 Book 2, Part 3 of the Memoirs of Chateaubriand, Volume 5, Part 4. This is the LibriVox Recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Nicole Lee, the Memoirs of Chateaubriand, Volume 5 by François René de Chateaubriand, translated by Alexander Tixera de Matos, Book 2, Part 3. On the 29th of August I went to Diner, Aranenburg. Aranenburg stands on a sort of promontory in a chain of steep hills. The Queen of Holland, whom the sword had made, and whom the sword had unmade, built the chateau, or if you prefer, the summerhouse of Aranenburg. From it one enjoys an extensive but melancholy view. This view commands the lower lake of Constance, which is only an expansion of the Rhine over swamped fields. On the other side of the lake one sees gloomy woods, remains of the black forest, a few white birds fluttering under a grey sky, and driven by an icy wind. There, after having sat on a throne, after being outrageously slandered, Queen Hortense came to perch upon a rock. Below is the Isle of the Lake, on which they say the Tomb of Charles the Fat was discovered, and on which at present canaries are dying, which ask in vain for the son of the native islands. Madame la Duchesse Sanlio was better off in Rome. Nevertheless, she has not descended in proportion to her birth and her early life. On the contrary, she has risen. Her abasement is only relative to an accident of her fortune. This is not one of those descents like that of Madame la Dauphine, who has fallen from all the height of the centuries. The companions, male and female, of Madame la Duchesse Sanlio were her son, Madame Sauvage, Madame Bayway of Visitors, there were Madame Ricamié, Monsieur Vieryard, and myself. Madame la Duchesse Sanlio acquitted herself very well, in her difficult position as a queen and a domoiselle de bourgonnaie. After dinner Madame de Sanlio sat down to her piano with Monsieur Cottreau, a tall young painter, mustachos, a straw hat, a blouse, a turned-down shirt collar, an eccentric costume, who hunted, painted, sang, laughed, in a witty and noisy fashion. Prince Louis occupies a summer house standing apart, where I saw arms toffographical and strategical chops, industries which made one as though by accident, think of the blood of the conqueror without naming him. Prince Louis is a studious and well-informed young man, full of honour and naturally grave. Madame la Duchesse Sanlio read me a few fragments of her memoirs. She showed me a cabinet filled with relics of Napoleon. I asked myself why this wardrobe left me cold. Why that little hat, that sash, that uniform, worn at such and such a battle, found me so indifferent? I was much more perturbed in writing of the death of Napoleon at St Helena. The reason of this is that Napoleon is our contemporary. We have all seen him and known him. He lives in our memory, but the hero is still too close to his glory. A thousand years hence it will be a different thing. It is only the centuries that have lent a perfume to Alexander's sweat. Let us wait. Of a conqueror one should show only the sword. I returned to Wolfsburg with Madame Récumier and set out at night. The weather was dark and rainy, the wind whistled through the trees, and the wood owl hooted, a real Germanian scene. Madame de Chartebriand soon arrived at Lucerne. The dampness of the town frightened her, and as Lugano was too dear, we decided to come to Geneva. We took our route over Sempach. The lake preserves the memory of a battle, which ensured the enfranchisement of the Swiss, at a time when the nations on this side of the Alps had lost their liberties. In Sempach we passed before the Abbey of St. Urban's, crumbling like all the monuments of Christianity. It stands in a melancholy spot on the skirt of a heath which leads to a wood. If I had been free and alone I would have asked the monks for a hole in their walls, there to finish my memoirs beside an owl. Then I should have gone to end my days in doing nothing, under the beautiful do-nothing son of Naples or Palermo. Her beautiful countries in springtime have become insults, disasters and regrets. On reaching Byrne we were told that there was a great revolution in progress in the city. I looked in vain. The streets were deserted, silence reigned. The terrible revolution was realised without a word, to the peaceful smirk of a pipe in the corner of some coffee-house. Madame Recamier was not long in joining us at Geneva. Geneva End of September 1832 I have begun to take up my work again seriously. I write in the morning and walk in the evening. Yesterday I went to pay a visit to Coppert. The house was shut up, they opened the doors for me. I wandered through the deserted rooms. The companion of my pilgrimage recognised all the places where she still seemed to see her friends seated at her piano or coming in or going out or talking on the terrace alongside of the gallery. Madame Recamier has seen again the room which she used to occupy. Days gone by have come up again before her. It was like a rehearsal of the scene which I described in Rene. I passed through the sonorous apartments where nothing was heard but the sound of my footsteps. Everywhere the rooms were without hangings, and the spider-spun it's web in the abandoned couches. How sweet, but how rapid are the moments which brothers and sisters pass in their youthful years gathered under the wing of the old parents. Man's family is but of a day. God's birth disperses it like a bubble. The son has scarce time to know the father, the father, the son, the brother, the sister, the sister, the brother. The oak sees its acorn shoot up around itself. It is not thus with the children of men. I also remembered what I said in these memoirs of my