BOOK VI

[427]

In London as Ambassador--I cross the ocean--François Tulloch--Christopher Columbus--Camoëns--The Azores--The isle of Graciosa--Sports on board ship--The isle of Saint-Pierre--The shores of Virginia--Sunset--Danger and escape--I land in America--Baltimore--The passengers separate--Tulloch--Philadelphia--General Washington--Comparison of Washington and Bonaparte--Journey from Philadelphia to New York and Boston--Mackenzie--The Hudson River--Song of the lady passenger--Mr. Swift--I set out for the Falls of Niagara with a Dutch guide--M. Violet--My savage outfit--Hunting--Wolverine and Canadian Fox--Musk-rat--Fishing dogs--Insects--Montcalm and Wolfe--Encampment on the shore of the Onondaga Lake--Arabs--The Indian woman and her cow--An Iroquois--The Onondaga chief--Velly and the Franks--Ceremonies of hospitality--The ancient Greeks--Journey from the Onondaga Lake to the Genesee River--Clearings--Hospitality--My bed--The enchanted rattle-snake--Niagara Falls--The rattle-snake--I fall to the edge of the abyss--Twelve days in a hut--Change of manners among the savages--Birth and death--Montaigne-Song of the adder--The little Indian girl, the original of Mila--Incidents--Old Canada--True civilisation spread by religion--False civilisation introduced by commerce--Traders--Agents--Hunts--Half-breeds or Burnt-woods--Wars of the companies--The Indian languages dying out--The old French possessions in America--Regrets--A note from Lord François Conyngham--The Canadian lakes--A fleet of Indian canoes--The American rivers--Legends--Muscogulges and Siminoles--Our camp--Two Floridan beauties--Ruins on the Ohio--What the Muscogulge damsels were--Arrest of the King at Varennes--I interrupt my journey to go back to Europe--Dangers for the United States--Return to Europe--Shipwreck.

One-and-thirty years after embarking, as a simple sub-lieutenant, for America, I embarked for London with a passport conceived in these terms:

"Pass His Lordship the Vicomte de Chateaubriand, Peer of France, Ambassador of the King to His Britannic Majesty," and so on.

No description: my greatness was such as to make my face known wherever I went. A steamboat chartered for my sole use conveyed me from Calais to Dover. On setting foot upon English soil, on the 5th of April 1822[428], I was saluted by the guns of the fort. An officer came on behalf of the commandant to offer me a guard of honour. On alighting at the Shipwright Inn[429], the landlord and waiters received me with hanging arms and bareheaded. The Mayoress invited me to an evening party in the name of the fairest ladies of the town. M. Billing[430], who was attached to my embassy, awaited me. A dinner of huge fishes and enormous pieces of beef restored Monsieur l'Ambassadeur, who had no appetite and was not at all fatigued. The crowd gathered beneath my windows rent the air with hurrahs. The officer returned and, despite my wishes, posted sentries at my door. The next morning, after lavishly distributing the money of the King my master, I set out for London, to the roar of artillery, in a light carriage drawn by four fine horses driven at full trot by two smart postillions. My staff followed in other coaches; couriers wearing my livery accompanied the cavalcade. We passed through Canterbury, attracting the eyes of John Bull and of the occupants of the vehicles we passed. At Blackheath, a common formerly haunted by highwaymen, I found a newly-built village. Soon there loomed before me the immense cap of smoke which covers the city of London.

[Sidenote: In London as Ambassador.]

Plunging into the gulf of black mist, as though into one of the jaws of Tartarus, and crossing the entire town, whose streets I recognized, I reached the Embassy in Portland Place. The _chargé d'affaires_, M. le Comte Georges de Caraman[431], the secretaries of embassy, M. le Vicomte de Marcellus[432], M. le Baron E. de Cazes, M. de Bourqueney[433], and the _attachés_ of the embassy received me with dignified politeness. All the ushers, doorkeepers, footmen, and flunkeys of the house stood gathered upon the pavement. I was handed the cards of the English ministers and of the foreign ambassadors, who had been informed beforehand of my coming.

On the 17th of May in the year of grace 1793, I disembarked at Southampton for London, an obscure and humble traveller from Jersey. No mayoress took note of my passage; the mayor of the town, William Smith, handed me on the 18th a way-bill for London to which was added an extract from the Alien Bill. My description ran in English:

"François de Chateaubriand, French officer in the emigrant army, five feet four inches high, thin shape, brown hair and whiskers."

I modestly shared the cheapest conveyance with some sailors on leave; I changed horses at the meanest inns; poor, sick, and unknown, I entered a wealthy and famous city in which Mr. Pitt held sway; I took a lodging at six shillings a month under the laths of a garret which a cousin from Brittany had prepared for me at the end of a little street off the Tottenham Court Road.

Ah! _Monseigneur_, que votre vie, D'honneurs aujourd'hui si remplie, Diffère de ces heureux temps[434].

Still an obscurity of another kind envelopes me in London. My political position casts into shade my literary fame: not a fool in the three kingdoms but prefers the ambassador of Louis XVIII. to the author of the _Génie du Christianisme_. I shall see how the matter turns after my death, or when I shall have ceased to fill M. le Duc Decazes'[435] place at the Court of George IV.[436], a succession as incongruous as the rest of my life.

Now that I have arrived in London as French Ambassador, one of my chief pleasures is to leave my carriage at the corner of some square, and on foot to traverse the back-streets which I frequented in former days, the cheap popular suburbs, where misfortune takes refuge under the protection of a kindred suffering, the nameless shelters which I haunted with my companions in distress, not knowing whether I should have bread to eat on the morrow, I whose table today is covered with three or four courses. At all those narrow and necessitous doors which were once open to me, I see none but strange faces. I no longer meet my fellow-countrymen roaming, recognizable by their gestures, their gait, the shape and age of their clothes. I no longer perceive those martyred priests, wearing the clerical collar, the big three-cornered hat, the long, black, threadbare frock, whom the English used to salute as they passed. Wide streets, lined with palaces, have been cut, bridges built, walks planted with trees: Regent's Park, near Portland Place, occupies the space of the old meadows filled with herds of cows. A cemetery which formed the prospect from the dormer-window of one of my attics has disappeared within the circumference of a factory. When I call upon Lord Liverpool[437], I find it difficult to pick out the spot where stood the scaffold of Charles I.; new buildings, closing in upon the statue of Charles II.[438], have come forward, with forgetfulness, to cover up memorable events.

[Sidenote: And as an emigrant.]

