Book VII

., he says to his son, "I will treat of this fact in the Eighth Book," and the Eighth Book of Castelnau's Memoirs does not exist: that is a warning to me to take advantage of life while it lasts.

Washington does not, like Bonaparte, belong to the race that surpasses human stature. There is nothing astonishing attached to his person; he is not placed upon a vast stage; he is not engaged in a struggle with the ablest captains and the most powerful monarchs of the time; he does not rush from Memphis to Vienna, from Cadiz to Moscow: he defends himself with a handful of citizens in a land not yet famous, within the narrow circle of the domestic hearth. He delivers none of those battles in which the triumphs of Arbela and Pharsalia are renewed; he overturns no thrones to build up others from their ruins; he does not send word to the kings at his gate:

Qu'ils se font trop attendre, et qu'Attila s'ennuie[468].

A certain silence covers the actions of Washington; he acts slowly; it is as though he felt that he was entrusted with the liberty of the future and feared to compromise it. It is not his own destiny that a hero of this kind carries in his hand: it is that of his country; he does not suffer himself to stake that which does not belong to him; but from this profound humility see how great a light arises! Seek the woods in which flashed Washington's sword: what do you find? Tombstones? No: a world! Washington left the United States as a trophy on his battle-field.

*

[Sidenote: Washington and Bonaparte.]

Bonaparte has none of the features of this grave American: he fights noisily upon an old world; he seeks to create nothing but his fame; he entrusts himself with nothing but his own lot. He seems to know that his mission will be short, that the torrent which descends from so great a height will soon flow away; he hastens to enjoy and to misuse his glory, as though it were a fleeting season of youth. Like Homer's gods, he wishes to reach the end of the world in four steps. He appears on every shore; precipitously he inscribes his name upon the annals of every nation; he tosses crowns to his family and his soldiers; he makes haste with his monuments, his laws, his victories. Bending over the world, with one hand he fells the kings to the ground, while with the other he lays low the revolutionary giant; but in crushing anarchy, he stifles liberty, and ends by losing his own upon his last field of battle.

Each is rewarded according to his works: Washington raises a nation to independence; a peaceful magistrate, he falls asleep beneath his roof-tree amid the regrets of his fellow-countrymen and the veneration of the nations. Bonaparte robs a nation of its independence: a fallen emperor, he is hurled into exile, where the affrighted earth does not think him sufficiently closely imprisoned, even when guarded by the ocean. He dies: the news, posted on the gate of the palace before which the conqueror has caused so many funerals to be proclaimed, does not delay nor astonish the passer-by: what had the citizens to mourn for?

Washington's republic is in existence; Bonaparte's empire is destroyed. Washington and Bonaparte issued from the bosom of democracy: both were born of liberty; the first was faithful to her, the second betrayed her.

Washington was the representative of the needs, the ideas, the judgment, the opinions of his day; he seconded, rather than opposed, the changes in men's minds; he desired what he was bound to desire, the very thing for which he had been called: hence the coherent and perpetual character of his work. This man who strikes the imagination little, because he is in proportion, merged his existence in that of his country: his glory is civilization's inheritance; his fame towers like one of those public sanctuaries from which flows a fertile and inexhaustible spring.

Bonaparte had it equally in his power to enrich the commonwealth; he worked upon the most intelligent, the most gallant, the most brilliant nation on earth. How high would be the rank held by him today, if he had added magnanimity to the heroism which was his, if, Washington and Bonaparte in one, he had appointed liberty the universal legatee of his glory! But this giant did not link his destinies with those of his contemporaries; his genius belonged to modern times: his ambition was of a by-gone age; he did not perceive that the miracles of his life surpassed a diadem in value, and that that Gothic ornament would become him badly. Now he flung himself into the future, again he drew back towards the past; and according to whether he reascended or followed the course of time, thanks to his prodigious force, he drew with him or pushed back the waves. Men, in his eyes, were but a means of power; no sympathy was established between their happiness and his; he had promised to deliver them, and he enchained them; he isolated himself from them, and they withdrew from him. The Kings of Egypt placed their funeral pyramids, not among thriving pastures, but in the midst of barren deserts; those great tombs rise like eternity in the solitude: Bonaparte built the monument of his fame in their image,

*

I was impatient to continue my journey. I had not come to see the Americans, but something quite different from the men I knew, something more in harmony with the habitual order of my ideas; I burned to throw myself into an enterprise for which I had nothing prepared except my imagination and my courage.

At the time when I formed the project of discovering the North-West Passage, it was not known whether North America extended towards the Pole and joined Greenland, or whether it terminated in some sea adjoining Hudson's Bay and Behring's Straits. In 1772, Hearne had discovered the sea at the mouth of the Copper Mine River in latitude 71° 15' N. and longitude 119° 15' W. of Greenwich[469].

On the Pacific coast, the efforts of Captain Cook and subsequent travellers had left doubts. In 1787, a vessel was said to have entered an inland sea of North America; according to the story told by the captain of this ship, all that had been taken for uninterrupted coast to the north of California consisted merely of a closely-knit chain of islands. The British Admiralty sent Vancouver[470] to verify these reports, which proved to be false. Vancouver had not yet made his second voyage.

[Sidenote: Arctic exploration.]

In 1791, people in the United States were beginning to discuss the road taken by Mackenzie: starting from Fort Chippeway on Mountains Lake[471], 3 June 1789, he descended to the Arctic Ocean by the river to which he gave his name.

This discovery might have changed my direction and caused me to take my route due north; but I should have scrupled to alter the plans agreed upon between M. de Malesherbes and myself. I proposed, therefore, to travel westwards, so as to strike the north-west coast above the Gulf of California; from there, following the outline of the continent, and always keeping the sea in sight, I intended to explore Behring's Straits, double the northernmost cape of America, descend on the east along the shores of the Arctic Ocean, and return to the United States by way of Hudson's Bay, Labrador, and Canada.

What means had I to carry out this prodigious peregrination? None at all. Most of the French travellers have been isolated men, left entirely to their own resources; it is but rarely that the government or any company has employed or assisted them. Englishmen, Americans, Germans, Spaniards, Portuguese, thanks to the concurrence of the national volition, have accomplished the things which, with us, destitute individuals have begun in vain. Mackenzie and many others after him have, to the profit of the United States and Great Britain, made conquests upon the immensity of America, with which I had dreamed of aggrandizing my native land. In case of success, I should have had the honour of bestowing French names upon unknown regions, of endowing my country with a colony upon the Pacific Ocean, of taking away the rich fur-trade from a rival Power, and of preventing that Power from opening out a shorter road to the Indies, by placing France herself in possession of that road. I have stated these projects in the _Essai historique_, published in London in 1796, and these projects were taken from the manuscript of my Travels written in 1791. These dates prove that I was ahead, both in thought and work, of the latest explorers of the Arctic ice-fields.

I received no encouragement in Philadelphia. I foresaw from then that the object of this first journey would be missed, and that my expedition would be but the precursor of a second and longer journey. I wrote in this sense to M. de Malesherbes, and while looking forward to the future, I promised to poetry what should be lost to science. In fact, if I did not find in America what I had come to seek, the Arctic world, I did find there a new muse.

A stage-coach, similar to that which brought me from Baltimore, took me from Philadelphia to New York, a gay, populous, commercial town, which was nevertheless far from being what it is today, far from what it will be in a few years; for the United States grow faster than does this manuscript. I made a pilgrimage to Boston to salute the first battlefield of American liberty. I saw the plains of Lexington; I there sought, as I since sought at Sparta, the tomb of the warriors who died "in obedience to the sacred laws of their country[472]." A noteworthy instance of the concatenation of human affairs: a finance bill passed by the English Parliament in 1765 erects a new empire upon the earth in 1782, and causes one of the oldest kingdoms of Europe to disappear from the world in 1789!

*

I embarked at New York in the packet which sailed for Albany, situated on the upper reaches of the Hudson River. The company was numerous. On the evening of the first day we were served with a collation consisting of fruits and milk; the women sat on the benches on deck, the men on the deck at their feet. Conversation was not long maintained: at the sight of a beautiful natural picture, one involuntarily lapses into silence. Suddenly some one or other exclaimed:

"There is the place where Asgill[473] was arrested."

A Quakeress from Philadelphia was asked to sing the ballad known as _Asgill._ We were passing between mountains; the fair passenger's voice died away on the water, or rang out when we hugged the bank more closely. The fate of a young soldier, a lover, a poet and a hero, honoured by the interest of Washington and the generous intervention of an unfortunate queen, lent additional charm to the romance of the scene. The friend whom I have lost, M. de Fontanes, let fall some courageous words in memory of Asgill at the time when Bonaparte was preparing to ascend the throne upon which Marie Antoinette had sat. The American officers appeared touched by the song of the fair Pennsylvanian: the memory of the past troubles of their country made them appreciate more highly the calm of the present moment. They gazed with emotion upon those spots but lately filled with troops, resounding with the clash of arms, and now wrapped in profound peace; those spots gilded with the fading light of day, enlivened with the singing of the cardinal-birds, the cooing of the ring-doves, the song of the mocking-birds, while the inhabitants, leaning against their fences fringed with trumpet-flowers, watched our bark pass below them.

[Sidenote: I arrive at Albany.]

On arriving at Albany I went in search of a Mr. Swift, for whom I had been given a letter. This Mr. Swift traded in furs with the Indian tribes enclosed in the territory ceded to the United States by England; for the civilized Powers in America, republican and monarchical alike, unceremoniously share among themselves land which does not belong to them. After listening to what I had to say, Mr. Swift made some very reasonable objections. He told me that I could not undertake a journey of this importance at first sight, alone, without assistance, without support, without letters of recommendation to the English, American, and Spanish stations by which I should be obliged to pass; that if I had the good fortune to cross so many solitary tracts of country, I should arrive at frozen regions where I should perish of hunger; he advised me to begin by acclimatizing myself, suggested that I should learn the Sioux, Iroquois, and Esquimaux languages, and live among the coureurs and the agents of the Hudson's Bay Company. Having gained this preliminary experience, I might then, in four or five years, with the assistance of the French Government, proceed on my hazardous mission.

This advice, whose justice, in my heart of hearts, I admitted, annoyed me. Had I trusted to my own judgment, I should have set out then and there to go to the Pole, as I might go from Paris to Pontoise. I concealed my vexation from Mr. Swift, and asked him to find me a guide and horses to take me to Niagara and Pittsburg: from Pittsburg I would go down the Ohio and gather ideas for my future plans. I still had my first project in my head. Mr. Swift engaged a Dutchman on my behalf, who spoke several Indian dialects. I bought two horses and left Albany.

The whole stretch of country between the territory surrounding that town and Niagara is now inhabited and cleared; the New York Canal crosses it; but at that time a great part of the district was unfrequented. When, after crossing the Mohawk, I entered woods which had never known the axe, I was seized with a sort of intoxication of independence; I went from tree to tree, left and right, saying to myself:

"Here are no more roads, no more cities, no more monarchies, no more republics, no more presidents, no more kings, no more men!"

And, in order to test whether I was really reinstated in my original rights, I indulged in acts of will which infuriated my guide, who in his heart believed me mad.

Alas, I imagined myself to be alone in that forest in which I was carrying my head so high! Suddenly I almost broke my nose against a shed. Under that shed, my amazed eyes beheld the first savages I had seen in my life. There were a score of them, men and women, all bedaubed like wizards, with half-naked bodies, slit ears, crows' feathers on their heads, and rings through their nostrils. A little Frenchman, all powdered and curled, in an apple-green coat, a drugget vest, and a muslin frill and ruffles, was scraping a pocket fiddle and making those Iroquois dance _Madelon Friquet._ M. Violet (that was his name) was the savages' dancing-master. They paid him for his lessons in beaver-skins and bear's hams. He had been a scullion in the service of General Rochambeau[474] during the American War. He remained in New York after the departure of our army, and resolved to instruct the Americans in the fine arts. His views widened with success, and the new Orpheus carried civilization to the savage hordes of the New World. In speaking to me of the Indians, he always said:

"Those savage ladies and gentlemen."

He took great pride in the nimbleness of his pupils; indeed I never saw such capers before or since. M. Violet, holding his little violin between his chest and his chin, tuned the fatal instrument; he cried to the Iroquois:

"Take your places!"

