(one of his earliest works) he writes: "Je m'ennuie de la vie; l'ennui m'a toujours dévoré: ce qui intéresse les autres hommes ne me touche point. . . . . . Je suis vertueux sans plaisir: si j'étais criminel, je le serais sans remords. Je voudrais n'être pas né, ou être à jamais oublié." In the Mémoires d'outre Tombe he writes, under the date of 1821: "Religion à part, le bonheur est de s'ignorer, et d'arriver à la mort sans avoir senti la vie." Eleven years later, when he was sixty-four years old, he writes to a lady friend: "Puissance et amour, tout m'est indifférent, tout m'importune. J'ai mon plan de solitude en Italie, et la mort au bout."

It must not be supposed that his youthful studies and reveries were wholly unproductive: he seems to have talked well when excited and sufficiently at ease to overcome his native shyness; and his sister, struck with some remarkable indications of talent, persuaded him to write. He did so for a while; then he became discouraged, threw his work aside, and grumbled at Lucile for having suggested it. Even then he thought only of fame, not of interest in his subject, nor of the simple expression of his sentiments and fancies. "J'en voulus à Lucile d'avoir fait naître en moi un penchant malheureux: je cessais d'écrire, et je me pris à pleurer ma gloire à venir." He began by writing verses, as nearly all young men do; and he would fain persuade his readers that so competent a critic as M. de Fontanes found them excellent. "J'écris longtemps en vers avant d'écrire en prose: M. de Fontanes prétendait que j'avais reçu les deux instrumens." Unfortunately for Chateaubriand, M. de Fontanes gave his own version of the matter to M. Villemain, showing that the poet must have magnified some enforced politeness into deliberate eulogy. The critic signalised in the verse of Chateaubriand a want of spirit and real poetry which surprised him: "Car, enfin" (said he), "à travers les énormités, il est admirable de créations de style dans sa prose: c'est toute autre chose dans sa poésie ;-on dirait qu'il se dédommage et qu'il fait amende honorable de ses hardiesses par le prosaisme et la timidité."*

Meantime the young aspirant had embraced no profession, though he had dreamed of nearly all, and was unfit for any. "His spirit of independence," he himself says, "rendered him averse from every sort of service; j'ai en moi une impossibilité d'obéir. Les voyages me tentaient, mais je sentais que je ne les

*Villemain, p. 17. In another part of his Memoirs, Chateaubriand, in reference to the novel and unclassic style of his earlier writings, observes: "Toutefois, mon ami (Fontanes), au lieu de se révolter contre ma barbarie, se passionna pour elle.” On this M. Villemain remarks: "M. de Chateaubriand is wrong here. No one, as we can testify, was more thoroughly impatient of the affectation, barbarous or not, which disfigures Atala and René, but he was charmed with their beauties" (p. 75).

His father de

aimerais que seul, en suivant ma volonté." signed him for the navy, and sent him to Brest to prepare for his commission; but he renounced the career for some unexplained cause, and returned to the paternal mansion. His mother wanted to make him a priest; but Chateaubriand felt no vocation in that line, though some preliminary studies were undertaken, and he actually received the tonsure from the Bishop of SaintMalo, as a step towards becoming at some future period a Knight of Malta. He at one time resolved to obtain same appointment in the East Indies, and his father consented to let him dispose of himself in this manner; but months flowed by, and no active measures were taken to realise the scheme. At last the paternal patience was worn out: a commission in the army was obtained, and the future Celebrity was sent off to join his regiment with a hundred louis in his pocket and a parting allocution, which was rather a scolding than a benediction. The young ensign presented himself at head-quarters, and for a while did duty with his corps; but he saw no service and learned no discipline, spending most of his time in Paris, watching the gradual opening of the Revolution. The state of affairs soon became uncomfortable for an officer of noble family in the service of the king; Chateaubriand appears to have been still too egotistical a dreamer to feel any absorbing interest in the great drama that was then evolving; he was seized with a fancy for discovering the north-west passage,-so at least he says; but probably he was only restless and adventurous. However, he sailed for America; renounced his alleged scheme on the first discouragement he met with; wandered awhile in the prairies and the forests of the new world; gained a glimpse into the poetry of savage life, of which he made the most in Atala and the Natchez; and returned suddenly to France, with no definite reason or determinate purpose, on hearing of the king's flight to Varennes. One passage in the Mémoires relating to this period is so indicative of certain features of Chateaubriand, that we must turn aside for a moment to call attention to it. On the voyage out he had formed an intimacy with a fellow-passenger, an Englishman named Francis Tulloch, who seems to have possessed both talent and merit. This was in 1791. Thirty-one years afterwards, in 1822, when Chateaubriand was at the summit of his worldly grandeur as ambassador to England, Francis Tulloch was living in Portland Place, just opposite to the official residence of his former fellow-traveller and intimate. He wrote a very friendly and courteous letter to Chateaubriand, informing him of their close neighbourhood, and saying that though of course he could not make the first advances towards the renewal of intercourse with so great a man, yet that, "on the slightest

