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London, April to September, 1822.

RETURN OF THE ÉMIGRÉS TO FRANCE-THE PRUSSIAN MINISTER GIVES ME A FALSE PASSPORT UNDER THE NAME OF LASSAGNE, AN INHABITANT OF NEUFCHATEL, IN SWITZERLAND-DEATH OF LORD LONDONDERRY-END OF MY CAREER AS A SOLDIER AND AS A TRAVELLER I LAND AT CALAIS.

I BEGAN to turn my eyes towards my native country. A great revolution had been effected. Bonaparte having become First Consul, re-established order by despotism; many of the exiles returned; the émigrés of rank especially hastened back to recover the wrecks of their fortunes; fidelity was perishing at its head, while its heart still beat in the breast of a few poor gentlemen of the provinces. Mrs. Lindsay had left England, and wrote to MM. de Lamoignon to return to their country; she also urged their sister, Madame d'Aguesseau, to come over. Fontanes wished me to go and finish the publication of the Génie du Christianisme at Paris. Although my recollection of and affection for my country were fresh and vivid, I felt no desire to return to it; gods more powerful than the paternal lares kept me back; I had no longer either possessions or a home in France; my country had become to me a bosom of stone, a milkless breast; I should find neither my mother, nor my brother, nor my sister Julie there. Lucile was still living, but she had married M. de Caud, and no longer bore my name; my young widow only knew me by a union of a few months, by misfortune, and an absence of eight years.

Had I been left entirely to myself, I know not whether I should have had strength of mind to resolve on departure; but I saw my little circle melting away, Madame d'Aguesseau offered to take me to Paris, and I yielded. The Prussian minister procured me a passport under the name of Lassagne, an inhabitant of Neufchâtel. MM. Dulau stopped the printing of the Génie du Christianisme, and gave me the sheets already printed. I extracted from the Natchez the sketches of Atala and René, locked up the rest of the manuscript in a trunk, which I entrusted to the keeping of my hosts in London, and set out for Dover with Madame d'Aguesseau: Mrs. Lindsay was waiting for us at Calais.

Thus, in the year 1800, I quitted England; my heart was filled with very different thoughts from those which occupy it when I write this, in 1822. Then, I brought from the land. of exile nought but regrets and dreams; now, my head is filled with scenes of ambition, politics, grandeur, and courts, so ill-suited to my nature. What masses of events are, as it were, piled up in my present existence! Pass on, men, pass on; my turn will come. I have as yet unfolded but a third part of my days to you: if the sufferings which I have endured weighed darkly on my bright early days, now, when entering on a more productive age, the germ of René is about to be developed, and bitterness of another kind will mingle with my narrative! How much shall I have to say in speaking of my country, of its revolutions, of which I have already traced the first sketch; of the Empire and its gigantic head, of whose fall I have been a witness; of the Restoration, in which I took so great a part, glorious now in 1822, but over which there yet seems in my eyes to hover a vague, dark, funereal cloud!

I am about to close this chapter, which traces me up to the spring of 1800; arrived at the end of my first career, there now opens before me the career of the author: from a private individual, I am about to become a public man; to quit the pure and silent shelter of solitude, for the soiled and noisy highway of the world; bright daylight will throw its beams upon my dreamy existence, and light penetrate into the kingdom of shadows. I look back with emotion on the pages which delineate these hours, unmarked by action or event; I seem to be bidding a last farewell to my paternal home; I take leave of the thoughts and chimeras of my youth, as of sisters or lovers, whom I leave by the family hearth, and shall never

see more.

Our passage from Dover to Calais occupied four hours. I crept into my native land under the protection of a foreign name; doubly hidden in the obscurity of the Swiss Lassagne and in my own, I set foot on France with the century.

Dieppe, 1836.

Revised in December, 1846.

MY STAY AT DIEPPE-TWO SOCIETIES.

WHILST writing these Memoirs, you know that I have changed my abode many times, and have often described those places, and uttered opinions which they suggested; I have thus retraced my recollections, mixing up the history of my thoughts and of my various homes with the history of my life.

You see where I am now. Walking this morning on the cliffs behind the castle of Dieppe, my eye rested on the postern which communicates with them by means of a bridge over the moat. By this postern Madame de Longueville escaped from Queen Anne of Austria; and having embarked secretly at Havre, and landed at Rotterdam, she went to Stenay, to Marshal de Turenne. The conquests of the great captain were no longer innocent, and the exiled scoffer did not treat the guilty with any mercy.