And the whole troop leaped about like a band of demons.

Was it not an overwhelming thing for a disciple of Rousseau, this introduction to savage life through a ball which General Rochambeau's late scullion was giving to the Iroquois? I had a great longing to laugh, but I felt cruelly humiliated.

*

I bought a complete outfit of the Indians: two bearskins, one to serve as a demi-toga, the other as a bed. I added to my new equipment the red ribbed-cloth cap, the cloak, the belt, the horn to call in the dogs, the bandoleer of the _coureurs des bois._ My hair hung over my bare neck; I wore a long beard: I had something of the savage, the hunter, and the missionary. I was invited to a hunt which was to take place the next day to track a wolverine.

[Sidenote: Life in Canada.]

This race of animals is almost entirely destroyed in Canada, as are the beavers. We took boat before daybreak to go up a river which issued from the wood in which the wolverine had been seen. There were some thirty of us, both Indians and American and Canadian _coureurs_: one part of the troop walked alongside of the flotilla with the dogs, and the women carried our provisions. We did not find the wolverine; but we killed lynxes and musk-rats. Formerly the Indians used to go into deep mourning when they had inadvertently killed any of the latter animals; for the female of the musk-rat is, as everybody knows, the mother of the human race. The Chinese, with their finer powers of observation, know to a certainty that the rat changes into a quail, the mole into a loriot.

Our table was abundantly furnished with river-side birds and fish. The dogs are trained to dive; when they are not hunting, they go fishing: they plunge into the streams and seize the fish down at the bottom of the water. The women prepared our meals at a large fire around which we took our places. We had to lie flat down, with our faces against the ground, to protect our eyes from the smoke, the clouds of which floated above our heads and indifferently preserved us from the stings of the mosquitoes.

Seen through the microscope, the various carnivorous insects are formidable animals; they were once perhaps those winged dragons whose skeletons are sometimes found: decreasing in size in proportion as their matter decreased in energy, these hydras, griffins and others would today be reduced to the condition of insects. The antediluvian giants are the little men of our time.

*

M. Violet offered me his credentials for the Onondagas, the remnant of one of the six Iroquois nations. I first came to the Lake of the Onondagas. The Dutchman selected a suitable spot at which to pitch our camp: a river issued from the lake; our gear was set up in the curve of the river. We drove two forked stakes into the ground, at a distance of six feet one from the other; in the forks of these stakes we hung, horizontally, a long pole. Strips of birch bark, one end resting on the ground, the other on the transversal pole, formed the sloping roof of our mansion. Our saddles served as pillows, our cloaks as blankets. We fastened bells to our horses' necks and turned them loose in the woods near our camp: they did not wander far.

Fifteen years later, when I was bivouacking in the sand of the Saba Desert, at a few steps from the Jordan on the banks of the Dead Sea, our horses, those swift sons of Araby, looked as though they were listening to the tales of the sheik and taking part in the story of Antar and of the horse in Job[475].

It was hardly four o'clock in the afternoon when we were hutted. I took my gun and went for a stroll round about There were few birds. A solitary, pair alone fluttered before my eyes, like the birds which I had followed in my paternal woods; by the colour of the male, I recognised the white sparrow, the _passer nivalis_ of the ornithologists. I also heard the osprey, very clearly characterized by its note. The flight of the "screamer" had led me to a dale hemmed in by tall and rocky heights; on a mountain-side stood a poor hut; a lean cow roamed in a field below.

I like small shelters: "_A chico pajarillo chico nidillo_: a little bird, a little nest." I sat down on the slope facing the hut planted on the hillside opposite. In a few minutes, I heard voices in the valley: three men were driving five or six fat cows; they put them to graze and drove away the lean cow with blows of a switch. An Indian woman came out of the hut, went towards the frightened beast, and called it. The cow ran to her, stretching out its neck with a little low. The planters shook their fists at the Indian woman, who returned to her hut The cow followed her.

[Sidenote: The Indian woman.]

I got up, climbed down the declivity of the hillside, crossed the glen, and climbing the opposite hill, reached the hut. I uttered the greeting I had been taught:

"_Siegoh!_ I have come!"

The Indian woman, instead of returning my greeting by the customary repetition, "You have come," made no reply. Then I petted the cow: the Indian woman's yellow and saddened face showed signs of softening. I was touched by these mysterious relations of misfortune: there is sweetness in lamenting ills that none have lamented beside.

My hostess looked at me a little longer, with a remnant of doubt lingering in her eyes, and then came forward and passed her hand over the forehead of her companion in misery and solitude. Encouraged by this mark of confidence, I said in English, for I had exhausted my Indian:

"She is very lean."

The Indian woman replied, in broken English:

"She eats very little."

"They drove her away roughly," I added.

And the woman replied:

"We are both accustomed to that."

I asked:

"Does not this meadow belong to you then?"

She answered:

"This meadow belonged to my husband, who is dead. I have no children, and the pale-faces drive their cows into my meadow."

I had nothing to offer this creature of God. We parted. My hostess said a number of things to me which I did not understand; they were doubtless wishes for prosperity; if they have not been heard by Heaven, it is not the fault of her who prayed, but the infirmity of him for whom the prayer was offered. All souls have not an equal aptitude for happiness, just as all lands do not bear equal harvests.

I returned to my wigwam, where a collation consisting of potatoes and Indian corn awaited my arrival. The evening was splendid: the lake, smooth as a flawless mirror, showed not a ripple; the murmuring river bathed our peninsula, which the calycanthuses perfumed with the scent of apple-blossom. The whip-poor-will uttered its song: we heard it, now nearer, now farther away, according as the bird changed the spot of its amorous calls. No one called me. Weep, poor Will!

The next day I went to pay a visit to the sachem of the Onondagas; I reached his village at ten o'clock in the morning. I was at once surrounded by young savages, who spoke to me in their language, mixed with English phrases and a few words of French; they were very noisy and wore an air of light-heartedness, like the first Turks whom I saw, later, at Koroni, when landing on the soil of Greece. These Indian tribes, enclosed in the clearings made by the whites, own horses and cattle; their huts are filled with utensils purchased at Quebec, Montreal, Niagara, and Detroit on the one side, and in the markets of the United States on the other.

The explorers of the interior of North America found in a state of nature, among the different savage tribes, the several forms of government known to the peoples of civilization. The Iroquois belonged to a race which seemed destined to conquer the Indian races, if strangers had not come to exhaust his veins and stop the progress of his genius. That fearless man was not astonished at fire-arms when these were first used against him; he stood fast amid the hiss of the bullets and the roar of the cannon, as though he had heard them all his life; he seemed to pay no more heed to them than to the storm. So soon as he was able to procure a musket, he made better use of it than the European. He did not abandon for it the tomahawk, the scalping-knife, the bow and arrow; but to these he added the carbine, the pistol, the dagger, and the axe: he seemed never to have enough arms to satisfy his valour. Doubly equipped with the murderous instruments of Europe and America, his head decked with plumes, his ears slit, his face streaked with various colours, his arms tattooed and smeared with blood, this champion of the New World became as redoubtable in appearance as in battle, on the shores which he defended foot by foot against the invaders.

The Onondaga chief was an old Iroquois in the fullest sense of the word; he kept up in his person the ancient traditions of the desert. The English narratives never fail to speak of the Indian sachem as "the old gentleman." Now, the old gentleman is perfectly naked; he wears a feather or a fish-bone in his pierced nostrils, and sometimes covers his head, which is smooth and round as a cheese, with a laced three-cornered hat, as an European sign of honour. Has not Velly[476] depicted history with the same veracity? The Frankish chieftain Khilpérick[477] rubbed his hair in sour butter, _infundens acido comam butyro_, stained his cheeks with woad, and wore a party-coloured jerkin or a greatcoat made of the skin of some beast; he is represented by Velly as a prince magnificent to the point of ostentation in his furniture and equipage, voluptuous to the point of debauchery, and scarcely believing in God, whose ministers formed the subject of his raillery.

[Sidenote: With the Onondagas.]

The sachem of the Onondagas received me well and made me sit down on a mat. He spoke English and understood French; my guide knew Iroquois: conversation was easy. Among other things, the old man told me that, although his nation had always been at war with mine, he had always respected it. He complained of the Americans; he thought them greedy and unjust, and regretted that, in the division of the Indian territories his tribe had not gone to swell the lot of the English. The women served us with a meal. Hospitality is the last virtue left to the savages in the midst of European civilization; their hospitality is well known of old; the hearth had all the power of the altar. When a tribe was driven from its woods, or when a man came to demand hospitality, the stranger began what was called the dance of the supplicant. The child touched the door-sill and said:

"Here is the stranger."

And the chief replied:

"Child, bring the man into the hut."

The stranger entered, under the protection of the child, and sat down by the ashes on the hearth. The women sang the song of consolation:

The stranger has found a mother and a wife; the sun will rise and set for him as of old.

These customs seem borrowed from the Greeks: Themistocles, visiting Admetus, kisses the Penates and his host's young son (I have possibly at Megara trod upon the poor wife's hearthstone beneath which Phocion's cinerary urn lay concealed[478]); and Ulysses, visiting Alcinous, implores Arete:

"Noble Arete, daughter of Rhexenor, after suffering cruel ills, I throw myself at your feet[479]."

Having spoken these words, the hero goes towards the hearth and seats himself by the ashes.

I took leave of the old chief. He had been present at the capture of Quebec. In the shameful years of the reign of Louis XV., the episode of the Canadian War comes to our consolation as though it were a page from our ancient history discovered in the Tower of London.

Montcalm[480], left to defend Canada unaided against forces often relieved and four times his own in number, fights successfully for two whole years; he defeats Lord Loudon[481] and General Abercromby[482]. At last fortune forsakes him; he falls wounded beneath the walls of Quebec, and two days later breathes his last: his Grenadiers bury him in a hole dug by a shell, a grave worthy of the honour of our arms! His noble enemy Wolfe[483] dies facing him; he pays with his own life for Montcalm's life and for the glory of expiring upon a few French flags.

Once more my guide and I mounted our horses. Our road became more difficult and was marked only by some felled trees. The trunks of these trees served as bridges over the streams or as hurdles in the bogs. The American population was at that time moving towards the Genesee grants. These grants were sold at prices more or less high according to the goodness of the soil, the quality of the trees, the current and abundance of the water.

It has been observed that colonists are often preceded in the woods by bees: these are the van-guard of the tillers of the soil, and the symbols of the industry and civilization whose coming they proclaim. Foreign to America, these peaceful conquerors came in the wake of Columbus' sails, and have robbed a new world of flowers of those treasures only of whose use the natives were ignorant; nor have they employed those treasures other than to enrich the soil whence they derived them.

The clearings along both sides of the road which I travelled displayed a curious mixture of the state of nature and the state of civilization. In one comer of a wood which had never known any sound save the yells of the savage and the belling of the stag, one came across a ploughed field; one saw from the same point of view the wigwam of an Indian and the dwelling of a planter. Some of these dwellings, when completed, reminded one of the neatness of the Dutch farm-houses; others were only half finished, and had nothing but the sky for a roof.

[Sidenote: Indians and settlers.]

I was welcomed in these dwellings, the results of a morning's work; often I would find a family displaying European elegancies, mahogany furniture, a piano, carpets, mirrors, at a few steps from the hut of an Iroquois. In the evening, when the farm-servants returned from working in the woods or fields with the axe or the hoe, the windows were opened. My host's daughters, with their beautiful fair hair dressed in ringlets, would sing, to the accompaniment of the piano, the duet from Paisiello's[484] _Pandolfetto_ or some _cantabile_ by Cimarosa[485], all in full view of the wilderness, and sometimes to the murmuring sound of a waterfall.

Small market-towns rose in the better districts. The spire of a new steeple shot up from the midst of an old forest. The English are accompanied by English customs wherever they go: after crossing districts containing no trace of habitation, I came upon the sign of an inn swinging from the bough of a tree. Hunters, planters, and Indians mingled at these caravansaries: the first time I rested there, I swore that it should be the last.

