SOURCE: Chadbourne, Richard M. “Chateaubriand's Aviary: Birds in the Mémoires d'Outre-Tomb.” In Symbolism and Modern Literature: Studies in Honor of Wallace Fowlie, edited by Marcel Tetel and Austin Warren, pp. 65-80. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1978.

[In the following essay, Chadbourne traces the presence of birds in Memoirs, noting Chateaubriand's use of the thrush as a trigger for childhood memories. Chadbourne then considers Chateaubriand's use of birds in four ways: in literary and other references, as comparisons, in literal ways, and as symbolism.]

In the Génie du Christianisme birds are one of the “marvels of nature” which “prove the existence of God,” and the bird is “the true symbol of the Christian here below” (le véritable emblème du chrétien ici-bas) because “il préfère, comme le fidèle, la solitude au monde, le ciel à la terre, et sa voix bénit sans cesse les merveilles du Créateur” (Part I, Book v, Ch. 5). In Atala birds are an essential feature of the exotic American setting and contribute to an imagery designed to create “une atmosphère vaguement poétique et un peu sentimentale.”¹ References to birds are few in René, but at the core of that story lies the comparison which the hero makes of himself to “un oiseau voyageur” and of man in general to a migratory bird waiting to unfold his wings and to be borne on the “wind of death” to the higher world for which he yearns.²

In the light of these and many other references to birds in earlier works, it would have been surprising if Chateaubriand had not featured them prominently in his masterpiece, Mémoires d'outre-tombe. The most famous bird in the work is probably the thrush (la grive), whose warbling, heard by the forty-four-year-old Chateaubriand one summer's day at Montboissier, near Chartres, stimulated memories of a thrush heard in his childhood in the woods of Combourg and led, as though by magic, to the series of chapters recreating Combourg (I, iii). No less an authority than Proust himself cited this passage as one of his sources for what has come to be known as la mémoire involontaire ou affective, and it has been the subject of considerable comment and debate.³

But the thrush is merely one of the many “petits oiseaux mémoriels,” as Jean-Pierre Richard calls them, which serve as stimulants to Chateaubriand's memory and as leading threads through the complex time-strata of the Mémoires. “Peu d'animaux dans le bestiaire de Chateaubriand,” writes Richard, “mais une infinité d'oiseaux, reconnus par leur apparence et par leur chant, nommés, replacés dans leurs habitudes propres, caressés du regard, toujours chéris.”⁴ In the Mémoires alone, I have counted more than 200 references to birds. Approximately 170 are to birds by name and an additional 30 or so to birds in general (les oiseaux). Total kinds mentioned number over 60. Most of the named birds, including the thrush, receive only two or three mentions, but a small number recur frequently, by which I mean from 10 to 20 times. These, in descending order (once again the figures are approximate), are the nightingale, le rossignol, 20; the raven, le corbeau, and the crow, la corneille, 20 (raven, 13, and crow, 7); the eagle, l'aigle, 15; the swallow, l'hirondelle, and the swift, le martinet, 13 (swallow, 10, swift, 3); and finally, the lark, l'alouette, 10.

The purpose of this essay is to determine the function of birds in the Mémoires more extensively than previous critics have found occasion to do.⁵ The essay is divided into four parts: birds in literary and other references, birds in comparisons, “literal” birds, and bird symbolism.

Throughout the Mémoires one finds scattered references to birds in various literary and popular sources. Naturalists are represented by Aristotle on partridges, Pliny the Elder on Agrippina's talking thrush, Buffon on tropical birds. A Greek popular song about the return of the swallow is quoted, as well as the Chanson de l'Epervier et de la Fauvette beloved of an aunt of Chateaubriand disappointed in love. “Miraculous” or legendary birds are cited from medieval chronicles (the dove which descended on Clovis with the holy oil, the ravens carrying live coals which set fire to the French countryside) and from the saints' lives (the raven which brought food to Saint Paul the Hermit in the desert, the birds which were “brothers and sisters” to Saint Francis of Assisi). Literary references include Anacreon on the “prattling” swallow (a disparaging epithet rejected by Chateaubriand), a Greek epigram on the bird and the grasshopper, Virgil's Philomela or nightingale (based on the ancient Greek myth of Philomela and Procne), Ovid on quails, Lucretius on crows, Shakespeare's lark in Romeo and Juliet (a bird, Chateaubriand suggests, which will be remembered long after the Congress of Verona is forgotten), and Rousseau's nightingales of “la nuit au bord de la Saône” (Les Confessions).