last visit to Combo before leaving for America. Two different worlds, but connected by a common sympathy, occupied Madame Recamier and myself, alas each of us carries within himself one of those isolated worlds, for where the persons who have lived long enough together not to have separate memories. From the chateau we enter the park. The early autumn began to redden and to loosen a few leaves. The wind fell by degrees and let one hear a stream that turns a mill. After following the alleys along which she had been accustomed to walk with Madame de Steele, Madame Recamier wanted to greet her ashes. At some distance from the park stands a coffest mingled with taller trees and surrounded by a damp and dilapidated wall. This coffest resembles those clusters of trees in the midst of plains which sportsmen call covers. It is there that death has driven its prey and shut up its victims. A viral place had been built beforehand in that wood to receive Monsieur Necker, Madame Necker and Madame de Steele. When the last of these arrived at the tristing place, they walled up the door of the crypt. The child of Auguste de Steele remained outside, and Auguste himself, who died before his child, was laid under a stone at his relation's feet. On the stone are carved these words taken from scripture. Why seek you the living with the dead? I did not go into the wood. Madame Recamier alone obtained permission to enter it. Standing seated on a bench before the surrounding wall, I turned my back on France, and fixed my eyes, now on the summit on Montblanc, now on the lake of Geneva. The golden clouds covered the horizon behind the dark line of the Dura. It was as though a halo of glory were rising above a long coffin. On the other side of the lake I saw Lord Byron's house, the ridge of which was touched by a ray of the setting sun. So was no more there to admire that spectacle, and Voltaire, who had also disappeared, had never cared about it. It was at the foot of the tomb of Madame de Steele that so many illustrious absentees on the same shore presented themselves to my recollection. They seemed to come to seek the shade they are equal to fly away into the sky with her, and escort her during the night. At that moment Madame Recamier, pale and in tears, came out from the funeral grove herself like a shadow. If ever I have felt at one time the vanity and the verity of glory and life, it was at the entrance of that silent, dark, unknown wood, where she sleeps who had so much lustre and fame, and when seeing what it is to be truly loved. That same evening, the day after my devotions to the dead of Coppert, tired of the edge of the lake, I went, still with Madame Recamier, in search of less frequented walks. We discovered going down the ron, a narrow gorge through which the stream flows bubbling under several mills, between rocky cliffs intersected by meadows. One of these meadows stretches at the foot of a hill on which a house is planted amid a cluster of elms. We several times climbed and descended, talking the while, this narrow strip of grass which separates the boisterous stream from the silent hillock. How many persons are there whom one can vary with what one has been, and carry back with one on the track of one's days? We spoke of those days, always painful and always regretted, in which the passions form the happiness and the martyrdom of youth. Now I am writing this page at midnight, while all is at rest around me, and through my window I see a few stars glimmering over the alps. Madame Recamier is going to leave us. She will return in the spring, and I shall spend the winter in evoking my vanished stars, in summoning them one by one before the tribunal of my reason. I do not know if I shall be very impartial, nor if the judge will not be too indulgent towards the culprit. I shall spend next summer in the land of Jean-Jacques. God grant that I may not catch the dream as malady, and then when autumn shall have returned, we shall go to Italy, Italian, that is my eternal refrain, Geneva, October, 1832. I have read the little pamphlet which you were so good as to entrust to me. I have jotted down as you wished a few reflections, springing naturally from yours, which I had already submitted to your judgment. You know, Prince, that my young king is in Scotland, that so long as he lives there can be no other king of France for me than he. But if God in his impenetrable councils had rejected the house of St. Louis, if the habits of our country did not render the republican state possible, there is no name which goes better with the glory of France and yours. I am, etc., etc., Chateaubriand. Paris, Reid-en-Faire, January, 1833. I had dreamt much of that approaching future which I had made for myself, and which I thought so near. The nightfall I used to go wandering in the windings of the earth, in the direction of Salep. One evening I saw Monsieur Berriet enter. He was returning from Luzan, and told me of the arrest of madame La Duchesse de Berri. He did not know any details. My plans for repose were once more upset. When the mother of Henry V believed in her success, she discharged me. Her misfortune destroyed her last note, and recalled me to her defence. I started on the spot from Geneva after writing to the ministers. On arriving in my Reid-en-Faire, I addressed the following circular letter to the editors of the newspapers. Sir, I arrived in Paris on the seventeenth of this month, and wrote on the eighteenth, to Monsieur the Minister of Justice, to ask if the letter which had had the honour to send him from Geneva, on the twelfth, for madame La Duchesse de Berri, had reached him, and if he had had the goodness to forward it to madame. I begged