Chateaubriand Quotes

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

Every man carries within himself a world made up of all that he has seen and loved; and it is to this world that he returns, incessantly, though he may pass through and seem to inhabit a world quite foreign to it.

A moral character is attached to autumnal scenes; the leaves falling like our years, the flowers fading like our hours, the clouds fleeting like our illusions, the light diminishing like our intelligence, the sun growing colder like our affections, the rivers becoming frozen like our lives--all bear secret relations to our destinies.

You are not superior just because you see the world in an odious light.

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

Alexander created cities everywhere he passed: I have left dreams everywhere I have trailed my life.

The sign of a true woman isn't the ability to recite French poetry or play the pianoforte or cook Chateaubriand. The sign of a true woman is learning to listen to her own voice even when society does its best to drown it out.

One is not, my dear sir, a superior man merely because one sees the world in an odious light. One only hates mankind and life itself through failing to look deeply enough.

Justice is the bread of the nation, it is always hungry for it.

Quand on parle des vices d’un homme, si on vous dit : “Tout le monde le dit” ne le croyez pas ; si l’on parle de ses vertus en vous disant encore : “Tout le monde le dit”, croyez-le.

Imagination is rich, abundant, full of marvels, existence poor, dry, disenchanted. One inhabits, with a full heart, an empty world.

Il y a des temps où l’on ne doit dépenser le mépris qu’avec économie, à cause du grand nombre de nécessiteux.

As a child, at the age when others promise to be Chateaubriand or nothing, I had written that I would be myself or nothing. I had certainly not foreseen that one day I would find myself in the position of being both myself and nothing. 65

Hesitating, at the threshold of various illusory paths of life, I considered them one by one, without daring to pursue any one of them.

Le passé et le présent sont deux statues incomplètes: l'une a été retirée toute mutilée du débris des âges, l'autre n'a pas encore reçu sa perfection de l'avenir.

The original writer is not he who refrains from imitating others, but he who can be imitated by none.

There is no power but in conviction.

Purgatory surpasses heaven and hell in poetry, because it represents a future and the others do not.

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between her work and her play; her labor and her leisure; her mind and her body; her education and her recreation. She hardly knows which is which. She simply pursues her vision of excellence through whatever she is doing, and leaves others to determine if she is working or playing. To herself, she always appears to be doing both.

L’arbre tombe feuille à feuille : si les hommes contemplaient chaque matin ce qu’ils ont perdu la veille, ils s’apercevraient bien de leur pauvreté.

Si quelques heures font une grande différence dans le cœur de l’homme, faut-il s’en étonner ? Il n’y a qu’une minute de la vie à la mort.

La vie me sied mal; le mort m'ira peut-être mieux.

[L]ike a kingfisher I have made my nest on the waves.

Sunday. I contemplate my books, piled up on the windowsill to constitute a small library: a rather useless one, for today no one will come to read them for me. Seneca, Zola, Chateaubriand, and Valery Larbaud are right there, three feet away, just out of reach. A very black fly settles on my nose. I waggle my head to unseat him. He digs in. Olympic wrestling is child's play compared to this. Sunday.

Posters go up in the market, on tree trunks in the Place Chateaubriand. Voluntary surrender of firearms. Anyone who does not cooperate will be shot.

Brothers in one great family, children lose their common features only when they lose their innocence, which is the same everywhere. Then the passions, modified by climate, government and customs, differentiate the nations; the human race ceases to speak and hear the same language: society is the true tower of Babel.

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labour and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

On se réconcilie avec un ennemi qui nous est inférieur pour les qualités du coeur ou de l'esprit ; on ne pardonne jamais à celui qui nous surpasse par l'âme et le génie.

Je sais fort bien que je ne suis qu'une machine à faire des livres.

Il n'est qu'un bien, c'est le tendre plaisir. Quelle immortalité vaut une nuit heureuse ? Pour tes baisers je vendrais l'avenir.

I was simply occupied with tailoring myself to society's standard.

ô enfance du coeur humain qui ne vieillit jamais! voilà donc à quel degré de puérilité notre superbe raison peut descendre! Et encore est-il vrai que bien des hommes attachent leur destinée à des choses d'aussi peu de valeur que mes feuilles de saule.