These references are on the whole fairly impersonal and do not appear to form any particular pattern, except perhaps to remind the reader, as the author goes about incorporating certain birds into his personal mythology, of the distinguished role which birds have played over the centuries in various mythical and literary traditions. One of the sources referred to, however, the legend of Saint Francis of Assisi, bears an intimate relationship to Chateaubriand's “myth” or poetic image of himself. Francis of Assisi was the patron saint of François-René de Chateaubriand, and strange though it may seem, the two men do share some traits, including their penchant for conversations with birds. “J'ai reçu de mon patron,” wrote Chateaubriand with reasonable accuracy, “la pauvreté, l'amour des petits et des humbles, la compassion pour les animaux; mais mon bâton stérile ne se changera point en chêne vert pour les protéger” (II, 861).⁶ (This last, an allusion to the legend of Saint Francis's walking-stick transformed into a nesting tree for the turtledoves, is his way of saying that holiness was not one of the gifts he had received from the saint.)

Turning now to bird images (that is, similes and metaphors) of Chateaubriand's own invention, it is surprising to discover that only about one-fifth of the total references to birds use them in this way. Surprising not only because, according to Lehtonen, nature—including birds—provided Chateaubriand with most of his images⁷ but also because his well-known admiration for Shakespeare might have led one to expect him to emulate the great master of bird imagery much as he emulated in him the vision of life which embraces both the tragic and the comic.⁸ As an explanation for the relatively small number of these images, I hazard the guess that the author chose not to lessen the impact of the “literal” or “real” birds, which play a central role in the Mémoires (as we shall see), by using birds in too many comparisons.

Of the bird images one does find, a significant number occur in a political or military context. Some examples: the French habitually forsake yesterday's political favorites for new ones, “comme les pigeons d'une ferme s'empressent sous la main qui leur jette le grain” (II, 545); the fall of the “great eagle” Napoleon, the death of “l'aiglon,” his son (the Duke of Reichstadt) left no eagles or eaglets on the French political horizon, and those promised by the July Revolution “sont descendus de leur aire pour nicher avec les pigeons pattus” (II, 584); France, upon the return of Napoleon from Elba, is compared to “a great nest of soldiers” belonging to armies hatched beneath “the wings of the fame of Marengo and Austerlitz” (I, 960).

The majority of avian images compares persons to birds, for example, Lucile and Pauline de Beaumont, in their last years, to dying swans (I, 512), Tasso (on his return to Ferrara and prison) to “l'oiseau fasciné [qui] se jette dans la gueule du serpent” (II, 803), and Napoleon (of course) to the eagle and also, in a phrase borrowed from Buffon and reminiscent of the Icarus myth, to “l'oiseau des tropiques, attelé, dit Buffon, au char du soleil, [qui] se précipite de l'astre de la lumière” (I, 1025). If pigeons are the vulgar comic foil for the noble eagle, it should be pointed out in passing that eagles are far from uniformly noble in the Mémoires. In one episode of humorous intent, for example, the author shows us the Duchesse de Berry and General Bugeaud engaged in a quarrel: “Ils criaient comme deux aigles” (II, 816).

No person is compared more frequently to a bird in the Mémoires than the author himself.⁹ In the first such image, very early in the book, using the word hibou in the sense of a morose, solitary fellow, he writes: “Il fallut quelque temps à un hibou de mon espèce pour s'accoutumer à la cage d'un collège et régler sa volée au son d'une cloche” (I, 48). He thought of his whole family at Combourg, in fact, as a nest of birds: after the death of his father and the property settlement, “nous nous dispersâmes, comme des oiseaux s'envolent du nid paternel” (I, 122); later, when François and Lucile joined Julie in Paris, he called this reunion “une douce association des trois plus jeunes oiseaux de la couvée” (I, 136). At various times he compares himself to the hazel-grouse (la gelinotte), to the lark (I, 496), to “ce triste et petit oiseau de l'hiver qui chante, ainsi que moi, parmi les buissons dépouillés” (I, 819), and to “le vieil oiseau [qui] tombe de la branche où il se réfugie [et qui] quitte la vie pour la mort” (II, 383). He is also the bird who got away from Napoleon, that is, during the Cent Jours: “l'oiseau a déniché” (I, 942). Only once, however, does he refer to himself as an eagle, when he attributes to himself as a diplomat “un regard d'aigle” (II, 356).

In the light of these comparisons, it may seem at first somewhat strange to hear him declare: “Mon exactitude tient à mon bon sens vulgaire; je suis de la race des Celtes et des tortues, race pédestre; non du sang des Tartares et des oiseaux, races pourvues de chevaux et d'ailes” (I, 621). But the contradiction is more apparent than real. The essential point is that he consistently aspired to a birdlike freedom, just as he dreamed of the freedom of an artist's life in Rome unburdened of his ambassadorial responsibilities:

Je voudrais être né artiste: la solitude, l'indépendance, le soleil parmi des ruines et des chefs-d'œuvre, me conviendraient. Je n'ai aucun besoin; un morceau de pain, une cruche de l'Aqua Felice, me suffiraient. Ma vie a été misérablement accrochée aux buissons de ma route; heureux si j'avais été l'oiseau libre qui chante et fait son nid dans ces buissons!

