London, April to September, 1822. DEATH OF MY MOTHER-RETURN TO RELIGION. Alloquar? audiero nunquam tua verba loquentem ? Aspiciam post hac ? at, certe, semper amabo! "Shall I speak to thee no more? Shall I never hear thy words? Shall I never see thee, oh! brother dearer than my life? Ah! I shall ever love thee!" I HAVE just lost a friend, and am about to lose a mother: the verses addressed by Catullus to his brother are constantly applicable. In our valley of tears, as in the infernal regions, there is the constant murmur of an eternal plaint, forming the ground-work, or principal note, of human lamentations; it never ceases, and would continue should all created griefs be silent. A letter from Julie, which I received a short time after that from Fontanes, confirms my sad remark on my progressive isolation. Fontanes urged me to work, to become distinguished; my sister begged me to give up writing altogether: the one proposed fame to me, the other oblivion. You have seen in Madame de Farcy's history that such was the tendency of her ideas; she had conceived a hatred to literature, because she regarded it as one of the temptations of her life. "St. Servan, July 1st, 1793. When you 'My brother, we have just lost the best of mothers; it is with sorrow that I announce this severe blow. cease to be the object of our solicitude we shall have ceased to live. If you knew how many tears your errors have caused our dear mother to shed, how deplorable they appear to any one of a thinking mind, to any one who lays claim, not only to piety, but to reason; if you knew this, it would perhaps help to open your eyes, to make you give up writing; and should Heaven, touched by our prayers, permit us to meet again, you would find amongst us all the happiness that can be enjoyed on earth; and you would bring happiness to us, since none exists for us while you are absent, and while we have reason to be uneasy on your account." Ah! why did I not follow the impulse of my heart? why did I continue to write? Had my writings never come to light, would there have been any difference in the events or spirit of the century? I had then lost my mother; and I had embittered her last hour! While she, with her last breath, was uttering a prayer for her only remaining son, what was that son doing in London? I was perhaps taking a walk on a fresh morning, while the death-damp was on my mother's brow, and my hand was not there to wipe it away! The filial tenderness which I had always preserved for Madame de Chateaubriand was very profound. My childhood and youth were intimately associated with my mother's image; all that I knew I had learned from her. The idea of having poisoned the last days of her who had given me life, threw me into despair; I flung the copies of the Essai with horror into the fire, as the instruments of my crime; if it had been in my power to annihilate the work, I would have done it without hesitation. I did not recover from this distracted state of mind, until the thought occurred to me that I might expiate this first work by one of a religious character, such was the origin of the Génie du Christianisme. "My mother," I said, in the first preface to this work, "after having been thrown, at the age of seventy-two, into a dungeon, where she witnessed the death of some of her children, expired at length on a pallet, to which her misfortunes had consigned her. The thought of my errors greatly embittered her last days, and on her death-bed she charged one of my sisters to reclaim me to the religion in which I had been educated. My sister communicated my mother's last wish to me. When this letter reached me in my exile, my sister herself was no more; she, too, had sunk beneath the effects of her imprisonment. These two voices, coming, as it were, from the grave-the dead interpreting the dead—had a powerful effect on me. I became a Christian. I did not, indeed, yield to any great supernatural light; my conviction came from the heart; I wept, and believed." I exaggerated my fault; the Essai was not an impious book, but a book of doubt and grief. Through the darkness of this work still gleams a ray of the Christian light which beamed on my cradle. No great effort was needed to return from the scepticism of the Essai to the certainty of the Génie du Christianisme. London, April to September, 1822. "GÉNIE DU CHRISTIANISME" - LETTER FROM THE CHEVALIER DE PANAT. WHEN, after the sad news of my mother's death, I made a resolve instantly to change my course, the title Génie du Christianisme, which immediately occurred to me, inspired me; I set myself to the work, and laboured with the ardour of a son erecting a mausoleum to his mother. My materials had long since been collected and blocked out by my previous studies. I was better acquainted with the writings of the Fathers than people are in the present day; I had studied them with the intention of combating them, and having entered on the path, with evil designs, instead of vanquishing I had been vanquished. As regarded history, properly so called, it had been the especial object of my attention during the composition of the Essai sur les Révolutions. The Camden Papers, which I had just been engaged in examining, had rendered me familiar with the manners and institutions of the middle ages. And finally, my terrible manuscript of the Natchez, of 2393 folio