This is the first significant mention of an idea that will acquire an almost unbearable, next to mindless authority in European writing: the theme of Europe teaching the Orient the meaning of liberty, which is an idea that Chateaubriand and everyone after him believed that Orientals, and especially Muslims, knew nothing about. Of liberty, they know nothing; of propriety, they have none: force is their God. When they go for long periods without seeing conquerors who do heavenly justice, they have the air of soldiers without a leader, citizens without legislators, and a family without a father.83

Levantai-vos breve, ó desejadas tempestades que deveis transportas René para os céus de uma vida diferente,

men don't allow themselves to be killed for their interest, they allow themselves to be killed for their passion

The forces of nature and the feebleness of man: a weed often pierces the solid marble of those tombs, that all the dead, once so powerful, cannot now remove.

Plus notre coeur est tumultueux et bruyant, plus le calme et le silence nous attirent.

La mort est belle, elle est notre amie : néanmoins, nous ne la reconnaissons pas, parce qu'elle se présente à nous masquée et que son masque nous épouvante.

It is a long way from these strict parents to the child-spoilers of today.

What useless pageantry! No party ever believes in converting their opponent: neither liberty capitulating nor power abasing itself ever obtains mercy from its enemies.

A man may understand the power of a king without being a king himself; but he cannot understand the divinity without being God

Life is spent hovering round our tomb. Our various sicknesses are but the winds which carry us more or less near to the haven. … Death is our friend, nevertheless we do not recognise it as such, because it presents itself to us under a mask, and that mask inspires us with terror.

Aristocracy has three successive stages: the age of superiority, the age of privilege, and the age of vanity. Once through with the first, it degenerates into the second, and dies out in the third.

This new concept of the "finest, highest achievement of art" had no sooner entered my mind than it located the imperfect enjoyment I had had at the theater, and added to it a little of what it lacked; this made such a heady mixture that I exclaimed, "What a great artiste she is!" It may be thought I was not altogether sincere. Think, however, of so many writers who, in a moment of dissatisfaction with a piece they have just written, may read a eulogy of the genius of Chateaubriand, or who may think of some other great artist whom they have dreamed of equaling, who hum to themselves a phrase of Beethoven for instance, comparing the sadness of it to the mood they have tried to capture in their prose, and are then so carried away by the perception of genius that they let it affect the way they read their own piece, no longer seeing it as they first saw it, but going so far as to hazard an act of faith in the value of it, by telling themselves "It's not bad you know!" without realizing that the sum total which determines their ultimate satisfaction includes the memory of Chateaubriand's brilliant pages, which they have assimilated to their own, but which, of course, they did not write. Think of all the men who go on believing in the love of a mistress in whom nothing is more flagrant than her infidelities; of all those torn between the hope of something beyond this life (such as the bereft widower who remembers a beloved wife, or the artist who indulges in dreams of posthumous fame, each of them looking forward to an afterlife which he knows is inconceivable) and the desire for a reassuring oblivion, when their better judgement reminds them of the faults they might otherwise have to expiate after death; or think of the travelers who are uplifted by the general beauty of a journey they have just completed, although during it their main impression, day after day, was that it was a chore--think of them before deciding whether, given the promiscuity of the ideas that lurk within us, a single one of those that affords us our greatest happiness has not begun life by parasitically attaching itself to a foreign idea with which it happened to come into contact, and by drawing from it much of the power of pleasing which it once lacked.

Die Revolution hätte mich mitgerissen, hätte sie nicht mit Verbrechen begonnen: beim Anblick des ersten Kopfes auf der Spitze einer Pike zuckte ich zurück. Niemals wird für mich der Mord Gegenstand der Bewunderung und ein Argument für die Freiheit sein.

Taken collectively, the people are a poet, at once author and ardent actor of the part they play, or the part they are made to play. Their excesses come not so much from instinctual or inborn cruelty as from the unpredictable delirium of a crowd intoxicated by spectacles,

Cristina Belgiojoso, who was so close to Lafayette at the end of his life, watched Lafayette’s reputation tarnished by the hands of more cynical commentators like Chateaubriand. “When he is given his place in history,” she said in 1850, “it will be recognized, I am sure of this, that his political mistakes were caused by too high opinion of the human species and of men; he judged the latter according to himself. One can understand the serious errors he made in attributing to others the integrity, the uprightness, and the sincerity that were only in him.”57

Cependant mon père fut atteint d'une maladie qui le conduisit en peu de jours au tombeau. II expira dans mes bras. J'appris à connaître la mort sur les lèvres de celui qui m'avait donné la vie. Cette impression fut grande; elle dure encore. C'est la première fois que l'immortalité de l'âme s'est présentée clairement à mes yeux. Je ne pus croire que ce corps inanimé était en moi l'auteur de la pensée: je sentis qu'elle me devait venir d'une autre source; et dans une sainte douleur qui approchait de la joie, j'espérai me rejoindre un jour à l'esprit de mon père.

