Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  Given this lively mental tone and Tocqueville’s good manners it is perhaps small surprise that Milnes, while expressing concern for Marie as he left, had not detected that his host was himself seriously ill.54

  Such was his case, nevertheless. Early in September he was caught in rain and a sea-fog as he showed Gossin round the farms of Tocqueville and immediately lost his voice again; no doubt the tuberculosis made him vulnerable to any little accident. After a week he decided to go to Paris to consult the doctors there: he had no faith in his Cotentin doctor, André Collin. But at least Collin does not seem to have done him any harm, whereas the Parisian consultants, Andral and Charruau, after diagnosing a light bronchial infection, decided to torture him with vesicatories, painful applications to the skin which were supposed to do him good as counter-irritants. They also told him to drink large quantities of a Pyrenean mineral-water which was supposed to soothe his throat. He went back to Tocqueville to undergo the treatment and found it so painful and ineffective that after a fortnight he returned to Paris for another consultation. Marie was to follow him when she could (as usual there were building works at the chateau which had to be supervised); they had already decided to spend the winter in the warm south. Mme Guermarquer looked after him until Marie arrived, and for the first few days he had the company of his brother Édouard. He wrote anxious letters urging his wife to take care of herself. He himself coughed incessantly, particularly at night.55

  Marie’s arrival was constantly expected and as constantly postponed: she did not reach Paris until 16 October, more than two weeks after her husband. Meanwhile he depended on her letters, though they did not always cheer him. She was ill herself, extremely busy, and having seen Tocqueville recover in the past, thought he would do so this time, and seems to have hinted that he was making too much fuss. Tocqueville insisted that he was quite calm, though she could hardly expect him to be gay; nor were his fears exaggerated: if he was melancholy it was because he feared that from now on his life would be a matter of excessive weakness and tiresome precautions, if he wanted to last. It was almost worse when Marie’s letters evoked his house and garden: they brought tears to his eyes:

  I hope that next year we will walk together down the long avenue and see at its end the setting sun lighting the lawn. How have we come to surrender our hearts to mere exterior, insentient objects? It is because, for us, they live. They represent the last of our youth, the best days of our prime, and the inexpressible sweetness of these latest years, the happiest, after all, of my whole life; and their charm has been your doing.56

  In spite of his general weakness he occasionally had one of the bursts of energy which characterize consumptives; when he went walking in the Bois de Boulogne his pace was so quick that his cab-driver refused to believe that he was an invalid.57

  He had at first hoped to join Ampère in Rome, but Dr Andral advised against the climate of that city, and he did not think it worthwhile or kind to drag Marie over the Alps just to winter in, say, Pisa.58 Instead he decided to go to Cannes, which had the advantage of being only half the distance, and in France. Tocqueville spent most of October on the business of hiring a house there, and in trying to inform himself about the place, which was only beginning to be known as a holiday resort. He was not enamoured of the project, but he told himself and Freslon that he might work better at Cannes than at home:

  The trouble with my retreat at Tocqueville, which is so dear to me ... is to be too agreeable. It is not great emotions which render the mind unproductive; they are like a wind which blows about the flame of thought. It is little agreeable occupations which snuff it out; they distract the mind and prevent it from settling down. You see that I am trying to gild the pill.59

  Marie arrived on 16 October, fretful and weary, but she had come. Then Tocqueville’s trusted valet, Auguste, fell seriously ill and had to retire; a manservant to take with them instead had to be found at a moment’s notice. Tocqueville was apprehensive about the journey: Marie was exhausted and he himself was nothing to boast of. ‘I’m not coughing much, but nor do I digest much.’ Nevertheless, they could not defy the doctors’ advice. On 28 October they left Paris. Louis de Chateaubriand went to the station to see them off.60

  * ‘I believe that one can improve oneself all one’s life.’