It so happened that, on entering one of these hostelries, I stood dumfoundered at the sight of a huge bed set up in a circle around a post: each traveller took a place in this bed, with his feet against the post in the centre and his head on the circumference of the circle, so that the sleepers were arranged symmetrically, like the spokes of a wheel or the sticks of a fan. After a momentary hesitation, I got into this affair because I saw no one there. I was just falling asleep, when I felt something sliding against me: it was the leg of my big Dutchman; I never in my life experienced a greater fright. I sprang out of the hospitable work-basket, cordially cursing the customs of our good ancestors. I went and slept in my cloak by the moonlight: this companion of the traveller's bed had at least nothing but was agreeable, and fresh, and sweet.

On the bank of the Genesee we found a ferry-boat. A troop of colonials and Indians crossed the river with us. We camped in meadows bright with butterflies and flowers. With our varied costumes, grouped around our several fires, and our horses tethered or grazing, we looked like a caravan. I there first met the rattlesnake, which allows itself to be bewitched by the sound of a flute. The Greeks would have turned my Canadian into Orpheus; the flute into a lyre; the snake into Cerberus, or, possibly, Eurydice.

*

We rode towards Niagara. When we had come within a distance of eight or nine leagues of our destination, we perceived, in an oak grove, the camp-fire of some savages, who had settled down on the bank of a stream where we ourselves were thinking of bivouacking. We took advantage of their preparations: after grooming our horses and dressing ourselves for the night, we accosted the band. With legs crossed tailor-wise, we sat down among the Indians around the blazing pile, and began to roast our maize cakes.

The family consisted of two women, two infants at the breast, and three braves. The conversation became general, that is to say, interspersed with a few words on my side and many gestures; after that, each fell asleep in the place where he sat I alone remained awake, and went to sit by myself on a root trailing by the bank of the stream.

[Sidenote: The Falls of Niagara.]

The moon showed above the tops of the trees; a balmy breeze, which the Queen of the Night brought with her from the East, seemed to go before her through the forests, as though it were her cool breath. The solitary luminary climbed higher and higher in the sky, now pursuing her even way, again surmounting clusters of clouds, which resembled the summits of a snow-clad mountain-chain. All would have been silence and repose, but for the fall of a few leaves, the passing of a sudden gust of wind, the hooting of the wood-owl; in the distance was heard the dull roar of the Falls of Niagara, which, in the calm of night, extended from waste to waste and expired in the lonely forests. It was during those nights that an unknown muse appeared to me; I gathered some of her accents; I marked them on my tables, by the light of the stars, as a vulgar musician might write down the notes dictated to him by some great master of harmony.

The next day, the Indians armed themselves, the women collected the baggage. I distributed a little gunpowder and vermilion among my hosts. We parted, touching our foreheads and breasts; the braves shouted the order to march and walked in front; the women went behind, carrying the children, who, slung in furs on their mothers' backs, turned their heads to look at us. I followed this progress with my eyes until the whole band had disappeared among the trees of the forest.

The savages of the Falls of Niagara in the English dominion were entrusted with the police service of the frontier on that side. This outlandish constabulary, armed with bows and arrows, prevented our passage. I was obliged to send the Dutchman to the fort of Niagara for a permit in order to enter the territory of the British government. This saddened my heart a little, for I remembered that formerly France had ruled in both Upper and Lower Canada. My guide returned with the permit: I still have it; it is signed, "Captain Gordon." Is it not strange that I should have found the same English name on the door of my cell in Jerusalem? "Thirteen pilgrims had inscribed their names on the door and walls of the chamber: the first was called Charles Lombard, who visited Jerusalem in 1669; the last was John Gordon, and the date of his passage is 1804[486]."

*

I stayed two days in the Indian village, whence I wrote another letter to M. de Malesherbes. The Indian women busied themselves with different occupations; their nurslings were slung in nets from the branches of a tall purple beech. The grass was covered with dew, the wind issued all perfumed from the woods, and the cotton-plants of the country, throwing back their capsules, looked like white rose-trees. The breeze rocked the cradles in mid-air with an almost imperceptible movement; the mothers stood up from time to time to see if their children were asleep and had not been awakened by the birds.

From the Indian village to the cataract was some three or four leagues: it took my guide and me as many hours to reach it. Already at six miles' distance, a column of vapour indicated the situation of the weir to my eyes. My heart beat with joy mingled with terror, as I entered the wood that concealed from my view one of the grandest spectacles which nature has offered to mankind.

We dismounted. Leading our horses by the bridle, we passed through heaths and thickets until we came to the bank of the Niagara River, seven or eight hundred paces above the falls. As I never ceased going forward, the guide caught me by the arm; he stopped me on the very edge of the water, which passed with the swiftness of an arrow. It did not seethe, but glided in one sole mass to the slope of the rock; its silence before its fall contrasted with the uproar of the fall itself. The Scriptures often compare a people to the mighty waters: here it was a dying people which, deprived of its voice by the agony of death, went to hurl itself into the abyss of eternity.

The guide continued to hold me back, for I felt, so to speak, drawn on by the stream, and I had an involuntary longing to fling myself in. At one time, I would turn my eyes up the river, to the banks; at another, down to the island which divided the waters. Here the waters suddenly failed, as though cut off in the sky.

After a quarter of an hour of vague and perplexed admiration, I went on to the falls. The reader will find in the _Essai sur les révolutions_[487] and in _Atala_[488] the two descriptions which I have written of the scene. Today, high-roads run to the cataract; there are inns on the American side and on the English side, and mills and factories overhang the chasm.

I was unable to utter the thoughts that stirred me at the sight of so sublime a disorder. In the desert of my early life, I was obliged to invent persons to adorn it; I drew from my own substance beings whom I did not find elsewhere and whom I carried within myself. In the same way, I have placed memories of Atala and René on the edge of the cataract of Niagara, as the expression of its sadness. What meaning has a cascade which falls eternally in the unfeeling sight of heaven and earth, if human nature be not there, with its destinies and its misfortunes? To be steeped in this solitude of water and mountains and not to know with whom to speak of that great spectacle! To have the waves, the rocks, the woods, the torrents to one's self alone! Give the soul a companion, and the smiling verdure of the hill-slopes, the cool breath of the water, will all turn into charm: the journey by day, the sweetest repose at the end of the day's march, the gliding over the billows, the sleeping upon the moss, will call forth from the heart its deepest tenderness. I have seated Velléda upon the shores of Armorica, Cymodocea beneath the porticoes of Athens, Blanca in the halls of the Alhambra. Alexander created towns wheresoever he hastened: I have left dreams behind me wherever I have dragged my life.

I have seen the cascades of the Alps with their chamois and those of the Pyrenees with their izards; I did not go sufficiently high up the Nile to meet its cataracts, which are reduced to rapids; I will not speak of the azure zones of Terni or of Tivoli, graceful fragments of ruins or subjects for the poet's song:

Et præceps Anio ac Tiburni lucus[489].

Niagara eclipses everything. I gazed upon the cataract the existence of which was revealed to the old world, not by puny travellers like myself, but by missionaries who, seeking solitude for the love of God, flung themselves upon their knees at the sight of some marvel of nature and received martyrdom while completing their hymn of admiration. Our priests greeted the fine sites of America and consecrated them with their blood; our soldiers clapped their hands at the ruins of Thebes and presented arms to Andalusia: the whole genius of France lies in the double army of our camps and of our altars.

[Sidenote: Two hair-breadth escapes.]

I was holding my horse's bridle twisted round my arm; a rattlesnake came and rustled in the bushes. The startled horse reared and backed towards the falls. I was unable to release my arm from the reins; the horse, still more terrified, was dragging me after it. Already its fore-feet were off the ground; cowering over the edge of the abyss, it maintained its position only by the strength of its loins. It was all up with me, when the animal, itself astonished at its fresh peril, gave a sudden turn and vaulted inwards. Had my soul left my body amidst the Canadian woods, would it have carried to the Supreme Tribunal the sacrifices, the good works, the virtues of the Pères Jogues[490] and Lallemant[491], or empty days and wretched idle fancies?

This was not the only danger I encountered at Niagara. A ladder of creepers was used by the savages to climb down to the lower basin; it was at that time broken. Wishing to see the falls from below, I ventured, in the face of my guide's representations, down the side of an almost perpendicular rock. In spite of the roar of the water which seethed below me, I kept my head and climbed down to within forty feet of the bottom. When I had reached so far, the bare and vertical rock gave me nothing to lay hold of; I was left hanging by one hand to the last root, feeling my fingers open beneath the weight of my body: few men have spent two such minutes, as I counted them. My tired hand let go; I fell. By an unparalleled stroke of good fortune, I found myself upon the pointed back of a rock upon which I ought to have been smashed into a thousand pieces, and yet I felt no great hurt; I was at half a foot from the abyss and had not rolled into it; but when the cold and the damp began to penetrate me, I saw that I had not come off so cheaply: my left arm was broken above the elbow. The guide, who was watching me from above and saw my signals of distress, ran off to fetch some savages. They hoisted me with ropes along an otter's path, and carried me to their village. I had only a simple fracture: two splints, a bandage and a sling were enough to effect my cure.

*

I stayed twelve days with my surgeons, the Niagara Indians. I saw tribes pass which had come down from Detroit or from the districts lying south and east of Lake Erie. I inquired into their usages; in return for small presents, I was given representations of their former customs, for the customs themselves no longer exist. Nevertheless, at the commencement of the War of American Independence, the savages still ate the prisoners, or rather the killed: an English captain, helping himself to soup with a ladle from an Indian stew-pot, drew out a hand.

The practices attendant upon birth and death have lost least, because these do not pass lightly like the life which divides them; they are not things of fashion that come and go. The Indians still bestow upon the new-born, in order to do him honour, the name of the oldest person under his roof: his grandmother, for instance; for the names are always taken in the maternal line. From that time forward, the child fills the place of the woman whose name it has taken; in speaking to it, they give it the degree of relationship which the name revives; thus an uncle might address his nephew by the title of "grandmother." This apparently ludicrous custom is nevertheless touching. It restores the old dead to life; it reproduces the weakness of the last in the weakness of the earliest years; it brings closer the two extremities of life, the commencement and the end of the family; it confers a kind of immortality upon the ancestors and implies that they are present in the midst of their posterity.

[Sidenote: The Niagara indians.]

In what regards the dead, it is easy to find motives for the savage's attachment to sacred relics. Civilized nations are able to preserve the memory of their country by means of the mnemonics of literature and the arts: they have cities, palaces, towers, columns, obelisks; they have the track of the plough in fields once cultivated; their names are carved in marble and brass, their actions recorded in the chronicles.

The desert peoples have none of these advantages: their names are not written upon the trees; their huts, built in a few hours, disappear in a few moments; the butt of their ploughing only grazes the ground, and is not able even to raise a furrow. Their traditional songs perish with the last memory which retains them, and die away with the last voice which repeats them. The tribes of the New World, therefore, have but one monument: the tomb. Take away from savages the bones of their fathers, and you take away their history, their laws, and their very gods; you rob those men, in the future generations, of the proofs both of their existence and of their annihilation.

I wished to hear my hosts' songs. A little Indian girl of fourteen, called Mila and very pretty (the Indian women are pretty only at that age) sang something very pleasant. Was it not perchance the canzonet quoted by Montaigne? "Adder stay, stay good adder, that my sister may by the patterne of thy partie-coloured coat drawe the fashion and worke of a rich lace, for me to give unto my love; so may thy beautie, thy nimblenesse or disposition be ever preferred before all other serpents[492]."

The author of the _Essaies_ saw Iroquois at Rouen, who, according to him, were "not verie ill; but what," he adds, "of that? They weare no kinde of breeches nor hosen[493]!"

If ever I publish the Στρωματεὶς or patchwork of my youth, to talk like St. Clement of Alexandria[494] you shall there see Mila[495].

The Canadians are no longer the same as when they were described by Cartier, Champlain[496], La Hontan[497], Lescarbot[498], Lafitau[499], Charlevoix[500], and the _Lettres édifiantes_; the sixteenth century and the commencement of the seventeenth were still the time of a boundless imagination and ingenuous customs: the marvel of the first reflected a virgin nature, and the candour of the second reproduced the simplicity of the savage. Champlain tells us at the end of his first journey to Canada, in 1603, that "near Chaleur Bay, verging to the south, there is an island where dwells a frightful monster which the savages call Gougou."

