The Memoirs of François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand sometime Ambassador to England, Volume 2 (of 6): Mémoires d'outre-tombe, volume 2Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de
History
The Memoirs of François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand sometime Ambassador to England, Volume 2 (of 6): Mémoires d'outre-tombe, volume 2
Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de, 1768-1848
We asked to be taken to Tournay, saying we were in a position to make
ourselves known. The officer in command placed us between his troopers
and carried us off. When day broke, the uhlans perceived our national
guards' uniforms under our surtouts, and insulted the colours in which
France was soon to dress her vassal, Europe.
In Tournaisis, the primitive kingdom of the Franks, Clovis resided
during the early years of his reign; he set out from Tournay with his
companions, summoned as he was to the conquest of the Gauls: "Arms
always have right on their side," says Tacitus. Through this town, from
which, in 486, the first King of the First Race[65] rode to found his
long and mighty monarchy, I passed in 1792 to go and join the Princes
of the Third Race on foreign soil, and I passed through it again in
1815, when the last King of the French abandoned the kingdom of the
first King of the Franks: _omnia migrant._
When we reached Tournay, I left my brother to grapple with the
authorities, and in the custody of a soldier visited the cathedral. In
days of old, Odo of Orleans, the scholasticus of the cathedral, seated
at night before the church porch, taught his disciples the course of
the planets, and pointed out to them the Milky Way and the stars.
I would rather have found this artless eleventh-century astronomer
at Tournay than the Pandours. I delight in those days in which the
chronicles tell me, under the year 1049, that, in Normandy, a man had
been transformed into a donkey: that was like to have happened to me,
as the reader knows, at the house of the Demoiselles Couppart, who
taught me to read. Hildebert[66], in 1114, saw a girl from whose ears
grew spikes of corn: perhaps it was Ceres. The Meuse, which I was
soon to cross, was suspended in mid-air in the year 1118, as witness
Guillaume de Nangis[67] and Albéric[68]. Rigord[69] assures us that,
in 1194, between Compiègne and Clermont in Beauvoisis, there fell a
storm of hail, mixed with ravens which carried charcoal and caused a
fire. If the tempest, as Gervase of Tilbury[70] tells us, was unable to
extinguish a candle on the window-sill of the priory of Saint-Michel
"de Camissa," we also know through him that, in the Diocese of Uzès,
there was a fair and clear spring which changed its place when anything
unclean was thrown into it: our latter-day consciences do not put
themselves out for so little.
Reader, I am not wasting time; I am chatting with you to keep you in
patience while waiting for my brother, who is arranging things: here
he comes, after explaining himself to the satisfaction of the Austrian
commander. We have leave to go on to Brussels, an exile purchased with
too much care and trouble.
*
[Sidenote: Brussels.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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