[II, 242]

Birds in comparisons are far outnumbered, as I indicated earlier, by “literal” birds, that is, birds that exist in narrative or descriptive passages as objects of representation in themselves. Of course the distinction between “literal” and “figurative” birds frequently breaks down. Often the sight of a real bird will suggest to Chateaubriand a simile or metaphor which he will then proceed to formulate. Or on the other hand, he will imply, for a real bird he is depicting, an extension into the metaphorical or symbolic realm, without developing an explicit comparison.

Several birds figure in episodes or anecdotes of a humorous nature. These tend to be the more prosaic, “ridiculous” birds such as magpies and assorted barnyard fowl. Young Chateaubriand's theft of the magpie's nest while at the Collège de Dol (I, 59-60) belongs to this category, as do Madame Suard's noisy rooster which annoyed Madame de Coislin (I, 580), General de Trogoff's obstreperous nightingales (II, 710, 724),¹⁰ and Chateaubriand's mock-elegy for the young chicken (la géline) served to him for lunch in an Austrian inn (“Pauvre poussin! il était si heureux cinq minutes avant mon arrivée!”—II, 841).

In his descriptions of customs and manners the author frequently uses ornithological details to make his point. “Le vieux matelot ressemble au vieux laboureur. … A l'un, l'alouette, le rouge-gorge, le rossignol; à l'autre, la procellaria, le courlis, l'alcyon,—leurs prophètes” (I, 200).¹¹ In Germany he was struck by the widespread habit of caging songbirds as pets, and compared the “crows, sparrows, and larks” of the fields with the “nightingales, warblers, thrushes, and quails” which greeted him from their tiny prisons in the towns (II, 743). He felt that the traveler had much to learn about various peoples by observing carefully “la physionomie des animaux” (presumably this also included the birds) which shared their environment (II, 845).

His own “eagle eye” took in the smallest things in nature. Visiting Voltaire's house in Ferney, he seemed more interested in the flora and fauna of a little valley nearby than in the memory of Voltaire (II, 504-5). His lack of enthusiasm for mountains is well known: even the Alps visible from Ferney could not distract him from attention to the tiniest natural phenomena. In this particular passage the tiny things happen to be “une palmette de fougère … le susurrement d'une vague parmi des cailloux … un insecte imperceptible qui ne sera vu que de moi et qui s'enfonce sous une mousse,” but there is no doubt that his keenness of observation extended to birds as well as to plants and insects.

In another passage involving mountains considered as landscape subjects, he argued that the most beautiful landscape paintings are those which are reshaped by the painter's memory and feeling, and that from this point of view the smallest subjects have as much aesthetic value as the largest. His list of possibilities—a tree, a flower, a stream, a piece of moss on a rock, a bit of sky—this time also includes “une mésange dans le jardin d'un presbytère” and “une hirondelle volant bas, par un jour de pluie, sous le chaume d'une grange ou le long d'un cloître.” He concludes: “Toutes ces petites choses, rattachées à quelques souvenirs, s'enchanteront des mystères de mon bonheur ou de la tristesse de mes regrets” (II, 593). It is the painter, not nature, who creates the landscape. “Le paysage est sur la palette de Claude le Lorrain, non sur le Campo-Vaccino” (II, 593).

Of the many landscapes created by the poet-painter of the Mémoires, almost none is without its birds, whether these be the skylark (l'alouette de champ) and the sea-lark (l'alouette marine) which share the indistinct terrain between land and sea in Brittany (I, 41), the “sarcelles bleues” of the Azores (I, 207), the egret or tufted heron of the Ile Saint-Pierre (I, 213), the cardinals, doves, and mockingbirds along the Hudson River (I, 230), the cranes, turkeys, and pelicans of Florida “[qui] marbraient de blanc, de noir et de rose le fond vert de la savane” (I, 261), the doves nesting in cypresses in a Constantinople cemetery, “sharing the peace of the dead” (I, 605), or the “millions of starlings” flying above the ruins of Carthage (I, 616), among many others.

It should come as no surprise that the birds which play the most important role in the Mémoires are those associated with its author's childhood in Combourg. As he moved from place to place in his extremely long life, it was these birds which reappeared in different contexts, recalling the distant past to him, providing an essential element of unity and continuity in his life and in his work, and serving as structural links between the various parts of the Mémoires.

The thrush, we saw, was one of these: “Le chant de l'oiseau dans les bois de Combourg m'entretenait d'une félicité que je croyais atteindre; le même chant dans le parc de Montboissier me rappelait des jours perdus à la poursuite de cette félicité insaisissable” (I, 76). Another was the passereau-blanc, a kind of sparrow, glimpsed in the woods of northern New York: “Un couple solitaire voltigeait seulement devant moi, comme ces oiseaux que je suivais dans mes bois paternels; à la couleur du mâle, je reconnus le passereau-blanc, passer nivalis des ornithologistes” (I, 235). Still another was the water hen (la poule d'eau), which formed part of “la caravane emplumée” of the nearby pond at Combourg (I, 97), whose cry he heard outside Ghent, during a stroll, at the same time as the distant cannon of the Battle of Waterloo (I, 962), and which turned up once more in Lucerne (“J'ai vu les poules d'eau privées; j'aime mieux les poules d'eau sauvages de l'étang de Combourg”—II, 579).¹²

