He learned that Amélie had recently died during a pregnancy, and wrote a last short letter of sympathy to Rosalie, such a letter as could be safely read either by his wife or her husband. And that was that.
* uncompromising.
† damas means ‘damask’: ‘her household was furnished and lined with damask.’
* As Édouard was barely fourteen years old, this must have been a nominal commission, like his father’s twenty-five years previously, which would permit him to continue his education.
* The new, Bourbon-appointed prefect of Toulouse had even more trouble of this kind.
* HT used this term to encompass the whole bocage, not just the department of the Vendée.
† It was on this journey that Mme la Comtesse paid her one and only visit to the château de Tocqueville.
* Nevertheless, the Lycée Fabert is proud of him. Its newest building (2004) is named in his honour.
* AT is precise about his age when this incident occurred. His sixteenth birthday was on 29 July 1821; he entered the Collège Royal in November; study must have kept him busy throughout most of 1821–22, not to mention other distractions which will be mentioned. Late summer, 1821, seems, then, much the likeliest period; for one thing, it needs time and perhaps leisure to get through a number of demanding books, however brilliantly written.
* According to Denis Brogan, ‘It took far more courage than was needed in Tom Brown’s Rugby for a boy to practise faith and chastity in the state schools’ (The French Nation, London, 1957, 31).
* See below, ch. 24, pp. 637–38.
* In almost the same year, in Villers-Cotterets (Aisne), a young woman persuaded her mother to let her sleep in their summer-house, to which she then secretly admitted her lover, Alexandre Dumas, aged eighteen.
* This is very much the author of the Ancien Régime talking: AT was then writing it. Readers of that work will remember its unvarying tone of hostility to ‘the public administration’ – the intendants, and the bureaucrats of the council of state.
* Presumably Rosalie and her sister Amélie were staying at a house in the rue de Grenelle.
* Sic: ‘tu consommeras sa perte’.
CHAPTER FOUR
FIRST FLIGHT
1824–1827
Édouard is making a copy of his Travels in Switzerland. The job will be done in a fortnight. Isn’t it glorious to have an author in the family?
ABBÉ LE SUEUR TO ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE,
1 JANUARY 18231
AT SOME POINT in the summer of 1824 Tocqueville wrote ebulliently to Kergorlay about a splendid new scheme: the two of them should go together on a short journey to England and back.
We will sail up the Thames between the two rows of vessels which line it and see all the wealth of England displayed. We will stay in London for two days. Williams* assures me that he would give us a detailed guide-book so that we could see everything in that time, and on the third day we would be back in France. What a pity that it is barely practicable.2
It is a little difficult, in the twenty-first century, to grasp what was impracticable in the idea of two young men travelling to England and back on a short holiday. Gustave de Beaumont comments: ‘There were a number of difficulties about this project, among them (1): they did not know how to get passports. (2) they had no money. (3) they did not see how they could get their parents’ approval, or how to do without it.’3 Probably the expense of the journey was the crucial factor: the parents had no objection to a tour in France, indeed Mme de Kergorlay was positively helpful. But Tocqueville takes boyish pleasure in considering how he might pull the wool over his father’s eyes, and how to get passports. Does Kergorlay have one? Could Tocqueville pass as his servant? Or should he borrow Williams’s (‘we are the same height and appearance’)?
Once in England we would not need passports; the difficulty is getting in and out of France. We might be arrested ... but one has to risk something. I admit that I would be more than pleased to travel fifteen leagues with you and [take] a look at those rascally English who, we are told, are so strong and prosperous.
