit. Let us erase those twenty-two years, as they have in fact been erased from my life, and set off for the forests of the New World: the story of my Embassy will appear in its proper place, when God pleases; but provided I remain here for a few months, I shall have the time to travel from Niagara Falls to the Army of the Princes in Germany, and from the Army of the Princes to my retreat to England. The Ambassador of the King of France can recount the story of the French émigré in the very place where the latter spent his exile.