Monsieur the Keep of the Seals, at the same time, to give me the necessary authorisation to go to the princess at play. Monsieur the Keep of the Seals was so good as to reply on the nineteenth, that he had handed my letters to the president of the council, and that I must apply to the latter. I wrote consequently on the twentieth, to Monsieur the Minister for War. Today, the twenty-second, I receive his answer of the twenty-first. He regrets to be under the necessity of informing me that the government does not consider it expedient to grant my request. This decision has put an end to my applications to the authorities. I have never, sir, pretended to think myself capable of defending unaided the cause of misfortune and of France. My plan, if I had been permitted to reach the feet of the Auguste prisoner, was to propose to her in this emergency the formation of a council of men more enlightened than myself. In addition to the honourable and distinguished persons that have already come forward, I would have taken the liberty to suggest to Madame's choice, Monsieur le Marquis de Pasteurette, Monsieur Le Né, Monsieur de Villel, et cetera, et cetera. Now, sir, that I am officially turned away, I return to my right as a private individual. My memoire, Sulla V, Elamorte, Monsieur le Dut de Berry, wrapped in the hair of the widow, today a captive, lying near the heart of which Lavel made to resemble even more that of Henry IV. I have not forgotten that signal honour of which the present moment asks me for a reckoning, and makes me feel all the responsibility. I am, sir, et cetera, et cetera, Chateaubriand. While I was writing this circular letter to the newspapers, I found means to have the following note handed to Madame La Duchesse de Berry. Paris, 23 November, 1832 Madame, I had the honour to address to you from Geneva an earlier letter dated the 12th of this month. This letter, in which I beg you to do me the honour to choose me as one of your defenders, has been printed in the newspapers. Your Royal Highness' cause may be taken up by all those who, without being authorised to do so, might have useful truths to make known. But if Madame wishes that it be carried on in her own name, it is not one man but a council of men, of politicians and lawyers, that must be charged with this high affair. In that case I would ask that Madame would consent to assign to me as co-adjudicers, with the persons whom she would have already selected. Monsieur le Contre-Pastoret, Monsieur Ide de Neville, Monsieur de Villain, Monsieur Le Né, Monsieur Roye Collard, Monsieur Pardesieux, Monsieur Monard-Loup Viertami, Monsieur de Vufrelon. I had also thought, Madame, that one might summon to this council a few men of great talent and of an opinion country to ours. But perhaps it would be to place them in a false position, to oblige them to make a sacrifice a one-end principle, to which lofty minds and upright consciences do not ridderly lend themselves. Chateaubriand, an old discipline soldier, I was therefore hastening up to take my place in the ranks, and to march under my captains, reduced by the will of the authorities to a duel. I accepted it, had scarcely expected to come from the tomb of the husband, to fight by the tomb of the widow. Thinking that I were bound to remain alone, that I had misunderstood what suits France, I was nonetheless in the path of honour. Noise it of little use for men that a man should immolate himself to his conscience. It is good that someone should consent to ruin himself, to remain steadfast to principles of which he is convinced, and which have to do with what is noble in our nature. Those dupes are the necessary contestants of the brutal fact. My victims charge to utter the veto of the oppressed against the triumph of might. We praise the Poles. Is there devotion other than a sacrifice? It has saved nothing. It could save nothing, even in the minds of my opponents. Will that devotion be barren of results for the human race? I prefer family before my country, they say. No. I prefer fidelity to my oaths, before perjury. The moral world, before material society. That is all. Insofar as the family is concerned, I devote myself to it because it was essentially beneficial to France. I confound its posterity with that of the country, and when I deplore the misfortunes of the one, I deplore the disasters of the other. Beaten, I have prescribed duties to myself, even as the victors have laid interests upon themselves. I am trying to withdraw from the world with my self-respect. In solitude we have to be careful whom we choose for our companion. In France, the land of vanity. So soon as an occasion offers for making a fuss, a crowd of people seize it, some act from good-heartedness, others from their consciousness of their own merits. I therefore had many competitors. They begged, as I had done, of Madame la Duchesse de Berry, the honours to defend her. At least my presumption in offering myself to the princess as a champion was a little justified by former services, though I did not fling the sword of brenness into the scale. At least I put my name there. However unimportant that may be, it had already gained some victories for the monarchy. I opened my moise à la captivité de Madame la Duchesse de Berry, with a consideration by which I am forcibly struck. I have often reprinted it, and it is probable that I shall reprint it again. We never cease, I said, to be astonished at events. Ever we imagine that we have come to the last. Ever the revolution recommences. Those who, since forty years, are marching to reach the goal, repine. They thought they were sitting for a few hours by the edge of their tomb. Vain hope. Time strikes