Tea at Trianon: Only Style Survives: On Chateaubriand

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, January 12, 2023

Only Style Survives: On Chateaubriand

From The Paris Review:

I compile an undisciplined index on the flyleaf of the first volume as I read it, as a future aid to memory but also for the private pleasure of watching this crooked list accrue in its variously colored inks. On page 336 he haughtily refers to Rousseau as a kind of cobbler or a schoolmaster. His praise for Lord Byron receives an entire chapter in the twelfth book. As a boy he learns about love from the Latin poets: he voluptuously reads Lucretius in bed at night, by the light of stolen candles....Chateaubriand’s own boyhood coverlet was almost certainly of coarse manufacture; his father’s version of domestic economy in their moldering château was Spartan, inadvertently preparing the writer for his future exile and penury. An aficionado of exile, four times he mentions the troubadours in the first volume. Of all the items I have noted in my index, the one with the most entries is tomb. This shouldn’t surprise: everyone dies. Entire languages violently disappear. There’s not a place on earth, he says, that’s tombless. It is to him the most fascinating subject. He sees America, where he traveled at length during the Terror of the French Revolution, as nothing but the tomb of the great Indigenous nations reduced to ruin by Europe. On page 493, he describes how at Niagara Falls he heard an Iroquois girl named Mila sing a song about the beautiful pattern of the adder’s skin; as she sings, he realizes that he already knows the song, which was recorded, he says, in an essay by Montaigne, who had heard a different Iroquois girl sing it two centuries before in Rouen. I am enchanted by this incredible story, so I look further, and learn the adder song has a spurious linkage. The girl at Niagara Falls could not have sung the song cited by Montaigne, who writes in his 1580 account “Of Cannibals” that it was sung by a captive Tupinambá girl from Brazil, in the Tupi language. So am I to believe Chateaubriand when he says that he has handled the decomposed skull of Marie Antoinette? It is he who identified the remains of the guillotined queen, he claims, which had been thrown perfunctorily into a collective pit. He knew her, he says, by means of the set of the teeth in the jawbone; at Versailles, in his youth, he had been familiar with the Queen’s wide smile.

In July of 1791, alone in the forest near Albany, seeking, as he explained, the Northwest Passage, and believing himself to be in a primordial embrace with Nature, Chateaubriand heard the sound of a fiddle in the woods. He approached the surprising music to discover in a clearing a French dancing master in a powdered wig, apple-green suit, and lace jabot and cuffs, playing a tune for a group of twenty bare-torsoed, feather-wearing, dancing Iroquois men. These were the first Indigenous people the young exile had ever met. The fiddler’s tune, “Madelon Friquet,” had been a popular French fairground song. French dancing masters were then common in America, the notes inform me, having been displaced and there being no further call for them during the revolution. A faintly comedic melancholy is this book’s mother tongue.

Chateaubriand says that the pleasures of youth revisited in memory are ruins seen by torchlight. I don’t know whether I’m the ruin or the torch.

Montaigne was dead at fifty-nine—kidneys; Baudelaire at forty-six—syphilis, probably. Rousseau died at sixty-six of causes unconnected to his lifelong urethral malformation, described so exhaustively and enticingly by Starobinski; Lord Byron died of fever at the age of thirty-six in the Greek War of Independence in 1824, the year of Baudelaire’s birth. After a final visit to his mistress, Madame Récamier, he by then blind and she paralytic, Chateaubriand died at the age of seventy-nine, in 1848, the year of the third revolution and its failure and of Baudelaire’s grand political disillusionment.

The attribution of causation to human behavior is generally a work of fantasy. Birds will speak the last human words, Chateaubriand says. Each one of us is the last witness of something—some custom, habit, way of speaking, economy, some lapsed mode of life. He says only style survives. (Read more.)