Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859 Part 28

Jourdain. He talks of his horses and his carriages, builds a great hotel, and buys pictures. I have a neighbour of this kind; he drives four-in-hand over the bad roads of La Sarthe, visits with one carriage one day, and another the next. His jockey stands behind his cabriolet in top-boots, and his coachman wears a grand fur coat in summer. His own clothes are always new, sometimes in the most accurate type of a groom, sometimes in that of a dandy. His talk is of steeple-chases.'

'And does he get on?' I asked.

'Not in the least,' answered Beaumont. 'In England a _nouveau riche_ can get into Parliament, or help somebody else to get in, and political power levels all distinctions. Here, wealth gives no power: nothing, indeed, but office gives power. The only great men in the provinces are the _prefet_, the _sous-prefet_, and the _maire_. The only great man in Paris is a minister or a general. Wealth, therefore, unless accompanied by the social talents, which those who have made their fortunes have seldom had the leisure or the opportunity to acquire, leads to nothing. The women, too, of the _parvenus_ always drag them down. They seem to acquire the _tournure_ of society less easily than the men. Bastide, when Minister, did pretty well, but his wife used to sign her invitations "Femme Bastide."

'Society,' he continued, 'under the Republic was animated. We had great interests to discuss, and strong feelings to express, but perhaps the excitement was too great. People seemed to be almost ashamed to amuse or to be amused when the welfare of France, her glory or her degradation, her freedom or her slavery, were, as the event has proved, at stake.'

'I suppose,' I said to Ampere, 'that nothing has ever been better than the _salon_ of Madame Recamier?'

'We must distinguish,' said Ampere. 'As great painters have many manners, so Madame Recamier had many _salons_. When I first knew her, in 1820, her habitual dinner-party consisted of her father, her husband, Ballanche, and myself. Both her father, M. Bernard, and her husband were agreeable men. Ballanche was charming.'

'You believe,' I said, 'that Bernard was her father?' 'Certainly I do,'

he replied. 'The suspicion that Recamier might be was founded chiefly on the strangeness of their conjugal relations. To this, I oppose her apparent love for M. Bernard, and I explain Recamier's conduct by his tastes. They were coa.r.s.e, though he was a man of good manners. He never spent his evenings at home. He went where he could find more license.

'Perhaps the most agreeable period was at that time of Chateaubriand's reign when he had ceased to exact a _tete-a-tete_, and Ballanche and I were admitted at four o'clock. The most ill.u.s.trious of the _partie carree_ was Chateaubriand, the most amusing Ballanche. My merit was that I was the youngest. Later in the evening Madame Mohl, Miss Clarke as she then was, was a great resource. She is a charming mixture of French vivacity and English originality, but I think that the French element predominates. Chateaubriand, always subject to _ennui_, delighted in her.

He has adopted in his books some of the words which she coined. Her French is as original as the character of her mind, very good, but more of the last than of the present century.'

'Was Chateaubriand himself,' I said, 'agreeable?'

'Delightful,' said Ampere; 'tres-entrain, tres-facile a vivre, beaucoup d'imagination et de connaissances.'

'Facile a vivre?' I said. 'I thought that his vanity had been _difficile et exigeante?_'

'As a public man,' said Ampere, 'yes; and to a certain degree in general society. But in intimate society, when he was no longer "posing," he was charming. The charm, however, was rather intellectual than moral.

'I remember his reading to us a part of his memoirs, in which he describes his early attachment to an English girl, his separation from her, and their meeting many years after when she asked his protection for her son. Miss Clarke was absorbed by the story. She wanted to know what became of the young man, what Chateaubriand had been able to do for him.

Chateaubriand could answer only in generals: that he had done all that he could, that he had spoken to the Minister, and that he had no doubt that the young man got what he wanted. But it was evident that even if he had really attempted to do anything for the son of his old love, he had totally forgotten the result. I do not think that he was pleased at Miss Clarke's attention and sympathy being diverted from himself. Later still in Madame Recamier's life, when she had become blind, and Chateaubriand deaf, and Ballanche very infirm, the evenings were sad. I had to try to amuse persons who had become almost unamusable.'

'How did Madame de Chateaubriand,' I asked, 'take the devotion of her husband to Madame Recamier?'

'Philosophically,' answered Ampere. 'He would not have spent with her the hours that he pa.s.sed at the Abbaye au bois. She was glad, probably, to know that they were not more dangerously employed.'

'Could I read Chateaubriand?' I asked.

'I doubt it,' said Ampere. 'His taste is not English.'

'I _have_ read,' I said, 'and liked, his narrative of the manner in which he forced on the Spanish war of 1822. I thought it well written.'

'It is, perhaps,' said Ampere, 'the best thing which he has written, as the intervention to restore Ferdinand, which he effected in spite of almost everybody, was perhaps the most important pa.s.sage in his political life.