The nightingale also belongs to this privileged company of thematic “memory” birds. Together with the swallow, the oriole, the cuckoo, and the quail, it is one of the five birds announcing the arrival of spring in Brittany (I, 40). Later Chateaubriand encountered it at a crossroad of a wood in northern France as he and his brother fled to join the royalist army (I, 310), in a café on the Champs Elysées which he frequented (perhaps nostalgically) “à cause de quelques rossignols suspendus en cage” (I, 446), in the countryside near Rome as a true “Philomèle de Virgile” whose song he found less shrill than that of the French nightingale (II, 366), and in the garden of the Infirmerie de Marie-Thérèse in Paris, where its song “rivaled the hymns” heard in the outdoor religious processions and reminded him of his chapter on Rogation Day ceremonies in the Génie du Christianisme (II, 622).¹³ The nightingale also appears in the lyrical digression—one of the many variations on the Sylphide theme—known as “l'Invocation à Cynthie” (II, 725). Only once, however, does Chateaubriand suggest a more specific link between nightingales and the memory of Combourg, and even in this case he does so very indirectly. I refer to his gently mocking description of the way in which spring arrives in a Berlin park as compared with his native Brittany: “La nature vivante se ranimait avant la nature végétale, et des grenouilles toutes noires étaient dévorées par des canards, dans les eaux çà et là dégelées: ces rossignols-là ouvraient le printemps dans les bois de Berlin” (II, 49).¹⁴

Sharing top honors in Chateaubriand's hierarchy of birds are the swift and swallow, and the crow and raven.

“A few swifts,” along with some screech-owls at night, were the “only companions” of the boy in his tower room of Combourg castle, and therefore were intimate components of the situation of a child forced to adjust to solitude, to be brave, and to develop his imagination (I, 84). Swallows became part of the “caractère moral de l'automne” for him, when from his boat on the pond he used to watch their playful but purposeful maneuvers over the waters and on the shore as they prepared for their annual migration. “Je ne perdais pas un seul de leurs gazouillis,” he notes. “Tavernier enfant était moins attentif au récit d'un voyageur” (I, 96-97).¹⁵ And when he too left Combourg, like Adam exiled from Eden, the reeds on which these birds liked to alight (“les roseaux de mes hirondelles”) were among the last things his gaze took in (I, 105). As a Peer of France, busily engaged in political activities but never turning his back on the world of dreams, he associated in one memory “l'hirondelle qui me réveillait dans ma jeunesse et les Muses qui remplissaient mes songes” (II, 17).

Swallows and swifts then disappear for many pages, but it is inevitable, according to the artistic logic of the Mémoires, that they should eventually reappear, to have their special moments in the recall of Combourg.

For the swift the scene is Hohlfeld, in Germany, where Chateaubriand stopped on his return from Prague to France in 1833. There the configuration of swifts and tower perceived during an evening stroll set off the memory. “Sur [un] rocher s'allonge un beffroi carré; des martinets criaient en rasant le toit et les faces du donjon. Depuis mon enfance à Combourg, cette scène composée de quelques oiseaux et d'une vieille tour ne s'était pas reproduite; j'en eus le cœur tout serré” (II, 731).

The climactic swallow scene occurs shortly thereafter, in Bischofsheim (again Germany), and goes far beyond the recall merely of Combourg: it takes the form of one of those recapitulatory passages, frequent in the Mémoires, in which the author casts a backward glance over the major places and events of his life. A swallow, “vraie Procné, à la poitrine rougeâtre,” perches outside his open window “en me regardant d'un air de connaissance et sans montrer la moindre frayeur.” By means of references to Greek myth, poetry, and song the author effects a skilful transition from the familiar, prosaic, “real” bird to the figurative, personified bird who engages in a dialogue with him, recalling all her ancestors whom he has known in his life and travels, from her “trisaïeule qui logeait à Combourg” and bade him farewell when he embarked for America, through the swallows of England and the Holy Land, to those of Italy. Reminding him that she herself had met him “sur l'ancienne voie de Tivoli dans la campagne de Rome,” she invites him to fly away with her. In reply, Chateaubriand, “poor moulted bird” who has lost all hope of regaining his feathers, must decline her invitation, but not without reassuring her of their continuing affinity: “Comme toi, j'ai aimé la liberté, et j'ai vécu de peu” (II, 735-736).¹⁶

Among the corvine birds the magpie, as we saw earlier, lends comic relief, and the jay (le geai) appears in a brief poetic flash linking Brittany, the Holy Land, and Germany (II, 742). But these are far surpassed in thematic importance by crows and ravens.