But instead of this peace which I dared to expect, what anguish has weighed down my days! To become the perpetual plaything of fortune, dashed against every strand, long exiled from my country, and finding on my return only a cabin in ruins and friends the grave -- such was to be the fate of Chactas.

            Cependant qu'avais-je appris jusqu'alors avec tant de fatigue? Rien de certain parmi les anciens, rien de beau parmi les modernes. Le passé et le présent sont deux statues incomplètes: l'une a été retirée toute mutilée du débris des âges; l'autre n'a pas encore reçu sa perfection de l'avenir.

This self-righteous arrogance led me to suppose that the religious mind suffered from a deficiency, which is exactly the deficiency suffered by the philosophical mind: a limited intelligence thinks it can see everything because it keeps its eyes open; a superior intelligence consents to close it eyes, for it perceives that everything is within.

The Memoirs became the most celebrated unfinished, unpublished, unread book in history. But Chateaubriand was still broke. So Madame Récamier came up with a new scheme, and this one worked - or sort of worked. A stock company was formed, and people bought shares in the manuscript. Word futures, I guess you could call them, in the same way that people from Wall Street gamble on the price of soybeans and corn. In effect, Chateaubriand mortgaged his autobiography to finance his old age. They gave him a nice chunk of money up front, which allowed him to pay off his creditors, and a guaranteed annuity for the rest of his life. It was a brilliant arrangement. The only problem was that Chateaubriand kept on living.

Homem, tua estação migratória ainda não chegou. Espera que se levante o vento da morte, então desferirás o teu vôo para esses países ignorados que o teu coração deseja.

Tous les germes de la destruction sociale sont dans la religion de Mahomet.

Vous qui aimez la gloire ; soignez votre tombeau ; couchez-vous y bien ; tâchez d'y faire bonne figure, car vous y resterez.

L'histoire des peuples est une échelle de misère dont les révolutions forment les différents degrés.

...e io, fermo ai limiti della vita, conto le stelle, non faccio affidamento su alcuna e attendo l'aurora...

Sometimes a tall column stood alone in the wilderness, as a great thought stands alone in the soul which time and sorrow have crushed.

Except for the memories of his daughter and his son it was already as though he had never existed.

There and then I promptly resolved to end, in rural exile, a career scarcely begun, in which I had already consumed centuries.

There are only two true things: intelligent religion and youthful love, which is to say the future and the present. The rest is not worth the trouble

On n'est point un homme supérieur parce qu'on aperçoit le monde sous un jour odieux. On ne hait les hommes et la vie que faute de voir assez loin.

La douleur n'est pas une affection qu'on épuise comme le plaisir.

dans les grandes transformations sociales, les résistances individuelles, honorables pour les caractères, sont impuissantes contre les faits.

Soy enemigo de todos los libros, y si pudiera destruir los míos, no dejaría de hacerlo.

How many other friends I will never meet again! Every night as he goes to bed, a man can count his losses; it’s only his years that do not leave him, though they pass.

When, in the silence of abjection, no sound remains except the rattle of the slave’s chain and the informer’s voice; when everyone trembles before the tyrant and it is as dangerous to curry his favor as to incur his disapproval, the historian appears, entrusted with the wrath of nations. Nero prospers in vain, for Tacitus has already been born within the Empire.

In my eyes, murder will never be an object of admiration or an argument for freedom; I know of nothing more servile, more despicable, more cowardly, more narrow-minded than a terrorist.