'There is something revolting in an interference to crush the liberties of a foreign nation. But the expedition tended to maintain the Bourbons on the French throne, and, according to Chateaubriand's ideas, it was more important to support the principle of legitimacy than that of liberty. He expected, too, sillily enough, that Ferdinand would give a Const.i.tution. It is certain, that, bad as the effects of that expedition were, Chateaubriand was always proud of it.'

'What has Ballanche written?' I asked.

'A dozen volumes,' he answered. 'Poetry, metaphysics, on all sorts of subjects, with pages of remarkable vigour and _finesse_, containing some of the best writing in the language, but too unequal and too desultory to be worth going through.'

'How wonderfully extensive,' I said, 'is French literature! Here is a voluminous author, some of whose writings, you say, are among the best in the French language, yet his name, at least as an author, is scarcely known. He shines only by reflected light, and will live only because he attached himself to a remarkable man and to a remarkable woman.'

'French literature,' said Ampere, 'is extensive, but yet inferior to yours. If I were forced to select a single literature and to read nothing else, I would take the English. In one of the most important departments, the only one which cannot be re-produced by translation--poetry--you beat us hollow. We are great only in the drama, and even there you are perhaps our superiors. We have no short poems comparable to the "Allegro"

or to the "Penseroso," or to the "Country Churchyard."'

'Tocqueville,' I said, 'told me that he did not think that he could now read Lamartine.'

'Tocqueville,' said Ampere, 'could taste, like every man of genius, the very finest poetry, but he was not a lover of poetry. He could not read a hundred bad lines and think himself repaid by finding mixed with them ten good ones.'

'Ingres,' said Beaumont, 'perhaps our greatest living painter, is one of the clever cultivated men who do not read. Somebody put the "Misanthrope"

into his hands, "It is wonderfully clever," he said, when he returned it; "how odd it is that it should be so totally unknown."'

'Let us read it to-night,' I said.

'By all means,' said Madame de Tocqueville; 'though we know it by heart it will be new when read by M. Ampere.' Accordingly Ampere read it to us after dinner.

'The tradition of the stage,' he said, 'is that Celimene was Moliere's wife.'

'She is made too young,' said Minnie. 'A girl of twenty has not her wit, or her knowledge of the world.'

'The change of a word,' said Ampere, 'in two or three places would alter that. The feeblest characters are as usual the good ones. Philinte and Eliante.

'Alceste is a grand mixture, perhaps the only one on the French stage, of the comic and the tragic; for in many of the scenes he rises far above comedy. His love is real impetuous pa.s.sion. Talma delighted in playing him.'

'The desert,' I said, 'into which he retires, was, I suppose, a distant country-house. Just such a place as Tocqueville.'

'As Tocqueville,' said Beaumont, 'fifty years ago, without roads, ten days' journey from Paris, and depending for society on Valognes.'

'As Tocqueville,' said Madame de Tocqueville, 'when my mother-in-law first married. She spent in it a month and could never be induced to see it again.'

'Whom,' I asked, 'did Celimene marry?'

'Of course,' said Ampere, 'Alceste. Probably five years afterwards. By that time he must have got tired of his desert and she of her coquetry.'

'We know,' I said, 'that Moliere was always in love with his wife, notwithstanding her _legerete_. What makes me think the tradition that Celimene was Mademoiselle[1] Moliere true, is that Moliere was certainly in love with Celimene. She is made as engaging as possible, and her worst faults do not rise above foibles. Her satire is good-natured. Arsinoe is her foil, introduced to show what real evil-speaking is.'

'All the women,' said Ampere, 'are in love with Alceste, and they care about no one else. Celimene's satire of the others is scarcely good-natured. It is clear, at least, that they did not think so.'

'If Celimene,' said Minnie, 'became Madame Alceste, he probably made her life a burthen with his jealousy.'

'Of course he was jealous,' said Madame de Beaumont, 'for he was violently in love. There can scarcely be violent love without jealousy.'

'At least,' said Madame de Tocqueville, 'till people are married.

'If a lover is cool enough to be without jealousy, he ought to pretend it.'

[Footnote 1: Under the _ancien regime_ even the married actresses were called Mademoiselle.--ED.]

_Sunday, August_ 18.--After breakfast when the ladies were gone to church, I talked over with Ampere and Beaumont Tocqueville's political career.

'Why,' I asked, 'did he refuse the support of M. Mole in 1835? Why would he never take office under Louis Philippe? Why did he a.s.sociate himself with the Gauche whom he despised, and oppose the Droit with whom he sympathised? Is the answer given by M. Guizot to a friend of mine who asked a nearly similar question, "Parce qu'il voulait etre ou je suis,"