For certain of their attributes, Chateaubriand drew on motifs of folklore and legend: their association with death, their role as carriers of messages and of objects, either for catastrophic or for beneficent purposes (setting fire to the countryside, but also bringing food to nourish the anchorites), and finally their ability to talk and to remember and preserve bits of extinct languages (he imagines a raven surviving the disappearance of French civilization and alone preserving phrases from Bossuet taught to him by “le dernier curé franco-gaulois,” and suggests that this may one day be the fate of his own work—I, 250).¹⁷

In more intimate fashion both crows and ravens appear from the outset of the Mémoires, in the Combourg sections, as part of the “caractère moral de l'automne,” that is, the melancholy aspects of nature in this declining season which reflect man's own mortality and therefore possess “des rapports secrets avec nos destinées” (I, 96). According to the familiar Romantic paradox, such sad scenes are also pleasurable (“Mes joies de l'automne,” the chapter is entitled). Included among the pleasures are “le passage des cygnes et des ramiers, le rassemblement des corneilles dans la prairie de l'étang, et leur perchée à l'entrée de la nuit sur les plus hauts chênes du grand Mail” (I, 96). Two chapters later, in “Tentation,” the first ravens make their appearance, in a gloomy context, the adolescent Chateaubriand's death wish and temptation to suicide:

Après avoir marché à l'aventure, agitant mes mains, embrassant les vents qui m'échappaient ainsi que l'ombre, objet de mes poursuites, je m'appuyais contre le tronc d'un hêtre; je regardais les corbeaux que je faisais envoler d'un arbre pour se poser sur un autre, ou la lune se traînant sur la cime dépouillée de la futaie: j'aurais voulu habiter ce monde mort, qui réfléchissait la pâleur du sépulcre.

[I, 99]

The successors to the crows of Combourg are numerous. In his flight through the Ardennes forest after being wounded at the siege of Thionville, he comes across “quelques corneilles” together with some larks and yellow buntings, who seemed to be in as much danger as he while they sat immobile eyeing a falcon circulating above them (I, 339). At Westminster Abbey, too poor to pay the entrance fee very often, he “turned round and round outside with the crows” (I, 355). At Chantilly it is “quelques corneilles” which fly ahead of him, guiding him through the woods to the ruined castle of the Prince de Condé, where he broods on the arrest and execution by Napoleon of Condé's descendant, the Duc d'Enghien (I, 538). After this passage crows are absent for many pages (to be replaced by ravens) until they return in the fourth and last part of the Mémoires, to establish still another link with Combourg. The scene is the Danube Valley as Chateaubriand travels toward Prague on his second mission to the exiled court of Charles X:

Le 25 [septembre 1833], à la nuit tombante, j'entrai dans des bois. Des corneilles criaient en l'air; leurs épaisses volées tournoyaient audessus des arbres dont elles se préparaient à couronner la cime. Voilà que je retournai à ma première jeunesse: je revis les corneilles du mail de Combourg; je crus reprendre ma vie de famille dans le vieux château: ô souvenirs, vous traversez le cœur comme un glaive! ô ma Lucile, bien des années nous ont séparés! maintenant la foule de mes jours a passé, et, en se dissipant, me laisse mieux voir ton image.

[II, 847]

Ravens present nothing quite to match the poignancy of this scene, but they too have their moments of poetic beauty, and their spiritual affinity with Chateaubriand was surpassed by that of no other bird, except perhaps the swallow. As with the swallow, he “conversed” with ravens. In 1804 in the Parc de Monceaux, near the petit hôtel he then lived in on the Rue de Miromesnil, “je ne m'occupais de rien,” he observed, “tout au plus m'entretenais-je dans le parc avec quelques lapins, ou causais-je du duc d'Enghien avec trois corbeaux” (I, 576). Escaping from Paris at dawn during the Cent Jours, he saw on the outskirts a flock of ravens descending from the elm trees to “take their first meal in the fields”; he envied them their indifference to Louis XVIII and Napoleon, the fact that they were not “forced to leave their fatherland,” and their freedom of flight, which reminded him of his own lost freedom as a child. “Vieux amis de Combourg!” he complained, “nous nous ressemblions davantage quand jadis, au lever du jour, nous déjeunions des mûres de la ronce dans nos halliers de la Bretagne!” (I, 927).¹⁸

In Berlin he fed “de vieux corbeaux, mes éternels amis,” who perched in linden trees outside his window; he describes in detail their skill in manipulating large chunks of bread in order to feed on them, and dignifies their after-dinner song with a verse from Lucretius: “Le repas fait, l'oiseau chantait à sa manière: cantus cornicum ut saecla vetusta” (II, 48).¹⁹ “Aller revoir mes corbeaux” was synonymous with the wish to return to his diplomatic post in Berlin (II, 64). One of the few things he enjoyed in Zurich was “un vieux corbeau et un vieil orme,” for which he declared himself willing to exchange the whole history of that city (II, 596). The last glimpse we have of ravens in the Mémoires is in a delicately painted detail of a sunrise landscape in the Salzburg plain: “Des bandes de corbeaux, quittant les lierres et les trous des ruines, descendaient sur les guérets; leurs ailes moirées se glaçaient de rose au reflet du matin” (II, 844).