Thus, in my rendering, Chateaubriand may occasionally sound like Cioran (who called him “a sonorous Pascal”), or Baudelaire (who called him “one of the surest and rarest masters”), or Proust (who compared his distinctive sentences to the barn owl’s distinctive cry), or Sebald (who so seamlessly integrated passages of the Memoirs into the penultimate chapter of The Rings of Saturn).

l'infortune personnelle est une compagne un peu froide, mais exigeante ; elle vous obsède ; elle ne laisse de place à aucun autre sentiment, ne vous quitte point, s'empare de vos genoux et de votre couche.

Chateaubriand writes of René, his personification, ‘it wearied him to be loved’ – on le fatigait en l’aimant. I realized with astonishment that this experience was identical to my own, and so I couldn’t deny its validity. The weariness of being loved, of being truly loved! The weariness of being the object of other people’s burdensome emotions! Of seeing yourself – when what you wanted was to remain forever free – transformed into a delivery boy whose duty is to reciprocate, to have the decency not to flee, lest anyone think that you’re cavalier towards emotions and would reject the loftiest sentiment that a human soul can offer. The weariness of your existence becoming absolutely dependent on a relationship with someone else’s feeling! The weariness of having to feel something, of having to love at least a little in return, even if it’s not a true reciprocity!

El dandismo es una institución vaga, tan extraña como el duelo; muy anciana, pues César, Catilina, Alcibíades, nos proporcionan modelos rutilantes; muy general, pues Chateaubriand la encontró en los bosques y las orillas de los lagos del Nuevo Mundo. El dandismo, que es una institución fuera de la ley, tiene leyes rigurosas a las que se someten estrictamente todos sus sujetos, más allá de la fogosidad y la independencia de su carácter.

In the nation’s eyes, the Bastille was the trophy of its servitude; it seemed erected at the entryway to Paris, across from the sixteen pillars of Montfaucon, as a gallows on which liberties were hanged.* By razing this fortress of the State, the people thought to break the military yoke and thereby tacitly agreed to take the place of the army that they were disbanding. And we know what marvels were born when the people became soldiers.

For a whole fortnight my mind and my fingers have been working around me like two lost souls. Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamertine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around me. I study them, meditate on them, devour them with fury; besides this, I practise four to five hours a day of exercises (thirds, sixths, octaves, tremolos, repetition of notes, cadenzas, etc.). Ah! provided I don't go mad you will find me an artist!

Chateaubriand a chanté la gloire douloureuse de la mélancolie et de l’ennui. Victor Hugo, grand, terrible immense comme une création mythique cyclopéen, pour ainsi dire, représente les forces de la nature et leur lutte harmonieuse. Balzac, grand, terrible, complexe aussi, figure le monstre d’une civilisation, et toutes ces luttes, ses ambitions et ses fureur. Gautier, c’est l’amour exclusif du beau, avec toutes ces subdivision, exprimer dans le langage le mieux approprié 

I can understand the cruel gaiety of Cervantes’s masterpiece only through a melancholy meditation: considering the whole of human existence, weighing good and evil, one might be tempted to wish for any accident that brings forgetfulness, as a means of escaping from oneself.

The eighteenth century, a century of intellectual rather than material action, would not have succeeded in changing the laws so rapidly had it not stumbled on a suitable vehicle: the parliaments, and most notably the parliament of Paris, became the instruments of a philosophical system.

Spring, in Brittany, is milder than spring in Paris, and bursts into flower three weeks earlier. The five birds that herald its appearance—the swallow, the oriole, the cuckoo, the quail, and the nightingale—arrive with the breezes that refuge in the bays of the Armorican peninsula.[28] The earth is covered over with daisies, pansies, jonquils, daffodils, hyacinths, buttercups, and anemones, like the wastelands around San Giovanni of Laterano and the Holy Cross of Jerusalem in Rome. The clearings are feathered with tall and elegant ferns; the fields of gorse and broom blaze with flowers that one may take at first glance for golden butterflies. The hedges, along which strawberries, raspberries, and violets grow, are adorned with hawthorn, honeysuckle, and brambles whose brown, curving shoots burst forth with magnificent fruits and leaves. All the world teems with bees and birds; hives and nests interrupt the child’s every footstep. In certain sheltered spots, the myrtle and the rose-bay flourish in the open air, as in Greece; figs ripen, as in Provence; and every apple tree, bursting with carmine flowers, looks like the big bouquet of a village bride.