How much do I regret, in the midst of my insipid grandeur, that world of tribulations and tears, those times in which I mingled my sorrows with those of a colony of unfortunates! It is true, then, that all changes, that misfortune itself comes to an end, like prosperity! What has become of my brothers in emigration? Some are dead, others have undergone various destinies: they have, like me, beheld the loss of their kinsmen and friends; they are less happy in the land of their birth than they were on foreign soil. Had we not on that soil our meetings, our amusements, our merry-makings, and, above all, our youth? Mothers of families and young girls commencing life in adversity brought the weekly fruit of their toil, to revel in some dance of their country. Attachments were formed in the course of the evening chit-chat after work, on the grass at Hampstead or Primrose Hill. In chapels adorned with our own hands, in old tumble-down buildings, we prayed on the 21st of January and on the anniversary of the Queen's death[439], and were much moved by a funeral oration pronounced by the emigrant curate of our village. We strolled beside the Thames, now to see the vessels laden with the world's riches entering dock, and again to admire the country-houses at Richmond, we so poor, we who had lost the shelter of the paternal roof-tree: all these things constitute true happiness!

When I come home in 1822, instead of being received by my friend, shivering with cold, who opens the door of our garret to me, calls me "thee" and "thou," sleeps on a pallet beside mine, covering himself with his thin coat and having the moonlight for a lamp, I pass by the light of candles between two rows of lackeys, ending in half-a-dozen respectful secretaries. Overwhelmed along my road with the words, "Monseigneur, my Lord, your Excellency, _Monsieur l'Ambassadeur_," I come to a drawing-room upholstered in silk and gold.

"I beg you, gentlemen, to leave me! A truce to these my lords! What use do you think I have for you? Go and laugh in the chancelleries as though I were not here. Do you imagine you will make me take this masquerade seriously? Do you think me fool enough to believe that I have changed my nature by changing my coat? The Marquess of Londonderry is coming, you say[440]; the Duke of Wellington[441] has asked for me; Mr. Canning[442] is looking for me; Lady Jersey[443] expects me to dinner, to meet Mr. Brougham[444]; Lady Gwydyr[445] hopes to see me at ten o'clock in her box at the Opera; Lady Mansfield[446] at midnight at Almack's[447]?"

Mercy! Where can I hide? Who will deliver me? Who will save me from this persecution? Return to me, fair days of misery and loneliness! Come back to life, companions of my exile! Come, old comrades of the pallet and the camp-bed, let us go into the country, into the little garden of some despised tavern, and drink a cup of bad tea on a wooden bench, while we talk of our mad hopes and our ungrateful country, discuss our troubles, and seek means to assist each other or to succour one of our kinsmen in yet worse plight than ourselves!

[Sidenote: Kensington Gardens.]

That is how I feel, that is how I speak to myself in these first days of my embassy in London. I escape from the melancholy which besets me beneath my roof only by saturating myself with a less weighty melancholy in Kensington Gardens. These gardens, at least, have not changed; the trees alone have grown taller; in them, ever solitary, the birds build their nests in peace. It is no longer even the fashion to meet there, as in the days when the loveliest of Frenchwomen, Madame Récamier[448], used to walk there followed by the crowd. From the edge of the deserted lawns of Kensington, I love to watch, across Hyde Park, the crowd of horses, the carriages of the fashionable world, among which figures my empty tilbury; while I, once more a poor little emigrant noble, walk along the path in which the exiled confessor was wont to say his breviary.

It was in Kensington Gardens that I projected the _Essai historique_; that, on reading over the diary of my travels beyond sea, I drew from it the loves of _Atala_; it was there too, after wandering far away in the fields beneath a lowering sky, which assumed a golden hue and became, as it were pervaded with polar light, that I jotted down in pencil the first sketch of the passions of _René._ At night I deposited in the _Essai historique_ and the _Natchez_ the harvest of my dreams of the day. The two manuscripts marched abreast, although I often wanted money to buy paper for them, and was obliged, for lack of thread, to fasten the sheets together with splinters torn from the mantel-boards of my garret.

These spots where I received my first inspirations impress me with a sense of their power; they reflect upon my present the gentle light of my recollections; I feel in the mood to resume my pen. So many hours are wasted in embassies! I have as much spare time here as in Berlin to continue my Memoirs, the edifice which I am building up out of ruins and dead bones. My secretaries in London ask leave to go to picnics in the morning, to balls at night: by all means! The men in their turn, Peter, Valentine, Lewis, go to the ale-house, and the maids, Rose, Peggy, Mary, for a walk through the streets: I am delighted. They leave me the key of the hall-door: _monsieur l'ambassadeur_ is left in charge of his own house; if any one knocks, he will open the door. Everybody has gone out; I am alone: let us get to work.

Twenty-two years ago, as I said, I was sketching, in London, the outlines of the _Natchez_ and of _Atala_; I have now, in my Memoirs, come to just the period of my travels in America: that fits in perfectly. Let us wipe out those two-and-twenty years, as they are, in fact, wiped out from my life, and start for the forests of the New World: the story of my embassy shall come at its own date when God pleases; but provided I remain here a few months, I shall have the pleasure of coming from the Falls of Niagara to the army of the Princes in Germany, and from the army of the Princes to my retirement in England. The Ambassador of the King of France will be able to tell the story of the French Emigrant in the very spot where the latter spent his exile.

*

The last book ended with my embarkation at Saint-Malo. Soon we left the Channel, and the immense swell from the west told us that we had reached the Atlantic.

It is difficult for people who have never been to sea to imagine the feelings which one experiences when looking over the side of a ship and seeing nothing but the grave face of the deep on every hand. The dangerous life of the sailor has about it an independence which comes from the absence of land: the passions of mankind are left behind on shore; between the world which one is quitting and that for which one is making, one has no love and no country save the element upon which one is borne. No more duties to fulfill, no more visits to pay, no more newspapers, no more politics. The very language of the sailors is not the ordinary language: it is the language spoken by the ocean and the sky, the calm and the tempest. You inhabit a watery universe among creatures whose garments, tastes, manners, and faces are different from those of the auto-chthonic peoples; they combine the rudeness of the sea-wolf with the lightness of the bird. The cares of society are not seen upon their brow; the wrinkles which cross it resemble the folds of the lowered sail and are hollowed out less by age than by the north wind, as in the waves. The skin of these creatures, impregnated with salt, is red and hard, like the surface of the surge-swept rock.

[Sidenote: Nautical talk.]

The sailors become enamoured of their ship; they weep with regret on leaving her, with affection on rejoining her. They are unable to stay at home with their families; after swearing a hundred times that they will not again expose themselves to the sea, they find it impossible to live without it, like a youth who is unable to tear himself from the arms of a moody and faithless mistress.

In the docks of London and Plymouth, it is not unusual to find sailors born on board ship: from their childhood to their old age they have never set foot on shore; spectators of the world which they have never entered, they have seen the land only from the side of their floating cradle. In this life reduced to so small a space, beneath the clouds and upon the depths, all things become life-like to the mariner: an anchor, a sail, a mast, a gun are persons that excite his attachment and that have each their history.

