The Rings of Saturn (22 page)

The story of Charlotte Ives is only a minute fragment of the several thousand pages of the Vicomte de Chateaubriand's memoirs. It was in Rome in 1806 that he first felt the desire to search the depths of his soul. In 1811, Chateaubriand began this undertaking in earnest, and from that time onwards he devoted himself to his recollections whenever the circumstances of his at once glorious and painful life permitted. His personal feelings and thoughts unfolded against the background of the momentous upheavals of those years: the Revolution, the Reign of Terror, his own exile, the rise and fall of Napoleon, the Restoration and the July Monarchy all were part of this interminable play performed upon the world's stage, a play which took its toll on the privileged observer no less than on the nameless masses. The scene was constantly changing. We see the coast of Virginia from on board a ship, visit the naval arsenal in Greenwich, marvel at his description of the great fire of Moscow, stroll through the parks of Bohemian spas and witness the bombardment of Thionville. Burning torches illuminate the city battlements, which are swarming with thousands of soldiers; the fiery trajectories of cannonballs criss-cross the dark air; and before each report from the guns, a dazzling glare lights up the towering clouds in the sky right up to the blue zenith. At times the noise of the battle dies down for a few seconds, and then one can hear the beating of drums, brass fanfares, and orders bellowed out by voices strained to breaking point. Sentinelles, prenez garde à vous! Within the overall context of the task of remembering, such colourful accounts of military spectacles and large-scale operations form what might be called the highlights of history which staggers blindly from one disaster to the next.
The chronicler, who was present at these events and is once more recalling what he witnessed, inscribes his experiences, in an act of self-mutilation, onto his own body. In the writing, he becomes the martyred paradigm of the fate Providence has in store for us, and, though still alive, is already in the tomb that his memoirs represent. From the very outset, recapitulating the past can have only one end, the hour of deliverance, which in the case of Chareaubriand came on the 4th of June 1848, the day on which death took the pen from his hand in a rez-de-chaussée in the Rue du Bac. Combourg, Rennes, Brest, St Malo, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Brussels, the island of Jersey, London, Beccles and Bungay, Milan, Verona, Venice, Rome, Naples, Vienna, Berlin, Potsdam, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Neuchâtel, Lausanne, Basle, Ulm, Waldmünchen, Teplitz, Karlsbad, Prague and Pilsen, Bamberg, Würzburg and Kaiserslautern, and time and again, Versailles, Chantilly, Fontaine-bleau, Rambouillet, Vichy and Paris – these were just a few of the stations along a journey which had now reached its end. At the beginning was a childhood in Combourg, the account of which became indelibly imprinted on my mind the very first time I read it. François-René was the youngest of ten children, the first four of whom lived for no more than a few months. The others were christened Jean-Baptiste, Marie-Anne, Bénigne, Julie and Lucile. All four girls were of a rare beauty, especially Julie and Lucile, both of whom were to die in the turmoil of the Revolution. The Chateaubriand family lived in total seclusion, with a number of servants, in the manor house at Combourg, where the halls and passages were so vast and endless that an army of crusaders might lose their way in them. Apart from a few neighbouring noblemen
such as the Marquis de Monlouet or Count Goyon-Beaufort, no one ever visited the castle. Particularly in winter, Chateaubriand writes, entire months would pass without any travellers or strangers knocking on the gate of our fortress. Far greater than the sadness that hung over the surrounding heath was the sadness that pervaded this lonely house. Those who walked beneath its vaults felt much as one might when entering a Carthusian monastery. The bell for dinner always rang at eight. After dinner, we would sit for a few hours by the fire. The wind would be moaning in the chimney, mother sighed on the sofa, and father, whom I never saw seated except at table, paced up and down the enormous dining hall until it was time for bed. He always wore a white woollen shaggy robe, and a cap of the same material. Once he was at a certain distance from the centre of the hall, which was lit only by the flickering fire in the hearth and a solitary candle, he would begin to disappear into the shadows, and, when he was completely immersed in the darkness, all one would hear was his footfall until he came back like a ghost, in his peculiar attire. During the summer months, we would sit outside on the steps in front of the house as it was getting dark. Father would fire his shotgun at owls, and we children and mother would look across at the black tree tops of the forest and up at the heavens where the stars came out one by one. At the age of seventeen, Chateaubriand writes, I left Combourg. One day my father pronounced that I would have to make my own way henceforth. He had determined that I would join the Régiment de Navarre and leave on the following day to travel to Cambrai via Rennes. Here, he said, are a hundred Louis d'or. Do not squander them and never dishonour your name. At the
time of my departure he was already suffering from the progressive paralysis which was finally to send him to his grave. His left arm twitched constantly, and he had to keep it still with his right hand. And that was how, after he had given me his old rapier, he stood with me beside the cabriolet that was already waiting in the green courtyard. We drove up the lane by the fishponds, and one more time I beheld the mill stream shining and the swallows swooping across the reeds. Then I looked ahead, at the broad terrain that was now opening up in front of me.

