François-René de Chateaubriand, Travels in Americafrom "The Eastern Cities" (1827)

Transcribed from pages 16-20 of the 1969 University of Kentucky Press edition of François-René de Chateaubriand's Travels in America. Originally published in 1827. This translation by Richard Switzer.

When I arrived in Philadelphia, General Washington was not there. I was obliged to wait for him about two weeks before he returned. I saw him pass in a carriage drawn rapidly by four frisky horses, freely driven. Washington, according to my ideas at that time, was necessarily Cincinnatus, Cincinnatus riding in a carriage upset my idea of the Roman republic of the year 296. Could the dictator Washington be other than a peasant prodding his oxen and holding the handle of his plow? But when I went to deliver my letter of introduction to this great man, I found the simplicity of the old Roman.

A little house in the English style, resembling the neighboring houses, was the palace of the President of the United States: no guards, not even footmen. I knocked; a young servant girl opened the door. I asked her if the General was in; she answered that he was. I replied that I had a letter to deliver to him. The servant asked me my name, difficult to pronounce in English, which she could not retain. Then she said quietly to me, "Walk in sir," and she walked before me through one of those long narrow corridors which serve as a vestibule in English houses; she showed me into a parlor, where she asked me to await the General.

I was not impressed. Greatness of soul or of fortune does not overwhelm me: I admire the first without being crushed by it; the second inspires me more with pity than with respect. A man's appearance will never bother me.

At the end of a few minutes the General entered. He was a man of tall stature, with an air that was calm and cold rather than noble; the engravings of him are faithful. I gave him my letter in silence; he opened it and glanced at the signature, which he read aloud with an exclamation, "Colonel Armand!" That was what he called the Marquis de La Rouairie and how the letter was signed.

We sat down; I explained to him as best I could the motive of my trip. He answered me in French or English monosyllables and listened to me with a sort of astonishment. I noticed this and said to him in a rather lively fashion, "But it is less difficult to discover the Northwest Passage than to create a people as you have done." "Well, well, young man!" he cried, holding out his hand to me. He invited me to dinner for the following day, and we separated.

I appeared promptly for the appointment: there were only five or six guests. The conversation turned almost exclusively on the French revolution. The General showed us a key to the Bastille: those keys to the Bastille were rather stupid toys which were distributed then in both worlds. If Washington had seen the conquerors of the Bastille in the gutters of Paris as I did, he would have had less faith in his relic. The seriousness and the force of the revolution were not in those bloody orgies. At the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 the same populace of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine demolished the Protestant church at Charenton with just as much zeal as it laid waste to the church of Saint-Denis in 1793.

I left my host at ten o'clock in the evening, and I never saw him again; he left the next morning for the country, and I continued my trip.

Such was my meeting with this man who liberated a whole world. Washington descended into the tomb before a bit of fame could be attached to my name; I passed before him as the most unknown individual; he was in all his brilliance, and I in all my obscurity. My name did not perhaps remain a whole day in his memory. Yet how happy I am that his gaze fell upon me! I have felt warmed by it for the rest of my life: there is a power in the gaze of a great man.

I have since seen Buonaparte; thus Providence has shown me the two persons she was pleased to put at the head of their centuries' destinies.

If one compares Washington and Buonaparthe, man to man, the genius of the first seems less soaring than that of the second. Washington does not belong as does Buonaparte to that race of Alexanders and Caesars, who exceed the stature of the human species. Nothing astonishing is attached to his person; he is not placed on a vast stage; he is not confronted by the most adroit captains and most powerful monarchs of the time; he does not cross the seas; he does not rush from Memphis to Venice and from Cadiz to Moscow: he defends himself with a handful of citizens on a land without memories and without fame, in the restricted circle of the domestic hearths. He fights none of those battles which renew the bloody triumphs of Arbela and Pharsalia; he does not upset thrones to build others with their debris; he does not place his foot on the necks of kings; he does not have them say in the vestibules of his palace: That they delay too long, and Attila is bored.