The sail was torn off the coast of Labrador; the master sail-maker put in that patch which you see there.

The anchor saved the ship when she had dragged her other anchors among the coral-reefs of the Sandwich Islands.

The mast was broken in a squall off the Cape of Good Hope; it was all in one piece; it is much stronger since it has consisted of two pieces.

The gun is the only one which was not dismounted in the fight of the _Chesapeake._

The news on board is most interesting: they have just heaved the log; the ship is making ten knots.

The sky is clear at mid-day: they have taken the altitude; we are at latitude so-and-so.

We have taken our reckoning: we have made so many miles in our course.

The variation of the compass is so many degrees: we have gone up north.

The sand is running badly through the hour-glass: we shall have rain.

They have seen stormy petrels in the wake of the vessel: we must look out for a squall.

Flying-fish have been showing in the south: the weather will settle down.

A clear spot has formed in the clouds in the west: that's a sign of wind; the wind will blow from that side tomorrow.

The water has changed colour; pieces of wood and wrack have been seen floating by; there were ducks and gulls in sight; a small bird came and perched on the yards: we must heave to sea, for we are approaching land, and it is not good to come alongside at night.

In the hen-coop is a favourite and, so to speak, sacred cock, which has survived all the others; he is famous for having crowed during a fight, as though he were in a farm-yard in the midst of his hens. Below decks lives a cat: a greenish tabby, with a hairless tail and bushy whiskers, firm on his paws, able to bring a back-balance and side-balance to play against the pitching and the rolling of the ship; he has been twice round the world and has saved himself from shipwreck by climbing on a barrel. The ship-boys give the cock biscuits soaked in wine, and Tom has the privilege of sleeping, when he pleases, in the second mate's fur-coat.

The old sailor is like the old plough-man. True, their manner of harvesting is different: the sailor has led a wandering life, the plough-man has never left his fields; but they both know the stars and foretell the future while ploughing their furrows. Both have their prophets: one, the lark, the redbreast, the nightingale; the other, the petrel, the curlew, the halcyon. They retire to rest at night, one in his cabin, the other in his hut: frail dwelling-houses in which the hurricane which shakes them does not disturb peaceful consciences.

If the wind a tempest's blowing, Still no danger they descry; The guiltless heart, its boon bestowing, Soothes them with its lullaby.

The sailor does not know where Death will overtake him, upon what shore he will leave his life: perhaps, when he has mingled his last breath with the wind, he will be cast into the bosom of the waves, fastened to two oars, to continue his voyage; perhaps he will be buried on a desert island, which none shall ever see again, and sleep as he slept in mid-ocean, in his lonely hammock.

The vessel is a sight in herself: sensible to the smallest movement of the helm, winged horse or hippogriff that she is, she obeys the hand of the pilot as a horse does that of its rider. The grace of the masts and rigging, the nimbleness of the sailors laying out on the yards, the various aspects under which the ship displays herself, whether listing, borne down by a contrary blast, or scudding before a favourable wind, cause this intelligent machine to become one of the marvels of human genius. At one time the swell and its foam break and burst against the keel; at another the peaceful waves separate submissively before the stem. The flags, the pennants, the sails complete the beauty of this palace of Neptune: the courses, spread in their width, swell out like huge cylinders; the topsails, confined at their waist, resemble a siren's breasts. Driven by a stiff breeze, the ship noisily ploughs the seas with her keel as with a plough-share.

[Sidenote: Life at sea.]

On this ocean highway, along which one sees no trees, nor villages, nor towns, nor towers, nor steeples nor tombstones; on this road without posts or milestones, which has no boundaries save the waves, no relays save the winds, no lights save the stars, the finest adventure, when one is not travelling in search of unknown lands and seas, is the meeting of two vessels. They are mutually discovered on the horizon through the spy-glass; they turn each in the direction of the other. The crew and the passengers hasten on deck. The two ships approach each other, hoist their ensigns, clew up some of their sails, heave-to. When all is silence, the two captains take their stand upon the quarter-deck and hail each other through the speaking-trumpet:

"The ship's name? From what port? Name of the captain? Where is he from? How many days out? What is the latitude and longitude? Good-bye, let go!"

They let go the reefs; the sails fall down again. The sailors and passengers of the two ships watch each other flee from sight, without a word: one crew goes to seek the sun of Asia, the other the sun of Europe, both of which will see them die. Time carries off and separates travellers on earth even more rapidly than the wind carries them off and separates them on the ocean; they make a sign to each other at a distance:

"God speed you, and a prosperous journey!"

The common port is Eternity.

And what if the vessel encountered were that of Cook[449] or La Pérouse?

*

The boatswain of my Saint-Malo ship was an old super-cargo called Pierre Villeneuve, whose very name pleased me, because of the good Villeneuve of my childhood. He had served in India, under the Bailli de Suffren, and in America under the Comte d'Estaing; he had been present at a number of engagements. Leaning against the bow of the ship, near the bowsprit, like a veteran seated under the vine-arbour of his little garden in the moat of the Invalides, Pierre, chewing a plug of tobacco which filled out his cheek like a swelling, described to me the clearing of the decks, the effect of the gun-fire below decks, the damage done by the cannon-balls in ricochetting against the gun-carriages, the guns, the timber-work. I made him talk of the Indians, the negroes, the planters. I asked him how the people were dressed, how the trees were shaped, what was the colour of the earth and sky, the taste of the fruits; whether pine-apples were better than peaches, palm-trees finer than oaks. He explained all this by means of comparisons taken from things I knew: the palm-tree was a large cabbage; the robe worn by a Hindoo was like my grandmother's; the camels were like a humpbacked donkey; all the peoples of the East, and notably the Chinese, were cowards and robbers. Villeneuve came from Brittany, and we never failed to end with praises of the incomparable beauty of our native country.

The bell interrupted our conversations; it struck the watches, the time for dressing, for the roll-call, for meals. In the morning, at a signal, the crew mustered on deck, stripped off their blue shirts, and put on others which were drying in the shrouds. The discarded shirts were forthwith washed in tubs in which this school of seals also soaped their brown faces and tarred paws. At the mid-day and evening meals, the sailors, seated in a circle around the mess-platters, one after the other, regularly and without any attempt at fraud, dipped their tin spoons into the soup which splashed to the roll of the ship. Those who were not hungry sold their ration of biscuit or salt junk to their messmates for a screw of tobacco. The passengers took their meals in the captain's room. In fine weather, a sail was spread over the stern of the vessel, and we dined in sight of a blue sea, flecked here and there with white marks where it had been struck by the breeze.

Wrapped in my cloak, I stretched myself at night upon deck. My eyes contemplated the stars above my head. The inflated sail threw back upon me the coolness of the breeze which rocked me beneath the dome of heaven: half dozing and pushed on by the wind, I was wafted towards new skies and new dreams.