Un jour le Meschacebé, encore assez près de sa source, se lassa de n'être qu'un limpide ruisseau. Il demande des neiges aux montagnes, des eaux aux torrents, des pluies aux tempêtes, il franchit ses rives, et désole ses bords charmants. L'orgueilleux ruisseau s'applaudit d'abord de sa puissance; mais voyant que tout devenait désert sur son passage; qu'il coulait, abandonné dans la solitude; que ses eaux étaient toujours troublées, il regretta l'humble lit que lui avait creusé la nature, les oiseaux, les fleurs, les arbres et les ruisseaux, jadis modestes compagnons de son paisible cours.

Memories of the wrath of the League and the clashes of the Fronde had favored the establishment of absolute monarchy; the governments of Louis XIV's despotism, when that great prince went to relax among his ancestors in Saint-Denis, made the yearning for freedom more bitter. The old monarchy had lasted six and a half centuries with its feudal and aristocratic liberties. How long had the state formed by Louis XIV lasted? One hundred and forty years. After that monarch's tomb, there were only two monuments of monarchy: the pillow of Louis XV's debauchery and Louis XVI's executioner's block.

The Parisian bourgeoisie laugh at the bourgeoisie from a small town; the Court nobility mock the provincial nobility: the famous man scorns one who is unknown, without reflecting that time serves equal justice on their pretensions, and that they are all equally ridiculous or tedious in the eyes of succeeding generations.

The chronicler, who was present at these events and once more recalls what he witnessed, inscribes his experiences, in an act of self-mutilation, onto his own body. In the writing, he becomes the martyred paradigm of the fate Providence has in store for us, and, though still alive, is already in the tomb that his memoirs represent.

Depending on which flavor of academic scholarship you prefer, that age had its roots in the Renaissance or Mannerist periods in Germany, England, and Italy. It first bloomed in France in the garden of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 1780s. Others point to François-René de Chateaubriand’s château circa 1800 or Victor Hugo’s Paris apartments in the 1820s and ’30s. The time frame depends on who you ask. All agree Romanticism reached its apogee in Paris in the 1820s to 1840s before fading, according to some circa 1850 to make way for the anti-Romantic Napoléon III and the Second Empire, according to others in the 1880s when the late Romantic Decadents took over. Yet others say the period stretched until 1914—conveniently enduring through the debauched Belle Époque before expiring in time for World War I and the arrival of that other perennial of the pigeonhole specialists, modernism. There are those, however, who look beyond dates and tags and believe the Romantic spirit never died, that it overflowed, spread, fractured, came back together again like the Seine around its islands, morphed into other isms, changed its name and address dozens of times as Nadar and Balzac did and, like a phantom or vampire or other supernatural invention of the Romantic Age, it thrives today in billions of brains and hearts. The mother ship, the source, the living shrine of Romanticism remains the city of Paris.

Non vedrò più la magnolia che destinava la sua rosa alla tomba della mia fanciulla della Florida, il pino di Gerusalemme e il cedro del Libano consacrati alla memoria di Gerolamo, l'alloro di Granada, il platano della Grecia, le querce dell'Armorica ai piedi dei quali dipinsi Blanca, cercai Cymodocée, immaginai Velléda. Questi alberi nacquero e crebbero insieme ai miei sogni: erano le mie amadriadi. Essi stanno per passare sotto un'altra autorità: il loro nuovo padrone li amerà come li amavo? Li lascerà seccare, forse li taglierà, non devo conservare nulla in questo mondo? Evocherò l'addio che dissi un tempo ai boschi di Combourg dicendo addio ai boschi di Aluny: tutti i miei giorni sono degli addii.

Could Washington the Dictator be anything other than a rustic, prodding his oxen with a goad and steadily gripping the handle of his plow? But when I did go to him with my letter of introduction, I discovered the simplicity of an old Roman. A small house, which looked just the same as the neighboring houses, was the palace of the President of the United States.

Washington went to his grave before even the smallest bit of fame attached itself to my footsteps; I passed before him as the most anonymous entity. He was in all his glory, I in all my obscurity, and I doubt whether my name stayed more than a day in his memory. I am nevertheless happy that his gaze once fell upon me. I would feel warmed by it for the rest of my life. There is a virtue in the gaze of a great man.