Something silent envelops the actions of Washington; he acts slowly: one would say that he feels he is the envoy of future liberty and that he is afraid to compromise it. It is not his own destiny that this hero of another sort bears, it is that of his country; he does not allow himself to toy with what does not belong to him. But from this deep obscurity, what a light is to burst forth! Seek out the unknown forests where the sword of Washington shone, what will you find there? Tombs? No, a world! Washington has left the United States as his trophy on the field of battle.

Buonaparte has no trait of this grave American: he battles in an old land, surrounded with brilliance and clamor; he wishes only to create renown for himself; he holds himself responsible only for his own fate. He seems to know that his mission will be short and that the torrent which descends from such a height will quickly spend itself. He hastens to enjoy and abuse his glory as he would fleeting youth. In the manner of the gods of Homer, he wants to reach the ends of the world in four strides: he appears on every shore, he precipitously inscribes his name in the celebrations of all peoples; rushing by, he throws crowns to his family and his soldiers; he is hurried in establishing his monuments, his laws, his victories. Leaning over the world, he casts down kings with one hand, and with the other he crushes the revolutionary giant; but in crushing anarchy he stifles liberty and finally loses his own liberty on the last field of battle.

Each is rewarded according to his works: Washington raises a nation to independence; a retired magistrate, he peacefully falls asleep beneath his paternal roof amidst the regrets of his compatriots and the veneration of all peoples.

Buonaparte steals from a nation its independence; a fallen emperor, he is cast into exile, where the fears of the world do not yet consider him well enough imprisoned under the guard of the ocean. As long as he struggles against death, weak and chained to a rock, Europe does not dare to lay down its arms. He expires: this news, published at the gate of the palace where the conqueror had proclaimed so many funerals, does not cause the passer-by to tarry or to be astonished. What did the citizens have to mourn?

The republic of Washington still exists; the empire of Buonaparte is destroyed. It rose and fell between the first and second trip of a Frenchman who found a thankful nation where he had fought for a few oppressed settlers.

Washington and Buonaparte came from the bosom of a republic: both born of liberty, the first was faithful to her, the second betrayed her. Their destinies, according to their choice, will differ in the future. The name of Washington will spread with liberty from age to age; it will mark the beginning of a new era of mankind. The name of Buonaparte will also be repeated by future generations, but it will be attached to no blessing and will often serve as authority for oppressors, great or small.

Washington was in all things representative of the needs, ideas, enlightenment, and opinions of his period; he seconded rather than opposed the movement of minds; he wanted what he should have wanted, the very thing for which he was called; that is the reason for the coherence and the perpetuity of his work. This man, scarcely striking because he is natural and of just proportions, has bound up his existence with that of his country; his glory is the common heritage of the growing civilization; his fame wells up as from one of those sanctuaries from which flows an unending spring for the people.

Buonaparte could also have enriched the public domain: he was acting on the most civilized, the most intelligent, the bravest, the most brilliant nation of the earth. What would be the rank he would occupy today in the universe if he had joined magnanimity to what he possessed of the heoric, if combining Washington and Buonaparte at the same time, he had named liberty the heir of his glory!

But this great giant did not completely bind his destiny to that of his contemporaries: his genius belonged to the modern age, his ambition was of the olden days; he did not realize that the miracles of his life went far beyond the price of a diadem and that this gothic ornament would ill become him. At one moment he would take a stride with his century; at the next he would return to the past; and whether he went counter to the waves or repulsed them. In his eyes men were but a means of power; no sympathy was established between their happiness and his. He had promised to deliver them, he enchained them; he isolated himself from them, they drew away from him. The kings of Egypt placed their funeral pyramids not in the midst of flourishing countrysides but in the sterile sands; these great tombs rise like eternity in solitude. Buonaparte built the monument of his fame in their image.

Those who have seen the conqueror of Europe and the legislator of America as I have, today avert their gaze from the stage of the world: a few actors who make one cry or laugh are not worth looking at.

François-René de Chateaubriand, Travels in Americafrom "The Eastern Cities" (1827)

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