Glacial Errata, No. 84

[I recently got around to reading Lisa Roberton’s Riverwork, on the great suggestion of my friend Sarah. There’s lots of references to François-René de Chateaubriand’s very excellent Mémoires d’Outre Tombe (Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb), so here are five quotes from Chateaubriand, in Robert Baldick’s translation.]

One

“Death seems to have been born in Rome. There are more tombs than dead in this city. I imagine that the deceased, when they feel too warm in their marble resting-place, slip into another which has remained empty, just as a sick man is moved from one bed to another. One can almost hear the skeletons passing during the night from coffin to coffin.”

Two

“How many things have I awaited in vain! In the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, a slave is posted as sentry on the roof of the palace of Argos; his eyes strain to make out the agreed signal for the return of the ships; he sings to relieve the tedium of his vigils, but the hours pass and the stars set, and the torch never shines. When, after many years, its tardy light appears above the waves, the slave is bent beneath the weight of time; and nothing remains for him but to reap misfortune….”

Three

“Why have I outlived the epoch and the men to whom I belonged by the date of my birth? Why did I not fall with my contemporaries, the last of an exhausted race? Why have I remained alone to search for their bones in the dust and darkness of a crowded catacomb? I am weary of my survival. Ah, if only I possessed the indifference of one of those longshore Arabs that I met in Africa. Sitting cross-legged on a little rope mat, their heads wrapped in their burnous, they while away their last hours in following with their eyes, in the azure of the sky, the beautiful flamingo flying over the ruins of Carthage; lulled by the murmur of the waves, they half-forget their own existence and sing in a low voice a song of the sea: they are going to die.”

Four

“I have returned from Montboissier, and these are the last lines that I shall write in my hermitage; I have to leave it, filled with the fine striplings which in their serried ranks already hide and crown their father. I shall never again see the magnolia which promised its blossom to the tomb of my Floridan, the Jerusalem pine and cedar of Lebanon consecrated to the memory of Jerome, the Granada laurel, the Greek plane-tree, the Armorican oak, at whose feet I depicted Blanca, sang of Cymodocée, invented Velléda. These trees were born and grew with my dreams, of which they were the hamadryads. They are about to pass under another’s sway; will their new master love them as I have loved them? Perhaps he will let them die or cut them down: it is my fate to keep nothing on this earth. Bidding farewell to the woods of Aulnay, I shall recall the farewell which I bade long ago to the woods of Combourg: all my days are farewells.”

Five

“If my works survive me, if I am destined to leave behind a name, perhaps one day, guided by these Memoirs, some traveler will come and visit the places I have described. He will be able to recognize the chateau, but he will look in vain for the great wood: the cradle of my dreams has vanished like the dreams themselves. Left standing by itself on its rock, the ancient keep mourns for the oaks, its old companions which surrounded it and protected it against the tempest. Isolated like that keep, I too have seen falling around me the family which graced my days and lent its shelter: fortunately my life is not built on this earth as firmly as the towers in which I spent my youth, and man offers less resistance to the storms than the monuments raised by his hands.”