cordons with republican colours. The Revolution employed them before it had risen to any great height; they even became the principal generals in its army, the Duc de Lauzun, the romantic lover of the Princess Czartoriska, the pursuer of women, the Lovelace who, in the modest jargon of the court, had now this lady, now that, the Duc de Lauzun, then Duc de Biron, commanding for the Convention in La Vendée-what a pity to see! Baron de Bezenval, the false and cynical revealer of the corruptions of high life, displaying all the puerilities of the old expiring monarchy, this heavy baron, compromised in the affair of the Bastille, and saved by M. Necker and Mirabeau, solely because he was a Swiss-what a misery! What had such men to do with such events? When the Revolution increased in strength and power, it contemptuously abandoned these frivolous apostates from the throne; it had had need of their vices, it had need of their heads; it despised no blood, not even that of Madame du Barry.

Paris, December, 1821.

WHAT I DID IN THE MIDST OF THIS CONFUSION-MY SOLITARY DAYSMADEMOISELLE MONETI ARRANGE THE PLAN OF MY JOURNEY TO AMERICA, WITH THE HELP OF M. DE MALESHERBES-BONAPARTE AND MYSELF OBSCURE SUB-LIEUTENANTS-THE MARQUIS DE LA ROUERIE— I EMBARK AT ST. MALO-LAST THOUGHTS ON QUITTING MY NATIVE LAND.

THE year 1790 completed the measures sketched out in the year 1789; the possessions of the church, at first put into the hands of the nation, were confiscated, the civil constitution of the clergy decreed, the nobility abolished.

I was not present at the Federation of July, 1790; a rather serious indisposition confined me to bed; but I had been much entertained previously by the wheelbarrow scene in the Champde-Mars. Madame de Staël has described it with extraordinary cleverness. I shall always regret not having seen M. Talleyrand repeat the mass, assisted by the Abbé Louis, as I also regret not having seen him, with the sabre at his side, giving audience to the ambassador from the Grand Turk.

Mirabeau lost his popularity in 1790; his connections with the court were evident. M. Necker resigned his post of minister,

and retired; no one had any desire to detain him. Mesdames, the king's aunts, left for Rome, furnished with a passport from the National Assembly; the Duke of Orleans, after his return from England, declared himself the humble and obedient servant of the king. The societies of Friends to the Constitution, which had multiplied in different parts of France, leagued themselves with the original society in Paris, received its ideas, and executed its orders.

Public life met a favourable disposition in my character; what passed in common attracted me, because in a crowd I retained my solitude of soul, and had not to struggle with my timidity. The saloons, too, participating in the general movement, became a little less repugnant to my mind, and I had, in spite of myself, made some new acquaintances.

Among these was the Marquise de Villette. Her husband, whose reputation was much calumniated, wrote in the Journal de Paris, in conjunction with Monsieur, the king's brother. Madame de Villette, herself still a very charming woman, lost a daughter of about sixteen, who was yet more charming, and in memory of whom the Chevalier de Parny wrote this stanza, worthy of the "Anthologie:"

"Au ciel elle a rendu sa vie,
Et doucement s'est endormie,
Sans murmurer contre ses lois :
Ainsi le sourire s'efface,

Ainsi meurt sans laisser de trace

Le chant d'un oiseau dans les bois."

My regiment, quartered at Rouen, preserved its discipline for some time; it was engaged in a conflict with the people at the execution of the comedian Bordier, who suffered under the last exercise of the parliamentary power; hung one day, he would have been a hero the next, had he lived four-and-twenty hours longer. But at length insurrection broke out among the soldiers in Navarre. The Marquis de Mortemart emigrated; the officers followed him. I had neither adopted nor rejected the new opinions; as little disposed to attack as to advocate them, I neither wished to emigrate nor to continue my military career; I therefore retired.

Being free from all ties in opinion, I had on the one hand rather warm disputes with my brother and President de Rosambo; on the other, discussions not less bitter with Ginguené, Laharpe, and Chamfort. From the days of my earliest youth my political

impartiality had pleased no one. I only attached importance to the questions then mooted, in as far as they bore upon general ideas of human liberty and dignity; by this standard I judged them; personal politics wearied me; my true life was in higher regions.

The streets of Paris, crowded as they now were by day and by night, no longer permitted the indulgence of my whims. I sought solitude in the theatre; establishing myself in the depths of a box, I allowed my thoughts to wander to the verses of Racine, the music of Sacchini, or the dances at the opera. I must have intrepidly sat out "La Barbe Bleu" and "Le Sabot Perdu" twenty times running, at the theatre on the Italian Boulevard, wearying myself in order to get rid of ennui, like an owl in a hole in a wall; while the monarchy was crumbling to the ground, I heard neither the crash of the secular arches, nor the drawling of the vaudeville; neither the voice of Mirabeau thundering from the tribune, nor that of Colin singing to Babet on the stage :—

66

Qu'il pleuve, qu'il vente ou qu'il neige

Quand la nuit est longue, on l'abrege."