Quanto durerebbe se fosse vero? il tempo di stringerti tra le braccia. La gioventù rende bello tutto, persino l'infelicità. Incanta quando con i riccioli di una chioma bruna può asciugare le lacrime man mano che scorrono sulle guance. Ma la vecchiaia rende brutta persino la felicità; nell'infelicità è ancora peggio: i radi capelli bianchi che restano sulla testa calva di un uomo non saranno mai abbastanza lunghi da asciugare le lacrime che cadono dai suoi occhi.

Tantôt ses bras tendus montraient le ciel propice ; tantôt il adorait humblement incliné... etc. la foule, précédée de la croix, et mêlant ses chants sacrés au murmure lointain des tempêtes, marche vers l'asile des morts. Là, la veuve pleure un époux, la jeune fille un amant, la mère un fils à la mamelle. Trois fois l'assemblée fait le tour des tombes ; trois fois l'eau lustrale est jetée. Alors le peuple saint se sépare, les brouillards de l'automne s'entrouvrent, et le soleil reparaît dans les cieux.

Bisogna andare molto indietro nel tempo per trovare l'origine del mio tormento, bisogna riandare a quegli albori della mia giovinezza in cui mi creai un simulacro di donna per adorarla. Mi sfinii con quella creatura immaginaria, poi vennero gli amori reali e con essi non raggiunsi mai quella felicità immaginaria di cui portavo in me l'ideale. Ho saputo cosa significa vivere per una sola idea e con una sola idea; isolarsi in un sentimento, perdere di vista l'universo e porre tutta la propria esistenza in un sorriso, in una parola, in uno sguardo.

My mother, Apolline de Bedée, endowed with great wit and a prodigious imagination, was formed by reading Fénelon, Racine, and Madame de Sévigné. She was nourished on anecdotes of the Court of Louis XIV and knew all of Cyrus by heart. A small woman of large features, dark-haired and ugly, her elegant manners and lively disposition were at odds with my father’s rigidity and calm. Loving society as much as he loved solitude, as exuberant and animated as he was expressionless and cold, she possessed no taste not antagonistic to the tastes of her husband.

Vedi, quant'anche mi lasciassi andare a una follia, non sono sicuro che domani ti amerò. Non credo a me stesso. Non mi conosco. La passione mi divora e io sono pronto a pugnalarmi o a ridere. Ti adoro, ma tra un momento più di te amerò il rumore del vento tra queste rocce, una nuvola in cielo, una foglia che cade. Poi pregherò Dio piangendo, poi invocherò il Nulla. Vuoi colmarmi di delizie? Fa' una cosa. Sii mia, poi lascia che ti trapassi il cuore e beva tutto il tuo sangue. E allora! avrai adesso il coraggio di avventurarti con me in questa tebaide?

The Memoirs from Beyond the Grave have come to be considered a classic of French literature as much for the elegiac beauty of their language as for the way they capture an age. If they are the recollections of a sometime ambassador, a part-time politician, and a onetime celebrity, they are also the masterwork of an artist in consummate control of his prose. The person who writes that, on the day of his birth, his mother “inflicted” life on him, who makes up a meeting with George Washington and has the gall to declare that the first president “resembled his portraits,” has picked up the plume for more complicated reasons than the urge to compose a record of his times. The seductiveness of the Memoirs’ style—what Barthes calls the “vivid, sumptuous, desirable seal of Chateaubriand’s writing”—makes questions of factual authenticity seem piddling. The voice of the Memoirs is the voice of the private man behind the public façade, the grown-up boy who left home out of fear and in search of the Northwest Passage, the death-haunted exile, the solitary writer at his desk at night, who knew that he had to imagine himself and his world into being, as if everywhere were America, a second space and a dominion of dreams.

They return drunk and laughing to the kitchen of Number 4 rue Vauborel. “Dinan is now twenty kilometers to the north,” says Madame Ruelle. “Right in the middle of the sea!” Three days later, Madame Fontineau overhears that the German garrison commander is allergic to goldenrod. Madame Carré, the florist, tucks great fistfuls of it into an arrangement headed for the château. The women funnel a shipment of rayon to the wrong destination. They intentionally misprint a train timetable. Madame Hébrard, the postmistress, slides an important-looking letter from Berlin into her underpants, takes it home, and starts her evening fire with it. They come spilling into Etienne’s kitchen with gleeful reports that someone has heard the garrison commander sneezing, or that the dog shit placed on a brothel doorstep reached the target of a German’s shoe bottom perfectly. Madame Manec pours sherry or cider or Muscadet; someone sits stationed by the door to serve as sentry. Small and stooped Madame Fontineau boasts that she tied up the switchboard at the château for an hour; dowdy and strapping Madame Guiboux says she helped her grandsons paint a stray dog the colors of the French flag and sent it running through the Place Chateaubriand.

