vicomte de François-René Chateaubriand

“ In the desert of my early life, I was obliged to invent persons to adorn it; I drew from my own substance beings whom I did not find elsewhere and whom I carried within myself. In the same way, I have placed memories of Atala and René on the edge of the cataract of Niagara, as the expression of its sadness. What meaning has a cascade which falls eternally in the unfeeling sight of heaven and earth, if human nature be not there, with its destinies and its misfortunes? To be steeped in this solitude of water and mountains and not to know with whom to speak of that great spectacle! ”

“ My eyes remained fixed upon Saint-Malo, where I had left my mother in tears. I saw the steeples and domes of the churches where I had prayed with Lucile, the walls, the ramparts, the forts, the towers, the beach where I had spent my childhood with Gesril and my other play-fellows; I was abandoning my distracted country at the moment when she had lost a man who could never be replaced. I was going away in equal uncertainty as to my country's destinies and my own: which of us was to perish, France or I? Should I ever see France and my family again? ”

“ I have often seen her, with one arm thrown over her head, dream without life or movement; the life that was in her ebbed to her heart, and ceased to show itself without; her very bosom no longer heaved. Her attitude, her melancholy, her beauty gave her the air of a funeral Genius. I then endeavored to console her, and the next moment was myself plunged in inexplicable despair.
Lucile liked to read some pious book, in the evening, alone: her favourite oratory was the junction of two country-roads, marked by a stone cross and a poplar-tree, whose long stylus rose into the sky like a pencil. ”

“ We no longer behold the real Mirabeau, but the idealized Mirabeau, the Mirabeau as the painters depict him, in order to make him the symbol or the myth of the period which he represents: he thus becomes both more false and more true. From among so many reputations, so many actors, so many events, so many ruins, there will remain but three men, attached to each of the three great revolutionary epochs: Mirabeau for the aristocracy, Robespierre for the democracy, Bonaparte for the despotism; the monarchy has none: France has paid dear for three reputations which virtue is unable to acknowledge! ”

“ I have often been told these details; their sadness has never been erased from my memory. A day seldom passes on which, reflecting on what I have been, I do not see again in thought the rock upon which I was born, the room in which my mother inflicted life upon me, the tempest whose sound first lulled me to sleep, the unfortunate brother who gave me a name which I have nearly always dragged through misfortune. Heaven seemed to unite these several circumstances in order to lay within my cradle a symbol of my destiny. ”

“ I was on the side of M. de Malesherbes and of Madame de Rosanbo as against M. de Rosanbo and my brother, who was nicknamed "the raving Chateaubriand." The Revolution would have carried me away, had it not started in crime: I saw the first head carried on the end of a pike, and I drew back. Murder will never to my eyes be an object of admiration or an argument in favour of liberty; I know nothing more servile, more contemptible, more cowardly, more shallow than a Terrorist. Have I not in France seen the whole of this race of Brutus take service with Caesar and his police? ”

“ He will be able to recognize the castle; but he will look in vain for the great wood: the cradle of my dreams has vanished like those dreams. Left standing alone upon its rock, the ancient keep mourns the oaks, the old friends that surrounded it and protected it against the storm. Isolated also, I too have seen falling around me the family which beautified my days and lent me its shelter: fortunately my life is not built upon the earth so solidly as the towers in which I spent my youth, nor does man offer to the tempests a resistance so great as that of the monuments raised by his hands. ”

“ If I had formed my own clay, perhaps I would have created myself a woman, for love of them; or if I had made myself a man, I would in the first place have granted myself beauty; next, as a safeguard against weariness, my stubborn enemy, it would have suited me fairly well to be a consummate but unknown artist, using my talent only for the benefit of my solitude. In life, weighed by its light weight, measured by its short measure, relieved of all its cheating, there are but two things true: religion with intelligence, love with youth ”

“ The royal infidel took pleasure in profaning even the religion of the tomb by raising mausoleums to his dogs; he had marked out a burying-place near them for himself, less from contempt of mankind than an ostentation of annihilation.
They showed me the New Palace, already falling to pieces. In the old palace of Potsdam, they preserve the tobacco-stains, the worn and soiled chairs, in a word, all the traces of the renegade Prince's uncleanliness. This place immortalizes at once the dirt of the cynic, the impudence of the atheist, the tyranny of the despot, and the glory of the soldier. ”

“ In the docks of London and Plymouth, it is not unusual to find sailors born on board ship: from their childhood to their old age they have never set foot on shore; spectators of the world which they have never entered, they have seen the land only from the side of their floating cradle. In this life reduced to so small a space, beneath the clouds and upon the depths, all things become life-like to the mariner: an anchor, a sail, a mast, a gun are persons that excite his attachment and that have each their history. ”

“ Of the modern French authors of my own period, I may be said to be the only one whose life resembles his works: a traveller, soldier, poet, publicist, it is amid forests that I have sung the forest, aboard ship that I have depicted the sea, in camp that I have spoken of arms, in exile that I have learnt to know exile, in Courts, in affairs of State, in Parliament that I have studied princes, politics, law and history. The orators of Greece and Rome played their part in the republic and shared its fate. ”

“ I was at that time, like Bonaparte, a slim sub-lieutenant, entirely unknown; both of us emerged from obscurity at the same period, I to seek renown in solitude, he to seek glory among mankind. I had not attached myself to any woman, and my sylph still possessed my imagination. I placed before myself the bliss of realizing my fantastic wanderings in her company in the forests of the New World. Through the influence of a new manifestation of nature, my flower of love, my nameless phantom of the woods of Armorica, grew into Atala beneath the shady groves of Florida. ”

