Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  On the whole the impression left by the letters of these weeks is of a stubborn determination to keep up appearances; as if Tocqueville and the life that he was leading were almost normal. He wrote many letters (of which at least twenty-seven survive), and filled them with remarks about his usual interests. Many of them display his warmhearted concern for young people: he wrote to his nephew Hubert, to young Edward Childe, and to Corcelle about his daughter Marthe. More than a year before she had received an offer of marriage from a young man called Adolphe de Chambrun, a lawyer of excellent family; he had been accepted, but then the Corcelle parents, using their powers under the civil code, although Marthe was in her late twenties, broke it off; according to Tocqueville, who was furious, they had let themselves be influenced by a notoriously small-minded family lawyer, who had convinced them that Chambrun did not have much money and had no useful connections. Tocqueville thought well of the young man (who before long would be established as a legal counsel to the French embassy in Washington, where he became a friend of Abraham Lincoln) and used all his influence to patch things up. At first he could not understand why Marthe did not assert herself: perhaps she did not really love Chambrun? Then he had a private interview with her; she reassured him, and he was more ardent in her cause than ever: he was determined that she should not be the victim of her French upbringing of the sort which he disliked so much. It was a great happiness to him at Cannes to receive the news that the wedding date had finally been fixed. His efforts to keep Francisque up to the mark, and to stop him frightening off the groom by endless fussing, had succeeded.9

  His letters from Cannes also show him trying to stay in touch with the affairs of the world; he was particularly interested in a great quarrel that broke out between Montalembert and the imperial government. But he was vexed by a press report that Hippolyte had gone to Cannes because Alexis was suffering from a dangerous illness. He wrote to his friends in all directions contradicting what he called a false rumour: to Beaumont, to Corcelle, to Ampère in Italy, to Paris, to Normandy, to England. He told Senior, ‘I am just now an invalid who takes his daily walks of two hours in the mountains after eating an excellent breakfast.’ But he did not pretend to be well. He might say that the ‘false rumour’ had made him question for the first time freedom of the press; but after writing fifty denials he was driven, he said, to wonder if after all the rumour really was wrong. Perhaps his intuition was beginning to try to tell him the truth; certainly, as he confessed to Beaumont, he was occasionally frightened. Meanwhile, behind his back, his brothers and his doctors were sending grim if not yet desperate letters to each other. Hippolyte had realized, almost from the first, that his brother’s lung was the real danger; but nobody told the patient.10

  Then everything went wrong once more. January was the worst month that Tocqueville had ever endured. Suddenly (he said afterwards that it was like being struck by lightning) he started to cough up blood again, and did so repeatedly for ten days. As if that, his gastritis and his laryngitis were not trouble enough, he began to suffer painfully from a bladder complaint (presumably an infection which his weakened system could not resist or throw off ). Almost as bad for its effect on his spirits was the treatment imposed on him: fearfully weak, he lay in his bedroom forbidden to move, read or speak. The doctors were afraid that the slightest emotion might excite him dangerously; except for the two Sisters, only Marie was allowed into his room. Tocqueville was obedient: whenever Hippolyte presented himself at the door, which he did every day, he was waved away. Ill herself, Marie could not speak; for company, most of the time, Tocqueville only had the nuns. These had given an undertaking (probably at Hippolyte’s instance, who was perhaps relaying Tocqueville’s own request) not to talk to the patient about religion; but one Sunday, Soeur Théophile later reported, he asked them to recite the prayers of the Mass in his presence:

  Each Sunday he renewed his request and once it happened that at the end of the prayers he needed attention of some kind. When the Sister had looked after him he said: ‘And now, Sister, be so kind as to finish saying the Mass prayers.’ ‘They were finished, Monsieur.’ ‘Not so, Sister, you did not read me that fine passage from St John’s Gospel which begins with these words: In the beginning was the Word ...’ So they read it to him.11

