Horned adder. Marius Burger, through Wikimedia Commons.
I lie in mattress till the voice says Rise up and reside, then I placed on my slippers and skim my ordinary ten pages of Chateaubriand over breakfast. Why Chateaubriand? As a result of it’s an impossibly lengthy e-book, and lengthy out of vogue; as a result of Baudelaire claimed him, in a letter to Sainte-Beuve, as the daddy of dandyism; as a result of Proust heard in Chateaubriand’s type the delicate echoing name of an owl within the woods at night time; as a result of the e-book I need to write appears to me simply as unimaginable. My religious constancy is to the college of lapsed fashions. It’s Chateaubriand’s tomb that I uncover in my halting French—his memoirs from past the tomb, revealed posthumously, which I purchased in 4 fats pocketbook volumes, cheap however with well-glued bindings and thorough footnotes, in a bookshop on the Rue de Bretagne. I now consider I turned up that avenue in unconscious attraction to its title: Chateaubriand’s birthplace is Saint-Malo, Brittany. The evocative thriller of a reputation means all the things to him, because it did to Proust—a reputation, like a two-note birdcall from the woods, is the smallest signature of favor.
I compile an undisciplined index on the flyleaf of the primary quantity as I learn it, as a future support to reminiscence but additionally for the non-public pleasure of watching this crooked checklist accrue in its variously coloured inks. On web page 336 he haughtily refers to Rousseau as a form of cobbler or a schoolmaster. His reward for Lord Byron receives a whole chapter within the twelfth e-book. As a boy he learns about love from the Latin poets: he voluptuously reads Lucretius in mattress at night time, by the sunshine of stolen candles, and I consider Lucy Hutchinson’s 1653 English translation of the then-forbidden De rerum natura, wherein she describes how a lad’s nocturnal emission “wett / the shining Babylonian coverlett.” Chateaubriand’s personal boyhood coverlet was virtually actually of coarse manufacture; his father’s model of home financial system of their moldering château was Spartan, inadvertently getting ready the author for his future exile and penury. An aficionado of exile, 4 instances he mentions the troubadours within the first quantity. Of all of the gadgets I’ve famous in my index, the one with essentially the most entries is tomb. This shouldn’t shock: everybody dies. Whole languages violently disappear. There’s not a spot on earth, he says, that’s tombless. It’s to him essentially the most fascinating topic. He sees America, the place he traveled at size through the Terror of the French Revolution, as nothing however the tomb of the nice Indigenous nations decreased to spoil by Europe. On web page 493, he describes how at Niagara Falls he heard an Iroquois lady named Mila sing a track in regards to the lovely sample of the adder’s pores and skin; as she sings, he realizes that he already is aware of the track, which was recorded, he says, in an essay by Montaigne, who had heard a unique Iroquois lady sing it two centuries earlier than in Rouen. I’m enchanted by this unbelievable story, so I look additional, and be taught the adder track has a spurious linkage. The lady at Niagara Falls couldn’t have sung the track cited by Montaigne, who writes in his 1580 account “Of Cannibals” that it was sung by a captive Tupinambá lady from Brazil, within the Tupi language. So am I to consider Chateaubriand when he says that he has dealt with the decomposed cranium of Marie Antoinette? It’s he who recognized the stays of the guillotined queen, he claims, which had been thrown perfunctorily right into a collective pit. He knew her, he says, via the set of the enamel within the jawbone; at Versailles, in his youth, he had been conversant in the Queen’s extensive smile.
In July of 1791, alone within the forest close to Albany, searching for, as he defined, the Northwest Passage, and believing himself to be in a primordial embrace with Nature, Chateaubriand heard the sound of a fiddle within the woods. He approached the stunning music to find in a clearing a French dancing grasp in a powdered wig, apple-green swimsuit, and lace jabot and cuffs, taking part in a tune for a bunch of twenty bare-torsoed, feather-wearing, dancing Iroquois males. These have been the primary Indigenous individuals the younger exile had ever met. The fiddler’s tune, “Madelon Friquet,” had been a preferred French fairground track. French dancing masters have been then widespread in America, the notes inform me, having been displaced and there being no additional name for them through the revolution. A faintly comedic melancholy is that this e-book’s mom tongue.
Chateaubriand says that the pleasures of youth revisited in reminiscence are ruins seen by torchlight. I don’t know whether or not I’m the spoil or the torch.
Montaigne was useless at fifty-nine—kidneys; Baudelaire at forty-six—syphilis, in all probability. 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 on the age of thirty-six within the Greek Battle of Independence in 1824, the yr of Baudelaire’s start. After a last go to to his mistress, Madame Récamier, he by then blind and he or she paralytic, Chateaubriand died on the age of seventy-nine, in 1848, the yr of the third revolution and its failure and of Baudelaire’s grand political disillusionment.
The attribution of causation to human habits is mostly a piece of fantasy. Birds will communicate the final human phrases, Chateaubriand says. Every one in every of us is the final witness of one thing—some customized, behavior, means of talking, financial system, some lapsed mode of life. He says solely type survives.
You possibly can learn an excerpt from the primary quantity of Chateaubriand’s memoirs on-line right here, and an excerpt from the not too long ago revealed second quantity right here.
Lisa Robertson is the translator of “Pos de chantar m’es pres talenz,” a poem by William IX of Aquitaine in our Winter 2022 situation. Her most up-to-date e-book of poetry is Boat.