pages, contained everything I needed in the way of natural descriptions. I could draw largely from this source, as I had already done in the Essai. I wrote the first part of the Génie du Christianisme. The Messrs. Dulau, who had constituted themselves booksellers to the French emigrant clergy, undertook the publication; and the first sheets of the first volume were printed. A sort The work thus begun in 1799, in London, was not completed till 1802, in Paris: see its different prefaces. of fever preyed on me during the whole time of its composition: none but he who has felt it can know what it was to bear Atala and René at one time in the brain, the blood and the soul, and to have added to the ideas of these twins of passion the labour of composing the other portions of the work. The recollection of Charlotte mingled as a warning ray with all my thoughts, and, to crown all, the first desire for fame inflamed my heated imagination. This desire was the result of filial tenderness; I longed for fame, that it might ascend to my mother's dwelling-place, and that the angels might bring her my holy expiation. As one study leads to another, I could not occupy myself with my French researches without taking note of the literature and literary men of the country in which I was living: I was drawn away into other researches. My days and my nights were passed in reading, writing, taking lessons in Hebrew from a learned priest, the Abbé Capelan, consulting librarians and well-informed people, roaming in the fields indulging in my old habit of reverie, and in receiving and paying visits. If there are such things as retroactive and symptomatic effects of future events, I might have augured the sensation to be caused by the work which was to make a name for me, from the turmoil of my spirits and the palpitations of my muse. Some readings aloud of my first sketches served to enlighten me. These readings are excellent as a mode of instruction, so long as we do not take all the matter-of-course flatteries for genuine coin. If an author is earnest and sincere, he will quickly discover, by the instinctive impressions of others, the weak points of his work, especially whether it is too long or too short, whether it keeps to, does not complete, or exceeds, the proper measure. I find by me a letter from the Chevalier de Panat, containing his opinion on the readings of a work then so unknown. The letter is charming: one would not have thought the positive and mocking spirit of the chevalier susceptible of thus meddling with poetry. I do not hesitate to give this letter, one of the documents of my history, although it is filled with my praises from beginning to end, as if the malicious author had found a pleasure in pouring out his whole inkbottle over it: "Monday. "Mon Dieu! with what an interesting reading have you indulged me this morning! Our religion had reckoned among its defenders great geniuses, illustrious fathers of the Church; these giants had wielded all the arms of reasoning with vigour; incredulity was conquered; but this was not enough; we yet needed to be shown all the charms of this admirable religion, how fitted it is to the human heart, and what splendid pictures it offers to the imagination. Here we have, not the theologian in a school, but the great painter and the feeling man opening to himself a new horizon. Your work was needed, and you were called to produce it. Nature has eminently gifted you with the fine qualities required for this undertaking: you belong to another age. "Ah! if truths of sentiment stand first in the order of nature, no one has better felt those of our religion than you ; you have overwhelmed the impious with confusion at the very gate of the temple, and introduced delicate minds and feeling hearts into the sanctuary. You remind me of those ancient philosophers who gave their lessons with their heads adorned with chaplets of flowers, and their hands filled with sweet perfumes; and this is but a feeble image of your mind, so sweet, so pure, so classic. "I congratulate myself daily on the happy circumstance which threw me into your society; I cannot forget that it was a kindness done me by Fontanes; I love him the more for it, and my heart will never separate two names which should be united in the same fame, if Providence ever re-opens the gates of our country to us. "CHEVALIER DE PANAT." He The Abbé Délille also heard some fragments of the work read. He appeared surprised, and shortly after did me the honour to put the prose which had pleased him into verse. naturalised my wild American flowers in his various French gardens, and put my rather fiery wine to cool in the icy water of his clear fountain. The unfinished edition of the Génie du Christianisme, commenced in London, differed slightly, in the order of its subjects, from that published in France. The Consular censorship, soon to become Imperial, showed itself very touchy on the subject of kings; their persons, their honour, and their virtue, were dear to it beforehand. Fouché's police had already seen the white pigeon, the symbol of Bonaparte's frankness and revolutionary innocence, descend from heaven with the sacred vial. The sincere believers in the republican processions of Lyons obliged me to cut out a chapter entitled "The Atheist Kings," and to scatter the paragraphs here and there throughout the work. |