  In this way Tocqueville’s reconciliation to the Catholic Church began. He had always believed in a recognizably Christian god; it was natural that he now found comfort in a ritual which had been an essential part of his happy childhood. True, he had long ago renounced as unfounded the claims of the Church; but now, lonely and fearful of death, and with little else to think about, he seems to have begun to reconsider his position. His doubt had never been intellectually radical: it was a difficulty for him rather than the foundation of a new outlook; he was no philosopher, and Pascal was his favourite author. The surprise, perhaps, is that he ever left the Church rather than that he returned to it. His scepticism had always been ideological, even political, rather than systematic; a matter of the temperament and the emotions, as he had made plain to Mme Swetchine. Now his emotions were tugging him a different way. He did not consciously acknowledge that he was a dying man, but his illness may have told him at least that it was time to seek God’s comfort and mercy. He must at some stage have considered Pascal’s famous bet, but it is unlikely that it weighed with him: he was too sincere for such cynicism.*

  The process was drawn out. The local curé, Abbé Gabriel, called regularly at the villa Montfleury, but when at last the nuns induced Tocqueville to receive him he was hardly more gracious than he was to Hippolyte: he made what the Sister thought was a disdainful gesture, and did not speak. But by this stage (presumably the third week in January) he was recovering slightly; thinking it over that night he bitterly regretted his discourtesy, and the next time that the Abbé called he was allowed a brief conversation. Gabriel noted Tocqueville’s prostration, and as he went out suggested to the nuns that they should tactfully lead him to realize his danger (evidently with a view to a conversion).12

  Tocqueville did not need the nuns’ counsel: he later spoke of himself as having been ‘plunged into the abyss of Death’; sometimes the abyss was so black that he wanted to cry like a child. One of the tortures of that infinitely tedious and alarming time was the thought of his unfinished book. Striking his forehead he said to the Sisters, ‘Oh! If you only knew all that there is in there and how much I want to be cured so as to do my work.’ He barely ate or slept, and was to tell Beaumont that at one point he almost lost hope: ‘the spitting of blood frightened me as much as it failed to trouble my doctors.’ But then, round about 20 January, he began to gain ground, to the almost incredulous joy of his friends. The blood-spitting stopped, the bladder became much less troublesome, his appetite returned, his strength increased. By the beginning of February he was writing letters again, and complaining that he had been receiving none: the blundering Corcelle had told everybody that letters would be bad for him, whereas they were in fact his consolation, and the one intellectual pleasure that he was allowed.13

  This resurgence lasted for about seven weeks. It was never more than superficial. On 5 February he made his first venture outdoors – ‘like a lizard into the sunshine’ – and by the end of the month was boasting to Édouard that he had walked for two hours without the least fatigue. Earlier, he had reported that his doctors were more and more pleased with the state of his chest (his first acknowledgement that it was a problem), but it is probable that it was at this time that they began systematically to deceive him. He was still extremely feeble, needing and exacting constant attention. But as in December he maintained appearances bravely, if with less success than before. He continued to keep Corcelle up to the mark about his daughter’s marriage, and at times his mind leapt into brilliant action. Curiously, for a penitent, he began to read Gibbon’s Autobiography, in short snatches to spare his eyes, and was soon absorbed:

  [To Pierre Freslon, 23 February] Are you not of my opinion, that there i
s nothing more fascinating than memoirs, above all those of celebrated men, provided that they are at least a little truthful? I always think that I am going to discover the secret of the wonderful machines which produce such wonderful work (I admit that I am often disappointed). This specimen is evidently very sincere. But it only teaches what a prodigious thing a man can make of himself if he possesses an extraordinary memory and passes forty years in the comfort and repose that a high social position and an independent fortune bestow, always working, reading everything ever printed about an almost limitless subject, remembering it all, then, quietly, unhurriedly, collating all these texts, and discovering that he has written, almost without intending to, one of the greatest works of modern literature. And what is profoundly personal is that the same man ... endowed with this extraordinary power, of a kind which usually rules out most others, is, when he starts to write, concise, vigorous, full of life.

