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THE UNSELFISH EGOIST
By the same author

TIME AND CHANCE

The Story of Arthur Evans
and his Forebears.
THE Pursuit or HAPPINESS
The Story of Madame de Sérilly
1762-1799.
 THE
UNSELFISH EGOIST
A Life of Joseph Joubert

by
JOAN EVANS

“Un égoiste ... qui ne s’occupait que des autres.”

Chateaubriand

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.

LONDON : NEW YORK : TORONTO
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First published 1947

CODE NUMBER 12523

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY

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 PREFACE

ATTHEW ARNOLD included a paper on Joubert in

his Essays in Criticism ; his niece gave my mother
a copy of the book as a wedding present ; and con-
sequently I made Joubert’s acquaintance when I was still in the
schoolroom. Nearly thirty years later I met him again, when
I was working upon a life of his friend Chateaubriand, and
recognized him for an old acquaintance whom I would like
to know better.
I found that my wish was well-timed, for I encountered
Joubert again in the very year in which André Beaunier’s
complete edition of his notebooks appeared. Joubert, who
hardly ever published anything, left a mass of papers behind
him : letters sent and received, extracts from his varied read-
ing, and any number of little books in which he had noted
down not the events of his life but the thoughts that occupied
his mind. When he died, his wife religiously preserved them
all in the hope that their son might prepare them for publica-
tion. The son did nothing, and after his death in 1838
Madame Joubert entrusted them to Chateaubriand for editing,
though she still hesitated over publication. Chateaubriand
was old and tired, and found the task a sad one ; he wrote
“* Fécoute derriére moi les souvenirs, comme les bruissements de la
vague sur une plage lointaine.” He had loved Joubert as a man,
but the papers were voluminous and much that they contained
was not congenial with his temperament. He picked out a few
scattered pensées from the notebooks, not a twentieth part of
their content, and published them privately in a small edition
without any indication of how trifling a part they formed of
the whole. The edition had a greater success than he had
anticipated, and was succeeded in 1842 by another by Joubert’s
brother’s son-in-law, Paul de Raynal, which included more
Pensées and a selection of the letters, and a longer but over-
discreet biography. More Pensées were added in the edition
of 1862, which has often been reprinted. This was followed
in 1883 by a selection of the letters received by Joubert,
prepared by a great-nephew, another Paul de Raynal.
5
 PREFACE

It is Raynal’s edition of the Pensées which was known to

Matthew Arnold, and it is this edition which has appeared in
various English translations. Fortunately the papers of
Joubert were preserved, in their entirety, by the pious care of
his family, and after the war of 1914 were confided by the
great-niece and great-nephew who then owned them, M. Paul
du Chayla and Madame Henri de Lander, to M. André
Beaunier. With this fresh material he was able to write three
volumes of biography of Joubert, on a scale and with an
intimacy far beyond anything attempted by Raynal. The
biographical work was continued in an edition of Joubert’s
letters to Madame de Vintimille, and crowned by a publica-
tion, which all its readers must regret was posthumous, of the
notebooks of Joubert. This reveals not only a mass of material
hitherto undreamed of, but also the chronological sequence of
all the Pensées, known and unknown.
With so much new material, most of it of the first import-
ance, our knowledge of Joubert as a man and as a thinker is
enormously enriched and considerably modified. The Carnets
would lose too much in translation for it to be possible to
undertake the task ; but I have thought it justifiable to write
a short life of Joubert, necessarily based on Monsieur André
Beaunier’s invaluable work, in the hope of making the new
knowledge concerning him available to his English admirers.
Joubert never troubled to depict his material background;
it influenced him, but unconsciously, and he did not waste
his energy in describing it. In order to indicate it I have
ventured to draw upon other contemporary sources and upon
my own knowledge of the places where he lived.
When Joubert died in 1824 he was known to a small
literary circle in Paris as a critic of the most delicate sensibility,
who published nothing ; to a wider academic world, as the
most disinterested of school inspectors ; and to his neighbours
at Villeneuve as the kindest of friends. He deserved a wider
fame. The better we know him, the more lazy and the more
original he appears. He lived in an age when literary judg-
ment was guided by accepted canons ; his own judgments
are perfectly fresh and completely unconventional. He lived
before psychology was invented as a science ; his own appre-
ciation of his fellow men could still teach something to
psychologists. He decided that literature should represent
6
 PREFACE

emotion recollected in tranquillity fifteen years before Words-

worth, and he described the psychology of an extrovert more
than a hundred years before Jung. He was rare in being a
philosopher with a strong sense of visual imagery. Speech
is for him an arrow ; the soul a fire of which thought is the
flame. Every immaterial thing could be so vivid to him that
it took upon itself a visible form without the grossness of being.
Consequently he never lost himself among nebulous abstrac-
tions, and even those who find most philosophers unintelligible
can learn wisdom from his lips.

WOTTON-UNDER-EDGE J.E.
1946
hae! rhadtac ans
‘
 CONTENTS

PAGE

Preface
CHAPTER
I. 1754-1778
it 1778-1786
III. 1786-1787
TN 1787-1790
V. 1790-1793
VI. 1793

VII. 1793-1797 102

VIII. 1797-1800
IX. 1800-1801
X. 1802-1803 140

>. 1803 149

XII 1804-1808 160 |

XIII. 1808-1815 ris

XIV. 1815-1823 188

BIBLIOGRAPHY 199
INDEX 201
Boos
tt Br Lae { -
 CHAPTER ONE

1754-1778

ERIGORD is full of little towns that look from a distance

like a cartload of dressed stone that has been upset beside
a stream. Montignac is not very different from the rest
of them. Its inhabitants like to think that its individuality
is in every respect more marked
than that of its rival, Terrasson.
For them it is more muddy in winter, more windy in spring,
more dusty in summer, and more beautiful in autumn. Its
stones are more historic, its families older, and the sweet chest-
nuts from the woods above it larger and more floury, than
anything that Terrasson, which has five hundred more inhabit-
ants, can ever produce. Indeed, if Terrasson were not a mile
or two nearer the highway from Périgueux to Brive, and had
not the unfair advantage of a great horse fair in June, to which
the farmers even beyond Montignac have to drive theirbeasts,
Montignac would be accounted the more important town of
the two, even outside its own half-ruined walls. So, at least,
its inhabitants believe.
The Vézére flows swiftly through the middle of the town,
a trout-river of which the colour changes with every variation
of the weather and the seasons. Houses with projecting
wooden galleries hang over it ; a fine bridge of dressed stone
spans it ; yet it brings the changing life of the wild country
into the little town. Indeed Montignac is so small and so
crowded together that the country is only a stone’s throw away,
with water meadows and poplars by the stream, sunny slopes
terraced for vines, woods of walnut and chestnut, pointed with
an occasional cypress, and rutted lanes that wander through
the countryside to end at some lonely farm that looks half a
monastery.
Such is the country now ; and such, with little change,
was the country in the middle of the eighteenth century. But
in those days the town seemed less homogeneous. Its social
structure was as complicated as that of France under the
ancien régime. There was no bridge across the river. The
I!
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

Vézére was a frontier ; half the town, on the left bank, was in
the diocese of Sarlat, and the other half, on the right bank, in
the diocese of Périgueux. The left bank was the aristocratic
and older quarter, and consciously looked down upon the right.
Then, as now, Montignac had a little bourgeois society of its
own, with an aristocracy of the old legal families of the place,
and an intelligentsia of the apothecary, the surgeon and the
priest. But they found their society on their own bank of the
stream, and from such of the old manors and older fortified
houses of the Sarladais as had not been destroyed in the civil
wars that had ravaged the country one, two and three centuries
before. Jean Joubert was the doctor ; he had been born in
Montignac, and though he had gone away to be an army
surgeon, and had married a woman not of the country while
he was away on service, when she died in 1746 he had naturally
turned home again, set up in practice in his native place, cast
his eye over the families of Queyroy and Gontier, who were the
Jouberts’ recognized equals in Montignac, and married Marie
Anne Gontier.
Their first child was a daughter, their second, a son, who
was born on May 7th, 1754, and baptised Joseph in the old
church on the left bank of the river, with a Queyroy for god-
father. As the years went on, the stone house in the winding
street leading up from the river to the castle became fuller and
fuller of children. It had four good large rooms and plenty of
kitchen and storage space, and a terrace that served as an
additional sitting-room in the summer, but they hardly sufficed
to hold the thirteen babies that Marie Anne Joubert produced
in sixteen years. Joseph used to find in winter that even the
wide hearth-place was hardly wide enough to warm them all,
and in spring and summer that the dark and narrow garden,
smelling of box-trees and old earth, was less attractive than the
countryside beyond the walls. It did not seem long before he
was old enough to get down to the river alone, and to spend
hours watching its eddies and its reflections ; nor much longer
before he could follow it out into the water-meadows and watch
the clear blue spring of Bleu-fonds pouring into the dark waters
of the Vézére. As he grew out of childhood new life came to
the little town. A manufacturer who had risen to be Intendant
of Guyenne, and needed to send his waggons of wool-sacks
and bales of linen more easily between Sarlat and Périgueux,
12
 1754-1778
built a bridge over the Vézére. It was a beautiful bridge,
with pontoons of stone which had sharp prows like those of
ships ; the river made fresh eddies round them, and in time
of flood tumbled and gurgled angrily against their interference.
Young Joubert and his companions at the only school that
Montignac boasted, watched its erection most assiduously, in
company with the men at the other end of life, who like them
had time to stand still and watch things change. When the
bridge was finished soon after Joubert’s twelfth birthday, it
became evident that the focus of life in Montignac had shifted.
Left bank and right bank met upon the bridge ; it served as a
rendezvous and almost as a club. If a man were lonely or
bored, he could be sure of finding a friend leaning over the
parapet ; if he had a bit of news to give or a judgment to air,
he could be sure of finding an audience there. Insensibly the
barriers between right bank and left bank were broken down.
Montignac became a political entity, with its agora on the
bridge.
Joseph Joubert, as the eldest boy of the family, was early
broken to responsibility. His elder sister Catherine, his three
younger brothers, his three younger sisters, the five babies who
died in infancy, his mother, worn out by constant child-bearing,
his father, busy with a practice that extended beyond Montign-
ac into the country, none of them did much for him, and most
of them tacitly required his services or his consideration.. At
one time or another his parents used to eke out their modest
means by taking boarders, surgeon-apprentices or reputable
people who desired to sojourn in Montignac for some reason
or another and did not wish to make a long stay at the Soleil
d’Or. There was always good reason for Joseph to look for
solitude by the river or on the hills, for it was not to be found
at home. An obscure sense of duty made the little boy a good
son to his overburdened mother, but such duty could only be
fulfilled if its fatigues were repaired in solitary wanderings
about the countryside. Fortunately everyone at home was
busy enough for such wanderings to pass almost unperceived.
If life at the Jouberts was crowded and economical,
Madame Joubert yet contrived to offer certain pleasures even
to her introspective boy. The garden was too small and sun-
less and child-haunted to yield much ; yet in the markets held
on Wednesdays and Sundays the old ladies who had come in
13
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

from the farms and cottages outside the town had plenty of
vegetables to sell for very little money. The prudent house-
wife would make a bargain for all that one of the market-women
had left at the end of the morning ; three pounds of beans,
let us say, a basket of dandelion leaves for salad, a score of eggs,
and a pair of rather elderly hens ; and might get an odd lot of
small sweet figs, a few bullaces and a bunch of marigolds thrown
in for no more than she would have had to pay for the fowls
alone when the market first opened. On St. Crispin’s Day,
October 25th, the cry of the chimney sweep announced winter,
and winter meant duller fare. Yet the autumn quinces,
apples and pears had been cooked in honey, and Madame
Joubert still contrived to give her children treats. When the
household came back from the midnight mass on Christmas
Eve, there was always a supper of cabbage soup, pig’s puddings,
sausages, chitterlings and apple fritters that the old cook had
dished up as a surprise ; for Twelfth Night there was always
a cake with two beans in it, and the finders had the unwonted
glory of reigning, if only for a night.
Schooling in Montignac was simple; there was a school
that taught the boys the three R’s, and a convent where the
girls learned to read and sew and cook and sing pious canticles.
The nuns taught them to behave with the modesty and
consideration that mark a polttesse de ceur, and they were
little likely to forget the teaching in Montignac, where people
had the simple good manners of a country town in which
everyone knows his own rank. The girls were early taught
to spin a little wool in their spare time, and soon were skilled
enough to strip and spin the hemp from the water-meadows,
and their yarn then went to the weaver near the church
to be woven into strong coarse sheets and table linen. There
were so many bee-farms in the hills that wax was cheap,
and in the evening they had fine yellowish candles to sit by as
well as lamps fed by oil pressed from nuts gathered in the woods.
Joseph’s tentative and fumbling hands shewed no voca-
tion for surgery. Instead his parents destined him for the
profession that held the highest place in the estimation of the
bourgeois of Montignac : the Law. He was willing enough ;
the only other profession of which he had heard anything was
the army. In the evening when his father’s rounds had ended
early, he would sometimes find time to talk of his service with
14
 1754-1778
the regiment. For such a life, as for surgery, Joseph knew he
had no vocation : so why not the Bar? Already he knew
that words were more congenial to him than deeds.
He had gone to the town school for years now, and had
learned his three R’s and the elements of history, geography
and composition at the hands of its old master. Now, if he
was to have a learned profession, he must learn more than its
master knew. His parents decided to send him to the College
of the Fathers of Christian Doctrine at Toulouse.
Term began on St. Luke’s Day, and in October, 1768 he
left Montignac for the first time. He was fourteen ; he left
a home full of children, as usual with a baby of less than a
year crying in the old walnut cradle by the fire. For the first
time he recognized that his dependence on his mother was
almost as great as the baby’s ; her unquestioning love, her
simple faith, her tenderness, hardly expressed but always
there : these were what he had come to count upon. The
diligence might drive him through country as beautiful as the
valley of the Vézére, through towns larger and more prosperous
than Montignac, to a great city where he was to find learning ;
but all these places had no soul in them that loved him with
understanding. Toulouse seemed a wilderness of red brick,
oddly garish after the grey stone and grey slate of Périgord, a
metropolis of noise and strange people talking an unfamiliar
dialect. The yellow tide of the Garonne was no more different
from the tawny waters of the Vézére than the bustle of the
great town from the intimacy of Montignac. ‘The terrific
noise, once one had got used to it, made the remembered
silence of Montignac seem almost melancholy, and the number
of people who appeared to have nothing to do made the
loungers on its bridge seem almost industrious.
At the coach-stop a young man in a priest’s cassock was
waiting for Joubert, to escort him to the school ; and once he
was inside the Collége de l’Esquille he was at least shut off
from the confusion without. The building was all of rosy
brick, yet its cloisters and courts had a severe charm and quiet.
The members of the Congregation of Christian Doctrine, who
directed it, were aloof and impersonal, yet kind : though they
might keep themselves secret from their pupils, they tried
to sound the depths of the boys’ hearts and minds, as well as
to teach them a Christian philosophy and a classical canon of
1H
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

language. Freedom was gone, gone with maternal love;

but order had come in its place. The bell that gave its name
to the school governed all its life. Joubert soon found that it
saved him the trouble of deciding what to do ; and while he
obeyed its imperious note his mind, at least, enjoyed a new
kind of liberty. The chapel, with its portrait of St. Louis
Gonzaga, had quite another atmosphere than the church at
Montignac ; it was a place of spiritual effort as well as of
spiritual peace. Yet there was no conflict to be resolved here
between the everyday world and the world of church : here
religion had made a world of its own, and of that world
Joubert was now a citizen.
The bell rang at dawn ; the boys in the dormitory rose
and dressed in silence, and made their beds. The bell rang
once more, and they went down to prayers in the chapel.
After a brief breakfast, the bell rang again to summon the boys
to their classrooms. Part of the catechism was recited and
commented upon, a passage from the New Testament read,
and then they settled down to a hard morning’s work on the
classics. The teachers, all members of the Order, were all of
them young, and had themselves been trained in the school’s
characteristic tradition of religion and classicism. They had
the simple gaiety and complete disinterestedness of the
cloistered life, and looked forward only to the time when they
should proceed beyond educating others to the deeper study
of the things they taught. Their teaching revealed to the
little boy things undreamed of in Montignac: the loving
choice of words, the musical composition of phrases, that
constitutes style ; the precision of expression, the concatena-
tion of ideas, that expresses thought ; the sympathetic analysis,
the intuitive judgment, that is the basis of criticism. At
Montignac the busy present had sufficed ; here everything was
drawn from the past in order to serve the future. Personal
ambition needed no discouragement in a place where service
was unrewarded and the fruits of erudition traditional ;
learning was here not a career, but a way of life.
Joubert had had enough of the company of children at
Montignac ; at Toulouse he was content to find his soul in
solitude. He was friendly enough with his contemporaries,
but it was a surface friendliness ; his real links were with the
young Brethren who taught him. He began to feel that his
16
 1754-1778 3
true life lay in this quiet chapel, these orderly class-rooms,
these regular cloisters. By a custom of the school the best
pupils of the class used often to be invited in turn to mount a
kind of clerk’s desk below the teacher’s pulpit, and thence
give a résumé of what they had learned. Joubert dreaded the
experience, but when it came he found in it unexpected plea-
sure. Might he aspire one day to occupy even the teacher’s
place ?
He had no more vocation for the Bar than for surgery.
His mother could understand his wish for the professed life ;
his father only asked that he should have a:respectable calling
that would provide a living for him. A few days after his
eighteenth birthday he formally assumed the soutane, and was
entered on the list of novices of the Congregation.
The tall, thin, gangling boy with the long melancholic
nose looked distressingly at home in the black cassock buttoned
up to his chin, and the square biretta. But he felt less at home
away in the Mother House in the centre of the town where the
novices lived than he had done in the school. Every morning
he rose at four ; every day he was bound to recite the Breviary,
the Office of the Virgin and the Rosary. He ate his meals
at the common table with his fellow novices, sitting in silence
on one side of it with no one opposite him to distract his atten-
tion from the pious reading that accompanied the meal. His
studies continued ; he was given charge of one of the classes ;
but yet he was not so happy as his own masters had seemed
to be when he was a boy. ‘The discipline and the instruction
given to the novices seemed less to teach the aloofness of spirit
which was freedom than to threaten the very independence of
his inner self. Once or twice a year the novices underwent an
examination, at once intellectual and spiritual, to determine
whether they should continue to prove their vocation or no.
Joubert justified himself to the community in September,
1772; but before the next scrutiny in April, 1773, he had
disproved his vocation to his own satisfaction, and had with-
drawn from his novitiate.
Yet, if he were no longer in the novice-house, he was still
attached to the school. He still wore the cassock, as a lay
brother, and still taught Latin to the youngest children and
followed his own classical studies at the same time. He was
happier so ; he could profit by every aspect of the college as a

17
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

school of piety, without admitting the claim of the Congrega-

tion over his soul. He was contented to live with a crucifix
and a prie-dieu to form a minute oratory beside his bed ; to
follow of his own free will the pious exercises and mscdiiatiou:
of chapel and cloister ; and to submit of choice to a discipline
that he had resented when it was compulsory. ‘The monastic
tradition imposed an unconscious modesty upon learning;
there was not the hurry and struggle of emulation, but a quiet
discipline of study, a simple acceptance of the fact of ignorance.
The long quiet years provided exactly the environment that
his rather slow development required : release from material
cares, an ordered life, and intellectual direction combined with
freedom of mind. Without them he might have become a
hack advocate at the Toulouse Bar, an attorney with no gift
for pleading and a stronger sense of justice than of law. As it
was, he had time for serious study and quiet thought. He laid
the foundations of an unpretentious but genuine erudition and
by reading most of the classics learned which were those that
he wished to read again. He gained a knowledge of himself,
of his natural bent, his gifts, capacities and failings, that was
to be the rock on which his life was built.
He liked the little boys in his class; he respectedthe
Brethren ; and he took an amused interest in his colleagues.
They came from all over Southern France ; he liked to think
that their different characters were in some sort reflected in
their different dialects and accents. There was Noél de
Villar, who had a mind full of facts ranged like books on a shelf,
a gift for turgid eloquence, and a capacity for administration
that he exercised unmercifully upon the little boys in his class :
it was easy to predict a distinguished career for him within the
Order. ‘There was Pierre de Laromiguiére, who had entered
as a novice the year before Joubert : a man with a consider-
able capacity for music and an even greater gift for sentiment.
In the novice house he had used to play his flute in the evening
in hopes of enchanting a novice in the neighbouring nunnery.
But he was equally gifted in dialectic, and deeply interested in
Condillac and the sensualist philosophers; the learned
atmosphere of the Esquille would in the end probably suffice
for him. Joubert could remember one who had escaped :
Philippe Fabre from Carcassonne, who now called himself
Fabre d’Eglantine. Ugly, dirty, lazy, with adroit manners
18
 1754-1778
and an adventurous passion for women, he had run off in
Joubert’s third year at the school to join a troupe of travelling
comedians, unaware that his sonnet to the Virgin had won the
prize at the Jeux Floraux of Toulouse. Joubert’s real friend
was a quieter man, Dardenne, a few years older than himself :
a man who was a born teacher, a true example of the principles
of the Brethren. Yet even he was addicted to political think-
ing : the people, he thought, should be fed, and clothed, and
lodged, and beaten once a day. Philanthropy unmitigated
would bring destruction to society. Joubert, who was young
enough to feel that humanitarian philosophy might make
France a paradise even for the poor, found his predictions
astringent, yet he could not forget them. For his own part,
he felt that it was the sacrifice of one part of a man to another
that had prevented the flowering of human happiness and
human achievement ; man’s social feelings had been stunted
and warped, and he had been allowed to grow only like a
pollarded tree. If only a man were allowed to develop all
his faculties, that man would live in felicity. Yet with this
view honesty made him hold the doctrine that there was no
equality among men. Strength, industry and _ intellectual
power were not constant among them. ‘The philosophies of
the day, his own included, contained only isolated truths, that
were like the scattered ruins of a structure of which the founda-
tions had not yet been discovered.
Joubert’s position as a lay brother allowed him to see
something of life outside the cloister. He was free not only
to leave the school and wander through the merry streets of
Toulouse, but also to visit the families whose sons had been his
companions or pupils in the school. His masters warned him
against social pleasure ; he found the disappointments that it
often offered the best warning against overmuch indulgence in
it. It took a little time for him to grow accustomed to the
conventions of the outside world ; duty and good manners
sometimes seemed incompatible, and timidity sometimes to
lead to deceit. After the critical discipline of the novice-house
the easy praise of society rang oddly ; he had to remind him-
self that good manners alone dictated it. Yet, it seemed, it
was more often for the character and oddity of their defects
that men were loved than for their unpicturesque virtues.
Even he sometimes found himself under the charm of persons
19
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

whom he could neither love nor esteem ; yet it was impossible

to hate and despise them, or rather their bad qualities, as he
should. This element of charm was left out of the books of
moral philosophy that they read at college, yet it seemed to be
one of the motive forces of the world.
The chief delight of society, for him, was conversation ;
not the pedestrian conversation, between business and gossip,
of Montignac ; not the scholastic conversation, between learn-
ing and discipline, of the College, but a conversation of ideas
and personalities, carried on according to the gracious code of
the ancien régime, yet invigorated by the surprising notions of the
new philosophy. It was a conversation in which women played
an equal part with men, and Joubert, who had never known a
woman well, except his gentle, overworked mother and the
old ladies in the market of Montignac, learned to enjoy and to
value woman’s quickness in thought and talk, their unlearned
originality, their disrespect for authority and their liking for
simple truth. He learned, too, how to behave in such society,
with the old-fashioned ceremony and gentle gallantry that
befitted a man who wore a soutane, and the easy talk that
could reveal his ideas without the pedantry that was permitted
in the cloisters of the Esquille.
Toulouse had its own professional society, led by the
barristers of its Law Courts ; a society much more rich and
much more sophisticated than that of Montignac, but funda-
mentally likeit. It had also a more elegant, if less rich society,
composed of the lesser local nobles who had a town house for
the winter in Toulouse instead of in Paris. ‘They too sent their
sons to the Esquille, and so Joubert came to be admitted to one
or two such houses. One of his contemporaries, the Baron de
Falguiére, had married young, and his house was the gayest
and most fashionable that Joubert entered. The shy teacher
even wrote little verses for his hostess’s name day.
Joubert might easily have turned into the petit abbé with-
out whom no eighteenth century salon was complete, had not
he decided in 1776 to leave the Esquille for good. Three
years as a lay brother had revealed the world to him, and he
deliberately chose the world rather than the cloister. The
innocence of the cloister was ignorant ; it might be a virtue,
but it was no foundation on which to build a life. His mother
wrote sad letters to him which tore his heart, but he was
20
 1754-1778
twenty-two now, and for all his gentleness was out of leading-
strings.
Yet, when he had left the College, where was he to go?
He spent a few days with the Falguiéres in Toulouse, and then
returned to the only other place he knew, Montignac. The
bridge had weathered nicely, and looked as if it had always
been there ; his mother seemed more tired, his father more
irritable than he remembered. His brothers and sisters had
grown up ; even the baby whom he had left in the cradle was
nearly nine. The house was fuller than ever, and there
seemed little place for this eldest son of twenty-two, ill at ease
in his secular clothes, without profession or prospects or any
clear convictions except that he wished to be neither surgeon
nor barrister nor priest. His next eldest brother was away,
learning to be a doctor ; the second was at school at Brive, and
the youngest at the town school in Montignac. His father
was always busy and often out on his rounds. It was in the
main a house of women, occupied by his mother and his four
sisters. He missed the fine talk of Toulouse, yet discovered
once more that sublime common sense which is only to be found
in the country among people who learn it at their everyday
tasks. It was impossible to write vers de société in the dark little
garden, or to compose epigrams on the parapet of the bridge,
but something of the unreality of the cloister and of the salon
seemed to drop from him. There were things not taught at
the Esquille that might be learned on the rope-walk on the
terrace beside the church, or even on the pall-mall ground in
the field just outside the town.
Now that he had come back to it, he discovered that
Montignac had a poetry of its own. When a girl or a youth
died young, all the bells of the old church were pealed for the
funeral, and as if to excuse their merry noise the old ladies
would say that it was for their wedding that they sounded.
Even the avocations of every day made music out of the
rhythms of work. Joubert might find less enjoyment in the
fashionable poets, but he discovered a new pleasure in the old
songs that his mother and sisters used to sing about the house.
He liked to listen to the slow and heavy measures the plough-
men sang, to the shorter rhythms of the men poling rafts down
the Vézére, and to the songs, gentle and sentimental as a
lullaby, that the shepherds sang as they watched their sheep.
2
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

It was another prosody than he had learned at College, but it

gave a new value to the cadences of his own tongue. He
thought less often about an abstract Man, and more about the
farmers in blue blouses who drove their beasts up the steep
street, the white-capped women on their way to market, and
the shopkeepers who knew so much besides the value of their
wares. He began to think that other forms of literature than
verse might prove more congenial ; a novel, perhaps, or a
short tale with the valley of the Vézére for its setting? He
borrowed from his mother a magnificent phrase to begin it :
‘* There are three things in my country that only time can
whiten : flax, hemp and hair.” He described the white
dress of the heroine that made her visible to the monk in his
monastery on the distant hill ; the thirty paths down from
the monastery, graven by a hundred thousand storms ; and
then, when he was about to start on the story itself, inspiration
failed him and he came to a stop. Like the hero, he had
watched the girl upon the hill, and like him he had got no
further. He tried to continue his studies, and read Thomas
Hobbes’ Human Nature: there was a study worth making,
though he would have pursued it on different lines from
Hobbes. Few thinkers can grapple with the Good, the True
and the Beautiful at once ; most are content to conceive Good-
ness as a natural issue of Truth and Beauty. To Joubert,
however, Goodness was a living and overwhelming reality,
beside which Beauty and even Truth were pale abstractions.
He used to talk about it with the men on the bridge, who were
unconsciously flattered by his earnest attention to what they
had to say. Goodness, he soon found, was no self-contained
virtue, but a matter that must include not merely the indivi-
dual, but also the individual in relation to his fellows. Here
there was an endless field of study open to him. Why did the
benefits he had received from his father make a closer bond for
the old man then for himself? How could the freedom he
owed to himself be reconciled with the duty and gratitude he
owed to his parents ?
He had one real source of strength: he was perfectly
clear about what interested him and what did not, and even
clearer about what he was willing to do and what he was not.
He could not understand why his mother was always worrying
about his future and his father always grumbling about his
22
 1754-1778
past. His poor mother wept that her son, who was so full of
goodness, should be so tiresome ; what use were all his virtues,
when he was determined to make no practical use of them?
It was all very well to consider the moral significance of every-
thing—Joseph had always been a good boy—but in this world
one had to consider the material aspect, too, especially if one
were the eldest of eight and the son of a country surgeon. It
was all very well to take Excelle et tu vivras as a motto, but unless
her son excelled in some particular pursuit he would have
nothing to live on.
Joubert continued unperturbed in his search for excellence.
Such pocket-money as he had, he gave away ; other men might
. be richer than he was, but he was determined that they should
not be more generous. Such time as he disposed of (and by
the standards of Montignac he was wholly idle) he devoted to
philosophic thought. If he needed distraction, he studied
human nature in its local peculiarities.
Yet it was hard to be a philosopher in an atmosphere of
disapproval ; hard, even, to distinguish local peculiarities
when one had no metropolitan standards of judgment. If only
he could get to Paris! There everyone was a philosopher ;
there, the thinking that here passed for idleness would gain him
distinction and a living. Gradually the wish became a plan.
His parents were so thankful to find him positive at last that
they made it easy for him to go. In May, 1778, he drove in
to Brive and took the diligence: to Paris, with a ribbon from
his mother’s hair packed into a corner of his valise to remind
him of home.

23
 CHAPTER TWO

1778-1786

N Paris, Joubert gravitated naturally to the students’

quarter on the left bank, and found a modest lodging in
the Hotel de Bordeaux in the rue des Francs-Bourgeois,*
at the corner of the gardens of the Luxembourg. It was his
first experience of a landlady. Offficiously polite in manner,
she appeared to acquiesce in everything, and he began to think
her solicitous and kind ; but he soon found that she returned
with unrelenting perseverance to every proposition that might
gain her a few more livres, and that she was inflexibly atten-
tive to her own interest. Her manoeuvres were executed so
civilly, so sentimentally and so determinedly, that he had to
yield ; but he was duped without being deceived.
If Montignac was a town of rough grey stone and slate
that matched it, Toulouse a city of rose brick and ridged
Southern tiles, Paris was a metropolis with houses of stucco
and dressed ashlar that were so high that one never saw their
roofs at all. The shadows of the houses opposite made
patterns across their faces : otherwise they were inexpressive
and unchanging. ‘The stuffy streets had no obvious purpose :
at Montignac each road led outwards to some known destina-
tion in the country ; at Toulouse each street led from some
church or other landmark to another ; here in Paris they ran
in an aimless network that trapped the traveller.
He walked down the rue de la Harpe to the river, past the
convent of the Cordeliers. The medieval arcaded walls of
the Convent rose opposite the elegant colonnades of the
School of Medicine : ancient religion opposite new knowledge.
From the edge of the quay he saw the tall houses of the
island, like grey cliffs against the luminous summer clouds, and
their reflection, strangely beautified, in the green water. He
walked downstream a little way, until he reached the Pont
Neuf. Beside the river the plan of the city seemed plain.
He leaned upon the wide parapet of the bridge, between the
* Now rue Monsieur le Prince.

24:
 1778-1786
shops built out over the piers, and looked upstream to the old
palace that was now the Law Courts and Notre Dame. The
air was full of the noise of women washing linen on barges
moored by the bank, and beating the dirt out of it with wooden
battledores. They beat it unmercifully, and then scrubbed it
with a hard brush to save soap. Joubert felt the collar of his
shirt, made from flax grown, spun, woven, bleached and
sewn at Montignac, and wondered ruefully if it would stand
the strain.
Then he crossed the crowded roadway, steering with
agitated care between a dray drawn by white Percherons and
an elegant phaeton with a pair of fiery bays, to look down-
stream to the Louvre and the Tuileries. The dull greenish
water was different from the yellow Garonne or the tawny
Vézére ; the boats and barges and rafts of timber seemed to
go by at a faster rate ; yet here by the river he seemed not
altogether a stranger. It gave him heart to explore the quarter
of the Sorbonne, and here, too, he began to feel at home.
Those young students in cassocks might have come from his
own College ; the bells in the monastic houses might not have
the timbre of the Esquille, but they had the same imperious
note. He came back to his lodgings by the rue de Vaugirard,
prepared to believe that the shops there were kept by men
busier, but not of another race, than his friends in the rue du
Cheval Blanc. There were no shop signs here to creak in
the wind, sticking out boldly into the street, but discreet little
boards set against the houses: yet these still portrayed the
familiar kettles and swords and pipes and woolsacks of the
old shops at home. The traffic was astonishing, even after
Toulouse ; the narrower the street, the more coaches seemed
to use it. The dirt was equally amazing. Hay was spread
about to keep the streets clean, but since open drains ran down
the middle it needed only a shower to turn the best paved
street into a stinking morass, swimming with greasy black mud.
There were ragged crossing sweepers, armed with birch brooms
and wooden shovels ; there were wretched barefooted girls
with baskets on their backs, and pninted sticks with which
they picked up the rubbish that lay about the streets ;_but
their work seemed to make little difference to the filth in the
roadway. The streets were noisy with people crying their
wares ; a man almost deafened him by suddenly yelling into

25
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

his ear: “ N’oubliez pas en passant des pierres a brrriquets qua

rrrendent la lumiérrre a volonté!”? And here was a fat woman
with a jolly face, with an incongruously fashionable hat on
the top of it, selling touch-wood : “La v’la, mes enfants, la
marchande d’amadou!”’ and an oyster-woman with a strange
staccato cry: “A la barqg?! a la bard!” Everything had a
certain elegance; the very strawberries on the barrows,
though they looked stale to country eyes, were arranged in
smart little bunches like buttonholes.
Joubert bought a bottle of ink from a bareheaded man
with tangled hair ; his cry was so complicated that Joubert
could not make it out, but his ink-bottles were evident, in a
basket fixed high on a wooden saddle on the donkey he led,
with the demijohns of ink to fill them slung on either side. A
beggar child asked him for a sou, “‘ en pitié de ma misere,” and
promptly turned a cartwheel to show his natural enjoyment
of life. Joubert perceived astonishing contrasts of wealth,
yet people belonged less simply to their class than they did at
home. For all the size of the city, Parisians seemed to be less
citizens than individuals. There was an extraordinary feeling
of freedom; Public Opinion, that ruled any smaller town, had
here lost its power. The people on the pavement seemed to
bounce along as if they had springs in their heels; and the
light, though colder than in the south, had a strange clearness
about it that made every detail amusing.
Soon he had found that though the Seine ran between
busy quays, and there were no water-meadows for him to
ramble in, there were other quiet places where a man might
think. The gardens of the Luxembourg were at his very door,
quiet and formal, where students and priests walked un the
sanded alleys and bourgeois children played by the neat
flower beds. There was no solitude there, but there was calm.
In any case one thought in a different fashion in a great city ;
things were no longer simple and clear and isolated, but
linked to each other by a thousand threads, like leaves on a
bramble on an October morning.
The Latin Quarter, he soon found, was but another
provincial city, in which he had every right to feel at home.
The real metropolis lay across the river, where the palaces
were, and the great squares with an equestrian statue ramping
in the middle. It was there that he realized that he was living
26
 1778-1 786
in a metropolis of seven hundred thousand souls. He felt a
stranger indeed on the long terrace of the Feuillants, that
ran alongside the gardens of the royal palaces and overlooked
the alley where the King’s horses were schooled and exercised.
These gentlemen with wide-skirted coats and elegant powdered
hair 4 [oiseau royal, with a diamond at their throat, were of
another race than he had encountered even in the most
fashionable salons of Toulouse. They took different things
seriously from any people he had known ; a rosette or a pin
might engage their whole attention, as solemnly and intellec-
tually as the definition of happiness might engage his own.
The ladies they escorted were like pictures, and walked with
an elegant, artificial, tripping step, a gait learned as carefully
as the paces of the manége.
Joubert looked down from the terrace before the Tuileries,
leaning upon the iron railings between the statues of winged
horses, and watched the carriages swinging across to the
Cours la Reine: chaises and coaches painted with mytho-
logical scenes, with shepherdesses, or in plain rich colours with
a great coat of arms splayed across the door ; each with its
coachman and groom and footmen in livery ; each carrying
its elegant occupants into a world he would never know. ‘The
air was misted with the dust of their passing, and the after-
noon sunlight turned the very dust to gold.
Beyond the gardens he came into another quarter, where
once more he felt at home. Here were bookshops and print-
sellers, with caricatures of Necker and the English ; here were
elegant wide streets, but if you peeped through the fortes-
cochéres you could see courtyards and old trees that might have
been in Toulouse. He found himself out on the Boulevard,
among the people walking on the pavements under the trees.
He followed it to a great gateway, carved with trophies of arms ;
and there turned up a long straight street which led him back
to the Ile de la Cité, and so home.
It was not long before Joubert began to feel at home in
any part of Paris. Soon he had begun to analyse the incredible
congestion of the streets; if a bit of earth or stone was big enough
to sit on without disturbance, someone started to make a living
on it. Each corner or angle that offered a foot or two of site
housed a letter writer or a shoe-mender or a man with an urn
of lemonade or brandy or a little furnace on which he cooked

27
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

waffles or roasted chestnuts. At nightfall each packed his wares,

folded up the legs of his table and strapped it on his back, and
disappeared to an unknown home ; but by morning he would
be there again, as regular an inhabitant of the street as the
owner of the house against which he leaned. The costers and
pedlars, the beggars and vagrants were faithful to their
quarter ; the blind man from the Hospital of the Quinze-
Vingts who chanted an interminable canticle would generally
be found under a porte cochére of the rue de Varenne, the man
who dealt in old clothes and shrieked like a macaw was
always about the rue Mazarine.
Joubert investigated the churches of Paris and learned
that each had a characteristic congregation. The lacy rood -
screen of Saint Etienne du Mont looked down on a congrega-
tion that seemed to belong to a commercial city of the
Middle Ages : women with faces from which penitence had
erased their history, leaving them like scrubbed parchments ;
men who had passed their lives in counting money, and now
told their beads with a practised caution, as if fearing that one
of them might sound false. At Saint Germain people wore
flowers, and came as much to listen to the organ as to worship ;
the very Benedictines looked cheerful, worldly and well fed.
But at Saint Sulpice everyone seemed thin, morose, and tired
of this world and the next ; not even their priest’s refusal to
bury Voltaire had made them secure in their piety.
Soon Paris exercised its inevitable influence, and Joubert
began to try to look like a Parisian. He had a barber to curl
his hair, and powdered it religiously every morning. He still
looked like a provincial, but no longer like a provincial who
had just escaped from a cloister. He learned the economies
of the Parisian bachelor : the luncheon that has for its immut-
able foundation a penny roll, round, oval, long, soft or crusty,
rye or wheaten, but always a penny roll : a meal to be eked
out with a hot potato from the brazier at the corner of the
street, by an apple from the greengrocer’s, or, on a feast day,
a smoked sausage from the pork butcher’s ; a meal to be washed
down with a cup of coffee at a favourite café, seasoned by the
reading of the day’s newspaper. Now that he was beginning
to look, as he thought, like a Parisian, he could sit in a café
among the chess-players and listen discreetly to other people
talking, without drawing anyone’s eye to himself. Hobbes
28
 1778-1786
had been right when he treated human nature as consistent ;
once one got behind the appearance and the setting, these
good bourgeois of Paris were not very different from the
Queyroys, the Gontiers and the Jouberts of Montignac.
Rather distressingly, too, they talked about the same sort of
things. He had been in Paris some time before he met a
single philosopher. Voltaire had died just before he reached
the city ; Rousseau was dying somewhere in the country out-
side the walls ; but even if these were the greatest, they were
not the only men in this city of practical men who pursued
thought and thought alone. He must contrive to meet the
others.
Dr Joubert had various acquaintances in the capital, men
whom he had known on service, and civil servants whom at
some time or another he had lodged in his house in Montignac.
His son had letters to them, explaining his strange wish to
study philosophy. He presented these, and through the kind-
ness of these acquaintances he was soon in touch with three
authentic philosophers, Marmontel, La Harpe and d’Alembert.
Marmontel was a moralist, and should have appealed to
Joubert ; he came from central France, and had taught in
the Jesuit College at Toulouse, and had followed classes at
the Esquille, which should have caused Joubert to appeal to
him. Yet, perhaps because he was thirty years older than
Joubert, perhaps because he had learned to see life from the
point of view of the Court, the two moralists failed to make
friends. La Harpe was nearer Joubert in age: he was not
quite forty and Joubert, in 1778, was twenty-four. Yet here
again there was too great a difference in temperament for
friendship to be possible. La Harpe was a fighter, and a bitter
fighter ; he had an envious eye, a sardonic mouth and the
intellectual attitude of a boxer ready to defend himself while
attacking his adversary. He seemed to Joubert to have a
polemist’s gift for dealing with words rather than with the ideas
that lay behind them. D’Alembert, again, was older, and
encased in the armour of achievement. He had, moreover,
little taste for company, and his brief meeting with the young
man from Périgord led to no further commerce.
The only philosopher whom Joubert really came to know
was Diderot, who lived quite near him in the rue Taranne, on
the way to Saint Germain des Prés. He was almost as famous
29
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

as d’Alembert, but found that no reason for shutting himself

off from the world. If his life seemed to set no particularly
shining example, none the less Joubert found a true morality
in his emphasis on virtue as the only hope of mankind, and in
his definition of it as a regulation of conduct and motives that
should make men tender, pitiful, simple and contented.
Diderot loved to have young men about him in his fifth floor
library, for he needed an audience for his thoughts ; and they
loved to sit and listen to him, provided that Madame Diderot,
that excellent but bad-tempered housewife, did not make an
ill-timed irruption upon their philosophizing. Diderot would
sit by the fire, without his wig, in a red flannel dressing-gown,
looking none the less the complete philosopher. He was
sixty-five now, but age had only added dignity to his massive
brow and friendly face, and peace to the brilliant eyes and
impetuous mouth. His vivacity overwhelmed and silenced
Joubert, but he was content to sit in a quiet corner and watch.
Diderot was a true polymath ; there seemed nothing that
he did not know. If law came up as a subject of conversation
he would rapidly sketch out an entire code; if the theatre,
he would allude to four or five possible plots ; if history, he
would suddenly launch upon a eulogy of Tacitus, and the hope
that Herculaneum or Pompei might produce fresh texts.
That would lead him on to talking of how best to conduct an
excavation ; and so he would arrive at a happy consideration
of the Golden Age of Greece. He had known persecution,
disappointment and insult ; his great work, the Encyclopedia,
had without his knowledge or consent been published only in a
mangled form ; yet he seemed able to bring light into every
mind and warmth into every heart. Formal and systematic
in much of his writing, in speech he was natural and generous ;
the words came tumbling out, coloured and glowing from his
imagination. To see him at his best one had to watch him
reading the work of some young aspirant : seizing upon it,
tasting it, and at once discovering its good points and supple-
menting its deficiencies from his own rich store, till he would
end by praising it for the things it contained only in his
imagination.
Diderot was for ever having ideas for the books that his
young disciples were to write ; it was hard to spend an after-
noon there without his saddling one with a great burden of a
30
 1778-1786
book that it would have taken a lifetime to complete. First,
Diderot tried to engage Joubert upon an article on the necessity
of great vistas for the soul, whether of hope or of vision ; then,
when Joubert found this too nebulous for his pen, a treatise
on Universal Goodwill was found for him. This he began to
write ; but it proved a difficult subject, without limits or
clear purpose, and Joubert, who liked to say the utmost in the *
fewest words, failed to make a book of it. It led him into all
sorts of trains of thought: about muscular memory, that
governs the musician’s fingers and the dancer’s feet ; about
the relation between touch and the other senses; about
memory and imagination ; about the extension of a man’s
individuality by the exercise of his intelligence ; but he still
failed to seize the root of happiness from which good will
must grow. Yet the very suggestion showed that Diderot
had no bad idea of the interests of his young listener, even
though he did not yet appreciate the quality of his gifts. It
was a great thing to have got Joubert to write on a definite
subject, even though it were to prove unfruitful ; it was a
great thing to have accustomed him to the give-and-take of
discussion ; it was a great thing to have made him forget
St. Thomas Aquinas, to have forced him to argue for himself ;
it was a great thing to have made him realize art, and beauty
its fruit, as a part of the universe, even of the moral universe.
All this Diderot did ; Joubert had not come to Paris in vain.
The other and more ordinary houses to which his father’s
friendships had admitted him, produced more congenial friends
than the libraries of the philosophers. At one of them Joubert
met a man, Louis de Fontanes, three years younger than him-
self, but a year senior in his sojourn in Paris. He was little
more than a boy, and yet at times he reminded Joubert of
Diderot : he had the same quick and almost tumbling manner
of thought and speech, the same brilliant eyes, and the same
gregarious spirit. He had had a hard youth ; he came ofa
good Protestant family, but his mother was a Catholic, and
had had him brought up by the Oratorians in all the rigour
of their régime. He had lost a beloved elder brother, who had
shown every sign of unusual poetic gifts ; his father had died,
leaving little patrimony ; his mother had retired to a nunnery,
and Fontanes had been left at seventeen to make his own way
in the world. He had tried the Civil Service, and given
31
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