those travellers gasping for breath, and forces them to move onward. How many times, since they have been on the road, has the old monarchy fallen at their feet? Scares escape from those successive crumblings. They are obliged once more to pass over its rubbish and its dust. Which sentry will see the end of the movement. Providence has will that the transient generations, destined for unremembered days, should be small, in order that the damage might not be great. And so we see that everything proves abortive, that everything is inconsistent, that no one is like himself or embraces his whole destiny, that no event produces what it contains and what it ought to produce. The superior men of the age which is expiring are dying away. Will they have successors? The ruins of Pamira end in sands. Passing from this general observation to particular facts, I show in my reasoning that they might deal with Madame La Duchesse de Berry by arbitrary measures, regarding how as a prisoner of police, of war, of state, or asking the chambers to pass a bill of attainder, that they might bring her within the competence of the laws, by applying to her the big deal law of exception or the common law of the code, that they might regard her person as inviolable and sacred. The ministers maintain the first opinion. The men of July the second, the royalists the third. I go through the several suppositions. I prove that, if Madame La Duchesse de Berry made a dissent upon France, she had been drawn thither only because she heard men's opinions, asking for a different present, calling for a different future. False to its popular extraction, the revolution proceeding from the days of July, repudiated glory and courted shame, except in a few hearts worthy of giving it an asylum, liberty, become the object of the derision of those who made it the Oralian cry, that liberty which befoons bandy about with kicks, that liberty strangled after dishonour by the tourniquet of the laws of exception will, through its destruction, transform the revolution of 1830 into a cynical fraud. Thereupon, and to deliver us all, Madame La Duchesse de Berry arrived. Fortuna betrayed her, a Jew sold her, a minister bought her. If they are not willing to proceed against her by police measures, the only alternative is to indict her at the Asaisis. I suppose this to have been done, and I bring on the stage to the Princess's defending council. Then after making the defending council speak, I address the council for the prosecution. Established learnedly that Carolian Ferdinand of Sicily, widow de Berry, niece of the late Maria Antoinette of Austria, widow Capet, is guilty of opposition to a man, the reputed uncle and guardian of an orphan called Henry, which uncle and guardian is said, according to the columnarist allegation of the prisoner, unlawfully to detain the crown of a ward, which ward impudently pretends to have been king from the day of the abdication of the ex-king Charles X and the ex-déphane till the day of the election of the king of the French. In support of your argument, let the judges first call up Louis Philippe as evidence for or against the prisoner, unless he prefer to excuse himself as a kinsman. Next, let the judges confront the prisoner and the descendant of the great traitor. Let this carrot into whom Satan had entered say how many pieces of silver he received for the bargain. Then it would be proved by those who have examined the spot that the prisoner for six hours suffered the Gehenna of fire in a space too narrow for her, in which four people could hardly breathe, which caused the tortured person consumulously to say that they were making war upon her as though she were St. Lawrence. Now Carolian Ferdinand, being pressed by her accomplices against the red-hot slab, her clothes twice caught fire, and at each blow of the gendarm on the outside of the fiery furnace, the shock was communicated to the prisoner's heart, causing her to vomit blood. Next in the presence of the image of Christ, they will lay on the desk as a piece of derrick evidence that burnt garments, for there must always be lots cast upon garments in these judas bargains. Madame Landeshesterbury was set at liberty by an arbitrary act of the authorities, after they thought that they had dishonored her. The picture which I drew of the proceedings made Philip see the invidiousness of a public trial, and determined him to grant a pardon to which he believed that he had attached a punishment. The pagans and the suburbs used to throw to the lions a newly delivered young Christian woman, my pamphlet of which only some phrases survive, had its important historical result. I melt it again as I copy out the apostrophe which earns my work. It is, I admit, a foolish waste of tears. Elast you's captive of blame, Madame. May your heroic presence in a land which knows something of heroism lead France to repeat to you what my political independence has won for me the right to say, Madame, your son is my king. If Providence inflicts yet a few hours upon me, shall I behold your triumphs, after having had the honor of embracing your adversities, shall I receive that girdon of my faith? At the moment when you return happy, I would joyfully go to end in retirement the days commenced in exile. Elast I am disconsolate to be able to do nothing for your present destinies. My words die away in a mere waste around the walls of your prison, the noise of the winds, of the waves, and of men, at the foot of the lonely fortress, will not even allow the last accent of a faithful voice to ascend to where you are. Paris, March 1833. Some newspapers, having repeated the phrase, Madame, your son is my king, were indicted in the