  * His distress about M. de Kergorlay was complicated by the fact that for some years past the comte had refused to receive him, for political reasons (it is not clear what). But his concern for Louis was straightforward (see AT to Louis, 22 March 1854, 16 June 1856, OC XIII ii 282–3, 297).

  * It is impossible for anyone who has not actually read the Tocqueville–Beaumont correspondence to imagine how much time, paper and ink the two friends had to devote to the business of keeping up their subscriptions and making sure that the copies of the journal arrived. It makes one unusually grateful for the invention of the telephone.

  * Presumably AT meant his brothers and their wives; he can scarcely have had in mind Beaumont or Ampère or Kergorlay himself.

  * Crazy, addled.

  † It might be interesting to know exactly when AT read Gobineau’s latest volumes. In the Foreword to the Ancien Régime he compares himself to a physician (OC II i 73).

  * I cannot find this precise phrase in the Ancien Régime. Presumably Gobineau is referring to Book Three, chapter 8, where AT writes of 1789 as a time of inexperience but of generosity, enthusiasm, etc. (OC II i 247).

  * AT refers to the lady only as ‘Mme B.’, but Jean-Alain Lesourd is surely right to identify her as ‘probably’ Rosalie Malye. We know of no other woman whose story fits the facts.

  * Eugène had apparently left his service some years earlier.

  * No more stagecoaches. But as always happens with such novelties, AT had long come to take this one for granted. He made great use of it during his English visit, and complained bitterly when Marie’s letters, which should have reached him by train in twenty-four hours, took forty-eight.

  † Edward John Littleton (1791–1863), a great landed proprietor of Worcestershire and Staf-fordshire. MP, 1812–35; Chief Secretary to Ireland, 1833–5; created Baron Hatherton, 1835. He kept a valuable diary, most of it still unpublished.

  * The round reading-room had just been opened, so that AT was one of its first users. Another was Karl Marx.

  * This discovery surely serves to refute Rédier’s allegation that English was the language of AT’s household.

  * AT twice called on Gladstone, who unluckily was out on both occasions.

  † Mill’s frightful wife despised AT as a specimen of what she called ‘the gentility class ... weak in moral, narrow in intellect, timid, infinitely conceited, and gossiping. There are very few men in this country who can seem other than more or less respectable puppets to us’ (see Packe, Mill, 338). When it came to infinite conceit Harriet Mill knew what she was talking about.

  * Soyer was the celebrated French chef at the Reform Club.

  † Sir Charles Wood (1800–1885), first viscount Halifax (1866), was a distinguished politician, almost continuously in the cabinet from 1846 to 1874; best remembered for his work as Secretary of State for India, 1859–66.

  * After AT’s death Beaumont, as editor of his works, after many misgivings published a heavily corrected version of the seven rough chapters which gave a most misleading impression of the state of AT’s drafts. See the excellent account by André Jardin in his ‘Note critique’, OC II ii 7–12.

  * See above, p. 28.

  * This seems to show that AT had changed his views on Algeria since 1848.

  * It was the last piece of writing that AT published. In it he concentrates on explaining the unfamiliar practice of judicial supremacy with all the masterly lucidity of the 1835 Démocratie. Modern editions would do well to include it as an appendix. It was perhaps fitting that Tocqueville’s last public word should be on the subject which first made his name.

  * He was furious when the press reported that ‘Madame de Tocqueville’ had dance
d a quadrille with the Emperor at Cherbourg. The lady in question was not Marie but AT’s sister-in-law Émilie, who should have been referred to as ‘the comtesse de Tocqueville’. AT blamed both her and the newspapers for the blunder (see OC XI 409).

  * William Rathbone Greg (1809–81), political writer and civil servant.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CANNES

  1858–1859

  Si j’étais chargé de classer les misères humaines, je le ferais dans cet ordre:

  1. les maladies

  2. la mort

  3. le doute.

  ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, 1831 1

  TOCQUEVILLE WAS SO WEAK that he could only travel in short stages. The night of 28 October was spent at Dijon, that of the 29th at Lyon. The weather turned hostile. Snowstorms blasted France, from Paris southwards. Alexis and Marie reached Aix-en-Provence on 31 October; they had been followed down the Rhône by a cold and violent wind, worse than any they had known in the Cotentin; Tocqueville from his railway carriage observed the angry river flooding its bridges. From Aix it took them three days to get to Cannes, ninety miles off, since the railway did not yet go beyond Toulon and they had to travel in what Tocqueville called a voiturin – an uncomfortable hired coach into which crowded the invalid, his wife, their servants and all the luggage. No wonder that it could only crawl across country, or that Tocqueville arrived at Cannes in a state of collapse. Snow, wind and ice had pursued him even beyond Fréjus. He could have gone no further and could think only of his bed. Marie was in little better case.2

  It is a measure of how Tocqueville’s health had deteriorated that whereas, in his youth, he had recovered rapidly from his even worse winter journey through Tennessee, it was now to be weeks before he threw off the effects of his journey to Cannes, to the extent that he ever did; and as for Marie, she was not to be restored to full health that winter. Tocqueville’s stomach and throat were as troublesome as ever, and by a sinister coincidence Marie too had a throat infection which made it impossible for her to speak for weeks at a time – she had to write what she wanted to say on a slate.* For ten days the unseasonal cold continued, Tocqueville could not set foot out of doors, and the balmy climate of the Riviera remained only a legend. He also complained that the servants were good for nothing: they had been useless on the journey, and Auguste’s replacement was a booby.3

  Bad though the situation was, it was not quite without alleviation. Before leaving Paris Tocqueville had written to Dr Sève, of Cannes, who had been warmly recommended to him, and the physician showed himself from the very first to be attentive and intelligent. He had great experience of patients with lung and bronchial complaints, for Cannes was becoming a favourite resort for such invalids (that was why Tocqueville had thought of it in the first place). His efforts were soon supplemented by those of Dr Maure, of Grasse, formerly a member of the Chamber of Deputies and a friend of Thiers: it was Thiers who, hearing of Tocqueville’s plight, sent Maure to him. The house at Cannes, the villa Montfleury, was large and comfortable, and when the weather improved Tocqueville was able to take pleasure in the olive, lemon and orange groves which surrounded it, and in its splendid views of the sea and the mountains. Best of all was the arrival of Hippolyte. No-one in the family had realized, at the time that Alexis left Paris, how ill he was and how unfit to travel – he had not fully realized it himself; but as soon as letters arrived from Cannes they took alarm. Hippolyte left home at once to join his brother, and thereafter Alexis was never to be without the support of his relations and closest friends. In spite of everything, he was in fairly good heart. He wrote to Beaumont that it would be months before he could resume work on his book; Dr Sève told him not to go out, not to speak, not to receive visitors and, above all, not to be bored or melancholy. Confronted with these inconsistent instructions he found that he badly needed light reading:

  could Beaumont send him some memoirs of the Revolution – Madame Campan,* for instance. ‘Take care of those legs of a twenty-year-old which you say you have got back, even if you only use them to hunt hares. As for me, I am more modest. I only ask God to give me back the legs of fifty.’4

  It was a vain prayer. The last five months of Tocqueville’s life can easily be summarized: every long and painful period of recuperation was followed by days or weeks of acute suffering until at last there was no recovery. Tocqueville’s essential problem was severe tuberculosis of the right lung (the tuberculosis in his throat was a secondary infection) and in the age before antibiotics he could only enter another period of remission if the lesions in his lung were closed by scarring (cicatrisation): in the language of medicine, were fibrosed. It did not happen: perhaps the disease had gone too far before he reached Cannes. Dr Sève did not despair for many weeks: as the chief physician in a supposedly therapeutic seaside resort he had a vested interest in optimism; but Dr Maure seems to have written off Tocqueville’s chances from the first. This disagreement in prognosis made little practical difference: Maure said nothing to alarm the patient and his advice was the same as Sève’s. The two of them rejected the heroic treatments of the Parisian doctors and recommended the quietest possible life to allow the supposedly beneficial climate to work its magic. They also looked after Marie: it was largely to relieve her that nuns (Sisters of the Congregation of Our Lady of Good Counsel) were brought in to nurse Alexis. Originally they were Soeur Théophile and Soeur Valérie; later Soeur Théophile, exhausted, was replaced by Soeur Gertrude. The experience was a dreadful one for everybody, and it would not be worth dwelling on were it not so revealing of everybody’s character, above all that of Tocqueville himself.5