Madame de Longueville, freed from the enmity of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, the throne of Versailles, and the municipality of Paris, became passionately attached to the author of Les Maximes (Larochefoucauld), and continued as faithful to him as she was able. He survives less from his thoughts than from the friendship of Madame de la Fayette and of Madame de Sévigné, from the verses of La Fontaine and the love of Madame de Longueville. Such is the value of illustrious attachments.

The Princess of Condé being on her death-bed, said to Madame de Brienne, "My dear friend, inform that pauvre misérable, who is at Stenay, of the state in which you now see me, and let her learn to die." Fine words; the princess, however, forgot that she herself had been loved by Henry IV.; that when taken to Brussels by her husband, she had been anxious to rejoin the Bearnese-to escape by night through a window, and afterwards to ride on horseback thirty or forty leagues; she was then a pauvre misérable, seventeen years of

age.

Having come down from the cliffs, I found myself on the high-road to Paris; on going out of Dieppe the road ascends

rapidly. To the right, the wall of a cemetery rises on the sloping side of a bank; and along this wall runs a rope-walk. Two rope-makers, walking backwards in parallel lines, and balancing from leg to leg, were singing together in a low voice. I listened to their song; they were just at the following couplet of the Vieux Caporal; a fine poetical falsehood, which has brought us where we are:

Qui là-bas sanglotte et regarde ?

Eh! C'est la veuve du tambour, &c., &c.

These men sung the chorus: conscrits, au pas; ne pleurez pas..marchez au pas, au pas, in a tone so manly and pathetic, that tears started to my eyes. Whilst keeping the step, and reeling off their hemp, they had the air of spinning out the last moments of the vieux caporal. I cannot describe the charm, peculiar to Béranger, though exhibited merely by two sailors, who, in sight of the sea, celebrate the death of a soldier.

The cliffs recalled to my mind monarchical greatness, the high-way plebeian celebrity; I compared in my mind the men who constitute the two extremes of society; I asked myself to which of these two periods I would have wished to belong. When the present shall have disappeared like the past, which of these two kinds of renown will most strongly draw towards it the respect of posterity?

And, nevertheless, if deeds were everything, if the value of names did not form in history a counterpoise to the value of events, what a difference there is between my time and the time which passed from the death of Henry IV. to that of Mazarin ! What were the disturbances of 1648 compared with those of this Revolution, which has swallowed up the old conditions of society, and which will die, perhaps, leaving neither old nor new society? Have I not had to draw, in my Memoirs, pictures of incomparably greater importance than the scenes related by the Duc de Larochefoucauld? Even at Dieppe, what was the careless and voluptuous idol of Paris, seduced and rebellious, in comparison with the Duchesse de Berry? The salvos of artillery which announced to the sea the presence of the royal widow, no longer thunder; the flatteries of powder and smoke have left nothing on the shore but the murmuring of the waves.

The two daughters of the house of Bourbon, Anne Geneviève and Marie Caroline, have withdrawn; the two sailors in the song of the plebeian poet will be forgotten; Dieppe is empty of myself; it was another self, that of my early days already ended, who formerly dwelt in these places, and this self has perished, for our days die before ourselves. Here you have seen me a sub-lieutenant in the regiment of Navarre, drilling recruits on the sands; you have also seen me an exile under Bonaparte, you will meet me again, when the days of July overtake me. Here I am still; and I resume my pen to continue my Confessions.

In order to know where we are, it may be useful to cast a glance on the state of my Memoirs.

RETROSPECT OF MY MEMOIRS.

THAT has happened to me, which happens to every man who works on a grand scale: I have, in the first place, raised the wings on the extremities; then, displacing and replacing my scaffolding hither and thither, I have raised the stones and mortar of the intermediate structures; several centuries were employed in completing the Gothic cathedrals. If Heaven grant me life, the monument shall be finished during the course of different years; the architect will always remain the same, only changed in age. Besides, it is a punishment to preserve the intellectual being intact, imprisoned in a material envelope almost worn out. St. Augustine, when he became sensible of his bodily decay, said to God: "Keep my soul in Thy tabernacle ;" and to men, "When you have learned to know me in this book, pray for me."

Six-and-thirty years must be reckoned between the things last spoken of, and those in which I am now engaged. How is it possible to resume, with any degree of ardour, an account of subjects which long ago inspired me with passion and fire, when those are no longer alive of whom I am about to speak, and the object is to resuscitate images frozen in the depths of eternity; to descend into a funereal cavern, in order to enjoy life? Am not I myself, as it were, dead? Have not my

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