Canada had its giant as well as the Cape of Storms. Homer is the true father of all these inventions; it is always the Cyclopes, Scylla and Charybdis, ogres or _gougous._

The savage population of North America, not including the Mexicans and Esquimaux, does not today amount to four hundred thousand souls on either side of the Rocky Mountains; there are travellers who put it so low as one hundred and fifty thousand. The degradation of Indian manners has kept pace with the depopulation of the tribes. Their religious traditions have become confused; the instruction spread by the Canadian Jesuits has mixed foreign ideas with the inborn ideas of the natives: through their rude fables, one sees the Christian beliefs disfigured; the majority of the savages wear crosses by way of ornaments, and the Protestant traders sell them what the Catholic missionaries give them. Let us say at once, to the honour of our country and to the glory of our religion, that the Indians had become greatly attached to us; that they never cease to regret us; and that a "black robe," or missionary, is still an object of veneration in the forests of America. The savage continues to love us under the tree where we were his first guests, on the soil which we have trod, where we have left tombs in his care.

When the Indian was naked or clad in skins, he had something great and noble about him; at present, rags of European clothing, without covering his nakedness, bear witness to his destitution: he is a beggar at the door of a counting-house, he is no longer the savage in his forest

Lastly, a kind of hybrid people has been formed, born of colonial fathers and Indian mothers. These men, called "Burnt-woods," because of the colour of their skin, act as brokers between the authors of their dual origin. They speak the language of their fathers and of their mothers, and have the vices of both races. These bastards of civilized and of savage nature sell themselves to the Americans and the English by turns, to hand over to them the monopoly of the fur-trade; they keep alive the rivalry between the English companies, the Hudson's Bay Company and the North-West Fur Company, and the American companies, the Columbian American Fur Company, the Missouri Fur Company and others: they themselves go hunting for account of the traders and with hunters paid by the companies.

[Sidenote: The Wars of the Companies.]

The great war of American Independence is the only one which people know of. They are ignorant of the fact that blood has been shed on behalf of the paltry interests of a handful of merchants. The Hudson's Bay Company in 1811 sold to Lord Selkirk[501] a tract of land on the bank of the Red River. The North-West or Canadian Company took umbrage at this transaction. The two companies, allied to various Indian tribes and seconded by the "Burnt-woods," came to blows. This domestic conflict, so horrible in its details, took place on the frozen wastes of Hudson's Bay. Lord Selkirk's colony was destroyed in the month of June 1815[502], at the exact period of the Battle of Waterloo. Upon those two theatres, one so brilliant, the other so obscure, the misfortunes of the human species were the same.

Seek no longer in America the skillfully constructed political constitutions of which Charlevoix has written the history: the monarchy of the Hurons, the republic of the Iroquois. A somewhat similar destruction has been accomplished and is still being accomplished in Europe under our very eyes; a Prussian poet, at a banquet of the Teutonic Order, held about the year 1400, sang in old Prussian the heroic deeds of the ancient warriors of his country: no one present understood him, and he received one hundred empty walnuts by way of recompense. Today, the language of Lower Brittany, the Basque and Gaelic languages, are dying out from cottage to cottage, keeping pace with the deaths of the goatherds and husbandmen.

In the English County of Cornwall, the language of the natives became extinct about the year 1676. A fisherman said to some travellers:

"I know hardly more than four or five persons who speak Cornish, and they are old folk like myself, between sixty and eighty years of age; none of the young people know a word of it."

Whole tribes of the Orinoco have ceased to exist; of their dialect there remain but a dozen words articulated in the tree-tops by parrots that have regained their freedom, like Agrippina's thrush, which warbled Greek words upon the balustrades of the Roman palaces. This, sooner or later, will be the fate of our modern jargons, the remains of Latin and Greek. Some raven escaped from the cage of the last Franco-Gallic curate will say, from the top of a ruined steeple, to peoples that shall be foreign to our successors:

"Accept these last strains of a voice once known to you; you will put an end to all this talk."

It is well worth while to be Bossuet, so that, in the ultimate event, your masterpiece may survive, in the recollection of a bird, your language and your memory among men!

*

When speaking of Canada and Louisiana, when considering on the old maps the extent of the former French colonies in America, I asked myself how the government of my country could have suffered the loss of those colonies, which would be an inexhaustible source of prosperity for us at this day.

From Arcadia[503] and Canada to Louisiana, from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi, the territory of "New France" surrounded what formed the confederation of the first thirteen United States: the eleven others[504], together with the District of Columbia, the North-Western Territory, the Territories of Michigan, Missouri, Oregon, and Arkansas either belonged to us or would now belong to us, as they belong to the United States by the cessions of the English and Spaniards, our successors in Canada and Louisiana[505]. The country enclosed by the Atlantic on the north-east, the Arctic Ocean on the north, the Pacific Ocean and the Russian possessions on the north-west, and the Gulf of Mexico on the south, in other words more than two-thirds of North America, would now be recognizing the laws of France.

[Sidenote: Former French possessions.]

I fear that the Restoration will ruin itself through holding ideas contrary to those which I have here expressed: the mania for adhering to the past, a mania which I never cease impugning, would be in no sense fatal if it subverted only myself, by robbing me of the Sovereign's favour; but it may yet subvert the Throne. Political stagnation is impossible; it is absolutely necessary to keep pace with human intelligence. Let us respect the majesty of time; let us reverentially contemplate past centuries, rendered sacred by the memory and the footsteps of our fathers: but let us not try to go back to them, for they no longer possess a vestige of our real nature, and if we endeavoured to seize hold of them, they would fade away. The Chapter of Our Lady of Aix-la-Chapelle caused the tomb of Charlemagne[506] to be opened, we are told, about the year 1450. The Emperor was found seated in a gilt chair, holding in his skeleton hands the Book of the Gospels written in letters of gold; before him were laid his sceptre and his golden buckler; by his side hung his sword "Joyeuse," sheathed in a golden scabbard. He was clad in the imperial robes. On his head, which was held erect by a golden chain, was a winding-sheet covering what had been his face and surmounted by a crown. They touched the phantom: it crumbled into dust.

We once possessed vast countries beyond the seas: they offered a refuge for our surplus population, markets for our commerce, stations for our navy. We are now excluded from the new world in which the human race is beginning life afresh: in Africa, Asia, Oceania, in the South Sea Islands, on the continent of North and South America, the English, Portuguese, and Spanish languages serve to interpret the thoughts of many millions of men; and we, disinherited of the conquests of our valour and our genius, scarce hear the tongue of Colbert and Louis XIV. spoken in some petty market-town of Louisiana or Canada, under a foreign government: it lingers there only as a witness to the reverses of our fortune and the errors of our policy.

And who is the king whose dominion now succeeds the dominion of the King of France in the forests of Canada? He who yesterday caused this note to be sent to me:

"Royal Lodge, Windsor,

"4 _June_ 1822.

"Monsieur le Vicomte,

"I am commanded by the King to invite Your Excellency to dine and sleep here on Thursday the 6th instant.

"Your Excellency's most humble and obedient servant,

"Francis Conyngham[507]."

It was fated that I should be plagued by princes. I lay down my pen; I recross the Atlantic; I mend my arm broken at Niagara; I take off my bearskin; I resume my gold-laced coat; I leave the wigwam of an Iroquois to repair to the Royal Lodge of His Britannic Majesty, King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and Lord of the Indies; I leave my hosts with the exposed ears and my little girl-savage with her bead: wishing Lady Conyngham[508] the charm of Mila, together with the age which as yet belongs only to the earliest spring-time, to the days which precede the month of May and which our Gallic poets called the _avrillée_, the April shower.

*

The tribe of the little girl with the bead departed; my guide, the Dutchman, refused to accompany me beyond the cataract; I paid him and joined a party of traders who were leaving to go down the Ohio; before setting out, I took a glance at the Canadian lakes. There is nothing so mournful as the aspect of these lakes. The liquid plains of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean open highways to the nations, and their shores are, or were, inhabited by civilized, numerous, and powerful peoples; the lakes of Canada display only the nakedness of their waters, which, in its turn, is joined to a bare soil: they are deserts dividing other deserts. Shores devoid of inhabitants look upon seas devoid of ships; you alight from the unfrequented waves upon unfrequented coasts.

[Sidenote: Lake Erie.]

Lake Erie is over one hundred leagues in circumference. The nations of the water-side were exterminated by the Iroquois two centuries ago. It is an appalling thing to see the Indians venturing in their birch-bark wherries upon this lake famed for its tempests, in which myriads of serpents swarmed in former days. These Indians hang their manitous upon the prow of their canoes and dart into the midst of the eddies among the heaving waves. The waves, level with the aperture of the canoes, seem ready to swallow them up. The hunters' dogs, with their front-paws resting on the side, utter loud barks, while their masters, preserving a profound silence, beat the waves in cadence with their paddles. The canoes proceed in Indian file: in the prow of the first stands a chief who repeats the diphthong _oah_: _o_ in a long, dull note, _ah_ in a short, sharp tone. In the last canoe is another chief, who also stands up, and works an oar by way of rudder. The other braves squat upon their heels at the bottom of the well. Across the mist and the winds one perceives nothing save the plumes adorning the Indians' heads, the outstretched necks of the baying dogs, and the shoulders of the two sachems, the pilot and the augur: as it were the gods of these lakes.

The rivers of Canada play no part in the history of the world of antiquity: how different from the destiny of the Ganges, the Euphrates, the Nile, the Danube, and the Rhine! What changes have not these beheld upon their banks! How much sweat and blood has been poured forth by conquerors to cross, in their current, waters over which, at their source, a goatherd passes with a single step!

*

Leaving the lakes of Canada, we came to Pittsburg at the confluence of the Kentucky and Ohio rivers; here the landscape unfolds an extraordinary stateliness. Nevertheless, this magnificent country is called Kentucky after its river, whose name means "river of blood." It owes this name to its beauty: for more than two centuries the nations on the side of the Cherokees and of the Iroquois nations fought for the possession of its hunting-fields.

Will the European generations be more virtuous and more free upon those banks than were the exterminated American generations? Shall slaves not till the soil beneath the lash of their masters, in these deserts of man's primeval independence? Shall prisons and gallows not fill the places of the open hut and the tall tulip-tree where the bird builds its nest? Shall the richness of the soil not cause new wars to burst forth? Shall Kentucky cease to be the "Land of Blood," and shall the monuments of the arts beautify the banks of the Ohio to better purpose than the monuments of nature?

After passing the Wabash, the Cypress, the Cumberland, the Cherokee, or Tennessee, the Yellowbank, one comes to a tongue of land often submerged beneath the mighty waters: here is formed the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi in latitude 36° 51'. The two rivers oppose an equal resistance to one another and relax the force of their currents; for some miles they sleep side by side without mingling in the same bed, like two great peoples at first of different origins and then combining to form but one race; like two illustrious combatants sharing the same couch after a battle; like a husband and wife born of hostile blood, who at first have but little inclination to mingle their destinies in the nuptial bed.

And I, too, even as the mighty urns of the rivers, have poured forth my life's small current, now on this, now on that side of the mountain; capricious in my straying, but never malignant; preferring the poor glens to the rich plains, stopping at the flowers rather than at the palaces. For that matter, I was so charmed with my rambles that I gave scarce a further thought to the Pole. A party of traders, who had come from among the Creeks, in Florida, gave me leave to accompany them.

We set out for the countries known at that time by the general name of the Floridas, today divided into the States of Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee. We followed, more or less closely, paths now connected by the high-road which runs from Natchez to Nashville, through Jackson and Florence, and which enters Virginia by way of Knoxville and Salem: a country very little frequented at that time, although Bartram[509] had explored its lakes and sites. The planters of Georgia and Florida proper went to the various tribes of the Creeks to buy horses and half-wild cattle, which multiplied indefinitely in the savannahs pierced by the wells at whose edges I placed Atala and Chactas. They even extended their journey as far as Ohio.

[Sidenote: I sail up the Ohio River.]

We ran before a stiff breeze. The Ohio, swollen by a hundred rivers, passed now through the lakes which opened out before us, now through the woods. Islands stood out in the middle of the lakes. We made sail for one of the largest of these: we came alongside at eight in the morning.

