Chateaubriand Joseph Joubert / Autograph signed letter / Journey to the Orient

  

Autograph letter signed (initialed) to Mme de Vintimille [Paris], 16 August 1806, 4 pp. Several crossed-out passages and additions in Joubert’s hand.

A precious testimony from Joubert about his friend Chateaubriand’s Italian wanderings, on his way to the Orient.

“Chateaubriand is already speaking of his return.

‘He will tell us, he says, in our homes, at the end of this autumn, about the things of distant lands.’ I must tell you that upon arriving in Trieste on July 30, he found in the harbor an Austrian vessel, ready to sail for Smyrna the next day, and which seemed to have set out expressly for him. So he had no doubt that this was a piece of gallantry shown to him by Providence.

He thanked it most Christianly and finally felt content and delighted with his fate. ‘His star, so he tells me, is beginning visibly to prevail, and the prayers of Saint-Sulpice have had their effect.’

“Saint-Sulpice, that is to say the seminary, indeed says a prayer every evening for his happy voyage, a prayer in which he has had great faith since the Austrian ship.

] This morning, a short letter he addressed to Bertin was printed in the Mercure, and in it he speaks rather badly of Venice and its black gondolas.] He adds ‘that he took one of those gondolas for a corpse being carried to burial.’ I myself am dying, dying of fear that Le Publiciste [later Le Journal des débats] will seize on this phrase and that poor Chateaubriand’s star will be clouded on this little occasion. Truly, his wife understands the small things better, and if Le Publiciste were to read her letters, it would find them tasteful and worthy of its feuilletons.

] This lively and spirited pen, I think, deserves to give you some pleasure.

[Here Joubert reproduces Madame de Chateaubriand’s letter of 26 July, no.

I do not have in front of me the second letter to my wife, which is even more piquant. At the moment she wrote it, her husband had left the day before at ten o’clock at night. He always travels at night, as you see.] May God guide them and bring them both back! I await the wife and the husband.

We shall console the former as best we can. It is unfortunate not to be able to hope for news of the other except through his return and his presence.

In the end, one must hope that the same Providence you assign to him, as I do, and which followed him to the port, will not abandon him and will bring him back there. Here end my duties as a newsmonger, and I resign.”

Back to literature, Chateaubriand conceived the project of a Christian epic in which dying paganism and the rising religion would be set in opposition. Eager to see the places for himself, he left Venice for the Orient on 28 July 1806.

Leaving behind a loving and patient wife, he passed through Trieste, Dalmatia, and Corfu, then landed in the Peloponnese on 10 August. He then traveled through Greece, Asia Minor, Palestine, and Egypt before returning to France during 1807.

Chateaubriand met Joubert in 1801 through Louis de Fontanes, in Pauline de Beaumont’s Paris salon. In 1838, for the restricted circle of his friends, he published the first Recueil des pensées de M. Joubert, selected from the fifteen thousand pages of his notebooks. In Mémoires d’outre-tombe, Chateaubriand sketches Madame de Vintimille’s portrait in a few strokes: “A woman of former times, as few remain, [she] went about in society and brought back to us what was happening there. Rémy Tessonneau, William Blake & Co.