  But what am I doing, running on about Gibbon?14

  Another intellectual treasure that came his way was Mill’s Liberty, published that month, of which the author sent him a copy. Tocqueville was delighted with the attention, and acknowledged it at once. He said he was sure that Mill had given the subject an original turn, and that the book manifested the rare vigour of his intelligence. ‘Nor do I doubt for a moment that in the field of liberty we will always march forward shoulder to shoulder.’ He hoped that a rumour which had reached him of the death of Harriet Mill was untrue;* if not, he offered his sincerest sympathy. He looked forward to reading the book, but there is no evidence that he ever did so – not surprising, given the state of his health, but deeply regrettable, for if he had he would have seen his own influence stamped deep on almost every page of Mill’s masterpiece.15

  Tocqueville was still alive, but the sufferings of January had profoundly changed both his consciousness and his behaviour. He was more and more aware of his dependence on his brothers (Édouard had now come to stay at Nice) and bitterly regretted his frequent surliness towards them. He hoped that they would blame the disease, not the patient. He thought tenderly of his distant friends: of Beaumont, the first person to whom he wrote after beginning to get some strength back (‘Who should I write to, if not you, before anybody else?’); of Kergorlay, whose child had just died; of his sister-in-law Émilie. Hippolyte had been writing to her every day, and she had been passing on news of Alexis to his friends in Paris. Past frictions were forgotten: he wrote to her with affectionate confidence in her concern for him, and filled most of his letter with praise of Hippolyte:

  People prate of their fine feelings, but what is more difficult and less common is to come, in the depths of winter, to bury oneself in a hole almost three hundred leagues away from the centre of the world, and to stay there for three months looking after a brother made often bad-tempered and always boring by illness ... This deed of my excellent brother will never be forgotten, I tell you from my heart.

  But there was still a cloud: Marie was getting no better, which distressed and surprised him.16

  Then on 28 February Hippolyte at last went home. He had been expected to stay for one month; he had stayed for over three and a half; it was time that he rejoined his wife and attended to his own affairs. Besides, Alexis seemed better; with Édouard close at hand, Hippolyte must have thought he could be spared. This was a miscalculation. In his thought for friends at a distance Alexis overlooked the needs of someone closer at hand. On 3 March he wrote a cheerfully confident account of himself to Ampère; but that very evening he and Marie had a showdown (considering that Tocqueville could speak only in a whisper, and that Marie was not supposed to talk at all, it is difficult to see how they managed it, but they did). The next day Tocqueville wrote to Beaumont:

  Mon cher ami, I don’t think I have ever said anything which has cost me so much as what I am going to say to you now: I beg you to come to me. We are alone here. Hippolyte has flown; Édouard, who is at Nice, is on the point of doing the same.* So here we are, sinking into solitude, just when our strength is returning, when intellectual and physical activity is reviving. If ever you could do us good, it is now. Nevertheless, I would not uproot you from the delightful life you lead, to dump you into the sort of cistern where we are living, but for a reason which I can mention only to you, but which will show the urgency of this relief: my wife’s state of mind frightens me, mon ami. She is unwell, more unwell than she has been for a month; she has palpably arrived at the end of her physical and moral strength; palpably, this state of mind engenders in her soul ideas, feelings, sorrows and fears, which could end by taking her mind I don’t know where. You know Marie. She is reason personified, until the moment when she suddenly lets go the reins. Furthermore, our servants ... are semi-invalids which leads to a slackness in their service just when their ardour and zeal ought to be multiplied a hundredfold. So what can I say to you, old. fellow, except COME. COME as quickly as possible. You alone can lead us back to the field. Your gaiety, your courage, your liveliness, your complete knowledge of us and our affairs, will make easy for you what nobody else could manage. Come. I know that I am asking an immense proof of friendship from you. I know; but I know to whom I speak ... Come. May Madame de Beaumont pardon us, or rather I am sure that she has pardoned us already. I embrace you from the bottom of my heart. A. de Tocqueville.17

  Light is thrown on this extraordinary letter (which is unlike anything else in the Tocqueville archives) by the letter which Marie sent to Clémentine de Beaumont by the same post. It is painful to read, but it does not suggest that the writer is losing her mind:

  My husband has written to yours, my very dear Clémentine, this morning. It is a great sacrifice that we ask of him, we hesitated for a long time before doing so, but our excessive misery has made us egoists and it seems to us that there is no salvation without him ... my poor invalid is better, but still so frail that, night and day, I can’t stop worrying, I can’t convince myself that what the doctors say is true, that he will be cured by the month of May. As for me, I will never be able to get back to a tolerable state of mind, I am so desperate. I have never seen such suffering. The doctors say that they have never seen anyone so ill. Not only does he have a terrible illness, he has 3 or 4 others less terrible but a thousand times less bearable. Nothing can make good what has happened. So I am so deeply discouraged that nothing can help me, all the time I think how what has happened can happen again, my heart breaks all over again each time the thought comes to me and alas! it never leaves me. I cannot speak at all, for three weeks I got back the partial use of my voice, but new distress has violently revived my throat ailment ... If I see your husband’s face I think that I shall once more have some satisfaction on this Earth, but then how frightful it will be when he goes away again. Still, he will do so much good to Alexis now when he has so much need of the distraction of friendly conversation that I am convinced that if there is anything which can cure him it will be a few days spent with his best friend ... One of the Sisters of Mercy [Soeur Théophile] who came here from Nice to look after Alexis went home today not being able to take any more, the other one stays but I am already worried that I have only one. For the last two months* we have had the Sisters, until then I was the sick-nurse and I grew so exhausted that I was good for nothing. I, four servants, two Sisters, scarcely sufficed to look after him, my household was in revolt, discontented, grumbling, and I unable to speak, always in need of nursing myself, yet not daring to ask even for what was strictly necessary, and which was worst of all, my heart broken in pieces. At length Providence seemed to take pity on us, but his coughing kills me ... I dare write no more, for all I can do is complain ...18

  Two things must be said about these documents. First, Tocqueville was deeply worried about Marie, and she was deeply worried about him. Second, Marie gives much the more concrete picture of their difficulties, and among other things she hints (with too much reason) that Tocqueville was a very troublesome patient. And while he saw that she was suffering, he did not grasp that it w
as her well-founded fear that he was dying, or that he would live only as an invalid, which was making her so ill. He had again managed to persuade himself that he was recovering, and that all he needed was company.

  Beaumont responded at once to the appeal, and arrived on 11 March. Before then Soeur Gertrude replaced Soeur Théophile, and Monsignor Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans, who was visiting the Riviera, paid a call. Dupanloup was one of the few prelates of the Second Empire of whom Tocqueville approved: he was a member of the Académie Française and did not truckle to Napoleon III.* As much to the point, it was he who, as a young man, had reconciled Talleyrand to the Church. There can be no doubt as to what his welcome to the villa Montfleury at this juncture signified, but we do not know what he and Tocqueville said to each other. Afterwards Dupanloup told Abbé Gabriel of his ‘concern about this soul’, and thereby strengthened Gabriel’s determination; but apparently the curé did not think that the time had yet come to push the matter. However, he called regularly to enquire after the invalid.19

  Beaumont had not known quite what to expect at Cannes. He had been afraid of what he called ‘Catastrophe’ for weeks, but he and Clémentine had not quite been able to suppress an unworthy suspicion that Tocqueville’s desperate appeal was ‘a sort of compliment of friendship’. Such thoughts vanished the moment that he saw Tocqueville. The patient was unable to speak for a few moments, struggling with sobs and tears of joy. He told Beaumont that he had been dying of sorrow and loneliness, and that by coming Beaumont had saved his life; then he did dissolve into tears. As for Marie, she needed looking after as much as her husband. With her ready agreement Beaumont took charge of the stricken household, and rashly promised that he would stay as long as he could be useful, though he had no idea of how long that would be. He approved of the nuns. They were good-mannered and intelligent, and their nursing was skilful: ‘without them I don’t know what would become of the poor invalid.’ He interviewed the doctors.