I crossed a meadow strewn with ragwort with its yellow flowers, hollyhocks with their pink plumes, and obelarias with purple egrets. An Indian ruin struck my eyes. The contrast between this ruin and the youth of nature, this monument of men in a desert, caused a great emotion. What people dwelt upon this island? Its name, its race, the time of its passing? Did it live at the time when the world in whose midst it lay hidden was as yet unknown to the three other quarters of the globe? The silence of this people was perhaps contemporaneous with the fame of some great nations that have in their turn lapsed into silence[510].

Sandy anfractuosities, ruins or _tumuli_ issued from amid poppies with red flowers hanging at the end of bent, pale-green stalks. The stem and the flower have an aroma which clings to the fingers when one touches the plant. The perfume which outlives the flower is an image of the memory of a life spent in solitude.

I observed the nymphæa: it was preparing to hide its white lily beneath the surface at the close of day; the "tree of sadness[511]" was awaiting the night before unfolding its own: the wife retires to bed at the hour when the courtesan rises.

The pyramidal œnothera, which is seven or eight feet high, with pale leaves dentated with dark green, has other habits and another destiny: its yellow flower begins to half-open in the evening, during the space of time which Venus occupies in descending below the horizon; it continues to expand by the light of the stars; the dawn discovers it in all its brilliancy; midway through the morning it fades; it falls at noonday. It lives for but a few hours; but it despatches those hours beneath a placid sky, between the breaths of Venus and Aurora: what matters, then, the shortness of life?

A streamlet trickled through a garland of dionæas; a multitude of day-flies buzzed all around. There were also humming-birds and butterflies which, decked in their brightest gauds, rivalled the motley flowers in splendour.

In the midst of these walks and studies, I was often struck by their futility. What! Did the Revolution, which already weighed down upon me and drove me into the woods, inspire me with no graver thoughts than these? What! Was the time of my country's confusion that which I chose to occupy myself with descriptions of plants, and butterflies, and flowers? The individuality of mankind serves as a measure of the littleness of great events. How many men are indifferent to those events! To how many others do they remain unknown! The aggregate population of the globe is estimated at from eleven to twelve hundred millions; a man dies every second: thus in each minute of our existence, of our smiles, of our joys, sixty men expire, sixty families moan and weep. Life is a permanent pestilence. The chain of mourning and funerals that winds us about is never broken, grows ever longer: we ourselves form one of its links. And then tell us to magnify the importance of the catastrophes of which seven-eighths of the world will never hear speak! To pant for a fame which will spread its wings at but a few leagues from our tomb! To plunge into the ocean of a felicity of which each minute slips away between sixty graves incessantly renewed!

Nam nox Nulla diem, neque noctem aurora sequuta est Quæ non audierit mixtos vagitibus ægris Ploratus, mortis comites et funeris atri.

The savages of Florida tell of an island in the middle of a lake where live the most beautiful women in the world. The Muskhogulges have repeatedly attempted its conquest; but this Eden flees before the canoes, a natural image of the chimeras which retreat before our desires. The country also contained a fountain of youth: who would wish to rise from the dead?

But little was wanting to make these fables assume a semblance of reality in my eyes. At a moment when we least expected it, we saw a flotilla of canoes come out of a bay, some with oars, others with sails. They landed at our island. They were two families of Creeks, of which one consisted of Seminoles, the other of Muskhogulges, including some Cherokees and Burnt-woods. I was struck with the grace of these savages, who in no respect resemble those of Canada.

[Sidenote: Two fair Floridans.]

The Seminoles and Muskhogulges are fairly tall, and, by an unusual contrast, their mothers, wives, and daughters are the smallest race of women known in America. The Indian women who landed near us, born of mixed Cherokee and Castilian blood, were tall in stature. Two of them were like the creoles of San Domingo and Mauritius, but yellow and delicate as the women of the Ganges. These two Floridan women, cousins on the father's side, served as my models, one for Atala, the other for Céluta: they excelled the portraits I drew of them only by that variable and fugitive truth of nature, that physiognomy of race and climate which I was not able to express. There was something indefinable in that oval visage, in that shaded complexion, which one seemed to see through a light, orange-tinted smoke, in that hair so black and soft, those eyes so long, half-hidden beneath the veil of two satiny eyelids that opened indolently; in short, in the two-fold seduction of the Indian and the Spanish woman.

The meeting with our hosts occasioned a certain alteration in our movements: our trading agents began to inquire about horses; it was decided that we should go to fix ourselves in the neighbourhood of the studs. The plain in which our camp stood was covered with bulls, cows, horses, bisons, buffaloes, cranes, turkeys, pelicans: these birds mottled the green background of our savannah with white, black, and pink stains.

Our traders and hunters were stirred by many passions: not passions of race, education, or prejudice, but natural passions, full and absolute, making straight for their object, having for witnesses a tree fallen in the depths of an unknown forest, a nameless stream. The relations between the Spaniards and the Creek women formed the ground-work of the adventures; the "Burnt-woods" played the principal part in those romances. One story was famous: that of a trader in strong waters seduced and ruined by a "painted woman" or courtesan. This story, put into Seminole verse with the title of _Tabamica_, was sung in passing through the woods[512]. Carried off in their turn by the colonists, the Indian women soon died forsaken at Pensacola[513]: their misfortunes went to swell the _Romanceros_ and to be numbered among the ballads of Ximenes.

*

The earth is a charming mother; we issue from her womb: in childhood, she holds us to her breasts swollen with milk and honey; in youth and old age, she lavishes upon us her refreshing waters, her harvests and her fruits; she offers us, wherever we may go, a shade, a bath, a table and a bed; she opens her entrails again to receive us after death, and throws a coverlet of herbs and flowers over our remains, while she secretly transforms us into her own substance, to reproduce us under some graceful shape. That is what I said to myself on waking, when my first look fell upon the sky, the canopy of my bed.

The hunters had set out for the work of the day; I remained behind with the women and children. I never left the side of my two sylvan goddesses: one was proud, the other sad. I did not understand a word of what they said to me, and they did not understand me; but I went to fetch water for their cup, shoots for their fire, mosses for their bed. They wore the petticoat and the wide, slashed sleeves of the Spanish women, the body and cloak of the Indian women. Their bare legs were cross-gartered with a lace-work of birch. They plaited their hair with posies or filaments of rushes; they mailed themselves in chains and necklaces of glass beads. From their ears hung purple berries; they had a fine talking paroquet: the bird of Armida; they fastened it on their shoulder like an emerald, or carried it hooded on their hand, as the great ladies of the tenth century carried their hawks. To harden their breasts and arms, they rubbed themselves with the apoya, or American gallingale. In Bengal the nautch-girls chew the betel-nut, and in the Levant the almes suck the mastic of Chio: the Floridan maidens pounded, between their teeth of a bluey whiteness, tears of liquid-amber and roots of _libanis_, which blended the fragrance of angelica, cedrat, and vanilla. They lived in an atmosphere of perfumes emanating from themselves, like orange-trees and flowers living in the pure exhalations from their leaves and chalices. I amused myself by placing a little ornament upon their heads: they submitted, gently dismayed; witches themselves, they thought I was working a charm upon them. One of them, the "proud" one, often prayed; she seemed to me half a Christian. The other sang in a voice of velvet, uttering at the end of each phrase a note that troubled one. Sometimes they spoke hastily to each other: I thought I could recognize the accents of jealousy, but the "sad" one wept, and silence was restored.

Weak as I was, I sought examples of weakness, in order to encourage myself. Had not Camoëns in the Indies loved a black Barbary slave, and might not I in America do homage to two young jonquil sultanas? Had Camoëns not addressed _endechas_, or stanzas, to his _Barbaru escrava?_[514]

*

A fishing-party was arranged. The sun was nearing its setting. In the foreground appeared sassafras, tulip-trees, catalpas, and oaks, from whose boughs hung skeins of white moss. Behind this foreground rose the most charming of trees, the papaw, which might have been taken for a chased silver style, surmounted by a Corinthian urn. In the background reigned balsam-trees, magnolias, and liquid-ambers.

[Sidenote: An exquisite landscape.]

The sun dropped behind that curtain: a ray piercing through the crown of a thicket sparkled like a carbuncle set in the sombre foliage; the light diverging between the trunks and branches projected heightening columns and mobile arabesques upon the sward. Below were lilacs, azaleas, annulated creepers with gigantic sheaves; above, the clouds, some fixed, like promontories or old towers, others fleeting, like rosy vapours or carded silk. By means of successive transformations, one saw the mouths of furnaces opening up in those clouds, heaps of embers piling themselves up, streams of lava flowing: all was dazzling, radiant, gilded, opulent, saturated with light.

After the Morean insurrection in 1770, some Greek families took refuge in Florida; they could still believe themselves in that Ionian climate which seems to have relented, together with men's passions: at Smyrna, in the evening, nature sleeps like a courtesan wearied with love.

On our right were ruins belonging to the great fortifications that were found on the Ohio, on our left an old savage camp. The island on which we were, pictured in the water and reproduced by a mirage, poised its double perspective before us. In the east, the moon rested upon distant hills; in the west, the vault of the sky was melted into a sea of diamonds and sapphires, in which the sun, half-immersed, appeared to be dissolving. The animals of creation were keeping watch; the earth, in adoration, seemed to offer incense to the sky, and the amber exhaled from its bosom fell back upon it in the form of dew, as prayers fall back upon those who pray.

Abandoned by my companions, I lay resting by the edge of a clump of trees: its darkness, glazed with light, formed the penumbra in which I sat. Fire-flies gleamed among the crape-covered shrubs and became obscured when they passed through the irradiations of the moon. I heard the sounds made by the rise and fall of the lake, the leap of the gold-fish, and the rare cry of the diver. My eyes were fixed upon the water; I gradually lapsed into the state of drowsiness known to men who travel the world's highways: I lost all clearness of recollection; I felt myself living and vegetating with nature in a kind of pantheism. I leant back against the trunk of a magnolia-tree and fell asleep; my slumbers floated upon a vague surface of hope.

When I emerged from this Lethe, I found myself between two women: the odalisks had returned; they did not wish to arouse me; they had sat down silently by my side; whether they had feigned sleep or had really slumbered, their heads had fallen on my shoulders.

A breeze blew through the grove and deluged us in a shower of rose-leaves from the magnolia. Then the younger of the Seminoles began to sing: let whomsoever is not sure of his life beware of ever thus exposing himself! No one knows the strength of the passion that glides with melody into a man's breast. A rude and jealous voice replied: a " Burnt-wood" was calling the two cousins; they started and rose: the dawn was beginning to break.

In the absence of Aspasia alone, I have since repeated this scene on the shores of Greece: ascending to the columns of the Parthenon with the dawn, I saw the Cithæron, Mount Hymettus, the Acropolis of Corinth, the tombs, the ruins, bathed in a dew of golden, transparent, shimmering light, reflected by the seas and wafted like a perfume by the zephyrs from Salamis and Delos.

We finished on the bank our voyage without words. At noon, we broke up the camp to inspect the horses which the Creeks wished to sell and the traders to buy. Women and children, all were summoned as witnesses, according to the custom in solemn bargains. Stallions of every age and colour, foals and mares, with bulls, cows and heifers, began to scamper and gallop around us. Amid this confusion, I became separated from the Creeks. A thick group of men and horses gathered on the skirt of a wood. Suddenly, in the distance, I perceived my two fair Floridans; vigorous hands seated them upon the cruppers of two barbs ridden bare-backed by a "Burnt-wood" and a Seminole. O Cid, why had not I thy swift Babieça that I might overtake them! The mares galloped off, the immense squadron followed them. The horses rushed, jumped, bounded, neighed, amid the horns of the bulls and buffaloes, their hoofs clashed in mid-air, their tails and manes flew blood-stained. A whirlwind of voracious insects swarmed about this wild cavalry. My Floridans disappeared from sight like Ceres' daughter, snatched by the god of the nether world.

[Sidenote: End of my Floridan romance.]