it up ; he had tried the cloth trade, and given it up ; and by

the time Joubert met him he was nearly twenty-two, and rather
precariously established as a minor poet in Paris, writing
lyrics of a fashionable melancholy and getting them published,
read and appreciated. Joubert was prepared to look with
respect on a man who contributed to the Almanach des Muses,
and Fontanes was willing to find all kinds of merit in Joubert’s
essays in literary criticism. Their education had given them a
common foundation of classicism ; they each were interested
in other people, and the fact that Fontanes’ interest was less
altruistic than Joubert’s was compensated for by his readier
wit. Each liked to draw general conclusions from the examina-
tion of the particular ; and if Fontanes was satisfied with a
direct cause, while Joubert went on searching for some ultimate
reason, it only made their conversations the more entertaining.
Joubert might be astonished at his friend’s passions, his
ostentation, his greediness, his exuberance, but these qualities
did not make him any less his friend. They looked an odd
pair: Joubert thin and tall, neat and precise, with a long
nose and a judgmatical upper lip; Fontanes inclined to
chubbiness, with flaring nostrils, brilliant eyes, showy yet
untidy clothes, and a habit of cracking his fingers like castanets
when he was excited. One had the air of a priest lately liber-
ated, the other of a rake recently reformed. Yet their friend-
ship was true and was to prove lasting. Fontanes prided
himself upon knowing all the poets and critics of the day ;
Joubert was content to know most of them at second hand.
Joubert himself did not even attempt poetry in these days, but
schooled his prose by making an elegant translation of passages
from Hesiod. His main occupation was still philosophy;
he was trying to find a physical basis for his theories, and read
not only Plato but also Descartes and La Mettrie’s Homme
Machine. None of them understood human happiness as he
would have liked to understand it. Could it be only the
length of their duration that differentiated happiness and
pleasure? Surely there was some difference in their very
essence ? Was La Mettrie right in thinking that there was no
sovereign good more exquisite than the pleasure of love?
Until he understood happiness Joubert had no foundation
for a scheme of morals.
Joubert’s study of such happiness took him far afield.
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 1778-1786
He studied the women who paraded their charms in the
galleries of the Palais Royal, so much more beautiful in figure
than in face, and in face than in mind. In them he was often
astonished to find the imprint of the innocence they had lost.
Did they find it afresh in the babies they had left at home ?
Was it from a sense of shame or a love of beauty that they
strove so hard to seem women of leisure and delicacy?
He studied the peasants in the villages near Paris : men
who were excluded from the city not merely by the great walls
that encircled it, but also by another outlook and way of life.
They were neither countrymen nor townsmen, workmen or
labourers, but a race apart. They had their vices : the greed
of money, the debauchery of wine ; but they had their virtues
too, and especially the infinite patience that made it possible
to make a living out of the eggs or fowls or vegetables or milk
they provided for the city. They combined the free-thinking
of the Parisian with the superstition of the peasant ; they were
troubled by politics, but had no understanding of them. When
Joubert saw one of them taking the washing his wife had done
into Paris on a barrow, with a dog underneath helping to pull
it, the man seemed to him in like case with the dog, helping
to pull an economic machine of which he did not understand
the working. Only when he met such a peasant on a Sunday,
driving out into the country with a friend in an old gig with a
sail-cloth tilt, did he feel happier about him. Common
holidays were a true bond between men, and Paris had its
general feast-days as much as Montignac or Toulouse. Every
spring a Parisian had to go to the Prés Saint Germain to smell
the lilacs ; every Sunday he had to leave the city, if it were
only to sit in the arbour of a wineshop just outside the gates.
Best of all, every. September he had to go to Saint Cloud by
water, on one of three successive Sundays, and walk through
the gay alleys by the river, full of marionettes and fountains
and fire-eaters and conjurers, dancing dogs and sagacious
monkeys, and climb the hill to the park to see Paris dominated
by the golden dome of the Invalides, trembling in a heat haze
at the end of the dark avenue. Joubert in his turn made the
journey, and failed to feel as lonely as he had anticipated. As
night fell he escaped from the crowd and watched the scene
from the quiet darkness at the other side of the long bridge.
The sparse lights of the roadway and of the houses climbing
33
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

the hill, the blaze of lamps by the river, the garish torches of
the stalls, the indistinct flighting movements of the dancing
crowds, were all reflected in the deep clear mirror of the water,
that joined the quiet of the woods above to frame the festivity
in peace.
Joubert studied Fontanes’ friends. There was Sebastien
Mercier, fat, smiling and insipid, a chatterer who chattered
even when he wrote, and yet seemed to have collected an
audience and acquired a reputation by dint of chattering long
enough. He had lately published a descriptive Picture of
Paris : Joubert read it, but found that it omitted much that
made the attractiion of the city for him: the wandering
musicians who played under his window at night, when their
music found a lonely echo in the empty streets ; the pecu-
liarities of the Paris shopkeepers, and of their knowledge of
human nature ; and the oddities of the Gates of Paris, that
instead of being magnificent entries to a great city were
wickets where one paid the octroz, or incongruously Roman
triumphal arches set into medieval fortifications. Perhaps
Mercier knew Paris too well to write about it. He might not
realize, as did a stranger, that there even night was different: a
drama of clocks that one never heard in the day time, of carts
rumbling through the streets, of hurried riders, of snatches
of song, shouted phrases, stumbling footsteps and whispers
under one’s window. Even sleep seemed to have a different
quality than it did when there was no sound but that of the
wind blowing up the valley and the Vézére fretting against the
bridge.
More interesting, and more odd than Mercier, was
Restif de la Bretonne, a man of an inferior yet genuine genius,
torn by occasional bursts of madness ; a man with a touch
of greatness and no dignity. He had the face of a satyr and
the brow of a sage, no manners, and a curiously charming
voice. He wore an extravagant blue cloak over an old dirty
suit, that showed no linen, and an enormous hat, that gave
him a Spanish air of nobility, but of the nobility of the comic
stage. He was fifty when Joubert knew him, a Burgundian
who came from between Avallon and Auxerre. He had made
himself a noble-sounding patronymic from the name of his
father’s little farm, and a pedigree that went back to an
Emperor of Rome. But occasionally he would remember
34
 1778-1786
reality, and describe peasant life as he had known it in a
fashion that enchanted Joubert. Restif de la Bretonne had
been apprenticed as a printer. If his resources were low, he
would work for a time at his trade ; or if some article were
required in a hurry, he would sit before the frame and compose
it as he set it up. He had great theories about printing,
spelling, vocabulary, syntax, life and happiness ; they were
all original and all a little mad.
He was no more sane in his relations with women ;
absolutely promiscuous and absolutely unashamed, he pub-
lished his successes abroad and in detail. His wife was the
cousin of the Auxerrois printer to whom he had been appren-
ticed, and he had married her knowing that she came to him
from other men. He was miserly even of paper and ink, and
when she began to aspire to literary success on her own account,
tried to stop her writing lest she should waste them. She
continued for a time, until he published a pamphlet in which
her infidelities and the comedies she wrote were alike held up
to derision.
Here was Sin, such as the good Fathers talked of in their
instruction of the novices ; Sin avowed as openly as Joubert
would ever have known it as a priest in the confessional, and
more naked, for it was veiled neither by shame nor repentance.
Yet was it still sin, when it was half madness? How strange
was the wall that madness built between men! One could
tell a sane man that he was acting madly, but one could never
tell a madman that he was mad.
At Restif’s house he found others to study who were hardly
less odd : Grimod de la Reyniére, for example, who began to
come there a year or two after he did : a rich young man, who
prided himself on doing nothing that was fashionable. He
was extremely polite to his inferiors, and coldly truthful to his
equals and his betters ; he lived as if he had been the son of a
decent tradesman rather than of a wealthy Farmer General.
He was handless and deformed : he had the parrot-nose and
retreating forehead of the overbred ; and he prided himself
on the simple masculine virtues of industry, candour and in-
tegrity. He used to give philosophic dinners, to which
Joubert and Fontanes went, at his father’s hotel in the Place
Louis XV. The guests drank enormous quantities of milky
coffee and ate piles of bread and butter with anchovies on the
35
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

top. The entertainment began at eleven: at four a great

sirloin or leg of mutton would be brought in. After that,
instead of general conversation, a poet or a dramatist would
read his work aloud to the guests. Joubert had a certain
respect for Grimod de la Reyniére, but found him oddly
pathetic in his attempt to make his wretched life a work of art
as a satiric drama. Yet it was impossible not to envy him the
grace of language that came of frequenting the best society,
that might have been used with effect to clothe thoughts that
could only be achieved in solitude. Grimod de la Reyniére,
with it all, was as mad as Restif, but in a different fashion; the
exhibitionism of the one, and the inverted snobbery of the
other, were alike protests against a world which held no place
for gifted men as neurotic as themselves. They had a third
mad friend, Francois Milran, a man twelve years older than
Joubert, even more humbly born than Restif, but claiming
kinship with Buffon. His real name was Marlin, but when he
had run away from Dijon to sea he had made an anagram of
it, so that it might not continue to remind him of his cruel
father. When Joubert knew him in 1784 he was settled in
Paris, engaged in a little journalism and in the far more
engrossing task of imitating Restif de la Bretonne in every
possible particular, except in the touch of genius that was
beyond him.
These strange characters had a fascination for Joubert.
At Montignac, and even in Toulouse, human nature had
seemed a matter of the most delicate nuances, a thing to be
painted in pastel or gouache ; here in Restif de la Bretonne’s
sordid and shabby old house stranger outlines and darker
shadows gave it the contorted reality of an etching by Jacques
Callot. Joubert found that his ideas of psychology and of
morality needed to be enlarged in scale and intensified in
colouring.
When Joubert first knew Restif de la Bretonne his wife
had just returned to him, after an interlude in which she had
tried to make a little money as a milliner at Joigny. They had
rooms in a great dilapidated house in the rue des Bernardins
near Saint Nicholas du Chardonnet ; a once-splendid house
now filled with noisy and miserable poor people, a house with
a strange wild look that made a fitting background for Restif.
Restif used to spend much of the day and the night wandering
36
 1778-1786
round the Ile Saint Louis, that he had made in some sort his
kingdom. He never left it for the city or the town without
ceremonially kissing its soil. He used to write his books, and
a diary in dog-Latin, on the parapets of the embankment, or
on dirty scraps of paper held flat against a wall. He was
obsessed by anniversaries : his diary gave him each day some-
thing to recall and to live over again, some escape from an
intolerable present into a past that he had succeeded in living
through. For the same reason he would scratch the date on
the parapet or the wall, in the hope that it might help him to
live through another day years hence: scratch it furtively,
lest the police should see him and erase it when he was gone.
Consequently his wife was much alone. By the spring of
1784 Joubert had fallen into the habit of calling at the shabby
house in the rue des Bernardins ; when, as usual, he found
its master out, he used to sit and talk quietly with its forty-
year old mistress. He endowed her, it may be, with a sensi-
bility that was not hers, but at least his belief in her roused her
from the apathy of despair. Soon she was writing to him :—
“* What a consolation for me is your acquaintance,
dear friend! You and your friend M. Fontanes, you
have pulled me out of the degradation in which I was
buried ; you have informed me that I was worth some-
thing, and have made me esteem myself. I owe to you
a new existence ; I owe to you as much as I owe to my
own father. Before I knew you, I was crushed beneath
household cares; I thought myself capable only of
holding a needle and of looking after domestic details.
Kind friends, you have opened my mind; you have
shown me that I have the faculties of thinking, of writing.
. . . L accept with joy the rule that I write to you in the
morning and see you in the afternoon. So I shall give
you all my time, and it is not too much after what I owe
to you. As for the man of whom we sometimes speak,
you do him much honour, and I am not sure that he is
worth as much as you esteem him at... .”
With the hope of giving Madame Restif new encourage-
ment, Joubert came often to the rue des Bernardins. He
did not reckon with the insane jealousy of her faithless husband ;
while Joubert talked by the fire in the sitting-room in the
evening, Restif in his printing room papered with theatrical
3
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

posters, was portraying him as Naireson, one of the lovers in

his novel La Femme Infidelle ; while he took Agnés Restif de la
Bretonne for a quiet walk on the quays. Restif was revealing
the identity of Joubert and Naireson in the nineteenth volume
of the second edition of his Contemporaines ; while he watched
the play of her arched eyebrows beneath her powdered hair,
and unwisely warned her against her husband’s depravity,
Restif was becoming so angry that he would write Joubert’s
name in full in his manuscript instead of in some slender
disguise. At first Restif’s jealousy had been groundless, but
gradually Joubert fell indeed under the charm of the experi-
enced and still beautiful Agnés. There was a day when he
discovered that the light from the two candles by the fire
struck beauties from her face that he had never seen in sunshine
or daylight. There was a day when he sat with her beside
the window and watched the twilight falling at the end of a
rainy afternoon ; everything outside looked taller than it
really was, and within doors he found a new gentleness, a new
sensibility, as if the rain had shut them in together in a solitude
they had never enjoyed before. Joubert added all sorts of
notes to the collection of philosophical observations he had
begun to make : first, criticisms of the theory that a woman
is the chattel of her husband ; then surprised remarks on the
nature of feminine constancy, and then the observation,
written almost in amazement, that a woman may give herself
to another man than her husband and still remain sweet,
industrious, kind and even chaste: feeling no sense of guilt
defiling, but rather a sense of virtue consecrating, her secret
pleasures. It needed less than all this to make Restif de la
Bretonne quite mad with jealousy, but it was still a silent
jealousy. He disapproved, but did not forbid, a project by
which his wife joined Joubert and Fontanes in renting a little
garden for the summer in the rue de l’Oursine. He even dined
with them and Milran in its summer-house. While Restif
carried on a fresh intrigue with a young novelist, he watched ;
and when the intrigue came to a stormy end, and he began to
be haunted again by the fear of the Bastille, or Bicétre, he
revenged himself upon Joubert. On the goth January, 1785,
they were still on good enough terms to eat together a turkey
stuffed with truffles from Montignac ; but Restif was sure
that Joubert was his wife’s lover and that Fontanes was
38
 1778-1786
plotting with the friends of the discarded novelist to send him
to the Bastille. His wife’s lovers and plots against himself
were nothing new to his thoughts, but he knew that he must
defend himself. The part of his mind that was not mad
realized that public opinion was turning ever more strongly
against him, and that it might indeed be the Bastille or Bicétre
next time, unless he could really prove someone else to be in
the wrong. He bribed his younger daughter, still little more
than a child, to act as his spy. The writing of the Femme
Infidelle continued all through that year ; it was published
on December 23rd, 1785. It was a novel written in the form
of letters and many of the letters were those that had actually
passed between Agnés and Joubert: letters tender and un-
wise, and never intended to be published, with a little deadly
distortion and a bitter commentary, by the lady’s husband.
It was an incredible situation for the young moralist of
Montignac. He had spent hours every day in the company of
Agnés ; he had enjoyed a friendship with her that grew ever
more tender, an affection that grew ever more passionate, yet
he had always been sustained by a sense of virtue. He had
hoped to bring her back to religion and quiet happiness ; and
all the time her incalculable husband had been preparing to
explode this public scandal. Joubert had never expected
to see himself pilloried as a treacherous friend and an illicit
lover ; and now the impossible had happened.
A liaison with a married woman might not be taken
seriously in the circles in which Fontanes and Grimod de la
Reyniére moved ; but with his own decent bourgeoisie it was
still a grave matter. Even in elegant society it was only per-
mitted if there were no scandal ; and here was scandal of the
grossest and most vulgar sort. He was angry when he thought
of his few grand friends reading the book, and bitterly ashamed
when he thought that by some strange coincidence knowledge
of it might come to his mother.
By the end of November, Agnés had left Restif de la
Bretonne for good ; that did not help matters. Fontanes had
left Paris for London in the middle of October ; that made
things worse. Diderot had died, rather suddenly, in 1784,
just when Joubert was getting really involved with Agnés.
There was no mitigation or consolation but the fact that he
himself was little known in Paris and the book that pilloried

39
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

him not a success. And in it, too, were evident signs of Restif’s —
derangement ; one of his accusations against Joubert was that
he had used to erase the inscriptions which Restif made on the
parapets of the Ile Saint Louis. Yet Joubert felt that he him-
self had gained his knowledge of Restif’s psychology at a great
price, and that not everyone would be so quick as he was to
recognize madness when they saw it. Even the evidence of
Restif’s derangement might not suffice to save his own reputa-
tion. He tore up his letters from Agnés and the rough copies
of those he had written to her, all but one sheet on which tears
and laughter were mingled. Her subsequent regret that he
should have destroyed them seemed so strange to him that it
helped to soften their parting. Evidently he did not yet know
all concerning human nature, evidently the secret of human
happiness still lay hid ; but at least he had drunk at poetry’s
true source, though discretion had made him destroy all the
results of his first sweet draught of the spring of love.

40
 CHAPTER THREE

1786-1787

OUBERT?’S obvious ability, and his literary friends, had

given him a reputation as a promising writer, but he had
published nothing to justify it. His experience with
Restif de la Bretonne had now given him a horror of publica-
tion : he neither wished to put himself in the category of those
who published anything based on experience, nor to make
his own name illustrious, for fear that fame should lead to
notoriety. Yet habit and his natural bent conspired to keep
him engrossed in intellectual enquiry, and in the recording of
his premises and his conclusions.
When his essay on Universal Goodwill had come to an
untimely end, Joubert turned his attention to the psycho-
logical study of language, especially in its relation to literature.
He wished to consider not only such problems as whether
a man should write as he felt, at once, or write long after-
wards, as he remembered he had felt; but also the hidden
intimate relation between words and feeling. Restif, in the
friendly days, had called him a Dictionnaire raisonnée, and the
interest lasted longer than their friendship. He read much to
gain material for such investigations. Diderot, before he
died, had advised him also to read books on painting and
sculpture, so that he might learn that there were other means
of communication than language. His researches led to no
great work, but they made him a writer distinguished for his
extreme care in the choice of words, and a critic of other
people’s writing who had standards hard to satisfy. It gave
him an apprehension of the distinction between beauty of
style and clarity of thought, and a sense that in prose these
separate beauties must be indissolubly allied. A_ great
philosopher could not be a great writer unless he also possessed
lucidity of mind and delicacy of touch ; it was a mark of
greatness to treat of subtle things in simple language.
Joubert might not seek a career, but even he had to
recognize that he could not expect to live for ever on an
41
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

allowance from his impecunious and ageing father. He might

not be willing to publish his own works, but he could publish
anonymously his reviews of other people’s. Fontanes had
gone to London in the October of 1785 with a great project
in view: no less than the establishment in England of a
French news-letter, to be devoted, like Grimm’s Correspondence,
to literary and artistic criticism. Joubert was to become his
partner in the enterprise. Fontanes knew very little English,
but since, with the aid of an existing French prose translation,
he had produced a metrical version of Pope’s Essay on Man,
he was commonly supposed to be an expert English scholar.
In any case, the paper was to be published in French, but
Fontanes thought that his translation of Pope should commend
him to the English literary public. The Marquis de Marnésia,
one of Fontanes’ more fashionable friends, was trusted to
finance the scheme. Fontanes had hardly landed at Brighton
before he was asking for money for his fare to London, and had
hardly reached London before he was wanting more money
for a frock-coat. With this to make him acceptable in London
society, he was writing on 27th October, 1785, to Joubert in
Paris, to say that he had seen the Secretary of Embassy and
the Ambassador’s nephew, in the absence of the Ambassador
himself.
‘““ I was received, as one is in England, politely and
coldly. No one keeps open house here; they even
warned me of it themselves. The Comte de Cambis
(the Secretary of Embassy) told me that if he wished to
dine out in town, even once, he would not know what
house to go to, although he has been in London for two
VEaIS. esr
“This town, although it is immense and much more
extensive than Paris, has only offered me, in certain
districts, the sight of a hopeless solitude ; all the rich
householders live on their properties in the country. I
have already gone through London in all its length ; I
saw, on the first two days I was here, what it has to show
that is most remarkable in the way of monuments. The
list is short. Westminster is the old fane made famous
by a few memories and a few fine bits of sculpture. St.
Paul’s is magnificent and finer than any of our own
churches, but unlike most of them it lacks a square to set
42
 1786-1787
it off. The streets of London are very wide, very con-
venient and for the most part well aligned. You will not
see in them ten houses of stone ; everything is in brick,
even the King’s Palace, which is not so fine, by a long
way, as the Hotel de Beaujon or even the town house of
M. de la Reyniére. This brick, always blackened by the
eternal smoke of sea-coal, gives a most gloomy impression
to all the streets. There are any number of squares, but
they are all alike ; the best comparison I can give you
is our Place Royale with the equestrian statue of Louis xm.
They are made to the same pattern, with the same orna-
ments. The three bridges which span the Thames are
more majestic than our Pont Neuf and Pont Royal. I
should need a happy moment of inspiration to depict
the sublime aspect of the Thames ; indeed it is on the
Thames that all the greatness of the English people is
displayed, that hardly ever appears within London itself.
St. James’s Park is no more than a large meadow with a
few alleys of trees. Hyde Park is a little better ; but what
charms a foreigner when he reaches this country is the
cleanliness which reigns in all the houses, in the town, and
in the neighbouring villages ; everything is ceaselessly
cleaned and watered. ‘The London shops are enchanting
in their brightness. The countryside is greener than ours,
but, in the part of England that I have travelled through,
I have seen nothing that could be compared with the
valley of the Loire, the pays de Caux, or the beautiful
country of Languedoc. The continual mist covering
England, the cattle remaining in the meadows night and
day, keep them perpetually green. I do not know if you,
who are a great enemy of the demon of property and of
iron barriers, would like England ; there is no cottage
that has not the boundaries of its land marked, no house
that has not iron railings round it. The god Terminus
is the god most respected in England. Land is very
far from being common property in this country of free-
dom ; at every step one finds all the marks of slavery.
Yet the English tend and keep up their land better than
do our French labourers. One can see that this nation
is economical, wasting nothing and making use of every-
thing.

43
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

“Their food, which is monotonous but wholesome,

suits me very well. It is heavy for people of delicate
digestion. Porter is a very pleasant drink.
‘“‘ The women are for the most part well built, fair and
fresh looking. Yet I am not much struck with those that
I have seen ; there are all sorts here, as with us. I have
seen some horrible faces. The caricatures of English-
women that we see on the quays at Paris are for the most
part life-like. The old women are more ugly than in
France, if I am not mistaken. I have been struck by
some monstrous faces that bore every mark of baseness
and vice. Repulsive countenances seem to be rare in
Paris, but perhaps we have fewer of the modest and sen-
sible faces which are fairly common in this city. London
is full of thieves ; fortunately I have so far lost nothing
but a handkerchief, and everyone congratulates me on
my good luck. I have hardly any money, so I cannot lose
much. I have found a lodging with some very respect-
able old maids, the Misses Somerville, in Piccadilly... .
We make ourselves understood by signs. They also have
a worthy English parson as a lodger. We speak Latin
together, which makes communication easier. .. .”
The real trouble was that a secretary of the Ambassador
seemed already to be secretly engaged on work of the kind
they were planning. Meanwhile Fontanes would continue
to do his best ; though now that he knew the rigour of the
English laws against debt, he thought he was rather brave to
be in England at all.
He awaited an answer to this letter in vain: Joubert
was much too busy with the Restifs de la Bretonne. On
November roth, Fontanes wrote again to report progress. He
had seen more people, French and English, to whom he had
introductions, and had received a certain amount of encourage-
ment. The trouble was that in London people read little
that was not of political, commercial or industrial interest.
There was in that city no class of pleasant, well-educated men
of good breeding, with leisure enough to cast their eyes outside
their own island to see what was happening in the literary
circles of Paris. Leisure was lacking ; everyone was too
active in commerce or profession to have time for the things
of the mind, except for a few who already had their own
44
 1786-1787
correspondents in Paris. Fontanes, however, was enjoying
his stay. He was moving in a society far more elegant than
he had thought it possible might receive him ; he was meeting
politicians and beauties ; and when he spent an evening at
home the eldest Miss Somerville sang him the songs of Ossian
to the harp, and he fell under the charm of the strange out-
landish music. Joubert was still staggering under Restif de la
Bretonne’s betrayal, and wrote evidently hoping to join his
friend in the safe obscurity of England and to work at the new
review. On November goth, Fontanes had to write discourag-
ing the project. It would be impossible to establish the news-
letter without the backing of the Ambassador ; this would not
be given without the backing of the Minister of Foreign
Affairs, which was, to say the least of it, uncertain. Fontanes
_ must come home from London with little gained but a few
social contacts and some nebulous promises of subscription
to the news-letter which might never exist. He thought that
if he could sell his patrimony in Poitou and return to spend a
year in London as a man of leisure, he might succeed in making
a good marriage there. There was nothing for poor Joubert
in all this, and the next letter held out no further hopes.
Fontanes said grandly that he had kept tranquil though far
from his friend and almost penniless, and advised Joubert to
do the same. By the 12th of December he was writing to
say that he had given up all idea of the news-letter, for the
criticism and literary news that it was to contain would have
no interest for the English public. In England, if a man
owned as many as four hundred books, he was considered a
bibliophile. Moreover the position of artists was less distin-
guished than in Paris. Sir Joshua Reynolds was not received
at the houses of the ladies he painted. If Fontanes were to
continue in the project his social successes would be jeopardized.
But he thought the London fogs and the stimulus of new
surroundings had aroused his poetic genius and that he would
do great things when he was back in France, and that this
awakening would justify all the expense of the fruitless journey.
Meanwhile, he thought often of Joubert, and hoped he was
looking after himself and enjoying life. Poor Joubert !
Sorrowing over and after Agnés Restif de la Bretonne, fearing
the repercussions of her husband’s jealousy, hard up and
unoccupied, he was not likely to do either. Fontanes’ only
45
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

aid was to give him something to do, in running round Paris

to see Fontanes’ publishers and his lady friends and to com-
mend the absent poet to their good offices. Joubert’s reply
may well have pointed out the number of his own difficulties
that were left unresolved. At all events, Fontanes’ next letter,
of January 20th, 1786, was less cheerful. It began with the
~ melancholy fact that it cost him at least fifteen francs a day
to live in London, apart from dress. His sister had forwarded
seven hundred Jivres of his patrimony to Monsieur de Marnésia ;
would Joubert please see that the Marquis forwarded it all,
and did not waste any of it on his Parisian creditors? He had
not yet paid a penny to his London landladies.
** Fach invitation in this country is but an additional
expense ; one must play whist or go to the play after-
wards ; and it is rude to refuse ; and not to pay for one’s .
seat or for one’s dinner at the tavern, when one is invited,
is to be dishonoured. Moreover Court mourning, which
is strictly worn in London, even if we do not believe in it,
has compelled me to spend another twelve louis, and still
I am very shabbily dressed. ... The more I live in
England, the more I am convinced that this is the land of
commerce and gold, but not of art or love or pleasure.
“Is he well-off?’ That is the decor that every rank of
society asks in London, just as we ask‘ Is he well-bred ? ’
Their great men are buried in Westminster Abbey,
but so long as they are alive they live despised.”
The one beauty of the English character was their genius
for friendship ; they might be slow to make friends, but once
they had given their friendship, it was for ever. This apart,
and this only in exceptional cases, Englishmen were in every
respect corrupted by the love of gold. And, worse luck, they
had the gold ; even the canaille were rich, and made the
country insupportable to a man of sensibility. The demean-
our, walk and manner of a really well-bred Englishman were
exactly those of a rich farmer of the pays de Caux, and the gait
and deportment of the English ladies were no more elegant.
Let Joubert read a few pages of Shakespeare, and then go
right through Athalie, Zaire and Mérope ; and let him then
thank Heaven that he had been born to enjoy the fair skies
and rich soil of France, in the agreeable company of the
citizens of the first Kingdom of Europe.
46
 1786-1787
Joubert was not feeling inclined to thank Heaven for
anything, but Fontanes’ arrival in Paris in February alleviated
his gloom. His friend had so much to tell him about England
and against his creditors in Paris, that it was easy not to talk
about the Restifs de la Bretonne. Joubert, moreover, had
begun to work again, for him it might almost be said syste-
matically. He had started, with an eye on the projected review,
to write a series of ‘‘ anecdotes ’’ : sometimes anecdotes in the
true sensé, sometimes “‘ characters’ enlivened by incident. ©
Sir Joseph Banks and more particularly Captain Cook were
his favourites. Cook gained an amusing ascendence over the
inactive and stay-at-home writer ; for ten years to follow him
in his voyages was to be Joubert’s chief intellectual delight.
He came to think that he knew Otaheite better than Périgord ;
it began to have for him an ideal significance, to be to him
what Atlantis had been to Plato. The failure of the projected
review made the anecdotes unusable, and his subsequent long
dream-voyages in the Southern Seas were all the reward
Joubert got for his pains. He had, however, other irons in the
fire. At Diderot’s he had met a Chevalier de Langeac, a man
of good family with literary ambitions. The Chevalier was
anxious above all things to carry off one of the prizes awarded
by the Academy, yet his poems had so far never even been
commended. In 1782 he was just finishing a poem on
Christopher Columbus, and he engaged Joubert to add weight
to it by providing it with a preface in prose. The preface was
very philosophic, but not even with its help did Langeac win
a prize. However, it set a precedent, and Langeac continued
to find Joubert work. A précis historique sur Crumwel (an error
for Cromwell only corrected in an erratum slip), later to be
published as by a member of the Academy of Marseilles (to
which Langeac belonged), betrays Joubert’s handiwork in
the characteristic octosyllabic rhythm of its prose.
Work for Langeac brought in a little money, and that
was the main thing. Fontanes had returned in an extremely
impecunious state, to stay in the country with his friends the
Marnésias and to polish his poems with a view to publication.
He had cheerful moments when he dreamed of a pension, and
gloomy ones when he thought of suicide : in either case he
wrote to Joubert and told him all about it. Meanwhile
Joubert was trying to follow in the steps of Diderot and to

47
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

take to art-criticism. He planned a review of a book on

ancient paintings and articles on art in general and on Pigalle
in particular. But the editors of the journals for which they
were destined waited in vain ; Joubert’s notebooks grew full
of quotations and thoughts, he even calculated the number of
words it took to fill a column ; but the articles remained
unfinished, unpublished and unpaid. He had allowed his
critical faculty to overwhelm his creative faculty, and the
balance was never to be redressed. Fontanes might write
from the country that unless Joubert made some money he,
Fontanes, would die: but not even this could conquer
Joubert’s aversion from the imperfect. So far as art criticism
was concerned, it was, perhaps, no great loss. Joubert had
good sense and good judgment, but he had not Diderot’s
natural empire over the visual arts. His sphere lay rather in
thought and in its verbal expression ; already he was beginning
to delight in the formation of thoughts in a mind like clouds
in a sky. It was with such clouds, rather than with the skies -
of Poussin, that his true preoccupation lay.
He still had the deep knowledge of his own temperament
that he had acquired in the cloisters of Toulouse. Paris
might have startled him by its standards of achievement,
Restif and his friends by the crudity of their colouring, Diderot
by the width of his learning : but he still knew that his only
strength lay in the fact that he was a philosopher. Neither the
tribulations of circumstance, the pressure of poverty nor the
advice of his friends could persuade him to try to be anything
else.
Joubert, at thirty-one, had learned much, but he was as
far as ever from making a career for himself. His mother came
to Paris in the autumn of 1786, bringing with her Arnaud, her
youngest son, who was to study law there. The second son,
Elie, was finishing his training as a doctor ; only Joseph, who
had once seemed the cleverest of the family, remained without
profession or occupation. He tried to console her by explain-
ing that the true calling that nature had intended for a man
was to give aid and pleasure, strength and forgiveness, to his
fellow-men ;_ those who declared ‘“‘ je fais honnétement mon
métier ”? as the justification of their lives, were no philosophers.
Madame Joubert, conscious that she did not understand
philosophy, was silenced. Her son’s idleness at least permitted
48
 1786-1787
him to escort her on a visit to an old cousin, Monsieur Des-
monts, who when he left the army had settled near his wife’s
family at Villeneuve le Roi, not far from Sens. After so long
a sojourn in Paris it was delightful to be in the country again ;
and in the country Joubert re-discovered the mother he had
known.
The Yonne country has a peculiar quietness and tran-
quillity ; those who hurry through it call it uneventful and
dull, and those who linger there account it as charming a
district as any in France. Villeneuve lay behind medieval
walls that gave a feeling of security, though the chief use of the
fortifications was to provide shelter for the fruit gardens that
lay at their feet.
The town was a picture composed in mushroom colours :
walls of flawed yet silvery white or of the pale pinkish hue found
underneath a young mushroom, and roofs of every tone of
the ripe flesh, and especially of the deep rich brown of a mush-
room that has grown over-ripe in some quiet corner. Evidently
the weather changed there as everywhere else, yet it seemed
to have more than its share of days when the sun does not
quite shine and the air is as soft as milk : days when every
sound and every subtle variation of colour take on a new value.
The sweet breezes of the countryside cleansed Joubert from
the foul air of the rue des Bernardins ; before very long his
thoughts, if they ever turned to Agnés Restif de la Bretonne,
regarded her as a person whom he had known a long time ago.
With this renewed peace of mind, his thoughts formed more
readily ; under the influence of his mother’s rural orderliness,
he even began to record them in a more systematic fashion.
Instead of scattered scraps of paper, he used now, as he was
to continue to use, a tidy note-book. The first thing he
recorded on its virgin page was the gentleness of line to be
found in the country round Villeneuve. The country roads
over the low hills had the inevitable look of valleys rather than
of any man-made tracks. Instead of the sharp limestone
breaks of Périgord there were the soft curves of a valley that
hardly sank, and of hills that hardly rose, from the plain : and
consequently the mind felt rested and at ease, and what had
to be done was done gently and at leisure. The company of
his mother gave him the same feeling of relaxation and solace ;
soon every feature of the landscape began to have sentimental

fe)
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

associations with a repose so perfect that in itself it approached

the intensity.of happiness. Life itself was uneventful ; they
planted a poplar in the garden, they took the barge to Auxerre,
and talked about grapes and vintages with their fellow-
passengers. Joubert was able once more to wander alone
among the meadows and to find peace in watching time slip
by. He passed a happy day away to the east of Villeneuve,
near a village with the lovely name of Valprofonde, but
though the first meditation he recorded there was on the need
for the public performance of great dramas, the next was on
how unhappy a poplar looked when it was planted upon a
hill, and the last was on the beneficence of sleep.
By the 23rd of October it was time for Madame Joubert
to return to Montignac and for her son to return to Paris.
He travelled by river, and read Cook’s Voyages yet once more
on the way. It came as a shock at the end of the journey to
find himself at the Quai Saint Paul within sight of the twin
islands of Paris and not beside some palm-fringed atoll. He
was soon back in the life of the Latin quarter, but instead of
Restif’s unhealthy lodgings he frequented the cafés where the
artists met and talked of brushes and paints and effects and
how a man must identify himself with sunlight before he could
paint it. Fontanes was back again, still full of the oddities
of England and the fine figure he had cut there. Indeed his
two London frock-coats continued to have the happiest effect:
the treaty with England had brought everything English into
fashion, and with a London coat on his back Fontanes was
growing more and more mondain even in Paris. Of the rest
of the old company the only one Joubert still saw was Milran,
who had suffered almost as much as he had at Restif’s hands,
because he had not admired all the Contemporaines unreservedly
and had been on Agnés’ side in the final quarrel. Like Joubert
he had been pilloried in the Femme Infidelle, and like him had
broken with Restif for good. Like Joubert he had taken
refuge in the country for a time, and had not returned until
the summer of 1787. He and Joubert made an odd pair, the
one with the inborn intellectual servility of the third-rate
brain, and the other with the unconscious arrogance of an
original mind. Milran might propose the works of men he
wished to placate to Joubert for admiration, but»that proud
and penniless critic remained perfectly disinterested. Milran,
50
 1786-1787
whose best quality was the pedestrian honesty that comes
from a want of imagination, was always remembering what
people had once said and finding it incongruous with their
present opinions ; whereas Joubert declared that true veracity
should reflect the opinions of the actual moment, and that in
an intelligent man these must necessarily change. ‘The two,
in fact, could never know each other well ; there was too much
disparity between them.
Joubert passed a quiet summer, mostly with the old
cousin at Villeneuve. Everyone’s interest seemed in these
days to be turning to history ; so, since he was aware that his
knowledge of post-classical history was slight, he put himself
through a severe course of reading : Du Cange’s Glossary, a
dictionary of diplomatic, and a number of historical texts.
He yet had time to enjoy the new pleasures of the harvest :
the girls who came through the fields with their arms full of
corn, the extraordinary silence of evening, and the peace that
seemed to fall upon the spirit with the night.
In September he was back in Paris, and Milran was haunt-
ing him again and again being shocked. This time it was by
Joubert’s avowal (dragged out of him by his persistent friend)
that he no longer believed either in God or in a future life.
Joubert was far from proud of his atheism ; it was no fashion-
able belief flaunted in the face of established authority, but
the secret fruit of disinterested meditation. Self-respect, he
had come to think, self-respect and peace of mind must be the
guiding principles of life : ‘‘ son repos et l’estime de sot-méme.”’
He had travelled far from the cloisters of Toulouse.

51
 CHAPTER FOUR

1787-1790

N November, 1787, Joubert once more left Paris to make a

long stay at Villeneuve. It was the moment when the King
declared that the States General should at last be sum-
‘moned, for a date five years hence : the fever of unrest was
beginning to seize upon the capital, and its air was in conse-
quence becoming uncongenial to anyone as peaceable as
Joubert. At Villeneuve he was as much an individual as he
was in Paris, yet with the familiar atmosphere of Montignac
about him. His cousin Elie Desmonts was the son of Pierre
Desmonts, the Montignac notary, and his father’s aunt
Toinette Queyroy ; and he lived in a society, a little richer
and perhaps a little more lettered than that of Montignac, but
otherwise remarkably like it. There were the Menus de
Chomorceau, who lived in the grandest house on the main
street : the head of the family, Jean-Etienne, was very literary
and had published an imitation of Tasso’s Rinaldo, with
descriptions of his own family and his own countryside intro-
duced into the narrative. There was Maitre Martineau, the
lawyer, there was Madame Moreau de Bussy, a cousin of the
Menus de Chomorceau ; there were the Devauves and the
Chevaillers, and they all seemed to have daughters who were
pretty, or graceful, or at least interesting. In another category
were the three Mesdemoiselles Piat, old maids who ‘had spent
all their lives at Villeneuve, who could tell even its inhabitants
things they did not know about its citizens, and keep a stranger
indefinitely amused by the odd histories that had the little town
for setting. The year he spent at Villeneuve filled his notebook
with no profound thoughts and with few entries but notes of
the feasts of the Church and of expeditions to the nearby
villages, when Fontanes came to stay. Joubert had lauded
self-respect and peace of mind as guiding principles in life,
and here at Villeneuve both seemed a necessary part of exist-
ence, He wrote hardly anything but a eulogy of the place.
“It is here that nature and cultivation go sweetly
52
 1787-1790
hand in hand and are never parted in any season. It is
here that the earth offers a choice of labour to everyone
from ten to a hundred years old, which allows them neither
to rest nor to weary. It is here that the very perfection
of work hides its burden ; these people have in truth
rather the air of adorning the countryside than of tilling
it. One would say that they had done nothing but for
pleasure. Each vine-stock is cultivated with as much
care and love as an orange tree might be in the gardens
of the great. . ... There is not an inch of ground that
is not cultivated, not a plant that dies uncared for, and
that is not culled in its season for some domestic use. I
might have counted, had I wished, more than fifty of
them that are trodden underfoot in the most thrifty
countries, that here are known to all the children by
name, variety and habitat. It is the children, and
especially the little girls, who make these minute harvests,
as small as themselves. Nowhere else will you see so
many tiny baskets carried in the hand or borne on the
back. It seems as if the little girls had been entrusted
with keeping the ground tidy while their parents are
responsible for planting it with trees and fruit....
Harvests may be more abundant elsewhere, and the earth
more royally fruitful ; but nowhere will rustic economy
be found more perfectly established or more exactly
followed. All the inhabitants of the place work like ants
upon an ant-hill, except that everything they do seems to
be done sedately and without haste. They do not work
like lazy people who hasten to rid themselves of the
burden of their work, but like men who love their occupa-
tion and do not want to leave it. You might count their
steps as easily as the leaves of their vines ; neither precipi-
tate nor slow.”
Others shared his opinion ; people travelling from Paris to
Lyons or beyond often broke the journey at Villeneuve and
some made a longer stay. In the spring of 1788 a party of
travellers from Lyons stopped there for a time: an elderly
gentleman, the Baron de Juis, travelling in his own carriage,
a lady, his cousin, Madame Cathelin, the wife of a Lyons
merchant, and her daughter, a girl of twenty. Villeneuve
charmed them ; they had friends there ; and they decided
D8
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

to make a stay of some days. Each day they took the classic
walk round the town, admiring the gardens that sheltered
under the ramparts. They soon knew Joubert by sight. One
day they asked him the name of the proprietor of a particularly
flowery patch, and the acquaintance thus made, was soon
fostered by meetings at the houses of their common friends.
The Baron de Juis was rich, and extremely proud both
of his riches and of his comparatively recent title. His career
in the service of the Treasury had taught him that nothing
mattered so much as money, unless it were the privileges of
birth. Madame Cathelin had all the respect for him that one
has for one’s daughter’s wealthy and affectionate godfather :
the said god-daughter, Geneviéve Marie Faustine Chantal
Cathelin, was too well brought up not to share her sentiments,
and so they made a pleasant travelling party. Their acquaint-
ance inspired Joubert with a brilliant plan : the girl would be
just the wife for Fontanes. Fontanes, impecunious as usual,
was having a wholly unprofitable affair with Adelaide Dufré-
noy, a women poet, who loved him much more than he did her
and was inspired by her passion to write better verses than he
did. It could lead to nothing ; it was time for him to settle
down, and marry an heiress. He might not be rich, but he
was well born, he passed as handsome, he had an increasing
reputation as a poet, and the best heart in the world. But
Joubert’s idea had unfortunately come to him a little late, as
his ideas often did, and the Baron and the ladies had already
left Villeneuve. With a persistence that he never showed but
in the service of his friends, Joubert thereupon wrote to his
brother Elie in Paris, to ask him to call upon the Baron and the
ladies Cathelin, to speak of Fontanes, and to make sure that
Fontanes called later. On August 26th his brother casually
reported that he had paid the call, and had found them in
after six attempts. The ladies thought Villeneuve a far
politer place than Paris, but Paris offered so many distractions
that they had not had time to write, as they had meant to do,
to their new acquaintances. Elie had not stayed long, as
they were to be taken to the Academy, but he was there long
enough to find the mother more attractive than the daughter,
and to guess that the daughter was prepared to fall decorously
in love with Joubert. Meanwhile Fontanes had promised to
call upon them the next day. Joubert waited on tenterhooks

54
 1787-1790
to hear his friend’s impressions. Nothing happened. Fontanes
had fallen in love once more, this time with an actress who
had tears in her voice and sensibility in her bosom, and he
had other things to think of than calls of politeness. Joubert
continued to wait. Finally he wrote to Fontanes to reveal
his project. Fontanes must call on some such pretext as
taking them to see the poet Florian. On the 6th of October
the long-awaited letter from him arrived. After skimming
through a literary dissertation on Homer, Virgil, Fénelon and
Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Joubert was thankful to find that all
was going well.
““M. de Juis . . . seemed to me an excellent man
and his ladies most amiable. ... You did make me
laugh. Just as I got your last letter the ladies came to
call upon me in my bachelor lodging. I received them
in my nightcap ; you can guess what a fool I felt. Are
you mad? How the devil do you expect people to give
me girls with fortunes of a hundred thousand crowns?
You realize, I think, that in my position, if such a marriage
were possible, I should make no bones about it. Besides
the young lady whom I have seen three or four times has
nothing about her that displeases me. But what a
fantastic idea! It is just like you. You believe every-
thing to be possible, and the most. improbable schemes
won’t put you off. But anyway, what means can you
use to succeed? Good-bye, dear friend : believe that
when I no longer love you, it must be that I am dead.”
- The night-cap was very upsetting ; the English frock-
coat would have set Fontanes off to much better advantage.
But at least he was showing himself amenable. Before long
Joubert had made sure that the impression that Fontanes had
made upon the Cathelins was favourable. Itremained to
propose the match in form to the girl’s guardian. On October
tgth, Joubert wrote from Villeneuve to the Baron de Juis.
| *¢ Sir, I would like to tell you about M.de Fontanes. -
His talents are unusual, his character lofty, his birth
honourable. He is born to aspire to anything. His
father, a member of a very old Protestant family ruined
for their religion, is dead, in the prime of life. He was
Inspecteur Général du Commerce, and worthy to have been
head of its ministry. His mother was a Fourquevaux, of