The passengers on board ship afford a different sort of society from that of the crew: they belong to another element; their destinies are of the land. Some travel in search of fortune, others of rest; these are returning home, those leaving it; others cross the seas in order to become acquainted with the manners of nations, to study science and art. People have time to know one another in this wandering hostelry which travels with the traveller, to have many adventures, to breed antipathies, to contract friendships. When those young women come and go, born of mixed English and Indian blood, who add to the beauty of Clarissa the delicacy of Sacontala, then are formed chains which are bound and unbound by the fragrant breezes of Ceylon, sweet and light as themselves.

*

[Sidenote: Francis Tulloch.]

Among my fellow-passengers was an Englishman. François Tulloch[450] had served in the artillery: he was a painter, a musician, a mathematician; he spoke several languages. The Abbé Nagault, Superior of the Sulpicians, had met the Anglican officer and made him a Catholic: he was taking his neophyte to Baltimore.

I became intimate with Tulloch: as I was at that time a profound "Philosopher," I invited him to return to his parents. The spectacle that lay before our eyes transported him with admiration. We used to rise at night, when the deck was given up to the officer of the watch and a few sailors who smoked their pipes in silence: _Tuta aequora silent._[451] The vessel rolled at the will of the slow and silent waves, while gleams of fire ran with a white foam along her sides. Thousands of stars shining in the sombre azure of the celestial dome, a boundless sea, infinity in the sky and on the waves! Never has God confused me with His greatness more than during those nights when I had immensity over my head and immensity beneath my feet.

Westerly winds, interspersed with calms, delayed our progress. On the 4th of May, we had reached only the level of the Azores. On the 6th, at about eight o'clock in the morning, we came in sight of the Isle of the Peak; this volcano long commanded unnavigated seas[452]: a useless beacon by night, an unseen landmark by day.

There is something magical in seeing the land rise from the depths of the sea. Christopher Columbus, surrounded by a mutinous crew, preparing to return to Europe without having attained the object of his voyage, perceives a small light upon a beach which the darkness had hidden from him. The flight of the birds had guided him to America; the gleam from the hut of a savage reveals to him the presence of a new world. Columbus must have experienced the sort of feeling which the Scriptures attribute to the Creator when, having out of nothing brought forth the world, He saw that His work was good: "And God saw that it was good[453]." Columbus created a world. One of the first lives of the Genoese pilot is that which Giustiniani[454], when editing a Hebrew psalter, placed in the form of a "note" at the foot of the psalm, _Cœli enarrant gloriam Dei._[455]

Vasco da Gama must have marvelled no less when, in 1498, he approached the coast of Malabar. Thereupon all things change on the face of the globe: a new revelation of nature is given; the curtain which for thousands of ages has concealed one part of the earth is raised, discovering the birthplace of the sun, the spot whence he issues each morning "as a bridegroom, as a giant[456];" we see in all its nudity the wise and brilliant East, whose mysterious history was intermixed with the journeys of Pythagoras, the conquests of Alexander, the memory of the Crusades, and whose perfumes came to us across the plains of Arabia and the seas of Greece. Europe sent to the East a poet to salute it: the Swan of Tagus made his sad and beautiful voice heard upon the shores of India; Camoëns[457] borrowed their lustre, their fame and their misfortune; he left them only their riches.

When Gonzalo Villo, Camoëns' maternal grandfather, discovered a portion of the Archipelago of the Azores, he ought, had he foreseen the future, to have reserved for himself a concession of six feet of ground to cover the bones of his grandson.

We anchored in a bad roadstead, with a rocky bottom, in five-and-forty fathoms of water. The island of Graciosa, before which we were moored, displayed its hills a little swollen in outline like the ellipses of an Etruscan amphora; they were draped in the green of their cornfields and emitted an agreeable odour of wheat peculiar to the harvests of the Azores. In the midst of these carpets, one saw the dividing lines of the fields, formed of volcanic stones, half black and half white, piled one upon the other. On the summit of a mound stood an abbey, the monument of an old world upon new soil; at the foot of this mound, the red roofs of the town of Santa-Cruz were mirrored in a pebbly creek. The whole island, with its indentations of bays, capes, bights and promontories, reflected its inverted landscape in the sea. For outer girdle it had a belt of rocks jutting from the surface of the waves. In the background of the picture, the cone of the volcano of the Peak, planted upon a cupola of clouds, pierced the perspective of the air beyond Graciosa.

[Sidenote: The isle of Graciosa.]

Tulloch, the second mate and I decided to go on land; the long-boat was lowered and rowed towards the shore, which lay about two miles away. We saw some movement on the beach; a pram put out in our direction. So soon as she had come within speaking distance, we distinguished a number of monks. They hailed us in Portuguese, in Italian, in English, in French, and we replied in all four languages. Alarm prevailed, our vessel was the first ship of large tonnage that had ventured to anchor in the dangerous roadstead where we were going with the tide. On the other hand, the islanders now saw the tricolour flag for the first time; they did not know whether we hailed from Tunis or Algiers: Neptune had not recognized the standard so gloriously borne by Cybele. When they saw that we had human shapes and that we understood what was said to us, their delight was extreme. The monks took us up in their boat, and we rowed merrily towards Santa-Cruz, where we landed with some difficulty because of a rather violent surf.

The whole island came running up. Four or five _alguazils_, armed with rusty pikes, took possession of us. His Majesty's uniform attracted the honours in my direction, and I was taken for the leading member of the deputation. We were led to the Governor's house, or hovel, where His Excellency, dressed in a worn green uniform, which had once been gold-laced, received us in solemn audience: he gave us leave to replenish our stores of provisions.

Our monks took us to their convent, a roomy and well-lighted building, surrounded with balconies. Tulloch had discovered a fellow-countryman: the principal brother, who did all the bustling about for us, was a sailor from Jersey whose ship had gone down with all hands off Graciosa. The solitary survivor of the shipwreck, and not lacking in intelligence, he had become an apt pupil of the catechists; he learnt Portuguese and a few words of Latin; the fact of his being an Englishman militated in his favour, and they converted him and made a monk of him. The Jersey sailor found it much pleasanter to be lodged, boarded, and clothed at the altar than to take in the top-gallant sail in a storm. He had not forgotten his old trade: it was long since he had heard his language spoken, and he was delighted to meet some one who knew it; he laughed and swore like a true pilot's apprentice. He showed us over the island.

The houses in the villages, built of wood and stone, were adorned with outer galleries which gave an air of neatness to these cottages, because of the quantity of light that prevailed. The peasants, almost all vine-dressers, were half-naked and bronzed by the sun; the women, short, yellow as mulattoes, but sprightly, were frank coquettes, with their posies of syringa-blossoms and their beads worn by way of crowns or chains.