intimation from the ambassador of a wish to see him, he should be delighted to express, &c. &c." The letter was complimentary, -so Chateaubriand gives it a prominent place in his Mémoires; he quotes it "in proof of the accuracy of his recollection and the veracity of his narrative;"—and he then proceeds to some rather trite and feeble reflections on the fading of friendship and the loss of friends:-he appears never either to have answered the cordial letter, or to have responded to the modest invitation of his former companion. It was so much easier and more becoming to moralise over the fidelity of others than to give any pledge of his own.

Throughout this portion of his Memoirs, as, indeed, in nearly every volume, we find constantly-recurring examples, and very nauseous ones, of his besetting weakness. He never misses an opportunity, in season and out of season, àpropos and mal-àpropos, of instituting, not exactly comparisons but rapprochemens between himself and every great or notable man whom he can in any way drag into the narrative. When he shakes hands with Washington, he cannot help contrasting the renown of the one with the then obscurity of the other, and surmising that the great American statesman probably forgot his existence the day after the presentation. When he describes his residence at the Vallée-aux-Loups, near Chatenay, he adds: "Lorsque Voltaire naquit à Chatenay en 1697, quel était l'aspect du côteau où se devait retirer en 1807 l'auteur du Génie du Christianisme ?" He cannot mention his birth without reminding us that, "twenty days before him, at the other extremity of France, was born" another great man-" Bonaparte." On occasion of his departure for America, he observes: "No one troubled himself about me; I was then, like Bonaparte, an insignificant ensign, quite unknown; we started together, he and I, at the same time; I to seek renown in solitude, he to acquire glory among men.' He makes Mirabeau say to him, àpropos to nothing, what we know he said to others in a natural context: "Ils ne me pardonneront jamais ma supériorité." And he adds more consueto : "Lorsque Mirabeau fixa ses regards sur moi, eut-il un pressentiment de mes futuritions?" Once more: the following paragraph is headed Mort de mon Père. "L'année même où je faisais à Cambrai mes premières armes, on apprit la mort de Frédéric II. Je suis ambassadeur auprès du neveu de ce grand roi, et j'écris à Berlin cette partie de mes mémoires. A cette nouvelle importante pour le public, succèda une autre nouvelle, douloureuse pour moi," &c. Chateaubriand lost his shirts when campaigning with the emigrant army near Trèves: this reminds him (or makes him invent) that Henry IV. found, just before the battle of Ivry, that he had only five shirts left. He observes thereon: "Le Bear

nais gagna la bataille d'Ivry sans chemises; je n'ai pu rendre son royaume à ses enfans en perdant les miennes !"'*