And they would see the sea, ‘of all sights that which most impressed and exalted me during my childhood ... I am curious what it will do to me nowadays.’ He makes earnest calculations (‘On my trips to Metz I have realized that it is impossible to feed a horse for less than thirty sous a day’) and concludes that the English journey would cost 298 francs (say, twelve guineas).4
In a lost letter Kergorlay raised certain doubts. Replying, Tocqueville admits their sense (‘you say that I would find it hard to pass for an Englishman, and you are perfectly right; I would not find it easy to pass for a servant either’). He wonders how to get help from his father: ‘with him, you have to hide everything or tell him everything frankly and honestly. That’s his character. If I didn’t he would see at once what I was up to and [scold?] me for not being frank.’ He urges Kergorlay in Paris to buy an up-to-date guide to London: ‘Buy it even if it is in English, so long as you are sure that it is a good one; I will undertake to interpret it, well or ill.’ (This is the first sure sign that Tocqueville has been learning English.) And he speaks out again in favour of a voyage to the Thames on a steam-ship: ‘the passage being longer [than that to Dover] there would be more hope of adventures ... How exciting it would be to lose sight of land altogether!’
Tocqueville the traveller – bold, energetic, enthusiastic, and anxious not to waste his time through ignorance or inadequate preparation – has begun to make his appearance; it is even possible to see what Beaumont meant when he said of him, ‘it is impossible to conceive how far, when he wanted something, he could go in proving ingeniously to others and in demonstrating to himself that it was the most reasonable idea in the world.’5 But in this instance it would not do; the scheme had to be given up. He went to Metz instead.
For the next two years (that is, until 1826) he faisait son droit (read law) in Paris, living with his mother at 77, rue Saint-Dominique in the west of the faubourg Saint-Germain – ‘the noble faubourg’. His time was divided between his studies and his affair with Rosalie Malye, although his studies also led him to join a student debating society where current politics and legal matters were discussed. It was an exciting period in the history of the city: Louis XVIII died, an anticlerical (or, more precisely, an anti-Jesuit) agitation erupted, and the battle between the Romantics and the Classicists burst out. But the law course was exceedingly dull, and Tocqueville turned to M. Mougin, his old rhetoric teacher at Metz, for advice on intellectual stimulus. Mougin had much approved his decision to devote himself to law; it was not an agreeable study, but ‘to till arid soil, perhaps bristling with thorns, is useful in a different way; and a difficulty conquered also has its pleasure.’ Nevertheless, Mougin quite understood Tocqueville’s problem, and approved something he said about English poetry. He went on:
The genius of a language harmonizes with its manner of thinking, as the character of a nation is the effect of its morals and its political habits. For a long time the English character has been shaped by the form of its government, by its various pursuits, even by its geographical position and its laws which drive off foreigners and make these kings of the ocean a homogeneous and autochthonous people. No-one, in my opinion, can ... write or speak any language as a Great Briton can his own.
These remarks, although decidedly tinged with Romanticism, would be of very little interest were they not the first to show Tocqueville encountering the kind of study which he would eventually make his own. Later, Mougin did him another service by recommending that he start going to the various lecture courses open to the public which dealt with literature and history – ‘history, of all your studies the most necessary and the most difficult’.6 But it is doubtful if Tocqueville, wrestling with his legal studies, found time to take this good advice just yet. He graduated on 29 August 1826 by successfully defending his two theses, one in Latin, one in French. Under the ever more reactionary regime of the Restoration he
was not expected to show the slightest originality, and did not: I cannot judge the Latin thesis, but the French one is stupefyingly dull, the only boring thing he ever wrote; at least it proves that he had worked very hard.7 Beaumont was to remark that he thus finished brilliantly studies which he often regretted ever having begun; ‘and then he went on his travels.’8
His yearning to see the world, so palpable two years previously, seems to have grown stronger in the interval, and was, if anything, strengthened by the journey to Italy and Sicily which he now undertook. No doubt his father paid for the voyage as a reward for his success; Édouard, unemployed and by now an experienced traveller, went with him as a companion and bear-leader (it should be borne in mind that foreign travel was then far more difficult than as a rule it is today). The two brothers were on good terms, and their six months’ companionship strengthened their friendship, although after their return Alexis had to confess, ‘I was often wrong with respect to you. In our petty quarrels you were almost always in the right. That is the sort of thing that one does not admit to oneself at the time but which you come to see quite clearly later on.’9 Alexis kept a travel-diary, perhaps following Édouard’s example. It was extant in 1861, when Gustave de Beaumont published extracts from it; but like so much else it has since disappeared.10
Perhaps no other lacuna in the archives is so lamentable. It is possible to sketch the development of the young Tocqueville’s character and opinions from the materials available (though not without conjecture); his emergence as a writer is hidden in darkness.