The hill-slopes glowed with vine-stocks, the wine from which resembled that of Fayal. Water was scarce, but wherever a spring welled, there grew a fig-tree, there rose an oratory with a frescoed portico. The ogives of the portico framed views of the island and portions of the sea. On one of these fig-trees, I saw a flock of blue teal settle, not of the web-footed variety. The tree had no leaves, but bore red fruit set like crystals. When adorned with the cerulean birds, which let fall their wings, its fruits appeared to be of a brilliant purple, while the tree seemed suddenly to have shot forth an azure foliage.

It is probable that the Azores were known to the Carthaginians; it is certain that Phœnician coins have been dug up in the island of Corvo. The modern navigators who first landed at this island are said to have found an equestrian statue pointing with outstretched arm to the west, provided always that this statue is not the imaginary engraving which adorns the old books of seaports.

In the manuscript of the _Natchez_, I have made Chactas, returning from Europe, land at the island of Corvo, where he comes across the mysterious statue. He thus expresses the feelings which filled my mind at Graciosa, when I recalled the legend:

"I approached that extraordinary monument. On its base, bathed by the foam of the ocean, were carved unknown characters: the moss and the saltpetre of the sea corroded the surface of the time-honoured bronze; the halcyon, perched upon the helmet of the colossus, uttered at intervals its plaintive note; shell-fish clung to the courser's flanks and mane of brass, and one's ear, when approached to its open nostrils, seemed to hear confused murmurs."

*

[Sidenote: Supper with the monks.]

We were served with a good supper by the monks after our excursion, and we spent the night in drinking with our hosts. The next day, at noon, our provisions having been taken on board, we returned to the ship. The monks took charge of our letters for Europe. The vessel had been in danger through the rising of a stiff south-easterly wind. We heaved the anchor; but it was caught in the rocks, and we lost it, as we expected. We set sail: the wind continued to freshen, and we had soon passed the Azores.

Fac pelagus me scire probes, quo carbasa laxo.

"Muse, help me to show that I know the sea over which I spread my sails."

Thus, six hundred years ago, wrote Guillaume-le-Breton[458], my fellow-countryman. Restored to the sea, I began anew the contemplation of my solitude; but across the ideal world of my dreams, stern monitors appeared to me: France and the events of reality. My lurking-place during the day, when I wished to avoid my fellow-passengers, was the main-top, to which I climbed nimbly amid the applause of the sailors. I there sat and commanded the waves.

The vast expanse, doubly hung with azure, had the appearance of a canvas prepared to receive the future creations of a mighty painter. The colour of the water was like that of liquid glass. Long and steep undulations opened within their hollows vistas of the ocean deserts: those wavering landscapes made clear to my eyes the comparison drawn in the Scriptures of the earth reeling before the Lord, like a drunken man[459]. Sometimes one might have pronounced the space narrow and restricted, for want of a vanishing point; but if a wave happened to raise its crest, a billow to curve in imitation of a distant coast, a shoal of dog-fish to pass along the horizon, then one had a scale to measure by. The expanse was revealed still more when a mist, creeping to the ocean's surface, seemed to enlarge the very immensity.

On descending from the eyrie of the mast, as when, in former days, ever reduced to a solitary existence, I climbed down from my nest in the willow-tree, I supped on a ship-biscuit, a little sugar, and a lemon; I then lay down, either wrapped in my cloak on deck, or in my cot below: I had but to stretch my arm to reach from my bed to my coffin.

The wind compelled us to bear to the North, and we came alongside of the bank of Newfoundland. Floating icebergs roamed in the midst of a pale, cold mist.

The men of the trident have sports which are handed down to them from their ancestors: when you cross the Line, you must make up your mind to receive "baptism;" the same ceremony occurs beneath the Tropics, the same ceremony on the bank of Newfoundland, and whatever the spot, the leader of the masquerade is always "the Old Man of the Tropics." To the sailors, tropical and hydropical are interchangeable terms: the Old Man of the Tropics therefore has an enormous paunch; he is dressed, even when beneath his native Tropics, in all the sheepskins and all the furred jackets that the crew can supply. He sits squatting in the main-top and roaring from time to time. Every one looks at him from below: he begins to climb down the shrouds, moving heavily like a bear, and stumbling like Silenus. As he sets foot on deck, he utters fresh roars, gives a bound, seizes a pail, fills it with sea-water, and empties it over the chief of those who have not crossed the Equator or who have not reached the line of ice. You fly beneath the decks, you spring upon the hatches, you clamber up the masts: Old Father Tropics is after you; all this ends in a generous gift of drink-money: games of Amphitrite which Homer would have celebrated, even as he sang Proteus, if old Oceanus had been known in his entirety in the time of Ulysses; but, in those days, only his head was visible at the Pillars of Hercules: his body lay hidden and covered the world.

We steered for the islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, in search of a new port. When we came in sight of the former, one morning between ten and twelve o'clock, we were almost upon it; its coast showed like a black hump through the fog.

We anchored in front of the capital of the island: we could not see it, but we heard the sounds on land. The passengers hastened to disembark; the Superior of Saint-Sulpice, who had been constantly racked with sea-sickness, was so weak that he had to be carried on shore. I took a separate lodging; I waited until a gust of wind tore the mist asunder and showed me the place in which I was living and, so to speak, the faces of my hosts in this land of shadows.

[Sidenote: The Isle of Saint-Pierre.]

The port and roadstead of Saint-Pierre are situated between the east coast of the island and a long-shaped islet called the _Île aux Chiens_, or Isle of Dogs. The port, known as the _Barachois_, or Little Inlet, cuts into the land and ends in a brackish pool. Small, barren mountains crowd together in the centre of the island; some are detached and overhang the coast; others have at their feet a skirt of flat and turfy moorland. The look-out hill is visible from the market-town.

The Governor's house faces the wharf. The church, the vicarage, the provision warehouse are situated at the same spot; next come the houses of the naval commissary and the harbour-master. From there, the one street of the town runs over the shingles along the beach.

I dined two or three times with the Governor, a very polite and obliging officer. On a sloping bank he grew a few European vegetables. After dinner he showed me what he called his garden. A delicate and fragrant odour of heliotrope was exhaled from a small patch of flowering beans; it was not wafted to us by a gentle breeze from home, but by a wild Newfoundland wind, having no connection with the exiled plant, no sympathy of remembrance or delight. In this perfume no longer inhaled by beauty, purified in its breast, or diffused upon its path, in this perfume of a changed dawn, cultivation and world, lurked all the several melancholies of regrets, absence, and youth.

From the garden we mounted towards the hills, and stopped at the foot of the flag-staff of the look-out. The new French flag waved over our heads; like Virgil's women, we looked at the sea, _flentes_: it separated us from our native land! The Governor was uneasy: he belonged to the defeated opinion; he was bored, moreover, in this sequestered spot, which was suited to a visionary like myself, but which was a thankless habitation for a man interested in affairs and not endowed with the all-filling passion which causes the rest of the world to disappear from view. My host inquired after the Revolution; I asked him for news of the North-West Passage. He was in the van of the wilderness, but he knew nothing of the Esquimaux and from Canada received nothing save partridges.

