vicomte de François-René Chateaubriand

“ The tower of the monastery, changed into a rosy column, is reflected in the waves; the white front of the church is so brightly lighted that I can pick out the smallest details of the chisel. The outlines of the shops of the Giudecca are painted with a Titian light; the gondolas on the canal and the harbour are swimming in the same light. Venice is there, seated on the shore, like a beautiful woman about to die away with the day-light: the evening breeze lifts up her balmy tresses; she dies saluted by all the graces and all the smiles of nature. ”

“ Misfortune again resembles the executioner of the high decrees of Heaven: it strips the condemned man, snatches the sceptre from the king, the sword from the warrior; it takes the noble's dignity, the soldier's heart, and sends them back degraded into the crowd.
On the other hand, one derives from extreme youth arguments in favour of postponement: when one has much time to spend, one persuades one's self that one can wait, that one has years to play with before events happen:
"They will come to us," one cries, "without our going to any trouble; all will ripen; the throne will come of itself ”

“ In the divine order of things, religion and liberty; in the human order, honour and glory (which are the human generation of religion and liberty) : that is what I have desired for my country.
Of the French authors of my own period, I may be said to be the only one who resembles his works: a traveller, soldier, publicist, minister, it is amid forests that I have sung the forests, aboard ship that I have depicted the Ocean, 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 and laws. ”

“ It is a fight to the death between the two principles, monarchical and republican, if they remain distinct and separate: the consecration of a single edifice built up again out of the various materials of two edifices would belong to you, Madame, to you who have been admitted into the highest as into the most mysterious of initiations, undeserved misfortune, to you who are marked at the altar with the blood of the spotless victim, to you who, in the contemplation attendant upon a saintly austerity, would open with a pure and blessed hand the portals of the new temple. ”

“ The American War of 1779, although impolitic for France, the dupe, as always, of her generosity, was useful to the human race; it restored throughout the world the esteem in which our arms were held and the honour of our flag.
The Revolution sprang up, ready to give birth to the warlike generation which eight centuries of heroism had laid in its womb. The personal merits of Louis XVI. did not redeem the faults which his ancestors had left to him to expiate; but the blows of Providence fall on the evil, never on the man: God shortens virtue's days upon earth only to lengthen them in Heaven. ”

“ France, the ripest of the present nations, will probably be the first to go. It is likely that the Elder Bourbons, to whom I shall die attached, would not even to-day find a lasting shelter in the Old Monarchy. Never have the successors of an immolated monarch worn his torn mantle long after him: there is distrust on both sides; the prince dares not rely upon the nation, the nation refuses to believe that the reinstated family is capable of forgiving it. A scaffold raised between a people and a king prevents them from seeing each other: there are tombs that never close. ”

“ Nowadays we count many of those unruffled characters, many of those citizens of the soil: still, if there is to be any greatness in growing old like the hermit in the ruins of the Coliseum, they must be guarded with a cross; M. de Talleyrand had trodden his underfoot.
Our species is divided into two unequal parts: the men of death, loved by death, a chosen band which is born again; the men of life, forgotten by life, a multitude condemned to annihilation which is born no more. ”

“ By your side lie your heart and your intestines, snatched from your breast and your loins, even as we lay beside a dead mother the abortive fruit that has cost her her life. At each anniversary, O Most Christian Monarch, O cenobite after death, some brother will recite to you the prayers of the memorial service; you will attract to your eternal Hic Jacet none save your sons banished with you: for even at Trieste the monument of Mesdames is empty; their sacred relics have returned to their country and you have paid to exile, by your own exile, the debt of those noble ladies. ”

“ M. de La Fayette had only one idea, and, unfortunately for him, it was that of his century; the fixity of that idea constituted his empire: it served him as a blinker, prevented him from looking to right or left of him; he walked with a firm step along a single line; he marched on without falling into precipices, not because he saw them, but because he did not see them; blindness stood him in the stead of genius: all that is fixed is fatal, and that which is fatal is powerful.
La Fayette's funeral. ”

