vicomte de François-René Chateaubriand

“ You others, Frenchmen who have not been forced to leave your country, you who received one Frenchman the more only to escape imperial despotism and the foreign yoke, inhabitants of the great and good town who have seen only the happy Prince: when you crowded round him, on the 12th of April 1814; when, weeping with emotion, you touched consecrated hands; when, on a brow ennobled by age and misfortune, you found again all the graces of youth, as one sees beauty through a veil, you perceived only virtue triumphant, and you led the son of kings to the royal couch of his fathers. ”

“ Often the thought has come to me to go to solve my doubts; but could I return to England, I, who am weak enough not to dare to visit the paternal rock on which I have marked out my tomb? I am afraid nowadays of my sensations: time, removing my young years, has made me like those soldiers whose limbs have been left on the battle-field; my blood, having a less long road to travel, rushes into my heart with so rapid a flow that that old organ of my joys and sorrows throbs as though ready to burst. ”

“ My journey to Rome.
In revising all this, I have been struck with one thing. On my arrival in the Eternal City, I feel a certain dislike and, for a moment, I believe that everything has changed; little by little, the fever of the ruins overtakes me and I end, like a thousand other travellers, by adoring that which left me cold at first. Nostalgia is the regret of one's native country; on the banks of the Tiber we also suffer from "home-sickness," but it produces an opposite effect to its customary effect: we are seized with the love of solitudes and the distaste for our own country. ”

“ Lastly, if we associated ourselves with the warlike projects of England and Austria against Russia, where should we go in search of our old adversary of Austerlitz? He is not on our frontiers. Should we then send out at our cost a hundred thousand men, fully equipped, to succour Vienna or Constantinople? Should we have an army at Athens to protect the Greeks against the Turks, and an army at Adrianople to protect the Turks against the Russians? Should we fire grape-shot on the Osmanlis in the Morea and embrace them on the Dardanelles? Nothing that lacks common-sense in human affairs succeeds. ”

“ With your mind possessed with the foreign ideas, the importunate phantoms, the deluded or incomplete feelings of a world which has left you no happiness. Those ideas, those phantoms, those feelings place themselves between you and the bliss which you might still enjoy. You return with your heart sick with regret, afflicted by those errors of youth so painful to the memory in the modesty of years. That is how I returned, after having been to Rome, to Syria, after seeing an empire go by, after becoming the man of noise, after ceasing to be the man of silence. What had Madame Récamier done? ”

“ To fall back from Bonaparte and the Empire to that which followed them is to fall from reality into nothingness, from the summit of a mountain into a gulf. Did not everything finish with Napoleon? Ought I to have spoken of anything else? What person can possess any interest beside him? Of whom and of what can there be any question after such a man? Dante alone had the right to associate himself with the great poets whom he meets in the regions of another life. How can one speak of Louis XVIII. in the stead of the Emperor? ”

“ We have a revered King, an Heir to the Throne who, with three hundred thousand men, would increase, on the banks of the Rhine, the glory which he has reaped in Spain; our Morean Expedition is making us play a part filled with honour; our political institutions are excellent; our finances are in a state of prosperity unequalled in Europe: with that one can walk with one's head raised. What a fine country is that which possesses genius, courage, men and money! ”

“ I abhor servitude; liberty pleases my natural independence; I prefer that liberty in the monarchical order, but I can conceive it in the popular order of things. Who has less to fear from the future than I? I have that which no revolution can take from me: without place, honours, or fortune, any government which would not be stupid enough to disdain public opinion would be obliged to reckon me for something. Popular governments, above all, are composed of individual existences and make for themselves a general value out of the particular value of every citizen. ”

“ I rest upon a prince shot dead and a prince in banishment; they sustain my old arms entwined in their feeble arms: O Royalists, are you so well attended?
My sacrifices.
But, the more I have tied down my life with the bonds of devotion and honour, the more have I changed my liberty of action for independence of thought; that thought has resumed its nature. Now, outside everything, I appraise governments at their worth. Can one believe in the kings of the future? Is one to believe in the peoples of the present? ”

“ In a revolution which endures and which has taken its last step, as for instance in Rome, the Patricians, a century after the fall of the Republic, could resign themselves to being no more than the Senate of the Emperors; the past had nought wherewith to reproach the Emperors of the present, since that past was finished; every existence was branded with a like stigma. But in France the nobles who converted themselves into chamberlains were in too great a hurry; the new-born Empire disappeared before them, and they found themselves face to face with the old Monarchy raised to life again. ”

“ The independence of Europe would not be at all threatened by Russia's conquests in the East. It is tolerably absurd, it is to ignore every obstacle, to imagine the Russians hastening from the Bosphorus to lay their yoke upon Germany and France: every empire weakens itself by extension. As to the balance of power, this has long been shattered for France; she has lost her colonies, she has shrunk back within her old boundaries, while England, Prussia, Russia and Austria have prodigiously enlarged theirs. ”

“ In the Republics of Rome and Athens, were not the titles of "King," the names of the great families adhering to the Monarchy respectfully preserved? It is only the French who foolishly take offense at their tombs and their annals, who hurl down the crosses, devastate the churches, out of grudge against the clergy of the Year of Grace 1000 or 1100. There is nothing more puerile or more stupid than those reminiscent outrages; nothing which would tend more to the belief that we are incapable of anything serious whatsoever, that the true principles of liberty will for ever remain unknown to us. ”

“ If, in the dual solitude of nature and war, you come across a daisy sheltered under the redan of a glacis, that floral amenity relieves you. When, in the castles in Italy, I saw goats suspended to the ruins and the goat-girl sitting under a parasol pine; when, on the mediæval walls with which Jerusalem is surrounded, my eyes plunged into the Valley of Cedron upon some Arab women climbing up steeps among pebble-stones, the sight was a sad one doubtless, but history was there, and the silence of the present allowed the sounds of the past to be heard all the more clearly. ”

“ M. de Villèle wanted a time which could not be his and, from honour, he will have nothing to do with a time which belongs to him. Under the Restoration, all the faculties of the mind were alive; all parties dreamt of realities or illusions; all, advancing or receding, came into tumultuous collision; none purposed to remain where he was; to no earnest mind did the Constitutional Legitimacy seem to be the last word of the Republic or the Monarchy. We felt stirring in the ground under our feet armies or revolutions which came to offer themselves for extraordinary destinies. ”

“ Your Majesty has been told that I regretted Paris because of the Museum and Talma: this is an agreeable jest upon exile, in other words upon the misfortune which Cicero and Bolingbroke have declared to be the most insupportable of all; but, if I were to love the master-pieces of art which France owes to Your Majesty's conquests, if I were to love those beautiful tragedies, the images of heroism: would it be for you, Sire, to blame me for it? Is not the happiness of each individual compounded of the nature of his faculties? ”

“ But, whatever the changes in manners and persons, from century to century, in Italy may be, we observe a habit of greatness there which we paltry barbarians cannot approach. There still remains Roman blood in Rome and the traditions of the masters of the world. When one sees foreigners crammed into small new houses at the Porta del Popolo, or lodged in palaces which they have divided into boxes and pierced with chimneys, it is as though one saw rats scratching at the feet of the monuments of Apollodorus [664] and Michael Angelo and gnawing holes into the pyramids. ”

“ This vagrant and swaggering Great Britain makes for your seats at public solemnities, and boxes with you to turn you out of them: all day long it hastily swallows pictures and ruins and, in the evening, it comes to swallow cakes and ices at your parties, feeling that it confers a great honour upon you in doing so. I do not know how an ambassador can endure those unmannerly guests, nor why he does not show them his door. ”