One morning I had gone alone to the _Cap-à-l'Aigle_, or Eagle Head, to see the sun rise in the direction of France. There, a wintry brook formed a cascade which with its last leap reached the sea. I sat down upon a projecting rock, my feet hanging over the water which broke into foam at the bottom of the cliff. A young fisher-girl appeared on the upper slopes of the hill-side; she was bare-legged, in spite of the cold, and walked in the dew. Her black hair was carelessly twisted under the figured silk kerchief bound round her head; over this kerchief she wore a hat made out of the reed-grass of the country and shaped like a cradle or boat. A bunch of purple heather peeped out from her bosom, which was outlined beneath the white material of her shift. From time to time she stooped to gather the leaves of an aromatic plant known in the island as "homegrown tea." With one hand she dropped these leaves into a basket which she carried in the other. She saw me: without being frightened, she came and sat down by me, placed her basket within reach, and began like myself to look at the sun, her legs swinging over the sea.

[Sidenote: The fisher-girl.]

We remained some minutes without speaking; at last I proved myself the bolder, and asked:

"What are you gathering there? The season for bilberries and atocas is over."

She opened two large, dark, shy, but proud eyes, and answered:

"I was picking tea."

She showed me her basket.

"Are you taking the tea home to your father and mother?"

"My father is away fishing with Guillaumy."

"What do you do in the island in the winter?"

"We make nets; we fish in the lakes by breaking the ice; on Sundays we go to Mass and Vespers or we sing hymns; and then we play in the snow and watch the boys hunting the polar bears."

"Will your father be back soon?"

"Oh no: the skipper is taking the ship to Genoa with Guillaumy."

"But Guillaumy will come home again?"

"Oh yes, next season, when the fishermen return. He is going to bring me a striped silk bodice in his stock, a muslin skirt, and a black necklace."

"And you will be decked out for the wind, the mountains, and the sea. Would you like me to send you a bodice, a skirt, and a necklace?"

"Oh no!"

She rose, took up her basket, and ran down a steep path, along a fir-grove. In a loud voice she sang a Mission hymn:

Tout brillant d'une ardeur immortelle, C'est vers Dieu que tendent mes désirs[460].

She scattered to flight, as she went, those pretty birds called egrets, from the tuft on their heads; she looked as though she were one of their number. When she reached the sea, she leapt into a boat, unfurled the sail, and seated herself at the rudder; one might have taken her for Fortune; she sailed away from me.

"Oh yes; oh no; Guillaumy:" the picture of the young sailor seated on a yard among the winds changed the hideous rock of Saint-Pierre into a land of delights:

L'isole di Fortuna, ora vedete[461].

We spent a fortnight in the island. From its desolate shores one discerns the yet more desolate coasts of Newfoundland. The hills in the interior put out diverging chains of which the highest extends towards Rodriguez Creek. In the dales, the granite rock, mixed with red and green mica, is covered with a thick cushion of sphagnum, lichens, and dicranum.

Small lakes are nourished by the tribute brought by the streams from the _Vigie_, or Look-Out; the Courval; the _Pain-de-Sucre_, or Sugarloaf; the Kergariou; the _Tête-Galante_, or Gallant Head. These pools are known by the names of the _Étangs-du-Savoyard_, or Savoyard's Ponds; the _Cap-Noir_, or Black Head; the Ravenel; the _Colombier_, or Dove-cot; the _Cap-à-l'Aigle_, or Eagle Head. When the whirlwinds strike upon these pools, they rend the shallow waters, laying bare, in places, portions of submarine meadows, which are as suddenly covered over by the newly-woven veil of the waters.

The _flora_ of Saint-Pierre is the same as that of Lapland and Magellan's Straits. The number of plants diminishes as one proceeds towards the Pole; in Spitzbergen we find only forty species of phanerogamous plants. In changing their habitation, races of plants become extinct: some which dwell in the frozen steppes in the North become daughters of the mountain in the South; others which thrive in the peaceful atmosphere of the thickest forests decrease in strength and size until at last they expire on the stormy strands of the ocean. At Saint-Pierre, the marsh myrtle (_vaccinium fugilinosum_) is reduced to the condition of creeping grasses; it will soon be buried in the wadding and cushions of the mosses which serve as its soil. Myself a passenger plant, I have taken my precautions to disappear by the sea-shore, the site of my birth.

The slope of the hillocks of Saint-Pierre is laid over with balsam-trees, medlars, dwarf palms, larches, black firs, the gems of which are used for brewing an antiscorbutic beer. These trees do not exceed a man's stature. The ocean wind pollards them, shakes them, bends them like so many ferns; then, gliding beneath these forests of shrubs, it raises them again; but it finds no trunks there, nor branches, nor arches, nor echoes to wail among, and it makes no more noise than on a heath.

These rickety woods form a contrast with the great forests of Newfoundland, whose fir-trees bear a silver lichen (_alectoria trichodes_): the polar bears seem to have torn their fur against the branches of those trees, of which they are the strange creepers. The swamps of Jacques Cartier's[462] island contain roads beaten by these bears: it is as though one saw rustic footpaths in the neighbourhood of a sheep-fold. The whole night reechoes with the cries of these famished beasts; the traveller is comforted only by the no less mournful sound of the sea: those waves, so unsociable and so rude, become friends and companions.

The northernmost point of Newfoundland touches the latitude of Cape Charles I. in Labrador; a few degrees higher, the polar landscape commences. If we are to believe the travellers, a charm lies upon those regions: in the evening the sun, touching the earth, seems to stay motionless, and subsequently reascends the sky instead of sinking beneath the horizon. The snow-clad mountains, the valleys carpeted with white moss upon which the reindeer browse, the seas covered with whales and strewn with ice-bergs, this whole scene glitters, lighted as it were at one time by the gleam of the setting sun and the light of dawn: one knows not whether he is assisting at the creation or the end of the world. A little bird, similar to that which sings in our woods at night, utters a plaintive warbling. Then love leads the Esquimaux to the icy rock where his mate awaits him: those human nuptials at the extreme boundaries of the earth lack neither dignity nor happiness.

*

[Sidenote: We leave Saint-Pierre.]

When we had shipped stores and replaced the anchor which we had lost at Graciosa, we left Saint-Pierre. Sailing south before the wind, we reached the latitude of 38°. The calm delayed us at a short distance from the coasts of Maryland and Virginia. The misty sky of the northerly regions had been succeeded by the clearest weather; the land was not in sight, but the odour of the pine-forests was wafted to our nostrils. The dawn and the early morning, the rising and setting sun, the twilight and the night were alike admirable. I was never satisfied with gazing at Venus, whose rays seemed to envelop me like the tresses of my sylph of former days.

