Parnassus

[Magnum Opus]

The Parnassus is a topic dedicated to every single person wishing to share a poetic text (no matter the author) to the whole community, possibly assorted by an image and a background music. You're free to comment and shar, the purpose is purely esthetic and I would like that each respects the work of others and abstains from scurvy criticisms. Thanks. And hope you like it.

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« Will this work inspired by my ashes and destined for my ashes survive me? It may be that my work is bad; it may be that these Memoirs will fade in the light of day: at least the things I have recounted to myself will have served to beguile the tedium of these last hours which no one wants and which one does not know how to employ. The end of life is a bitter time; nothing pleases because one is worthy of knowing; useful to none, a burden to all, near our last resting-place it takes only a step to reach it: what point is there in dreaming on a desert shore? What delightful shadows could one glimpse in the future? Fie on the clouds now hovering above my head!

One idea returns to trouble me: my conscience is uneasy regarding the innocence of my nightly labours; I fear the effects of my blindness and man’s indulgence towards his faults. Is what I have written in accord with true justice? Have morality and charity been carefully observed? Had I the right to speak of others? What use would my repentance be, if these Memoirs did harm? All you, unknown and obscure on earth, you whose lives pleasing to religion work miracles, hail to your secret virtues! Some poor man deprived of knowledge, one whom no one will ever care about, has exerted on his companions in suffering, solely by his moral stance, that divine influence which emanated from Christ’s virtues. The finest book in the world is not worth a single unknown act of those nameless martyrs whose blood Herod mingled with that of their sacrifices.
You have seen my birth; you have seem my childhood, my idolatry of my strange creation in the Château of Combourg, my presentation at Versailles, and my presence in Paris in the first throes of the Revolution. In the New World I met Washington; I plunged into the forests; shipwreck overtook me on the coast of my native Brittany. Then my sufferings as a soldier transpired, and my poverty as an emigrant. Returning to France I became the author of Le Génie du Christianisme. In a changed society, I made and lost friends. Bonaparte halted me, and threw himself across my path with the bloodstained body of the Duc d’Enghien; I halted in turn, and led the great man from his cradle, in Corsica, to his grave, on St Helena. I participated in the Restoration and saw its end.

Thus I have known public and private life. I have crossed the sea four times; I have followed the sun in the East, touched the ruins of Memphis, Carthage, Sparta and Athens; I have prayed at St Peter’s tomb and worshipped on Golgotha. Poor and rich, powerful and weak, happy and miserable, a man of action and a man of thought, I have given my hand to the century and my mind to the desert; real life has revealed itself to me in the midst of illusion, as land appears to sailors amidst the clouds. If those events, whose tide covered my dreams like the varnish which preserves fragile paintings, are not forgotten, they will mark the places through which my life has passed.

I’ve lived through the empty years of my youth, the heady days of the republican era, the splendor of Bonaparte, and the triumph of the Legitimists. I have explored the seas of the Old World and the New, and trodden the soil of the four quarters of the Earth. Having camped in the cabins of Iroquois, and beneath the tents of Arabs, in the wigwams of Hurons, in the remains of Athens, Jerusalem, Memphis, Carthage, Granada, among Greeks, Turks and Moors, among forests and ruins; after wearing the bearskin cloak of the savage, and the silk caftan of the Mameluke, after suffering poverty, hunger, thirst, and exile, I have sat, a minister and ambassador, covered with gold lace, gaudy with ribbons and decorations, at the table of kings, the feasts of princes and princesses, only to fall once more into indigence and know imprisonment.
I have had dealings with a host of famous celebrities in the military, the Church, politics, the judiciary, the arts and sciences. I possess an immense mass of material, more than four thousand private letters; the diplomatic correspondence from my various embassies; and those of my stay at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; among which are items private to myself, unique and unpublished. I have borne the musket of a soldier, the traveller’s cane, and the pilgrim’s staff: as a sailor my fate has been as inconstant as the wind: a kingfisher, I have made my nest among the waves.

I have been party to peace and war: I have signed treaties, protocols, and along the way published numerous works. I have been made privy to party secrets, of court and state: I have viewed closely the rarest disasters, the greatest good fortune, the highest reputations. I have been present at sieges, congresses, conclaves, at the restoration and demolition of thrones. I have made history, and been able to write it. And my solitary life, of a dreamer and poet, traversed this world of realities, catastrophes, tumult, noise, with the sons of my dreams, Chactas, René, Eudore, Aben-Hamet: with the daughters of my imaginings, Atala, Amélie, Blanca, Velléda, Cymodocée. Within and alongside my age, perhaps without wishing or seeking to, I have exerted upon it a triple influence, religious, political and literary.
I found myself between two centuries as at the confluence of two rivers; I plunged into their troubled waters; regretfully leaving the ancient strand where I was born, and swimming hopefully towards the unknown shore where new generations will land. »

François René de Chateaubriand - Memoirs beyond the grave