courts for oppressor offense. I found myself involved in the proceedings. This time I could not take exception to the competency of the judges. I had to try to save by my presence the men attack for my sake. My honor was at stake, and I had to answer for my works. Moreover, at the day before my summons before the court, the monitor had given the declaration of Madame La Duchesse de Berry. If I had stayed away, they would have thought that the royalist party was retreating, that it was abandoning misfortune and blushing for the princess whose heroism it had celebrated. There was no lack of timid counsellors who said to me, Do not put in an appearance, you will be too much embarrassed with your phrase, Madame, your son is my king. I shall shout it louder than ever, I replied. I went to the very court where the revolutionary tribunal had formally been installed, where Marie Antoinette had appeared, where my brother had been condemned. The revolution of July has ordered the removal of the crucifix whose presence, while concealing innocence, caused the judge to tremble. My appearance before the judges had a fortunate effect. It counterbalanced for a moment the effect of the declaration in the monitor. I maintained the mother of Henry V, in the rank in which her courageous adventure had placed her. Men hesitated, when they saw that the royalist party dared to face the event, and did not consider itself beaten. I did not want to counsel, but Mozilla drew, who had attached himself to me at the time of my imprisonment, wish to speak. He grew disconcerted and gave me great uneasiness. Monsieur Verre, who represented the quotidian, indirectly took up my defense. At the end of the proceedings I called the jury the universal purge, which contributed not a little towards the acquittal of all of us. Nothing remarkable occurred to signalize this trial in the terrible chamber that had resounded with the voices of Fouquet, Tainville, and Antoinette. There was nothing amusing in it, except the arguments of Monsieur Perceal, wishing to prove my guilt, he quoted this phrase from my pamphlet. It is difficult to crush what flattens itself underfoot, and exclaiming, Do you feel, gentlemen, all the scorn comprised in that paragraph, it is difficult to crush what flattens itself underfoot? He made the movement of a man who crushes something under his feet. He resumed his speech triumphantly. The laughter of the audience was renewed. The worthy man perceived neither the delight of the audience at his unlucky phrase, nor the perfectly absurd figure which he cut while stamping his feet in his black robes as though he were dancing, at the same time that his face was pale with inspiration, and his eyes haggard with eloquence. When the jury returned and pronounced the a verdict of not guilty, her flaws broke out, and I was surrounded by young men who had put on Barastas robes to get in. Monsieur Perceal was there. The crowd increased as I went out. There was a scuffle in the courtyard of the palace between my escort and the police. At last I succeeded with great difficulty in reaching home, in the midst of the crowd which followed my calm shouting, Long live Chateaubriand! At any other time this acquittal would have been very significant. To declare that it was not guilty to say to the duchess de berry, Madame, your son is my king, was to condemn the revolution of July. But today this verdict means nothing, because there is no opinion nor duration in anything. In four and twenty hours everything has changed. I should be condemned to-morrow for the fact on which I was acquitted to-day. I had mentally left my card on the jury-man, and notably on Monsieur Chavette, one of the members of the universal purge. It was easier for that worthy citizen to find a conscientious verdict in my favour, than it would have been for me to find in my pocket the money necessary to add to the happiness of my acquittal the pleasure of eating a good dinner my judge's establishment. Monsieur Chavette arbitrated with more equity on the legitimacy, the usurpation and the author of the Genie du Christianism than many publicists and censors. Paris, April 1833 The memoirs you lack up to you today, Madame duchess de berry, has obtained for me an immense popularity in the royalist party. Deputations and letters have reached me from every quarter. I have received from the north and south of France declarations of adhesion covered with many thousands of signatures. All of these, referring to my pamphlet, demand the liberation of Madame duchess de berry. Fifteen hundred young men of Paris have come to congratulate me, not without great excitement on the part of the police. I have received a cup in silver-guilt with this inscription, to chateaubriand from the loyal men of Yel-Nev, Lot Egaul. A town in the south sent me some very good wine to fill this cup, but I do not drink. Lastly, Legitimus France has taken as its motto the words, Madame, your son is my king. And several newspapers have adopted them as an epigraph. They have been engraved on necklaces and rings. I am the first to have uttered in the face of the usurpation a truth which no one dared to speak, and strange to say, I believe less in the return of Henry V than the most contemptible juxtamillure man or the most violent republican. For the rest I do not understand the word usurpation, in the narrow sense given to it by the royalist party. There would be many things to say about this word as about that of legitimacy, but there really is usurpation, and usurpation of the worst kind, in the guardian who plunders his ward and prescribes the orphan. All those grand phrases that the country had to be saved are so many pretexts furnished