One day I was reading in the captain's room; the bell struck for prayers; I went and mingled my prayers with those of my companions. The officers and passengers filled the quarter-deck; the chaplain, book in hand, stood a little before them, near the helm; the sailors were crowded promiscuously on deck; we stood with our faces turned towards the ship's bows. All sails were furled. The disk of the sun, preparing to plunge into the sea, appeared through the rigging of the vessel in the midst of the boundless space: it was as though, with the rocking of the poop, the radiant luminary at each moment changed its horizon. When I drew this picture, which you can see in its entirety in the _Génie du Christianisme_[463], my religious sentiments were in harmony with the scene; but alas, when I was present at it in person, I had not yet put off the old man: it was not God alone that I contemplated in the waves, in all the magnificence of His works. I beheld an unknown woman and the miracles worked by her smile; the beauties of the heavens seemed to open out at her breath; I would have bartered Eternity for one of her caresses. I pictured her to myself throbbing behind the veil of the universe which hid her from my gaze. Ah, why was it not in my power to tear aside that curtain to press the idealized woman to my heart, to be consumed upon her breast with that love which was the source of my inspirations, of my despair, and of my life! While I abandoned myself to these impulses so well suited to my future career as a _coureur des bois_, an accident occurred which very nearly put an end to my plans and to my dreams.

The heat was overpowering; the vessel, lying in a dead calm, with furled sails and overweighted by the masts, rolled heavily: burning upon deck and wearied by the motion, I longed to bathe, and although we had no boat out, I dived into the sea from the bowsprit. All went well at first, and several passengers followed my example. I swam without looking at the ship; but when I came to turn my head, I saw that the current had dragged her some distance. The sailors, alarmed, had slipped a rope to the other swimmers. Sharks appeared in the ship's waters, and the men fired at them to drive them away. The swell was so heavy that it delayed my return by exhausting my strength. I had an eddy below me, and at any moment the sharks might carry off one of my arms or legs. On board, the boatswain was trying to lower a boat, but it was necessary to fix the tackling, and all this took time.

By the greatest good fortune, an almost imperceptible breeze sprang up; the vessel answered her helm a little and approached me; I was just able to catch hold of the rope, but my companions in rashness were clinging to it; when we were pulled to the ship's side, I was at the extremity of the line, and they bore upon me with all their weight. We were thus fished up one by one, which took long. The rolling continued; at each roll, we were either plunged six or seven feet into the water, or hung up as many feet in the air, like fish at the end of a line: at the last immersion, I felt ready to faint away; one roll more and it would have been over. I was hoisted on deck half dead: had I been drowned, what a good riddance for me and the rest!

Two days after this accident, we came in sight of land. My heart beat fast when the captain pointed it out to me: America! It was barely indicated by the crowns of a few maple-trees standing above the water. The palms at the mouth of the Nile have since indicated the coast of Egypt for me in the same manner. A pilot came on board; we entered Chesapeake Bay. In the evening a boat was sent on shore to fetch fresh provisions.

I joined the party, and soon trod American soil.

Turning my looks around me, I remained for some moments motionless. This continent, perhaps unknown during the whole course of antiquity and a large number of modern centuries; the first wild destinies of that continent and its second destinies after the arrival of Christopher Columbus; the sway of the European monarchies shaken in this new world; the old society ending in young America; a republic of a hitherto unknown character ushering in a change in the human mind; the part which my country had played in these events; those seas and shores owing their independence in part to French blood and the French flag; a great man issuing from the midst of discord and the desert; Washington inhabiting a flourishing city in the same spot where William Penn[464] had bought a patch of forestland; the United States handing on to France the revolution which France had supported with her arms; lastly, my own destinies, the virgin muse which I had come to abandon to the passion of a new revelation of nature; the discoveries which I desired to attempt in the deserts which still extended their broad kingdom behind the narrow empire of a foreign civilization: such were the thoughts that revolved through my mind.

[Sidenote: Chesapeake Bay.]

We walked towards a dwelling-house. Woods of balsam-trees and Virginian cedars, mocking-birds and cardinal-birds proclaimed by their aspect and shade, their song and colour, that we were in a new clime. The house, which we reached in half-an-hour, combined the characteristics of an English farm-house and a West-Indian cabin. Herds of European cattle grazed in pastures surrounded by glades, in which played striped squirrels. Blacks were sawing logs of wood, whites cultivating tobacco-plants. A negress of thirteen or fourteen years of age, nearly naked and of singular beauty, opened the gate of the enclosure to us, like a young figure of Night. We bought cakes of Indian corn, chickens, eggs, milk, and returned to the ship with our demi-johns and baskets. I gave my silk handkerchief to the little African: a slave welcomed me to the soil of liberty.

We weighed anchor in order to make the roads and port of Baltimore: as we approached, the waters grew narrow; they were smooth and motionless; we appeared to be ascending a lazy stream lined with avenues. Baltimore presented itself to us as though at the further end of a lake. Opposite the town rose a wooded hill, at the foot of which they were commencing to build. We moored alongside the quay. I slept on board and did not go on shore till the next day. I went to stay at the inn with my luggage; the seminarists retired to the establishment prepared for them, whence they have since dispersed over America.

What became of François Tulloch? The following letter was handed to me in London on the 12th of April 1822:

"Thirty years have elapsed, my dear viscount, since the 'epoch' of our journey to Baltimore, and it is very doubtful whether you will remember as much as my name; but if I may judge from the feelings of my heart, which has always been loyal and true to you, this is not so, and I flatter myself that you would not be displeased to see me again. Although we are living almost opposite each other (as you will see by the date of this letter), I am only too well aware how many things separate us. But should you show the smallest wish to see me, I shall be eager to prove to you, in so far as I can, that I am ever, as I always have been, your faithful and devoted,

"FRANCIS TULLOCH.

"P.S.--The distinguished rank which you have won and which you have earned by so many claims has not escaped me; but the memory of the Chevalier de Chateaubriand is so dear to me that I cannot write to you (this time, at least) as Ambassador, &c., &c. So pardon the style for the sake of our old alliance.

"30 Portland Place,

_Friday_, 12 _April._"

And so Tulloch was in London; he did not become a priest; he is married; his romance ended as did mine. This letter testifies to the truthfulness of my Memoirs and the faithfulness of my recollections. Who would have given evidence of the "alliance" and "friendship" formed thirty years ago upon the sea, if the other contracting party had not appeared upon the scene? And what a sad and retrogressive perspective this letter unfolds before me! Tulloch, in 1822, was again living in the same city as myself, in the same street; the door of his house was opposite mine, as when we met on the same ship, upon the same deck, cabin facing cabin. How many of my other friends I shall never meet again! Every night, on retiring to rest, a man can count his losses: there is naught save his years that does not leave him, although these pass; when he reviews them and calls their numbers, they reply, "Here!" Not one but answers the roll-call.

