Following Vanished Wakes: Chateaubriand's Pilgrimage to the Ancient World

Following Vanished Wakes: Chateaubriand's Pilgrimage to the Ancient World The gods no longer inhabit Olympus. And yet in the summer of 1806 one Frenchman set out to find them anyway. His name was François-René de Chateaubriand, and he called himself perhaps the last Frenchman to leave his country for the Holy Land with the ideas, the aim, and the sentiments of the pilgrims of old. Picture him on the 13th of July, 1806, leaving his homeland once more. He compared himself to the Sire de Joinville, that Seneschal of Champagne who set out on crusade centuries before, who dared not turn his face back toward his own castle for fear his heart would break with regret. Chateaubriand dared not turn his head either. But there was a bitter difference. Almost a stranger in his own country, he left behind him neither castle nor cottage. Why was he going? Officially, to gather material for Les Martyrs, his Christian epic in prose. He had drafted most of its chapters, but he refused to finish them before seeing the lands where they were set. Others, he admitted, find their resources in themselves. He needed to supply what he lacked through effort. And there was something more. In the deserts of America he had contemplated the monuments of nature. He knew Celtic antiquity and Roman antiquity. It remained for him to walk the ruins of Athens, Carthage, and Memphis. And above all, he wanted to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. His route took him from Paris to Milan, then to Venice, where he arrived on the 23rd of July and spent five days among the remains of its past grandeur, seeking out paintings by Tintoretto, Veronese, Bassano, and Titian. He even searched an abandoned church for Titian's tomb, and had trouble finding it, just as he had once struggled to find Tasso's tomb in Rome. From there to Trieste, where a boat was found, ready to sail for Smyrna. They set sail on the 1st of August, at one o'clock in the morning. The sea tested them almost immediately. On the 2nd of August, a storm rolled in from the coast of Croatia. The Austrian captain led prayers amid torrents of rain and claps of thunder, while a small light burned before an image of the Blessed Virgin. Chateaubriand noticed something about sailors in that moment. On shore they may be as firm-hearted as anyone. But near danger, mankind becomes religious. The torch of philosophy, he observed, reassures less in the midst of a tempest than the lamp lit before the Madonna. Then came the moment that transformed the journey. On the 5th of August, at eleven o'clock, the ship reached the gates of the Adriatic, between Cape Otranto in Italy and Cape Linguetta in Albania. Think about what that meant to him. This was the frontier of Greek antiquity and the border of Latin antiquity. Pythagoras, Alcibiades, Scipio, Caesar, Pompey, Cicero, Augustus, Horace, Virgil had all crossed this sea. And now he, an obscure traveller, was following their vanished wake. Becalmed off Corfu on the 6th of August, he had time to let memory unspool. This was the island where Odysseus was hurled after his shipwreck. Aristotle went there in exile. A young Alexander landed there. Cato met Cicero at Corcyra after the battle of Pharsalia, and Chateaubriand imagined what a painting that encounter would make. One of those Romans would fall on his sword at Utica. Antony and Octavia celebrated their fatal marriage there, the marriage that cost the world so many tears. And Agrippina came to that very place to perform the funeral rites for Germanicus. It was as if the island existed to supply two rival historians of genius, Thucydides and Tacitus, with their most admirable subjects. But then Chateaubriand did something bold. He turned from the pagan giants to the Christian martyrs of Corfu, to Saint Jason and Saint Sosipater, and asked a question that cuts to the heart of his whole journey. Is a martyr to freedom any greater than a martyr to truth? Is Cato, devoting himself to the liberation of Rome, more heroic than Sosipater, allowing himself to be burnt in a brazen bull to announce to men that they are brothers? On the 7th of August a breeze rose from the northwest, and the ship carried him onward, past Ithaca, where neither the forests of Mount Neriton nor the thirteen pear trees of Laertes could still be seen, and toward Zante, the Isle of Gold, the Flower of the Levant. What remains of this journey is not archaeology. It is a way of seeing. Chateaubriand looked at a whitish rock and chose to see Calypso's enchanted island. Woe, he wrote, to him who sees not nature with the eyes of Fenelon or Homer. Perhaps that is his lasting lesson for you and me. The past is not simply behind us. It is a lamp we carry, and it changes everything it touches.