Chateaubriand returned from America as unsettled as ever in his mind, and poorer than ever in purse. Meantime the Revolution made rapid progress. The emigrant army of Condé formed itself on the left bank of the Rhine; nobles and royalists flocked to join it, as fast as they could contrive means of escape; and Chateaubriand, mindful of his birth and antecedents, and moved by an ill-considered feeling of honour, resolved to follow their example, though in his heart he neither completely embraced their political principles, nor in his conscience was at all satisfied as to the morality of the emigrant warfare. He makes no secret of this state of mind in his record of the discussions he held with Malesherbes upon the subject. But he had no money wherewith to carry out his half-hesitating purpose; his family could not furnish him with it: he married in order to obtain it. This, at least, is his own account of the matter, and we have never seen it contradicted. "Il s'agissait de me trouver de l'argent pour rejoindre les Princes: . . . . on me maria, afin de me procurer le moyen de m'aller faire tuer au soutien d'une cause que je n'aimais pas." His sisters arranged the affair. He tells us that he felt no vocation for matrimony-none of the qualities to make a good husband; since "toutes mes illusions étaient vivantes; rien n'était épuisé en moi; l'énergie même de mon existence avait doublé par mes courses; j'étais tourmenté par la muse." Nevertheless he told his sisters they might do as they liked. "Faites donc!" said he. Accordingly they found a young lady with a reputed fortune of twenty thousand pounds, who, in spite of her friends' opposition, consented to become Madame de Chateaubriand; and, we believe, notwithstanding mortal annoyances, never repented of her complaisance. She appears, both by her husband's account and by that of M. Villemain, and of others who knew her, to have been clever, lively, and spiritual, and a really affectionate and devoted wife. Admiring Chateaubriand vastly, but appreciating him little, and approving and agreeing with him scarcely ever; proud of his fame, but indifferent to literature, and never reading a line of his works,-the union must have been a curious, if not precisely an ill-assorted one. He esteemed and respected, but does not pretend to have loved her; and, according to our notions, he neglected her shamefully. He deserted her almost immediately after their marriage, and abandoned her to all the horrors and perils of the Reign of Terror. He left her behind him when he went to England, and seems for a time to have forgotten he was married; he left her when he went as Secre

* See also his remarks on Canning àpropos of the Literary Fund dinner. ii. 76.

tary of Legation to Rome; he left her when he went on a pilgrimage to the Levant; in fact, he usually left her behind him whenever he went any where. She was a kind of pied-à-terre or furnished lodging, which he kept in Paris to be ready for him when he happened to return, after his restless wanderings. The few pages which he devotes to her in narrating his marriage are singularly cool and characteristic. He does full justice to her intelligence and character, and expresses himself grateful for her devotion and affectionate patience with his faults. He intimates that her virtues made her less easy to live with than his defects, but generously takes no merit to himself for his more facile commerce; for he says, that "resignation, general obligingness, and serenity of temper"-which no one but himself ever dreamed of attributing to him—"are easy to a man who is weary and indifferent to every thing." He then proceeds to speculate whether, possibly, after all, he may not have plagued her more that she plagued him; and ends by a deliberate and earnest disquisition on the problem whether his marriage "did really spoil his destiny." "No doubt," he argues, "I should have had more leisure and should have produced more; no doubt I might have been better received in certain circles and among the grandees of the earth; no doubt Madame de Chateaubriand often bothered me, though she never controlled me. But, on the other hand, without her I might have gone to the bad, like Byron; I might have become a disreputable old débauché; and after all, I am not sure that if I had given full scope to my desires, and led a life of vagabond amours, it would have added a cord to my lyre,' or made my voice more touching, or my sentiments more profound, or my tones more energetic or more thrilling." "Retenu par un lien indissoluble, j'ai acheté d'abord au prix d'un peu d'amertume les douceurs que je goûte aujourd'hui. Je dois donc une tendre et éternelle reconnaissance à ma femme, dont l'attachment a été aussi touchant que profond et sincère. Elle a rendu ma vie plus grave, plus noble, plus honorable, en m'inspirant toujours le respect, sinon toujours la force des devoirs.'

Chateaubriand soon discovered that his wife's property, for the sake of which he had married her, was all but mythical. It had been secured on the domains of the clergy, and these domains had been confiscated by the nation. At all events, the funds, whether existing or not, were inaccessible. With great difficulty he borrowed ten thousand francs; and, as ill-luck would have it, while these were in his pocket, for the first and only time in his life, he was enticed by the fatal fascinations of the gaming-table. He lost all except fifteen hundred francs, and, in his confusion and distress of mind, he left these also in a