  As he felt his strength and appetite reviving during November and December he grew more cheerful, especially when at last the sun came out. His chief worry was Marie, who had lost, he said, half her weight since they left Paris. He would never have thought that anyone could lose weight so fast. She was exhausted physically and morally, ‘which I never thought to see’. She was his sole providence, and had had to take on too much responsibility during the journey south. The two new servants (‘I hardly know their names’) were still useless, and even after a month Marie was no better. Tocqueville saw that it was distress about his illness that was laying her low. He did not realize how much cause she had for anxiety, but his mood about himself fluctuated widely. At times he made light of things: ‘I sleep, I eat, I go for walks and I cough ...’ But he admitted to Corcelle that his throat complaint, though much better, was still afflicting him, ‘and there is no trivial illness where a necessary organ is concerned’. He went still further with Beaumont:

  I cough infinitely less, but still, I cough, and it forces me to spit abominably. From time to time little threads of blood are mingled in the spit which frighten me abominably, but seem to have no importance in the doctor’s eyes. He always says, and says it more and more often, that I’ll leave here completely cured. Decidedly, I hope so too.

  His worst affliction was the ban on speaking.. ‘I had never believed that it was so necessary for me, and so agreeable, to speak.’ It would have been hard for anyone, but was perhaps particularly so for the vivacious Tocqueville.6

  He was deeply touched by the eagerness of his friends to help him. Both Corcelle and Beaumont offered to go to Cannes. Gratefully, he refused them, but assured Beaumont that he would be sent for if it was useful, let alone necessary. To whom else should he turn, if not to the first and best of his friends? He had not forgotten Kergorlay, but Louis had troubles of his own: a twenty-year-old niece died that December, and his wife had a difficult accouchement; the baby died in January. But it was true that Tocqueville no longer felt so close to him: he actually remarked in a letter that since Kergorlay had become a successful businessman he seemed to attach little importance to his intellectual exchanges with Alexis (Kergorlay vehemently repudiated this allegation).7

  Most of all, Tocqueville was grateful to his brothers. Once he complained to Beaumont of their heartlessness in letting him leave Paris, and in not
dreaming, even for a moment, of accompanying him on his terrible journey, though they knew how ill he was, but he soon repented of this libel. Hippolyte was indispensable, whether in going for the doctor at a crisis or keeping order in the household; most of all, in supporting the spirits of Alexis and Marie by his resolute cheerfulness. Sometimes of an evening he and Marie would sit playing cards while Alexis dozed beside them. At other times, since reading by lamplight hurt Tocqueville’s eyes, he was read to:

  I have discovered in Cannes a sort of seminarian, who comes to pass some of the evening with us, reading aloud. This future Levite is a thorough poltroon. As the roads which lead to our house are deserted at night he never fails, though he is nineteen years old, to bring his mamma with him, who knits in the antechamber while her son renders good French prose into Provençal for us.

  Tocqueville had not lost his ironic eye. It did not even spare his brother: Alexis observed that Hippolyte consoled himself for the dreadful boredom of evenings at the villa (which he never missed) by spending his days calling on some Bonapartist notables who were staying in Cannes – a senator, a deputy, even an imperial chamberlain. ‘My poor Hippolyte!’ said the unreconciled liberal. ‘What a poor character, but what a heart of gold!’8