Only one thing held my attention: the hands of a clock stopped at the minute that Frederick expired. I was deceived by the stillness of the image. The hours never suspend their flight; it is not man who stops time, but time who stops man. In the end it matters little what part we have played in life. The brilliance or obscurity of our doctrines, our wealth or poverty, our joy or pain: these things have no effect on the measure of our days. Whether the hand moves around a golden face or a wooden one, whether the dial fills the bezel of a ring or the rose window of a cathedral, the length of the hour is still the same. 

Cette société, que j'ai remarquée la première dans ma vie, est aussi la première qui ait disparu à mes yeux. J'ai vu la mort entrer sous ce toit de paix et de bénédiction, le rendre peu à peu solitaire, fermer une chambre et puis une autre qui ne se rouvrait plus. J'ai vu ma grand'mère forcée de renoncer à son quadrille, faute des partners accoutumés; j'ai vu diminuer le nombre de ces constantes amies, jusqu'au jour où mon aïeule tomba la dernière. Elle et sa sœur s'étaient promis de s'entre-appeler aussitôt que l'une aurait devancé l'autre; elles se tinrent parole, et madame de Bedée ne survécut que peu de mois à mademoiselle de Boisteilleul. Je suis peut-être le seul homme au monde qui sache que ces personnes ont existé. Vingt fois, depuis cette époque, j'ai fait la même observation; vingt fois des sociétés se sont formées et dissoutes autour de moi. Cette impossibilité de durée et de longueur dans les liaisons humaines, cet oubli profond qui nous suit, cet invincible silence qui s'empare de notre tombe et s'étend de là sur notre maison, me ramènent sans cesse à la nécessité de l'isolement. Toute main est bonne pour nous donner le verre d'eau dont nous pouvons avoir besoin dans la fièvre de la mort. Ah! qu'elle ne nous soit pas trop chère! car comment abandonner sans désespoir la main que l'on a couverte de baisers et que l'on voudrait tenir éternellement sur son cœur?

On a dit qu’une cité dont les membres auront une égale répartition de bien et d'éducation présentera aux regards de la Divinité un spectacle au-dessus du spectacle de la cité de nos pères. La folie du moment est d'arriver à l'unité des peuples et de ne faire qu’un seul homme de l'espèce entière, soit ; mais en acquérant des facultés générales, toute une série de sentiments privés ne périra-t-elle pas ? Adieu les douceurs du foyer ; adieu les charmes de la famille ; parmi tous ces êtres blancs, jaunes, noirs, réputés vos compatriotes, vous ne pourriez vous jeter au cou d’un frère. N’y avait-il rien dans la vie d’autrefois, rien dans cet espace borné que vous aperceviez de votre fenêtre encadrée de lierre ? Au-delà de votre horizon vous soupçonniez des pays inconnus dont vous parlait à peine l’oiseau du passage, seul voyageur que vous aviez vu à l’automne. C’était bonheur de songer que les collines qui vous environnaient ne disparaîtraient pas à vos yeux ; qu’elles renfermeraient vos amitiés et vos amours ; que le gémissement de la nuit autour de votre asile serait le seul bruit auquel vous vous endormiriez ; que jamais la solitude de votre âme ne serait troublée, que vous y rencontreriez toujours les pensées qui vous y attendent pour reprendre avec vous leur entretien familier. Vous saviez où vous étiez né, vous saviez où était votre tombe ; en pénétrant dans la forêt vous pouviez dire : Beaux arbres qui m’avez vu naître, Bientôt vous me verrez mourir

These Memoirs have been composed at different dates and in different countries. For this reason, I have been obliged to add some prefatory passages which describe the places that I had before my eyes and the feelings that were in my heart when the thread of my narrative was resumed. The changing forms of my life are thus intermingled. It has sometimes happened that, in my moments of prosperity, I have had to speak of times when I was poor, and in my days of tribulation, to retrace days when I was happy. My childhood entering into my old age, the gravity of experience weighing on the lightness of youth, the rays of my sun mingling and merging together, from its dawn to its dusk, have produced in my stories a kind of confusion, or, if you will, a kind of ineffable unity.