*

Baltimore, like all the other capitals of the United States, had not the dimensions which it now possesses: it was a pretty little Catholic town, neat and lively, with customs and a society closely resembling the customs and society of Europe. I paid the captain my passage-money and gave him a farewell dinner. I booked my seat in the stage-coach which ran three times a week to Pennsylvania. I climbed up to it at four o'clock in the morning, and found myself rolling along the high-roads of the New World.

The road we followed was marked out rather than made, and crossed a somewhat flat tract of country: there were hardly any trees, some straggling farms, and thinly-scattered villages. The climate was French: swallows flew over the water as on the pond at Combourg.

[Sidenote: Philadelphia.]

As we drew nearer to Philadelphia, we met country-folk going to market, public carriages and private carriages. Philadelphia struck me as a fine town, with wide streets, some of which were planted with trees, intersecting each other at right angles in regular order from north to south and east to west. The Delaware runs parallel to the street which follows its west bank. This river would be considered a large one in Europe: it is not spoken of in America; its banks are low and unattractive.

At the period of my journey (1791), Philadelphia had not yet spread as far as the Schuylkill; the ground running towards that tributary was divided into lots, upon which houses were being built at intervals.

Philadelphia presents a monotonous aspect. In general, the Protestant cities of the United States fall short in great works of architecture: the Reformation, young in years, and sacrificing nothing to the imagination, has rarely erected those domes, those aerial naves, those twin towers with which the old Catholic religion has crowned Europe. No monument, in Philadelphia, in New York; at Boston, one pyramid rising above the mass of walls and roofs: the eye is saddened by this uniform level.

First alighting at an inn, I next took a room in a boarding-house in which were staying planters from San Domingo and Frenchmen who had emigrated with other ideas than mine. A land of liberty offered an asylum to those who were fleeing from liberty: nothing better proves the high value of generous institutions than this voluntary exile of the partisans of absolute power in a pure democracy.

A man who had landed in the United States as I had, filled with enthusiasm for the classic races, a colonist who sought on every side the rigidity of the early Roman manners, was necessarily much scandalized to find on every hand the luxury of private carriages, frivolity of conversation, inequality of fortunes, the immorality of banking and gaming-houses, the excitement of theatres and ball-rooms. In Philadelphia I might have thought myself in Liverpool or Bristol The appearance of the inhabitants was agreeable: the Quakeresses with their grey gowns, their uniform little bonnets and their pale features seemed attractive.

At that period of my life, I had a great admiration for republics, although I did not believe them possible at the stage of the world's history which we had reached: my idea of liberty was that conceived by the ancients, liberty the daughter of the manners of a new-born society; but I knew nothing of the liberty which is the daughter of enlightenment and of an old civilization, a form of liberty which the representative republic has proved to be real: God grant that it may be lasting! A man, to be free, is not obliged himself to plough his small field, to storm at arts and sciences, to wear hooked nails and a dirty beard.

General Washington was not in Philadelphia when I arrived there; I was obliged to wait a week. I saw him go past in a carriage drawn by four prancing horses, driven four-in-hand. Washington, according to my then ideas, was necessarily Cincinnatus; Cincinnatus in a chariot somewhat upset my republic of 296 B.C. Could Washington the Dictator be anything save a boor, driving his oxen with a goad and holding the tail of his plough? But when I went to carry my letter of recommendation to him, I found once more the simplicity of the ancient Roman.

A small house, resembling the neighbouring houses, was the palace of the President of the United States: no sentries, no footmen even. I knocked, and a young maid-servant opened the door. I asked if the general was at home; she replied that he was in. I said I had a letter for him. The servant asked my name, which is difficult to pronounce in English and which she could not remember. She then said softly, "Walk in, sir," and led the way down one of those narrow passages which serve as an entrance-hall to English houses: she showed me into a parlour where she asked me to wait until the general came.

I felt no agitation; greatness of mind or fortune in no way overawe me: I admire the first without being crushed by it; the second calls forth my pity rather than my respect: no man's countenance will ever disconcert me.

[Illustration: General Washington.]

After a few minutes, the general entered the room: tall in stature, of a calm and cold rather than noble bearing, he resembled his engraved portraits. I handed him my letter in silence; he opened it and glanced at the signature which he read aloud, exclaiming:

"Colonel Armand!"

This was the name by which he knew the Marquis de La Rouërie and by which the latter had signed himself.

We sat down. I explained to him as best I could the object of my journey. He replied in monosyllables in English and French, and listened to me with a sort of astonishment. I remarked this and said to him, with some little animation:

"But it is less difficult to discover the North-West Passage than to create a people, as you have done."

"Well, well, young man!" he exclaimed, giving me his hand.

He invited me to dinner for the next day, and we parted.

[Sidenote: General Washington.]

I took care to keep the appointment. We were only five or six guests at table. The conversation turned upon the French Revolution. The general showed us a key from the Bastille. These keys, as I have already said, were rather silly toys which passed from hand to hand at that time. The consigners of locksmiths' wares might, three years later, have sent to the President of the United States the bolt of the prison of the monarch who bestowed liberty upon France and America. If Washington had seen the "victors of the Bastille" disporting themselves in the gutters of Paris, he would have felt less respect for his relic. The seriousness and strength of the Revolution did not spring from those blood-stained orgies. At the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685, the same mob from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine demolished the Protestant temple at Charenton with as much ardour as when it laid waste the church of Saint-Denis in 1793.

I left my host at ten o'clock in the evening, and never saw him again; he went away the next day, and I continued my journey.

Such was my meeting with the citizen soldier, the liberator of a world. Washington descended to the grave before a vestige of fame had become attached to my footsteps; I passed before him as the most unknown of beings; he was in all his lustre, I in all my obscurity; my name perhaps did not linger one whole day in his memory: well for me, nevertheless, that his looks fell upon me! I have felt warmed by them for the rest of my life: there is virtue in a great man's looks.

*

Bonaparte is but lately dead[465]. As I have just knocked at Washington's door, it is natural that the parallel between the founder of the United States and the Emperor of the French should occur to my mind: the more so since, at the time when I am writing these lines, Washington himself is no more. Ercilla[466], singing and battling in Chile, stops in the middle of his journey to describe the death of Dido; why should not I stop at the commencement of my ramble through Pennsylvania to compare Washington with Bonaparte? I might have delayed my notice of them until I came to the time at which I met Napoleon; but should I happen to sink into the grave before reaching the year 1814 in my chronicle, the reader would never know what I had to say on the subject of the two mandataries of Providence. I remember the case of Castelnau[467]: he was Ambassador to England like myself, and like me wrote a part of his life in London. On the last page of