It took another hour to walk from Ilketshall St Margaret to Bungay, and a further hour from Bungay over the marshes of the Waveney valley to the far side of Ditchingham. Visible from a distance, nestling at the foot of the ridge which drops down quite steeply to the watermeadows, was Ditchingham Lodge, the isolated house where Charlotte Ives lived for many years after her marriage to Admiral Sutton. As I approached, I could see the window panes glinting in the sunlight. A woman in a white apron – what an unusual sight, I thought – came out underneath the portico roof which was supported by two columns, calling a black dog that was running about in the garden. Apart from her there was not a soul in sight. I climbed the slope to the main road and then walked across the stubble fields to Ditchingham churchyard, some way outside the village, where the elder of Charlotte's two sons, who went to seek his fortune in Bombay, is buried. The inscription on the stone sarcophagus reads: At Rest Beneath, 3
^rd
Feb
^ry
1850, Samuel Ives Sutton, Eldest Son of Rear Admiral Sutton, Late Captain 1
^st
Battalion 60
^th
Rifles, Major by Brevét and Staff Officer of Pentioners. Next to Samuel Sutton's grave stands another even
more imposing monument, also built of slabs of heavy stone and crowned by an urn. What struck me about this tomb were the round holes on the upper edges of the four sides. They reminded me somehow of the air-hole we used to make as children in the lids of the boxes in which we kept the cockchafers we caught, with some leaves for food. It was possible, I thought to myself, that the bereaved had had these holes bored into the stone in the eventuality that the dear departed in her sepulchre should wish once more

to breathe the air. The name of the lady who had been cared for in this manner was Sarah Camell, who died on the 26th of October 1799. As the wife of the Ditchingham doctor, she would have been acquainted with the Ives family, and it is probable that Charlotte, together with her parents, was present at the funeral and perhaps even played a pavane on the pianoforte at the Camells' home after the service. The higher sentiments which
were cultivated at the time in the circles in which Sarah and Charlotte moved are preserved in the elegant words of the epitaph which Dr Camell, who survived his wife by nearly forty years, had engraved on the south-facing side of the pale grey tomb:

Firm in the principles and constant

in the practice of religion

Her life displayed the peace of virtue

Her modest sense, Her unobtrusive elegance

of mind and manners,

Her sincerity and benevolence of heart

Secured esteem, conciliated affection,

Inspired confidence and diffused happiness.