Thus does everything prove abortive in my life, thus is nought left me save pictures of what has passed so quickly: I shall descend to the Elysian Fields with more shades than mortal man has ever taken with him. The fault lies with my organization: I am never able to take advantage of any piece of good fortune; I can never take an interest in anything whatever that interests others. Putting religion aside, I have no beliefs. Shepherd or king, what should I have done with my sceptre or my crook? I should have wearied equally of glory or genius, work or leisure, prosperity or misfortune. Everything tires me: laboriously I tow my weariness after my days, and, wherever I go, I yawn away my life.

*

Ronsard[515] shows us Mary Stuart[516] ready to set out for Scotland after the death of François II[517]. Was I like Mary Stuart wandering through Fontainebleau, when I wandered about my savannah after my widowerhood? One thing is certain, that my mind, if not my person, was wrapped in "a long crape, subtil and flowing," as Ronsard also says, that old poet of the new school.

The devil having flown away with the Muskhogulge damsels, I was told by the guide that a "Burnt-wood," who was in love with one of the two women, was jealous of me and had resolved with a Seminole, the brother of the other cousin, to carry Atala and Céluta off from me. The guides spoke of them bluntly as "painted girls," which shocked my vanity. I felt the more humiliated in that the "Burnt-wood," my favoured rival, was a lean, ugly, dark-skinned mosquito, possessing all the characteristics of the insects which, according to the entomologists of the Grand Lama, are animals whose flesh is inside their bones. Solitude appeared empty to me after my misadventure. I gave the cold shoulder to my sylph, who generously hastened to console her faithless lover, like Julie when she forgave Saint-Preux his Parisian Floridans[518]. I lost no time in quitting the desert in which I have since resuscitated the drowsy companions of my night. I know not whether I gave back to them the life they gave me: at least I made a virgin of one, a virtuous spouse of the other, by way of expiation.

We again crossed the Blue Mountains, and approached the European clearings in the neighbourhood of Chillicothe. I had gathered no light upon the principal object of my enterprise; but I was escorted by a world of poetry:

Comme une jeune abeille aux roses engagée Ma muse revenait de son butin chargée[519].

On the bank of a stream I saw an American house: at one end a farm-house, at the other a mill. I went in, asked for food and shelter, and was well received.

My hostess led me by a ladder to a room above the shaft of the hydraulic apparatus. My little casement-window, festooned with ivy and cobæas with iris bells, opened above the stream which flowed, narrow and solitary, between two thick borders of willows, elms, sassafras, tamarinds, and Carolina poplars. The moss-grown mill-wheel turned beneath their shade and let fall long ribands of water. Perch and trout leapt in the foam of the eddy; water-wagtails flew from bank to bank, and various kinds of kingfishers fluttered their blue wings above the current.

How happy should I have been there with the "sad" one, had she been faithful to me, seated dreaming at her feet, my head laid upon her knees, listening to the noise of the weir, the rotations of the wheel, the rolling of the mill-stone, the sifting of the bolter, the even beating of the clapper, breathing the freshness of the water and the scent from the husks of the pearl-barley.

Night came. I went down to the sitting-room of the farm-house. It was lighted only by maize-straw and husks of beans blazing in the hearth. The fire-arms of the master of the house, lying horizontally in the gun-rack, gleamed in the reflections from the fireplace. I sat down upon a stool in the chimney-corner, near a squirrel, which jumped from the back of a large dog to the shelf of a spinning-wheel and back again. A kitten installed itself upon my knee to watch this sport. The miller's wife put a large stew-pot on the fire, the flames of which played round the pot's black bottom like a radiant golden crown. While I watched the sweet potatoes boiling for my supper, I amused myself by reading by the firelight, with lowered head, an English newspaper which had fallen on the floor between my legs. Printed in large letters I read the words:

FLIGHT OF THE KING.

It was the story of the flight of Louis XVI., and the arrest of the unfortunate monarch at Varennes[520]. The paper also described the progress of the emigration and the gathering of the officers of the army around the flag of the French Princes.

A sudden conversion took place within my mind. Rinaldo beheld his weakness in the mirror of honour in Armida's gardens; I was not Tasso's hero, but the same looking-glass showed me my image in the midst of an American orchard. The clash of arms, the world's tumult resounded in my ears under the thatch of a mill hidden in unknown woods. I abruptly interrupted my travels, and said to myself:

"Go back to France."

Thus it happened that my sense of duty upset my early plans, and occasioned the first of the revolutions that have marked my career. The Bourbons no more needed that a cadet of Brittany should return from across the seas to offer them his obscure devotion than they have needed his services since he has emerged from his obscurity. Had I lit my pipe with the newspaper which changed the course of my life, and continued my journey, no one would have remarked my absence; my life was at that time as unknown and weighed as little as the smoke from my calumet. A simple contest between myself and my conscience flung me upon the world's stage. I could have acted as I pleased, since I alone was a witness of the struggle; but, of all witnesses, that is the one before whose eyes I should most fear to blush.

Why is it that the solitudes of Erie and Ontario present themselves to my thoughts today with a charm which the brilliant spectacle of the Bosphorus is not able to possess in my memory? It is because, at the time of my journey in the United States, I was full of illusions: the troubles of France commenced at the same time as the commencement of my existence; nothing was complete in myself or in the land of my birth. Those days are dear to me because they recall to me the innocence of sentiments inspired by the family and the pleasures of youth.

Fifteen years later, after my journey in the Levant, the Republic, swollen with ruins and tears, had discharged itself like a torrent from the deluge into despotism. I no longer deluded myself with chimeras; my recollections, thenceforth taking their source in society and passions, lacked candour. Deceived in both my pilgrimages to the West and to the East, I had failed to discover the passage to the Pole, I had failed to snatch glory on the banks of Niagara, where I had gone in search of it, and I had left it seated on the ruins of Athens.

After setting out to be a traveller in America and returning to be a soldier in Europe, I did not go the whole length of either of those careers: an evil genius snatched the staff and the sword from my hand, and put the pen there in its stead. Fifteen more years have elapsed since, finding myself at Sparta, and contemplating the sky during the night, I recalled the countries that had already witnessed my peaceful or troubled sleep: on the commons of England, in the plains of Italy, upon the high-seas, in the Canadian forests, I had already saluted the same stars which I saw shine upon the land of Helen and Menelaus. But what would it avail me to complain to the stars, the fixed witnesses of my vagrant destinies? One day their gaze will cease to tire itself by pursuing me; meantime, indifferent to my fate, I will not ask those stars to move it with a gentler influence nor to restore to me that portion of life which the traveller leaves behind in the places at which he touches.

Were I to revisit the United States today, I should no longer recognize them: there where I left forests, I should find tilled fields; there where I traced a path for myself across the thickets, I should travel on the high-roads; at Natchez, instead of Céluta's hut, stands a town of some five thousand inhabitants; Chactas might today be sent to Congress. I have lately received a pamphlet printed among the Cherokees and addressed to myself, in the interests of those savages, as "the defender of the liberty of the press."

In the land of the Muskhogulges, the Seminoles, the Chickasaws, we find a city of Athens, another of Marathon, another of Carthage, another of Memphis, another of Sparta, another of Florence; there is a County of Columbia and a County of Marengo: the glory of every country has placed a name in the same wastes where I met Father Aubry and the obscure Atala. Kentucky exhibits a Versailles; a territory called Bourbon has a Paris for its capital.

All the exiles, all the fugitives from oppression who have taken refuge in America have carried there the memory of their country.

Falsi Simoentis ad undam Libabat cineri Andromache[521].

The United States offer in their bosom, under the protection of liberty, an image and a memory of the greater part of the famous spots of antiquity and of modern Europe: the Emperor Hadrian caused copies of the monuments of his empire to be placed in his garden in the Roman Campagna.

[Sidenote: American progress.]

Thirty-three high-roads run out of Washington, as formerly the Roman roads started from the Capitol; spreading asunder, they end at the circumference of the United States and trace a circulation of 25,747 miles. Posting-stations are established on a large number of these roads. One now takes the coach for the Ohio or Niagara as in my time one took a guide or an Indian interpreter. The means of transport are two-fold: lakes and rivers abound, and are connected by canals; you can travel alongside of the high-roads in rowing or sailing-boats, barges or steamers. Fuel is inexhaustible, since immense forests cover coal-mines level with the surface.

The population of the United States has increased in every decade from 1790 to 1820 at the rate of 35 per cent. It is calculated that in 1830 the population will amount to 12,875,000 souls. Continuing to double every twenty-five years, it should amount in 1855 to 25,750,000 souls, and twenty-five years later, in 1880, it should exceed fifty millions[522].

This human sap causes the wilderness to thrive on every side. The Canadian lakes, on which lately no sail was to be seen, now resemble docks in which frigates, corvettes, cutters and barks pass Indian pirogues and canoes, in the same way in which the big ships and galleys mix with the pinks, sloops and caiques in the waters of Constantinople. The Mississippi, the Missouri, the Ohio no longer pursue a solitary course: three-masters ascend their currents; over two hundred steam-boats enliven their banks. This immense inland navigation, which alone would ensure the prosperity of the United States, does not lessen their distant expeditions. Their vessels sail all the seas, engage in all forms of enterprise, carry the Stars and Stripes from the horizon of the setting sun to the shores where the sun rises, shores that have never known aught but slavery.

To complete this surprising scene, one must picture to one's self cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans, lighted at night, filled with horses and carriages, adorned with coffee-houses, museums, libraries, ball-rooms, theatres, displaying all the enjoyments of luxury.

At the same time, the United States must not be searched for that which distinguishes man above the other beings of creation, for that which constitutes his certificate of immortality and the ornament of his days: literature is unknown in the new republic, although called for by a multitude of institutions. The American has replaced intellectual by positive operations. Do not impute to him as an inferiority his mediocrity in the arts, for it is not in that direction that he has turned his attention. Cast through various causes upon a desert soil, he made agriculture and commerce the first objects of his cares: before thinking, one must live; before planting trees, one must fell them, in order to till the ground.

The primitive colonists, it is true, their minds steeped in religious controversy, carried the passion for disputation into the very heart of the forests; but it was necessary for them first to shoulder their axes and march to the conquest of the desert: their sole pulpit, in the intervals between their labours, was the elm they were engaged in squaring. The Americans have not passed through the ages of other nations: they left their childhood and their youth in Europe; the artless words of the cradle were unknown to them; they enjoyed the delights of home only through the medium of their regrets for a native land which they had never seen, and of which they mourned the eternal absence and the charm they had heard of from others.

The new continent has no classical literature, nor romantic literature, nor Indian literature: for the classical, the Americans have no models; for the romantic, no middle-ages; I for the Indian, the Americans despise the savages and loathe the sight of the woods as of a prison to which they were once condemned.

And thus it comes that literature as a thing apart, literature properly so-called, does not exist in America; what one finds is applied literature, answering to the different needs of society: the literature of workmen, merchants, sailors, farmers. Americans succeed in mechanics and science, because science has its material side. Franklin[523] and Fulton[524] took possession of lightning and steam for the benefit of mankind. It fell to America to endow the world with the discovery, thanks to which no continent can henceforward escape the mariner's search.

Poetry and imagination, the portion of a very small number of idlers, are regarded in the United States as puerilities appertaining to the first and to the last age of life. The Americans have had no childhood and have as yet had no old age.

[Sidenote: The American presidents.]

Hence it follows that men engaged upon serious studies have necessarily been obliged to take part in the affairs of their country in order to become acquainted with them, and in the same way they inevitably found themselves actors in their revolution. But one melancholy fact must be observed, which is the prompt degeneration of talent, from the first men, who figured in the American troubles, down to the men of these latter days; and yet those men all touch. The old presidents of the Republic have a religious, simple, lofty, calm character, of which we find no trace in the blood-stained tumults of our own Republic and Empire. The solitude with which the Americans were surrounded reacted upon their nature; they achieved their liberty in silence.

General Washington's farewell address[525] to the people of the United States might have been uttered by the gravest characters of antiquity:

"How far in the discharge of my official duties," says the General, "I have been guided by the principles which have been delineated, the public records and other evidence of my conduct must witness to you, and to the world. To myself, the assurance of my own conscience is, that I have at least believed myself to be guided by them....

"Though, in reviewing the incidents of my Administration, I am unconscious of intentional error--I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors. Whatever they may be, I fervently beseech the Almighty to avert or mitigate the evils to which they may tend. I shall also carry with me the hope that my country will never cease to view them with indulgence; and that, after forty-five years of my life dedicated to its service, with an upright zeal, the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the mansions of rest."