to ambition by an immoral policy. Truly, would we not to regard the meanness of your usurpation as an effort of virtue on your part? Are you brutish by chance, sacrificing his sons to the greatness of Rome? I have been able in the course of my life to compare literary renown and popularity. The former pleased me for a few hours, but that love of renown soon passed. As for popularity it found me indifferent, because in the revolution I have seen too much of men surrounded by those masses which, after raising them on the shield, flung them into the gutter. A democrat by nature, an aristocrat by habit, I would most gladly sacrifice my fortune and my life to the people, provided I need have little relation with the crowd. Anyhow, I was extremely sensible of the impulse of the young men of July, who carried me in triumph to the chamber of peers, and this inasmuch as they did not carry me there to be their leader, or because I thought as they did, they were only doing justice to an enemy. They recognized in me a man of honour and liberty, that generosity touched me. But this other popularity which I have lately acquired in my own party has caused me no emotion. There is an icy barrier between the royalists and myself. We want the same king. With that exception, most of our wishes are opposed one to the other. And of Book 2, Part 3. Part 1 of Book 3 of Part 4 of the Memoirs of Chateaubriand, Volume 5. This is the LibriVox Recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Nicole Lee, the Memoirs of Chateaubriand, Volume 5 by François René de Chateaubriand, translated by Alexander Tixar de Matos, Book 3, Part 1. Paris, Vui d'enfer, 9th May, 1833. I have brought the sequence of the most recent facts up to this day. Shall I at last be able to resume my work? This work consists of the different portions of these memoirs which are not yet finished, and I shall have some difficulty in applying myself to them again ex abrupto. For my head is filled with the things of the moment. I am not in the mood suited for gathering my past in the calm where it is sleeping, agitated though it was when in the state of life. I have taken up my pen to write. What on, and what about? I know not. On glancing through the journal in which for the last six months I have kept a record of what I do, and of what happens to me, I see that most of the pages are dated from the read-on fare. The small house which I occupy near the barrier, maybe worth sixty thousand francs or so, but at the time of the rise in the price of ground I bought it much dearer, and I have never been able to pay for it. It was a question of saving the unfilmary de Marie-Torres, founded by the care of Madame de Chateaubriand, and adjoining the house. A company of builders was proposing to establish a café a montagne-rousse in the aforesaid house, a noise which does not go very well with the death-agony. Am I not glad of my sacrifices, certainly. One is always glad to succour the unfortunate. I would willingly share the little I possess with those in need, but I do not know that this disposition amounts to virtue in my case. My goodness is like that of a condemned man, who is lavish of that for which he will have no use in an hour's time. In London the convict whom they are about to hang sells his skin for drink. I do not sell mine, I give it to the gravediggers. Once the house was bought the best that I could do was to live in it. I have arranged it as it is. From the windows of the drawing-room one sees first what the English call a pleasure-ground, a proscenium, consisting of a lawn and some blocks of shrubs. Beyond this enclosure on the other side of wall, the height of a man's breast, surmounted by a white lozenge fence, is a field of mixed cultivation, reserved for the provender of the cattle of the infirmary. Between this field comes another piece of ground, separated from the field by another breast-high wall in green open-work, interlaced with bibernums and bengal roses. These marches of my state embrace a clump of trees, a meadow, and an alley of poplars. This nook is extremely solitary. It does not smile to me like Horace's nook, Angulus Riddett. On the contrary I have sometimes shed tears there. The proverb says that youth must have its fling. The decline of life also has some freaks to overlook. Les pleurs et la pitié, sort d'amour, ayant ses charmes. My trees are of a thousand kinds. I have planted twenty-three cedars of Lebanon and two druid oaks. They make game of their short-lived master, Brevim Domino. Amor, a double avenue of chestnuts, leads from the upper to the lower garden. The ground slopes rapidly along the field between. I did not choose these trees, as are the valley Olu, in memory of the spots which I have visited. He who takes pleasure in recollection cherishes hopes, but when one has no children, nor youth, nor country, what attachment can one bear to trees whose foliage, flowers, and fruits are no longer the mysterious numerals employed in the calculation of the periods of illusion? In vain people say to me, You are growing younger. Do they think that they will make me take my wisdom teeth for my milk-teeth, and even the latter have been given me only to eat a bitter loaf under the royalty of the seventh of August? For the rest, my trees are not much interested to know whether they serve as a calendar for my pleasures, or as a death certificate of my years. They increase daily, from the day that I decrease. They wed those of the grounds of the Foundling Hospital and the Boulevard d'Enferre, which surround me. I do not see a single house. I should be less separated from the world at two hundred leagues from Paris. I hear the bleating of the goats which