“ Had I done what other men do, I should soon have become acquainted with the pains and pleasures of the passion whose germs I bore within me; but everything in me assumed an extraordinary character. The ardor of my imagination, my shyness, the solitude in which I lived caused me, rather than rush out of doors, to fall back upon myself; for want of a real object, I evoked, by the strength of my vague longings, a phantom which never left my side. I do not know whether the history of the human heart offers another instance of this nature. ”

“ Thus have I been so singularly placed in life as to have assisted at the tilting at the Quintain and at the proclamation of the Rights of Man; to have beheld the train-bands of a Breton village and the National Guard of France, the banner of the Lords of Combourg and the flag of the Revolution. I am as it were the last surviving witness of the feudal customs.
The visitors whom we received at the castle consisted of the inhabitants of the market-town and the neighboring gentry: these good people were my first friends. Our vanity attaches too much importance to the part we play in the world. ”

“ The desert peoples have none of these advantages: their names are not written upon the trees; their huts, built in a few hours, disappear in a few moments; the butt of their ploughing only grazes the ground, and is not able even to raise a furrow. Their traditional songs perish with the last memory which retains them, and die away with the last voice which repeats them. The tribes of the New World, therefore, have but one monument: the tomb. Take away from savages the bones of their fathers, and you take away their history, their laws, and their very gods ”

“ But what is most admirable in Brittany is to see the moon rising on land and setting upon the sea. The moon, by divine creation governess of the deep, has her clouds, her mists, her beams, her projected shadows like the sun; but, unlike the latter, she does not set alone: a retinue of stars accompanies her. As, upon my native coast, she descends the vault of heaven, she extends her silence, and communicates it to the sea; soon she sinks to the horizon, intersects it, shows but the half of her forehead, which diminishes, dips, and disappears in the yielding intumescence of the waves. ”

“ Avaricious in the hope of restoring to his family its pristine splendour, haughty of demeanour with the nobles at the States of Brittany, harsh with his dependants at Combourg, taciturn, despotic and threatening at home, the feeling which the sight of him inspired was one of fear. Had he lived until the Revolution, and had he been younger, he would have played a great part, or got himself massacred in his castle. He was certainly possessed of genius: I have no doubt that, at the head of an administration or an army, he would have been a man out of the ordinary. ”

“ But one melancholy fact must be observed, which is the prompt degeneration of talent, from the first men, who figured in the American troubles, down to the men of these latter days; and yet those men all touch. The old presidents of the Republic have a religious, simple, lofty, calm character, of which we find no trace in the blood-stained tumults of our own Republic and Empire. The solitude with which the Americans were surrounded reacted upon their nature; they achieved their liberty in silence. ”

“ Moments of crisis produce a reduplication of life in men. In a society which is dissolving and Recomposing itself, the struggle of two geniuses, the clash of the past and the future, the mixture of old manners and new manners form a transient combination which does not leave a moment for weariness. Passions and characters, when at liberty, display themselves with an energy which they do not possess in the well-regulated State. The breaches of the laws, the emancipation from duties, social usages, and seemly manners, the very dangers, all add to the interest of this disorder. ”

“ The whole of our life is spent in wandering round our tomb: our illnesses are so many puffs of wind that send us more or less near to the haven. The first corpse I saw was that of a canon of Saint-Malo: he lay dead upon his bed, his features distorted with the final convulsions. Death is beautiful, he is our friend: and yet we do not recognize him, because he comes to us masked, and his mask frightens us. ”

“ The two manuscripts marched abreast, although I often wanted money to buy paper for them, and was obliged, for lack of thread, to fasten the sheets together with splinters torn from the mantel-boards of my garret.
These spots where I received my first inspirations impress me with a sense of their power; they reflect upon my present the gentle light of my recollections; I feel in the mood to resume my pen. So many hours are wasted in embassies! I have as much spare time here as in Berlin to continue my Memoirs, the edifice which I am building up out of ruins and dead bones. ”

“ Will the European generations be more virtuous and more free upon those banks than were the exterminated American generations? Shall slaves not till the soil beneath the lash of their masters, in these deserts of man's primeval independence? Shall prisons and gallows not fill the places of the open hut and the tall tulip-tree where the bird builds its nest? Shall the richness of the soil not cause new wars to burst forth? Shall Kentucky cease to be the "Land of Blood," and shall the monuments of the arts beautify the banks of the Ohio to better purpose than the monuments of nature? ”

“ Pellico has wasted his best days in the cells of the Spielberg: the talents of the land that gave Dante birth are condemned to silence or driven to languish on foreign soil; Lord Byron and Mr. Canning have died young; Walter Scott is no longer with us; Goethe has left us, full of years and glory. France has scarce anything remaining from her abundant past; she is commencing a new era, while I linger behind to bury my period, like the old priest who, in the sack of Béziers, was to toll the bell before falling himself when the last citizen had expired. ”

“ Name of the captain? Where is he from? How many days out? What is the latitude and longitude? Good-bye, let go!"
They let go the reefs; the sails fall down again. The sailors and passengers of the two ships watch each other flee from sight, without a word: one crew goes to seek the sun of Asia, the other the sun of Europe, both of which will see them die. Time carries off and separates travellers on earth even more rapidly than the wind carries them off and separates them on the ocean; they make a sign to each other at a distance:
"God speed you, and a prosperous journey!" ”

“ The sailor does not know where Death will overtake him, upon what shore he will leave his life: perhaps, when he has mingled his last breath with the wind, he will be cast into the bosom of the waves, fastened to two oars, to continue his voyage; perhaps he will be buried on a desert island, which none shall ever see again, and sleep as he slept in mid-ocean, in his lonely hammock. ”