55
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

a family held in consideration in Languedoc, where its

glories still exist. The only near relatives left to him are
his sisters, who are ladies of distinction, living at Niort
in Poitou, where M. de Fontanes was born.
“ His fortune is but moderate, which is not to say that
he is without patrimony ; only his heart is too generous
not to be restricted by it. He is thirty-one ; his senti-
ments are straightforward and decided ; his principles
are sound. His only defect is a certain changeability in
his opinions, that in him is charming, and that his friends
would be very sorry to see corrected. None the less he
will lose it so soon as he sees his destiny plain.
** M. de la Harpe and M. Ducis will tell you what they
think of his talent, with which they are familiar. I know
it better than they do, for he has only shown them his
works, whereas to me he has more than once made his
whole genius evident. He will certainly be one of the
greatest poets that our age has produced, and may be
looked upon as a man destined one day to bring the great-
est glory upon his country. . .. He is the husband who
would suit Mlle. Cathelin.... He is young ; he is at the
doors of the Academy ; he has already won fame, and
his talent is of that fresh and robust kind that will only
grow with time. In making this marriage, in bestowing
upon him a fortune and a charming girl, able to keep him
for ever under her spell, you would render a great service
to the Fine Arts and to France ; you would hasten the
perfecting ofa greatman. Great talents, toreach maturity,
must have been battered by past adversity and be favoured
by present prosperity ; these are as winds and sun to them.
‘ Neither the tastes nor the work of M. de Fontanes
would take Mademoiselle Cathelin, whom you love,
far from you. He could live six months of the year in
Lyons. A few journeys to Paris to see his friends would
be all that he needed. .. .
“I propose him to you; he knows nothing about it.
This project, which I have pondered at length, is my own
idea ; none the less I have made sure that he would not
gainsay it. Nothing would be easier than for you to find,
in Paris, exact confirmation of the information that I
have had the honour of giving you. . . .
56
 1787-1790 |
“You have an affection for your amiable god-
daughter that does credit to your heart, and she seems
worthy of it by her candour, her graces and her modesty.
Her happiness may well lie in what I propose... . The
inequality of their fortunes is one respect in which it may
seem unsuitable, but if a fortune is to bring happiness in
marriage, it must be by being given or received... .
** Now I have told you everything. You have a mag-
nanimous spirit; Madame de Cathelin has a capacity
for penetrating observation ; whatever you both decide
will certainly be for the best. As for me, I have told you
the truth. M. de Fontanes has been my intimate friend
for ten years ; I owe much to his affection, but I have
paid no tribute but to his merit. As a man, he is worth
more than a million: but then so is Mademoiselle
Cathelin.”
It was a beautiful letter ; and if scruples assailed Joubert
whether he had indeed told the truth, they were untimely.
There is a code in such matters that permits at least the
suppression of the inconvenient : poetesses, actresses, irrespon-
sibilities and debts. The Baron knew the code and realized
that Fontanes had not a penny. He replied politely but firmly
saying that the fortune of the young man did not permit him
to give the consideration he would have liked to the
proposal.
It was a pity; Chantal Cathelin and her eminently
respectable family might have been able to remove Fontanes
from his Bohemian surroundings. That November, Milran
arrived at Villeneuve to spend three weeks there with his
mistress, whom he called Tullia. The fact that it was impos-
sible to present him to the society of Villeneuve stressed the
unsuitability of the companionship of such men for Fontanes ;
and Milran’s deplorable want of appreciation for Villeneuve
made it impossible to rate Bohemianism very highly. Joubert
used to sneak away to the inn to take Milran out ; they took
all the walks, climbed all the hills, watched all the effects of
light and colour ; and Milran trotted obediently after him in
hopes of finding the inspiration of solitude and discovered
nothing remarkable or inspiring in all the quiet loveliness of
the countryside. The weather was bad, and Milran found the
country cold, wet and incredibly muddy. He much preferred

57
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

to walk round and round the cloister of Saint Patrice and at

least to keep dry. After ten days he and Tullia could bear it
no longer and left for Paris.
Joubert continued to dream of a marriage between
Chantal and Fontanes, a marriage that seemed all the more
desirable for its impossibility. After the Baron de Juis’ letter,
Joubert and Fontanes had naturally ceased to write to the
ladies. The ladies, however, knew nothing about Joubert’s
proposal or the Baron’s refusal, and were hurt. Fontanes,
with his poetry and his air of the great world, had made a deep
impression upon the girl and her mother, and they had spoken
of him enthusiastically to Madame de Cathelin’s uncle, the
Abbé de Vitry, a learned and sociable Jesuit. The old abbé
knew more than they did, and wrote at the end of November to
Joubert, to try to make peace between him and the Baron ;
and at the same time Madame de Cathelin wrote a pleasant
non-committal letter to Fontanes. Neither received any
reply. By the beginning of December, Chantal Cathelin was
coming to the conclusion that she had been crossed in love and
her mother was beginning to wonder if she were going to take
it hard and go into a decline. She realized by now that the
Baron disapproved of Fontanes, and had probably discouraged
him, but she wrote to Elie Joubert, the doctor in Paris, asking
him to see Fontanes, and to send news of him to her, addressed
to the Abbé de Vitry. Elie Joubert at once sent her letter to
his brother at Villeneuve, and Joubert once more entered
upon diplomatic démarches. He wrote a most elegant letter to
the Abbé de Vitry, whom he hailed as already known to him
through the conversation of his niece, and almost related to
both him and Fontanes through their common interest in
literature and art. Then came the heart of the letter. If only
the Abbé really knew them, he would know how simple and
sincere were their intentions, and he would certainly make
himself Fontanes’ advocate with the Baron. He would
understand how far the proposal that Joubert had made to
M. de Juis was sensible and suitable : no, that brought in the
money question : cross it out. “I hope that the future may
smooth many of our difficulties’? : no, that stressed them ;
cross it out. Three more false starts : then :
‘““T am happy at least to think that your own distinc-
tion will enable you to appreciate his talent (talent? no,
58
 1787-1790
cross it out), his genius and his wit without reference either
to his fame or his presence. Re-read his first works in
the Almanach des Muses of 1778, 1780 and later. You will
judge of the nature of his talent and of what it is capable
of becoming. How can M. de Juis, who has the views
and tastes of a man of merit, how can he bargain with such
a man and accept or refuse him on account of a few bags
of a thousand francs of income, more or less? The Baron
is himself certain of leaving Mademoiselle Chantal a
reasonably large fortune ; he can only further desire for
her the two benefits that Monsieur de Fontanes would give
her in his own person: an honourable rank in society
and a fine name for her children. . . .”
Meanwhile Joubert made Fontanes write to Chantal :
one short letter. Poor lovelorn Chantal replied discreetly, if
at length ; but the tiresome Fontanes was once more pre-
occupied with his poetesses and his actresses and forgot to
answer. Finally, at the beginning of January, 1789, Chantal
was so desperate that she wrote to Joubert :
** Since it is to you that I owe the happiness or the
misfortune of knowing M. de Fontanes, it is to you that
I address myself to dissipate the alarm caused by his
silence. He has not written me a word since the 16th of
December. Tell me about him frankly, I beg of you, I
insist in the name of your friendship. I have only two
questions to ask : is he ill, or am I forgotten? I tremble
to be enlightened, yet I desire it. Keep nothing from me
concerning him ; he is the only master of my destiny ;
he has it in his power to make it happy or unfortunate.
Do you think he still loves me? Sound his feelings about
me a little, and be the interpreter of mine to him. I put
myself entirely in your hands ; I cannot, I believe, better
give my trust ...I ought to have begun my letter
with you, but I counted upon friendship forgiving love.”
Now she made up for it by asking kindly after Joubert’s eyes
and his health ; was he standing the winter well? She would
have sent him some cheeses from Mont-Dore, but the roads
were frozen so hard that the waggoners refused the commission.
It was a difficult letter to answer ; it was only too easy
to guess how Fontanes’ silence had arisen. However, by the
end of January the Abbé de Vitry wrote in a more practical

59
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

spirit, saying the time had come to stop making phrases and to
get to business. Fontanes, it seemed to him, was too busy
writing verses to care about acquiring a fortune. He had
already written to Fontanes to tell him what obstacles must be
overcome ; could not Joubert encourage him to make an
effort, to turn his attention from his rhymes to more practical
matters? It was no good for him to stay with his arms crossed
waiting for Urania to descend from the skies and improve his
income. He had told Fontanes, first, that he must get a place
in some prince’s household, and second, that he must see how
much of his patrimony his sisters were prepared to cede to him.
Fontanes had simply replied that it was difficult to find a
prince for patron and that he dare not approach his sisters
with such a question. It was all very well, but unless he had a
position and prospects he could not expect the Abbé to use
his influence with the Baron to further his suit. If only
Joubert would make his friend see reason and be practical, all
might yet be well. They could start in rooms in the family
house at Lyons, with a little dressing-room where Fontanes
could write his poetry ; Fontanes could have a little house in a
cheap part of Paris, where he could put up the Baron, his
servants and his horses when he came to the capital. But it
was time someone did something sensible.
*“‘ It is nearly three months since they parted. They
have written sweet and pretty things to each other, he has
been witty and tender, and has done nothing whatever to
bring about the desired union. JI fear that a head accus-
tomed only to the arranging of syllables has no under-
standing of the arranging of happiness. I have more
confidence in your advice than in his fine passionate
ecstasies. When you have got something done, let me
know. Let me know even if you only hope to do so.
You see, Sir, by the frankness of my expressions that I
sincerely desire the happiness of two beings who seem
made for each other. But I repeat, and end by repeating,
the old proverb that God helps those who help themselves.”
Alas ! it was less his scansion or his rhymes than Adélaide
Dufrénoy that was occupying Fontanes. Chantal might wait
by the open window for the post till all her family had caught
cold, she might snatch the paper to see if he had published
verses or were dead, she might prepare new songs to sing to
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 1787-1790
him until she refused to sing at all, she might reach the point
of sealing up his few letters in order to return them to him,
she might ask the Baron to find her an old, plain and stupid
husband, who would give her no trouble ;_ but she still loved
Fontanes. Fontanes might still have (when he thought of
them) pleasant memories of a fresh and unspoilt girl with a
charming voice, but he was busy giving literary dinners with
Adélaide as hostess, he was writing a poem in praise of the
Edict that granted toleration to non-Catholics, destined for a
competition at the Academy, and he was beginning to think
of taking a more active part in journalism by acquiring an
interest in a paper. He might have to end by marrying an
heiress, but there was no hurry.
Joubert found that diplomacy involved white lies ; it was
impossible to tell Chantal or her mother the truth, so he wrote
implying rather than stating that Fontanes had met with a
slight accident and was making a slow recovery. If one took
a broad view, was not Adelaide Dufrénoy rightly to be regarded
as an accident?
Joubert returned to Paris in February, pursued by letters
of sympathy and affection from the ladies Cathelin. Only
Madame suggested, very delicately, that he should hasten his
friend’s convalescence a little ; he would listen to so old a
friend, for age was the highest claim of friendship, but not of love.
The Abbé wrote too, to say that Chantal was willing to throw
herself at the Baron’s feet, all tears, to ask for his permission
to marry the impecunious poet ; but he thought it would be
well to postpone so touching a scene until the suitor had a little
more to offer. Joubert replied, and in the reply he even
allowed a point of his annoyance with his friend to appear.
** Were I with you, Sir, I would take your hand and
holding it in mine would swear to you that there is no
man in the whole world more worthy than M. de Fontanes
of the happiness of being one day the husband of Mlle. de
Cathelin.”” (The de was pure politeness on Joubert’s
part). ‘‘He has his faults; these faults are merely
childish. He has defects likewise ; but these are amiable
defects that one is glad to have to forgive, defects that would
soon be corrected by a happy life ; it is because I can
appreciate his merits that I want him to become Madame
de Cathelin’s son-in-law. ... He cares for nothing
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

in isolation, and for nothing in a crowd ; he is made for

marriage and for life in the home. Therefore he believes,
and has not, I assure you, for one moment ceased to feel
that destiny will never offer him twice such a girl, with
such a mother, and that outside such a marriage he would
never find perfect happiness. Really I am very angry
with him ; how can he be so clumsy as to allow these
ladies to doubt the truth of this opinion, which he has
expressed to me a thousand times? ... .”
Within a few days Joubert had been angry enough with
Fontanes to make him write to Chantal. The girl replied in
an incoherent babble of happiness, tutocements and love. ‘Then
her mother wrote on the rest of the sheet, hardly less happily,
to tell Fontanes not to be such a laggard ; had he not wasted
so much time he might already have been married and installed
on the first floor. Who was going to be elected to the two
vacant places at the Academy ?
Not Fontanes : but at least in August he succeeded in
winning its prize for his poem on toleration. Then he took
over the Journal de la Ville from its almost bankrupt proprietor,
and ran it with the aid of another poet, Claude Emmanuel
Carbon de Flins des Oliviers, of whom it was said that he had
more names than laurels. By January his paper had become
the Moderateur, and by April it had amalgamated with the
Spectateur national. ‘The chief interest of all three papers was
political. Fontanes tried to turn Joubert into a_ topical
journalist, but in vain. Joubert, indeed, occupied himself
with the ideas that were to bring political revolution in their
train, but not even these could turn him into a partisan.
Public freedom, he determined, could only be established
through the sacrifice of individual liberty ; the strong must
give up a part of their strength, the rich a part of their wealth,
the nobles a part of their nobility, and the poor, the weak and
oppressed a part of their hopes ; and in 1789 no one was
prepared to give up anything.
The only thing he contributed to any of Fontanes’ papers
was an account of the Salon of 1789 : a piece of subtle and well
written criticism that in more fortunate times might have
opened a career for him. For he permitted himself a point of
irony in his criticism; he blamed M. Vieu. for painting
French heads on Greek bodies ; he considered that Madame

62
 1787-1790
Vigée le Brun’s talents would soon equal her reputation ;
and said of one picture that the girl in it looked as if she had
escaped from a picture by Rubens before the painter had had
time to do more than block her in.
Joubert was also engaged upon a more important piece of
work, that was to serve as introduction to an Histoire impartiale
de la France to be published by Prudhomme. He began to
work upon it in the later months of 1790. He started with a
sketch of prehistoric man, classified rather a la Diderot, accord-
ing to whether he ate sitting or lying down ; he proceeded by
the origins of Gaul, where he got a little lost in the maze of
Celtic history, and described the Gauls as a communistic
people worthy to be emulated by their descendants. He was
happier with yet more primitive people ; he found that
Savages represent a modern antiquity, and that life in his
beloved Otaheite was a present-day equivalent of the heroic
age of Greece. Unfortunately he was as usual behind-hand
with his work, and the publication of the book could not begin
until the introduction was ready. ‘The publisher continued
to advertise it until February, 1791, when even he lost hope.
No history could be so impartial as to be absolutely independ-
ent of political events, and by then anything that had been
written would have been out of date.
For conditions were changing rapidly in Paris, which was
beginning to look like a city in which it was always August.
An enormous number of its richer inhabitants had emigrated,
and an even greater number had retired to their country
houses to be away from the political turmoil. Few of the great
swinging coaches were left in the streets ; everywhere the
shopkeepers and concierges had leisure to sit and chat in their
doorways, and to tell new stories, that improved at each telling,
of the crimes of the Royal Family. The balance of the orches-
tra of street cries was displaced ; none of them mattered but
those of the pedlars selling newspapers. The rest sold only
the necessities of every day, but they sold history.
Meanwhile Fontanes’ suit was being neither withdrawn
nor pressed. The Abbé de Vitry gave friends of his letters of
introduction to Joubert in Paris ; Madame Cathelin com-
mended to him her son, Jean-Baptiste, who was rather a black
sheep and had got into trouble in the regiment in which, after
various unsatisfactory beginnings, he had finally enlisted. The

63
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

Baron remained perfectly obdurate : Fontanes was not a

husband for whom he would provide his godchild with a dowry,
and it never entered Fontanes’ head to marry Chantal without
one. Fontanes’ only contribution to the financial question
was to say that though he dare not ask his sister for anything,
he had a cousin who might possibly leave him something one
day : would that do? Chantal’s relations replied in unison
that it would not, especially as the cousin was young and
might marry and found a family at any moment. A friendly
letter from Claudine Cathelin asking him for goodness’ sake
to screw up his courage and tackle his sister, ended by asking
why they had only received the Modérateur for five months
when they had subscribed for six? This, too, touched on a
tender spot. Fontanes, deep in the troubled politics of the
first year of the Revolution, when a straw might have turned
the whole fate of France, grew impatient and irritable. He
was neither reactionary nor revolutionary ; there was no
party of which the success could console him, and on every
hand he saw the precious past of France torn to tatters by men
too stupid to see its beauties.
Joubert had a less backward-turning mind, a less strong
sense of actuality, and a slower temperament. In July, 1790,
Fontanes came to a dinner-party of his and was so irritable and
rude that they almost quarrelled. The quiet Joubert was upset
enough to write him a letter of reproof.
*“T would like to erect an altar to Bonhomie. It is
she who, taking everything in good part, allows no one to
grow irritable and to give unnecessary pain to others on
the road of life. It is she who makes men love other
people even when they are not at all loveable. It is she
who above all other should be called Bona Dea. If I may
venture to say so, you had made no sacrifice to her
yesterday, and she withdrew from you. That is why you
fell into three enormous crimes : first, in disturbing the
peace of the table ; second, in not troubling to spare a
woman ; and third, in making your fellow-guests un-
happy before dessert. I had prepared a beauty, all for
your honour and glory. That was where my dinner was
to shine. All my trouble was wasted ; this dessert was
not for you. You never even looked at it) I am none
the less your servant ; but hereafter I shall have you to

64
 1787-1790
dine only with the resolute and bold. Send me the
Procopius and the Abbé du Bos; and admit honestly
that yesterday you were neither excessively well-bred nor
excessively discreet nor excessively moderate. Happy
those who spend to-day with you !”’
Happy, perhaps, but hardly very respectable. Fontanes
had quarrelled with Restif de la Bretonne as finally as had
Joubert, but unlike Joubert he had returned to the disreput-
able and sordid if sometimes amusing society of the Latin
Quarter. It was this, and a consequent unacknowledged
sense of guilt, rather than debts, or laziness or bad temper,
that built a wall between the two friends. Fontanes was
involved with a girl of poor but decent family in the rue
Mazarine ; he had no intention of marrying her, nor, for the
time being at any rate, of marrying Chantal either. Joubert
seemed not only to have failed in his plan to find a wife and
fortune and happiness for his friend, but also to have lost the
friend in the process.

65
 CHAPTER FIVE

1790-1793

J scorn lost his father in April, 1790. He had not

seen him for twelve years ; he had never loved him as he
loved his mother ; yet he had a true sense of loss. The
receipt of an extremely Christian letter from Fontanes did not
do much to console him ; he found more solace in a visit to
Villeneuve. Villeneuve was never merry, unless it were
with the merriment of a crowd, under the torches of the fair,
or the market umbrellas; nor was it ever tragic. Such
tragedy as walked there lay within the soul, and found no
dramatic expression. The town and its surroundings seemed
always calm, with a gentle serenity, a little sad but infinitely
kind. It seemed to remember much, and to mourn a little,
but to be torn by no violent passions. It was a real consolation
to walk once more along the quays and watch the boats, to
cross to the fields and to see the great roofs of the church
reflected like brown velvet in the water. The magpies were
pairing in the bare fields, and the woods were full of Lent
lilies, single bloomed, exquisitely alike, that starred the dun
earth at regular intervals like a heraldic semé of fleurs de lys.
In the town there had been a few marriages and fewer
deaths ; otherwise all was unchanged. Paris might be in the
throes of anarchy ; the property of the Church might all be
confiscated, the monastic orders suppressed ; most of the
aristocracy might be in exile ; the navy might be in a state
of mutiny ; yet life in Villeneuve went on with remarkably
little modification. Its decent and law-abiding citizens were
neither rich enough to be victims, poor enough to be gainers,
nor politically minded enough to be violently partisan. They
read about the National Assembly in a single newspaper;
those who had money invested in Church Funds were justifiably
anxious ;_ those who had relatives in religious houses were
having to provide for them ; yet the citizens of Villeneuve
remained spectators of the drama of Revolution rather than
actors in it. The prices in Sens market and the prospects for
66
 1790-1793
the vintage remained far more positive interests than anything
that happened in Paris.
One of the families of whom Joubert saw most at this time
were the Moreaus, who lived in a decent bald-faced stone
house in the rue du Pont. There was Madame Moreau de
Bussy, the widow of a lawyer who had been premier échevin of the
town, and the four sons and one daughter that remained to
her of the sixteen children she had borne. The eldest sur-
viving son was a lawyer who usually spent most of his time in
Paris, but had now come to Villeneuve for peace and quiet ;
the next, a widower with a little daughter, held a small official
post at Villeneuve ; the third, a priest, was a curé near
Tours, but often found an excuse to come home; and the
fourth, a lawyer like the eldest, like him spent his time between
Villeneuve and Paris. The youngest of all the children, and
the only surviving daughter, was Adélaide Victoire Thérése
Moreau de Bussy, commonly called Victoire : at this time a
brisk, competent woman of thirty-four, very good to her rather
alarming old mother and to her young orphan niece. She
was not notably handsome, but she had vitality, candour and
kindness, three qualities that always had their appeal for
Joubert ; and the fact that at thirty-four she was filling with
graciousness and sense the unrewarded roles of daughter and
aunt appealed to his sensibility. She was good as the bread
she used to slice so resolutely, and sweet as her own conserves.
When Joubert felt anxious about politics, sad about Fontanes,
and disheartened about his progress as a philosopher, it was
curiously encouraging to call at the Moreau’s in the rue du
Pont and to find her busily at work in house or garden,
generally in the company of her great friend Madame Cholet.
After a few weeks it was time for Joubert to return to
Paris. He was hardly back there before the eldest brother,
Jacques Moreau, fell gravely ill. Joubert knew Victoire well
enough to know that he was her favorite brother, and wrote
at once.
** Dare I take up your attention in reading one of my
letters, when you must be given over to so many cares, and
so many anxieties? I have just heard vaguely of the
sudden departure of your younger brother and of the news
which caused it ; I hasten, for my own peace of mind,
to express to you the extreme disquiet with which they

67
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

fill me, and the sympathy I have with the state to which
your brother is now reduced. ... But it is not only
the thought of him which disquiets me, but also of you,
Mademoiselle, of you and Madame Cholet. I dread
for both of you the agitation in which you must be living
and the sufferings of which you must be witnesses : above
all, I dread the grief that you must experience. Your
health has no need of such trials, nor your hearts of such
emotion. ... Why am I not at Villeneuve-le-Roy?
Why can I not share your troubles beside you? You
might not find them any the lighter, but I should find them
less bitter. Separation is horrible when one knows that
those one cares for are suffering ! ”’
This was almost a declaration ; Joubert looked at it, hesitated ;
nearly scratched it out, and then decided to mitigate it by the
presence of Madame Cholet as a chaperon.
‘I beg Madame Cholet to understand that she has a
half-share in all these sentiments ; and you, Mademoiselle,
I implore to believe that it will not be possible for me to
feel at peace until I know that you are... .”’
Even with Madame Cholet thrown in, such a letter argued a
close and even tender friendship. It had, however, no
immediate sequel. M. Moreau’s illness was a long one, and
before it was over Joubert was unexpectedly back in Périgord.
Montignac was as remote from the torrent of the Revolu-
tion as Villeneuve, more remote, indeed, for one was on the
high road from Paris to Lyons, and the other hidden in a
Périgourdin valley. Yet even in Périgord the ancient structure
of society was changed. The jurisdiction of the royal and
seigneurial courts had been abolished, and in their place a
new and almost equally complicated legislature had been
created by the Constituent Assembly. Each country town
was to have its Justice of the Peace, who with local knowledge
and a sympathy for local ways was to give judgment in any
differences that might arise between its inhabitants. His
jurisdiction was to extend beyond the town over the rural area
administratively dependent upon it ; and, indeed, one of his
tasks was to be the encouragement of agriculture and rural
life. It was not necessary for him to be a lawyer ; any good
man over thirty, with some experience of thé world, was
eligible for election to the post.
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 1790-1793
Every town of more than two thousand inhabitants was
to have its own Justice, Montignac amongst them. With her
husband, who had never appreciated dear Joseph, safely out
of the way, it became Madame Joubert’s dream to have her
son back to live with her. This judgeship might have been
created expressly for him. He was the right age ; he had had
(by the standards of Montignac) great experience of the world;
and even as a young man he had made a local reputation for
himself as a moralist among the people with whom he had
used to talk on the bridge. Joubert consented to stand for
election, but did not come to Montignac to canvass the citizens.
That was left in the hands of the Jouberts, the Queyroys and
the Gontiers, and above all of his brother-in-law, Jean Boyer,
egged on by old Madame Joubert. On the 28th of November,
Joubert was elected. Still he did not hasten to leave Paris ;
the weather was bad, and the journey to Périgord difficult.
Meanwhile his election was causing trouble in Montignac.
A disappointed citizen, Waurillon de la Bermondic, denounced
Joubert’s brother-in-law, Jean Boyer, to the authorities at
Sarlat, as dangerous, and said that he and “ that little despot,”
the doctor Frangois Lacoste, nourished ambitions to oppress the
people. Boyer had not only had his nominee elected as
mayor, but had also had his candidate appointed Fuge de Paix.
In order to secure Joubert’s election he had sent emissaries
to catch votes into every house in Montignac, and had bribed
a certain Jean Degain to tell timid citizens that if Joubert were
not elected they would have a man as judge who would behead
half the citizens. Worse, he had ordered the town crier to go
round with his drum and speak in favour of Joubert. Borre-
don, the rival candidate, had had no such supporters, and that
was why Joubert had been elected.
On December Ist, 1790, a meeting was held in the now
disused Chapel of the Penitents, and the defeated Borredon
read a long statement of his grievances. Incidentally he
disclosed the fact that the law required each voter to take the
oath separately, and that this formality had not been complied
with. Waurillon and Borredon on one side, Boyer and his
mayor on the other, argued and quarrelled until men began
to feel that the Revolution had reached Montignac at last.
The meeting ended in a free fight. News of all this was sent
to Joubert, but gave him no stronger wish to take up his office.
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

Meanwhile Borredon and Waurillon had appealed to the

authorities of the Department of the Dordogne to declare the
election illegal and void : they declared people had not known
which Joubert they were voting for, and even spoke of the
“< prétendu Joubert,” and declared that he was not eligible for —
election if the election had itself been properly held. Madame
Joubert retaliated with a manifesto that described her son as
“< homme de loi :”’ another understandable exaggeration. The
fact that the oath had not been properly taken by the voters
was indisputable, but was common to nearly every election
that had taken place in the Dordogne. After much delibera-
tion the departmental authorities finally concluded that to save
time, trouble and intrigue, the election should stand. Joubert’s
election as Justice of the Peace for Montignac was confirmed
on December 12th. Waurillon, after a last despairing pro-
test, lapsed into silence, and the Journal Patriotique de la Dordogne
lauded the dignity and elevation of Montignac’s choice.
In January, Joubert was still in Paris, though in a Paris
that changed every day. All the characteristic trades that
brought wealth to the city were at a standstill. No furs, or
fans, or jewels, or silver, or porcelain, or silks, or tapestries, or
inlaid furniture were bought ; nothing was sold but necessities
and souvenirs of the Revolution so trumpery that it seemed as
if even their purchasers did not wish it to last. The carriages
that passed had clumsy patches of paint to hide the armorial
bearings on the panels ; the footmen had gone out of livery ;
and as Joubert walked through the streets he saw masons
busy plastering over the sculptured coats of arms set above the
doorways of the great private houses. Every wall was pasted
over with posters, in every colour of the rainbow, proclaiming
opinions as variegated. The gardens of the Luxembourg
seemed little changed, but even here he saw that the old copper
sign had disappeared that forbade ‘‘ aux gueux, mendiants,
servantes et aux gens mal vétus d’entrer dans le jgrdin, sous
peine de prison, de carcan et autres punitions plus graves.”
The quieter and emptier city had its own charm for
Joubert. He walked behind the apse of Notre Dame and
watched the Seine flowing in flood beneath a cloudy sky, and
felt uplifted and happy. A week later he was still watching
the flood, this time where it tumbled past the ruins of the
Bastille. But by February he had nerved himself for the
70
 1790-1793
journey to Périgord, that proved less alarming in fact than in
prospect, and on the 6th of March he took the oath as Fuge
de Paix before the assembled municipality of his native town.
The Judge had no official dress ; his plain clothes were sup-
posed to be a mark of the fraternity that bound him to those
over whom he exercised his jurisdiction. Joubert, however,
looked elegant, tall and thin in his Paris clothes, and his mother
wept with pride that he should be a lawyer and a man of mark
in Montignac after all. The oath was moderate enough to
satisfy any scruples: “I swear to be faithful to the Nation,
the Law and the King, and to maintain with all my might the
Constitution of the Kingdom decreed by the National Assembly
and accepted by the King, and to fill with zeal and impartiality
the functions of my office.” The next day he was elected a
““notable”’ of the town, and appointed to sit with the town
council to assess the taxes ; on the eighth he took the oath
again in this capacity. It was all very gratifying and impres-
sive, especially for his relations. The only distressing thing
was that while Montignac had only its rural district and a
solitary judge, its rival Terrasson had a large area of juris-
diction and a whole tribunal, who'were installed with pealing
bells, a salute of guns and a band. The domestic festivities
of the Jouberts, the Queyroys and the Gontiers could offer
nothing to compare with such jubilations.
Joubert found it an interesting experience to recapture his
own youth. He still had time to walk beside the river, where
the linen was spread to bleach on the grass, or through the
rain-channeled terraces of the vineyards on the slopes. He
had not now time for day-long rambles through the chestnut
woods ; he was too old to join the young people when they
went for moonlight walks, singing on their way ; but how rich
was the material for his meditations with which life had pro-
vided him! When he had been last at Montignac, he had
known nothing of life but the cloister of the Esquille, a couple
of salons in Toulouse and a few books. Now he had all his
Paris life to look back upon: Diderot and Fontanes, Restif
and his wife, the talk of café and club, the ideas of philosophers
and revolutionaries. The only pity was that he had some-
thing to do in Montignac beside thinking and remembering ;
he would have liked to warm himself in the sunshine of idleness,
and instead he had to act as Justice of the Peace.
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

It was curiously pleasant to be back in the old house,

and to find everything in it, from the newel-post to the soup
ladle, at once familiar and half-forgotten. The sisters were all
married, though they lived near by and often looked in to see
their mother ; the brothers were away in Paris ; his father
was dead, and Joubert enjoyed being head of the household
and living with the mother who adored him. She was old
now, but gentle and thrifty as ever, still singing the snatches
of old songs she had sung to him in his cradle, and still bringing
out quinces in honey for a treat on winter evenings. He used
to sit in his father’s chair by the great hearth, while she sat
opposite and told him long tender stories of his own child-
hood, weeping gently over kindnesses he had shown her that
he had long forgotten, and the love he had borne her that
seemed to spring up fresh and strong as ever.
Outside the old house, Montignac seemed much less
peaceful than it had used todo. A miasma of restlessness and
strife had blown from the great towns even as far as Périgord.
If people met and talked on the bridge, their talk was apt to
turn to argument ; if they drank the sweet local wine together
at the café, it might turn to blows. There was no longer the
ease of manners that came from everyone knowing his own
place ; a false equality made the more aggressive members of
the community rude, and the more timid, obsequious. Ardent
revolutionaries discovered a kind of /ése-nation in being too
civil. Even the market women and their customers could not
keep off politics; the sins of the King or the politicians were the
reason why the winter greens were dear, the apples wormy, and
the hens stringy ; nothing seemed to have ripened properly
since people had invented the Nation. The cottage women
were rude to the rich farmers’ wives who came to market,
and insufferable to the wife of that little despot, the doctor,
and her friends.
One day in March, at a session of the municipal council,
which Joubert attended, the procureur de la commune appeared to
preach to them on the subject. He was deeply pained at the
disorder and violence that he saw in Montignac, and by the
insults that he heard offered to the National Guard and the
citizens. It was time to check them, or they would become
a public danger. How could it have happened. that they,
who before the Revolution had lived together in amity and
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 1799-1793
brotherhood, should now find themselves divided in interests,
intimacy and concord, by the very revolution that strove to
bring fraternity to France ? The council must make a decree,
or there would be more ill-feeling in the town than there had
ever been, even before the bridge was built.
~ Meanwhile, Joubert had assumed the functions of his
office. He was supposed to sit with two assessors, drawn from
a panel of six and on duty for two months at a time. Since
the office was honorary and unpaid, and they had their own
avocations, one of his earliest difficulties was to find anyone to
sit with him. He also had a clerk ; the office was filled by one
of his Queyroy cousins. His court sat formally three times
a week, and he was available for consultation and informal
work at any time at the family house in the rue du Cheval
Blanc, just re-christened rue de la Liberté.
His work interested him. He was for ever seeing human
nature in action. Each party to a dispute would reveal their
view of the case to him, and it was for him by patience and
kindness to draw them into sincerity. It was, in some aspects,
like the priest’s task of listening to confessions to which he had
once thought himself called ; it was, in others, like his father’s
vocation of examination, diagnosis and treatment. He was
infinitely patient, absolutely honest, and no fool ; the votes of
Montignac might have gone to a worse Judge.
By the end of March his first formal case was behind him ;
a village girl had successfully vindicated her good name against
slander and the vindication had been solemnly registered by
the clerk and signed by the Judge. Next he was busy with an
affair of local heroism. In December, while he had been
watching the flooded Seine, the Vézére had also been in flood.
A child had fallen in ; it was dinner time, few people were
about, and he would have drowned had not a fisherman
named Grangier and called Barbefine jumped into his boat and
saved him at considerable risk of drowning himself. Meanwhile
another, Pierre Cailloud, who could swim, was tearing off his
clothes ready to jump into the torrent. Montignac would at
any time have been stirred and grateful but, at the dawn of
the Revolution, Virtue had acquired a political significance.
The municipal authorities reported the event in a flowery
letter to the departmental administration ; they referred it back
to the town council, and just before Joubert arrived it was
8
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIJST

decided that Grangier dit Barbefine was to receive a reward

of a hundred livres. Then people remembered Cailloud dit
Lachenau ; his intentions had been as good, and surely his
Virtue was therefore as great? By the time that they had
drawn a picture of him preparing to dive into the stream and
rescue the child at the peril of his life, no one very exactly
remembered that in fact he had been able to remain safely on
the bank. Once more a flowery letter was written ; once
more the departmental administration referred it back ; once
more a reward was decreed : this time only thirty-five livres.
Then, and only then, did the authorities at Périgueux begin to
take an interest in the matter ; and they, rather as an act
of charity than as a reward, agreed to recompenses being given,
but cut them down as a matter of principle to eighty-three and
twenty livres respectively. One of Joubert’s first official
duties was to undertake the necessary oratory at the presenta-
tion ceremony. It was, strictly speaking, the Mayor’s business,
but that functionary had confessed that speech-making was
not his line, and that his colleague who had heard all the great
orators in Paris would do it much better.
There was the town council, with its rural representatives ;
there were the Jouberts, the Queyroys and the Gontiers, and all
their friends and relations ; there was all Montignac. There
were Barbefine and Lachenau dressed up for the occasion,
and Joubert in his new uniform, which had been invented since
he became judge : a coat of French cut, that is to say wide-
skirted, embroidered over the heart with a medallion inscribed
La loi et la paix, and a round brimmed hat, turned up in front
with a panache of black feathers. The ceremony took place
in the parish church, which gave unction to Joubert’s oratory.
His speech was charming, simple and sincere : he told Barbe-
fine and Lachenau that it was indeed for them and for them
alone that all this pomp and circumstance was displayed ;
and that it was a sign of the brave new world that two fisher-
men like them, because they had shown courage and devotion,
should be honoured like kings. He bade the child who had
fallen into the river come forward ; told his story, making
the dinner hour at Montignac sound like something out of
Virgil ; dramatically besought the boy to serve his country
through all the tempests that might assail it, and» presented
their rewards to the fishermen amid acclamations and applause.

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 1790-1793
Villeneuve and his friends there seemed far away. News
came, however, in May, that Mademoiselle Moreau de Bussy’s
brother had died of his illness, and Joubert dutifully wrote to
her, still with a considerable degree of intimacy.
“*] have only had the honour of knowing you for a
few years, and in that short space of time you have had to
endure all the sorrows worthy of the name that could
have affected your life. I have shared in them all, and
whatever befalls I will continue to share in any others
you may still have to bear, for it is no longer possible for
me either to ignore them or not to feel them. . . . Accept,
in this the first moment of your sorrow, of which I hardly
dare speak, the expression of the esteem of a man who can
never forget you and who realizes your merit, the more
since there is on this earth one heart the less that loves
you. Joubert.” ‘
Again caution prevailed and Madame Cholet was invoked in
a postscript.
*“‘ If any consideration could increase the grief which
yours causes me, it is the thought that Madame Cholet
shares it. All the sorrows and misfortunes of both of
you will always also be my own.”
Montignac once more absorbed him. He had to wear
official mourning for Mirabeau, attend secular services in
honour of his memory, subscribe to a pyramid to commemorate
him, and attend meetings of the town council where Mirabeau’s
perfidy was disclosed and the plan of the pyramid vetoed. He
had, indeed, to attend endless sessions of the town council,
that apart from routine business was busy buying for a song
the buildings of which the religious orders had been dispossessed.
He was occupied, too, with the ordinary routine of his office :
sealing a house, in case of arrest or death, issuing warrants
and writs, settling disputes about payments and legacies, and
studying the new Code de la justice de paix which aspired to guide
him through any difficulty that might arise in the course of
his duties.
In May more news came from Paris. Fontanes had been
living with another girl from the Rive Gauche ; now she had
borne him a son, and he had insisted on the absent Joubert’s
being godfather, with his brother Arnaud for proxy. No
doubt a Juge de Paix, even of Montignac, added a specious
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

air of respectability to a birth certificate that gave as father a

wholly mythical Louis Saint Marcellin; but really it was rather
tiresome of him. Fontanes had given the child a good start
in life ; he called him Louis, after himself, Charles, after his
mother Charlotte Rochelle, Joseph after Joubert ; and gave
him Saint Marcellin for a surname, after his brother Marcellin
who had died at school. Fontanes had a heart of gold and a
genius for friendship, but he was sometimes trying.
In July more news came from Paris : first, of the flight to
Varennes, and the of then death of Madame Cholet, who had
proved so decorously useful. Once more Joubert wrote to
Victoire.
*‘ The events which have everywhere offered serious
pre-occupations to men in public life have precluded
them from giving themselves up, wholly and assiduously,
to their private affections. I have been more conscious
than most of this deprivation, since, in the first moments
of your loss, I have not been able to give myself to
grief as completely as I should have wished, over this
last sorrowful passing of your irreplaceable friend. . .
If her pure soul still exists and sees what passes in this
world, she is content with the feeling I have for you. . .
Night makes up for the distractions of the day, and your
sorrows have often occupied my dreams.”
Why does she never write to him? Why does she give him
no news of her health ?
** So long as I live, your happiness and your existence
will not cease to interest me. Grant me enough of your
confidence to count upon these sentiments and to be
assured that you have now no friend, man or woman,
who esteems you more than I do.”
Esteem evidently comes in, as Madame Cholet used to do, as
a cool shower at the end.
Victoire replied to this letter, after a time, with news of
the death of the lawyer relative with whom she had used to
stay in Paris. Once more he replied, more tenderly than ever.
“Tt is to time and reason that I commit your afflic-
tion ; they alone can console you. As for me, I confine
myself to begging you, you who in times of prosperity
ever seemed to me so amiable, whom so many sorrows
have made to me so dear, I confine myself to beseeching
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 1799-1793
you not to despair. You have not yet reached the middle
of your career, and your life in all its length may offer
you an infinity of happiness such as you have never known.
Do no cast off the future and let the present slip by. . .
Do not outrage Providence by believing that there is
nothing left in its treasury that may make up to you for
what you have lost... . Iam now, alas—and I mourn
the fact—your oldest friend, now that so many others
are no more. It is from the depths of my heart that
this title rises to present itself to my pen. It is in right of
it that I ask you to tell me often about yourself, to con-
verse with me about yourself continually, for you will
always concern me so long as your unhappiness endures. .
Think that I love in you both you yourself and your friend
and the country where you live, which pleased me so
much, and the memories which my soul will always hold
as precious. I have gathered together on you all the
emotions which the society inspired wherein you lived.
You are dear to me by many titles. . . .”
By January, 1792, Joubert was writing to Victoire’s
notary brother. ‘The occasion was far from romantic ;
Joubert had backed a bill for Fontanes, M. Moreau-Descombes
had accepted it, and now Fontanes had defaulted. It offered
however, an opportunity of speaking of Victoire in a manner
that left his sentiments evident.
‘For six months your sister has often written to me
in eulogy of your nobility and goodness of heart ; but the
language you use to me, in which these qualities are
so well seen, praises you better even than she did, though
assuredly she praises you well. I see that it is my fate
not to be able in any way to detach myself from your
family. I knew in it a man of noble character and a girl
of true worth ; be the heir of part of the esteem which I
avowed for the first, and consent to share with the
second the eternal interest which I shall never cease to
take in her sorrows, her happiness, her health and her
destiiyes. Pa%
Joubert would pay Fontanes’ debt, naturally, but would
gratefully accept the extra time in which to discharge it that
Victoire’s brother offered him.
Joubert was, indeed, still Fontanes’ friend. He had

77
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST
acted as godfather to his child, he had backed his bills, and he
was still worrying over his possible marriage with Chantal
Cathelin. Fontanes’ ‘‘ moderation,’’ which people were apt
to consider reactionary, had driven him from Paris in the
autumn of 1791, and with unusual good sense he had gone to
Lyons to prosecute his suit. There he was busy writing
ephemeral verse, on such subjects as L’emploi du temps, and
cultivating the family. Chantal loved him as devotedly as
ever, though she might have fewer illusions about him ; her
mother and the Abbé still encouraged the match, and the
Baron was still obdurate. Fontanes, however, was beginning
to be reasonable ; any career that Paris offered was, for the
time at least, at an end, and not all his bills were backed by
friends as staunch as Joubert. Before very long he had brought
himself to the point of approaching his sister, Madame Rouget
de Lisle. She proved far more amenable than he had ex-
pected, and warmly approved the project of his marriage. If
he married Chantal (but not otherwise) she would leave him
all she had at her death : some 10,000 livres. It was not much
to put into the scale against Chantal’s dot : 12,000 livres from
the Abbé, 20,000 at her mother’s death, and 200,000 down
from the Baron. The Baron, however, was growing old and
ill, and no better prétendant had presented himself. Therefore,
against all probability, the poet’s proposal was accepted not
only by the lady but also by her guardian, and the contract
was signed on October 20th, 1792, just four years after the
marriage had first been proposed. Joubert realised with
thanksgiving that his friend’s future was assured.
Joubert’s own affair with Victoire simmered gently. She
had plunged, in her mourning, into the reading of Young’s
Night Thoughts, and Joubert wrote to her briskly scolding her
for giving way to melancholy at second hand. He had noticed
strange outlandish words in her letters, and these must have
come from the same source : would she please remove them
from her vocabulary ? He loved her as she was. She replied
with a little point of malice, telling him that he was jealous of
Young, and would not have him as a third party at their
téte-a-téte ;she could not always be sensible and reasonable;
he must let her sometimes be as sad as she liked. Her letters
were long and rambling ; he liked them so, for so they gave
him the illusion of conversation. He fought with all his
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might against her nervous wish to prolong and deepen her
grief, but he fought subtly and tenderly. By April, 1792, the
anniversary of her brother’s death, he was bidding her mourn
with all her heart for a month, then leave her black cloaks and
veils and hoods, and take up life once more.
She found it hard to follow his advice, and wrote complain-
ing that life was sometimes hardly to be borne. Joubert
answered on a note of tender irony :
‘““T have read the compliments you pay to life. I
judge them very new, very agreeable, very well founded
and altogether unanswerable. Yet I believe, that if Life
could speak, she would have the audacity to answer back,
ill or well. She would say, for instance, ‘ You call me
unbearable ; it is because you do not know how to bear
me. Iam like those burdens which are not felt, and which
are even borne with pleasure because they strengthen the
powers, once one knows how to place them rightly,
whether on back, or head or neck, by observing the laws
of an easy and just equilibrium, but which cannot be
moved, which make one sweat and crush one, if one is
poor spirited enough to wish to use only one’s hands or
the tips of one’s fingers in shifting them. Ask the poor
folk who pass their days at your door, whom men call
Savoyards, and watch them at work. They will teach
you how to be strong and how to make such burdens light.
I am (you say) a bitter thing that can only rouse
your aversion. The truth is that you do not know how to
use me. I am like an orange, and refresh with sweet
and reviving juice those who seek my true substance and
my very flesh. You only bite upon my bitter skin ; and
if a friendly hand tries to peel this away from my sweet
inside and to offer me to you in reality, you push it away
in disdain... My friend, remember one _ thing.
Thousands of men, while I speak, have for their only meat
a coarse bread, ill ground, ill kneaded and ill baked,
aud they have only such hunks of it as they can eat out in
the fields, in the wind and sunshine, in rain and hail and
frost. Yet they make it suffice, and are even grateful. ..”
Joubert tells her to profit by his preaching, for he is going to
marry her whether she will or not.
‘* Consent to it by compliance, goodness or necessity :

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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

but consent you must. It is necessary to save my life,

or at least its tranquillity. It is necessary to save your
own, that you do not take much care of, in spite of the
fact that it is so interlaced with mine that nothing can
strike at one without attacking the other. You must!
You must! ... It rests with you to waste my time, my
health, my soul and my body in attentions, efforts and
prayers, or to leave all this to those who need it, by
consenting blindly to that which must happen if you live
and I live. So consent straight away: and then I will
do everything you wish. Consent in spite of yourself
and with repugnance: I don’t care. Willingness will
come. Consent with confidence : I will justify it... .
Were I only twenty-five, I would give you ten years to
answer in. I am thirty-eight ; I don’t give you a day,
an hour or a minute. And I shall be obstinate about it.
Spare me all this trouble, and, in a word, say to me :
‘ Well, I consent, until the time comes when I want to.’ ”
The letter has a postscript, as usual, and as usual, still a little
cautious.
**T have tried to write to my brother, to my cousin,
to his wife, to all the world to commend you to them. I
have been tempted to come myself. But I cannot get
away, and a little cold common sense spoils nothing.”
Still Victoire hesitated : she wrote, often, with tender-
ness and true friendship, but without passion or certitude in
the future. Joubert’s peace of mind, that pillar of the philo-
sophic life, was seriously disturbed. He could not understand
that she had only his memory and his letters ; and that, after
the sorrow she had endured, she felt herself to be too deeply
changed to entrust herself blindly to either. The times were
too disturbed for easy trust ; even during her stay in Paris
she had suddenly found herself called upon to give asylum to a
Swiss Guard escaping from the Palace. Now that she was back
in Villeneuve she had nothing but her bereavements as a
background to her daily monotonous duty of looking after her
mother. Joubert might lose his temper over her devotion to
those she had lost, but it masked a deep distrust of life that
could not be conjured away from a distance, talk he never so
platonically. At least their constant and steady correspond-
ence was making each a habit to the other ; only the gesture
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 1790-1793
and expression of conversation were lacking, without which
their friendship could hardly be fired to love.
Joubert himself was occupied with the official celebrations
of a year in which everyone seemed to become grave and
humourless. In July he helped to plant a Tree of Liberty,
that quickly withered, and as a magistrate wore a civic crown
of oak leaves and formally embraced his colleagues, similarly
crowned and looking rather sheepish. He found some of his
fellow-citizens grieved and indignant at the King’s deposition.
but their grief was without energy and their indignation
quickly stilled. Men were too suspicious of each other for
their views to become a political force. On August 11th the
mail came through with the news that Paris was a feu et a
sang, and the lips of thinking men were finally sealed.
Through it all Joubert continued busy with debts and
slanders, quarrels and affiliations ; the lesser cases for settle-
ment, the greater to be reported to the tribunal of the district.
His work was often less of law than of conciliation, and in this
he excelled. He had to remember the characteristics of the
province, which he defined as a habit of saying cold things
with vivacity and fire, arising from the fact that southern
vivacity lies not in the soul but in the blood. He had to
accustom himself to listening to a flood of speech, with the little
grain of truth that mattered hidden in an inordinate number
of words. His chief consolation lay in the reading of Plato.
Such reading, he found, was like mountain air ; it did not
nourish, but it sharpened the organs and gave an appetite
for good food. ‘The intellectual food that his own time offered
was too political for his taste ; he feared that the revolutionary
thinkers were sowing briars and would reap thorns. Virtue
and toleration were fine things, but they were not enough on
which to build the perfect state. In his own work he found
the eternal principles of Law hidden behind a mass of
ephemeral decrees, made necessary by the troubled state of
the times, but dictated by the needs of administration rather
than the principles of good government. The exclusion of
men without patrimony from the electorate troubled him»;
if they were less wise and less balanced in their views than the
better endowed, it was because of their position, not of any
innate defect. The only tie which at that time seemed to
unite men was the tie of the common life, of common hours of
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

work, and meals and sleep ; this might bind Montignac into
an entity, but it could unite no greater city. He turned more
and more away from his own troubled age into the timeless
world of Plato.
He had to emerge from it to deal with a matter that shook
the world of Montignac. In August, 1790, the Constituent
Assembly had made Terrasson the seat of the district tribunal.
The pride of Montignac had been wounded, and its trade
injured ; but it was in pride that its citizens had suffered most.
The district was composed of seven Cantons, and in the subse-
quent months the citizens of Montignac succeeded in getting
six of them, representing forty-eight parishes out of sixty, to
sign a petition to their deputies begging that the seat of Justice
should be removed to Montignac. The petition had gone to
and fro between rival authorities, but the tribunal had remained
at Terrasson.
In September, 1792, however, all the tribunals came up for
confirmation and renewal. A majority of the electors voted
for the transference of the Terrasson tribunal to Montignac ;
the district authorities approved ; Terrasson appealed, and
even sent an indignant deputation to Montignac. Once more a
petition wandered from file to file, but this time it was the
petition of Terrasson. It even got so far as the Convention,
which decided that before a final decision was made the judges
should continue to sit at Terrasson. Montignac promptly
summoned the newly elected judges ; Terrasson did the same ;
the Departmental authorities annulled both summonses and
decided that the judges might choose to sit in whichever town
they liked. One judge and a deputy (who had been born in
Terrasson and had always lived there) chose Terrasson ;
three judges and the commissary, Montignac. The Depart-
mental authorities were not pleased ; they had hoped for
unanimity. Once more they wrote to the Convention, but
the Convention had graver matters on its agenda. They
wrote again ; still no action was taken. So on November
16th, 1792, the head of the local administration wrote straight
to the Minister, Roland. ‘‘ Either, virtuous Roland, the law
will triumph, or we will perish for its fulfilment : such is our
confession of faith.” Still nothing happened. Montignac
sent a deputation to Terrasson to seize the papers from the
office, explaining to the indignant citizens that municipal
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 £7/99-1793
administrations such as theirs were specifically excluded from
any concern with the processes of justice. The administrator
of the district finally fell back upon Joubert. In himself he
was little use in such a quarrel ; but he held an official position,
and he could leave Montignac more easily than most people
who could claim in any way to represent it. Moreover his
capacity for conciliation, that was of little use in assuaging the
quarrel of two angry little towns not ten miles apart, might
prove more effective at a greater distance. Joubert, therefore,
was sent to Libourne, on the way to Bordeaux, where three
commissaries of the Convention, Carnot, Garrau and Lamar-
que, happened to be staying, to break the long journey from
the Pyrenees. Joubert caught them in time, and pleaded the
cause of his town with such effect that they rapidly reported
in favour of Montignac ; the tribunal was finally and officially
transferred, Terrasson was told to remember its place ; and on
January Ist, 1793, Montignac was given its proper importance
in the world.
The judge who had been born in Terrasson (who had
an elder brother who was a member of the Convention) might
be as tiresome as he liked ; the victory was to Montignac, and
was due to Joubert. He had justified himself to his family
and his native place : self-respect was assured, and now he
could cultivate peace of mind. His office had been modified
a few weeks earlier: the juges de paix had everywhere been
succeeded by tribunaux de conciliation. He had continued to act
as President of the tribunal ; it had meant more colleagues
but little essential change. Now the time had come to free
himself from red tape and procés-verbaux and oaths of fidelity
that grew more revolutionary with every month that passed.
He resigned ; and one of his opponents reigned in his stead.

