which the gods bestowed, and then the situation developed according to the rules. Miss Charlotte Ives "changed her manner," after the way of maidens whose lovers are dilatory in declaration : "She became reserved; she ceased to offer me flowers for my buttonhole; she would no longer sing to me." It was very puzzling, thought Chateaubriand. What could it all mean?

There could be, in truth, no doubt whatever what it meant, and Mrs. Ives could read the situation, even if Chateaubriand, being still young and inexperienced, could not. She understood what was happening, and she approved. She conferred with Mr. Ives, and Mr. Ives said that he was quite of her opinion. They would raise no obstacles, they agreed, but would help the course of true love to run as smoothly as possible, and, as the handsome young stranger seemed afraid to speak, he should be spoken to. And so, one day, when dinner was over, Mr. Ives, instead of passing the bottle, rose and left the room, and Miss Charlotte Ives followed him dutifully, with drooped eyes, and Mrs. Ives remained, tête-à-tête, with her guest. He was expecting admonitions and reproaches-expecting to be told that he was a penniless adventurer who had presumed upon hospitality. But not at all. Mrs. Ives blushed, and then :

"Sir" (she said), “you have been the witness of my confusion. I do not know what your feelings towards Charlotte may be, but the eyes of a mother cannot be deceived. My daughter is certainly in love with you. Mr. Ives and I have talked the matter over. You suit us in every respect, and we believe that you would make our daughter happy. You are without a country; you have lost your relatives; your property has been sold. There is no reason, then, why you should return to France. While waiting for the recovery of your inheritance you shall live with

us.

Chateaubriand wept. "I threw myself," he says, "at Mrs. Ives' feet, and covered her hands with my kisses and my tears." Mrs. Ives jumped to the conclusion that the tears were tears of joy. She sobbed herself, in responsive maternal sympathy, and rose and reached out her hand for the bell rope, meaning to summon Charlotte and Mr. Ives to a tender scene of family rejoicings. And then, and only just in time :

"Stop, madam,' I cried. One moment, I beg of you. I am a married man.' She fell in a fainting fit upon the floor."

And that was all, and it was on the floor that Chateaubriand left his hostess. He did not dash cold water in her face, or call the servants, or run for brandy or smelling salts. He did not communicate with Mr. Ives; he did not even stay to pack his traps. On the contrary, he "took French leave "--departed, as

the French say, “à l'anglaise "-walked straight out of the door and all the five miles from Bungay to Beccles, presumably, since it was night, in evening dress, and took his seat in the coach that was just starting for London, leaving all his luggage behind him, and never even, so far as one knows, giving any member of the Ives family an address to which it could be forwarded.

Such was the first love affair of Chateaubriand's life, and it cannot be said that he comes out of it otherwise than badly; for it is quite clear, on his own showing, that he had been discreetly questioned about his family affairs, and had returned evasive answers, telling only a part of the truth, saying nothing about the wife whom he had left behind him in Brittany, but allowing it to be believed that he was a bachelor and eligible— conduct by no means to be defended even by those of his coreligionists who are most full of zeal for the fair fame of the illustrious champion of their creed.

None the less, he was seriously, and even passionately, enamoured; and his English love affair counts in his literary, and even in his religious, development. "I cursed," he writes, "my marriage, which had side-tracked' me and so deprived me of happiness." He cherished the idea of wandering back to Bungay, and hiding behind a hedge, that he might peep unseen at Charlotte "on her way to church"; "a hundred times," he tells us, he was on the point of doing so. He also wrote many long letters to Charlotte, though he tore them all up instead of posting them. Nor was that all. The memory of Charlotte haunted him continually in his despair, so that "It was at this time that the mad ideas depicted in René assailed my heart, making me the most miserable of men."

That is to say, the peculiar vein of melancholy in René is not of French, but of English inspiration.

Sainte-Beuve finds

It had also, of course, its literary sources. some of these in the Book of Ecclesiastes and the songs of the minnesingers--in the "De rerum natura" of Lucretius and in Hamlet. There are more obvious anticipations of it by writers nearer to Chateaubriand's own time, in Werther, and in the Rêveries of Rousseau and of Sénancour. It was in the air as an exclamation against the empty vanities of the eighteenth century even before it was diffused by the cruelties of the Reign of Terror. But gloom, in the individual case, if it be sincere, can generally be shown to have had a particular as well as a general origin; and the particular cause, in Chateaubriand's case, was his hopeless passion-hopeless though returned-for the country clergyman's daughter towards whom he had behaved so scandalously.

Moreover, Charlotte Ives inspired him, if we may trust his statements, to ambition as well as to melancholy. "I felt," he writes, "that, if only I could win renown, the Ives family would be less disposed to regret the interest which it had taken in me. Charlotte, whom I thus thought to win back by achieving glory, presided over my studies. Her image was before me when I sat down to write. When I lifted my eyes from the paper, I saw the figure which I adored as clearly as if the model had indeed been present in the flesh. . . . Charlotte, with a halo of glory on her brow, reigned over me." And, so stimulated, he finished his Essai sur les Révolutions.

It was a crude work, described by Abbé Sieyès as "a hotch potch of philosophical pretentiousness." The glory which it won for its author was inconsiderable, and it was quite unworthy of the Muse who presided over its composition. Probably the influence of Charlotte-or at least of Chateaubriand's distress because he had lost Charlotte-may be found in the marginal notes scrawled by him in his own copy of the book, bought by Sainte-Beuve for £40, and sold, when his library was dispersed, for £124. They are the notes of a man disgusted and disillusioned, a cynic and a materialist, sceptical of immortality, and writing of the Christian doctrine that "in any case it is a doctrine which no one believes in now." They are far more likely to have been due to disappointment in love than to any impartial examination of the Christian evidences. Chateaubriand lived the mood down, and was converted.