Although quick to become bored by everything, I am always patient with the smallest details: I am endowed with the fortitude to face every impediment and, even when I grow weary of my object, my persistence is always greater than my boredom. I have never abandoned any project worth the trouble of completing. There are many things in my life that I have pursued for fifteen or twenty years with as much ardor on the last day as the first. My supple intelligence has extended itself to secondary matters also. I was deft at chess, skilled at billiards, hunting, and fencing, and I was a passable draughtsman. I would have sung well, too, if my voice had been trained. All this, combined with my unusual education and my experience as a soldier and a traveler, explains why I have never been a pedant, nor ever displayed the dull conceit, awkwardness, and slovenliness of the literary men of the last century, nor the arrogant self-assurance, the vain and envious braggadocio, of the new authors.

What was the battle? What were the aims of the romantics? Why was the subject the focus of such violent interest? Hugo and his generation were all ‘enfants du siècle’, all, give or take a year or two, born with the century. Brought up amidst the dramas of Napoleon’s wars, they had reached manhood to the anticlimax of peace and Bourbon rule. Restless and dissatisfied, their dreams of military glory frustrated, they had turned them- selves instead towards the liberation of the arts, their foes no longer the armies of Europe but the tyrannies of classical tradition. For thirty years, while the nation’s energies had been absorbed in politics and war, the arts had virtually stood still in France, frozen, through lack of challenge, in the classical attitudes of the old régime. The violent emotions and experiences of the Napoleonic era had done much to render them meaningless. ‘Since the cam- paign in Russia,’ said a former officer to Stendhal, ‘Iphigénie en Aulide no longer seems such a good play.’ By the 1820s while the academic establishment, hiding its own sterility behind the great names of the past, continued to denounce all change, the ice of clas- sicism was beginning to crack. New influences were crowding in from abroad: Chateaubriand, the ‘enchanter’, had cast his spell on the rising generation; the po- etry of Lamartine, Hugo and Vigny heralded the spring. An old society lay in ruins; the tremendous forces which had overturned it were sweeping at last through the realms of art and literature, their momentum all the greater for having been so long delayed. Nor, despite the seeming stability of the Restoration, had the political impetus of earlier years been spent. In the aftermath of the Empire exhaustion had brought a temporary longing for repose. Now, to the excitement of creative ferment was added a hidden dimension: a growing undercurrent of political dissent, as yet unexpressed for fear of reprisal. The romantic rebellion, with its claims for freedom in the arts, cloaked the political revolution once more preparing in the shadows.

Cette société, que j'ai remarquée la première dans ma vie, est aussi la première qui ait disparu à mes yeux. J'ai vu la mort entrer sous ce toit de paix et de bénédiction, le rendre peu à peu solitaire, fermer une chambre et puis une autre qui ne se rouvrait plus. J'ai vu ma grand'mère forcée de renoncer à son quadrille, faute des partners accoutumés; j'ai vu diminuer le nombre de ces constantes amies, jusqu'au jour où mon aïeule tomba la dernière. Elle et sa sœur s'étaient promis de s'entre-appeler aussitôt que l'une aurait devancé l'autre; elles se tinrent parole, et madame de Bedée ne survécut que peu de mois à mademoiselle de Boisteilleul. Je suis peut-être le seul homme au monde qui sache que ces personnes ont existé. Vingt fois, depuis cette époque, j'ai fait la même observation; vingt fois des sociétés se sont formées et dissoutes autour de moi. Cette impossibilité de durée et de longueur dans les liaisons humaines, cet oubli profond qui nous suit, cet invincible silence qui s'empare de notre tombe et s'étend de là sur notre maison, me ramènent sans cesse à la nécessité de l'isolement. Toute main est bonne pour nous donner le verre d'eau dont nous pouvons avoir besoin dans la fièvre de la mort. Ah! qu'elle ne nous soit pas trop chère! car comment abandonner sans désespoir la main que l'on a couverte de baisers et que l'on voudrait tenir éternellement sur son cœur?