Jefferson[526] in his house at Monticello, wrote, after the death of one of his two children:

"The loss which I have experienced is a really great one. Others may lose of that which they possess in abundance, but I, of my whole portion, have now to deplore the loss of one-half. The declining years of my life are now held up by the slender thread of one human life. Perhaps I am destined to see the last tie of a father's affection broken!"

Philosophy, which is rarely touching, is here touching in the highest degree. And this is not the idle grief of a man who had played no part in life. Jefferson died on the 4th of July 1826, in the eighty-fourth year of his age, and the fifty-fourth year of the independence of his country. His remains lie covered with a stone, having for sole epitaph the words:

THOMAS JEFFERSON,

AUTHOR OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.

Pericles and Demosthenes pronounced the funeral oration of the young Greeks who had fallen for a people that disappeared soon after themselves: in 1817, Brackenridge[527] celebrated the death of the young Americans whose blood gave birth to a nation.

We have a national gallery of portraits of distinguished Americans, in four volumes octavo, and what is more singular, a biography containing the lives of over one hundred of the principal Indian chiefs. Logan[528], the Virginian chief, uttered these words before Lord Dunmore[529]:

"Colonel Cresap[530], the last spring, in cold blood and unprovoked, murdered all the relations of Logan. There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature that called on me for revenge. I have sought it; I have killed many.... Who is there to mourn for Logan? Not one."

Without loving nature, the Americans have applied themselves to the study of natural history. Townsend[531] set out from Philadelphia and traversed on foot the regions separating the Atlantic from the Pacific Ocean, jotting down numerous observations in his journal. Thomas Say[532], who travelled in Florida and in the Rocky Mountains, has published a work on American entomology. Wilson[533], a weaver who became an author, has left some rather finished pictures.

[Sidenote: American literature.]

To turn to literature proper, although it does not amount to much, there are, nevertheless, a few writers to be mentioned among the novelists and poets. Brown[534], the son of a Quaker, is the author of _Wieland_, which is the source and model of the novels of the new school. Unlike his fellow-countrymen:

"I prefer," said Brown, "roaming in the forests to thrashing corn."

Wieland, the hero of the novel, is a Puritan whom Heaven has commanded to kill his wife:

"'I have brought thee hither,' says he to her, 'to fulfil a divine command. I am appointed thy destroyer, and destroy thee I must.'

"Saying this, I seized her wrists. She shrieked aloud, and endeavoured to free herself from my grasp....

"'Wieland.... Am I not thy wife? And wouldst thou kill me? Thou wilt not; oh!... Spare me-spare-help, help--'

"Till her breath was stopped she shrieked for help-for mercy."

*

Wieland strangles his wife, and experiences unspeakable delights by the side of her dead corpse. The horror of our modern inventions is here surpassed. Brown had trained his mind by reading _Caleb Williams_[535], and in _Wieland_ he copied a scene from _Othello._

At the present day, the American novelists Cooper[536] and Washington Irving[537] are obliged to take refuge in Europe to find chronicles and a public. The language of the great English writers has been "creolized," "provincialized," "barbarized," without gaining anything in energy in the midst of a virgin nature; it has become necessary to draw up catalogues of American expressions.

As to the American poets, their language has charm, but they rarely rise above the common-place. Still, the _Ode to the Evening Breeze_, the _Sunrise on the Mount_, the _Torrent_, and some other poems, deserve a passing glance. Halleck[538] has sung the death of Bozzaris, and George Hill[539] has wandered among the Ruins of Athens:

Alas! for her, the beautiful, but lone, Dethroned queen[540]!...

And again:

There sits the queen of temples[541]--grey and lone. She, like the last of an imperial line, Has seen her sister structures, one by one, To time their gods and worshippers resign[542].

It pleases me, a traveller on the shores of Hellas and Atlantis, to hear the independent voice of a land unknown to antiquity lamenting the lost liberty of the old world.

[Sidenote: American politics.]

But will America preserve her form of government? Will the States not become divided? Has not a representative of Virginia already maintained the theory of ancient liberty with slaves, the result of paganism, against a representative of Massachusetts, defending the cause of modern liberty without slaves, as Christianity made it? Are not the Northern and Southern States opposed in mind and interests? Will not the Western States, so far removed from the Atlantic, wish to have a separate government? On the one hand, is the federal bond sufficiently powerful to maintain the union, and to compel each State to draw closer to it? On the other hand, if the presidential power be increased, will not despotism come with the guards and privileges of the dictator?

The isolation of the United States has permitted them to spring into being and to increase: it is doubtful whether they would have been able to exist and grow in Europe. Federal Switzerland subsists in our midst; but why? Because she is small, poor, cantoned in the bosom of the mountains, a nursery of soldiers for kings, a goal for travellers.

Separated from the old world, the population of the United States still inhabits the solitude: its deserts have been its liberty; but already the conditions of its existence are altering.

The existence of the democracies of Mexico, Columbia, Peru, Chile, Buenos Ayres, always troubled as they are, constitute a danger. When the United States had nothing near them except the colonies of a Transatlantic kingdom, no serious war was probable; now, are there not rivalries to be dreaded? Let men on both sides have recourse to arms, let the military spirit seize upon the children of Washington, and a great captain may rise to the throne: glory loves crowns.

I have said that the Northern, Southern, and Western States were divided in interests; that is common knowledge: if these States break up the union, will they be reduced by force of arms? In that case, what a leaven of hatred will be spread through the social body! Will the dissenting States maintain their independence? In that case, what discords will not break out among those emancipated States! Those republics across the sea, once uncoupled, would no longer form aught save feeble units without weight in the social balance, where they would be successively subjugated by one of their number (I leave on one side the serious question of alliances and foreign intervention). Kentucky, peopled as it is with a race of men bred in the open air, harder and more soldier-like, would seem destined to become the conquering State. In this State devouring the others, the power of one would soon rise upon the ruins of the power of all.

I have spoken of the danger of war; I must point out the dangers of a long peace. Since their emancipation, the United States have, with the exception of a few months, enjoyed the most profound tranquillity; while Europe was shaken with a hundred battles, the United States tilled their fields in safety. Hence we find an overflowing population and riches, with all the drawbacks of a superabundance of riches and population. If hostilities came unexpectedly upon an unwarlike people, would it be able to offer resistance? Would its fortunes and habits consent to sacrifices? How could it give up the bland usages, the comfort, the indolent well-being of life? China and India, asleep in their muslin draperies, have constantly endured the foreign yoke. That which is best suited to the complexion of a free society is a state of peace moderated by war, and a state of war tempered with peace. The Americans have already worn the olive-crown too long continuously: the tree that provides it is not a native of their shores.

The commercial spirit is beginning to take possession of them; self-interest is becoming their national vice. Already the speculations of the banks of the different States clash with one another, and bankruptcies threaten the fortunes of the community. So long as liberty produces gold, an industrial republic does wonders; but when the gold is acquired or exhausted, it loses its love of independence, which is not based upon a moral sentiment, but arises from the thirst for gain and the passion for trade.

Moreover, it is difficult to create a mother-country among States which have nothing in common in religion or interests, which, issuing from various sources and at various times, live on a different soil and under a different sun. What connection is there between a Frenchman of Louisiana, a Spaniard of Florida, a German of New York, an Englishman of New England, Virginia, Carolina, Georgia, who are all reckoned as Americans? One is thoughtless and a duelist; the next a Catholic, lazy and haughty; the other a Lutheran, a husbandman, with no slaves; another, an Anglican and a planter, with negroes; yet another, a Puritan and a merchant: how many centuries will be needed to make these elements homogeneous?

A chrysogenous[543] aristocracy is ready to appear with the love of distinctions and the passion for titles. Men think that a general level prevails in the United States: that is a complete mistake. There are sets in their society which despise one another and refuse to mix; there are houses in which the arrogance of the master exceeds that of a German prince with sixteen quarterings. These plebeian nobles aspire to form a caste in the face of the progress in enlightenment which made them equal and free. Some of them speak of nothing but their ancestors, proud barons, bastards apparently and companions of William the Bastard. They display the knightly blazons of the Old World, enriched with the serpents, lizards, and parrots of the New. A Gascon younger son, landing on the republican shores with nothing but his nobility and his umbrella, becomes a person of consideration on the steam-boats, if he will only take care to call himself "marquis."

[Sidenote: American manners.]

The enormous inequality of fortunes threatens still more seriously to kill the spirit of equality. There are Americans with incomes of one or two millions a year; and already the Yankees of high society are no longer able to live as Franklin did: the true "gentleman," disgusted with his new country, goes to Europe in search of the old; one meets him at the inns, making "tours" in Italy like the English, tours marked by extravagance or spleen. These ramblers from Carolina or Virginia buy ruined abbeys in France, and lay out English gardens with American trees at Melun. Naples sends its singers and perfumers to New York, Paris its fashions and dancers, London its grooms and prize-fighters: exotic delights which do not add to the gaiety of the Union. There they amuse themselves by jumping into the Falls of Niagara, amid the applause of fifty thousand planters, semi-savages whose merriment is with difficulty aroused by the sight of death.

And what is so extraordinary is that, at the very time when the inequality of fortunes is extending and an aristocracy is springing into being, the great levelling movement outside obliges the industrial or landed proprietors to hide their luxury, to dissimulate their wealth, for fear of being knocked on the head by their neighbours. These refuse to recognize the executive power; they dismiss the local authorities whom they have chosen at will, and elect others in their stead. This in no way disturbs order; practical democracy is observed, while the laws laid down by the same democracy in theory are laughed at. The family spirit scarcely exists; so soon as the child is fit to work, he has to fly with his own wings, like the newly-fledged bird. Out of these generations emancipated in a premature orphanage, and out of the emigrants arriving from Europe, are formed nomadic companies which clear the land, dig canals, and carry their trade in every direction without becoming attached to the soil; they run up houses in the desert in which the transient owner will live scarce a few days.

A cold and hard egotism reigns in the towns; piastres and dollars, bank-notes and silver, the rise and fall of stocks, these form the sole subject of conversation: one imagines one's self on 'Change or in the counting-house of a large shop. The newspapers, huge in dimensions, are filled with business articles or scurrilous gossip. Could the Americans be unconsciously submitting to the law of a climate in which vegetable nature seems to have benefited at the expense of living nature, a law combated by some distinguished minds, and yet not put entirely out of court by its refutation? It might be worth while to inquire whether the American has not been too soon used up in philosophic liberty, as the Russian has been in civilized despotism.

To sum up, the United States give the idea of a colony, not of a parent country; they have no past, their manners owe their existence to the laws. These citizens of the New World took rank among the nations at the moment when political ideas were entering upon an upward phase: this explains why they change with such extraordinary rapidity. A permanent form of society seems to become impracticable in their case, thanks, on the one hand, to the extreme weariness of individuals; on the other, to the impossibility of remaining in one spot, the necessity for movement, by which they are dominated: for one is never very firmly fixed where the household gods are wandering gods. Placed on the ocean road, at the head of progressive opinions as new as his country, the American seems to have received from Columbus a mission to discover fresh worlds rather than to create them.

*

On returning to Philadelphia from the desert, as I have already said, having hurriedly written on the road "what I have just related," like the old man in La Fontaine, I did not find the remittances I expected: this was the commencement of the pecuniary difficulties in which I have been plunged ever since. Fortune and I conceived a mutual dislike at first sight. According to Herodotus, certain Indian ants used to heap together piles of gold; according to Athenæus, the sun gave Hercules a golden ship in which to accost the island of Erythia, the home of the Hesperides: ant though I be, I have not the honour to belong to the great Indian family; and navigator though I be, I have never crossed the sea, save in a wooden bark. It was a vessel of this kind which brought me back to Europe from America. The captain gave me my passage on credit. On the 10th of December 1791, I embarked with several of my fellow-countrymen who were returning to France, like myself, for various reasons. The ship's destination was the Havre.

[Sidenote: I return to Europe.]