There remains one final function of birds in the Mémoires to be pointed out: their role as symbols. The symbolic motifs which I shall outline briefly are rarely presented explicitly by Chateaubriand; his usual pattern is to convey them by repeated association of certain birds, or of birds as a whole, with certain qualities or states.

Birds symbolize, in the first place, solitude, a very positive value for Chateaubriand, as we know. The earliest reference to birds in the Mémoires has this connotation. He describes how, as a boy in Saint Malo, too poor to buy playthings at the fair and afraid to be ridiculed for his poverty, he went off alone by the seashore, “loin de la foule,” and there, “je m'amusais à voir voler les pingouins et les mouettes, à béer aux lointains bleuâtres, à ramasser des coquillages, à écouter le refrain des vagues parmi les écueils” (I, 31). The motif of the swifts and the tower is also part of this symbolism. Typical of the Mémoires are scenes of the author alone with a few birds, often among ruins, in a deserted churchyard, or in some other secluded site. “Mes compagnons étaient les morts, quelques oiseaux et le soleil qui se couchait” (I, 161). At L'Abbaye-aux-Bois “quelques oiseaux se venaient coucher dans les jalousies relevées de la fenêtre; je rejoignais au loin le silence et le solitude, par-dessus le tumulte et le bruit d'une grande cité” (II, 221). Among the ruins in Rome “il y reste quelques oiseaux et moi, encore pour un temps très court; nous nous envolerons bientôt” (II, 297). Passing by L'Abbaye de Saint Urbain in Switzerland, he muses: “Si j'eusse été libre et seul, j'aurais demandé aux moines quelque trou dans leurs murailles pour y achever mes Mémoires auprès d'une chouette” (II, 604).

In most of these passages the solitude which birds come to represent also carries with it thoughts of the vanity of human existence and a yearning for the peace of death.

A second symbolic meaning attributed to birds is that of freedom, the freedom to take flight, to be elsewhere. This significance is more than once assumed by migratory birds in association with clouds. “Comme aux oiseaux voyageurs, il me prend au mois d'octobre une inquiétude qui m'obligerait à changer de climat, si j'avais encore la puissance des ailes et la légèreté des heures: les nuages qui volent à travers le ciel me donnent envie de fuir” (I, 538). During Chateaubriand's first sojourn in Prague he was dining on the grounds of the estate of the Comte de Choteck when he realized that he felt out of place:

Tandis que je m'efforçais d'être présent au repas, je ne pouvais m'empêcher de regarder les oiseaux et les nuages qui volaient audessus du festin; passagers embarqués sur les brises et qui ont des relations secrètes avec mes destinées; voyageurs, objets de mon envie et dont mes yeux ne peuvent suivre la course aérienne sans une sorte d'attendrissement. J'étais plus en société avec ces parasites errants dans le ciel qu'avec les convives assis auprès de moi sur la terre: heureux anachorètes qui pour dapifer aviez un corbeau!

[II, 687]²⁰

The reader will note here not only a reprise of the oiseaux-voyageurs-nuages motif but also a distant echo of the “rapports secrets avec nos destinées” of autumn in Combourg.

Thirdly, birds symbolize the world of dream and imagination,²¹ which Chateaubriand opposes, as he does the world of nature as a whole, to the world of “realities,” by which he usually means politics.

Occasionally the sight of a bird serves to bring him back to earth from some flight of fancy: “Le vent du soir qui brisait les réseaux tendus par l'insecte sur la pointe des herbes, l'alouette de bruyère qui se posait sur un caillou, me rappelaient à la réalité” (I, 95). (This particular bird, significantly, is touching down to earth himself rather than taking flight.) But more characteristically birds represent an invitation to, and help usher in, the world of reverie. Their mere flight or even coming to rest, without the need of song or other sound, suffices. It was the cessation of sounds of the fresh-water birds as night descended over l'étang de Combourg, together with the sound of the reeds in the wind and of the water lapping the shore, that led to the first “Incantation” or magic conjuring-up by the imagination of the poeticized ideal woman, the Sylphide (I, 97). “Une fleur que je cueille, un courant d'eau qui se dérobe parmi des joncs, un oiseau qui va s'envolant et se reposant devant moi, m'entraînent à toutes sortes de rêves” (I, 485). Each meeting he attended as a politician left him “un peu plus homme d'Etat et un peu plus persuadé de la pauvreté de toute cette science,” and he would lie awake nights picturing all those bald-headed, unkempt, and physically unattractive statesmen and remembering that other, poetic world in which he felt more at home, the world of “the swallow who wakened me in my youth and the Muses who filled my dreams” (II, 17).

