Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859 Part 27

'The husband of an acquaintance of mine,' said Madame de Beaumont, 'used to disappear for two or three hours every day. He would not tell her for what purpose. At last she found out that he was employed in the _chambre noire_, the department of the police by which letters pa.s.sing through the post are opened. The duties were well paid, and she could not persuade him to give them up. They were on uneasy terms, when an accident threw a list of all the names of the _employes_ in the _chambre noire_, into the hands of an opposition editor, who published them in his newspaper.

'She then separated from him.'

'If the Post-office,' I said, 'were not a Government monopoly, if everyone had a right to send his letters in the way that he liked best, there would be some excuse. But the State compels you, under severe penalties, to use its couriers, undertaking, not tacitly but expressly, to respect the secrecy of your correspondence, and then systematically violates it.'

'I should have said,' answered Ampere, 'not expressly but tacitly.'

'No,' I replied; 'expressly. Guizot, when Minister for Foreign Affairs, proclaimed from the tribune, that in France the secrecy of correspondence was, under all circ.u.mstances, inviolable. This has never been officially contradicted.

'The English Post-office enters into no such engagements. Any letters may be legally opened, under an order from a Secretary of State.'

'Are prisoners in England,' asked Beaumont, 'allowed to correspond with their friends?'

'I believe,' I answered, 'that their letters pa.s.s through the Governor's hands, and that he opens them, or not, at his discretion.'

'Among the tortures,' said Ampere, 'which Continental despots delight to inflict on their state prisoners the privation of correspondence is one.'

'In ordinary life,' I said, 'the educated endure inaction worse than the ignorant. A coachman sits for hours on his box without feeling _ennui_.

If his master had to sit quiet all that time, inside the carriage, he would tear his hair from impatience.

'But the educated seem to tolerate the inactivity of imprisonment better than their inferiors. We find that our ordinary malefactors cannot endure solitary imprisonment for more than a year--seldom indeed so long. The Italian prisoners whom I have known, Zucchi, Borsieri, Poerio, Gonfalonieri, and Pellico, endured imprisonment lasting from ten to seventeen years without much injury to mind or body.'

'The spirit of Pellico,' said Madame de Beaumont, 'was broken. When released, he gave himself up to devotion and works of charity. Perhaps the humility, resignation, and submission of his book made it still more mischievous to the Austrian Government. The reader's indignation against those who could so trample on so unresisting a victim becomes fierce.'

'If the Austrians,' I said, 'had been wise, they would have shot instead of imprisoning them. Their deaths would have been forgotten--their imprisonment has contributed much to the general odium which is destroying the Austrian Empire.'

'It would have been wiser,' said Beaumont, 'but it would have been more merciful, and therefore it was not done. But you talk of all these men as solitarily imprisoned. Some of them had companions.'

'Yes,' I said, 'but they complained that one permanent companion was worse than solitude. Gonfalonieri said, that one could not be in the same room, with the same man, a year without hating him.

'One of the Neapolitan prisoners was chained for some time to a brigand.

Afterwards the brigand was replaced by a gentleman. He complained bitterly of the change.

'The brigand,' said Minnie, 'was his slave, the gentleman had a will of his own.'

'How did M. de La Fayette,'[2] I asked Madame de Beaumont, 'bear his five years' imprisonment at Olmutz?'

'His health,' said Madame de Beaumont, 'was good, but the miseries of his country and the sufferings of his wife made him very unhappy. When my grandmother came to him, it was two days before she had strength to tell him that all his and her family had perished. I was once at Olmutz, and saw the one room which they had inhabited. It was damp and dark. She asked to be allowed to leave it for a time for better medical treatment and change of air. It was granted only on the condition that she should never return. She refused. The rheumatic attacks which the state of the prison had produced, continued and increased: she was hopelessly ill when they were released--and died soon afterwards. The sense of wrong aggravated their sufferings, for their imprisonment was a gross and wanton violation of all law, international and munic.i.p.al. My grandfather was not an Austrian subject; he had committed no offence against Austria.