He became one of the most distinguished French authors of his day, but his output is strikingly uniform. Even in his letters and his reported conversation the utterance is predominantly that of a publicist concerned with history, politics and society; in his writing for publication the preoccupation is total. Sainte-Beuve, discussing the second part of the Démocratie, remarked that while Tocqueville never read a book without digging out its heart and meditating upon it, he had not done enough casual, random reading. Tocqueville himself rather confirms this observation in remarks made to Nassau Senior. Apart from Racine, he said, the only French poetry worth reading was the light verse. ‘I do not think that I could now read Lamartine, though thirty years ago he delighted me.’ He said that he read no novels that ended ill: ‘Why should one voluntarily subject oneself to painful emotions?’ During his childhood his family had read Richardson and Fielding aloud, and Alexis had wept for Lady Clementina in Sir Charles Grandison, but the only novelist he mentions having read as an adult is George Sand, whom he dismissed, though he admired her style, because ‘her plots and her characters are so exaggerated and unnatural, and her morality is so perverted.’ At some stage in his youth he read Scott, and succumbed to his spell like everyone else in the 1820s. He read Madame Bovary while he was dying, and according to Beaumont thought it interesting, talented, and the incarnation of immorality.11
We are all more or less the prisoners of our tastes and circumstances, and sooner or later get to know what they allow and what they do not. But many of us like to splash in the bath. Tocqueville seldom did. He lived through one of the greatest epochs of French literature, art and music, but seems to have been unable to enjoy any of it much, except perhaps the art.
We know little of what may be called his educational reading. André Jardin mentions Horace, Racine, Cicero, Demosthenes and Quintilian (he might have added Tacitus), and, in his father’s library, eighteenth-century travel-writers and such authors as Voltaire, Montesquieu and Rousseau.12 We know nothing of his early writing, except for a few school essays. Yet a born writer, which Tocqueville certainly was, is a slave of the pen, cannot help scribbling, and in youth is likely to be an eager emulator. So where, then, are the experiments that one would expect to find – the epic (incomplete) on William the Conqueror, the novel à la Scott (unfinished), The Lovers of Tourlaville, the tragedy à la Corneille on his collateral ancestress, Jeanne d’Arc, the projected history of the world in nine volumes, the biography of Cicero, even the light verse which other members of his family turned out fluently? If anything like them ever existed, it has been completely lost.
Just possibly he was a late developer, though that is not the impression left by his first letters: there are no anecdotes of childish precocity, and he does not seem to have spread his wings until he went to school. Very probably he did not expect to turn author, and when he did, his milieu (except for his immediate family and closest friends) was discouraging: ‘I was thought of as a poor eccentric, who, robbed of his career, wrote in order to kill time, admittedly a tolerable occupation since at any rate it is better to write a bad book than to go whoring.’13 The tradition of his family required him to enter the service of the King, and his father, like many others, believed that the Restoration had brought back the noblesse as well as the legitimate monarch. Shorn of its unjust privileges by the Revolution, the nobility yet retained its most important assets: wealth, education and access to the government. Comte Hervé wanted the noblesse to be defined in future by its duty to the state, and in carrying out that duty to demonstrate its right to its pre-eminent position in society. The tradition of both sword and robe was to be modernized. (The idea was Napoleonic, although the comte would not have admitted the fact: the British peerage was the avowed model.) The future of the Tocqueville children, then, seemed unproblematic: Hippolyte and Édouard, as we have seen, were supposed to be soldiers, and Alexis, once his special gifts were recognized, was to be groomed for a career in politics. He did not want to be an administrator, but he was allured by the idea of political leadership, of oratory (one of his essays at the lycée was on the topic of eloquence, and another, in Latin, was a eulogy of Demosthenes). Unfortunately, under the laws of the Restoration, he would not be entitled to vote before the age of thirty, or to enter the Chamber of Deputies before he was forty. Yet all his studies before that rather remote period, all his writing, and whatever job he took, would be by way of preparing him for that particular destiny.