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 CHAPTER SIX

1793

Jssa, left Montignac for Paris in the middle of

January, 1793. Travelling was in those days no easy
' matter. All the horses of private persons had been taken
for the use of the army, and those that remained officially for
hire were constantly employed in going from camp to camp.
French carriages were rarely in order, and could not be mended
at a moment’s notice, least of all when the blacksmith was
likely to be with the National Guard or making a political
oration at the Club. Joubert was thankful for the opportunity
of travelling with the three commissaries of the Convention
whom he had interviewed at Libourne ; at least their papers
would be in order and they would have first call on any post-
horses that were to be had. One of them, Frangois Lamarque,
he had known in Paris, and it was through him that he had
had this chance of travelling pleasantly and economically.
Lamarque, however, occupied one carriage with his wife and
small son, and Joubert had a seat in a larger vehicle with the
rest of the party. Lazare Carnot was the most interesting of
them : a Burgundian of a likeable ugliness and a witty con-
versation. He was of Joubert’s age, and had already made a
name for himself as an expert on fortifications ; he was inclined
to be prouder of his reputation as a writer of light verse. They
travelled by the Western road: plain or valley country for
the most part, swept by the wind and rain that blew in from
the Atlantic. It was too stormy for comfort or conversation ;
the inns were cheerless, the beds damp ; and Joubert, who was
a chilly soul always afraid of catching cold, was thoroughly
unhappy. He was thankful to reach his little hotel in the rue
Saint Thomas du Louvre. The trial of the King had just
begun. The three members of the Convention naturally
attended it, and Joubert was present at several of its sessions in
company with his brother Arnaud. The long narrow room
was arranged with banks of seats, on which he looked down
from the precarious heights of the spectators’ gallery. They
were filled with the members of the Convention: men of every
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sort and kind. There were men from the country who might
have been mayors of Montignac; men whose plain clothes
failed to hide their aristocratic mien; men whose frockcoats
failed to hide the fact that they were more used to soutanes;
men from every part of France, and above all men from the
seedier parts of Paris. Joubert almost found himself looking for
Restif de la Bretonne, for there were men of his stamp among
them. There was a face he knew : it was Fabre d’Eglantine,
who had run away from the Esquille to join the comedians.
Signs of approval and disapprobation were forbidden, but
nonetheless there was a constant murmur, a vague grumble,
from the extremists of the Montagne. Most faces were not
marked by gravity or even fatigue, but rather by boredom or
impatience. He heard Lamoignon de Malesherbes defend
his sovereign with the reasoned eloquence and the learned
precision of a great lawyer ; he saw the King himself, stout
and commonplace, standing at the Bar of the House to reply
to the charges brought against him. Even when he leaned
over the rail of the gallery Joubert could see little but the
King’s curled wig and spreading waistcoat, and hear nothing
but a vague murmur ; he felt like a man in a bad seat at an
ill-acted tragedy. The shafts of pale light from the high
windows were alone dramatic : these, and the reiteration of
“La Mort” as each deputy in turn ended his speech with
his verdict. He heard his three acquaintances record their
vote. His friend Lamarque startled Joubert, who was himself
always reluctant to pass sentence, by his categorical speech :
** Louis is guilty of conspiracy ; he has been a perjurer and a
traitor. His existence sustains the hopes of conspirators and
the efforts of aristocrats. ‘The Law has pronounced sentence
of death ; I pronounce it also, wishing that this act of Justice,
which decides the fate of France, may be the last instance of
a legal homicide.” The young Garrau was no more merciful ;
Carnot admitted that he found his duty hard, but that he knew
that it was his duty to vote for death.
The participation of three men he knew and liked in such
a scene made Joubert realize its horror. He knew, with
profound and certain knowledge, that he could never again
play any part in politics. The real world was too horrible
to live in ; only in the immaterial world of thought and feeling
could he now find a home.
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

Fontanes was with his bride at Lyons, but Victoire Moreau

de Bussy was with her lawyer brother in the rue Saint Honoré.
She was still melancholy, and even when they had once more
grown used to each other did not consent at once to marry
him ; but neither she nor Joubert had much doubt that they
would eventually be man and wife. Meanwhile he found in
her company some respite from the troubles of Paris. The
Convention was sitting in the Tuileries, and the rue Saint
Thomas du Louvre and the rue Saint Honoré were both too
near that storm-centre for peace. The guillotine was set up
in the Place Louis XV, in front of the winged horses; all the
Tuileries were forbidden ground. Joubert and Victoire spent
January 21st together in an anxiety that passed into the silence
of horror,when men rushed up the street shouting that the King
was beheaded. Soon France was at war with Austria, Prussia,
England, Holland and Spain, and Austria and England were
invading its borders. Could the new laws, as Joubert hoped,
give France an impenetrable moral frontier that no one could
invade? Life was not much changed, except by an incalcul-
able feeling of restlessness. Only four days after the King’s
death Joubert was buying children’s books to send to his
nieces and nephews at Montignac, and meditating upon
education. He tried to reconcile himself to the present by
the study of the past. Had not the liberties of to-day been
won by centuries of servitude ? Was Demos only capable of
virtue, never of wisdom? Even such studies soon became too
painful ; by the end of February he was turning back to pure
literature, to thoughts of dictionaries, that were like a paint-
box to a writer, and to dreams of a new world other than that
being created by the Convention. He would make a law that
no man should build a house in a town unless he had brought
back a field into cultivation. Towns should be planned;
they should have agricultural land surrounding them and
belonging to them, except for some, like factories, that should
be allowed to exist without land attached. There should be
wide stretches of land upon which no towns should be permitted.
There should be festivals at the four seasons: a festival
of families, when relatives in any degree should feast together ;
a festival of friends and neighbours; a festival of the
poor, especially of widows and orphans ; and a festival of
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strangers. And there should be a fifth festival, for servants
and tenants and workmen. Yet such dreams could only be
achieved by shutting one’s eyes to reality, and the process was
extraordinarily tiring. A man needed little energy to live ;
but these times left him hardly enough to love. And, if one
dreamed too much, one created a woman more lovely, more
gentle, more quiet, more charming, than one could hope to
find in reality. Victoire was ceding ; he must convince him-
self that what was good and real must be worth more than a
visionary best.
The state of France went from bad to worse. The Revolu-
tionary Tribunal was formed ; civil war broke out in the
Vendée ; the Girondins were overthrown, and a reign of terror
first dawned in Paris on June 2nd, 1793. Five days later the
contract of marriage was signed between Joseph Joubert and
Adélaide Victoire Moreau : signed at the bride’s brother’s
house and witnessed by the family lawyer. Marriage was
now a civil ceremony, valid if notice of intention had been
displayed at a town hall for a week, and there was no other
rite. But ifthe priests had no part in it, the lawyers still saw
to it that there was a good old-fashioned contract. Joubert
brought nothing to the wedding : not a stick of furniture or
a penny of money. Therefore no community of goods was
established, but everything was to remain in the wife’s hands.
If she died first, he was to receive two thousand francs a year
from her estate, and a further annuity from her brother.
Meanwhile, he was assured of living comfortably on her modest
and sufficient income.
Victoire’s health was still not quite re-established, and
they spent a long honeymoon at Plombiéres, where she took
the waters. The village lay in a narrow cleft and seemed shut
off from the troubles of the world without. Its stone houses
with sculptured keystones still recalled the royal and aristo-
cratic visitors of the past ; its tree-bordered walks still seemed
expectant of rheumatic duchesses ; its springs were still
dedicated to kings. Victoire and Joubert were happy there.
She was soon strong enough for them to drive out to La
Feuillée Dorothée, and dine in a waggon under a shelter of
green boughs. The want of any object to give the scale lent a
factitious grandeur to the Val d’Ajol ; the eye plunged into
its depths like a diver into deep water. Almost for the first
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time Joubert realized that Périgord was lacking in distant

horizons. The news from Paris continued disquieting, but
Joubert found a certain amusement in the new and poetical
names for the months, invented by his old schoolfellow Fabre
d’Eglantine, and formally instituted in September.
By the end of October, 1793, they were back at Villeneuve,
and Joubert was settling into the family life of the house in the
rue du Pont. Victoire’s old mother, bad-tempered and
rough-tongued, and the young niece, Louise Alexandrine,
whom Victoire had adopted, completed the household ; the
notary brother from Paris and the priest brother from Touraine
joined it from time to time. Fortunately the house was built
in two parts, divided by a courtyard and linked by a service
wing, and the Jouberts could have the part furthest from the
street to themselves. The rooms were low, with red tiled
floors and heavy rafters, but there were marble chimney pieces
to give them an air, set in panelling, with a mirror or an old
picture of shepherdesses framed in it over the fire. The
country furniture was good and plain, with a kind of rustic
elegance. There was a long narrow room for Joubert to
write in, and three or four pleasant bedrooms with light
wall papers patterned like old brocade. There was no view ;
the central garden court was no bigger than the cloister garden
of a monastery, and the windows that looked on to the outer
world saw only the grey-white walls and the corduroy velvet
roofs of the small houses that lay between the Maison Moreau
and the river; but light and air flowed easily through the
quiet rooms. It was enchanting to be there in the wide bed
and hear the distant noises of the town as it woke ; the morning
slap of shutters against the walls, the clap of sabots on the
pavement, the snatches of high-pitched talk about the weather
—“ J] brouillasse un peu,” or a triumphant “‘ Fait beau!”
The creak and groan of a heavy cart coming up from the
bridge made a kind of music with the light tinkle of the bells
on the horses’ collars.
Joubert lived in greater comfort in the rue du Pont than
he had ever known. Victoire was the sort‘of woman who
had learned at her convent school lists of the leaves that were in
season for salads for every month of the year, and*had never
forgotten them. She knew when each of the fourteen cheeses
that can be bought in the market at Sens was at its best ; she
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was as skilful and thrifty as his own mother in the matter of
conserves, and much more extravagant when it came to sauces.
Villeneuve itself had markets on Fridays and Sundays, or, in
Revolutionary language, three times a decade, and six fairs
a year ; but for books and clothes and luxuries they used to
drive into the fairs at Sens, and buy them from gaudy booths
set up in the shadow of the great cathedral. It was a long time
before Joubert learned to feel possessive about his wife’s house,
but he soon discovered the exact corner of the garden where
an American maple best shaded him from the sun and a group
of shrubs best protected him from draughts.
Joubert loved Villeneuve more than ever, now that he
could feel that he was one of its citizens. He knew all the
houses in the long street that crossed the town, with their
high pointed roofs of brownish tiles and their discreet facades
that each had a countenance of its own. The great church
with its high tower stood over the houses by the brimming
Yonne like a shepherd who has brought his flock down to the
water to drink.
A bridge, an eighth of a mile long, with medieval pon-
toons and arches, led across the Yonne to open country ; the
two gates opened on the roads to Sens and to Joigny : and a
number of sandy lanes led up the low but steep hills behind the
town into the country of woods and farms that Joubert best
loved. He used to spend hours at Valprofonde or Le Buisson,
until the evening light flooded the valley, so warm, so golden,
so suave, that it seemed as if it were a liquid that one could
drink. Then he would return to see the blue mists rising from
the Yonne and the smoke of all the houses of Villeneuve veiling
the glow of sunset.
He needed at times to get away from the house, and its
population of confident women. Sometimes their briskness
and competence were too much for him ; they made him feel
helpless and ill. At times he came to have an odd horror of
their laughter ; it disconcerted his abstract thinking, and
brought him down from his Platonic heights to the world of
every day. He came to consider it as an enemy of reason.
He would huddle over the fire, sheltered from draughts by an
old tapestry curtain, and declare that he was too tired and ill
to go out. Fortunately Victoire was mercifully kind behind
her brusque decisions ; she had only to stand beside a bedside
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to become serene, caressing and encouraging. She would

treat him like an ailing child, and her mother would say
** Stuff and nonsense.’”?> Madame Moreau de Bussy was a
difficult old lady to live with ; if her daughter tried to cajole,
her persuasion had as little effect upon her as oil upon
marble. If all other means failed, Madame Moreau would
get her own way by becoming pathetic. Her harsh voice
would grow plaintive, and by deploring non-existent evils she
would become genuinely low-spirited.
Joubert found that the Terror made it difficult even to
read systematically. However much he tried to shut himself
off from the horrors of the present, they were too much in the
air for him to be unconscious of them. Yet the Revolution
had as yet hardly reached Villeneuve. There had been, even
in Villeneuve, a club affiliated to the Jacobins in Paris, that
chiefly existed in order to read the newspapers, but so soon
as the Terror began, its horrified members had closed it.
There was Corporal Violette, with his hat over one ear and a
game leg, who would have threatened to sabre God Almighty
if he had suspected him of aristocratic leanings, but he was the
only real revolutionary. The café was only mildly liberal ;
the mayor hardly that. Even when the Terror made it
necessary to re-open the club and to make a brave display of
red caps, banners and inscriptions, it was done as a measure
of safety and meant little ; even when Villeneuve had to
have a Revolutionary Committee, it was presided over by an
ex-aristocrat who had only come to Villeneuve to find a little
peace. Of Villeneuve’s four thousand souls, not one was sent
to the guillotine by its efforts ; not one even languished in
prison. A man was indeed denounced to the Revolutionary
Committee, and it seemed dangerous to take no action ; but
one of the men from the timber-rafts who was a member
sagely remarked : ‘‘ If you kill the father who’s going to feed
the children?’ and the matter was dropped. Monsieur
Vautrin, a retired cook, who could read, might spend all his
time when he was not hoeing his vineyard in reading the news-
paper ; but though the other vinedressers would stop and rest
their baskets on his gate and listen to his political disquisitions
on their way home in the evening, they did not take in much
that he said ; and in any case even the maxims of Marat
sounded quite mild when expressed in his fat cook’s voice,
go
 1793
There were a few politicians in the town who were so
aimlessly busy that the others called them cockchafers ; but
the only scandal they discovered was that the most liberal of
the priests was found working in his garden on one of the new
tenth-day holidays, having got mixed between the official
and the ecclesiastical week.
Joubert meditated in vain on the strange fact that when,
as then, villages and great towns held different opinions,
it was always the villages who were expected to change their
views.
No one who lived in a great town was safe. Fontanes
and his wife had stayed on in Lyons after their marriage, and
Chantal had had the pleasure of being received in its literary
society. It was not long before such pleasures came to a
sudden end. Lyons was torn between its own dissident
factions. Fontanes, between boredom and prudence, decided
to go to Paris. He served as escort to Josephine de Beau-
harnais on the journey, but his wife was expecting a child and
could not travel. He wished not merely to escape from a
troubled city, but also to intrigue so as to secure some powerful
friends in the Convention to protect him if the danger grew
worse. He had chosen a good moment for leaving Lyons.
In May the royalists and moderates succeeded in securing the
upper hand, and the Convention decided to treat it as a rebel
town. By August it was in a state of siege, and the siege lasted
seven weeks. The army were reasonably well equipped with
artillery, and the bombardment was reiterated and severe :
the Convention had decreed that if the city would not sur-
render, it should be destroyed.
Poor Chantal endured it all ; the house she was in was
shelled and burned ; she bore her child in a barn. (She
gratefully christened the baby after Fontanes’ sister, Imberthe
Rouget de Lisle, who had made her marriage possible.)
Fontanes, meanwhile, was assuring his political status in Paris,
by helping the deputies who had come from Lyons to beg
mercy for the city to compose their speeches in the purest
classical style. Unfortunately they were not successful ;
Lyonnais refugees in Paris were ordered to leave the city,
and Fontanes had to hide with some friends at Les Andelys.
Chantal, her baby, her mother and her uncle, the Abbé, hid
in a quiet village near Lyons.
gl.
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

Villeneuve had seen the passage of the army on its way to

besiege Lyons. The soldiers had even dared to destroy the
market cross. Some time before, when it had been decreed
that all the emblems of feudalism were to be destroyed, the
fleurs de lys with which it was carved had endangered it ;
but a nice old lady of Villeneuve, Mére Hureau, had pleaded
its cause and had persuaded the authorities to plaster over
the fleurs de lys instead of chipping them off or destroying
the cross altogether. Now the soldiers threw it down because
it was a cross, and as it broke the plaster came off and the
damning fleurs de lys were revealed. ‘The doubtful patriotism
of Villeneuve thus disclosed, further investigation revealed
that the apostles still stood in the niches of the church door,
and that even the cross still decorated its wind-vane. Luckily
the re-founded club and its red caps could be hurriedly invoked,
and a respite of twelve hours obtained : the carpenter managed
to get the cross down in time, ‘at considerable risk to life and
limb, and the reputation of the town was saved. The army
that was to besiege Lyons remained a horrible memory in
Villeneuve.
The recollection did nothing to lessen Joubert’s anxiety
when early in 1794 he heard of the plight of Fontanes and his
family. Instead it filled him with a great wish to have them
all with hin at Villeneuve. He had not, however, room for
them in his own part of the house, and the old lady would
not make room in hers. Yet he still dreamed of making it
possible, and if his kindness was ineffectual, it was none the
less sincere. On February 3rd he wrote to Chantal, at her
retreat in the Lyonnais :
“I only possess in this poor world, for all furniture
and almost for all goods, a piano that really belongs to
my niece, two engravings which are indeed mine, and half
a sugar loaf which we consume in common. Come and
share in these treasures : I can dispose of them as their
master and offer them to you with all my heart.
“I would have liked to have found you a cottage in
my neighbourhood, a cottage at the foot ofa tree. I have
done everything to discover one, even to the point of
resolving to buy one—I who hate property !—but I have
not succeeded in doing so. I shall be reduced to lodging
you in a thatched cottage at the foot of a wall. It is not
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very magnificent: but if only we were really sure of
disposing even of this hovel! Yet it is the best that this
neighbourhood affords at present. People come to
blows over the smallest hole, so rare are lodgings. Fon-
tanes must decide quickly ; I am writing to him by this
post. Ifhe waits there will be nothing left.
** This cottage at the foot of a wall is a priest’s house
built by a bridge. You would have our river under your
eyes, our plain before your feet, our vineyards in per-
spective, and a good quarter of our sky over your heads.
That is attractive enough. A yard, a little garden, of
which the gate opens the country to you, neighbours
whom you would never see, a whole town on the other
bank of the stream, boats to ferry you across, and a
convenient isolation ; all these things are worth a great
deal. And, indeed, you would have to pay a great deal
for them.
*“* The site is better than the building. The building
is no more than a dwelling in which you would not get
wet, in which you would not freeze, in which you would
even be able to sleep without being all crammed into one
bed ; but at the same time you would not have spacious
apartments. Your mother would have an alcove for her
bed, a little room and a view ; you would have a large
chamber, and the good uncle one at the side. I have
described it all to Fontanes. He thinks it will be enough ;
for myself I find it too little, but can find nothing better.
** Arm yourself therefore with a great courage, and if
you are resolved not to find reason for complaint in being
ill-lodged, quickly make ready the bag in which you will
pack all your belongings and hold yourself ready to start
whenever the signal is given. You will find when you
reach here a man who will receive you with a profound
respect and a most tender affection.
Joubert.
*“P.S.—I beg you, all of you, to be sure that all
the sentiments which I express for you very briefly, and
which I have for all of you, are felt and given not for
Fontanes’ sake (though assuredly that would be reason
enough) but because of you yourselves. 1 honour and love
you because I have known you.

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“ T am very conscious of the unpleasantness of having

nothing to offer you but such poor services. I must
become a great landowner. If only I had a little palace
in an enchanted island, with what pleasure should I be
able to say to your mother: ‘It gives me great satis-
faction, Madam, that you and your daughter have not one
stone left upon another, since it provides me with the
opportunity of proving that I am your servant by giving
you shelter under my roof.’ One is wrong to laugh at
the doctor in the comedy who wishes that those he loves
may have a good fever, so that he may have the pleasure
of curing them. He was a little man with a good heart.
I shall not dare to laugh at his folly in the future, for I
know that I share it, or very nearly.
** T have a wife who thinks about you as I do. This
gives me great pleasure. She had (as I told Fontanes)
drawn in all her thoughts from society to enclose them in
her own room ; now they have all flown out again, at the
news of the disaster that has befallen you, and do not
cease from hovering over the ruins of your houses. . . .
Her great regret is not to be able to be of any service to
you herself. Like the lark in the fable, after having
delayed too long, she is about to become a mother, and
has hardly strength enough to build her nest. You and
your mother will do me a great service if, with time and
little by little, you make her take the same interest in
your society that she already takes in your misfortunes.
In any case we see no one here ; everyone lives a solitary
life, as we do while we wait for you.”
Chantal replied on February 16th, telling him that his
letter had given her new life. She could not write as delight-
fully as he had done; she felt so overwhelmed by misery
that she had no brains left. She was living in the hope of
getting to Villeneuve and meeting Fontanes there ; Joubert
should give them a nuptial benediction. Meanwhile she must
go back to Lyons, in an attempt to save some of her property ;
that done, she and her family would try to get away to Ville-
neuve, but only for a few days, for her husband thought he
had found safe furnished lodgings for them somewhere near
Paris. She hoped that Joubert’s child would be more fortun-
ate in its birth than her own ; her baby was just like Fontanes,

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with a hot temper and (she hoped) a good heart. How long
it was since they had broken their journey at Villeneuve, and
Joubert had made them taste fried roses! Now life was all
thorns. Alas! she had no time for the piano now, but had
to spend all her time in sewing.
Fontanes’ famous furnished lodgings near Paris were in
the house of his former mistress Adélaide Dufrénoy, at Sevran
near Livry : it was, perhaps, a strange place to which to bring
his wife, her mother and her uncle the priest, but it was safe
enough as far as Adélaide was concerned.
At the end of March the swallows came to Villeneuve,
and Joubert marked the occasion with a star in his journal.
On April the 8th he heard the nightingale and his son was
born ; and for three days a constellation of three stars marked
his happiness. The midwife christened the baby Victor
Joseph as he lay on her lap by the fire. On the roth he was
taken out to have his legal existence registered and to be seen
by the neighbours. Joubert found in his wife’s peace of body
and mind, in the very existence of his son, apart from his
obvious beauty and health, a joy such as he had never known
before. He stayed in the house, and walked in the little garden,
in order that he might taste that joy in solitude and peace.
Then, on the 12th, he wandered across the bridge to the other
bank, to the hamlet of Chaumot, and in a wood he heard a
grey bird sing more sweetly than he had deemed possible.
The mother’s first rising, the baby’s first smile, each was a
family festival. For a long time there were no philosophic
thoughts recorded in the journal.
Even in Villeneuve July, 1794, was an anxious time. It
was known that More, the leading revolutionary of the Depart-
ment, was dissatisfied with the ‘ patriotism ”’ of Villeneuve ;
only troubles in Troyes and Sens prevented him from making a
threatened descent upon the town, which could hardly fail to
lead to the denunciation and death of some ofits citizens. Then
for forty-eight hours no news came from Paris, and the Ville-
neuviers had already learned that the failure of the mail was
the sign of a major catastrophe. At last news came, and a
joyful neighbour rushed in to tell Joubert that Robespierre
had been guillotined. The Terror was over.
By the end of August things were quiet enough, and
Joubert had grown used enough to his son’s existence, for him
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

to be able to tear himself away from Villeneuve to spend a few

days in Paris. He saw Fontanes at Sevran ; there had been
anxious moments, for a spy had denounced them as refugees
from Lyons, but now the amnesty of Thermidor had relieved
their anxieties. They were hoping to be able to leave Sevran,
and to set up house in the rue de la Sourdiére, near Saint Roch,
where Fontanes had used to live as a bachelor. .
Joubert was hardly back at Villeneuve before he received
a long and tiresomely practical letter from Fontanes. The
move had been made, and Paris was proving extremely expen-
sive.
‘** Whoever has not mountains of banknotes or rolls
of gold pieces, whoever is not a politician, a merchant or
a highwayman, cannot live here any longer. I have
thought for a long time that the evil had reached its height,
but each day it is redoubled, and we are getting near the
time when one will need fifty thousand francs for a dinner,
asin America. Wine in Paris is detestable and very dear.
Do you know that I am paying three francs and ten sous
a pound for meat? I imagine that everything is less
dear in Villeneuve. ‘Therefore, I expect from your kind-
ness and beg of you on my wife’s behalf to buy us in your
villages forty or fifty pounds of clarified butter, a reasonable
quantity of eggs, a few pots of grape and pear preserve for
the winter, and a few bottles of liqueur from Auxerre ;
you probably do not know it, but one can get excellent
stuff there. In addition, couldn’t you manage to send us
some rolls such as you have yourselves? ‘They would be
excellent for making soup, as they are so crusty. I do
not say how many pounds of them ; the more you are
able to send; the kinder you will be. . . .”
““P.S.—And potatoes! Potatoes! Buy me a few
bushels for pity’s sake, or at least keep them for me.”
The letter came by the hand of Joubert’s brother Arnaud,
and some at least of its commissions were executed by his aid
and the results taken back by him in the coach to Paris. Such
mundane things, however, were not of a kind to provoke
Joubert to letter writing. Fontanes received no letter from
him until early in November, when news had come that the
baby Imberthe had died of the small-pox.
“You will have doubtless seen my young brother,
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 1793
and he will have given you the packages that you asked for.
He will also have been able to tell you how sorry we were
for the death of your poor child. We had amused our-
selves by making our little preparations, suitable for her
age, ready to receive her ; these occupations of a moment
have been sadly brought to nought. They had given us
a sort of connection with her, a kind of companionship
which has much increased our regret.
“You and your wife are young and healthy. The
consoler, Time, will not fail you. Use time quickly to
fill again the void which this dreadful smallpox has so
quickly made in your family. These creatures of a day
should not long be wept for, like men ; but the tears that
flow for them are bitter. I know it when I think that
your loss might at any moment become mine ; I thank
you for having thought of it. I do not doubt that in like
case, you would be ready to share in my emotion as I
share in yours ; consolation is a loan that one makes,
which sooner or later.every man will need in his turn.
I shall turn to you with confidence whan the day of that
need comes.
““T write to you very seldom or not at all. It is
because your devilish letters always provide me with
material that excites my brain to such activity that when
it is time to answer I am weary and worn out with the
fatigue of thinking. I therefore determine to be silent —
and to forget you altogether, so as to get my strength
back. My health has no strength at all. My heart,
lungs, liver and all my vital organs are healthy. I live
with a regularity and wisdom of which the uselessness
bores me excessively. I waste nothing, and nothing
sets me up again. My mind masters me often enough,
to tell the truth, and the weakness of my body makes it
intractable ; but often, too, when I have thrown Mind
out of the saddle, I lie down upon the litter in my stall
and I live for months on end like a beast, without being
any the more rested for it. You see that my existence is
not altogether the bliss and enchantment in which you
believe me to dwell. Yet I have them sometimes ; and
if my thoughts would write themselves unaided on the
tree trunks that I meet just as they form and I pass, you

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would find when you came to decipher them up and down

this countryside after my death, that I lived from time to
time more platonically than Plato himself, Platone platontor.
I think that even this proves that I am separating myself
from mundane things and becoming pure spirit. In any
case, if I hold too little to life by those gross and solid ties,
health and appetite ...I shall cling until my last
moment to those I love by my desire for their happiness,
which can only end with my thought and breath. Count
on it as far as you are concerned .. .
‘“T have sent you four dozen rolls. It is a great
regret that it was all that I could do. My intention is
further to prevent you, so far as lies in my force and
power, from making soup with them, and I forbid you,
by all the authority that your complaisance may give me
over you, to use more than one or two of them thus, as
an experiment, for your personal use. With the stomach
capacity with which my brother assures me you are still
endowed, on which I congratulate you with all my heart,
you would soon absorb the whole stock. ... They
tell me that these crusty rolls, in the hot drinks of break-
fast time keep a mixture of softness and firmness that makes
them delicious. Leave therefore at least forty-six of
them for the ladies’ chocolate. It is for their benefit that
I have had them baked by a German baker, the only man
in these parts who understands them. It is impossible
to make him light a fire in his oven more than two or
three times a year in the circumstances in which we live.
. . . My brother will share his butter with you.... I
have bought no potatoes here, for there are not enough
to give a taste to all the poor folk who would like them.
There is the same lack, and the same difficulty, about
other dried vegetables. The liqueurs one drinks at
Auxerre come from somewhere else when they are good.
As to the girls of these parts, when you have cows to feed
and farmyards to sweep out, I will send you one or two ;
but until then you shan’t have the shadow of one, for
there is not one who knows how to pour out chocolate.
I have now, I think, replied to all your commissions.
‘Tt remains for me to say one thing about books
and style that I have always forgotten. Buy and read
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 1793
books written by old men, who have known how to put
into them the originality of their character and their age.
Get for yourself a little Varro, Marculphi Formulae
(this Marculph was an old monk who should please you) ;
Cornaro, Dela vie sobre. I think I know two or three more
of them, but I have not time to recall them. Run through
those I have mentioned, and tell me if you do not discover
manifest in their words and thoughts, green minds, how-
ever wrinkled, sonorous if broken voices, the authority of
white hair, in short, portraits of old men? The amateurs
of pictures always have one or two in their collections ;
and a connoisseur of books should put a few in his library.
“IT am cold and I am going to warm myself. Keep
well and tell Madame Cathelin and your wife that I have
always honoured and loved them and always shall.”
Fontanes next wanted wine. He had already in October
bought sixty gallons from a merchant of Villeneuve, but being
Fontanes had naturally not paid for them. Would Joubert
go to M. Hyver and make the expression of his regret and
gratitude to that excellent man as elegant as possible? Now
he wanted two hogsheads which were to be bottled before they
were despatched. He spiced his request with criticisms of
Rousseau and Voltaire, and a eulogy of crabbed old pedants
who gave you something to bite upon. He had acquired a
few powerful friends ; if Joubert were to write a little school-
book, he thought he could get it officially accepted.
_ Joubert was once more faced with the task of provisioning
his friend. On November 24th, 1794, he wrote :—
“Your wine has gone and you may perhaps have
received it when you get this letter. It would not have
been prudent to send it you in bottles, since glass is
breakable ; there, as you see, is a reason taken from the
essence of things. There is another, pertaining to cir-
cumstance and no less weighty : you would not have
found in all this countryside a hundred and fifty bottles
to be bought, and they would certainly have sold them
much dearer than in Paris. . .
** Advise your wife to go to Lyons so that she may
come and see us. As for you, you must in due time and
place risk a little journey to spend ten days with me. I
think it very necessary that we should give ourselves
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

leisure to renew our acquaintance, for it seems to me that

we have forgotten each other a little. I will gladly
mingle my thoughts with yours when we can talk together,
but you must in no wise expect me to write anything
which makes sense. I love blank paper more than ever,
and I no longer wish to give myself the trouble of expres-
sing carefully any thoughts but those worthy of being
written upon silk or upon bronze. I am stingy with my
ink, but I talk as much as anyone likes. I have, however,
prescribed myself two or three little reveries of which the
continuity exhausts me. You will see that one fine day I
shall breathe my last in the middle of a beautiful phrase,
filled with a beautiful thought. This is all the more
likely, since for some time I have only tried to express the
inexpressible.
‘‘T have been busy in these last few days in imagining
exactly how my brain is made. This is my conception of
it. It is certainly composed of a substance of the utmost
purity, but the depth is variable. It is by no means
fitted for all kinds of thoughts. It certainly is not for
prolonged work. If its marrow is exquisite, its covering
is not strong. It is small in quantity, and its ligaments
have joined it to the worst muscles in the world. This
makes me find taste very difficult and fatigue insupport-
able. At the same time it makes me an obstinate worker,
for I can only rest when I have achieved something that
charms me. My soul hunts butterflies, and the chase
will kill me. I can neither remain idle nor be strong
enough for action. It results (to look on the best side)
that I am only fitted for perfection. At least Perfection
makes up to me for everything, when I can attain her.
Besides she gives me rest by forbidding me a crowd of
undertakings, for few kinds of work or material are able
to admit her. Perfection and I are congenial, for she
exacts as much slowness as vivacity. She lets me begin
all over again, and makes pauses necessary. I would like
I tell you, to be perfect. There is only that which suits
me and might make me content. I am therefore going
to create for myself a sphere, a little celestial and very
peaceful, in which everything shall please me and remind
me, and of which the scope, as well as the temperature,
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shall be exactly fitted to the nature and extent of my poor
little brain. I intend henceforward to write nothing but
in the idiom of this sphere. There I intend to give my
thoughts more purity than brilliance, without denying
them colour, for my mind is fond of it. As to the things
called strength, vigour, sinews, energy, dash, I intend
henceforward to use them only to climb into my sphere ;
it is there that I shall reside, when I wish to take my flight ;
and when I come down again to converse with men,
one foot and one step at a time, I shall never take the
trouble to understand what I am saying, as I do at this
moment when I wish you good day. . . .”
Never has an invitation to write a school-book been more
elegantly, more loftily or more elliptically declined. Joubert
kept his word ; he continued to dwell in his Platonic sphere.
Fontanes wrote twice to him that winter to send him more wine,
and Joubert never answered at all.

IOI
 CHAPTER SEVEN

1793-1797
HILE the citizens of Villeneuve were living in peace,
however anxiously, the Terror was striking at their
very gates. A couple of miles up the road to Sens
lay the village of Passy, and on its outskirts the symmetrical
pile of its chateau was isolated from the world by magnificent
gardens designed by Lendétre. It belonged to Antoine Mégret
de Sérilly, who lived there with a charming wife and four
young children.* In February, 1793, they had given shelter
to his relative, Madame de Montmorin, the widow of Louis
XVI’s last premier ministre, who had been massacred in Septem-
ber, and her two daughters, Madame de la Luzerne and
Madame de Beaumont. These had later been joined by their
brother, Montmorin-Saint Hérem. It was courting danger
to shelter them, but they were old friends ; moreover Sérilly
was liberal in his opinions, and had enrolled himself, and taken
the oath to support the new constitution, as a member of the
National Guard. He was a good landlord and a generous
neighbour ; it seemed as if his popularity might serve to protect
him and his. He was chosen to read the new constitution to
the assembled parishioners in July, and he shared in the festivi-
ties when the deeds of his feudal rights were formally burned in
October.
Yet while all went well in Burgundy, trouble was brewing
in Paris. The Committee of Public Safety ordered Sérilly’s
arrest; he had given asylum to a friend, since dead, who
had been wounded in the attack on the Tuileries, and he had
disguised and hidden him from the Commissaries who came
for his arrest. On the 13th February, 1794, the commissary
Guesnot and two companions arrived unheralded at the
Chateau de Passy. The family and their guests were at supper
when they heard a clatter of sabots in the courtyard. In a
moment three men in red caps, armed with sabres and pistols,
entered with an escort of villagers. They set a sentinel at
each door and stood in silence enjoying to the full the growing

