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THE MEMOIRS OF CHATEAUBRIAND.
Selected, translated and with an introduction by Robert Baldick. (Hamish Hamilton.)

CHATEAUBRIAND by Friedrich Sieburg, translated by Violet M. Macdonald. (Allen & Unwin.)

A good many years ago, I happened to be looking through a large collection of miscellaneous correspondence, addressed to the celebrated Madame de Lieven at a time when she and her husband occupied the Russian Embassy in London, and picked out, among the letters of statesmen, hostesses and royal dukes, a diminutive visiting card with the simple engraved inscription: Vicomte de Chateaubriand. It must have lain there since 1822. How bitterly, I remembered, the ultra-conservative Russian Ambassadress had disliked the literary French Ambassador! He reminded her, she told her lover Metternich, of ‘a hunchback without the hump’ — a reference to the broad ungainly shoulders that surmounted his small and spindly legs. He appeared, she wrote, to be ‘carrying his heart in a sling’, affected a blasé disillusioned air, and announced that he was bored by intelligent women, although Madame de Lieven herself — or so she and her friends considered — was one of the cleverest women of her day. Chateaubriand’s first impressions of Madame de Lieven seem to have been even more unfavourable: she was a ‘mediocre creature’, he records, with a ‘sharp, repulsively ugly face’. Worse still, she could only talk of politics. Hers was an assertive, masculine spirit; and, despite his affection for Germaine de Staël, masculine intelligence in women was not a quality he had ever greatly prized. He preferred a blend of beauty and sentiment, of intuitive sympathy and unselfconscious sensual charm.

     Above all else, he was a ‘woman’s man’, whose existence passed in a long series of absorbing love affairs. But then, as soon as we begin to define his character, we immediately run up against some contradiction. Chateaubriand was a romantic amorist; and it is impossible to separate his public from his private life. Yet he was also a sternly ambitious careerist, who held — and often mismanaged — a number of important posts. As a romantic adventurer, he had much in common with Byron. But, apart from his few parliamentary speeches, Byron never attempted to play an influential public role; while Chateaubriand served his country under three successive French sovereigns: Napoleon — to whom he renounced his allegiance after the government’s judicial assassination of the innocent young duc d’Enghien — and Louis XVIII and Charles X, once the Bourbon monarchy had replaced the Empire. In 1823 he became French Foreign Minister, an opportunity he had always coveted. This, however, proved a somewhat unfortunate episode, which again revealed his contradictory leanings. Although he had fought as an anti-revolutionary patriot with the ‘Army of the Princes’, he later professed to be a passionate liberal. Yet he now launched a war of intervention — ‘my war’, he proudly called it—on behalf of the reactionary Spanish monarch. Ferdinand VII was duly restored to power; but his own king, who distrusted Chateaubriand’s romantic exuberance, quickly gave him his official congé.

     The collapse of the Bourbons and the rise of Louis-Philippe completed his extinction as an homme d’état. Today we need not regret his ruin, which was both political and financial; having lost his official stipend, he was obliged to live by writing books and pamphlets; and, within the next nine years, he was able to round off the majestic autobiographical narrative that he had embarked on during the autumn of 1811. Until September 1841 he continued to revise the work. Then, after an expedition à la recherche du temps perdu that he had prosecuted for nearly three decades, he composed a valedictory conclusion and put aside his manuscript. There was his past, from his curious childhood in his father’s gloomy Breton stronghold: there, too, was the story of modern France as it had unfolded, crisis by crisis, from the far-off period before the Revolution, when the awkward young chevalier de Chateaubriand had attended Louis XVI’s royal hunt and had watched Marie-Antoinette — ‘she seemed delighted with life’ — pass by among her bowing courtiers: an immense panorama of men and events and ideas, against a background not only of France, England, Italy and the Middle East, but of the forests of the New World.