She seized him simply because he was a liberal, because his principles had made him the enemy of tyranny in America and in France; and because his birth and talents and reputation gave him influence. It was one of the brutal stupid acts of individual cruelty which characterise the Austrian despotism, and have done more to ruin it than a wider oppression--such a one, for instance, as ours, more mischievous, but more intelligent,--would have done.'

'Freedom,' said Ampere, 'was offered to him on the mere condition of his not serving in the French army. At that time the Jacobins would have guillotined him, the Royalists would have forced duel after duel on him till they had killed him. It seemed impossible that he should ever be able to draw his sword for France. In fact he never _was_ able. America offered him an asylum, honours, land, everything that could console an exile. But he refused to give up the chance, remote as it was, of being useful to his country, and remained a prisoner till he was delivered by Napoleon.'

'He firmly believed,' said Madame de Beaumont, 'that if the Royal Family would have taken refuge with his army in 1791 he could have saved them, and probably the Monarchy. His army was then in his hands, a few months after the Jacobins had corrupted it.'

'Two men,' said Ampere, 'Mirabeau and La Fayette, could have saved the Monarchy, and were anxious to do so. But neither the King nor the Queen would trust them.

'Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette are among the historical personages who have most influenced the destinies of the world. His dulness, torpidity and indecision, and her frivolity, narrow-minded prejudices and suspiciousness, are among the causes of our present calamities. They are among the causes of a state of things which has inflicted on us, and threatens to inflict on all Europe, the worst of all Governments--democratic despotism. A Government in which two wills only prevail--that of the ignorant, envious, ambitious, aggressive mult.i.tude, and that of the despot who, whatever be his natural disposition, is soon turned, by the intoxication of flattery and of universal power, into a capricious, fantastic, selfish partic.i.p.ator in the worst pa.s.sions of the worst portion of his subjects.'

'Such a Government,' I said, 'may be called an anti-aristocracy. It excludes from power all those who are fit to exercise it.'

'The consequence,' said Beaumont, 'is, that the qualities which fit men for power not being demanded, are not supplied. Our young men have no political knowledge or public spirit. Those who have a taste for the sciences cultivated in the military schools enter the army. The rest learn nothing.'

'What do they do?' I asked.

'How they pa.s.s their time,' said Madame de Beaumont, 'is a puzzle to me.

They do not read, they do not go into society--I believe that they smoke and play at dominos, and ride and bet at steeple-chases.

'Those who are on home service in the army are not much better. The time not spent in the routine of their profession is sluggishly and viciously wasted. Algeria has been a G.o.d-send to us. There our young men have real duties to perform, and real dangers to provide against and to encounter.

My son, who left St. Cyr only eighteen months ago, is stationed at Thebessa, 300 miles in the interior. He belongs to a _bureau arabe_, consisting of a captain, a lieutenant, and himself, and about forty spahis. He has to act as a judge, as an engineer, to settle the frontier between the province of Constantine and Tunis--in short, to be one of a small ruling aristocracy. This is the school which has furnished, and is furnishing, our best generals and administrators.'

We talked of the interior of French families.

'The ties of relationship,' I said, 'seem to be stronger with you than they are with us. Cousinship with you is a strong bond, with us it is a weak one.'

'The habit of living together,' said Beaumont, 'has perhaps much to do with the strength of our feelings of consanguinity. Our life is patriarchal. Grandfather, father, and grandson are often under the same roof. At the Grange[3] thirty of the family were sometimes a.s.sembled at dinner. With you, the sons go off, form separate establishments, see little of their parents, still less of their cousins, and become comparatively indifferent to them.'

'I remember,' I said, 'the case of an heir apparent of seventy; his father was ninety-five. One day the young man was very grumpy. They tried to find out what was the matter with him; at last he broke out, "Everybody's father dies except mine."'