Finally, birds represent, as does the whole natural system of which they form part, changelessness and permanence in contrast to the transitory nature of man and all his works. Grevlund points out how this theme is tied in with the theme of memory: “Sans parler encore de mémoire affective, il est tout naturel que les retours en arrière se produisent surtout aux rencontres de ce qui, dans le monde présent, semble avoir traversé les années sans subir d'altérations: fleurs, oiseaux, parfums, la mer, le ciel …” (p. 200). Man forgets and passes away; nature remembers and endures. Chateaubriand's own powerful determination to remember the dead, to “donner une existence impérissable à tout ce qu'il a aimé” (I, 526), to “faire vivre dans mes ouvrages les personnes qui me sont chères” (I, 629), is a central preoccupation of all his work and reaches its supreme expression in the Mémoires. He would not forget, and if others forgot, at least he and nature would remember.

This piety extended to the small as well as the great (“Puisque c'est ma propre vie que j'écris en m'occupant de celles des autres, grandes ou petites”—I, 1026). One of the most moving examples is the awesome evocation of the Napoleonic retreat from Moscow and of the countless dead soldiers left behind whose remains would disappear on the battlefield:

Qui pense à ses paysans laissés en Russie? Ces rustiques sont-ils contents d'avoir été à la grande bataille sous les murs de Moscou? Il n'y a peut-être que moi qui, dans les soirées d'automne, en regardant voler au haut du ciel les oiseaux du Nord, me souvienne qu'ils ont vu la tombe de nos compatriotes.

[I, 818]

This passage seems to me to provide the serious counterpart to the semihumorous stories about human languages surviving in “la mémoire d'un oiseau.”

When Chateaubriand refers to ravens as “mes éternels amis,” the adjective is not to be taken lightly. Birds, and the natural system to which they belong, represent a permanence, almost a kind of eternity, which man lacks—a view easier to hold in the nineteenth century than today, when man has revealed his power to alter nature radically and even to destroy it. “Les oiseaux,” observes Lehtonen, “qui, pour Chateaubriand, jouent un rôle important dans l'évocation du passé, sont également des symboles de la nature qui survivra aux civilisations humaines” (p. 457). She cites several variations on this theme from other works, in addition to the passages I have included in this essay, but correctly points out that its main symbolic expression is the stork (la cigogne), whose role she traces from an early book-review by Chateaubriand through the Mémoires. The storks in Athens had inspired this reflection on his part:

[La] mobilité des choses humaines est d'autant plus frappante pour le voyageur, qu'elle est en contraste avec l'immobilité du reste de la nature: comme pour insulter à l'instabilité des peuples, les animaux mêmes n'éprouvent ni révolution dans leurs empires, ni changements dans leurs mœurs.²²

In the Mémoires a striking little painting, almost in the manner of a Dutch master, serves both to link the storks of a Danube valley town with those seen many years earlier, on a minaret in Athens, and to illustrate the contrast between the fragility of man and his creations and the durability of the animal kingdom. A stork's nest on the chimney of a house; beneath it a woman watching passers-by from her window; and in a niche below the window the wooden statue of a saint; the moral: “Le saint sera précipité de sa niche sur le pavé, la femme de sa fenêtre dans la tombe: et la cigogne? elle s'envolera: ainsi finiront les trois étages” (II, 639).

With apologies to ornithologists for any inaccuracies in terminology and to the computer for any errors (at least serious ones) in bird count, I conclude with a summary of my findings.

Birds are present from one end of Chateaubriand's Mémoires to the other, with only a few breaks of any appreciable length. Their presence is in fact so habitual that the reader feels the weight of their absence when it does occur. Their identities and habits are noted with precision: what is unusual is the author's occasional inability to name them, not his ability to do so. His birds reflect ancient beliefs of folklore as well as the observations of naturalists and the imagery of poets. They form part of landscapes of several continents, enter into anecdotes, episodes, and scenes, and provide the basis of many comparisons. The most significant of his birds, however, are those associated with his childhood in Combourg, and above all, the nightingale, the lark, the swallow and the swift, the crow and the raven. These rank among his favorite agents of recall to memory, his most persistent “echo” effects (“Mes souvenirs se font écho”—I, 61), and the strongest structural links uniting the various parts of this “temple de la mort élevé à la clarté de [ses] souvenirs,” as he described the Mémoires (I, 7). Joined by other birds, they are also raised to the poetic dignity of symbols, representing especially solitude, freedom, the world of reverie, and the permanence and changelessness of nature as opposed to the ephemeral character of mankind.

The thematic treatment of birds, which can be traced back to Chateaubriand's earliest works, reaches its artistic culmination as well as its richest amplification in his Mémoires. Such an exalted place in his imagination could hardly have been possible for them had he not felt with them, as he felt with the flowers, trees, clouds, rivers, and seas which he so often associates with them, mysterious bonds of affinity, “des relations secrètes avec [ses] destinées.”

Notes

1. Maija Lehtonen, L'Expression imagée dans l'œuvre de Chateaubriand (Helsinki: Société Néophilologique, 1964), p. 75.

2. Chateaubriand, Œuvres romanesques et voyages (Paris, 1969), I, 130.

3. For further discussion of this question, see Lehtonen, pp. 416-23, Merete Grevlund, Paysage intérieur et paysage extérieur dans les Mémoires d'outre-tombe (Paris, 1968), pp. 200-207, and Jean-Pierre Richard, Paysage de Chateaubriand (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967), pp. 105-11.