Madangdhpain taransc sc16 21 ee

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disquiet of the company. Their unwilling hosts waited and
waited, in apparent calm ; they could keep their dignity,
even if Pauline de Beaumont could not quite control her
trembling. At last the terrifying silence was broken. The
men showed the warrant for arresting M. de Sérilly and all
suspicious characters found in his house. Every room was
searched. All papers were removed. They pummelled the
linen, cut open the chairs, rummaged the drawers, and drank
the best wine ; but they found little or nothing that was
suspicious. Pauline de Beaumont was treated as an enemy
of the Revolution because she hada portrait of her father,
wearing the blue ribbon of the Saint Esprit, but that was one
of the most incriminating finds. The ladies were each shut
up in a different room while the search went on. At noon the
next day they were once more gathered together and strictly
questioned. The commissaries finally removed Seérilly to
Paris, under arrest, and left the terrified women at Passy. A
few letters came from Sérilly in prison ; his wife eventually
succeeded in getting a permit to go to Paris so that she might
be near him. No sooner had she got there than she too was
arrested ; and on the third of April the Committee of Public
Safety decreed that Madame de Montmorin, her son, and
Madame de la Luzerne should be arrested too and brought
to the Conciergerie. Madame de Beaumont did not appear
on the list. At eighteen her family had married her to a
scoundrel from whom she had long been separated ;_ since
he had not emigrated there was no charge against her as
parente d’émigré. On April 6th the same commissary and two
assistants arrived at Passy with the warrants. Once more
they’searched and once more questioned, with as little result
as before. The prisoners were bound and thrown into waggons
which were to take them to Paris. Only Pauline de Beaumont
was left free, but she insisted on coming with the others. She
looked so frail and ill that the commissaries were not willing,
without a warrant, to accept responsibility for her. Once
the cart had passed through the iron gates of the park they
threw her out on to the grass by the wayside, and drove off
towards Sens and Paris. She dragged herself along the road
that the cart had taken until it was lost to view. Infinitely
weary, she returned to the castle. Many of the rooms were
sealed, but not all ; she must stay there and look after the
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

four children until word came from Paris. It was a strange

existence, in a half-sealed house, trying to preserve the frame-
work of an ordered life for the benefit of the children. Brave
letters came from both parents in prison, and the children
who were old enough to understand proved themselves worthy
of their parents. Pauline de Beaumont kept up the appear-
ance of a gracious calm, taught them the verse and music that
she had learned with their mother in the convent of Panthé-
mont, and supervised their manners and their deportment :
it was in itself the lightest of work, yet under the weight of
constant anxiety and constant grief it was curiously exhausting.
In May, her father’s faithful servant, Germain Couhaillon,
brought her the news that her mother and brother had been
guillotined. She had just strength enough to get to the
church, mouldy and deserted, with no image left but one of
St. Vincent, the patron of vine-dressers. The blow that had
fallen seemed all the worse for having been anticipated ; but
in the church she found a refuge where she could be alone.
For weeks she was obsessed and haunted by the words of Job :
“‘ Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life
unto the bitter in soul?’ By July came news that her sister
had gone out of her mind and died in prison ; it seemed as if
Fate could have few arrows left to shoot at her.
Madame de Sérilly had been condemned to death with
her husband. She had declared herself pregnant, and the
law permitted, in such cases, that execution should be delayed
until the child was born. She was removed from the Con-
ciergerie to the Hospital, and thence wrote in July that she had
arranged for her man of business to come to Passy and to take
Armand and Aline, the two elder children, to Paris to be with
friends. ‘The third was soon able to follow, and the youngest
was found shelter near by. Then came the gth of Thermidor;
the Terror ended, Madame de Sérilly could admit that her
pregnancy was feigned, and though her imprisonment con-
tinued, her life was no longer in immediate danger.
After all the children had left Passy, Pauline de Beaumont
was forced to leave it too. Its contents were to be cleared and
sold by the revolutionary tribunal, and she had no claim to
stay there. She would have been in ill case had not two
peasants, Dominique Paquereau and his wife, taken her in.
Dominique Paquereau was half vine-dresser and half farrier ;
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 1793-1797
he and his wife lived in a little cottage called Les Groseillers,
near the church. She had hitherto known only the chateaux
or town houses of the aristocracy and the palaces of the King ;
but she found shelter there in a low dark room, furnished with
a bed, an old oak table, a bread-cupboard and a few stools.
She had no hope and an infinity of fears; there seemed
nothing left to live for. Yet gradually the kindness of Madame
Paquereau and the rough encouragement of Dominique
brought her to life again, if only to a feeble life.
The inhabitants of the Chateau de Passy had lived in a
different world from Joubert : he had known none of them.
Passy had few architectural pretensions but regularity of plan,
but its grand stables, its great garden, the formal moat, made
it a residence of another social class than the house in the rue
du Pont. Yet the story of Pauline de Beaumont, ill, bereft
and alone, appealed to his imagination. In the solitary walks
that he took in the late summer of 1794 he used to wonder
where she had found refuge ; he used to ask the vine dressers
and road-menders for news of her; and one day he unex-
pectedly found her sitting in front of the Paquereaus’ cottage.
Thenceforward it became a duty to go to see her from time
to time, and duty soon became a delight. She was the first
great lady he had ever known ; and in her he found a culture
as wide, if not as deep, as his own, and a taste as delicate if
less philosophic. Pauline de Beaumont, now a woman of
twenty-six, had never been a beauty. Now her face was too
haggard and her cheek too hollow to disclose the exquisite
oval which was her chief charm. Her almond-shaped eyes
had the soft gleam of short-sight ; she was so ill and tired that
all that she said sounded unnaturally gentle. Yet, sitting
on a rush-seated chair in front of the cottage, she could talk
with an ease, a grace and a sensibility that veiled but did not
hide an inborn strength of character and laid Joubert under
a spell. On days that he could not see her, he would send her
notes and books by a child or an old shepherd with a crook and
a hairy cloak ; at other times he would come himself by the
sandy path over the hill. In November Madame de Sérilly,
free at last, came to Passy to recover what she could ; when
she returned to Paris she tried in vain to persuade Pauline to
accompany her. At Les Groseillers, with Joubert to talk to,
Pauline was conscious that she was at last recovering some
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

elasticity of mind. Joubert did everything to encourage her

to stay even a few days longer in the country. On December
26th he wrote :
“‘T venture, Madam, to be well content that you have
not gone, and very impatient to have the honour of seeing
you again. Your snow-covered cottage would already
have received my homage, if I had not feared to startle
your kindness by such haste. I have a cold, and I should
be over-bold to come and cough near you in this remark-
able weather. My policy, Madam, is only to pay you
visits that cost me nothing, so that since you have to take
little notice of them you may permit them more often.
I shall assuredly soon be braving all kinds of frost for the
good of my health, and shall naturally direct my walks
towards Passy ; the air there suits me. Accept, Madam,
the assurance of the profound respect with which I shall
always approach any place where you may be.
Joubert.
“ P.S.—Have a little pity on yourself and wait for
g5.... Paris has nothing but streets which will be
impracticable in such weather.... Let the heavy
diligences come and go without you, so long as they run
a risk of foundering. Your taste for solitude should only
leave you with good weather. May your resignation,
which has submitted to so many things, cede also to the
elements! They forbid your departure and give me
pleasure, I avow, if you permit me to avow it.”
Joubert used to say that he had ‘‘l’esprit et le caractére
frileux”’ : assuredly it was not only chill of body that he
dreaded for Madame de Beaumont. Yet she had to go. Her
departure was softened by the letter that she wrote to him on
December 2oth :
“TI am going, sad not to have said good-bye to you,
sick at heart to leave my cottage and terrified to see this
city stained by the blood of those whom I held dearest
in the world. Yet I am going once more to see my
friends : I would like only to think of that, and yet other
thoughts overwhelm me. I feel myself to be too bad
company to talk longer with you. I hope to see you
again ; I am going to see your brother. I did right to
make up my mind, for my presence is needed there.
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 1793-1797
Once more, Sir, good-bye ; in a little time I shall have,
I hope, the pleasure of congratulating myself on having
made your acquaintance. My hands are so cold that I
cannot hold my pen: it is a bad preparation for the
journey.”
Joubert’s thoughts travelled with her. On January 6th,
1795, he was writing to her :
“If ever you make a little fortune, I beg you to
build a little house on the banks of the Seine, between
Paris and your Passy, opposite the setting sun, and on
the peak of a hillock. When I am grown up I will come
to live in your vicinity, and being thus in a position to
cultivate your kindness, I shall choose a favourable
moment to thank you, as I should like to do, for the little
note that you troubled to write to me at the moment of
your departure. ... Your cottage is still covered with
snow. Iam no longer so sorry that you left it shivering ;
you would have shivered much more, if you had left a
week later. Since New Year’s Day I have only been able
to melt my inkpot in the last hour, without risk of splitting
it. ... If I venture to write to you of snow and frost
it is certainly not of necessity and faute de mieux. But I
do not want to make you think of the place where you are,
and I know only too well how to think of that which you
have left.”
He entrusted the letter to his brother Arnaud, who had
come to Villeneuve for the New Year; but when he returned to
Paris he found Madame de Beaumont away with friends. She
and Madame de Sérilly had some thought of trying to find an
apartment that they could share in Paris, but Madame de
Sérilly was soon back in Burgundy trying to save what she
could of the family property. She collected Pauline’s few
belongings from Paquereau’s cottage ; she managed to save
the Passy silver from being sent to the Mint, and some at least
of the furniture from being sold for a song. Pauline had
entrusted a letter for Joubert to her; but though he and
Madame de Sérilly might exchange formal letters, Joubert was
too shy of her, as the great lady of the neighbourhood, to accept
her invitation to call upon her. He was, moreover, in poor
health ; the severe winter had tried him, and as usual he took
his colds and his earaches very seriously. He sat by the fire
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

and listened to the wind ; its sound was to cold what flame
was to heat. The nurse and his infant son sat on the other
side of the hearth ; he listened to her baby-talk, and added it
to the number of languages he had philosophically considered.
Such sparkling cold, he felt, needed loud and brilliant music;
just as spring demanded sweetness, autumn softness and summer
lightness of tone. He missed Pauline ; to talk with an
intelligent woman was like playing a duet with her as the
violin and himself as the ’cello. It gave him little consolation
to think of politics ; cruelty might be giving way to order, but
men had still no clear duty fitted to their capacity, nor that
security which was the foundation of happiness, It was better
to read the old poets, and to dream in the lamplight. The
sad thing was that Victoire had no sense of the exquisite and
did not know how to dream.
Even when Madame de Beaumont returned in the middle
of March, he was not well enough to go to see her.
' “JT have been living, Madam, for seventeen days
under the dominion of the faculty of medicine. This
forbids me to throw my night-cap over the windmill.
I find myself, inevitably led to follow this part of the
prescription, with the more exactitude that the tempera-
ment with which it has pleased heaven to endow me
forbids me to make use of any other remedies. However
the ridiculous apparel which is prescribed for me, muffling
up my two ears, does not permit me to use them to listen
to you. I lose through this servitude all that you would
have been kind enough to say to me and all that you would
have made me think. There is, Madam, reason enough
for sorrow in such a grievous loss . . . and I grieve .. .
My humour is so embittered that if they keep me much
longer with my cap pulled down over my head I shall
become so hot-headed that I shall tear it offinarage. .. .
The impatience which torments me, to which I can see
no end, has its indestructible source in the sentiments,
worthy of you, which I cherish for you.”
Madame de Beaumont was in no better case ; she was
racked by a cough, and could not be troubled to nurse it.
Indeed she confessed to Joubert that, like Montaigne, she
would like to die, having driven post, at some village inn.
Joubert replied :
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 1793-1797
“I am well content to tell you that I cannot admire
you at leisure, and hold you in as high esteem as I should
wish, until I perceive in you the most beautiful of all
forms of courage, the courage to be happy. To attain it
you must first have the courage to look after your health,
the desire to be well, and the will to be cured.”
The doctor at Sens was an honest man, but a poor healer ;
he hoped she might be persuaded to go to Paris to consult a
better physician. For three months he had been anxious
about her health : how anxious she might judge when he said
that he had rather that summer have had her away at
Plombiéres than present at Passy. Her only answer was that
by her way it would be sooner ended. Joubert replied
indignantly :
*“Sooner? Yes, but not soon. One is a long time
dying and if (brutally speaking) it is sometimes pleasant
to be dead, it is horrible to be dying for centuries. .. .
Besides, one must love life while one has it : it is a duty.
The reasons are endless ; I will confine myself to the
assertion. This may annoy you, perhaps ; but even to
please you, I would not keep silence concerning this
truth. ... Sometimes I am tempted to cut off my
two ears.”
His earaches, indeed, still prevented him from seeing
Pauline. The shepherd in the hairy cloak was kept busy as
a messenger, but Joubert grew more and more impatient.
Finally on March 27th, having sent a note of warning by the
shepherd, he dressed himself up in his best blue nightcap, an
infinity of mufflers and coats, and a pair of sabots like a peasant,
and solemnly started out to see her. It was rather embarras-
sing clapping over the cobbles of the Villeneuve streets, but
out in the country it was better ; even the formal entrance to
Passy down a double avenue, over the moat and past the
orangery, was safely negotiated. Once he had got there the
welcome he received made him forget his fear that he might
have caught another cold, and even his embarrassment at
paying a first call on Madame de Sérilly in sabots and a
nightcap.
Madame de Beaumont was to leave on the goth; he
returned the books she had lent him, of which he thought little,
with a letter which declared that her absence would be a
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heaven-sent opportunity of clearing himself from the imputation

of idleness. Madame de Sérilly was also summoned to Paris
to be a witness in the trial of Fouquier-Tinville which did not
end until the 1st of May. The correspondence continued,
but not abundantly. Towards the end of May, Pauline was
writing to Joubert :
‘* How can IJ have been so long in writing to you,
when I so much enjoy receiving your letters? Without
explaining this oddity, I will only tell you that at the
hour when the post comes I say to myself: if I had
written, I might expect a letter: and I curse my stupidity.”
She had heard that he was better, but that he still had to sport
an abundance of nightcaps ; she was learning that health is
an essential ingredient of happiness, and must wish him both.
She had found all the evocation of the past necessitated by the
trial of Fouquier-Tinville extremely painful ; it was a struggle
to keep freedom of the mind when so many passions had been
unloosed. By June, Madame de Sérilly was at Passy, full of
news of Paris and its politics, on her way to Auvergne to try to
recover some of her brother’s property. Joubert did not see
her at first ; he was once more in poor health. But ina few
weeks they met to discuss the pros and cons of sending Madame
de Beaumont to Plombiéres.. Meanwhile Pauline remained
in Paris, trying to sell her house, and rather feverishly en-
deavouring to escape from her memories in the life of the
present. When Madame de Sérilly returned at the end of
July she found her ill ; she wrote to Joubert to tell him the
news and to scold him for not writing. She was sincerely
worried over Pauline, but family affairs once more called her
to Auvergne ; she could only beseech him to give their friend
good advice : and Joubert could only send it without much
hope of its being followed. So the year ended for him in an
indefinite inaction, clouded with anxiety that was tinged with
unconscious jealousy as Pauline de Beaumont seemed to slip
further and further away from him.
Fontanes provided the only pleasant news. In Decem-
ber he was nominated Membre de I’Institut, and this honour was
quickly followed by his appointment as Professor of Literature
at the Collége des Quatre Nations. It was comical to think of
Fontanes in these official positions ; but he would fill them
well enough, he would enjoy the splendours of his official
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uniforms, and those who had not known him in his youth
would no doubt take him very seriously.
Meanwhile Joubert’s contacts with other minds had struck
sparks from his own brain; his notebooks had rarely been so
steadily and consistently filled as they were during this winter.
He was turning with a new love towards the past, now that it
was everywhere menaced with destruction ; its monuments,
he realized, became the strongest ties between one generation
and another, its literature the best solace for mediocrity. For
at this point, with his friends away, Villeneuve for once closed
in upon him, and he had need of all the sublimity of Homer
to escape for a time from the narrow bounds of its ordinariness.
January, 1796, brought unexpected news : Madame de
Sérilly was to marry again. Her new husband was a cousin,
Frangois de Pange, who had long admired her. He had
suffered in the Revolution, but like her had contrived to sur-
vive it ; now they were to make life anew from the fragments
of their old world. By February they were at Passy, both
tired, both suffering from bad colds, yet gallantly prepared to
make the chateau ready for the Sérilly children who were to
follow them. Joubert soon came to pay his respects, and as
soon made friends with Frangois de Pange, a man at once
ugly and handsome, saturnine and animated, full of prejudice
and of generosity. His categorical statements and his deep
laugh were a little alarming, but Joubert liked to listen to
him, even if he were afraid to talk much himself. The listener
came to the conclusion that if a speaker had decided opinions,
supported by three or four little-known but incontestable
facts ; if he spoke boldly and listened little, he might well be
wrong but everyone would believe him to be right. Joubert
had hardly written to Pauline de Beaumont of late, from
laziness rather than forgetfulness; now, hearing from his
brother Arnaud that he might be escorting her to Passy, he
wrote once more. Arnaud had politely declared that to escort
her would make him the happiest of men.
“JT defy him,’ wrote Joubert; “I shall be far
happier than he so soon as I have the honour of seeing
you. I have the imprudent audacity to await you,
fearing nothing ; and in spite of the obstinate silence
which you have had the goodness to perceive, I confide
myself in all security to the delights of a hope that no
ye
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

shame can taint. In fact, Madam, my feelings reassure

me when my actions denounce me. My crimes are,
indeed, purely mechanical. My nerves were guilty, my
heart was always innocent. ... I must beg of you to
spend a few minutes learning one or two rules of anatomy ;
they will be enough for me to show you irrefutably that
for an entire year it has been impossible for me either to
write to you once or to forget you a single moment. I
have written to you more than two hundred times in my
empty and dreamy head ; and if the voyage that you
are about to undertake ’”—the voyage from Paris to Passy,
by barge—‘‘ were the voyage from the Indies and Fate
were to embark me upon the same vessel, I should be
able to deafen you throughout the passage only by telling
you what remains in my head of all these secret letters.
My silence is the crime only of my hand, and not of my
thought. I often see Madame de Sérilly, and I wish
you were in her garden. I have not done her extreme
merit the horrible injustice of not enjoying her company
excessively ; but you have rights or primogeniture, which
only allow me to be supremely happy at Passy when I see
you there. I see Monsieur de Pange with great profit.
His mind is austere and strong, and his very laugh, deep.
As I return, I like to think of all that he has said, but as
I go there I feel myself more spurred on by the wish to
run to hear him than by that of talking with him. If
you were here, Madam, as I climbed the high hill I
should feel myself moved, pushed and sustained by a
double impatience. With him, my imagination is under
some constraint and dare not give way to all its caprices.
With you, it is more at ease. He likes people to walk ;
and I like to fly, or at the least to flutter. My little fly’s
wings itch to unfold themselves so soon as I think of you.”
On April 19th, Pauline de Beaumont arrived. It was a
happy summer ; he taught her to rejoice that a thorny briar
should bear roses, instead of mourning that a rose should have
thorns. They discussed Madame de Staél at length : she was
an old friend of Pauline’s, and they had lately renewed the
friendship. Everything he heard of her dismayed Joubert.
They discussed the rules of drama, the nature of imagination,
the qualities of town life and the limitations of microscopic
II2
 1793-1797
investigation ; they delighted above all things in the fact
that each liked to talk of his thoughts rather than his knowledge.
They hardly noticed that Monsieur de Pange was growing
more and more ill. Pauline returned to Paris, and in the void
she left it came almost as a shock when Monsieur de Pange
died in the middle of July. His wife bore the blow as bravely
as the others that Fate had rained upon her. ;
She returned with Pauline at the end of the year. Once
more Joubert was too ill to come to see them ; this time the
two ladies announced that they would pay him a visit instead.
The prospect threw him into a great flutter ; old Madame
Moreau was bedridden now, but in her lucid moments as
difficult as ever ; his wife was shy and incalculable in company ;
what would they think of him and his house? Fortunately
the visit was a great success ; Madame Joubert fell under the
charm of the two great ladies; her son, aged two and a
half, learned to say Madame de Pange’s name, and Joubert
felt himself coming to life again. If they would repeat the
visit, he sent word by the shepherd, he would mark the day in
his journal with four stars.
It was evident that Madame Moreau de Bussy had not
now long to live. The house, at her death, would pass to
her two sons, and Joubert began to think of finding another
for himself. He tried to get a lease of a house belonging to
Madame de Pange at Etigny, near Passy, which charmed him
because it had a pleached alley in a large garden, He ended
a long letter about it with a postscript—Joubert loved post-
scripts—written with the evident wish of explaining his wife
to Madame de Pange :
*“ My wife asks me to tell you that when she re-
nounced the world, by a resolve stronger than the most
solemn vows, she did not renounce the love and admiration
of what is good and beautiful. She does not willingly
share in the pleasures and amusements of anyone what-
ever ; but she has shared most acutely in your sorrows.
Your latest loss in particular has known few souls more
quick to feel it. When you have tamed her, you will
know how much she honours you. She will never tell
you, but none the less you will be able to perceive it.
I count upon your discernment to distinguish her feelings
and her merit, which she has the bad _habit of displaying
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

too little. At one time, when I used to meet her in

society, I seemed always to see her as a violet under a
hedge. Since then sorrow has trampled upon her and
fate has trodden her down ; her leaves hide her from all
eyes. My wife is not at all alarmed at the duties which
the pleasure of having seen you will impose upon her. It
is a marvel! But I must beg you and your cousin to
depart. You cause me horrible pain. I had grown
accustomed to doing without you, and you have cured me
of the habit. Your last kindness, your presence, the
weather, my sensibility, indeed I don’t know what, have
so far dominated me that I see with horror that both of
you are becoming indispensable to me: this would be a
very great misfortune ; you would deprive me of all my
patiences and all my resignations.”’

II4
 CHAPTER EIGHT

1797-1800

T’ was perhaps as well for Joubert’s peace of mind that

neither the house at Etigny, nor the pavilion in the garden at
Passy on which he next set his heart, proved practicable.
He was still writing to Madame de Pange about becoming her
tenant somehow and somewhere, when his mother-in-law
died. His wife had never ventured to face the fact of her
mother’s mortality ; when the old lady’s death left the void
that she had not dared to anticipate, she alone seemed to feel
it. ‘“‘I must grieve,” she said, “ without me, who would
weep for my mother?’ ‘‘ The poor,’ answered Joubert;
and indeed the rough manners and negative emotions of the old
woman had hidden more practical charity than most people
guessed.
With her death it became evident that Victoire at least
was unwilling to leave her old home, and that the brothers-
in-law would be delighted for the Jouberts to continue to live
there. Joseph’s youngest brother, Arnaud, a successful lawyer
in Paris, was about to marry Victoire’s niece, Alexandrine,
and they too looked forward to coming to a family home at
Villeneuve. Joubert still cherished dreams of a house that
might remove him from the circle of Villeneuve into the circle
of Passy, but in the judgment of the rest of the family a leaky
cottage, with or without a pleached alley, out in the country,
was neither so suitable nor so convenient as the comfortable
family house. Madame Joubert was wise enough to put no
impediment in the way of Joubert’s friendships. She knew
that fine talk about books and ideas was a necessity to him ;
she knew that she had neither time nor knowledge to provide
it herself; and if the company of the plain but pleasant
Comtesse de Beaumont gave him pleasure, she saw no reason
to disturb herself about it. In February, the two ladies from
Passy dined in the rue du Pont off a turkey with truffles from
Montignac, and a little later the two Jouberts dined in return,
less well, at the Chateau de Passy.

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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

By the end of March, Joubert was once more alone. Lent

had brought him new spiritual experiences, but he hesitated
to accept them. Feeling, he thought, should remain near the
heart that felt it : it was better to love those near one well,
than vainly to expend one’s emotions upon the vague, the
abstract and the remote. Yet he came once at least near to
the ecstasy of the mystic : near enough to hold such experi-
ences as little worth. To forget the things of this world, to
feel only heavenly ties, to be exempt from all the bitterness
and disquietude of passion, from all toil and trouble, to enjoy
in stillness the fulness of life, the delights of feeling without
the trammels of thought, could only be the bliss of an hour, a
minute, a moment. To breathe that air for a moment
refreshed the soul ; to remember it sweetened long years of
life ; but in itself it was not life, nor the emotion that life
demanded.
Madame de Pange had returned to Paris, and Madame
de Beaumont to a house that her father had bought from
M. de Sérilly at Theil. She wrote to him :
. ‘‘ T should be very happy here, if I were less far from
you, if you could come for walks with me, open and turn
over my books, even if it were to grumble at my dear
Condillac. I passionately wish to see you here, because
here I enjoy a well-being that is denied me anywhere
elsez”
If only she could be there three months she would grow fat,
smiling and self-satisfied ; but now she must return to Paris.
But might she break the journey at Villeneuve, and spend
Easter Sunday at the Jouberts? Joubert replied with enthu-
slasm ; she should have a little room like a cell, and dream
that she was a nun ; and his brother Elie should accompany
her to Paris. He was nothing but a good surgeon, but he
would slash, cut, pare away and slit every obstacle that lay
before her feet.
The visit was short, anxious, but delightfel. Pauline’s
easy manners calmed Victoire’s over-anxiety, and her pleasant
companionship made the familiar four de la ville, with its tree-
sheltered walls and sunny quays beside the river, seem strange
and interesting as a walk in a foreign town. Aater her visit
Joubert could write with the pleasant intimacy possible with
a visitor who knows all the family.
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 1797-1800
“We have nothing to grumble about here. Alex-
andrine is well again, and comes down to-morrow ; my
wife goes on as usual ; the Abbé departed yesterday in
order to dine to-day, three leagues off, with a colleague
who is rumoured to have a pasty ; and Victor has no
other occupation in life but the uncertainty in which he
finds himself, for an hour past, whether a certain animal
that he has shown me in his picture-book, which I told
him is a fox, is indeed a fox, or is not rather a marten ;
for you had told him it was a marten, as he confided to
me a little too late for his peace of mind. You see he
remembers you and your sayings. As for me, I am
buried in Aristotle. . . .”
Once Pauline reached Paris, however, Madame de Staél
undid all the good that Joubert and Theil had done : restless,
energetic and decisive, she could destroy tranquillity better
than any woman in Europe. Yet her father had been Mont-
morin’s colleague, and the friendship between her and Pauline
was old and inescapable. Pauline was soon tired, disappointed
and unhappy, but still pouring out her troubles in her letters
to Joubert. He offered for her consolation his tenderest
wishes, and advised the reading of the Phaedo and of Tristram
Shandy. Then, as usual, he fell into that state of idle melan-
choly in which he could not pen a letter, though he found
enough energy to consider religion as an art and to set down
his thoughts in his notebook. Madame de Pange wrote
reproachfully from Paris : but her reproaches were mitigated
by messages from Pauline de Beaumont and an invitation to
visit them. Joubert pleaded ill health ; he had gone to Sens
for a change, and to get his son vaccinated, and he found
himself as ill as usual and with a more interesting variety of
illnesses. Paris, indeed, offered no charm but his friends’
company, whereas Sens in June seemed the greenest and most
smiling place in the world, with happiness living behind the
hedges and under the trellises of the gardens sheltered by its
walls. Since he did not feel like joining Pauline in Paris, he
had gone to see her house at Theil. He then wrote about it,
not to her but to Madame de Pange ; for (as he avowed) he
had to be very careful with himself not to indulge in an im-
moderate effusion when he wrote to Pauline. In his own
journal he had already noted that passions were to sentiments
Lig
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

what rain was to dew, or water to mist ; in his letter, without

explaining the comparison, he said he feared to drown her
beneath the flood of his thoughts.
They did not meet for some time. Joubert returned to
Villeneuve in July, Pauline de Beaumont to Theil in August.
His thoughts were turning more and more to Christianity :
not, perhaps, to an orthodox and authoritarian Catholicism,
but yet to a Christian religion that should seal morality, console
grief, and unite men in love. The Religious Orders had been
suppressed for five years, public worship for three ; there was
no organized Church in France to conflict with Joubert’s view
of Christianity as a Kingdom not of this world. His child
was being brought up a Catholic by his mother, and un-
consciously Joubert stood too at her knee and once more learned
to pray. It was no sudden conversion and no formal adhesion :
but it left him conscious of the necessity of Christianity and
therefore of its truth. It was not long before he decided to
give God a tithe of his time.
Fontanes was busy as ever with journalism. First he
wrote for Le Mémorial, founded on the goth June, 1797, and
dead on the 4th of September ; then for the Tablettes Historiques
which by November had become the Tablettes Républicaines.
Ephemeral though these were, his articles in them were con-
sistent and constructive. His aim was at once to defend
tradition and to reconcile it with new conditions. He sent
them all to Joubert, but Joubert was beginning to despair of
the present. The fate of France, indeed of the world, seemed
left to chance. So he wrote asking that no more papers
should be sent to him ; he had no wish to know the news. No .
man in France can have been less moved by the triumphs of
the campaign in Italy. He might have spared himself the
trouble of countermanding Fontanes’ publications. The
decrees of the 18th Fructidor (September 4th) were directed
against just such crypto-royalists as that poetical publicist.
Before the end of the year the Tabdlettes Républicaines had ceased
publication and Fontanes, less reconciling and more tra-
ditionalist than ever, had been driven out of France. The
sentence of general banishment that thus exiled him struck
likewise at many of Madame de Beaumont’s Bends, and she
was sadder than ever.
““ Everyone is plunged in uncertainty,” she wrote,
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 1797-1800
“making ready to pack up and bent under the yoke of
deportation, as once before under the yoke of the guillo-
tine. I await my fate with some serenity, perhaps only
because I think myself invulnerable, since I have once
escaped from a fate that seemed inevitable ; yet I have
no illusions, and am ready enough for any journey ; that
from which no one returns is not that which I would make
with the least pleasure. If I had courage enough I would
not wait to be driven to take it. The moment when I
suffer most is that when I feel that, if circumstances were
different, if some one thing or another existed, there might
still be happiness for me, because I have the taste and
need for it. Then I have no more resignation, and I
understand very fully what Hell is. For a long time I
have had my own conception of maleficent spirits. For-
give my sad nonsense. I hope that you will understand
none of it, and I beg you not to worry over it. I have an
attack of fever in my mind, which will soon pass... .
My cousin and I love you tenderly and for life, each in
our own fashion. A thousand tender messages to Madame
Joubert.”
If Pauline did not come to Passy, Joubert resolved to go to
Paris, which he had not visited for more than three years.
He arrived on November 18th, 1797, and was lodged in the
rue Saint Honoré, a short walk from the rue de Chabanais,
where his two friends were living.
Changes were more evident than he had expected : there
were no more silk coats or stockings, no hoops, no three-
cornered hats, no swords, no powder, little rouge, few jewels ;
instead men wore plain English clothes and women long
Greek dresses or Roman mantles. Paris was less brilliant and
less French. It was strange to be back in its world after so
long an interlude of solitary thinking. He no longer had any
great wish to see philosophers ; the new variety seemed not
to create, like Diderot, but to cut up and dissect like surgeons.
It was their wrong-headedness which had caused all the
sorrows of the world ; if only they would talk less about
human happiness and human perfectibility, men might indeed
achieve progress and felicity. He read some of Diderot’s work,
and felt sorry he had not been older when he had known him ;
he could have understood him, and even criticised him, so
11g
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

much better. His new sense of the beauty and necessity of

Christianity made him impatient of much that had been
written of late ; yet he still found in the bookshops of Paris
and their wares his chief pleasure outside the company of the
two ladies. At Villeneuve one ‘lived outside the world of
painting, and architecture consisted in the old church and the
new post-house ; in Paris both arts were a part of life. The
print shops tempted him almost as much as the bookstalls, and
he bought engravings of landscapes by Poussin and studies of
trees by Rembrandt. In Paris, too, even he felt a need to
bring his leisurely country trains of thought to some con-
clusion. It was there that he definitely came back to religion.
For, he decided, one could not consider that one had a religion
unless it were shared by others; and it mattered little if
the stairway that led to God were fantastic or real, made of
marble or wood, provided that one could climb it to find a
peace unknown elsewhere.
Round about the New Year he was ill for a fortnight ;
then he resumed his Paris existence, piano and in a minor key,
but even so much more animated than his life by the fireside
at Villeneuve. Madame de Pange had gone to Passy on
business for a time, and he enjoyed ¢étes-d-téte with Pauline
in which, instead of skimming over the surface of a subject,
as perforce they had to do in society, they could plunge into
its very depths. In the spring Pauline too had to go to Theil,
and Joubert remained for a time alone in Paris. She was slow
in writing, since, she said, she had waited for a ray of sun-
shine and a moment of well-being.
“*T have found here old letters of yours, that recom-
mend to me the love of repose and solitude. You were
right, as I felt at the time, but then I was unworthy of
solitude and incapable of repose. It is not so to-day.
The life which I lead is that which suits me best, and I-
realize all the merits of repose, without excepting that
which comes near to nothingness. It seems to me that
I am vegetating nicely, though much less pleasantly than
the plants around me.”’
Every evening she had precisely the same conversation with
her bailiff, and every evening he told her precisely the same old
stories. Joubert replied with advice about what she was to
read : Voltaire’s Letters, La Bruyére, Tasso ; and a promise
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 1797-1800
that he would send her such books as he thought fit. He did
not return to Villeneuve until August, but his time alone in
Paris proved less delightful than the winter had been. He
grew hypochondriacal in solitude ; not even his new-found
religion could console him. Memory was a mirror in which
he could see those who were absent, but they appeared frail
and grey upon its faulty surface. Alone in Paris, his thoughts
inevitably turned back to the old days when he had frequented
the Restifs de la Bretonne in the rue des Bernardins ; and such
memories were not merely grey, but distorted into a horrible
kind of caricature. Even material things lost something of
their reality ; he came to look upon them too as philosophical
entities, until iron was no more than a web of particles, and
the visible world a painted mist. He was not sorry to return
to Villeneuve, enriched with a great baggage of thoughts
to be elaborated at leisure, and a new suit of snuff-coloured
nankeen.
Pauline de Beaumont remained at Theil. Joubert tried
to persuade her to pay them a visit at Villeneuve ; she declared
that she was ill and unfit for company. Joubert still persisted :
“I warn you that in the future we shall only want
you when you say you are insupportable. So you did
wrong to take your medicine. Another time, keep your
ipecacuanha for the people who are not worthy to love
you when you are cross and sad ; keep all your sunshine
for them, and bring all your clouds to us. Come when
you like ; you will find our arms, our hearts and our doors
open. I have come in out of the rain ; I write to you
before I take my boots off: I shall take no pleasure in>
drying myself until I have told you that in no time or
circumstance could we ever receive anyone with as much
pleasure as you.”
Yet still she tarried, and was uncertain when the Jouberts
would find it convenient to receive her. Joubert wrote to end
her hesitations :
“They will be gathering the grapes here on Wednesday
next, but we shall not begin our own vintage until the
week after. This operation makes a deal of noise and
disorder in the house, but one dines and sups none the
less, and if the hurlyburly could amuse you, I can assure
you that here you would be in no-one’s way .. . Be
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

brave, then, and come to the vintage, if you are not

afraid of noise ; or come before it, if you prefer quiet. . .
Your room has already been swept three times to receive
you. My wife fears that you will not be comfortable ;
I tell her that you were comfortable with Dominique
Paquereau, and laugh at her fears. I would have looked
my best for you, if I had had the happiness of seeing you
during this last week. There were moments when I
thought myself almost equal to going to Theil to fetch
you ; but a fog has destroyed it all. Perhaps my fine
weather may return. Come and await your own here,
and bring your headache with you. We are even better
qualified and more inclined to nurse you than to amuse
you, and your room is better suited to a headache than
to-health yeeu
Local gossip reported that Madame de Pange was in
financial ‘difficulties, and that her son, now eighteen, was at
Passy to see what he could sell. Soon, however, news came
that all was well ; she was to marry the Marquis de Montes-
quiou-Fezensac, a distinguished man more than twenty years
older than she was, who had deserved well of the Republic
as a general in the Savoy campaign. The marriage em-
barrassed Joubert ; he was conscious that its motives might
have been not only of affection, and that the gossip of the
neighbourhood was of a kind that he had rather not hear. He
wrote a letter of the most delicate good wishes to the lady, who
was too much occupied with questions of harvests, turkeys,
the size of mirrors to be moved to the house at Paris, and the
problem of getting Madame de Beaumont out of Theil, which
she had re-acquired, to appreciate it or to reply. Pauline
stayed quite placidly at Theil, reading about the Inquisition
and Port Royal, and only disturbed by the prospect of a visit
from Madame de Staél. Joubert very handsomely offered to
put up that whirlwind of a woman at Villeneuve, but Pauline
replied that she would not allow her into his peaceful green
spare room, nor unloose her insatiable curiosity upon his
defenceless household. Meanwhile Madame de Montesquiou
was still being pursued and struck by the shafts of ill fortune.
In December her husband fell ill with a disease that was found
to be the black smallpox ; she nursed him devotedly, but he
died on December goth, less than four months after their
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 1797-1800
marriage. Pauline was anxious on her cousin’s account ;
she might have been tiresome about Theil, but she still loved
her. Pauline, too, had her own troubles ; her man of business
had gone bankrupt, and most of the little capital that was left
to her had been lost in the disaster. These losses, however,
seemed nothing beside her cousin’s trouble. News was long
in coming, and when it came it was bad. Madame de
Montesquiou had caught her husband’s malady. Pauline
went to Paris, and did what she could for her ‘‘ pauvre grande,”
but after a long and terrible illness she died in April. The
news reached Villeneuve quickly, and Joubert wrote at once
to Pauline.
** You are perhaps at this moment occupied with the
task of sending me word of the event that afflicts you. I
know it already ; Desprez came yesterday to tell me.
Take care of yourself, spare yourself, take foresight to
provide one day for your future, and come back to these
parts as soon as you can, if you are not indispensable to
your business where you are. Do not go to see Theil
again, but come near us. We will talk at leisure of her
who is no more, whom no one in the world, not even you,
can mourn as she deserved, had but her destiny allowed
those who loved her to remember only her qualities. It
is impossible to be as much grieved as one would wish,
and this thought makes me despair. Heart and memory,
judgment and feeling, are in this first moment in conflict
with one another. Time will purify our memories, and
I am certain that in ten years the thought of this pawvre
grande will be more sweetly and more intimately present
in the thoughts of her friends, than it can be to-day.
There are sorrows that those with delicate souls must
adjourn . . . to feel them more wholly, more perfectly
and more absolutely. Do not give yourself up to yours
at the wrong time. Think of the children ; when they
have found sure protectors, then we will weep for their
mother. As for me, I have found a way of thinking of
her, not for your use, which permits me to give myself,
without intermixture or contrariety, to all the feelings I
had for her. Thanks to this secret, I have not, like you
and the rest of the world, need of time, need to wait ;
I can pay her here and now, and will pay her all my life,
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the tribute of esteem and affection that are her due.

“Yet I confess that it is of you that I chiefly think.
Leave Paris ; do not stay long at Versailles, if you go
there at all, and come here : these are my wishes above
everything. If you have need of money (forgive such
bluntness) my brother has some at your service. For
myself, I have no need of any. Since yesterday I no
longer wish to go to Paris until August, when I start for
Périgord. Possibly my wife may go there alone for a
week. I snatched the pen from her to write this, for it
was impossible for me not to send you at least a line in
these dreadful circumstances, which although foreseen,
certain, inevitable, make the blow of reality no less
painful.
“You know if we love you.
Joubert.”
Pauline de Beaumont’s visit in May was but a passing one,
yet it was long enough for them to talk much of Madame
de Montesquiou. Joubert felt that her tragedy was that she
had been carried off by death as a negro is carried off into
slavery, with no knowledge of the country to which she was
going. His secret of seeing her was, of course, his new-found
piety ; he might hint at this to Pauline, but he did not dare
to reveal it except to the shabby little notebook that never left
him. Outside religion and philosophy life was difficult ;
one was too apt to use for one’s passions the stuff that nature
had given for one’s happiness.
On June 12th he was in Paris, enjoying music and the
pictures in the Louvre. Thence he and his wife and child
went by slow stages through the Beauce, Berri and Auvergne,
southwards to Montignac. His mother was growing old and
feeble, and he felt it his duty to see her once more. He reached
Montignac on July end, to find that all the terrestrial part
of her was indeed worn out, but that her spiritual self yet
lived. In a few days he was writing to Pauline de Beaumont :
“T left Paris neither by my wish nor from necessity,
but from duty. This reflection shuts the door on repent-
ance on whatever ground may be, and even your position
(and my heart knows if I am troubled about.it) cannot
make me wish not to have come. I can wish only that I
might be allowed to turn away from it and to come back,
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 1797-1800
for so long as my presence is necessary to my mother’s
happiness I shall have no other habitual domicile than
the house where I was born. I have given her great
sorrows by my remote and philosophic way of living,
and she has had many others. I ought and I wish to
make reparation for them all by withdrawing here, which
fulfils all her wishes by giving her the sight of a son, who
has no memory that could reproach him with having
willingly given her sorrow or with having loved her too
little. She suckled me herself, and never, as she often
tells me, never once did I bite her breast. Never did I
continue to cry once I had heard her voice. A single
word, a song from her would at once stop my cries and
dry my tears, even at night and asleep. I give thanks to
Nature who made me a good child ; but judge how tender
is the mother, who when her son is grown a man, likes
to occupy her thoughts with these trifles from his cradle.
My childhood has for her other springs of motherly
memories which seem each day to grow more delightful
and more numerous. She cites to me an infinity of
instances of my tenderness, of which she never spoke to
me and which she now recalls in all their details. Each
moment that Time adds to my years, her memory takes
from them ; and my presence aids her memory.”
Indeed, to return to Montignac brought back even to him
his own youth. It was so little changed that he could hardly
believe it was not a figment of his memory ; only the farmers’
wives seemed more like their own hens than he remembered.
Yet at last he could visit it without need to justify himself or
to create a possible life for himself within its narrow boundaries.
Only his mother remained to bind him to it, and the link was
growing frail. His thoughts turned more and more to God ;
his mother might not follow them, but they could wing their
way easily through the air that surrounded her. His chief
reading was the Aristotle he had brought with him, and this
occupied his days happily enough, when he was not sitting
with his mother or exploring the still-familiar woods and lanes.
There were the wonted occupations of the countryside to
follow ; the September vintages, the Michaelmas chestnuts,
the October fair ; and his mother’s old stories turned his
thoughts more and more towards the upbringing of his own
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son. He arrived at a clear vision of himself, and had strength

to compose a good resolution for the year 1800 : “ Not to be
occupied with oneself, but with one’s duty ; to go on to the
end without bowing to the audience ; to play one’s own part
and no other role ; only to consider utility, and the pleasure
of other people, if that pleasure be for their good, but to take
no heed of their coldness or their smiles ; to turn one’s eyes
away from theirs, to forget what is fleeting in them, and to
aspire only to a constant, intimate, entire and deeply rooted
esteem, that shall need no care to subsist and little to establish
itself ; to await it and not to dwell upon it ; to wish to be
approved, but only once in one’s life and for always, and not
at all hours and for a moment ; to be anxious about what
people will think in the end, but not at all about what they are
thinking now ; . . . to be a man and to cease to be a coxcomb
—say it for the year 1800.”
Even his letters to Pauline de Beaumont strove to be
practical. He wrote her a long one on the last day of 1799,
not at all in his usual vein ; he asked her opinion of Bonaparte
and the newly formed Consulate, and gave his own, which
was unfavourable ; and he never once mentioned Plato, his
own health or his own feelings. Pauline must have wondered
what had happened to him. Only in a postscript did he forget
his new objectivity and beg for a meeting at Mont Dore or
elsewhere, for since he left her he had not met a single man or
woman who had inspired him with the wish to speak with
them from the bottom of his heart and of his thought.
Pauline was back at Theil by February, rather melancholy,
if more hopeful about politics than Joubert ; she wrote to him
that it had given her pleasure even to find Montignac upon the
map, but that it would be but a sterile pleasure until she could
see him again. Her affairs were more involved than ever ;
she must soon leave Theil, and proceed with the tiresome
formalities of the divorce, only now possible, from the husband
whom she had left so long ago. Joubert replied more light-
heartedly asking her what she was now going to call herself?
Pauline de Montmorin was pretty and easily said; but Madame
de Montmorin made her sound as if she were one of her own
relations. So, in his view, she must either call herself Made-
moiselle de Montmorin, or, taking the territorial half of her
maiden name, become Madame de Saint Hérem. He was
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 1797-1800
finding Bonaparte ‘“‘ un inter-roi admirable’? and lauded him
(for a change) for having at least given back to France the gift
of enthusiasm.
“I wish him in perpetuity all the virtues, all the
resources, all the enlightenment, all the perfections
which he possibly lacks or has not had time to acquire.
He has caused the enthusiasm which was lost, lethargic,
extinguished and destroyed, to be born again, not only
for his own benefit but also for that of all other great men.
His exploits have made wit silent and have awakened
the imagination. ... May he keep all his successes,
and grow more and more worthy of them ; may he remain
master for a long time. He certainly is now, and he
knows how to be. We had great need of him... .”
His mother was very feeble, but tried to persuade herself and
him that she was better. He did not know when he would
leave Montignac, but hoped to be at Villeneuve for the ensuing
winter and to have Pauline as his guest.
By May she was back in Paris, in better spirits, and writing
to tell him the gossip of the literary world. Her letter came
when he needed it. His mother was altogether losing her
memory ; he was growing bored with Montignac and the
scientific reading he had prescribed for his own edification.
The erudition of scientific books gave him a kind of horror,
for it was based on authority rather than on thought. Their
minuteness drowned him; he decided that his mind was
intended only to flit over them as a swallow flits over the surface
of a pool. Their microscopes falsified values. Their pre-
tensions to completeness falsified truth, and their syntheses
were only attempts to destroy what had been accepted before.
They left out Life; whereas Life instead should be let in, to
be like a lighted candle to illumine the lantern of their philoso-
phy. The house still held some of his father’s medical books,
and he studied them carefully, with a growing disgust. He
needed the first violets and the first peach-blossom to restore
his spirits. Fortunately spring came early to Périgord that
year, and he could turn for a time from books to the study
of colour in Nature.
Summer passed in an uncongenial study of Descartes,
Berkeley and Voltaire, relieved by excursions into detailed
literary criticism. When such grey philosophy was too much
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

for him, he could always turn to Montaigne who never failed

him. By August he was better content, for his scientific
reading, with the psychology of Locke ; he might not always
agree with him, but at least his studies were humane and his
style lucid.
He was not sorry to leave his native town, though it was
heartbreaking to part for the last time from his mother. Again
they travelled in leisurely fashion ; he read Bacon when the
road was dull. They went by Ussel, Clermont, Moulins, La
Charité, where Joubert stood on the bridge and thought of
God, and so by Neuvy and Montargis home.

128
 CHAPTER NINE

1800-1801

Pir Germany spent two uncomfortable years as a refugee

in Germany and England, and returned, rather adventur-
ously and in secret, in September, 1799. His arrival
found its justification in the revolution of the 18 Brumaire
(November oth), which established Bonaparte as First Consul.
With him in power, Fontanes could gradually emerge
from his obscurity, and in this process his friendship with
Joubert proved unexpectedly of service. So far Fontanes’
connexions with the Bonaparte family had been only with the
less respectable Beauharnais ; now Elie Joubert was estab-
lished as physician to Napoleon’s sister, Elisa Bacciocchi, and
presented the returned exile to her. She and her brother
Lucien, who shared her house, were the most “‘ conservative ”’
of the Napoleonic family and the least likely to be shocked by
Fontanes’ incurable traditionalism. Fontanes had been in
the Secret Service of the Princes while he was in exile, and
the result had been to mitigate his royalism in no small degree.
He returned to France prepared to give his support to any
authority which could give his country strength and peace,
and he soon found that it mattered little to him whether it
were Bourbon or Bonaparte who ruled, provided that they
ruled well.
On the first day of 1800 he ventured to address a letter to
the Consul :
‘“* T am oppressed, you are powerful, I demand justice.
History will have taught you that great captains
have always defended from oppression and misfortune
the friends of the arts, and especially poets, of whom the
heart is feeling and the voice grateful.”
Napoleon was impressed, or amused, at such grandiloquence,
and the sentence of banishment on the author was soon lifted.
On February gth there was to be a great ceremony of the
translation of the standards captured by the Army of Egypt
to the Hotel des Invalides, rebaptised the Temple of Mars,
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

and Napoleon decided that the occasion should be graced by a

panegyric of Washington, then lately dead: a panegyric of
civic virtue that should prevent the ceremony from being too
military. He invited Fontanes to give the oration : partly
out of goodwill to a recent convert, partly because his name
was not too resounding or his politics too certain. Fontanes’
eulogy proved to be skilful and discreet, tactful and allusive,
and it did at least show that its author was emerging on the
side of the Consulate. The grateful voice, however, did not
continue to make itself heard as loudly as might have been
expected ; it was ironically that Joubert wrote in his diary
in July, 1800: ‘‘ Fontanes. O poet worthy of Bonaparte !”
In September, indeed, the Consul invited the poet to write a
triumphal ode on his Italian victories. Fontanes had just
lost a baby daughter, and pleaded his grief as an excuse for
his silence. He was rather unwisely inclining towards Lucien
rather than Napoleon, and published in November a Paralléle
entre César, Cromwell, Monk et Bonaparte, intended to air Lucien’s
view that his brother should be Consul for life and should
nominate Lucien to succeed him. Napoleon was so much
annoyed that he deprived Lucien of his portfolio as Minister
of the Interior, and sent him as ambassador to Madrid.
Fontanes himself had to do something to retrieve his own
situation. He had in England renewed and deepened his
friendship with a young Breton refugee, the Chevalier de
Chateaubriand : an odd creature who had travelled in
America, been in the French Army, lost most of his relatives
in the Revolution, and now wrote about the new beauties he
had seen and the old sorrows he had experienced in a style
which seemed to use French as if it were a musical instrument.
He had come back to Paris in May, with little luggage but the
manuscript of a book on the beauties of Christianity, which he
had written in exile and had first thought of dedicating to
Louis XVIII. Fontanes had now to turn his friend’s gifts
to practical advantage.
Fontanes had reverted to journalism, and had already
heralded his friend’s Génie du Christianisme in the literary
journals as a work of the first importance. Now Chateau-
briand had to serve him by writing a review for the Mercure
of Madame de Staél’s new book on literature. In this he too
appeared as a supporter of Bonaparte and a critic of the
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 1800-1801

ancien régime. ‘The review appeared at a good moment, two

days before a royalist attempt on Napoleon’s life, and served
to secure Fontanes’ return to favour, though its author still
remained officially under sentence as an émigré.
Joubert left Villeneuve with his family for Paris at the
end of January, 1801, to find that the wheel of politics had
thus created for him a new society in the capital Madame
de Beaumont was installed for good in a little apartment in the
rue Neuve du Luxembourg, and Fontanes back again, with
Chateaubriand as a close friend, and Elisa Bacciocchi as a
tender patroness. It seemed as if the Consulate were at least
permitting friendly companionship to flourish as it had not
done since the earliest years of the Revolution. Joubert
himself was able to settle into the apartment on the top floors
of the family house at 118 rue St. Honoré with a greater feeling
of permanence than he had felt for some time.* By now he
slipped as easily into Paris life as into his town suit. The
long stairs down from his flat, past the doctors and lawyers of
the upper floors, the rich banker on the first floor, the milliner
on the entresol, the bookbinder who lived in a kind of glass
hutch in the courtyard, and the fat old portress at the gate,
were all now familiar at Villeneuve. ‘The rue Saint Honoré,
that had once seemed so metropolitan, had become friendly
as the rue du Pont. Now, with his umbrella under his arm
and his muffler round his neck, he could trot along its pave-
ments as if he owned it, stopping to look at some new print
in a window, some old book in a second-hand box ; seeing
with pleasure the first striped tulips at the flower-stall, and with
regret the demolition of a seventeenth-century house in the
dark street behind ; remarking the carriages and the passers
by, but less as changing and individual things than as aspects
of a familiar landscape. The Oratoire du Temple lay fifty
steps from his door ; if he wished for quiet and the remote
air of a place of worship, he had only to enter its doors. If he
turned west he crossed dark and muddy little streets that still
recalled medieval Paris: evil-smelling little streets, that were
reputed to be the haunt of criminals. The main street was all
devoted to drapers and cloth merchants. Their old dark
shops still had their seventeenth century signs, and their
* The house has since been destroyed.