Monsieur Monet, Director of the Mines, and his young daughter, were sometimes sent by Madame Ginguené to disturb me in my hermit-like solitude; Mademoiselle Monet sat down at the front of the box, and I behind her, half grumbling, half pleased. I know not whether she pleased me, whether I liked her, but I was afraid of her. When she was gone I regretted her, although rejoicing that she was no longer beside me. Nevertheless, I sometimes gave myself great trouble to go and call for her and walk with her; I gave her my arm, and even occasionally, I think, pressed the one which rested on mine.

One idea now occupied my mind almost entirely-that of going to the United States; I wanted a useful aim for this journey; I therefore proposed to myself (as I have mentioned in these Memoirs, and in several of my works) to discover the North-west passage. This project was by no means uncongenial to, or independent of, my poetic nature. No one cared for me; I was then, like Bonaparte, an insignificant sub-lieutenant, utterly without name in the world; we both rose from obscurity at the same period, I to seek my renown in solitude, he his fame among men. Not having given my heart to any woman, my sylph still haunted my imagination; I looked forward to the felicity of realising with her my fantastic wanderings in the forests of the New World. Through the influence of another aspect of nature, my flower of

love, my nameless phantom of the Armorican woods, became Atalu beneath the shades of Florida.

M. de Malesherbes encouraged the idea of this voyage, and increased my desire for it; I passed whole mornings with him, poring over maps, comparing the various charts of the Arctic circle, calculating the distances from Behring's Straits to the top of Hudson's Bay, reading the different narratives of English, Dutch, French, Russian, Swedish, and Danish travellers and navigators; we traced out land-routes by which to reach the shores of the Polar Sea; imagined difficulties to be surmounted and precautions to be taken against the rigour of the climate, the attacks of wild animals, and the want of provisions. This illustrious man said to me, "If I were young I would go with you; I would spare myself the sight of the crimes, cowardice, and folly which meet me here; but at my age, men must be content to stay and die where they are. Do not fail to write to me by every opportunity, to give me full accounts of your progress and your discoveries; I will introduce them to the notice of the ministers. It is a great pity that you do not understand botany." After such conversations, I turned over Tournefort, Duhamel, Bernard de Jussieu, Grew, Jacquin, Rousseau's Dictionary, and a variety of elementary Floras; then ran off to the Jardin du Roi, and already thought myself a Lin

næus.

At length, in the month of January, 1791, I seriously made up my mind. The chaos of affairs was increasing; the very name of aristocrat sufficed to subject any one bearing it to persecution; the more moderate and conscientious a man's opinion was, the more it was suspected and spied upon. I therefore resolved to strike my tent; I left my brother and sisters in Paris, and set out for Brittany.

At Fougères I met with the Marquis de la Rouërie, and asked him for a letter to General Washington. Colonel Armand (the name borne by the Marquis in America) had distinguished himself in the war of American Independence. In France he made himself known by the part he took in the royalist conspiracy, which made some such touching victims in the Désilles family. Having lost his life while organising this conspiracy, he was afterwards exhumed and recognised, and drew down misfortunes on his hosts and friends. Rival to Lafayette and Lauzun, and forerunner of La Rochejaquelein, he was more clever than any of them; he had fought oftener than the first; carried off opera actresses like the second; and would have been companion in arms to the third.

He was then scouring the woods in Brittany, accompanied by an American major, and with an ape seated on the croup. The law students at Rennes were fond of him; his boldness in action and his freedom of ideas pleased them; he had been one of the twelve Breton gentlemen imprisoned in the Bastille. His appearance and manners were elegant, his air manly, his face intelligent and pleasing; he somewhat resembled the portraits of the young noblemen of the League.

I chose St. Malo as my port of embarkation, in order that I might take leave of my mother. In the third book of these Memoirs I have spoken of my visit en passant to Combourg, and of the feelings which there oppressed me. At St. Malo I remained two months, busied in preparations for my voyage, as I had once before been, at the same place, for my projected departure for India.

I made arrangements for my passage with a captain named Desjardins; he had engaged to convey the Abbé Nagault, head of the seminary at St. Sulpice, and several of the students under his charge, to Baltimore. These fellow voyagers would have been more congenial to me four years before; from a zealous Christian as I had then been, I had now become an esprit fort, or to speak more truly, an esprit faible. This change in my religious opinions had been produced by reading books on philosophy. I truly believed that on one side a religious mind was as it were paralysed—that there were truths which could not reach it, however superior it might be in other ways. It was this foolish pride which effected the change in my mind; in a religious spirit I supposed a deficiency, an absence of faculty, which in fact exists in a philosophic spirit; a limited intelligence imagines it sees every thing, because it keeps its eyes open; a superior intelligence consents to shut its eyes, because it sees every thing within.

Another and final cause was the ceaseless despair which lay deep in the recesses of my heart.

A letter of my brother's has fixed the date of my departure in my memory; he wrote to my mother from Paris, announcing the death of Mirabeau.

Three days after the arrival of this letter I rejoined the vessel in the roads; my luggage had all been previously sent on board. The anchor was weighed a solemn moment among sailors. The sun was setting when the coasting pilot left us, after having safely guided our vessel out of the channel. The weather was gloomy, the breeze languid, and the waves beat heavily upon the rocks at a few cable-lengths from the vessel. My eyes were fixed on St.