In the “high politics” of literature, around 1830, an axis is formed among Chateaubriand, George Sand, and Victor Hugo that gives preeminence to good feelings—whether they are noble and remote, as in Chateaubriand, or are ladled out from the thick soup of the peuple, as in George Sand, or glide on visionary clouds, as in Victor Hugo. Ideals and Lofty Aspirations now become solemn platoons of armed guards around the enclosure of Art. From a distance, the only thing to be seen is their maneuvers, and every so often there’s a burst of gunfire as a reminder that guardsmen die but they never surrender, that the realms of the heart are always the deepest, that an indomitable soul will never bow to a hostile world. Meanwhile, inside the enclosure, somewhat hidden from the public gaze, among curtains and scraps of cloth, crates and trunks, the cruel old lace of Art is continually unraveled, with no concern about Ideals or Listeners.

Sainte-Beuve thought, with sly regret, that Chateaubriand, like certain wines, could not travel outside the language and borders of France. This because he would have lost his “magic, which is all in syllables.” And he wouldn’t have allowed himself to be seen without his “frame, which is France—the brilliant, vain, mad, sweet France.”⁷² Extraneous to every concept, indulgent to imagery, Chateaubriand is most perceptive at hearing the currents of sounds within each individual word, a master in breathing imperfects, inventor of the glaucous syllable. His is a certain orchestral color that we find in every particle of his prose, in the same way that Wagner’s orchestral color pervades every bar of the Ring. The fate of such works lies in their timbre no less than in the story they tell.

Exempla Voluptatis

Mademoiselle de la Force, before devoting herself to fairy tales (as Madame d’Aulnoy had done before her), used to dance at Ménilmontant with Monsieur de Briou, who knew whole pages of L’Astrée by heart, and was handsome and a minor aristocrat with a large fortune. Monsieur de Briou’s father was opposed to their affair and locked his son in a room overlooking the palace courtyard. So Mademoiselle de la Force hired a strolling player to take his dancing bears into Monsieur de Briou’s courtyard. Mademoiselle de la Force danced naked and drenched in sweat, sewn up inside the skin of a bear, beneath her lover’s window, and even managed to get close enough to arrange another encounter with him as she beat time with her paws. After the performance, the strolling player handed a basketful of figs to his bears and led them back toward the Pont-Neuf.

“A neighbor in the Combourg district had come to spend a few days at the chateau, along with his very attractive wife.⁷³ Something happened in the village, I don’t remember what; we rushed to one of the drawing room windows to see. I reached there first, the visitor was running behind me, I wanted to offer her my place and turned toward her; she unintentionally cut across my path, and I felt myself squeezed between her and the window. I lost all sense of what was happening around me.”