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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

owners were as proud of their names and their houses as the

duchesses at the other end of the town.
If he turned east down the rue Saint Honoré, every little
street to his left ended in the sombre mass of the Louvre.
There were rich shops that sold furs and jewels and clocks
and those essentially Parisian trifles without which no toilette
was complete. By the Palais Royal was the Café de la Régence
with the same old gentlemen playing chess every day, taking ©
half-an-hour to move a pawn to prolong the pleasure of the
game. Past the pretentious portal of St. Roch, still scarred by
the bullets fired against the rebels of Vendémiaire, he came to
the Jacobins, whence Robespierre had ruled Paris, and so to
a quarter where new and colourless houses were being built on
the site of the old convent of the Feuillants, a quarter that
served as a transition between the Paris of commerce and the
Paris of the aristocratic hétels entre cour et jardin.
Or he might go down the rue Saint Roch through the
labyrinth of streets that led to the rue de Richelieu : a good
walk for a showery day, for three quarters of it would be spent
inside the book-shops. Their characteristic smell, com-
pounded of decaying paper, printer’s ink, morocco leather,
‘glue and dust, made him think of Time and Mortality. In the
_ store-rooms at the back, full of elaborate bookcases that neither
fitted nor matched, might be seen the great illuminated anti-
phonals, the crabbed manuscripts, that had been looted from
the libraries of the dispossessed religious houses. To decipher
a year in the annals, to see the great pile of deeds and accounts,
the heaps of inscribed parchments scrolled and cracked by
time, made Joubert realize how imperfect any history must be.
The history of thought might perhaps be written from books,
but not the history of action.
There was a curious bitterness in the dust of book-shops ;
he was glad to go to the Palais Royal, to find an empty chair
in the sun, and to enjoy a cup of coffee outside the Café de
Foy. Joubert liked that particular café because it was less
political than most of its neighbours. Its pretensions, indeed,
were rather artistic than political; the chief pride of its
proprietress lay in the great bird that Carle Vernet had
painted on the ceiling. It was thence, it is true, that Camille
Desmoulins had set out with a sprig of greenery in his hat to
call the bourgeois of Paris to the taking of the Bastille ; but
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 1800-1801

even Desmoulins had been a poet. Under the stone arcade

Joubert was out of the draught and could watch at leisure.
The children raced each other through the spray blown from
the fountain, and drew patterns in the wet dust ; the passers-by
studied the bills of fare hung outside the many restaurants,
and the expensive jewels and elegant bonnets in the windows ;
the waiters came flapping their napkins over the round iron
tables; some brave sparrows came looking for crumbs; and
Joubert enjoyed the peculiar pleasure of idleness that was not
solitary.
Thanks to Napoleon, he could even enjoy some of the
pleasures of travel. The Apollo Belvedere lorded it over the
antiques of the Louvre, where Joubert could see the finest
sculptures of Rome, gathered together as the spoils of Napo-
leon’s triumphs in Italy ; and the brothers Piranesi had
brought their father’s copper plates from Rome and set up
their presses in Paris. Nor were the pleasures of friendship
lacking. Fontanes came to see him, bringing Chateaubriand
with him, and Joubert took them both to call upon Madame
de Beaumont, feeling an innocent pride in the fact that he
could present to her two such distinguished men. There was
so much talk in the ensuing months that he hardly wrote
anything in the little note-book.
Pauline de Beaumont was beginning, almost without
knowing it, to hold a salon in the little room in the rue Neuve
du Luxembourg. It was a shabby little room, with green
hangings and a single lamp, but it was her own, and in it
she unconsciously found again the gracious elegance that she
had learned in the gilded salons of the Hotel de Montmorin.
It is the hostess, not the setting, that makes a salon, and
Pauline had polished her art in the best school. Joubert
noticed the predilection which she and her friends showed for
words of, muted colour, sound and force : words which took
all struggle and effort for granted, and passed beyond them
into a language a little tenuous but infinitely sweet. As her
friends and connexions ventured back from exile, they naturally
gathered round her : Monsieur de Bonald, who gave himself
airs of extreme liberalism ; Madame Hocquart, who had once
been loved by Pauline’s brother ; Monsieur Pasquier and
Monsieur Molé, who all represented pre-revolutionary friends
or acquaintances. To them were added Joubert, who brought
33
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

Chateaubriand, Fontanes, and a poet called Charles Lioult

de Chénedollé, whose acquaintance he had made because he
admired the silvery quality of his verse. Chateaubriand soon
introduced his sister, Lucile de Caud, who had come up from
Brittany for a few weeks : a strange woman, never pretty, but
occasionally almost beautiful, with the fire and charm of her
brother, but changed and frustrated.
Soon each habitué had his nickname ; Chateaubriand
was the Cat, from his name ; Chénedollé the Crow, from his
melancholy ; Fontanes the Boar, from his heavy yet vigorous
frame ; Joubert the Stag, for he was tall and thin and loved
walking in woods ; and Pauline herself, slight and graceful,
skimming from friend to friend and from subject to subject,
the Swallow:
At first all met on an equal tone of polite friendliness,
but not even politeness can keep out passion. Chénedollé
was soon desperately in love with Lucile de Caud, who half
returned it and half feared to ; and soon Pauline herself came
under the charm of Chateaubriand. He had a wife of whom
he thought seldom, away in Brittany ; he had left an English-
woman heartbroken at his departure from her country : he had
had several mistresses since his arrival in Paris; he could
accept the devotion she offered him as of right. Joubert,
who had liked Chateaubriand from the first, and followed
him in a state between astonishment and admiration, watched
him impose upon Pauline a relation exacting, difficult and
even humiliating. He saw her, whom he himself had been
accustomed to shelter from the world by a thousand tender-
nesses, accept the rough yoke with a dazzled and trembling
happiness. Poor Joubert! He was a faithful husband and
a faithful friend ; but Chateaubriand’s domination over the
lady he had only dared to worship from afar was a blow,to his
heart and to his pride. His own love always included so much
tenderness that passion itself was transmuted into something
gentler ; Chateaubriand’s was so full of egoistic strength
that he could never have even an amitié amoureuse without
making the woman suffer cruelly. From being called the Cat
he became the Savage ; and soon even that was forgotten in
Pauline’s new name for him: the Enchanter. Joubert wrote
what he felt, suitably abstracted, in his notebook, but when he
had written it he tore out the leaf. His forty-seventh birthday
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 1800-1801

in May was a sad one, but he brought himself to write : Fiat

voluntas tua. .
Chateaubriand had caught the tide of fortune at its flood.
Fontanes presented him to Elisa Bacciocchi early in April,
and later that month, with her aid, he petitioned to get his
name deleted from the list of condemned émigrés. In the same
month his novel Atala was published, and enjoyed one of
those successes that are only achieved once in a generation.
Even Joubert was moved by it, though he thought it dangerous
to treat of such passions without the restrictions of poetry.
“I like this savage,” he told Fontanes. ‘“‘You must
wash out Rousseau, Ossian, Thames fogs, revolutions ancient
and modern, and leave him the Cross, Missions and sunsets
of the open sea, and you will see what a poet we are going to
have !”’
It was handsome, it was indeed noble, of him to write
thus, when Pauline was saying that the style of the book gave
her a shiver of passion, and played upon the fibres of her being
as if upon.a clavecin ; but Joubert was coming to accept the
fact’ that she was an instrument upon which this maestro
could play better than he could ever hope to do.
By the summer, Chateaubriand had official leave to
remain in France, and had become one of the best-known
writers in French literature. His book on the merits of Chris-
tianity was still unfinished ; he had brought it from England
in proof, but the very air of Paris had soon shown it to be
provincial and insular, and it had all to be rewritten. Fon-
tanes, too, through Elisa Bacciocchi, who was now reputed
to be his mistress, was looking forward to a time when its
advocacy of Christianity would not be a cry in the wilderness,
but an instrument of Government propaganda. Pauline
conceived the idea that it was her mission to help Chateau-
briand to finish it : and indeed her delicate Parisian taste,
that made style a matter of tact and elegance, was exactly
fitted to restrain the crude ebullience of an author whose
language still bore the marks of the province where he had
been educated and of the country to which he had been
exiled. So she took a little house outside Paris at Savigny
sur Orge, and she and her enchanter went there to spend the
summer together, the summer that she had once promised to
spend near Joubert at Villeneuve. On May 23rd, 1801,
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

she wrote to Joubert from Savigny with a touching confidence

in his understanding and sympathy.
‘ Although I have only been here twenty-four hours,
I am already impatient to give you our news. It seems
to me that you must be more curious about the recluse
than about me ; you know too well how much the country
charms me, and how good for me is solitude. So that it
is about the Savage that I want to talk to you.
** Even before the end of the journey he had forgotten
his talk with Fontanes, and the subjects of his disquiet
and worry. Never have I seen him more calm, more gay,
more childlike and more reasonable. Nothing, even
down to M. Pigeau the landlord, but has proved a cause
of joy for us. We feared his figure waiting on the thres-
hold : he was away! And then, when he came to have
me sign the inventory, and the appendix of twelve hens
and a cock, and the deletion of seven lines composed of
seventy-two words, we were seized with immoderate
laughter that is not yet ended. After his departure we
walked to the fountains of Juvisy by a short and delight-
ful path. At ten o’clock all the household was in bed
and in a deep sleep. This morning the Savage read me
the first part of Volume I, showing me the changes which
he thinks of making. To tell the truth, I wish him critics
more cold and more enlightened than I: for I am still
spellbound and am much less severe than he is. That is
abominable ! ”
Joubert paid them a short visit at the end of May, but
was in a mood that made him secretly critical of them both.
Chateaubriand pained him, because the studies he was
following were intended merely to adorn his book, not to
increase his knowledge ; and Pauline’s sensibility seemed to
him morbid, and her passion, with her health and at her age,
less an experience than a malady. He had to arm himself
as best he might with religion and philosophy, to establish
himself in isolation from their feelings, until he had learned
to admit, permit, suffer and endure reality.
Joubert returned to Paris, and wrote sending them an”
Italian translation of Atala that had just appeared.
‘* Advise the author to be more original than ever,
and to show himself constantly such as God made him.
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 1800-1801

The foreigners, who compose three quarters and a half

of Europe, will only find striking what the usages of our
language automatically lead us, at the first moment,
to find strange. The essential is to be natural, for one-
self; then one will soon seem so to others. ... Let
each man take care to keep the particularities which are
proper to him, if he has any. One owes deference to
reason, and compliance to custom ; but one also owes
them to one’s own particular usage, of which the practice
adds to one’s work a whimsical pleasure that is soon
shared by our readers. A personal accent always pleases.
It is only an imitated accent that can displease if it is
unusual. .. .”
Poor Joubert! He was trying to give his mind hard exercise,
by reading Kant ; and finding when he had finished reading,
re-reading, taking notes and checking them, that it was all
rubbish. But Pauline, after all, had other things to think of
than metaphysics.
“I do not know what I am thinking of to chatter
so much. It must be the influence of my pen which in
my absence has doubtless been used by some lawyer who
has come to see my brother. It is so worn that it slides
over the paper whatever one does with it, and is hard to
stop. I will recut it for you, next winter, for it is likely
that from now till then I shall not write more, especially
after such an overflow of ink.”
Pauline was not going to allow him to escape so easily.
She replied, telling him how much she missed him, how bored
she was at having to make peace between Chateaubriand and
Madame de Staél ; and what pleasure she would have in
receiving a letter from him, if she were sure that it had not
tired him to write it.
News came on August 8th of his mother’s death, and he
could think of nothing else for days. Then he forced himself
to turn to Kant again. Soon he could write to Pauline de
Beaumont that he had been tempted ten times in the last week
to send her a special messenger to tell her the joyful news :
Kant had been translated! It was true that it was only into
Latin ; but though the Latin was German Latin, a mixture
of pebbles and ostrich eggs, at least he could understand it
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

better than the German. But when was she coming to see
them? They would be leaving Paris in a week.
She could not leave her Enchanter, but invited the
Jouberts to come to Savigny instead. They arrived towards
the end of August: Joubert brought Kant with him as a
buckler against jealousy. He used to read him, walking up
and down a pleached alley, while Chateaubriand, Pauline
and his wife sat by the pond in the kitchen garden, his little
son played with the cat on the grass, and the pigeons cooed
from the gables. He took many notes, but came to like his
author none the better. He talked much with Chateau-
briand, and for all his jealousy came to like him more and
more.
So soon as he was back again in Paris, early in September,
Pauline wrote asking for the loan of all sorts of dull theological
works for the benefit of Chateaubriand’s book, and confiding
to Joubert all her fears about it.
Joubert was back at Villeneuve before he answered. His
troubles took the form of a passionate desire for such unques-
tioning love as only his dead mother could have given him.
He wrote to Pauline about all the dull books that Chateau-
briand wished to borrow, and sent that author much good
advice. She was to tell him that the public did not want
quotations, but his own thoughts ; that it was his genius rather
than his learning which interested people ; that it was beauty
rather than truth that counted in his work ; and that it was
for Chateaubriand to make Christianity beloved, and not the
reverse. And when would he and Pauline come to Ville-
neuve? ‘They were fattening a lovely pig, and in October
there would be charcuterie to make their mouths water. Alas!
The end of the book still seemed far off, and Pauline wrote that
though the fame of the pig was chanted to all the visitors to
Savigny (and especially to Fontanes, who was both gourmet
and gourmand) they feared that it must die without them.
When at last they left Savigny, it was not to go to Villeneuve
but to Paris.
Joubert continued at Villeneuve, sad, lonely, jealous and
haunted by bad dreams. He had finished with Kant, and
had only Locke and his own thoughts to occupy him. He
wasted much time in trying to analyse the genius of Chateau-
briand, in considering from what want of equilibrium it
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 1800-1801
derived its force. He even criticised Fontanes, and found in
all his thoughts an elegant, noble and rich uselessness. It was
a jealous and melancholy winter, and ended in long, severe
and rather bitter criticism of the advance copy of the Génie du
Christtanisme, which reached him in March. Chateaubriand,
he decided, was no more than a mixture of Diderot, Madame
de Staél and Bernardin de St. Pierre, with Bernardin pre-
dominating.

139
 CHAPTER TEN

1802-1803

Y the end of March the Peace of Amiens was signed.

Joubert at Villeneuve was studying the colours of his
tulips as if they had been Old Masters, and Chateaubriand
and Pauline were awaiting in Paris the publication of the
Génie du Christianisme. She was nervous and anxious, and
confided her fears to her friend at Villeneuve. His winter of
discontent had at last purged him of jealousy, and he could
write to her :
‘*T do not share your fears, since what is beautiful
cannot fail to please. ... This book is not like any
other. Its value does not depend upon its matter, which
some will none the less regard as its merit, and others as
its defect. It does not even depend upon its form, a more
important thing, wherein good judges may perhaps find
things to reprove, but will find nothing to wish for. Why?
Because, to find contentment, taste has no need to find
perfection. ‘There is a charm, a talisman, attached to
the workman’s finger. He will have spread its influence
everywhere, because he has handled everything, and
wherever this charm is, its impress, its character, there
too will be a pleasure in which the mind will find satis-
faction. I wish I had the time to explain all this to you,
and to make you feel it, to drive away your faint-hearted-
MCSSr ee
The book appeared on April 14th, 1802 ; it came out
within a few days of the Concordat between Church and
State, and though its literary success was perhaps less great
than that of Atala, it enjoyed a political and topical success
that was almost without parallel. Napoleon singled out
Chateaubriand at a party at Lucien’s ; Fontanes had become
in February a member of the Corps législatif as deputy for the
Deux Sévres, and both began to slip into the official world of
the Empire, where Joubert had no wish to go.
His winter of trial had set up new barriers between him
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and his friends. He was still, and would always be, the friend
of Pauline, but what was passionate in their friendship had
all been burned away. He returned to Paris at the beginning
of May worn and resigned. His calm and his abnegation
seemed hardly real to himself, yet they brought a certain
weary peace of mind. Before long he was surprised to find
himself still capable of happiness. After a winter of bitter
loneliness the atmosphere of Pauline’s salon affected him as
sunshine does a butterfly ; he stretched his wings, and displayed
beauties of thought of which even his friends had hardly deemed
him capable. He met there a woman, Louise Comtesse de
Vintimille, to whom he transferred the residue of passion that
remained to him. He first met her at Pauline’s on May 6th ;
that night he made no entry in his diary but six stars. Louise
de Vintimille was a woman of thirty-nine, half Viennese, with
a robust and opulent beauty, blue eyes and chestnut hair.
She was the very antithesis of Pauline ; she lacked her delicacy
of taste and tact, her grace of mind and heart ; but she had
instead the simplicity and directness of health, a capacity for
frank silence that pleased Joubert, and a vivacity that streng-
thened and sustained him. She was a woman, not a man ;
a great lady, not a poet: yet she seemed to have something
of the vitality and spontaneity that made Fontanes so good a
friend. Like him, she had a backward-turning mind ; she
told Joubert that she thought she ought to have lived in the
age of Louis XIV, and that she always wore mourning on the
anniversary of Madame de Sevigne’s death. Certainly her
speech had the elegance, the terseness and the force of the
language of the grand siécle. She had been married at
seventeen to a cold, stiff man twenty-three years older than
herself, and had had no children. He had emigrated, but she
had not ; now, after ten years’ separation, they had set up
house once more in the rue d’Anjou. It was a good moment
to start a romantic friendship.
She and Joubert met again in the rue neuve du Luxem-
bourg on May 25th. He listened to her lively talk with
interest ; she was not so subtle as Pauline, but she could say
the sort of thing he liked : she said that evening, for instance,
that since God had not been able to bestow truth upon the
Greeks, he had given them poetry. She brought news of the
great world to the little salon, and she told it well; her
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

knowledge of its meanness, its scandals and its intrigue made

the security of the quiet room yet more precious. He saw her
again on June 23rd, 27th, 28th, 29th and goth, and though
he did not like the way her hair was done on the 27th, each
day he inscribed her initials in his notebook, and them alone,
for he knew he would need no further reminder of his happi-
ness. Then for a time she did not come to the rue neuve du
Luxembourg, and he had to content himself with listening
to Chateaubriand’s sister Lucile reading her poems aloud.
On the 22nd of July, a day for ever after to be marked in
his annals, he walked with Louise de Vintimille and Chateau-
briand in the gardens of the Tuileries. Long trains were in
fashion that year, and her silken gown moved over the grass
with a rustling noise that it was a delight to hear. The
sunshine under the trees, her confidence, her fine clothes, her
evident friendliness, the breath of glamour that Chateaubriand
could bring with him, made Joubert realize that he had
regained happiness, and that it had come back to him in a
more positive form than he had ever known. ‘To love Louise
de Vintimille after Pauline de Beaumont seemed as natural as
to enjoy a rose after the lilies of the valley had gone out of
bloom. He, the least impulsive of men, followed an impulse ;
he went up to one of the flower stalls in the shade of the trees,
and bought Madame de Vintimille a great bunch of tuberoses.
Soon he was even dreaming of her, and dreaming happily ;
the thought of her helped him through the inevitable sorrow
of the anniversary of his mother’s death.
Chateaubriand was growing more and more ambitious.
His heart had been set on the Embassy at Rome even before
the Génie du Christianisme was finished, and though Napoleon’s
uncle, Cardinal Fesch, had been nominated Ambassador, he
still had hopes of some lesser position. Intrigue and counter-
intrigue therefore occupied much of Pauline’s time and
interest, and made her seem yet more remote. The slightest
thing that concerned Chateaubriand—a parody, a review,
a rumour—absorbed all her attention ; it was only when
she was tired or worried and needed a confidant that she
now wrote to Joubert. Her deepest causes of sorrow and
worry she did not confide in him : Chateaubriand was enjoy-
ing a brisk and badly-hidden flirtation with Madame de
Custine, and was wondering if it would not look better, if he
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were appointed to Rome, if he took his wife with him.
Joubert spent all the winter in the top floor flat of the rue
Saint Honoré, where he saw, as he said, a great deal of the
sky and very little of the earth. He read much, and newer
books than were apt to come his way at Villeneuve ; he
ventured to call upon Madame de Vintimille, who held her
salon in a pleasant library full of her father’s books : and he
talked literature endlessly with Fontanes, Chateaubriand and
Chénedollé. Each respected and criticised the other’s judg-
ment. Chénedollé said that Joubert demanded something of
the future in all his ideas ; the first word must lead on to the
last in an inevitable chain. From the start great porticoes
of thought had to be evident ; and at the end one looked down
a long perspective to find the beginning still visible. Fon-
tanes declared that Joubert’s trouble was that there was no
language in existence that could express what Joubert wanted
to say, and that in the effort to create one he made French a
hard and metallic instrument. Joubert told Chénedollé
that Fontanes was often attracted by false beauty, but none
the less felt true beauty as profoundly as anyone he knew :
what was lacking to his style was not polish, but brilliance.
It was too soft and fluid ; it left no furrow or impress upon
the mind. Fontanes talked so much, and so differently from
how he wrote, that the others were left with an impression of
warmth and colour rather than with a clear idea of what he
had said. Chateaubriand seemed the most different from
Joubert of them all. Even when they travelled in the same
countries of the mind and the heart, they brought back different
treasures. The power of creation and production which the
others enjoyed sometimes made Joubert a little envious, but
he consoled himself with the thought that if his not-impossible
book was still not being written, yet his hand was growing
more skilled and his style more polished every day. At least he
was learning what people forgot nowadays: what to do
without in language. He was gathering clay for a great
statue, and kneading it ; the time for modelling had not yet
come. Meanwhile he criticised and encouraged the others,
and when Chénedollé had to return to Normandy, even inter-
viewed his publisher for him : a man who reminded Joubert
of cold broth, fairly good, fairly greasy, perhaps even nourish-
ing, but without any appearance of solidity.

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Chateaubriand was nominated First Secretary in Rome on

May gth ; Fontanes, Elisa, Pauline, Madame de Custine and
all his other admirers had not intrigued in vain. The others
were now satisfied, but Pauline had discovered a new ambition :
to join her Enchanter at Rome. Chateaubriand left Paris
on May 26th ; he left Pauline behind, and instinctively turned
to Joubert to protect and help her. He wrote from Lyons
to describe the journey, and his impression of Villeneuve as
he had seen it at four in the morning.
‘‘ Tt remains to say that I find Madame de Beaumont
too severe ; the hillsides at Villeneuve are, it is true, bald
and dry, but they are fairly high and have a false air of
being mountains that does not suit them badly. I also
saw a certain wood in a valley which might be brought in
as evidence in the suit: without counting the sunset,
which both parties to it declare to be fine. I have only
seen a sunrise, which to tell the truth was not marvellous,
but morning is not evening, and I maintain that in a
mist, and in owl-light, Villeneuve is a very pretty place.
There are beauties, as you know, which cannot stand the
full light of day. Frankly, I like you better roosting in
your library in the rue Saint Honoré than in the little street
going uphill to the left, as I saw it at four in the morning.
I fear that the Mayor, if he saw me, may have taken me for
an Englishman who had come to examine the spot and
perhaps to sound the Yonne, in order to guide Nelson’s
feet there... <-. .
Chateaubriand wrote again from Turin, full of the
festivities he had come in for at Lyons and the splendours of
the Alps. He wrote again from Milan and Florence, and
finally on June 27th could announce his arrival in Rome.
Before this Joubert had returned to Villeneuve. The day
before he left he saw Pauline ; she hurt him by her want of
reticence. It was one thing to love Chateaubriand, and
another to talk about it to those who loved her too. He was
himself over-sensitive, or he might have seen that the intensity
of her feelings, or at any rate her free expression of them,
came from fever. She confessed she felt ill, but not that she
had little hope of recovery. She was going away to undergo
a cure at Mont Dore, but was going almost without hope ;

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all that she looked forward to was to be able to travel onwards
from Auvergne to Rome.
Joubert left her, not only hurt, but disquieted. He
asked Fontanes to try to see her during his absence, but
Fontanes replied, too full of the Mercure and Elisa Bacciocchi to
do more than apologize casually for not having gone. On the
24th July, Pauline herself wrote to him from Paris :
‘““T did not want to write to you except to say: I
have started ; bad luck decrees otherwise. I am wearied
to a point when I expect rest even from the diligence. Do
not scold me for my impatience to reach Mont Dore and
for my profound disgust for the slowness of a diligence
that will not be filled with dear friends like you.... I
ought to have begun by telling you about Rome. I have
had two letters from there. It is a kind of delirium both
of the monuments and of the desert places that one finds
on every side : desert places ‘ where the trace of the last
Roman plough is not effaced, with whole cities empty of
inhabitants, with eagles hovering over the ruins,’ etc.! ...
I leave you because I am tired. I have not strength
enough left to tell you all that I feel for you. How do
you find yourself in your solitude? Are you master of
your ideas, or have they mastered you ? ' You would do
well to see that I have a letter at Clermont ; but remember
how many Clermonts there are, and put the name of the
department. ... Ifyou knew how many syrupy potions
I have drunk, without my chest being any the better!”
She did not start until three days later, after having had to
write to Fontanes to intercede with Talleyrand for Chateau-
briand, who had begun his term of office in Rome with a
burst of unimportant indiscretions that Cardinal Fesch was
inclined to take seriously.
Joubert wrote to Pauline as she asked, with all sorts of
instructions to the postmaster at Clermont about forwarding
the letter if it missed her.
‘* With these precautions, I hope that this paper which
I am touching and holding at this moment will sooner
or later be touched by you in a place where I have much
desired you to be... . Your spirit has so plagued and
pestered your poor machine that it is tired and over-
worked. ‘There, I believe, is the root of all your illness.

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Revive the body, and let your soul rest, and we shall not
be long in seeing you as we should like. . . . You will
give me great pleasure by quoting a few words of each
letter that you receive from Rome. I am certain that
you would always choose them so well, that, without
tiring you, they would suffice to give me an idea of the
Tests p44
“‘ Fontanes wrote me a long letter which came with
yours. ... He ends by recommending me to write
down, each evening, the result of my meditations during
the day, and assures me that in the end it will turn out
that I have made a beautiful book without any trouble.
This would assuredly be very pleasant ; but, however I
continue, I should only leave a blank book. My spirit
is not my master, and I am no more its master myself ;
my wits depart, and I don’t know what you would say to
them. Except for a stray thought or two, the rest has
been only a stupid and monotonous consideration of a
single subject : the age 1 am about to enter upon. Those
whom I see have reached that decline of life seem so
decrepit and so ended that the spectacle terrifies me.
I became a tree for a time, two years ago ; this time I
have become marble. I shall find my way out either by
resignation or by some rashness: as it shall please
Ged an?
He had to wait until August 15th for her answer, and when
it came it was not very hopeful. She wrote from Clermont :
“It is so overwhelmingly hot that I have not the
courage to go to the post to see if I shall find there a letter
from Villeneuve ; I therefore write on the chance and
in the hope of finding one. I left Paris on Thursday, at
eleven in the morning, in a cabriolet bound for Moulins.
I had for travelling companions an old and crafty mer-
chant, very much taken up with himself and his affairs,
and very little with the rest of the world, yet polite and
full of sense ; a young man, a liar and a boaster, knowing
everything, having been everywhere, having cloven
whole battalions in twain, but really not even knowing
how to give orders to a postillion, otherwise the nicest
boy in the world, full of complaisance and attentions.
There was only lacking, for my amusement, someone to
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 1802-1803
be taken in by his valiancy, but my old merchant laughed
in his sleeve, my maid gaped her head open, or slept, less
than she would have liked, for we were cruelly jolted.
When I got to Fontainebleau I was so tired that I thought
I could not go on; the next day, half dead, I took my
courage in both hands and got into that horrible cabriolet,
to travel thirty-two leagues at a stretch ; I was no more
tired than the evening before, but the next day, when I
got to Moulins, I had neither strength nor will left; a
-kind of Fury who kept our inn did me the service of making
me angry, which revived me. I arranged to start the
next morning in a noble but springless coach ; to repay
herself for the good she had done me, she robbed me,
but not of the coach. I got into it trembling, and was
much surprised to find myself much better off than in the
cabriolet. I slept at a place six leagues from Clermont,
where I arrived very early, and whence I write to you,
still very tired. The fits of coughing which you know,
left me on the journey ; I had no more than a cough
from a cold and a bad chest ; the paroxysms of coughing
have come on again violently since I have been at Cler-
mont ; but indeed the weather is very stormy. Everyone
greets me with a ‘ Madame is ill?’ which makes me
impatient, though I am only too sureI am. There is an
enormous number of people at the baths, which upsets
me ; I shall be worried and ill-lodged ; farewell to all
the benefit I expected! I say nothing of all of you,
unless it be that I am often with you, even when travelling
over the highways and almost dead. . . .”
Joubert replied, anxiously enough :
** When you do not receive our letters, it is at the
most one little pleasure in the world the less for you ;
but when we do not get yours, we suffer an unbearable
torment. Perhaps because of its belief in Evil and its
opposition to hope, fear is in me always a sentiment that
is against nature. So judge to what a violent state the
fears of every kind that have been agitating me for a
week have reduced me, with you for their subject. I was
slow in growing afraid ; but when the time naturally
prescribed for my delay was over, when the posts, that
pass here three times a week, followed each other without

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bringing anything from your waters, when at last the

terrible Vo which was always the answer to my question :
Are there any letters from Madame de Beaumont? had
made my ears hot with its stubbornness and its monotony :
a kind of trembling overtook my soul, and I made all the
house desolate with my lamentations. At last, at last, a
letter. that I received yesterday from Madame de Vinti-
mille told me that you had written to her from Mont
Dore ; that you were mortally bored there (which is
always a sign of life) and that the waters were relaxing
you, which should rest you. I shall never again see her
writing. without a lively pleasure, not only for her own
sake, but also for yours, and for the extreme relief which
she has this time afforded me. Henceforward, let your
letters come by whatever post they please, I am hardened.
There will be no loss but of pleasure, and after the agita-
tion from which I have emerged, everything will seem to
me peace and happiness.
‘“* Madame de Vintimille’s letter was handed to me
just as we were getting into the carriage. I did not open
it until we started, for it took me a little time to swear, storm
and groan because I received no other letters than this.
We were proceeding to Bussy sadly enough, when reading
this letter by the light of the four little windows of our
waggon, I found and pieced together the mention that
it made of you. The coachful had, like me, a surprise
that cheered up everyone, down to the children and the
horse. Think sometimes of the incurable fidelity with
which you are loved in this little corner of the world, and
let the thought bind you to curing yourself and to telling
us all that you attempt in this good work. . . .”

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 CHAPTER ELEVEN

1803

Mees DORE, hidden in the mountains of the Cantal,

was far from the post road, and Joubert’s letters were
slow to arrive. Pauline was soon almost as anxious
as he had been.
*“‘ If it were not you and Madame Joubert, I should
think myself forgotten, and I should resign myself sadly
to the fate of the absent ; but that cannot be, and I do
not know what to fear or to think. I wrote to you from
Clermont, during the very worst of my vexations and my
fatigues ; my head was writing to you, and I dreamed of
you! A thousand little details seemed to me as if they
ought to please you, and I occupied myself with them
although I was not really in a fit state to do so; then
your silence altogether scared me, and added to the dis-
agreeables which I find in Mont Dore and its society ;
and its four steps of walks, and its mountains, which I
cannot climb over, and its continual storms, which
suddenly make it as cold as November. My room has
no chimney ; the only one is in the kitchen. I freeze
as I write to you. Yet I am here for at least seventeen
days, as I want to do the thing properly. Good-bye ;
if by chance I get news of you, I will write with a better
courage ; meanwhile I am like the weather, sad, sombre
and sulky ; but not cold, my very sadness proves that.”
The letter had hardly gone before his arrived ; she soon
wrote again to answer all his questions.
** To say that your letter gave me the utmost pleasure
is to give you no idea of what I felt when I received it :
all my disquiets, all the mists were swept away in a
moment, and behold me able to talk with you as much as
my strength would permit : but it is not very much, my
strength! I can take up my story at Clermont. .
I left it at two in the morning. One could see nothing,
and when day dawned, that boring and everlasting Puy
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

de Déme presented itself to me, not to leave me for a long

time. At six we stopped at a hovel, where we took some
excellent milk and some courage between the jolts. I
found a way of lying on the mattress that made them
bearable. So we got to Rochefort at ten; the horse
had to rest ; they suggested that I should dine, but I was
not hungry. I went for a walk beside a charming brook,
in very pleasant country. I think I have heard you speak
of the castle of Rochefort ; encircled by its old trees and
its ruins it makes a very picturesque effect.... At
noon we started again, in unbearable heat. I asked the
driver to stop for dinner at the Drap d’Or, but he made
short work both of the order and of my dinner, for after-
wards we did not even find a crust of bread. To crown
our misfortunes a storm that had long been threatening,
broke, the rain caught us in the rear ; then, turning in a
road that turned unceasingly, we had it in our faces ;
large hailstones were mixed with it, nothing sheltered
the front of the tilt-cart, so that we were soaked and frozen
to the skin. In this state I arrived at Mont Dore, and
for half an hour went from door to door to find a lodging,
which we failed to do ; in the end, they gave me a tiny
closet, and while they made it ready, I warmed myself
as best I might in the kitchen. I was so tired, so stupefied
that I did not know what I was saying or doing ; I had
not been able to eat anything. A legion of hungry fleas
made my bed a hell, and when daylight came to show me ©
in what a horrible hole I was lodged, my courage failed
me. So soon as I could get up I went to see the walks ;
they showed me a dozen steps to be taken in a rather
disagreeable spot. I came back more wretched than I
had gone out. By dint of seniority and by profiting from
other people’s departures, I have now got a room with a
fire, quite passable, at least for Mont Dore.”’
She had had the usual difficulties with doctors and tesunents:
and was now following a fairly severe régime.
“ Result : I cough much less, but my chest is tight
as if it were in a vice ; I cannot take four steps, or climb,
without being most painfully breathless ; I eat a little
more, I often feel very ill, and I only get through it all
by dint of much rest ; when I feel irritable I lie upon my
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bed and count the rafters of the roof; with this help,
calm returns. This aptitude for imbecility would be
rather sad ; but it was not strong enough to make me
endure your silence without murmuring : you have seen
my heartache, and if you knew what it is to find oneself
alone and ill among indifferent people and in a lost place,
you would forgive me for having had need of material
proof of the remembrance of my dearest friends. . . .”
Poor Pauline! She wrote to Chénedollé yet more sadly
than she dared to do to Joubert ; she coughed less, it was true,
but she thought it was so that she might die quietly. If she
lived she had only one ambition : to join Chateaubriand in
Rome. Already she had arranged with her man of business
to sell some of her small remaining capital and to forward
the proceeds to Lyons, which would be the first stage of her
journey. This project, as much as her own view of her health
as desperate, had to be kept from Joubert of all men.
He, poor man, was hoping that Mont Dore might do her
real good, in spite of its disagreeables, and that she might
stay with them at Villeneuve on the way back. He wrote to
her, telling her that they too had rafters that she might count,
and that she could rest there for a month, two, three, four,
five, six or a year. He would come to meet her at Montargis ;
they would dine at Courtenay, and be at Villeneuve that night.
On September gth he wrote to Fontanes, who had pro-
posed himself for a visit, with this in mind.
** If you would really like to spend a little time here,
come boldly, my dear friend. You will upset no one in
this house but me. You will take from me my room,
my time, my leisure and my occupations ; but you can
rest assured that the pleasure of having you for a guest
is above all that.
“You must only consult yourself and discover, for
instance, if you can manage without your valet. We
have only very ugly girls here, but for nothing in the
world would we provide them with the spectacle of a
Parisian valet. The very sight of the laziness of these
odd creatures is enough to corrupt the hard-working
simplicity of a whole countryside. There is a peruke-
maker at the end of the road who shall be at your service,
and our little servant girl shall brush your clothes. We
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live in plenty, and I am anyhow not going to trouble to

cater for you sumptuously. I know that for all your pre-
tensions as an epicure, nothing is easier than to make you
think that a detestable dish is excellent. You shall have
a huge room, which does not leak, a dressing room and a
bathroom ; thirty hillsides round the town and all the
earth round that. You shall be alone as much as pleases
you, and with us when you like.
“I ought to warn you that Madame de Beaumont
has been invited before you, and is accustomed to the
rooms which you will occupy ; and since she is ill with
her malady and from the waters she has been taking, she
will have the right to displace you if she comes to us while
we still have you ; but in that event we will find you
other accommodation, and nothing in the world is more
uncertain than the much-to-be-desired difficulty which
such a reunion would cause. The poor woman does not
even know yet if her wretched health will allow her to go
back to Paris.”
Soon a letter came from Pauline to Victoire Joubert,
striving to paint her situation in brighter colours, and declaring
that she was distinctly better. Mont Dore, its dirt, its fleas,
its pigs, its inhabitants and above all its imprisoning moun-
tains, had got on her nerves, but the baths were doing her good.
It was a letter intended to pave the way for her next, to Joubert
himself. On September 4th she wrote to tell him that she
hoped to leave Mont Dore on the morrow, and to go by
Clermont to Lyons, where she was hoping for letters that would
decide how she was to spend the winter. It was followed by
others from Clermont, declaring that the waters had given
her new life, and that she felt even more animated that she
would wish, for she did not want to burn it up too quickly.
At this moment, when it was beginning to be evident that
Pauline had set her heart on going to Rome, what should
come but a letter from Chateaubriand, scolding Joubert for
his neglect of Pauline : a disapproval ironic in its source, for
Chateaubriand had some claim to be the most inconsiderate
man in the world.
“Our friend writes from Mont Dore letters which
break my heart ; she says that she feels that there is no
more oil left in the lamp ; she speaks of the last beats of
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her heart. Why was she allowed to go alone on that
journey ? Why did not you write to her? What will
happen to us if we lose her? Who will console us for
her loss? We do not realize the value of our friends
until the moment when we are threatened with their loss.
We are even unfeeling enough, when all goes well, to
believe that we can safely go far from them. Heaven
punishes us ; they are taken from us and we are appalled
at the solitude that they leave around us. Pardon, my
dear Joubert, I feel in myself to-day the heart I had when
I was twenty ; Italy has given me back my youth ; I
love all that is dear to me with the same ardour as in my
early years. Sorrow is my element ; I only find myself
when I am unhappy. My friends are now of so rare a
kind that the fear of losing them is enough to freeze my
blood. Endure my lamentations ; I am sure that you
are as unhappy as I am.”
This letter, so tiresome, so ardent, and so like Chateau-
briand, was followed by one from Pauline in which at last she
declared her intention of going to the South : Rome was not
mentioned. Joubert replied that her vivacity might well kill
her, but that it must represent a real vital force.
“I have successively counselled to you black and
white, green and dry. My poor imagination turns to
every side to find you some relief and to create for itself
something on which to build hope and consolation. It
is not of my prescriptions that you should take notice in
all that, but of my friendship, anxious to bend itself and
unbend itself into a thousand different opinions, to find
you a better future. ... To live is to think and feel
with one’s soul ; all the rest, eating and drinking and what
you will, although I may set a value upon them, are only
the preparations of life, the means of keeping it going.
If one had no need of them, I would give them up easily
and would do very nicely without my body if I might
keep all my soul. . . . You activity disdains such happi-
ness, but let us see if your reason would not hold this
opinion. Life isa duty ; one must try to make a pleasure
of it, as best one can, as of all other duties, and a half-
pleasure, when one can do no more. If the charge of
maintaining it is the only one which Heaven lays upon us,
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

we must carry it out gaily and with the best grace in the
world, and add fuel to the sacred flame, and keep ourself
warm at it as best we can, until the time comes when we
are told, ‘It is enough’... I dare not oppose the
question of the South ; it is a question of coughing less,
and that is a sacred matter. None the less, I sometimes
think that the desert wind and the cold of solitude are
worse for you than any others. I await your final decision
with impatience and disquietude, as one awaits the ver-
dict in a great lawsuit on which one’s fortune depends.
If the North wins, you must pass the whole winter here.
You would have a room facing South, your maid beside
you, a worse climate perhaps than in Paris, but a peace
that you would find nowhere else, and that is, to my way
of thinking, the remedy of which you have most need. . . ’
Joubert spent a restless September at Villeneuve, trying
to find his philosophic calm among the vineyards on the hill-
side. Sometimes the sunlight upon the ripening grapes, the
hidden and mysterious appropriateness of their form to the
stock on which they grew and to the leaves that surrounded
them, would give him peace ; sometimes Plato and Plutarch
would give him courage ; but there was always a canker at
his heart. He could not but feel that Pauline meant to go to
Rome, and that if she went he would lose her altogether.
It was idle to dream—though he could not help dreaming—
of what they might do together if she spent the winter at
Villeneuve ; he had always the bitter sense that she would
not wish to come. Indeed the tacit struggle between North
and South, Villeneuve and Rome, had been decided long
before this. In spite of a bout of illness at Lyons, Pauline
had already started for Italy. She wrote to Joubert from
Milan at the beginning of October, saying that she had
arrived there very tired but in a better state of health than she
had dared to hope.
“Good-bye ; I will write to you again only from
Rome. Good-bye ; I hope that rest may make me a
little less foolish ; I hope most of all that you will continue
to love me such as 1 am. That alone consoles me, the
rest is all uncertain, I embrace Madame Joubert. My
heart is full of sadness ; no ray of joy has yet penetrated
nts

3
 1803
The writing was so feeble and shaky that Joubert was
thoroughly alarmed. He wrote at once, to Rome.
“If I have not written to you, it was from trouble.
Your departure, in the fatigue in which you still were, and
your immense distance from me, have overwhelmed me.
I do not think I have ever endured a sadder feeling than
I drink each morning, as a bitter breakfast, when I say
to myself as I awake, ‘ She is now beyond France. She is
far away.’
*“In other times and other circumstances, I should
have had, in imagining and knowing you to be in Italy,
precisely half the pleasure I should have had in being
there myself. As it is, I have only grief. You have need
of rest, and you have gone to seek an activity which will
exhaust you. It seems to me that each step that you
take and each look to right or left that you cast, during
so long a journey, will dissipate some of your strength
upon the roads.
** At this moment you must have reached Rome;
but are you tranquil, are you at peace, are you restored ?
That is what it will be impossible for me to believe for a
long time. You are in the middle of a whirlwind. When
you are kept in breath and in action only by the inevitable
curiosity which will agitate you, that alone will be enough
to do you harm. Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! ... Hasten,
if you wish me to calm down, to forgive you, to find once
more a little peace, hasten to tell me that you are better,
or I shall die of dumb rage... .
“You ask me to love you always. Alas! can I do
otherwise, whatever you are and whatever you want to
do? There used to be between us a sympathy to which
you sometimes opposed many obstacles and contradic-
tions. Yet, when my feelings are strong and _ well-
founded, nothing can change them, weaken them, or
stop them. No one has ever filled me with a more lasting
and faithful attachment than you have.
“TI am going to write a line to our poor friend. I
have owed him an answer for a long time, which I could
only pay him ill and with a sore heart. He has his troubles
I know ; in heaven’s name, soften them by your presence,
but do not share them ; you will only double them and
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

make his troubles irremediable by the harm you will do

yourself.
“We talk of you endlessly in every corner of the
house ; my brother, Madame Joubert and I. I do not
tell them the half of what I suffer, and we have told no
one in these parts what distresses us. You put this
friendship which we have for you to a severe test, by
reducing us, through the course you have taken, to the
impossibility of being any good to you in any respect. . .
** Farewell, cause of so much pain, who have so often
been for me the source of so much good. Farewell.
Keep yourself, spare yourself, and come back some day
among us, if only to give me for a single moment the
inexpressible pleasure of seeing you once more. . . .”’
Fontanes was full of embarrassing gossip about the harm
that Madame de Beaumont’s visit would do to Chateaubriand’s
career, and of worrying stories of that diplomat’s indiscretions,
that had got him into serious trouble with the authorities at
The Foreign Office. He persuaded Joubert to write to Mon-
sileur Molé, a common friend with a good deal of influence
in that quarter, a letter giving an appreciation of Chateau-
briand’s character which should cause his diplomatic stupidities
to be taken less seriously. Joubert did it, for Pauline’s sake ;
anything which saved Chateaubriand from the consequences
of his folly also saved her. It was not easy to be charitable
and clear-sighted about him at that moment; yet Joubert
succeeded in writing one of the best analyses of Chateau-
briand’s character that has ever been attempted.
“Tt is certain that, he loves the errors with which
his book (the Génie du Christianisme) is filled better than
_ the truths, for the errors are more his own: he is in a
greater degree their author. He lacks in this respect a
kind of sincerity which one only has, and only can have,
when one lives much with oneself, when one consults
oneself, listens to oneself, and when this intimate sense
has become very lively by the practice it has been given
and the use that has been made of it. He has, so to speak,
all his faculties turned outwards, and never turns them
within. He does not speak with himself, he hardly ever
listens to himself, he never questions himself, unless it be
to discover whether the external part of his soul, I mean
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 1803
his taste and his imagination, are content, whether the
thought is well-rounded, the phrases fine-sounding, the
pictures well painted ; observing little whether all these
be good ; that is the least of his anxieties.
“* He addresses himself to others; it is for them only,
and not for himself, that he writes ; it is similarly their
approval, rather than his own, that he seeks. Thence
it follows that his talent will never make him happy, for
the basis of the satisfaction it might bring him lies outside
himself, far from himself, and is diverse, changing and
unknown.
“His life is another matter. He composes it, or
rather he lets it arrange itself, in quite another fashion. He
writes only for others, and lives only for himself. He
_ never considers the approval of others, but only his own
satisfaction. He is even profoundly ignorant of what the
world approves and of what it does not. He has never
thought about it in his life, and prefers not to know it.
Moreover, since he never occupies himself in judging
anyone, he supposes that no one finds occupation in judg-
ing him in their turn. In this belief he does with full and
complete security whatever enters his head, without
giving himself the slightest approval or blame.
** A depth of boredom, which seems to be drawn from
the immense void that lies between his soul and his
thoughts, for ever demands from him distractions which
no occupation and no society can ever provide to his liking,
for which no fortune can ever suffice, unless sooner or
later he is to become prudent and orderly. Such is what
one might call the natural man ; now for the finished
product.
** It seems that he early proposed to himself, or had
proposed to him, as the final goal of his ambition, the
honour of being a courtier. If you regard him closely,
you will find that the only acquired quality that has been
strongly impressed upon him, and that he invariably
retains, is that which fits him for this calling: a great
circumspection. Transparent as he is by nature, he has
become reserved by policy. He contradicts nothing,
but willingly makes mysteries of everything. With an
open nature, he not only keeps the secrets of others, as

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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

everyone should do, but also his own. .. . He carries

the cautions and technique of discretion to such a point
as to immolate truth, and sometimes even virtue, before
his eyes, without any attempt to save them. He would
willingly lend his pen, but not his tongue, to the finest
cause in the world. Indeed, even in the expansive and
unconstrained intimacy of companionship, he will only
contradict his friend with a reluctance which betrays
that he is breaking a habit. That is Chateaubriand in
society.
** Add to all this a few of the whims of a grand seigneur,
a love of what costs him dear, a hatred of economy, an
inattention to what he spends, an indifference to the evils
that his extravagances may cause, even to the unfortunate ;
an inability to resist his fancies, made stronger by a
heedlessness of their consequences ; in a word, the mis-
behaviour of a young and generous man at an age when
it is no longer forgiveable, and with a character that
does not excuse it : for though he was born prodigal he
was in no wise born generous. The virtue of generosity
implies a capacity for practical reflection, for considera-
tion for others, for detachment from self, that he did not
receive at his birth and that he has never dreamed of
acquiring. ... There is and there always will be in
him an element of childishness and innocence which make
him as incapable of doing serious wrong as.of conferring
lasting benefits.”
Joubert, enjoying an artistic display of his psychological
skill, forgot that he might be prejudiced ; but at the end of the
letter he remembered all the anxiety that Chateaubriand’s
irresponsibilities might be bringing upon Pauline, and en-
quired with warmth and true friendship what on earth the
erring diplomat had done, that even Molé should feel dis-
approving.
“There is one essential point that must be agreed
upon between us, as a preliminary, and that is that we
still love him, culpable or not ; that in the first case we
will defend him, and in the second, console him. That
laid down, let us judge him without mercy and talk of
him without reticence ; you have begun very well, and
you see that I follow you close ; finish, and make up my
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mind for me irrevocably, for my uncertainty is un-
bearable.”
It was a sadder circumstance than any judgment of —
Moleé’s that was to set Chateaubriand apart from any criticism
of Joubert’s. He went to meet Pauline at Florence, and
found her so ill that she could scarcely smile ; he conveyed
her by slow stages to Rome, and installed her in the villa he
had taken near the Spanish Steps. For a few weeks she
lingered, happy in his company, resigned to death. On
November 4th she died in his arms. Before her death she had
acknowledged herself a daughter of the Church, and had
been admitted to its last rites. Towards the end she had
talked of Joubert, and told Chateaubriand what true and
unfailing friendship he had to give.
The news of her death reached Joubert from Chateau-
briand, from Fontanes, from Madame de Vintimille: it
seemed to reach him by a series of echoes of which he could
understand neither the meaning nor the source. He went
out to be alone, and tried by the foolish details that his friends
had told him to persuade himself that Pauline indeed was
dead. He went to Dominique Paquereau’s cottage; he
went to the little chapel nearby. The painted statue of St.
Vincent, holding his bunch of grapes, seemed to have no pity
for him ; the works of man seemed to separate him from God.
He returned home by the sandy path over the hill. The past
had become a great nothingness into which his spirit was too
weary to enter more.