He tells us himself that he was converted when he heard the news of the death of his mother and his sister. "I wept and I believed," he writes; and he adds that he instantly set to work to write Le Génie du Christianisme in expiation of his errors. But that cannot be, for there are obstructive dates standing in the path of the story. His sister died on July 22nd, 1799. England and France being at war, and letters having to travel by circuitous routes, he could hardly have heard of her death before the beginning of August; and a letter dated August 19th states that the first draft of Le Génie du Christianisme-430 pages in length-is already at the printer's. The length of time, therefore, in which Chateaubriand claims to have planned his masterpiece, "taken Hebrew lessons, consulted libraries and learned men, roamed in the country wrapped in meditation," and written 430 pages, appears upon analysis to have been somewhere between a fortnight and three weeks. Which is absurdmore absurd even than the alternative story told by Napoleon at Saint Helena that the conversion of Chateaubriand was due to the worldly counsel of Dulau the bookseller, who

assured him, on the word of a keen man of business, that eighteenth-century philosophy was played out, and that the writer who wanted to succeed must look for his readers in the opposite camp.

The truth, we may take it, is that the conversion was a gradual process, and that the sound commercial advice of Dulau was only one influence mong many. A more potent influence was probably that of his friend Fontanes-a ci-devant Voltairian whom the Revolution had disgusted with philosophy-who was for some months intimate with him in London.

Fontanes had already trodden in his quiet way the path which Chateaubriand was to tread with more sublime solemnity. Piety without Puritanism was the religious system which he cultivated; and that was just the sort of religious system to suit Chateaubriand. He wanted a consoling faith which carried no onerous obligation in the way of works-other than literary; and it was to just that sort of faith that Fontanes could help him. The two men were continually together, exploring London and the suburbs, talking of literature, of France, of common friends, of whatever deeper thoughts were stirring in their minds. They read the Essai together, and talked of that. Fontanes, who was nine years Chateaubriand's senior, admired but disapproved. He was quite of Dulau's opinion, though for quite other reasons, that Chateaubriand had better desert philosophy and address the religious public. Chateaubriand listened, and was persuaded, and began to write his palinode; and the news of Madame de Chateaubriand's death only set the seal of tears and the semblance of sincerity upon a conversion already half effected from more or less interested motives.

But he had not forgotten Charlotte Ives. He "wanted to make a great noise in the world that my mother might hear of me in Heaven," where he pictured the angels "laying the holy work of expiation at her feet," but he permitted himself to be inspired by memories of a more earthly order. "The recollection of Charlotte was mixed up with it all and added its communicative glow." It would have been more proper, of course, that the thought of Madame de Chateaubriand should have been mixed up with it not only because she was his wife, but also because she was a very orthodox and pious Catholic. But facts are facts; and the fact, in this instance, does seem to be that the æsthetic masterpiece of the Catholic reaction in France was inspired by a married man's unlawful passion for the daughter of an English Protestant clergyman.

Twenty-eight years passed before Chateaubriand saw Charlotte Ives again. He was then "a magnificent ambassador," and she

was Mrs. Sutton,1 the widow of an admiral. She called on him, in deep mourning, at the Embassy, asking, "My Lord, do you remember me?" and, of course, he protested that to say "My Lord" to him was "cruel." And, of course, they talked of old times, asking-Do you remember this-and that? And then Mrs. Sutton introduced her sons, and asked whether, for the sake of those old times, the Ambassador would speak for them to Canning and Lord Castlereagh, and so help them to appointments in the service of the East India Company; and, of course, the Ambassador would, and did.

Then they returned to their reminiscences, and Mrs. Sutton handed Chateaubriand a packet of papers which he had left behind him on the night of that precipitate departure for which he was now forgiven; and he asked her whether she found him. altered. Not in the least, she said he had not even aged; and he, in writing of her, returns the compliment in language of poetical sublimity. "Her beauty bore the imprint of the divine hand of the creator "; and also: "Of the years which had passed over her head only those of the Spring had left their traces."

Assuredly he owed her that homage after his treatment of her; no doubt she valued it, though M. de Marcellus, already quoted, declares that it was not deserved.

"A somewhat exaggerated piece of gallantry," is his note upon the passage. "I, myself, shortly after this interview, saw Lady Sutton and her four-and-forty years. She still retained, no doubt, as some Englishwomen do at her age, handsome features, and had a good complexion, though she was corpulent. But it was no longer the Spring with her. The Summer was nearly over, and the Autumn was beginning."

Alas! Alas!

For perhaps, if we read between the lines, we may find confirmation of the testimony of M. de Marcellus in Chateaubriand's own declamatory farewell to his recollections:

"First love of my youth, you and your charms flee from me. I have just seen Charlotte again-but after an interval of how many years! Sweet ray of light from the past, pale pink of the twilight on the edge of night, lingering long after the sun has set!

Once more, alas! alas!

FRANCIS GRIBBLE.

(1) He calls her Lady Sutton, but that is a characteristic exaggeration. She derives the title from no other fountain of honour than Chateaubriand's imagination

(2) Chateaubriand says that the call was unexpected. Suffolk tradition says that it was arranged by correspondence, and that provincial opinion considered Mrs Sutton's conduct reprehensibly indiscreet.