feed the abandoned orphans. Ah, if I had been like these, in the arms of Saint Vincent de Paul, born of a frailty, obscure and unknown as they are, I should today be some nameless workman, having no concern with men, nor knowing either why or how I entered life or how and why I was to quit it. By pulling down a wall, I have placed myself in communication with the unfirmary demeriteurs. I find myself at the same time in a monastery of farm and orchard and a park. In the morning I wake to the sound of the Angelus. I hear from my bed the singing of the priests in the chapel. I see from my window a Calvary which stands between a walnut tree and an elder tree, cows, chickens, pigeons and bees, sisters of charity in black timony gowns and white dimity caps, convalescent women, old ecclesiastics go roaming among the lilacs, azaleas, calicanthusus and rhododendrons of the flower garden, among the rose trees, gooseberry bushes, strawberry plants and vegetables of the kitchen garden. Some of my octogenary vicars were exiled with me, after mingling my poverty with theirs on the lawns of Kensington. I have offered the grass plots of my hospice to their failing footsteps. They there drag their pious old age like the foals of the veil of the sanctuary. I have, as a companion, a fat red-grey cat with black cross-tripes, born at the Vatican in the Raphael gallery. Leo XII brought it up in a skirt of his robe, where I used to watch it with envy, and the pontiff gave me my audiences as a master. On the death of the success of St. Peter, I inherited the cat without a master, as I have told in writing of my Roman Embassy. They called it Michetto, surname, the Pope's cat. In this capacity it enjoys an extreme consideration among pious souls. I strive to make it forget exile, the Sistine Chapel in the sun of Michelangelo's dome, on which it used to take its walks far removed from earth. My house in the different buildings of the infirmary, with their chapel in the Gothic sacristy, present the appearance of a colony or hamlet. On ceremonial days, religion hiding under my roof, the old monarchy in my arms-house form up in marching order. Precessions composed of all are valitude-narrants, preceded by the young girls of the neighbourhood, pass under the trees, singing with a blessed sacrament the cross and the banner. The Meshater beyond follows them, beads in hand, proud of the flock which is the object of her solitude. The blackbird's whistle, the red-breast's wobble, the nightingale's compete against the hymns. I am carried back to the regations of which I have described the rustic pomp. From the theory of Christianity I have passed to its practice. My home faces west. In the evening the treetops lighted from behind imprint their black serate outlines on the horizon. My youth returns at that hour. It revives those lapsed days which time has reduced to the unsubstantiality of phantoms. When the constellations pierce through their blue arch, I remember that splendid firmament which I admired from the bosom of the American forests or the lap of the ocean. The night is more favourable than the day to the traveller's reminiscences. It hides from his eyes the landscapes I would remind him of the regions which he inhabits. It shows him only the luminaries, which look the same under the different latitudes of the same hemisphere. Then he recognises those stars which he contemplated in such a country at such a time, the thoughts which he entertained, the feelings which he underwent in the different portions of the world, shoot up and fix themselves at the same point in the sky. We here speak of the world in the infirmary, only of the two public collections and a little on Sundays. On those days our hospice changes into a kind of parish church. The sister superior pretends that beautiful ladies come to mass in the hope of seeing me. Skillful manager that she is, she lays her curiosity under contribution. By promising to show me to them she attracts them to the laboratory. Once she has entrapped them she forces sweet stuff on them really nearly in exchange for money. She makes me serve at the sale of the chocolate manufactured for the profit of her patients, when, as la matinière, took me into partnership for the trade in the Guzbry Serp, which he used to coiff to the success of his love affairs. The sainted woman also steals stumps of quills from Madame de Chateaubriand's ink-stand. She trades in them among the thoroughbred royalists, declaring that with those precious stumps were written that superb memoirs sur la captivité de Madame de Chesterbury. A few good pictures of the Spanish and Italian schools. A virgin by Guerin, the Saint-Theresa, the last masterpiece of the painter of Corrine, make us attached to the arts. As for history we shall soon have at the hospice a sister of the Marquis de Fabra and a daughter of Madame Roulant. The monarchy and the republic have sent me to expiate their ingratitude and to feed their invalids. All are anxious to be received, are Marie-Thérèse. The poor women who are obliged to leave when they have recovered their health take up their lodgings near the infirmary. In the hope of falling ill again and returning to it, nothing smacks of the hospital. The duos, the Protestant, the Catholic, the foreigner, the Frenchwoman receive the cares of a delicate charity, disguising itself as an affectionate relationship. Each afflicted woman seems to have found her mother. I have seen a Spaniard beautiful as Dorothea, the pearl of Seville, diet sixteen of consumption in the common dormantry. Looking herself upon her happiness, looking as she smiled with great black half-dimmed eyes, a pale and emaciated face, had Madame La Dauphine, who