A westerly gale caught us at the mouth of the Delaware and drove us right across the Atlantic in seventeen days. Often, scudding under bare poles, we were scarcely able to bring to. The sun did not appear a single time. The vessel, steering by a dead reckoning, flew before the waves. I crossed the ocean among shadows; never had it looked to me so sad. I myself, sadder still, was returning deceived, after my first step taken in life:

"Palaces are not built upon the sea," says the Persian poet Feryd-Eddyn[544].

I felt a vague heaviness of heart, as at the approach of a great misfortune. Turning my eyes over the waves, I asked them to tell me my destiny, or else I used to write, more inconvenienced by their motion than troubled by their threats.

So far from calming, the tempest increased the nearer we came to Europe; but it blew steadily: the uniformity of its raging produced a sort of furious lull in the wan sky and leaden sea. The captain, having no means of taking the altitude, was uneasy; he climbed into the shrouds and scanned each point of the horizon through a telescope. A look-out was placed on the bowsprit, another in the main-top-mast cross-trees. The sea became choppy, and the colour of the water changed, signs that we were approaching land: what land? The Breton sailors have a proverb, "Who sees Belle-Isle sees his isle; who sees Groie sees his joy; who sees Ouessant's shore sees his gore."

I had spent two nights in walking the deck, to the hissing of the waves in the dark, the moaning of the wind in the rigging, and the constant dashing of the sea which swept the decks: the waves rioted all around us. Tired with the shocks and jerks of the vessel, I went below early on the third night. The weather was terrible; my hammock creaked and rocked with the blows of the sea, which, breaking over the vessel, threatened to dislocate her very planks. Soon I heard men running from one end of the deck to the other, and coils of rope falling: I experienced the motion which one feels when a vessel is put about. The hatch of the steerage ladder was thrown open; a frightened voice called for the captain: that voice, in the middle of the night and the tempest, sounded tremendous. I listened; I thought I heard sailors discussing the lie of a coast. I tumbled out of my hammock; a sea drove in the quarter-deck, flooded the captain's room, knocked over and rolled pell-mell tables, mattresses, chests, furniture, and arms; I made my way on deck half-drowned.

When I put my head out of the steerage, a splendid sight met my eyes. The ship had tried to put about; but, failing in this attempt she had become embayed under the stress of the wind. By the light of the moon, her horns broken by the clouds, from beneath which she emerged only to be hidden by them again, we discovered on either side of the ship, through a yellow fog, a coast bristling with rocks. The sea threw up waves like mountains in the channel in which we found ourselves engulfed: now they scattered into foam and spray; again they presented merely an oily and vitreous surface, mottled with black, coppery, or greenish stains, according to the colour of the bottom over which they roared. During two or three minutes, the moaning of the abyss and that of the wind would be confused; the next moment, one distinguished the ripple of the currents, the hissing on the reefs, the voice of the distant surge. From the hold of the ship issued sounds which made the hearts of the stoutest sailors beat faster. The stem of the vessel cut through the thick mass of waves with a hideous crash, and, at the helm, torrents of water flowed away eddying as from the mouth of a sluice. Amid all this uproar, nothing was so alarming as a certain dull, murmuring sound, like that of a vase filling.

Lighted by a ship's lantern and held down by weights, harbour-books, charts, and log-books lay spread out upon a hen-coop. A gust of wind had put out the binnacle-lamp. Every one was at variance about the land. We had entered the Channel without noticing it; the vessel, staggering under each wave, was drifting between the islands of Guernsey and Alderney. Our shipwreck appeared inevitable, and the passengers put up their valuables to save them.

The crew included some French seamen; one of them, in the absence of a chaplain, raised the hymn to "Our Lady of Succour," the first thing I had learnt as a child; I repeated it in sight of the coast of Brittany, almost under my mother's eyes. The American Protestant sailors joined in chorus in the song of their French Catholic mates: danger teaches men their weakness and unites their prayers. All, passengers and sailors, were on deck, one clinging to the rigging, another to the sides, another to the capstan, others to the bills of the anchors, in order not to be swept away by the sea or thrown overboard by the heaving of the ship. The captain shouted, "An axe! an axe!" to cut away the masts; and the rudder, of which the tiller had been forsaken, swung from side to side with a harsh sound.

[Sidenote: And I am nearly shipwrecked.]

One experiment remained to be tried: the lead marked only four fathoms on a sand-bank which crossed the channel; it was just possible that the swell might enable us to clear this bank and carry us into deep water; but who would dare to seize the helm and charge himself with the common safety? One false turn of the tiller, and we were lost.

One of those men who spring from events and who are the spontaneous children of danger was found: a New York sailor took the post deserted by the steersman. I seem still to see him in his shirt and canvas trousers, his bare feet, his tangled streaming hair, holding the tiller in his powerful grasp, while, with turned head, he looked over the stern at the sea which was to save or sink us. See that great wave coming, embracing the whole width of the channel, rolling high without breaking, as it were a sea invading the billows of another sea: large white birds go before with a calm flight, like the birds of death. The ship touched and struck; there was a complete silence; every face turned pale. The swell came: at the moment when it touched us, the sailor put down the helm; the vessel, just ready to fall on her side, turned her stern, and the swell, which seemed about to swallow us, lifted her. The lead was heaved; it registered twenty-seven fathoms. A cheer rose to the sky, and we added a shout of "Long live the King!" God did not hear it for Louis XVI.; it benefited none save ourselves.

Although clear of the two islands, we were not out of danger; we were unable to run up above the coast of Granville. At last the ebbing tide carried us out, and we doubled Cape La Hougue. I experienced no agitation during the semi-shipwreck and felt no delight at being saved. Better to give up possession of one's life while young than to be evicted from it by time.

The next day we entered the Havre. The whole population had come out to see us. Our top-masts were broken, our boats carried away, our quarter-deck cut down, and we shipped water at every pitch of the vessel. I landed on the jetty. On the 2nd of January 1792, I once more trod my native soil, which was soon again to slip from under ray feet I brought with me no Esquimaux from the Polar regions, but two savages of an unknown species: Chactas and Atala.

[427] This book was written in London between April and September 1822, and revised December 1846.--T.

[428] The 5th of April was the date of Chateaubriand's arrival in London. He landed at Dover from the French packet Antigone, on the evening of the 4th (_Moniteur_, 11 April 1822).--B.

[429] This should read the Ship Inn, also known as Wright's Hotel.--T.

[430] Baron A. Billing, _attaché_ to the French Embassy in London (1822), and afterwards _chargé d'affaires_ at Naples (1834).--B.

[431] The Comte Georges de Caraman, son of the Duc de Caraman, Ambassador to Vienna.--B.

[432] Marie Louis Jean André Charles Demartin du Tyrac, Comte de Marcellus (1795-1865). While secretary of embassy in 1820, he discovered the Venus of Milo, now at the Louvre. He was _chargé d'affaires_ in London during Chateaubriand's absence at the Congress of Verona, and was appointed Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs in the Polignac Ministry. Marcellus was the author of, among other works, a valuable volume on the subject of these Memoirs, entitled, _Chateaubriand et son temps._--B.

[433] François Adolphe Comte de Bourqueney (1799-1869). Here signed upon Chateaubriand's dismissal in 1824. In 1840 he was again secretary of embassy in London, _chargé d'affaires_ in 1841, Ambassador to Constantinople in 1844, and Ambassador to Vienna under the Second Empire. Louis-Philippe created him a baron (1842), and Napoleon III. a count (1859).--B.

[434]

"Ah, my Lord, how your Lordship's life, In which such honours now are rife, Differs from those happy days!" --T.

[435] The Duc Decazes was French Ambassador in London from 17 February 1820 to 9 February 1822.--B.

[436] George IV. (1762-1850) came to the throne in 1820, after being Prince Regent since 1811.--T.

[437] Robert Banks Jenkinson, second Earl of Liverpool (1770-1828), Prime Minister from 1812 to 1827.--T.

[438] Chateaubriand refers to the statue of James II., not Charles II., which stood until recent years in Whitehall Gardens, behind Whitehall, and was entirely hidden from view by the United Service Institute. This very beautiful statue has now been placed in a more conspicuous position in a garden standing back from the Whitehall pavement, beside Gwydyr House.--T.

[439] Marie Antoinette was guillotined 16 October 1793; 21 January was the date of the execution of Louis XVI.--T.

[440] Robert Stewart, second Marquess of Londonderry, K.G. (1769-1822), Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in the Liverpool Ministry. He bore the title of Viscount Castlereagh until the death of his father in 1821. He cut his throat on the 13th of August of this same year 1822.--T.

[441] Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, K.G. (1769-1852) became Premier in 1828.--T.

[442] George Canning (1770-1827) became Foreign Secretary upon the suicide of Castlereagh.--T.

[443] Sarah Child Villiers, Countess of Jersey (1787-1867), was Lady Sarah Fane, eldest daughter of the tenth Earl of Westmorland, and grand-daughter of Robert Child the banker, whose fortune she inherited. She married George Villiers, fourth Earl of Jersey, who assumed the additional surname of Child in 1812, and became one of the reigning queens of London society.--T.

[444] Henry Brougham, first Lord Brougham and Vaux (1778-1868), had lately made his name as counsel for Queen Caroline at her trial (1820). He became Lord Chancellor and a peer in 1834.--T.

[445] Priscilla Barbara Elizabeth Lady Gwydyr (1761-1828) _née_ Bertie, widow of the first Lord Gwydyr, and Baroness Willoughby de Eresby in her own right.--T.

[446] Louisa Murray, Countess of Mansfield (_d._ 1843), was the Honourable Louisa Cathcart, daughter of the ninth Baron Cathcart, and became Countess of Mansfield in her own right. In 1776 she married her cousin David, seventh Viscount Stormont and second Earl of Mansfield. He died in 1793, and in 1797 she married the Honourable Fulke Greville, retaining her title as Countess of Mansfield.--T.

[447] Almack's, the ball-room in King Street, St. James's, retained its vogue from 1765 to 1840. Lady Mansfield was one of the lady patronesses of Almack's.--T.

[448] Julie Récamier (1777-1849), _née_ Bernard, wife of Récamier the banker. A woman of great beauty and charm; she was painted by David and Gérard, and sat to Canova for his bust of Beatrix. Chateaubriand became and remained until his death the most intimate and assiduous of her friends.--T.

[449] Captain James Cook (1728-1779). His discoveries were still fresh in the public mind in 1792.--T.

[450] Chateaubriand met François Tulloch in 1826, after writing this portion of his Memoirs. He does not tell us much about him even in the _Essai sur les Révolutions_, where he speaks of Tulloch at some length. It would appear, according to Chateaubriand, that he was the son of an English father and a Scotch mother, and that he did not eventually take orders, but remained in the world and married.--T.

[451] VIR., _Æ._ I. 164. The correct quotation runs: _Æquora tuta silent._--T.

[452] The Azores were known to the Carthaginians, but fell out of the map until rediscovered in 1431.--T.

[453] GEN. i. 10.--T.

[454] Agostino Pantaleone Giustiniani (1470-1531), Bishop of Nebbis in Corsica, and author of the _Psalterium hebraicum, græcum, arabicum, chaldaicum, cum tribus latinis interpretationibus et glossis_, the first work of its kind published. Giustiniani was drowned in crossing from Genoa to Corsica.--T.

[455] Ps. XVIII.--T.

[456] _Ibid._ 6.--T.

[457] Luiz de Camoëns (1517 or 1525-1579), author of the _Lusiad_ which treats of the exploits of Vasco da Gama, spent many years in India and in exile in Macao, where he wrote his principal poem. On his return from banishment, he was wrecked off the coast of Cochin China, where he is said to have lost all he possessed, except the manuscript of the _Lusiad._--T.

[458] Guillaume le Breton (_circa_ 1165-_circa_ 1220), the historian of Philip Augustus. The quotation is from his chronicle entitled, _Philippidos libri duodecime, sive Gesta Philippi Augusti, versibus heroïcis descripta._--T.

[459] Ps. CVII. 27.--T.

[460]

"Burning with immortal ardour, 'Tis to God my hopes are turned."--T.

[461] TASSO, _Gerusalemme Liberata_, XV. 27.--B.

[462] Jacques Cartier (1494--_circa_ 1554), the discoverer of Newfoundland and of the greater part of Canada.--T.

[463] _Génie du Christianisme_, Part I .