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TO THE SAME. - Alexis de Tocqueville, Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, vol. 2 [1861]

Edition used:

Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville. Translated from the French by the translator of Napoleon’s Correspondence with King Joseph. With large Additions. In Two Volumes (London: Macamillan, 1861). 2 vols.

Part of: Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, 2 vols.

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TO THE SAME.

Tocqueville, March 16, 1858.

Your letters, my dear friend, are the comforts of our solitude. There is nothing better, except your conversation. I hope to enjoy it in a fortnight.

I made the other day a visit which resembled one of Cuvier’s explorations of the antediluvian world. It was to a man, aged ninety-six, and as full of intellectual life as you or I. He is a Benedictine, a man of letters and of talent, who, without relinquishing his profession or his belief, was gained over by the principles of the Revolution. He lived with the men of thought and of action who appeared immediately before and in the first period of that Revolution. He leads a retired life a few miles from us.

I found him at his fireside, surrounded by Greek and Latin folios, which he was studying as if he were beginning his education. Think what it is to see before you a man who lived for twenty-seven years under our ancient monarchy, who was older in 1789 than I was in 1830, who was present at the meeting of the States General, and followed the labours of the Constituent Assembly when already a middle-aged man.

His mind is still more extraordinary than his age. It must have been preserved as we keep plants, by being hermetically sealed. I have before observed that in France, moral and intellectual warmth are in inverse proportion to age. The youngest are the coldest: the temperature rises as one grows older. Sages of eighteen laugh at you and me as enthusiasts. According to this rule my man of ninety-six ought to have been on fire. And so he was when he talked of his hopes in 1789, and of the great cause of liberty. He would not easily have admitted that we now enjoy the institutions which were promised by the makers of the Revolution.

I asked him if he found much moral change in France.

“Ah,” he answered, “I seem to dream when I call to mind the state of feeling when I was young; its ardour, its sincerity, its self-respect and respect for the public, the disinterestedness of even its political passions. Ah, sir,” he continued, squeezing my hands with the frankness and the earnestness of the eighteenth century, “we had then a cause, we have now mere interests. Men were then bound to one another; they are so no longer. It is sad to outlive one’s country.” Adieu.