     In his time, he had faced his contemporaries as courtier, soldier, exile, traveller, universally acclaimed writer and temporarily successful politician. The scope of the book is truly gigantic; yet it is not the fascination of the story itself, but the voice in which the story is told that has given his memoirs their immortality. Echoing from beyond the grave — Memoires d’Outre-Tombe was the title that the ageing writer chose — with an accent, Baudelaire remarked, that is ‘half earthly and half otherworldly’, Chateaubriand’s voice possesses an extraordinary resonance, yet is capable at the same time of the softest and subtlest modulations. He renders the rustle of a dead leaf in the deserted park at Comburg just as delicately and accurately as the thunders of the revolutionary storm; he is lyrical, romantic, ironic, caustic, boldly rhetorical, fiercely eloquent but, if the occasion demands it, nostalgic, evocative and deeply tender. However excited he may be by the tremendous events of his period, Chateaubriand cannot forget that events are shaped by individual human beings; nor does he allow the reader to lose the sense of his own individual solitude. He remains a solitary, secluded and self-absorbed, in the midst of world-wide stress and turmoil.

     Such is the effect that his style produces — a style compact of strength and grace, that reflects, as few other styles have done, the peculiar characteristics of its author’s temperament. Can it be reproduced through the medium of a foreign language? Mr Robert Baldick has made a gallant effort, selecting from the massive original work the substance of a single volume, and translating these extracts into easily running English prose. Here and there, one must admit, he employs a somewhat awkward turn. ‘Thanks to the exorbitance of my years, my monument is finished’, has not a very English ring; and there are other passages in which Mr Baldick’s translation is too literal to sound altogether natural. At second hand, Chateaubriand’s style loses much both of its grandeur and of its delicacy; and, in the choice of passages he has decided to translate, Mr Baldick, I think, often shows a lack of editorial judgement. Why did he include the extended account of Napoleon’s career and character and personality — where, as a French editor, Victor Giraud says, ‘les Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe, . . . cessent d’être les mémoires de Chateaubriand, pour devenir l’histoire de Napoléon — and exclude, for instance, his magnificent portrait of the demonic Mirabeau?

‘La laideur de Mirabeau, appliquée sur le fond de beauté particulière à sa race, produisait une sorte de puissante figure du Jugement Dernier de Michel-Ange . . . Les sillons creusés par la petite vérole . . . avait plutôt l’air d’escarres laissées par la flamme. La nature semblait avoir moulé sa tête pour l’empire ou pour le gibet, taillié ses bras pour étreindre une nation ou pour enlever tine femme. . . . Je me trouvais a côté de lui et n’avais pas prononcé un mot. Il me regardais en face avec ses yeux d’orgueil, de vice et de génie, et, m’appliquant sa main sur l’épaule, il me dit: “Il ne me pardonneront jamais ma supériorité!” Je sens encore l’impression de cette main, comme si Satan m’eût touché de sa griffe de feu.’

Yet, on the whole, Mr Baldick’s version should gain Chateaubriand many new admirers; and in Friedrich Sieburg’s competent biography — though it tells us very little we have not already learned from André Maurois — they will find a workmanlike summing-up of previous biographical studies. Under the biographer’s lens, the hero of the autobiography cuts a somewhat less imposing figure. Chateaubriand, of course, was vain and petulant and egotistical; the women he pretended to love he very seldom failed to make unhappy; and, as Joubert observed — speaking, it is true, of his earlier writings, not of the Mémoires d’Outre Tombe — he was a man who lived for himself, but wrote for the benefit of other people. At moments, there is something almost ridiculous about that frail, top-heavy personage, flanked by his acid, ailing wife, to whose virtues in his memoirs he pays a slightly ironic tribute, and by the chorus of adoring ‘madams’ who ministered to his self-esteem. To admire him as he deserves to be admired, one must return to the pages of his autobiography — not because they conceal or excuse his faults, but because they display the strength of the character in which those faults were ultimately rooted. There he views himself sub specie aeternitas, an individual on a gigantic world-stage; passionately self-centred, he is inspired by a vision of life that again and again, while he looks back on the past, lifts him high above his own existence. Mémoires d’Outre Tombe he planned as his personal monument, but also as an ‘epic of his time’. With its majestic, yet extremely various, style and its rare combination of interested and disinterested feeling, it is one of the major masterpieces of modern European literature.