Ditchingham churchyard was very the last stop on my walk through the county of Suffolk. The afternoon was already drawing to a close, and so I decided to return to the main road and continue a short way in the direction of Norwich, to the Mermaid in Hedenham, where the bar would be opening soon. I would be able to phone home from there to be picked up. The route I had to take led me past Ditchingham Hall, a house built around 1700 in beautiful mauve-coloured brick, the windows of which are fitted with dark green shutters. It was situated well off the main road above a serpentine lake, and encompassed on all sides by extensive parkland. Later, while I was waiting for Clara in the Mermaid, it occurred to me that Ditchingham Park must have been laid out around the time when Chateaubriand was in Suffolk. Estates of this kind, which enabled the ruling elite to imagine themselves
surrounded by boundless lands where nothing offended the eye, did not become fashionable until the second half of the eighteenth century. Planning and executing the work necessary for an emparkment could take two or three decades. In order to complete such a project it was usually necessary to buy parcels of land and add them to the existing estate, and roads, tracks, individual farm-steads, sometimes even entire villages had to be moved, as the object was to enjoy an uninterrupted view from the house over a natural expanse innocent of any human presence. It was for the same reason that fences were replaced with broad, grass-covered ha-has, which were dug out at a cost of many thousands of working hours. Naturally, such an undertaking, with its considerable impact not only on the landscape, but also on the life of the local communities, could not always be accomplished without controversy. At the period in question, an ancestor of Earl Ferrers, the present owner of Ditchingham Hall, having become embroiled in a confrontation with one of his estate managers, dispatched him with his gun, for which deed he was in due course sentenced to death by his peers in the House of Lords, and hanged publicly in London by a silken rope. – The least costly aspect of laying out a landscaped park was planting trees as specimens or in small groups, even if it was not seldom preceded by the felling of tracts of woodland and the burning-off of unsightly thickets and scrub that did not comply with the overall concept. Nowadays, given that only a third of the trees planted at the time are still standing in most parks, and that more are dying each year of old age and many other causes, we will soon be able to envisage once more the Torricelli-like emptiness in which the great country seats
stood in the late eighteenth century. Chateaubriand also later made a modest attempt to realize the ideal of nature projected into that emptiness. When he returned in 1807 from his long journey to Constantinople and Jerusalem, he bought a summer house that lay hidden among wooded hills in the Vallée aux Loups, not far from the town of Aulnay. It is there that he begins to write his memoirs, on the first pages of which he speaks of the tree he has planted and tended with his own hands. Now, he says, they are still so small that I provide them with shade whenever I step between them and the sun. But one day, when they have grown, they will give shade to me, and look after me in my old age much as I looked after them in their youth. I feel a bond unites me with these trees; I write sonnets, elegies and odes to them; they are like children, I know them all by name, and my only desire is that I should end my days amongst them. – This picture was taken at

Ditchingham about ten years ago, on a Saturday afternoon when the manor house was open to the public in aid of charity. The Lebanese cedar which I am leaning against, unaware still of the woeful events that were to come, is one of the trees that were planted when the park was laid out, and most of which, as I have said, have already disappeared. Since the mid-Seventies there has been an ever more rapid decline in the numbers of trees, with heavy losses, above all amongst the species most common in England. Indeed, one tree has become well nigh extinct: Dutch elm disease spread from the south coast into Norfolk around 1975, and within the space of just two or three summers there were no elms left alive in the vicinity. The six elm trees which had shaded the pond in our garden withered away in June 1978, just a few weeks after they unfolded their marvellous light green foliage for the last time. The virus spread through the root systems of entire avenues with unbelievable speed, causing capillaries to tighten and leading to the trees' dying of thirst. Even solitary trees were located with infallible accuracy by the airborne beetles which spread the disease. One of the most perfect trees I have ever seen was an almost two hundred-year-old elm that stood on its own in a field not far from our house. About one hundred feet tall, it filled an immense space. I recall that, after most of the elms in the area had succumbed, its countless, somewhat asymmetrical, finely serrated leaves would sway in the breeze as if the scourge which had obliterated its entire kind would pass it by without a trace; and I also recall that a bare fortnight later all these apparently invincible leaves were brown and curled up, and dust before the autumn came. It was then also that I noticed that the crowns of ash trees were becoming sparse, and the foliage
of oaks was thinning and displaying strange mutations. At the same time, the trees themselves were producing leaves from hard old wood, and by mid-summer they were dropping masses of rock-hard, deformed acorns that were covered with a sticky substance. The beech trees, which until then had remained in good shape, were affected by several long droughts. The leaves were only half their usual size, and almost all the beechnuts were empty. One after the other, the poplars on the meadow died. Some of the dead