4. Richard, pp. 64, 66.

5. Lehtonen (bird imagery in the major works of Chateaubriand), Richard (the bird as “l'aventurier du vide,” pp. 64-67, and the episode of the thrush, pp. 105-11), and Grevlund (birds as part of “les échos,” pp. 181-89) have all touched on my subject, but in larger contexts and in less detail. I am indebted to their studies, however, as I also am, for ornithological background, to Edward A. Armstrong, The Folklore of Birds, rev. ed. (New York, 1970). My thanks, finally, to my colleague Dr. Gérard de Jubécourt for his kind assistance in interpreting certain passages of the Mémoires related to birds.

6. References are given to the two-volume Pléiade edition of the Mémoires (Paris, 1951). I have also consulted the four-volume Edition du Centenaire, 2e éd. revue et corrigée (Paris, 1964).

7. Lehtonen: “La nature reste la source principale d'images, dont les plus fréquentes sont celles de l'eau (y compris la navigation) et les images empruntées aux animaux et aux oiseaux” (p. 517).

8. For references to this last point, see Mémoires I, 952, II, 575, and the discussion of Shakespeare in the Essai sur la littérature anglaise.

9. Lehtonen: “Dans les Mémoires d'outre-tombe Chateaubriand se compare le plus volontiers à un navigateur, à un voyageur, à un soldat et à un oiseau” (p. 508).

10. Armstrong (pp. 186-87) points out that the sad nightingale of harmonious song is better known to poetry than to folklore, where the noisiness of the bird is more commonly stressed. Chateaubriand appears to reflect both sorts of tradition.

11. Cf. Génie du Christianisme (I, v, 8): “Entre le rouge-gorge et le laboureur, entre la procellaria et le matelot, il y a une ressemblance de mœurs et de destinées tout à fait attendrissante.” In the Mémoires Chateaubriand has worked out the affinity between birds and his own “mœurs” and “destinées,” in more personal terms than in the Génie.

12. The “poule d'eau” is one of the birds described in most detail in the Génie. In a chapter of his Impressions de voyage (“Les poules d'eau de M. de Chateaubriand”), Dumas Père describes his visit to Lucerne in the summer of 1832, where Chateaubriand showed him “les poules d'eau, ses amies.” See note in Edition du Centenaire, IV, 112.

13. IV, i, 8.

14. The italicized phrase is quoted (slightly misquoted) from a letter of Madame de Sévigné to her daughter, Madame de Grignan.

15. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605-1689), a celebrated French traveler.

16. Lehtonen (pp. 418-19) points out a prior use of the swallow in L'Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem to link the scene at the time (aboard ship in the Syrian Sea) to America and Combourg. Compare Richard: “L'hirondelle … ponctuera de sa réapparition régulière les principaux moments—Combourg, Amérique, Grèce, Allemagne, Rome—de l'existence de Chateaubriand. A partir de ces retours prendra forme, et même conscience l'architecture d'une vie” (p. 67).

17. Most of these folkloric motifs are found in Armstrong, Ch. 5, “The Bird of Doom and Deluge.” For what it may be worth in the present context I also call attention to Armstrong's remark that in Celtic lands, “the raven and crow have far greater significance than the eagle” (p. 130).

18. Compare Grevlund: “Les corbeaux, inséparables de l'image de Combourg, sont toujours pour Chateaubriand un prétexte de célébrer la liberté de ses jeunes années” (p. 186).

19. “La voix des corneilles est comme la voix des siècles anciens.” The original Latin reads “Et partim mutant cum tempestatibus una / Raucisonos cantus cornicum ut saecla vetusta” (De rerum natura, V, 1084-85), and Chateaubriand translates: “D'autres oiseaux font varier avec les aspects du temps les accents de leur voix rauque; telles les générations des corneilles vivaces” (Edition du Centenaire, III, 67 n.).

20. Maurice Levaillant explains, “Le Depifer, ou Sénéchal, était sous les premiers Capétiens le chef des quatre grands officiers royaux de la Cour et le chef du service de la table.” According to Levaillant, Chateaubriand is alluding here to the legend of the raven who brought Saint Paul the Hermit a daily half-loaf of bread, and when Saint Anthony visited him, a whole loaf. He also reminds us of the echoes of René and the Génie in this passage: “Les thèmes ici réunis sont parmi les plus chers à l'imagination de Chateaubriand” (Edition du Centenaire, IV, 242-43).

21. “Generally speaking, birds, like angels, are symbols of thought, of imagination and of the swiftness of spiritual processes and relationships.” J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans. from the Spanish by Jack Sage (New York, 1962), p. 27.

22. Quoted in Lehtonen, p. 458, from Chateaubriand's review of Alexandre de Laborde's Voyage pittoresque et historique de l'Espagne, in Le Mercure of 1807.