This interpretation is certainly valid, up to a point; but no young man of talent could confine himself to such a programme. As will be shown, the influence on Tocqueville of Chateaubriand was profound, and it drove him to experimentation. Tocqueville was a man of his time, which meant that although he might prefer classicism he could not help being a Romantic. Classicism, once it was no longer universally accepted as authoritative (and how could it be? This was the era when Népomucène Lemercier, as absurd as his name, laid down twenty-six rules for writing a perfect tragedy, all derived from Athalie),14 became simply one mode among others which an author might choose for purposes of self-expression – a form of Romanticism, in short. In his mature work Tocqueville writes in the tradition of Montesquieu, Pascal and Rousseau; but in the Voyage en Sicile, which is, if not juvenile, at any rate youthful, we can glimpse him exploring literary possibilities, and must regret that glimpses are all that we will ever have.
Beaumont says that the manuscript of the Voyage was a quartosized volume of 350 pages, so what we have can only be a tithe of what was written. Tocqueville wrote on the cover ‘very mediocre’, which shows that he was a stern judge of his own productions, but he did not destroy it, and nor did Beaumont (it may yet turn up), who remarks that even were Tocqueville’s verdict just, ‘it would still be interesting to study in these first attempts of a great writer the direction of his spirit, his fumblings, his mistakes, his retreats, and the winding tracks by which he found his way to his right road.’15 Very true, even of the mere fragment left to us – which is much better than mediocre.
The Voyage was written up in Sicily as a complete account of the brothers’ journey, mostly as a literary exercise, but also, no doubt, for the entertainment of their family. Unhappily the fragment does not tell us how or when or where the travellers reached Italy; we first meet them in Rome, in January 1827. Until then, according to Beaumont, the journal had been the usual sort of thing: a young man’s conscientious account of all the palaces and mus
eums that he visited, of the paintings and medallions that he inspected. In Rome he abandons this sterile occupation, and tries his hand at something more fanciful: he falls asleep in the Campo Vaccino (the Forum) and has a vision of ancient Rome, ‘her heroes, her glory, her power, above all her liberty’; all the great events and great men of antiquity parade before him, ‘from the first Brutus to the coming of Augustus’. Then suddenly he is woken by a procession of bare-footed monks going up the steps of the Capitol, while a cowherd tinkles a bell to summon his beasts. ‘I arose and slowly took my way to my lodging, looking back from time to time, and saying to myself, “Poor humanity, what art thou after all?”’16
This passage may well startle a British reader, but it is not a plagiarism: Tocqueville read Gibbon’s Autobiography for the first time in the last weeks of his life.17 Both men play with what must have been a frequent, even trite experience of visitors to papal Rome (and something very similar happened to Heine, or so he said, in the amphitheatre at Verona); but Gibbon made it matter, for it gave him the idea of writing the history of the city.* Tocqueville, by contrast, is banal and pretentious, and matters are not mended by the surviving fragment of a letter to Kergorlay in which he palpably steals from a well-known passage by Chateaubriand on the same subject.† He redeems himself only by a tart remark that the modern buildings planted among the ruins make Rome look like an old man wearing rouge.18
These Roman passages, insignificant in themselves, nevertheless embody the literary pattern of the entire Voyage en Sicile, as we have it. The young author, as Beaumont indicates, is trying to find his voice. Much of the time he writes in a faded, sentimental, eighteenth-century vein of Classical commonplaces; he also works hard to make the chateaubrianesque sublime his own, with only partial success; occasionally, almost without realizing it, he achieves his own authentic note, when his flair for observing and analysing foreign societies emerges. Throughout, some important aspects of his personality, which were not exhibited in his career as a young lover, are revealed.
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