“ I shall be happy and proud to show by my side a man whose name is one of the glories of France and who has represented her so nobly in the country which I am about to visit.
"Come, then, monsieur le vicomte, and be sure to believe in all my gratitude and in the pleasure which it will give me to express to you, by word of mouth, the feelings of high esteem and attachment of which I love to send you with this the renewed and most sincere assurance." ”

“ In France, the gaols were crammed with victims who were got rid of by cutting their throats; but, in the prisons of Venice, they set free the shades of men who had, perhaps, never been there. The gentle butchers who sliced the throats of children and old men, the kind spectators who assisted at the guillotining of women were melted at the progress of humanity, so well proved by the opening of the Venetian dungeons. As for me, I have a hard heart; I am not like those heroes of sensibility. No old headless ghosts appeared before my eyes in the Palace of the Doges ”

“ I am descending the throne; I confirm all the benefits of my fathers, while releasing you from your oaths to the Monarchy."
Say if that end would not have surpassed all that is most wonderful in that dynasty! Say if ever a magnificent enough temple could have been raised to its memory! Compare that end with that which the decrepit sons of Henry IV. would make, stubbornly pinning themselves to a throne swamped by democracy, trying to preserve their power with the aid of measures of police, measures of violence, methods of corruption, and dragging on for a few short moments a degraded existence! ”

“ I love France, because France is the land of my birth, and, if I have ever turned my thoughts towards the throne of my ancestors, it has been only in the hope that it might be possible for me to serve my country in the principles and sentiments which have been so gloriously proclaimed by M. de Chateaubriand and which are honoured, in addition, by so many and such noble defenders in your native land. ”

“ July 1830 came: my fortune and credit began to look like the fate of Tasso's ashes. Those ashes seem to possess a virtue that rejects any display of opulence, repels any lustre, shrinks from any honours: little men want big tombs, big men little ones.
The god who laughs at all my dreams, after hurling me from the Janiculum with the old Conscript Fathers, has brought me back to Tasso in another way. Here I am able to form a still better opinion of the poet whose three daughters were born at Ferrara: Armida, Erminia and Clorinda. ”

“ For old Italy, I am the defender of religion; for young Italy, the defender of liberty; for the authorities I have the honour of being Sua Eccellenza GIA Ambasciadore di Francia at Verona and in Rome. Ladies, all doubtless of rare beauty, have lent the language of Angelica and Aquilante il Nero to the Floridan Atala and the Moor Aben-Hamet. I therefore see scholars arrive, old priests with wide skull-caps, women, whom I thank for their translations and their favours; next, mendicanti, too well-bred to believe that an ex-ambassador is as poor a beggar as their lordships. ”

“ Those white lines cutting into the green grass, the glitter of arms at sunrise formed a stately display worthy of those peoples depicted or rather sung by Tacitus: Mars the Teuton was offering a sacrifice to Aurora. What were my gondoliers doing at that moment in Venice? They were sporting like swallows, after the night was past, in the returning dawn and preparing to skim over the surface of the water; next would come the joys of the night, loves and barcarolles. Every nation has its lot: this one enjoys strength; that one, pleasures: the Alps make the division. ”

“ Two fears stop it: the fear of the return of the Legitimacy, the fear of the reign of the people; it clings to Philip, whom it does not love, but whom it looks upon as a safeguard. Stuffed full of offices and money, abdicating its own will, the Opposition obeys what it knows to be fatal and goes to sleep in the mire, which is the down invented by the industry of the age: it is not so pleasant as the other, but it is cheaper. ”

“ Just as a sick man in danger becomes preoccupied with what awaits him in his grave, a nation which feels itself decaying grows restless as to its future fate. Hence the political heresies which succeed one another. The old European order is expiring; our present contests will appear puerile struggles in the eyes of posterity. Nothing more exists; authority of experience and age, birth or genius, talent or virtue: all are denied; a few individuals clamber to the top of the ruins, proclaim themselves giants and roll down to the bottom as pygmies. ”