'An acquaintance of mine,' said Beaumont, 'not a son, but a son-in-law, complained equally of the pertinacious longevity of his father-in-law.

"Je n'ai pas cru," he said, "en me mariant, que j'epousais la fille du Pere eternel." Your primogeniture,' he continued, 'must be a great source of unfilial feelings. The eldest son of one of your great families is in the position of the heir apparent to a throne. His father's death is to give him suddenly rank, power, and wealth; and we know that royal heirs apparent are seldom affectionate sons. With us the fortunes are much smaller, they are equally divided, and the rank that descends to the son is nothing.'

'What regulates,' I asked, 'the descent of t.i.tles?'

'It is ill regulated,' said Beaumont 't.i.tles are now of such little value that scarcely anyone troubles himself to lay down rules about them.

'In general, however, it is said, that all the sons of dukes and of marquises are counts. The sons of counts in some families all take the t.i.tle of Count. There are, perhaps, thirty Beaumonts. Some call themselves marquises, some counts, some barons. I am, I believe, the only one of the family who has a.s.sumed no t.i.tle. Alexis de Tocqueville took none, but his elder brother, during his father's life, called himself vicomte and his younger brother baron. Probably Alexis ought then to have called himself chevalier, and, on his father's death, baron. But, I repeat, the matter is too unimportant to be subject to any settled rules.

Ancient descent is, with us, of great value, of far more than it is with you, but t.i.tles are worth nothing.'

[Footnote 1: This incident is described in a little book published last year, the _Memoirs of Madame de Montaign_.--ED.]

[Footnote 2: M. de La Fayette was Madame de Beaumont's grandfather.--ED.]

[Footnote 3: The chateau of M. de La Fayette.--ED.]

_Sat.u.r.day, August_ 17.--We drove to the coast and ascended the lighthouse of Gatteville, 85 metres, or about 280 feet high. It stands in the middle of a coast fringed with frightful reefs, just enough under water to create no breakers, and a flat plain a couple of miles wide behind, so that the coast is not seen till you come close to it. In spite of many lighthouses and buoys, wrecks are frequent. A mysterious one occurred last February: the lighthouse watchman showed us the spot--a reef just below the lighthouse about two hundred yards from the sh.o.r.e.

It was at noon--there was a heavy sea, but not a gale. He saw a large ship steer full on the reef. She struck, fell over on one side till her yards were in the water, righted herself, fell over on the other, parted in the middle, and broke up. It did not take five minutes, but during those five minutes there was the appearance of a violent struggle on board, and several shots were fired. From the papers which were washed ash.o.r.e it appeared that she was from New York, bound for Havre, with a large cargo and eighty-seven pa.s.sengers, princ.i.p.ally returning emigrants.

No pa.s.senger escaped, and only two of the crew: one was an Italian speaking no French, from whom they could get nothing; the other was an Englishman from Cardiff, speaking French, but almost obstinately uncommunicative. He said that he was below when the ship struck, that the captain had locked the pa.s.sengers in the cabin, and that he knew nothing of the causes which had led the ship to go out of her course to run on this rock.

The captain may have been drunk or mad. Or there may have been a mutiny on board, and those who got possession of the ship may have driven her on the coast, supposing that they could beach her, and ignorant of the interposed reefs, which, as I have said, are not betrayed by breakers.

Our informant accounted for the loss of all, except two persons, by the heavy sea, the sharp reefs, and the blows received by those who tried to swim from the floating cargo. The two who escaped were much bruised.

A man and woman were found tied to one another and tied to a spar. They seemed to have been killed by blows received from the rocks or from the floating wreck.

In the evening Ampere read to us the 'Bourgeois Gentilhomme.' His reading is equal to any acting. It kept us all, for the first two acts, which are the most comic, in one constant roar of laughter.

'The modern _nouveau riche,_ said Beaumont, 'has little resemblance to M.