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 CHAPTER TWELVE

1804-1808

A aes had perhaps been points of jealousy between all

the members of Pauline de Beaumont’s circle ;_ her
affection for all of them but Chateaubriand might have
been pure friendship, yet the others may, consciously or un-
consciously, have been a little in love with her. At all events,
her death brought them all together in a closer intimacy than
they had ever enjoyed before. Her death was described to
them by Chateaubriand in letters written in so noble and
sonorous a style that her end seemed rather the last chapter
of a tragic novel than the death of poor Pauline. They wrote
to each other about it in the effort to make it seem true. For
Joubert it was soon only too real. He could make nothing
monumental out of his memories of her; like a sigh the
phrase ran through his mind : “‘ tout passé est si court.’ It was
not long before he realized that he could best keep alive his
memories of her by continuing to cultivate the friends who
had used to meet and to talk in the rue neuve du Luxembourg.
She had died in Chateaubriand’s arms, and had confided him
to Joubert almost with her last breath : that secured him an
unequalled place in his affections. Joubert wrote to him,
from the heart. Fontanes, of course, was always his friend ;
but since Fontanes had never thought so highly of Pauline as
Joubert would have wished, her death insensibly removed a
barrier between them. It was Joubert who had introduced
Chénedollé to Pauline, and Chénedollé, sensitive poet that he
was, had always appreciated her properly. To him Joubert
wrote even more warmly than usual.
‘JT will say nothing to you of my sorrow. It is not
extravagant, but it will be eternal. What a place that
loveable woman held in my world! Chateaubriand will
surely regret her as much as I do, but he will not miss her
for so long. For nine years I have not had a thought in
which she did not appear in some fashion or another,
near or far. This bent will not be lost, I shall not have an
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 1804-1808
idea of which her memory and the affliction of her
absence will not form a part.
“You will receive the account of her last moments.
Nothing in the world is more apt to make’s one’s
tears flow than this account ; yet it is consoling. As
one reads it one adores that nice boy who wrote it ; and
as for her, one realizes, having known her, that she would
have given ten years of her life to die so peacefully and to
be so mourned. I should be miserable to-day if she had
not taken that journey, which at the time tormented me
sormuchis ya
Madame de Vintimille wrote to him with real kindness,
and gave him a miniature she had of Pauline ; with her, too,
he could feel more at ease now that his admiration for her
could no longer seem to hold any element of disloyalty to the
woman he had loved first and best.
Chateaubriand left Rome in February, to come to Paris
before taking up his new appointment as Chargé d’Affaires
in the Valais. He broke his journey at Villeneuve for an hour
or two ; he was full of plans for the future, in which his wife
was to share; and he talked of the past in a fashion that
endowed it with colour and the shimmer of gold rather than
with any ghostly greyness. He left Joubert feverish in mind
and sad in heart. For the two months that followed he had
not energy enough to write anything in his notebook. He
had begun to write an appreciation of Madame de Beaumont,
slowly, tenderly, and with infinite difficulty. He found it
hard, if not impossible, to express her aery, poetic quality in
prose ; and his attempts to make his prose poetical led him
into all kinds of subtleties of rhythm in which his taste could be
his only guide. Chateaubriand’s arrival, his naive airs of
proprietorship, his literary fecundity and sense of colour,
dried up the sources of Joubert’s inspiration. He did not
return to his work for some months, and then returned unwil-
lingly. Chateaubriand talked with scorn of those who did not
finish their phrases ; Joubert’s ambition, and his trouble,
was to bring his thoughts to a conclusion. Another of the
habitués of Pauline’s salon, Comte Molé, a rather priggish
young man of a great family, had written several times to
Joubert, since the salon had been broken up, and had sub-
mitted his own Essais de Morale et de Politique to him. Joubert
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

was humble enough to think that as a member of the great

world Molé would be a fit critic of his eulogy of Madame de
Beaumont ; and Molé was conceited enough to accept the
role. When at last the manuscript was finished, nearly nine
months after her death, the young critic said (possibly with
justice) that its apparent simplicity masked such conscious
art that it did not seem natural. Joubert took the criticism
so much to heart that he at once destroyed one of the few works
that he had ever finished. Only Pauline would have been
able to understand what he had tried to say.
He spent the spring sadly enough at Villeneuve, trying to
stifle regret in the study of Malebranche. On March aist,
news came of the tragedy of the execution of the Duc d’Enghien,
and that Chateaubriand had resigned his post in the Valais
as a gesture of horror and disgust. The Jouberts returned to
Paris on April 5th to find him established with his wife in a
little house in the suburbs, hard-up and more dispirited than
usual, with Pauline’s servant Couhaillon and his wife to look
after them. Céleste de Chateaubriand, with whom he had
once more joined his life on the advice of the dying Pauline,
was plain, prim and long-nosed, but had a pretty and rather
acid wit. Joubert felt that he would hardly have wished to
live with her himself, but that he was sincerely sorry for
her if she were to continue to live with Chateaubriand. She
had the possessive feelings of a lawful spouse strongly developed,
and he could not but feel that they were likely to be painfully
wounded. Already she had shown herself jealous of Chateau-
briand’s neurotic and devoted sister, Lucile de Caud. Lucile
had just broken with Chénedollé, who had turned out to have
married a German girl when he was in exile, and to have
conveniently forgotten.her existence so soon as he met Lucile.
Consequently Lucile was more strange and restless than ever,
and Céleste was occupied in edging her out of the domestic
circle. Joubert was sorry for the unhappy sister who already
seemed to him to be seriously deranged.
Chateaubriand cultivated the Jouberts ; evidently he
had not too many friends of a kind who would accept and
appreciate his wife. Céleste de Chateaubriand and Victoire
Joubert soon became friends ; they could discuss all their
household problems together, while their husbands debated
more abstruse matters. If Chateaubriand was under a cloud,
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 1804-1808
Fontanes was in the sunshine of prosperity, Président du Corps
législaiif, and full of official importance. He was ordering
his uniform for the coronation of Napoleon as Emperor, and
thoroughly enjoying himself. Joubert still loved Fontanes,
but he loved him better in his natural part of an irascible poet
than in his new rdle of an intriguing politician.
Neither the Chateaubriands’ disappointed and _ self-
centred household nor the political splendours of the Fontanes
could in any way make up to Joubert for the loss of Pauline,
and of the society of her little salon. Yet a woman friend
was necessary to him, for only a woman friend could make a
link between his heart and mind and modulate thought into
feeling. There remained to him Madame de Vintimille and
her library in the rue de Cerutti, where he used. often to find
her with her sister, Madame de Fezensac. They were of the
same race and education as Madame de Beaumont and
Madame de Seérilly, and showed him the same gracious kind-
ness. Like them, they made such kindness a part of good
manners. ‘‘ When my friends squint,’ said Madame de
Vintimille, “ I look at them in profile.” She too had had her
sorrows ; a favourite nephew, Alphonse de Fezensac, had
died ; but her sensibility was not of a kind to show itself
and her griefs could form no real bond. Moreover Pauline
had known Villeneuve, his home and his family ;_ there was
nothing to bring Madame de Vintimille into such a relation.
Joubert tried to endow her with some of Pauline’s lost qualities,
but indeed the two women were very different. Nothing
could make Madame de Vintimille aery. Her rich silks, shot
like a pigeon’s neck, her Mechlins fine as frost upon a window,
somehow never had the poetical grace of Pauline’s old cambrics
and her little woollen shawl. For him at least Pauline lived
against the country background of Passy ; Louise de Vinti-
mille was essentially a towns-woman. She belonged to that
Parisian world to whom the light of day meant less than the
soft glow of candlelight, the scent of the air after rain less than
the perfume of bergamot and ambergris in a firelit room.
Spring meant not the jonquils in the Yonne woods but the
gardens of the Champs Elysées and the Tuileries with the
chairs beside the main allée filled with women in elegant
light dresses. To Louise de Vintimille he would find it hard
to talk of the fleeting beauties of sunshine and cloud ; she
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could more easily appreciate a beauty that did not change.

To Pauline he had been able to talk subjectively about ideas ;
to Madame de Vintimille he talked objectively of facts. He
might describe the humours of a dinner party to her, send
her a disquisition on the vagaries of Chateaubriand, or talk
of the calls he had paid and the people he had met ; but the
days were past when Joubert could fill his letters with family
news, counting on the fact that it would be read with interest,
or with literary criticism, knowing that his correspondent
would herself have read and weighed the books. Nothing
had quite the savour or the colour that it used todo. Spring
and summer had passed ; autumn had come in friendship as
in all else. :
Joubert insensibly grew more and more hypochondriacal.
One day he had looked in the mirror, and seen that he was an
old man. He used to stay in bed until three in the after-
noon, and to see his literary friends in his room in the mornings.
Madame Joubert was for ever afraid that he would talk too
much, and would interrupt the most interesting of conversations
to spare him, or even forbid his friends to come in at all. For
Joubert’s greatest pretension was now to calm: nothing, he
had discovered, did more harm to his health than strong
emotion. Actually no one was ever more often or more
easily perturbed, though it was never for himself. He might
shut himself up in the cloisters of the mind, but he could not
shut his friends away from the emotions and risks of a life of
action. After he had seen them, or read their letters, he used
to shut his eyes and keep silence for hours, to recover his
strength. He was for ever following a regimen and a diet,
and it was always a new one: sometimes milk, with a little
slow walking over the smoothest paths; sometimes raw
mincemeat, with drives over the roughest roads to shake up
his liver. None of them made much difference, but he took
an impersonal and rather incredulous interest in them, such
as he always reserved for scientific experiments.
Joubert left Paris in the middle of September with less
regret than usual, especially as the Chateaubriands had
promised to come to visit them at Villeneuve that autumn.
When they came there was a new autumnal pleasure, with a
spice of pain in it, in showing Chateaubriand the sandy
path over the hill by which he had used to walk to Passy, and
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 1804-1808
the lanes where he had used to wander with Pauline, before
Chateaubriand knew her. But the cottage where she had
lived, and the little chapel where they had mourned in turn,
he kept to himself: Chateaubriand might be an enchanter,
but he could not have everything. Joubert picked strange
mushrooms in the woods, and Chateaubriand autumn crocuses
in the fields. His bonhomie, a kind of adolescent innocence he
had, a kind of trusting simplicity, made him a delightful
companion. They talked of everything in heaven and earth,
and especially of Pauline. In the evening, a little tired, they
came back to Villeneuve, quiet behind its ancient walls and
still guarded from the insurgent present by half-razed towers.
The vinedressers were home from the vineyards and every
chimney smoked for their suppers. That October the skies
flickered with the Aurora Borealis, and even the nights had a
strange and gentle brilliance. In November this peaceful
happiness, only clouded with tender memories for the anni-
versary of Pauline’s death, was interrupted by news of the
death of Lucile de Caud in Paris; she had been growing
more and more strange, and, the shock apart, not even her
brother grieved for her very deeply. The love that had once
bound them had died even before Lucile did.
When Chateaubriand and his wife returned to Paris in .
December, they left Joubert very tired. He had enjoyed the
privilege of being the first to read what Chateaubriand wrote :
that prose that reminded him of amber that had lain near
attar of roses. But something eternally youthful in its writer
eventually wore him out, and that eternal verve, alternating
only with a conscious melancholy, was not altogether easy to
live with. Joubert fell altogether ill for a time, and only hoped
that, in the peasant phrase, his health was taking a rest.
Inaction and warmth were all that he craved : the warmth
that was in wool and silk, because they came from living
things. He ate very little: toast and water, and honey,
which led him to an infinity of pleasant thoughts about the
life of bees. Even his mind lay fallow, and his notebook
rested unopened in its drawer ; and his soul and heart seemed
weary too, and in need of rest. In January he wrote to Molé,
and asked him to tell him how Madame de Vintimille was ;
she had not written, and either she was ill or she had forgotten
him. He only wished to write to her if he could write to her
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

very beautifully, and now he was not well enough. Every

day he said to himself that if he lived he would write to her the
day after to-morrow : but it was never to-day. His cure was
slow ; even in February the only point in going to Paris
seemed to be that he might there consult new doctors. But
by the spring Joubert was beginning actually to think of writing
a book: a book of psychological portraits of such writers as
Fiévée and Delalot, with their faults, used to model and
define the character and defects of their minds. He did not
like either writer, and was not unwilling that his portraits
should verge on caricature. Gradually the want of nobility
in his subject disgusted him, and the book was never finished.
He returned to Paris at the middle of May. His wife
undertook the journey with more anxiety than usual ; a few
weeks before the coche d’eau had sunk opposite the Jardin des
Plantes, and though sixty cases of soap had alone been drowned,
it was very alarming. They found the Chateaubriands
established in the attics of the Hétel de Coislin, at the corner
of the rue Royale and the Place de la Concorde. Fontanes,
Molé and Joubert fell into the habit of meeting there, and once
they had got their breath again after climbing the stairs, used
to argue until they lost it once more over the aim and technique
of writing. Fontanes, who wrote less and less, was growing
more and more classical in his ideas ; he wished to see every-
thing, even the climax of a tragedy, isolated in a poetic medium
like an object seen beneath a crystal globe. Chateaubriand
was struggling, more empirically with the task of bringing
back colour to a language that had too long striven to be
colourless as statuary. Joubert’s pre-occupations were of
another kind. He maintained that it was the thought, not the
phrase, that must be polished: once the thought was per-
fected, its expression would drop from the pen as lucid and
shining as a drop of water. Argument ran high ; Fontanes
once arrived breathless at half-past eleven at night and
hammered on the door until he woke Chateaubriand to give
him yet another reason why the dramatist Picard should be
set even above Moliére.
Joubert saw something of Madame de Vintimille, but
usually there were too many people with her for real content.
There was a certain Philibert Guéneau de Mussy, whom he
had first met in Pauline’s salon, who seemed to haunt her :

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a young man from Semur en Auxois, nearly twenty-two years
younger than himself, pale and reserved, with intensely blue
eyes. He adored Chateaubriand (he was of the generation
that found their own autobiography in René) ; he adored
Fontanes, and was so uncritical that Fontanes liked him in
return. Delicate in health, prudent in life and calm in
temperament, he used all his strength, prudence and calm
to appear infallible. He and Joubert understood and dis-
liked one another. There was enough jealousy between
them to make them always disagree, but they only quarrelled
over Racine.
Joubert flattered himself that he went as willingly into
society when he knew that people wished to see him as when
he knew that he would enjoy himself. In this spirit he started
out early on Trinity Sunday to visit the Molés at Champla-
treux, in company with his brother Arnaud. It rained and
rained : at Saint Denis his principles weakened, and he
decided that instead of pushing on to Champlatreux they
would go no further than Sannois, where Madame de Vinti-
mille and her sister were staying with old Madame d’ Houdetot.
The valley of Montmorency looked charming in the rain;
and, at Sannois, Joubert saw a house so delightful that he felt
sure it must be Madame d’Houdetot’s. Without making
further enquiries they put up the horse at the neighbouring
inn, and walked there, to find that they were right. At once
they were invited for the day. The company was just what
Joubert enjoyed : Madame de Vintimille and her sister made
him feel expansive and at home ; Madame de la Briche was
handsome (though he did not like her hat) and had been a
friend of Pauline’s ; and Madame d’Houdetot, now seventy-
five, had the legendary charm of one who had been the mis-
tress both of Saint Lambert and of Rousseau. The Jouberts
stayed till eight ; his hostesses made him eat every unwhole-
some and delicious dish that appeared at dinner, and Madame
d’Houdetot made him drink her ratafia. Joubert got wet
again driving home, but was so happy he did not care. The
only excuse he could make to Molé was to describe at length
how much he had enjoyed himself elsewhere than at Champla-
treux.
For the next few days he thought much of Madame
d’Houdetot. She had become one of the legendary figures of
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the eighteenth century ; and here she was a magnet that had
lost its magnetism, her passions burnt out, yet still possessing
the wit, the manners, even the levity of the century and the
world that had gone. Here was living history ; with her aid
he could estimate what the Revolution had gained and lost
for France. At least what it had lost in wit it had gained in
soul. The trouble was that the new civilization was like a
violin that had not been played enough : a little harsh and
lacking in undertones.
Here he was, however, once more embarked upon a social
life. He must live up to it, and look his best, and keep his
bald head warm by wearing a wig. It was an elegant wig with
a curled front, of much the same brown as his nankeen suit ;
it made him look quite fashionable, and kept his head beauti-
fully secure from draughts. Armed with it, he attended even
the Opera with equanimity. He wrote to tell Louise de
Vintimille of the change, with an infinity of tact; but she
regretted it, for she could no longer imagine that he looked
like Plato.
He returned to Villeneuve in September, and in October
the Chateaubriands paid them a short visit on their way back
from Switzerland, a country that she had adored and he had
detested. Chateaubriand’s thoughts were all taken up with
Greece : he must travel there, and see the East, before he
finished his book Les Martyrs. Meanwhile he was occupying
himself with his own Mémoires, and was delighted with the
society of Villeneuve, for it recalled that of Plancoét in his
youth. The three old maids, the Mesdemoiselles Piat, who
were of a good family and had never left Villeneuve, talked to
him of their dogs and of a muff that their father had once
bought at Sens fair, and he felt himself back at his grand-
mother’s. Chateaubriand and Joubert once more made their
pilgrimage to the places that Pauline had known. ‘“ Her
memory is a wound,” said Chateaubriand ; but Joubert felt
that it was his imagination, that for ever made him dream
that he might find her where she had once been, that wounded
his own heart. And perhaps, from that wound, as from some
scarred Arabian tree, a precious balm might drip.
The winter passed peacefully enough. Joubert’s Paris
friends wrote teasingly to tell him that they were expecting
him at their balls and concerts, but he remained placidly by
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his own fireside, reading Herodotus, and Don Quixote and the
masters of eighteenth century criticism. When he was at
Villeneuve, he could concentrate on being himself. He no
longer envisaged that self in action ; being sufficed. When
he read, he analysed his authors ; he had become, in fact, a
Montaigne who did not write Essays.
That year he returned to Paris earlier than usual, on
December 7th. The transition he always found an effort;
when he left Paris, it meant leaving his friends, and when he
left Villeneuve, it meant leaving himself. Each year the
transition grew more difficult, as he grew older and Paris
changed. New bridges named after the victories of Napoleon
were spanning the Seine ; new triumphal gates in honour of
his armies were rising ; new streets were being driven through
old cloisters and old gardens. Paris seemed full of stone dust
and the noise of masons’ mallets and carpenters’ hammers ;
any walk might reveal some familiar landmark, some medieval
turret or Renaissance gateway, in course of demolition. Even
if Joubert did not share in Fontanes’ cult of the past, its death
was none the less saddening.
Joubert was learning to live quietly even in Paris ; he
might go to Madame de la Briche’s concerts and occasionally
be dragged to the Opera, but he spent much time in his own
library. There were few modern books upon his shelves,
but a good set of the classics, and a rich collection of books of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, all annotated by their
owner with hieroglyphics in the margin—crosses, triangles,
flowers, thyrsoi, hands and suns—that indicated what he
thought memorable in them. He could not endure the
thought of a bad book standing on the shelf beside a good
one ; it was like setting an onion beside a rose. To unite
good and bad work in the same series and under the same
binding was to make a bouquet of thyme and nettle. For
this reason, when he read a modern book, if a page displeased
him, he tore it out ; so Molé, and Guéneau de Mussy, as well
as greater men such as Rousseau and Buffon, only existed on
his shelves in a limp and fragmentary state.
The chief event of the spring of 1806 was Chateaubriand’s
projected tour in the East. He read so much about Greece
and Asia Minor, and talked so much more, that all his friends
began to feel as if they were going too. When the final
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departure came in July, Joubert wrote to Madame de

Vintimille to describe it.
“‘ Chateaubriand left Paris on Sunday, July 13th, at
half-past three in the afternoon, to give himself the pleasure
of travelling all night. During the morning he had time
to spare, and spent part of it in visiting his dearest friends,
although he had bidden them all farewell the evening |
before. He saw among others Monsieur Molé, to whom,
in parenthesis, he commended in case of accident his
funeral oration, of which he indicated the place, while
leaving to him the choice of text and heads. He also
recommended him, if he failed to return, to go to England
to look for the papers that he left there when times were
bad : and Monsieur Molé gave him his promise. If you
ask me what humour dominated him while he made these
prudent and lugubrious arrangements, I shall reply .. .
that he was gay. He passed more than an hour with me
and we laughed immoderately. Fontanes can also
guarantee his good humour. When he had returned
home, he found he had still time left, and to save himself
from boredom, sent out for arms: I mean for arms to
buy, pistols, carbines and espfingoles. I name these last
on the evidence of the story told me, for I don’t know
what they are ... He must have needed much skill
to fit this addition to his equipment into a carriage that
was already full, and above all to hide it from the very
penetrating eyes of Madame de Chateaubriand, who had
declared to him the night before, in my presence, that
when travelling she would rather see a brigand than a
pistol.
‘When all these arrangements were made, the horses
arrived, and they departed. He had for carriage a heavy,
large and handsome dormeuse ; it is his pilgrim’s staff.
This carriage rolled away with him and his wife on the
back seat, an enormous maid opposite them, and, on the
box, the cook’s brother whom he is taking to Constanti-
nople, whom, by a whim at which he will assuredly laugh
for the entire journey, he has had the idea of dressing as
an icoglan. I must tell you that this icoglan; who is a
nice boy, otherwise, is at least forty-six, and has the
skin of a burnt roast. Well, he has dressed him up in a
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 1804-1808
kind of blue turban trimmed with gold braid, and a little
waistcoat and breeches of the same colour. He forgot
the moustache, which is why the poor man, who looks
very gentle and has the eye of a decent cabinetmaker such
as he has always been, will not be able to frighten anyone
and will make everyone laugh, beginning with his master.
*‘ It happened that the postillion was dressed like the
servant and in a new livery, which made the portress
indulge in conjectures which she communicated to all
those who came in, one after another, to dine with her
mistress that day. Fortunately for her the traveller did
not hear her. ‘Do you see, sir? Do you see, Ma’am?
The postillion and the servant are in the same livery.
Monsieur is travelling at the Government’s expense. Oh!
he has a very fine position!’ Some charitable persons
endeavoured to disabuse her, but she persisted in her high
opinion of this departure, and,. as the carriage went by,
was seen to make one of those profound inclinations, one
of those curtseys into nothingness, which her like reserve
for the occasions in which is involved the respect that is
given to crowned heads. It was the last salutation that
the poor boy received ; I take it for a good augury. He
did not leave, and will not come back, all that the portress
believed ; but he will return rich in fine thoughts and
beautiful imaginings, wherewith he will increase his
worth, his reputation, and the place that he occupies
in men’s minds. In any event he will always hold an
immense and most lofty one in his friends’ hearts, although
he makes no effort to spare them and they have all earned
the right to reproach him.’
Letters had since reached Joubert to say that the postillion
had nearly drowned them at Nevers, and the pistols had
exploded at Lyons, and that then all had proceeded happily as
far as Milan.
**T am charmed,” wrote Joubert to Madame de
Vintimille ; ‘‘ but, after such news, Madame de Coislin
and I have deliberated and have come to the following
conclusions ; first, that we will keep these imprudences
secret ; second, that we will hunt everywhere for a man
able to please us and to make us love him as he does ;
third, that, if we find such a man, we will forbid
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Chateaubriand all commerce with us and all administra-

tion of his own talent. In fact, we need a Chateaubriand
with more sense. See if you know one. We would
gladly break with the former, if you can provide us with a
second ; and would advise you todo the same. But I sadly
fear that that head belongs to only one man and that in
the end we shall find ourselves eternally condemned to love
him just as he is, constantly, furiously, and infuriatedly.”
Chateaubriand succeeded in persuading his wife to travel
no further than Venice. Thence she wrote to Madame
Joubert :
‘*T write to you from on board the Golden Lion,
for here the houses are only vessels at anchor. One sees
everything in the world in Venice, except the ground.
There is, however, a little corner, calfed the Piazza San
Marco, where the inhabitants go to dry themselves in the
evening ; I shall go there, too, after my dinner. JI vero
Pulcinella, who has survived the Doge, lives in this fine
square. For the rest, I will keep Italy to talk of when I
come to Villeneuve. .. .”
She returned to Paris, to await letters from her husband.
None came. By August she was in a great state of mind, and
was sure that he was dead. Letters eventually arrived,
however, and she reached Villeneuve in September upset
by no greater catastrophe than the loss of her trunk. She grew
calmer there, telling Joubert how to make the best of his garden,
and acquiring country recipes from Victoire. Yet, much as
they liked her, and much as they respected the patience with
which she endured her husband’s vagaries, there was something
pointed about her—her nose, her mind, her voice—that
made them rejoice when news came that Chateaubriand
had left Asia Minor and was on his way home. Joubert found
it tiring to live with someone whose opinions on every subject
were fixed and unchangeable, and was not altogether sorry
when Ceéleste de Chateaubriand returned to the Hotel de
Coislin.
The Jouberts went back to Paris at the very end of
December ;_ the winter was uneventful. Chateaubriand
came back from his travels in May, 1807 ; Joubert had been
reading books of travel in Asia and Africa in order to be ready
for him. They watched with interest and disapproval the
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 1804-1808
boutades he promptly launched against Napoleon, in articles
in the Mercure, and his purchase of an estate near Sceaux that
he could not afford.
By the middle of September, Joubert and Victoire were
back at Villeneuve, and since the new house of the Vallée
aux Loups was not yet ready the Chateaubriands soon
followed them, together with Arnaud. Joubert used to spend
the morning in his pleasant, long, low room with a pastoral
scene, rather indifferently painted, built in over the mantel-
_ piece. He would work in bed, propped up with a great many
cushions, with a wadded waistcoat and a large cotton nightcap
with a ribbon bow, to keep him warm, and all his little note-
books spread out on the coverlet before him. He would rest
with closed eyes, and think gently ; and then leap violently
out of bed to dash across to the green spare room to share his
thoughts with Chateaubriand. The house was beginning to
look more elegant than it had in the old lady’s time : in the
spare room there were engravings of Atala and a grand new
bed with urns on the top of the posts that upheld its tent
draperies. In the salon was the bookcase that Pauline had
left him, of rosewood with mirrors, her mahogany sécrétaire
with china on the top, and Vigée le Brun’s portrait of her,
painted in the happy days before the Revolution.
But Chateaubriand was not a tidy guest ; he left a dread-
ful inkstain on the good square table provided for him to write
on. Not all Victoire’s eau de Javel could remove it, and it had
to remain as a lasting souvenir of the visit of a great man.
They made a few expeditions : to Ancy le Franc, Semur
and Bourbilly, and to Bussy, to see the portraits of the belles of
Louis XIV’s court, who reminded Joubert of Madame de
Vintimille ; and to Epoisses, where they talked of Madame de
Sévigné. Before Christmas they were back in Paris, and
Joubert was soon enjoying the society of his friends and feeling
that they were delightfully exhausting.
Circumstances, and Fontanes, were conspiring to bring
Joubert out of his idle peace. In 1806 the Imperial University
had been founded ; in 1808 it was reformed and put in work-
ing order. On March 17th, Fontanes was nominated Grande
Maitre de ? Université Impériale. He continued to be Président du
Corps Législatif, and in May was made Count of the Empire.
He was firmly resolved that Joubert should be one of his
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colleagues in educational work. In September, 1808, Fontanes

had to submit a list of names to the Emperor for nomination to
the Conseil de I’Instruction Publique. Most of them were famous ;
the exception was Joubert.
“The choice of this man,” Fontanes wrote to the
Emperor, “is that to which I attach the most importance.
Monsieur Joubert ... has been my friend for thirty
years. He is the companion of my life, the confidant of
all my thoughts. His mind and spirit are most lofty.
I should be happy if your Majesty would accept me as
surety for him.”
Fontanes had a heart of gold, but he was sometimes trying, or
so Joubert thought when he found himself appointed. _

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 CHAPTER THIRTEEN

1808-1815

HE appointment of Fontanes as Grand Maitre de l Uni-

versité marked the triumph of the religious party over
the philosophers. His appointment of Joubert as a
colleague represented a skilful attempt to throw a bridge
between the two parties. Joubert’s early training at Toulouse
had made him sympathetic with the aims, and familiar with
the principles, of the great teaching Orders, and his subsequent
friendship with the moralists of three generations—Diderot,
Bonald and Molé—had made him no less sympathetic and
familiar with educational ideals of another kind. Such links
were very necessary. The Council included both men of
science and ecclesiastics, and Fontanes himself, who was no
born conciliator, had to reconcile not only its disparate elements
but also his own ideals of religion and classicism with the
political opportunism of his master. .
For the aim of Napoleon’s new educational system was,
at all events in the eyes of its creator, a political one. ‘‘ It has
always seemed to me,”’ he told Fontanes, “‘ that the education
of the young is not in harmony with the rest of our institutions.
We bring up young Frenchmen as if they were to live under a
republic or a dictatorship. The history of the Greek and
Roman republics, the democratic form of the governmentof
Sparta, the expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome, the estab-
lishment of the Archons in Greece, the courage of Brutus, or
the tyranny of the Caesars: these are the things which are
customarily set before their eyes. Young people are wiser
than one thinks. While the ashes of the Revolution are still
smoking, such teaching offers too many dangers.”
Fontanes was a good classicist, and a good courtier ; to
answer was not easy. ‘“‘ Sire,” he replied, ‘‘in that case one
would have to cut out the study of the dead languages alto-
gether from our educational system ; it is impossible to study
Greek and Latin authors without speaking of republics.”
“Yes ; but the teacher engaged in explaining them must

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accompany them with his own little commentary. Besides,

could not all the old editions be suppressed, and new ones
be printed, in which enlightened censors should have made the
necessary cuts, so that the children should be given only a
selection from the facts of history, purged from all seditious
phrases ? ”’
** Sire, the wishes of your Majesty are orders.”
Orders they might be for Fontanes, if orders reluctantly
obeyed ; but orders they were not for the rest of his Committee,
in less close touch with their august master, and with lesser
careers depending on his favour. For once ecclesiastics and
philosophers found themselves united in the defence of history.
Joubert had long maintained that it was better to be
above, than in, office : but once appointed he was inclined both
to take his work seriously and to enjoy it. Office became
tolerable if it was held under so old a friend, and work bearable
if he shared its responsibility. Joubert settled down to read
the History of the University of Paris with fewer qualms than he
would have expected. War with Austria and the victory of
Wagram left him unmoved ; but he laughed to find himself
watching Fontanes distributing prizes to the students of the
four lycées of Paris.
Joubert was soon busy, not with details of administration,
but with general principles. What they had to do, he thought
was to teach the new generation the physical science of to-day,
and the literature and ethics of the past ; what they had to
encourage the teachers to give was the indulgence and the
attention which make the thoughts of others blossom. Their
task was less to create than to recreate : Everso sucurrere saeclo
might well be the motto of the Imperial University. As to
the schools, his own experiences at Toulouse had taught him
that the masters should be the guides, and not the intimates,
of their pupils ; the boys should seek advice from their masters,
and companionship from their schoolfellows. Thence he
proceeded to a study of the actual curriculum, and came to the
conclusion that much of it was useless. Grammar, for example,
as it was theoretically taught, produced no principles, but a
multitude of abstractions, no sense of usage, but a babble of
words. Then came the point when his newly-discovered
principles, already a little battered in committee, were to face |
the wear and tear of real life in his first round of inspections.
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 1808-1815,
He and Fontanes had arranged that it should take place in
his own country, in the Department of the Yonne, so that he
might learn to endure its fatigues with the familiar comforts
of Villeneuve as a base. His inspection, however, was delayed
for a long time by bad health. Joubert’s nervous instability,
officially diagnosed as a flying rheumatism, was followed by a
long period of nervous apathy, in which he was fit for nothing.
The inspection was postponed for a year, and Joubert
returned to Paris, Fontanes and Committees. The Petits
Séminaires and the Church secondary schools had been brought
under the inspectorate, but Fontanes was so tactful and even
deferential towards the ecclesiastical authorities that the change
had no meaning. Napoleon, however, was still afraid of the
power of the Church, and protested against Fontanes’ inter-
pretation of the decree. The impatient Fontanes promptly
offered his resignation, which the Emperor refused to accept.
Joubert wasted a lot of time over the storm in a teacup ; and
when it had blown itself out he, Fontanes, the Church and its
schools were exactly where they had been before.
The next piece of work was provided by Louis Bonaparte,
the King of Holland. He wished to reorganise education in his
Kingdom, and in June, 1809, consulted Fontanes, who for-
warded the letter to Joubert, together with a folio volume
sent by the King, for him to make a précis. Joubert was, as
usual, ill and, as usual, full of ideas.
“I was dead yesterday’? ; he wrote. “I feel a
little resuscitated to-day, and I should like not to spoil the
feeling ; but it depends on how great a hurry you are in.
If you only wish to reply to the King’s letter, you can do
it at once ; butif you wish to give him pleasure, you must
take a little time. There are doubts, scruples, con-
fusions of thought : to dissipate all these, there must be
lucidity. The subject must be treated with some depth,
if with a light touch, and we must discuss our notes.
Will you take the risk of waiting a few more days, and
give me this week? ... Think, and decide. I can,
with the stump of my pen, dispatch hurriedly what
remains to be done; but I shall wear myself out and
spoil everything. If you can wait over the holidays, I
can go to Issy, take a bath, and finish without fatigue
and with pleasure. Your King will be better served, and
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you will end better pleased with him, me and yourself.”

Fontanes knew his Joubert, and pressed for a quick answer.
He got it, possibly less philosophical, and certainly more
practical than usual : including a prayer that heaven might
defend the children of the poor from learning all that the
Dutch Ministry wished to have them taught.
“‘ They would be no longer fit to work. The strength
of a man, if it is drawn to the brain, leaves the hands.
Whosoever is fitted to give profound and _ sustained
attention to what is abstract becomes unfitted for what is
mechanical. Nature has provided for the necessary
tasks of life by giving the majority of men brains that do
not work.”
Joubert was all against the possibility of experiment allowed
for in the Dutch code ; such experiments in education, if they
did not prove phenomenally successful, did nothing but
break the tradition of respect for antiquity, rouse ambition
and destroy the modesty of mediocrity. In such work lay
vanity, and in inaction, good sense. Fontanes hurriedly
wrote an appreciative letter, asking for a final instalment;
that received, he could shine, even though it were with
borrowed light. So the next day, for the third day running,
Joubert once more took up his quill, and continued with a
précis and criticism of the Dutch plan for secondary education,
which he found inferior to the scheme for primary schools.
He made the criticism that the Dutchmen were wrong in
thinking that a change of subject was enough to rest a child
and enable him to concentrate afresh ; it might rest a grown
man, but a child needed movement, games and real distrac-
tions. The Dutch scheme might make a hard-working boy
seem more intelligent than he was, but it would be a false and
unprofitable seeming that could lead to nothing. No child
should be taught to be cleverer than he was. Joubert was too
tired to finish that day ; Fontanes must wait for his opinion on
the Dutch universities until the morrow. Fontanes reluctantly
waited, only to receive a grand condemnation of Protestant
education in its later stages, and a still finer eulogy of the
classical training given by the Teaching Orders in Catholic
countries. ‘The difference between them was the difference
between grammar and literature. The letter ended with a
magnificent condemnation of modern education, which left
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 1808-1815
its pupils ignorant of how little they knew. The letter was one
of the best and most consecutive pieces of literature that
Joubert ever produced ; but it was not of much use to Fontanes
when he came to compose his final report to the King of
Holland.
Joubert returned to Villeneuve in the middle of October
to make the postponed inspection of the schools of the Yonne.
He announced his departure in a letter to Fontanes that
began “‘Monseigneur,” and after giving him details of the
proposed journey, continued with a jesting appreciation of
himself.
“I say to youin all sincerity and in that popular
style which suits frankness so well: ‘ My lord, you are
very lucky to have me.’ I do my duty remarkably well,
and I know how to amuse you in the process ; I play
with your ermine and enliven your royalty. You have
subjugated everyone around you except me. Every voice
is silent before yours, except mine. I tell you everything
I think, and in your company I think what I please.
But for me, you would not have in your empire a subject
who would always dare to tell you the entire truth. But
for me, there would not be a free man at your court, or at
least not one who, having regard to ancient intimacy and
friendship, could appear free, as I can, publicly and
completely, without offending against the proprieties.
But for me, you would not enjoy, outside your family, the
delights of contradiction ; but for me, nothing would
ever recall to your memory the sweet and ancient state
of equality.
“* And remark this, my lord: he who knows how to
laugh with you at his own occupations, and at yours, is
a man of gravity and even of austerity ; he who plays
with your dignities is the man who attaches the greatest
importance to your rank, to your functions, who respects
them most in his heart and mind ; the man who contra-
dicts you most often is he who has for you, in secret, the
most decided weakness ; the man who is the least your
slave is also the man who is most devoted to you.
** You have never obtained from me, and you never
will obtain, a blind approbation always ; but you have
always exercised over me, and always will, each and every

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day, in spite of yourself and of me, a more glorious ascend-

ancy. For thirty years and some months I have loved
you; that is but a trifle; for thirty years and some
months I have had for your talent in all its details, for
the great traits of conduct and of character, a sentiment
much greater than friendship ; a sentiment more rare
and more lofty ; a sentiment which few souls can inspire
and few keep ; a sentiment of which few men are worthy
and few great men even capable ; in fine, a unique
sentiment, to say all, of an incurable admiration. . .”
Joubert duly made his tour of inspection, and made it as
a crusade in favour of the classics and of religion, of austerity
in judgment and of gentleness in conduct, and of a spiritual
reticence that should make the teacher inspire his pupils to
be themselves rather than impress his own soul upon them.
Altogether both Joubert and the schoolmasters of the Yonne
found the inspection more interesting and less alarming than
they had anticipated. Joubert returned to Villeneuve with a
new idea of the infinity of things a man could do well if only
he were forced to do them. He reported his findings in due
form to the inspector-general, with a postscript, not quite
official, to say that he had written twice to the Grand-Maitre
and that he thought Fontanes might at least have indicated
to him that he had read the letters. He would never in his
life write to him again, even though the whim to do so might
seize him from time to time. Indeed Fontanes’ neglect in
replying to his outburst of affection had hurt him deeply.
He wrote to Chénedollé, who wished to be appointed a pro-
fessor, with a tender kindness that strove to efface the memory
of Fontanes’ casual forgetfulness to himself.
Joubert returned to Paris after Christmas, having success-
fully avoided an official reception, at which Fontanes had
covered himself with glory by declaring to Napoleon that
youth no longer had need of the example of the heroes of
antiquity, now that they had in the Emperor an example of
perfect heroism. Joubert attended his educational committees
and consoled himself with the reading of seventeenth century
writers. He was for ever advising Fontanes about education
in general and the University in particular, and for ever being
disappointed when expediency proved more important than
the principles he advocated. Fontanes, indeed, found him
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sometimes a difficult colleague. Either he took the view that
it was important to air a question, but not to come to a decision
about it, or else he became intuitively the partisan of one side
or another, and then obstinately supported his own view
without any dispassionate examination of his reasons for
holding it. Even his virtues-were not always administratively
convenient, and he was apt to be a tiresome critic on official
occasions. ‘The Latin discourses pronounced by Fontanes’
four professors of rhetoric on the occasion of Napoleon’s
marriage to Marie-Louise left him completely cold.
Joubert himself was a little solitary. The Chateaubriands
were away at the Vallée aux Loups; Fontanes, work apart,
lived in another world; Chénedollé was established as Professor
at Rouen, and Madame de Vintimille seemed more taken up
with Guéneau de Mussy and his new wife than with Joubert.
Joubert had his own troubles nearer home. |His son had always
been healthy and in childhood had shown every sign of promise;
but as he grew older an inexplicable change became apparent.
He had a good brain, well taught, and a good heart, well
trained; but he became the victim of a moral inertia that
prevented him from doing anything. Joubert and Victoire
might strive, each in their own fashion, but nothing could
overcome the boy’s spiritual immobility. He was like a
beautiful piece of machinery of which the spring had
been broken, and so he remained. Poor Joubert! There
was an inevitable element of personal regret in his inspection
of schoolboys, so brilliant, so merry, so full of the vitality that
his own son lacked. He made another tour in May and June
1810, and returned to Villeneuve seriously ill. The only
entry in his notebook for six weeks was ‘‘ Ma grande et bonne
maladie. Deo gratias.’ He recovered slowly, but was able to
go in November, with his wife, on a tour of the South that
lasted until they returned to Villeneuve in the following July.
The South was not congenial to Joubert. No country was less
like the Yonne than Provence ; and it followed, no country
less naturally friendly to him. A man might find there
passions of love and hate; a mystic, tortured visions; an artist,
a delirium of form and colour; but a melancholic philosopher
could find there neither repose nor inspiration. The very
climate was uncertain as the sea. There might be days of
milky calm, with the air like still grey-green water; there
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

might be days of azure brilliance when the light struck sparkles

from stone as if from breaking waves ; but the menace of gale
and tempest was never far off.
At Nice, Joubert was forced to record that he was horribly
bored for the first time in his life; but he returned to Villeneuve
his own man again. He was soon staying at the Vallée aux
Loups and boring Céleste de Chateaubriand most profoundly
with his talk of rectors, inspectors, professors and bursars.
She felt hardly sorry when he talked himself into such a state
of fatigue that he had to take to his bed for a week. He
celebrated his convalescence by painting to them all, with
Chateaubriand’s aid, the: happiness and independence one
might enjoy on board a ship for ever going over the face of the
waters under the vault of heaven: an infinite dream of
contemplation. The two artists were enchanted by the vision
they had called up; but Madame Joubert suddenly asked what
they were going to eat? Would they not occasionally have
to put into port for bread ?
By the autumn Joubert was briskly scolding Fontanes for
listening to the opinion of a junior inspector rather than his
own, for appointing a young man from the South to Caen,
where he would certainly die of pneumonia if he did not go
bankrupt first, and for not appointing Chénedollé to a better
post. By the end of October he was scolding Fontanes for
quite a new sin: the sin of avarice.
“Ah, Monsieur le Grand-Maitre, for Heaven’s sake
and your own, govern paternally, nobly and loyally, justly
and royally, and to say all in one word that can only be
said to you, govern poetically. They make you commit
every day in your official acts, crimes of stinginess that
they would not permit to an author of charades. I have
seen even prose-writers indignant at them. ... Talking
of avarice, our vices pursue us up to our last moment. It
would indeed be singular and deplorable if this most
wretched and most hideous of vices, from whom you have
so handsomely escaped on your own account, should
seize hold of you in the name of the University. ...
“JT tremble when I think with what ease your suc-
cessor, whoever he may be—for you will have a successor,
and you will perhaps have one soon—will ameliorate the
lot of the men who have been entrusted to you, and will
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 1808-1815
give them cause to find in his administration more pro-
tection, more forethought, more consideration and more
humanity than in yours.”
Two days later Joubert returned to the fray.
*“T say, Monsteur le Grand-Maitre, that there is not in
the University a professor who should not be lodged,
warmed, washed, lit, watered, fed, shaved, and trans-
ported. I would even add, dosed. ... They may say
what they like and do what they please, but there will
never be honour, happiness or constant success in the
University so long as the greater number of its mainstays
run the risk of lodging in a boarding-house, eating in a
cook-shop, travelling, staff in hand, and being nursed
if they are ill in the hospital. ... Well! When a fat
Member of Council, like M. Noél or M. Rendu, or asmart
and lively inspector, like M. Guéneau or me, depart in
a post chaise on some brilliant expedition, they are paid
their weight in gold, their salary remains untouched, and
even what they save, if I may be permitted to mention
such a bye-product of travelling, increases with every
movement they make. And when a starveling professor,
burdened with the weight of the scholastic year and over-
whelmed by worry, finds himself promoted to some
obscure post a shade more lucrative than that which he
holds, he has to go to take it up, sometimes at the other
end of the Empire, at his own charge and expense: he
has to impoverish himself at every step and arrive ruined !
I stop, for the moment, at this inequality in our
weights and measures, and tell you that it must be
redressed and expiated, by proposing to the Council the
law which I inscribe here, for law there already exists:
‘To travel at their own expense from one school to
another shall be a penalty inflicted on teachers who
change their posts because they have failed in their duty.’
That is what your law ought to be, a disciplinary and not
a bursarial regulation.”
Fontanes, indeed, needed an occasional recall to reality;
he used to go to the Tuileries three times a week to talk to the
Emperor about the University, and was apt to return full of
stories and more interested in high politics than in Higher
Education. He amused Napoleon, who realized that Fontanes
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

gave his devotion to Louis XIV, and only a provisional

acceptance to a Bonaparte. To talk with him was not a
bad test of public opinion. Fontanes was still unregenerate
at heart; he amused Joubert and shocked some of his col-
leagues by keeping a bust of Venus in his official library; he
might be an Imperial functionary, but he remained a classicist
and a gentleman.
Joubert followed an obscurer destiny. He saw Madame
de Vintimille, but not often; when they met she was too busy
telling him stories of their acquaintances to take much interest
in his own troubles. That summer Chateaubriand had been
standing for election to the Academy, and she had taken him
to pay one of the necessary visits of ceremony, to the Abbé
Morellet. They had found him asleep in an armchair before
the fire, with Chateaubriand’s Itinéraire de Paris 4 Férusalem open
on hislap. He had woken with a start at their entry, and had
apologized by saying, ‘Jl_y a des longueurs, il_y a des longueurs!”
before he realized who his visitors were. It was a good
story, and lost nothing by Madame de Vintimille’s telling of it.
By April, Joubert and Madame de Vintimille had almost
quarrelled: he had been ill in bed for six weeks, and she had
not written or come to see him. He complained; she wrote
at last, not too seriously, and he replied on the same note:
** With your nice little letter, with its turned-up nose,
do you think you are quits, and that after such a mis-
demeanour as yours it is enough to look nice to be in the
right? I have kept my room for fifty days; I am still
possessed and obsessed by an accursed silent catarrh,
that has kept me in bed, that has made me spit blood,
that no longer makes any noise but which still torments
all my muscles and all my nerves, having slipped in
between them. You did not once send to enquire after
me, and in reparation and apology you merely content
yourself with saying to me, with the insolent air and
tone of someone in a good humour: ‘I was cross, you
were cross, let us cease to be cross.’
* All in good time. So much assurance and so well-
turned and brazen a levity altogether disconcert me. I
no longer know what I have done with my anger, but I
reserve to myself all its rights, and if I ever find it again
you will hear about it. f
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 1808-1815
““ Meanwhile I will come to see you, smiling or
grumbling, or perhaps both, with the first ray of sunlight
that shines upon me. I will reserve my time, from noon
till one. It is, in the ordinary course of your days, a
time when the sun hardly ever sees you outside your
houses. 37
The Jouberts spent Chateaubriand’s name-day, the 4th
of October, at the Valley, but it was their last visit ; Chateau-
briand’s financial ill-luck, generally but not always the result
of his imprudence, was not compatible with the maintenanceofa
country estate. It was a troubled visit; their host was upset
at the prospect of leaving the Valley, and the political situation
and the rumours from Russia did nothing to calm his spirit.
Joubert spent the winter at Villeneuve, in poor health;
the horrors of the Moscow campaign seemed to haunt him.
One of his colleagues at the Ministry was the Chevalier de
Langeac, who had given him work in his first impecunious
years at Paris. Now Joubert had repaid the debt ; not only
was the Chevalier a functionary under Fontanes, but Joubert
handed over to him his own old manuscript anecdotes, which
Langeac published, with some additions, as Anecdotes anglatses
et américaines, in 1813. Langeac might not be a wholly
estimable character, but Joubert really preferred him to his
apparently blameless and exemplary colleague, Guéneau de
Mussy. He disliked in Guéneau both his geometrical neatness
and narrowness of mind, and his pretensions to poetry and
romance. Guéneau de Mussy would presume upon his
functions as an Inspector to trespass upon Joubert’s own
sphere, and would succeed in persuading everyone that he had
done it from the highest motives. Joubert unconsciously
regarded him as his rival with Madame de Vintimille; and
that summer the birth of Guéneau de Mussy’s child stressed
the difference between their ages and their hopes. Louise de
Vintimille, herself childless, adored babies; Joubert might be
willing, as he said, to pull the stars from the sky for her benefit,
but he could offer nothing so attractive to her as a small child.
Once he had had ideas to write about, but no patience ; now
an infinity of patience was his, but ideas had left him. He
felt older and iller, the shadow of himself; Madame de
Chastenay said of him that he looked like a soul who had found
a body by accident, and was trying to make the best of it.
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

Even the crop of tuberoses failed that year. On July 22nd,

1813, the anniversary of their as meeting, he wrote to
Madame de Vintimille :
‘**T] remember as in a dream that Joubert you speak
of and that you call amiable. He has been nearly dead,
for two or three years, from constriction of a heart once
full of confidence and hope. This has made him very
retiring and very uncommunicative, although sometimes
he may disguise it, through effort or habit. The man who
has succeeded him is a Joubert without tenderness. He
lives in himself, and at home; he no longer tries to speak,
and even avoids the opportunity of speaking. He bears
some kindness towards all the points on the earth’s surface
where people have the patience to want him and to invite
him, but he no longer finds any pleasure there.
“* He would find a very great one in seeing you assidu-
ously and in cultivating your kindness, if he could be
necessary to you; but he can now only be endured.
Look upon me as a shadow of myself, that will sometimes
appear before you with the semblance of the same life
and the reality of the same attachment as before. But
remember that it is all that remains of me. . .
* Be sure that I would willingly go a hundred leagues
to see you for a moment, and that, if I go elsewhere for
travel’s sake, it is to you that I would go to arrive. I
add that I would go as willingly a hundred steps as a hun-
dred leagues, if only I could be sure of arriving in a sup-
portable state, which is what I can now hope for but rarely.
I am resigned to everything, but not to being a crashing
bore, and above alltobethatto you. There, in passing and
under the inviolable seal of the most sacred confidence,
is the great secret of the rarity of my visits. Do not
let yourself be deceived in the matter. It may happen
to me again to flee from you, but never to forget you.
“P.S.—There are no tuberoses this year: this
bouquet is lacking to the festival and I have not been able
to give it to myself. But for this horrible weather, my
room would have been full of them. This flower is sacred
to you; it was so once, upon such a day, and every year I
remember it. To-day I regret its perfume and its beauty,
and I celebrate its absence smite I may not enjoy the
enchantment of its possession.”
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 1808-1815
Madame de Vintimille and Fontanes were both plunged
deep in the rumours, the gossip and the intrigue that
heralded the fall of Napoleon. Joubert remained outside
it all. He had no ties or traditions to make him think the
monarchy worth another Revolution; he was just liberal
enough to feel that any blind backward leap might be as
dangerous as too hurried a progress. The passage of armies
did not interest him, though the convoys of wounded tore his
heart. Moreover he could hardly feel that the nation wanted
the Bourbons back; the cry was less an enthusiastic ‘* Vive le
Roi!” than a hesitant ‘‘ Vive le Roi quand-méme.’”’ As usual he
consoled himself with Plato, Pascal and Madame de Sévigné,
and with the consideration of the principles that lay behind
the practice of the arts. When the Restoration came, it
brought with it an official blindness to human quality that
answered to his worst fears. Fontanes appeared in all his
splendour to welcome Louis XVIII when he entered Paris
on May 3rd, 1814, and was as assiduous at his court as he had
been at Napoleon’s. He tried to amuse the King with the
story of Napoleon’s attempt to suppress any mention of a
republic from the teaching of history. Louis XVIII listened
very carefully. Fontanes continued with an account of how
misplaced Napoleon had found the great peroration of Massil-
lon; he, a bishop, had dared to say in the presence of a King:
** Dieu seul est grand, mes freres.”’ ‘The Emperor had considered
that the equality of all men in heaven was a dangerous doctrine
for the Church to preach, for people might conclude that there
was therefore no reason for respecting inequality on earth.
Fontanes was a good conversationalist, but he did not
know his Bourbons. ‘“‘ Indeed,” replied Louis XVIII, when
he had finished, ‘‘ Bonaparte had well learned his profession
of kingship. He was right: an indefinite equality in a state
is the worst of evils.’ In February, Fontanes found his post
suppressed, although since he was an old royalist from his
émigré days, he was rewarded with a peerage, the Grand
Cordon of the Legion of Honour, a Privy Councillorship and
a Marquisate. Joubert’s work came to an end at the same
time; but his only official reward, and that through Madame
de Vintimille’s influence, was to be made a Chevalier of the
Legion of Honour. He might laugh a little wryly, but
Victoire and Villeneuve were vastly pleased.
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 CHAPTER FOURTEEN

1815-1823

HE Restoration did something to separate Joubert from

his old friends. The fact that he had never been of their
world suddenly became more obvious. If he appeared
in their salons, those who did not know him well regarded him
much as the fashionable society of Toulouse had done thirty
years before: and he was not now content with the réle of
petit abbé. The Marquis de Fontanes, when he was at his
house at Courbevoie, still had time to think with affection of
his old friend. That retired politician could lead a peaceful
and lazy existence in his garden on the banks of the Seine, and
sleep and dream and read Ovid and Horace under its lime
trees, and somehow produce his admirable Anacreontic odes
in an atmosphere to which Joubert belonged as of right. But
when the Marquis was in Paris his paths led in other directions
than the top floor of a shabby house at the wrong end of the
rue Saint Honoré; and with no common work to bind them
the two saw little of each other. The Vicomte de Chateau-
briand had plunged into politics and political writing: when
his Reflexions politiques appeared Joubert found a new softness
and insipidity in his style. It was beautiful, but weak; and
its virtues only served to show the magnitude of its vices. This
weakness, this want of living enthusiasm, was the element of
which Joubert was most conscious in the new régimé.
Joubert was soon ill, as he so often was in the winter, but
this time Madame de Vintimille wrote to him and promised
to come to see him: he contrived to make himself an heureux
imaginaire and to endure his rheumatisms with cheerfulness.
Madame de Vintimille declared that the test of a man’s worth
was the quality of his old age, so that Joubert could take a
certain pride in accepting the disabilities of his own age—he
was now sixty—as tests of magnanimity. Moreover he felt
no resentment at his old age or the manner of it; he had been
his own Fate and spun his own destiny. He remained in
Paris even through the Hundred Days, when nearly all his
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 1815-1823
royalist friends had to escape as best they might to England
or Belgium. Current politics moved him little; the Café
Montausier in the Palais Royal might set up a platform
from which the supporters of the Emperor harangued the people
at the round iron tables, but his own accustomed café was
- mercifully out of earshot. His notebook for March, 1815,
contained no allusion to Napoleon, but some profound thoughts
on style and taste. The nearest he came to politics was to
consider the question of liberty of thought, the day after
Napoleon entered Paris. With April he was beginning to
notice with regret that to talk of prosperity and commerce was
an unphilosophical way of making history, and that to scorn
the past was to scorn all that was enduring in beauty. With
May he was growing anxious for the future of religion. June
was exciting enough for the entries in the notebook to be
sparse and scanty; but with Waterloo the interrupted stream
of thought was tranquilly renewed.
He continued in Paris, inevitably saddened by its changed
atmosphere. After Waterloo the capital was more conscious of
defeat than she had been at the first Restoration; the Allied
troops were longer in possession, and as a_ recurring
phenomenon proved more disquieting. The French might
grow used to the sight of kilted Highlanders and enormous
Prussians on guard at each of the city gates, at each of the
bridges, and as sentinels before the palaces and many of the
great hotels: but they did not like them. There were few
ceremonies or entertainments; an atmosphere of clouded and
severe reserve had descended like a frost upon the city. Even
a cup of coffee in the gardens of the Palais Royal lost some of
its savour when the Palace had a strong foreign guard, with
loaded cannon, sentinels posted and muskets piled. Its
galleries were as much a vortex as ever, but the stream of
humanity was changed: storm had brought there Hungarians
in strange sixteenth century uniforms, Cossacks of the Imperial
Guard in wide trousers and high narrow caps, Prussians,
small-eyed and fat-necked, with tall feathers in their caps,
Highlanders, hard-featured and bony, drinking in the sights
around them with inflexible gravity and refusing to show
their inward amazement even at the bonnets. A dashing
English hussar and a slow-treading Guardsman would un-
consciously elbow a silent and grizzled veteran of Napoleon’s
. 189
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

army, who looked as if he would willingly sabre the lot.

It was an ungrateful world ; only the men who had
suffered most in the imperial campaigns still honoured Napo-
leon. The ballad singers on the quays sang comic accounts of
the Emperor’s various flights, with infinite fun and severity;
and the people who once had used to crowd these same quays
to see the Emperor ride by, applauded the satire vociferously.
Joubert grew so tired of the air Vive Henri Quatre that he found
himself remembering with pleasure that he had once been a
functionary of the Republic.
That autumn Paris was invaded by a horde of foreign
visitors, for the most part English, who had hurried over to
see the great collections of works of art that Napoleon had
united in the Louvre. For these treasures, that had so glowed
in the Parisian light that men said they were destined to be
seen by the Seine, were once more to be dispersed; all the
cities and countries that the Emperor had plundered were
clamouring for the return of the booty, and Blucher had
already removed the Prussian possessions by force. Bour-
bonist and Bonapartist, Royalist and Revolutionary, were
united in their dislike of the invaders, and even the gentle
Joubert had to remind himself that there were people in the
world with whom brusqueness was a sign of good humour.
One September day Joubert returned to the Louvre to
see once more the masterpieces in which he had tried to find
the secret of Beauty. A guard of British riflemen
was outside
the entrance; in the corridor, two English privates’ wives,
freckled, stout and shawled, were examining very curiously
the sculptured children clambering over the reclining statue
of the Tiber. When he reached the picture gallery he found
two English guardsmen spelling out from their catalogue,
syllable by syllable, the title of Poussin’s Rape of the Sabines:
and so soon as they had succeeded in putting the words to-
gether, passing on as industriously to the next. A Cossack
was turning up his simple barbarian face to Raphael’s Trans-
figuration, and a Highlander glaring at a primitive of St.
Cecilia playing a lute.
When he next came at the end of October, long blank
spaces of dirty blue wall appeared between the sparse pictures
that remained; the galleries had taken on the confused and
desolate air of an auction room after a sale. It was a proper
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 1815-1823
place for meditations on the vanishing of glory, but ideal
Beauty seemed more remote than ever. The palaces were
disfigured with scaffolding and ladders, with masons on them
chipping away at the stonework. The walls that had once
been adorned with the symbols of the Bourbons, had first been
defaced by the Revolution, and then bespattered with the N’s
of the Empire. Now the masons were racking their brains
how best to turn an N into an L, for any of four Louis, or if
that could not be done at least into an unhistorical H for
Henri IV.
Paris was changing, as usual, and less gloriously than in
the past. The Hotel de la Guerre had become, more peace-
fully, the Hétel de Commerce, and the Hétel de la Victoire
had subsided into the Hétel de la Paix. Men welcomed less
the returning monarchy than the hope of tranquillity; they
had ceased to love or to fear the Bourbons with any intensity.
They were too tired, indeed, for any strong feeling whether
for good or evil.
Joubert was more tired than most; his brief excursion
into official life seemed to have exhausted all his vitality, and
he began to wonder if his heart were not seriously diseased.
At home he was saddened by news of family dissensions at
Montignac, and by the abnormality of his son, that grew more
evident as he grew older. A cold hatred seemed the only
emotion of which Victor was capable: Victor, his own son,
who had come with the swallows and the nightingale. The
progress of French politics did nothing to console the father
for his family troubles. The extravagant Royalism that
ravaged France after the second Restoration of Louis XVIII
was little to his taste; he feared that the quality of being a
citizen might be lost in attempts to acquire the qualities of a
courtier, and that liberty might be lost in loyalism. The
return of the monarchy seemed only to stress the contrast
between modern France and the France of the ancien régime.
Things did not even look the same. Panelling was out of
fashion, but wall-paper was so cheap that it was peddled in the
streets. [he weavers of Lyons seemed to have forgotten how
to spread their silks with flowers, and drew all their new
patterns with ruler and compass. Jewels, lace, feathers,
nothing had its old plenitude and glory. Gilding had
vanished from panelling and coach, bindings and brocades;
IQI
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

the very dust over the Champs Elysées was not as golden as it
had used to be. Even Fontanes, who had a natural affinity
for showy clothes, was reduced to blue broadcloth and white
linen. It was as ifa June day overflowing with sunshine had
been succeeded by an autumn afternoon, cold, clear, bare and
presaging winter.
Madame de Vintimille, herself now over fifty, found more
time for Joubert than she had used to do, for all her political
preoccupations. She remembered to write to him for their
July anniversary in 1816. He only answered her in September,
when he had once more returned to Villeneuve after a long
absence.
“Your letter for St. Mary Magdalene’s day filled
me with joy. I have not answered it! How can I
excuse myself? I really don’t know. ... There is,
among the infinite variety of singular maladies to which
this world is subject, one infirmity which seizes upon its
victims by spasms of varying lengths. It is fortunately
more rare and more strange than all the others. It
may be called hydromelanophobia, which is to say an
invincible horror of black water. It is impossible for
anyone attacked by it to make any use of ink. So soon
as they wish to hold a pen of which the nib is wet with
it, they suffer a violent contraction of the muscles at the
tips of their fingers, which soon reaches the palm of their
hand, spreads along the arm, reaches the chest and
diaphragm, and every muscle and blood-vessel, and causes
a horrible, terrific and universal sense of anxiety, that
can only be relieved by removing the object that has
caused the torment. That has been my trouble, and it is
that which had prevented me from writing to you. I
have tried to turn my thought from this appalling dis-
ability by walking in the parks, by passing before your
door, and by scenting myself with tuberoses, of which the
first appeared in my quarters on St. Anne’s Eve and the
latest will still perfume my room here at Villeneuve, if I can
get any in Sens. In fine, I have been so taken up with you
and with the good old days as to make me guilty of the
most inexcusable silence towards you: inexcusable, that is,
ifit were possible not to pardon those who love much and
so to violate in an essential point the teaching ofthe Gospel.
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 1815-1823
‘“‘T must also tell you that the sufferers from hydro-
melanophobia, who have a horror of liquid ink, have also,
by a kind of inconsequence hardly remarkable among all
the anomalies caused by this singular illness, a marked
predilection for dry ink, when they perceive it, for instance,
in good books, and still more on note-paper written upon
by a hand they hold dear. Their eyes rejoice at it in an
extraordinary degree, and their heart and mind likewise.
So if you wish to honour me with some sign of remem-
brance (even if it were of your anger) be assured of the
pleasure and the good which your letter would give and
do me.”
Joubert continued to worry over politics and to console
himself with Lafontaine who, he declared, was to France
what Homer was to Greece. He spent the winter of 1817 at
Villeneuve meditating upon religion and the arts. There
were no neighbours to take the places left vacant by Madame
de Beaumont and Madame de Seérilly, but there was the old
bourgeois society of Villeneuve, changed in age but in little
else. The Abbé Choin was back again, in his pretty little
presbytery, the other side the river, where Joubert had dreamed
of lodging Fontanes and his family during the Terror. When
the Abbé had first taken possession of it, just before the Revolu-
tion, he had carved over the door: Deus dedit. When Revolu-
tion came, some wit added, Deus abstulit; but the Abbé came
secretly and chalked underneath sit nomen Domini benedictum.
Now at last he could enjoy its quiet and its garden in peace.
The priest of the town was back too: indeed, like his colleague,
he had never left Villeneuve, and when he could neither
officiate nor preach continued to set an example of charity.
They and their younger colleagues used to come in to talk to
Joubert and to borrow his books; and he always hoped that
if he stayed long enough at Villeneuve his friends from Paris
might come to see him. In December he had a fever, and
dreamed in delirium that he was in Otaheite, the magic
island that had haunted him so long. 1818 brought new
political changes, but Joubert refused to think of them. It
was better to remember that spring began in February, if not
for the air, at least for the earth. He was more than ever
conscious of illness and old age; the nervous apathy from
which he had suffered before seemed now to last with few
493
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

intermissions. He sometimes felt as if neither he nor the

outside world were quite real: a stranger, he dwelt in a strange
land. The arst of July he wrote to Madame de Vintimille
sadly enough.
‘‘ T am dead to the world, but not to you, even though
for six clear months and twenty days I have given you no
sign of life. If you ask me why for all this time I have
kept so obstinately cloistered in this tomb, without wish-
ing to open its door to anyone, not even to you: how it
is possible that I should have remained deaf to all your
kind invitations to come and pay me a visit, dumb as to
my regrets, and unshaken in my inclinations, I will tell
you that the reason is a secret not easily to be confided,
indeed to be hidden even from oneself, and not willingly
to be contemplated. In confessing it to you to-day, I
make the most painful effort which a man can be induced
to make by a friendship without bounds and a confidence
without reserve.
** Know, then, what no one else knows as yet, though
it will soon be evident even to the least perceptive eyes:
that in my inmost being I have become imbecile, bored
with what I hear, boring with what I say, indifferent to
almost all that I see, understanding hardly anything of
either men or books or my own thoughts; in fact, I am
now different from myself. The memory of me is better
than my presence, and I dare no longer show myself to
those by whom I want to be loved. Judge for yourself
if I am thus requited for avoiding you.
“This is not to say that after much reflection and
after feeling myself all over with great care I do not find
again, from time to time, the old heart, the old mind, the
old depths of fire and feeling: but it is all so buried, so
clouded, and so numb that I alone can still be assured of
my enduring identity.”
The Chateaubriands, in their turn, were slipping away
from Joubert. That philosopher remained sceptical and
critical while his friend plunged into the world of Restoration
politics. Even his political journal, Le Conservateur, made too
much noise to appeal to Joubert, who continued to regard
politics as a moral infirmity deserving of pity rather than
censure. If Chateaubriand was taken up with politics, his

194
 1815-1823
wife was absorbed in good works. She found time to write
often enough to both Jouberts, her characteristic clever,
scratching little letters, but they saw each other less and less.
Family troubles, however, brought Joubert into closer touch
once more with Fontanes. Fontanes’ illegitimate son, to
whom Joubert had stood godfather, had distinguished himself
at an early age in the Moscow expedition. In February,
1819, he was killed in a duel; he died saying ‘“‘ And I was to
have danced this evening!”? To Fontanes his death was a
mortal blow; he had no other son, and his daughter, now a
girl of nineteen, was only just emerging from a silly age when
she had given him a great deal of trouble by falling in love
with the Emperor of Russia.
Joubert, alas, was becoming not only weaker and more ill,
but ill with fewer intermissions. He was often too weary
either to read or to write. When he could, he sat up in bed
and polished the bindings of his favourite books with a silk
handkerchief and a little beeswax; even to caress them in this
fashion brough back some of the pleasure of reading them.
His reputation for kindness still brought people to ask favours
of him, and he still contrived to find strength enough to do
what they asked. Public events meant even less to him than
they had used to do. The assassination of the Duc de Berri
might stir Chateaubriand and Fontanes, but for Joubert it
was the kind of historic fact that had no reality.
On March roth, 1821, Fontanes was stricken by apoplexy;
on the 17th he had a second attack, and died. It was a great
blow for Joubert, who had always felt certain that he would
die first; but weakness had preserved him, and strength had
killed his friend. His only consolation came from Madame de
Vintimille, who wrote at once, with real understanding, and
came to see him in Paris within a week. In the summer he
was able to visit her himself, but his fatigue was such that she
misunderstood his silence and his géne. His July letter that
year was spent on an explanation.
“Is it possible that I could so far have misrepre-
sented myself and that you could so far have misunder-
stood me? I swear to you, with all the sincerity I owe to
you, from which I would never swerve, least of all at such
a time and on such day; I swear to you, I say, by you, by
me, by St. Mary Magdalene and by the tuberoses, the
195
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

dearest of my memories; I swear to you by my conscience

and all my friendship, by all my plain-speaking, by all my
fidelities, that I have never paid you a visit at which I
tasted beside you so much sweetness and so much peace
of mind as at that of which you are almost tempted to
complain. You have taken my confidence and my
relaxation for a weakness of feeling and my meditations
for dejection. I arrived feeling ill (for all my weaknesses
have now become painful), I seated myself, I became calm,
I made you talk, I listened. I left almost restored, and
said to myself in the carriage, as it reached the boulevard,
‘If it were possible for me to leave my bed each day at
such a time, to drive in such weather and to find in the
middle of the drive such a pleasure, of a certainty I should
live better and longer. .. .”
** T understand what is said to me with more difficulty,
I say less willingly what I think, because speech bores me
in cold blood and tires me when I am excited. I was at
the end of my tether when I reached your room, and had
to rest my chest by silence. You filled the gap with the
‘most delightful conversation. I left happy, revived, and
so much revived that I had strength enough after I left
you to make two duty calls of which the very idea would
have made me tremble before. I was going to write to
you at the moment when I received your letter. It gave
me great pleasure, although it violently upset my peaceful
security. I was far from thinking that you would demand
an explanation from me; but none the less I confess that
I am flattered by the unfair trouble that I have so inno-
cently caused you. One is not thus susceptible about
people one has ceased to love. . . ”
The autumn was spent as usual at Villeneuve; Joubert
was too tired to write much in his notebook, but liked to read
Montaigne; and when he was a little rested, to consider the
views of Leibnitz on the soul. On October atst the only
entry is: “I can do no more,” but by the next day he was
able to think about the ancient hidden meanings of words
that were used every day. He had long been trying to find
a definition of wisdom; on October 24th he defined it once
more, as repose in light, and added “‘ for the last time I hope.”
196
 1815-1823
All that spring, when he was back in Paris, he was able to
see more of his friends. He wrote to Madame de Vintimille
on May-day :
** It is the month in which I was born, and the month
in which I first saw you, twenty-years ago. I saw you
on the 1st, I saw you again on the 6th, and since then I
always feel as if I were seeing you for the first time. So
come, come often, come when you please, between half-
past twelve and half-past two. Come without warning,
or having warned me, as you like; come in season or
out of it. At whatever time and hour it may be, you
will never come without having been desired... .”
Joubert was even able to pay calls on people he did not
know well, if some point of patronage or help were in question.
At the beginning of July, Madame de Duras wrote to Chateau-
briand, who was enjoying the splendours of the London
Embassy :
**T do not know if I told you that I had seen M.
Joubert; he wanted to commend to me a young man in
whom he is interested. It is certainly the greatest effort
he ever made in his life. He wrote to me, and confessed
that he had made three fair copies of the draft: in one, he
forgota word, in another, a comma. What an original !
Finally the letter arrived, most involved. I am sending
it you as a curiosity. Then he came, sweating blood.
He had forgotten his handkerchief! In the end he
explained himself; we had a recognition scene; I had
not seen him for seven years. We have made an appoint-
ment to meet again, in seven years. ... You know
that M. Joubert is a taste of yours that I have never
agreed with. He is something to me because he is your
friend; but he is too affected for my liking.”
Joubert knew his weaknesses better than did Madame de
Duras; after he had seen her he was ill for a month. He
wrote to Madame de Vintimille on July 13th, saying that he
had hoped to enjoy a visit to her as the first-fruits of his con-
valescence; but his attempts at getting up had done him
harm.
Joubert found the winter trying; he could still read a
little and think much, but it was hardly life; and if he lived
more fully for an hour or two he paid for it by days of illness

197
 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST

and fatigue. He was even reduced to reading Rabelais, and

was astonished to find how wise he was. He was in Paris in
the summer, and wrote to Madame de Vintimille, sending her
a copy of a book on the history of the Church in the eighteenth
century. It was the last letter he ever wrote to her.
He lingered through the winter, too ill to write from
November until the middle of January. Then he seemed a
little better; but for February the notebook is almost blank.
On the 22nd of March there is a last entry: ‘‘Le vrai, le beau—
le juste, le saint.” After that he was past writing, but was
able to make his Easter communion in his room as usual. He
had been weak and ill for so long that it came almost as a
shock to his family when he died on May 4th, 1824, two days
before his seventieth birthday.
More than thirty years before his death Joubert had
written to Victoire Moreau de Bussy to tell her how he would
wish to be mourned.
** Let me tell you for a moment how I would wish
to be regretted. ... I would wish my memory never
to come to mind without my friends having a tear of
tenderness under their eyelids and a smile upon their lips.
I would wish them to be able to remember me in the
midst of their liveliest joys, without those joys being
troubled, and that even at table in the middle of their
banquets, while they make merry with strangers, they
should make some mention of me, accounting it among
their pleasures that they have loved me, and have been
loved by me. I should like to have had enough happi-
ness and enough good qualities for it to please them to
cite often some trait of my good humour or my good sense
or my good heart or my good will to the new friends they
may make. I should like these allusions to make their
hearts lighter, better disposed and more content. I
should like them thus to remember me all their days;
and I should like them to be happy and have a long life,
that they might remember me oftener and longer. . . .
I should like, in a word, to arouse such regrets that those
who witness them will fear neither to experience them
nor to inspire them.” .
Thus was Joubert mourned.

198
 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anon. Mémoires et Souvenirs. d’une femme de qualité sur le Consulat et
VEmpire. 4 vols. Paris, 1830.
Anon. (P. de Raynal). ugemens litiéraires, Pensées et correspondance
(de Joubert) in Revue des Deux Mondes XXIX, 1842, p. 936.
M. Arnold. oubert, in Essays in Criticism, First Series. London, 1865.
I. Babbit. The Masters of Modern French Criticism. London, Boston
and New York, 1913.
A. Bardoux. La Comtesse de Beaumont, Pauline de Montmorin. Paris,
1884.
. Beaunier. Trois amies de Chateaubriand. Paris, 1910.
. Beaunier. La Jeunesse de Foseph Foubert. Paris, 1918.
. Beaunier. Joseph Foubert et la Revolution, and ed., Paris, 1918.
. Beaunier. Les fiangailles de Foseph Foubert, in La Revue hebdoma-
daire, XXVIII, 4 Jan., 1919, p. 22.
. Beaunier. Joubert et Madame de Vintimille, in La Revue Universelle,
IH, 1920, p. 542 and 606.
. Beaunier. Joubert: Lettres aMadame de Vintimille. Paris, 1921.
. Beaunier. Joubert décoré, in La Revue hebdomadaire, XXX, Oct. 15,
1921, p. 301.
Beaunier. Madame de Chateaubriand et sons bons amis les Foubert,
in La Revue Universelle VI, 1921, 513, 650, VII, 32.
. Beaunier. Le roman dune amiti¢: Joseph Joubert et Pauline de
Beaumont. Paris, 1924.
. Beaunier. Les Carnets de Joseph Joubert. Paris, 1938. 2 vols:
. Caro. Joseph Joubert, in Meélanges et Portraits. Paris, 1888,
VO DL, P.\ 1.
R. de Chateaubriand. Mémoires d’Outretombe. Paris, n.d.,
6 vols. (ed. Biré, pub. Garnier).
bin
on
>.Pelt
2>piel
a P. Clarens. Joubert. Paris, 1893.
H. P: Collins. Pensées and Letters of Joseph Joubert. (Broadway
Library of 18th century French Literature). London, 1928.
J. Gondamin, Abbé. Essaz sur les pensées et la correspondance de
J. Joubert. Paris, 1877.
G. David. Etude sur les travaux du moraliste Joseph Joubert, in Recueil
de l’Académie des Feux Floraux. ‘Toulouse, 1887, p. 148.
Ocuvres de M. de Fontanes. .. . précédées d’une lettre de M. de
Chateaubriand. Paris, 1839, 2 vols.
V. Giraud. Moralistes frangais. Paris, 1923.
E. Henriot. Les cahiers de Foseph Joubert, in Revue de Paris, XLV,
15 Sept., 1938, p. 334.
Joubert. Journal Intime, in Nouvelle Revue Frangaise, XXV._ Paris,
1 Jan., 1937, p. 66.
Joubert. Pensées. Reproduction de Védition originale avec le notice
historique du frére de Foubert. Ed. V. Giraud. Paris, 1909.
F. Landet. Les Semeurs. Paris, 1917.
J. Lemaitre. Joubert, in Les Contemporains, 6th series. Paris, n.d.,
. 302.
G. bie Paris révolutionnaire. Paris, 1909.
V. Lombard de Langres. Mémoires d’un Sot. Paris, 1820.
M.. M. Maitland. Joubert, in Gentleman’s Magazine, CCXLVI.
1880, p. 459.
199
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Marmontel. Mémoires d’un Pére. Paris, 1927. 2 vols.

P. M. Masson. Chateaubriand et Joubert, in Revue d’ Histoire littéraire
de la France, XVI. Oct.-Dec., 1909, p. 794.
(Milran). Voyages en France depuis 1775 jusqu’a 1817. Paris, 1817,
vols.
J Nicticts Portraits d’hier et d’aujourd’hui. Attiques et humortstes.
Paris, 1863.
A. Monglond. Le préromantisme frangais, 2 vols. Grenoble, 1930.
A. Monnet. Joseph Joubert, Moraliste. Niort, 1887.
Marquis de Noailles. Le Comte Molé, 1781-1855. Paris, 1922-30.
6 vols.
G. Pailhés. Madame de Chateaubriand d’aprés ses mémotres et sa
correspondance. Bordeaux, 1887.
G. Pailhés. Chateaubriand, sa femme et ses amis. Paris, 1896.
G. Pailhés. Du nouveau sur F. Joubert. Paris, 1900.
M. L. Pailleron. Pauline de Beaumont. Paris, 1930.
M. Pellisson. Un inspecteur général de la premiére promotion: Joseph
Joubert, in Revue Pédagogique, LI. 15th June, 1908.
E. Pilou. Au pays de Joubert et de Pauline de Beaumont, in Revue des
Deux Mondes, XXII. Paris, 1936, p. 360.
A. de Pontmartin. Souvenirs d’un vieux critique. Quatriéme série.
Paris, 1886.
P. de Raynal (Sen.). Pensces, Essais, Maximes et correspondance de
J. Joubert. Paris (2nd ed.), 1850, 2 vols.
P. de Raynal (Jun.). Les Correspondants de Joubert, 1785-1822.
Paris, 1883.
N. E. Restif de la Bretonne. La paysan perverti, ou les dangers de
la ville. Paris, 1776. 4 vols.
N. E. Restif de la Bretonne. Oceuvres vol V. (La femme infidéle),
ed. H. Bacheton, Paris, 1931.
A. Roserot. Mémoires de Madame de Chastenay, 1771-1815. Paris, 1896.
C. A. Sainte-Beuve. Pensées de M. Joubert, in Causeries de Lundi.
vol. I. Paris, n.d., p. 159.
CG. A. Sainte-Beuve. Joubert, in Portraits Littéeraires, vol. II.
Paris, n.d., p. 306.
C. A. Sainte-Beuve. Chateaubriand et ses amis littéraires sous le Con-
sulat et sous VEmpire, vol. 11. Paris, 1861.
Mme. P. de Samie. Joubert, Mme. de Vintimille et Guéneau de Mussy,
in Revue d'Histoire littéraire de la France, XLII. Oct.-Dec.,
1935, P- 481.
J. Scott. Paris revisited in 1815. . . London (3rd edition), 1816.
E. Sichel. The Story of Two Salons. London and New York, 1895.
R. Tessonneau. Correspondance de Louis de Fontanes et de Joseph
Joubert, 1785-1819. Paris, 1943.
R. Tessonneau. Joseph Joubert Educateur. Paris, 1945.
L. Thomas. Correspondance générale de Chateaubriand. Paris, 1912-
1924. 5 vols.
L. Véron. Mémoires d’un bourgeois de Paris. 1856. 5 vols.
A. Wilson. Fontanes, 1757-1821: Essai biographique et littéraire.
Paris, 1928.

200
 INDEX

A D
Alembert, 29 Dardenne, 19
Andelys, Les, gt Degain, Jean, 69
Auxerre, 50 Desmonts, Elie, 49, 51, 52
Desmonts, Pierre, 52
Devauve family, 52
B Diderot, 29-31, 39, 41, 119, 120, 139,
Bacciocchi, Elisa, 129, 131, 135, 144, 175
145 Ducis, 56 \
Banks, Sir Joseph, 47 Dufresnoy, Adélaide, 54, 60, 61, 95
Beauharnais, Joséphine de, 91 Duras, Madame de, 197
Beaumont, Pauline de, 102-25, 131,
133, 135-8, 140-2, 144-8, 151-6, F
158-61, 163, 164, 168
Bonald, 133 Fabre d’Eglantine, 18, 19, 85, 88
Bonaparte, Louis, 177-9 Falguiére, Baron de, 20
Lucien, 130 Fesch, Cardinal, 142, 145
Napoleon, 126, 127, 129- Florian, 55
Fontanes, Chantal de, see Cathelin
31, 133, 140, 163, 173-7; 181,
183, 187, 188, 190 Fontanes, Imberthe de, 91, 94, 95
Borredon, 69, 70 Fontanes, Louis de, 31, 32, 34, 35,
Boyer, Jean, 69 38, 39, 42-8, 50, 54-67, 75, 77, 78,
86, 91-3, 96-101, 110, 111, 118,
129-31, 134-6, 139, 140, 143-6,
Gc 151, 156, 159, 160, 163, 166, 173-
Cailloud, Pierre, 73, 74 185, 187, 188, 195
Cambis, Comte de, 42 Fouquier-Tinville, 110
Carbon de Flins des Oliviers, 62
Carnot, Lazare, 83-5 G
Cathelin, Chantal (later Madame Garrau, 83, 85
de Fontanes), 53-62, 64, 78, 86, Gontier family, 12, 69, 73, 74
9I-4,99. Grangier, 73, 74
Cathelin, Claudine, 53-7, 60-5, 91, Grimod de la Reyniére, 35, 36, 43
94, 99 Gueneau de Mussy, 166, 169, 181, 185
Cathelin, Jean Baptiste, 63 Guesnot, 102
Caud, Lucile de, 134, 142, 162, 164
Chastenay, Madame de, 185
Chateaubriand, Celeste de, 162, 165, H
168, 170-2, 182, 195 Hocquart, Madame, 133
Chateaubriand, Francois René Houdetot, Madame de, 167, 168
Xavier, 130, 131, 133-40, 142-4, Hureau, Mére, 92
151-62, 164-73, 181, 182, 184,
185, 188, 194, 195, 197
Chénedollé, 134, 143, 151, 162, 181, J
182 Joubert, Armand, 48, 75, 84, 96, 107,
Chevailler family, 52 115, 167, 173
Choin, Abbé, 193 Joubert, Catherine, 12, 13
Cholet, Madame, 68, 75, 76 Joubert, Elie, 48, 54, 58, 129
Christian Doctrine, Congregation of, Joubert, Jean, 12, 13, 29, 42, 66
15-21 Joubert, Marie Anne, 12-14, 23, 48,
Cook, Captain, 47, 50 49, 68, 70, 72, 124, 127, 137
Couhaillon, Germain, 104, 162 Joubert, Victoire, see Moreau de
Custine, Madame de, 142, 144 Bussy
 INDEX

J—continued Paris, 23-40, 44, 50, 61, 63, 66, 70,

Joubert, Victor, 95, a6, 108, 117, 181, 84, 96, IIg, 120, 124, 127, 131-3,

IQI 138, 141, 143, 166, 169, 172, 177,

Juis, Baron de, 53, 56, 78 180, 189-91, 197
Pasquier, 133
Passy, 102-5, 109, 120, 164
L Piat, Mademoiselles, 52, 168
La Briche, Madame de, 167, 169 Plombiéres, 87
Lacoste, Francois, 69 Provence, 181, 182
La Harpe, 29, 56
La Luzerne, Madame de, 102, 103 Q
Lamarque, 83-5
Lamoignon de Malesherbes, 85 Queyroy family, 12, 52, 69, 73, 74
Langeac, Chevalier de, 47, 185
Larromiguiére, Pierre de, 18 R
Libourne, 83, 84 Restif de la Bretonne, 34, 41, 45, 47,
London, 42-5 48, 50, 121
Louis xvi, 52, 81, 84, 85 Restif de la Bretonne, Agnés, 35-40,
Louis xvi, 187, 191 45, 49, 50
Lyons, 53, 60, 91 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 45
Robespierre, 95
M Roland, 82
Marmontel, 29 Rome, 144, 145, 151, 152, 154, 159
Marnésia, Marquis de, 42, 46 Rouget de l’Isle, Imberthe, 78, 91
Martineau, Maitre, 52
Mégret de Serilly, Anne Marie Louise S
102-5, 107, 110-17, 120, 122-4 Saint Marcellin, Louis Charles, 76,
Mégret de Serilly, Antoine, 102-4 195
Menu de Chomorceau, Jean Etienne, Savigny sur Orge, 135, 136, 138
52 Sens, 117
Mercier, Sebastien, 34 Somerville, Misses, 44
Milran, Francois, 36, 38, 50, 51, 57; Staél, Madame de, 112, 117, 122, 130,
58 137, 139
Mirabeau, 75
Molé, 133, 156, 159, 161, 162, 165-7, Zt
169, 170, 175 Talleyrand, 145
Mont Dore, 144, 149-52
Montesquiou Fezensac, Marquis de, Terrasson, 69, 82, 83
122 Theil, 116-18, 120-3, 126
Montignac, 11-15, 21, 68-75, 82, 83, Toulouse, 15-21
124, 127, 128, 191
Montmorin, Madame de, 102, 103 Vv
More, 95 Vautrin, 90
Moreau de Bussy, Jacques, 67, 68, 75 Vieu, 62
Moreau, de Bussy, Louise Alexan- Vigée le Brun, Madame, 62, 63
drine (later Madame Arnaud Villar, Noél de, 18
Joubert), 88, 92, 115 Villeneuve le Roi, 49-54, 57, 66, 88-
Moreau de Bussy, Madame, 52, 67, 95, 109, III, 115, 118, 120, 128,
88, 90, 113, 115 138, 140, 144, 151, 154, 161, 162,
Moreau: de Bussy, Victoire (later 164, 165, 108, 172, 173, 177; 179-
Madame Joubert), 67, 75-81, 86, 81, 185, 192, 193, 195
87, 89, 90, 94, 95, 113, 115, 116, Vintimille, Louise de, 141-3, 148,
152, 162, 164, 166, 172, 198 159, 161, 163-8, 171, 181, 184-8,
Moreau-Descombes, Monsieur, 67, 77 192, 194-8
Morellet, Abbé, 184 Violette, Caporal, 90
Vitry, Abbé de 58-60, 63, 91, 93
P
Pange, Francois de, 114, 113 WwW ~

Paquereau, Dominique, 105, 107, 122 Washington, George, 130

159 Waurillon de la Bermondie, 69, 70
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 THE UNSELFISH EGOIST
A Study of Joseph Joubert

“* An egoist who devoted himself to others.”” Such was

Chateaubriand’s verdict on Joseph Joubert, intimate
friend of Diderot and Fontanes, a man who con-
trived to remain a quiet thinker through the turbu-
lent years of the French Revolution. His life was
neither without passion nor devoid of incident ; yet its
interest ultimately depends upon his intellectual and
emotional development and the delicacy and fresh-
ness of his judgment. It is still true to say of Joubert,
as did a contemporary, that full of whims and
oddities, he has an extraordinary hold over mind and
heart ; once he has taken hold of your imagination
his image is there like a reality from which you
cannot escape.
From the note books in which he recorded his
thoughts, and from many of the letters which he
wrote to his friends Joan Evans has written an inti-
mate biography of a remarkable man, set in Perigord,
Burgundy and Paris in the years between 1754 and
1823.

LONGMANS