asked after her, and assured her that she would soon be well. She expired that same evening, far from the Mosque of Córdoba, and the banks of the Gordal Quivir, her native stream. What are you? A Spaniard? A Spaniard, and here. We have many widows of knights of the Holy Ghost among our frequenters. They bring with them the only thing that remains to them, the portraits of their husbands, in the uniform of a captain of foot, a white coat with rose-pink or sky-blue facings, with their hair dressed al-Wazir Royale. They are put in the lumber-room. I cannot look at the regiment of them without laughing. If the old monarchy had survived, I should today be adding to the number of those portraits. I should be acting as the solace of my grand-nephuse in some deserted gallery. That's your great-uncle Francois, the captain in the Navarre regiment. He was a very witty man. He wrote the riddle in the mercure beginning with the words cut off my head, and the fugitive perm in the Armonite de Muse called Créducerre. When I am tired of my gardens, the plain of Montrouge takes their place. I have seen that plain change. What have I not seen change? Twenty-five years ago I used to pass by the barrières du Mar, when going to Mareville, to the Marais, to the Vallée-au-Loup, to the right and left of the road one saw only mills, the wheels of the cranes and the stone pits, and the nursery garden of Sel, Rousseau's old friend. Dénoyer built his rooms of a hundred covers for the soldiers of the imperial guard, who came to clink glasses between each battle-one, each kingdom overthrown. A few public houses stood round the mills, from the barrières du Mar, to the barrières du Montparnasse, higher up with the Moulin-Jean-Séniste and L'Oisein's Pleasure House, by way of a contrast. Near the public houses, acacias were planted, the poor man's shade. Even a seltzer water is the beggar's champagne. A travelling theatre fixed the migratory population of the public house-balls. A village was formed with a paved street, songwriters and gendarmes, the amphibons and sycopsies of the police. While the living was settling down, the dead were claiming their place. A cemetery was fenced in, not without opposition on the part of the drunkards, in an enclosure containing a ruined mill, by the Chaudais-Aboix. Their death brings every day the corn which it has gleaned, and mere wool separates it from the dancing, the music, the nightly uproar. The sounds of a moment, the marriages of an hour, separate them from infinite silence, endless night and eternal nuptials. I often stroll through this cemetery younger than myself, in which the worms that gnaw the dead are not yet dead. I read the epitaphs. How many women between sixteen and thirty years old have become the prey of the tomb? Happy they to have lived only in their youth, the Duchesse de Gèvre, the last drop of the blood of Duchesclin, a skeleton of another age, dozers in the midst of the plebeian sleepers. In this new exile I already have old friends, Monsieur le Moin, lies there, he was secretary to Monsieur le Moin-moin, and was bequeathed to me by Madame de Beaumont. He used to bring me almost every evening, when I was in Paris, the simple conversation which I liked so much, when it is joined to goodness of heart and singleness of character. My sick and weird mind finds relaxation in a healthy and restful mind. I left the ashes of Monsieur le Moin's noble patroness, on the banks of the Tiber. The boulevards which encompass the infirmaries share my walks with the cemetery. I no longer dream there, having no future, I have no dreams left. A stranger to the new generations, I appear to them a dusty and very bare wallet-bearer, scarce am I covered now with a rag of docked days and which time gnaws, even as the heralded arms used to cut the jacket of an inglorious night. I am glad to stand aside. I like to be at a musket-shot's distance from the barrier, on the edge of a high-road, and always ready to set out. From the foot of the milestone I watched the mail pass, my image, and life's. When I was in Rome in 1828, I formed a plan to build, in Paris, at the end of my hermitage, a greenhouse, and a garden as cottage, all to be paid for out of the savings of my embassy, and the fragments of antiquities found in my excavations at Torre-Vergata. Monsieur de Polignac assumed office. I sacrificed to the liberties of my country a place which charmed me, relapsed into poverty. Goodbye to my greenhouse, Fortuna Vitrea est. The evil habit of paper and ink brings about that one cannot prevent one so from scribbling. I have taken up my pen, not knowing what I was going to write, and have scrolled this description at least a third too long. If I have time, I will cut it down. I must ask pardon on my friends for the bitterness of some of my thoughts. I can laugh only with my lips. I have the spleen, a physical melancholy, a real complaint. Whoever has read these memoirs has seen what my lot has been. I was not as firm as stroke from my mother's breast before the torments had assailed me. I have wandered from chuprec to chuprec. I feel a curse upon my life, a burden too heavy for that hut of reeds. Let not those whom I love therefore think themselves denied. Let them excuse me, let them allow my fever to pass. Between those attacks. My heart is wholly theirs. I had written thus much on these loose pages, flung pale mel, on my table, and blown about by the wind that entered through my open windows, when they handed me the following letter and note from Madame La Duchesse de Berri. Come, let us return once more to the second part of my double life, the practical part. Place it Adele, 7th May, 1833. I am painfully annoyed at the refusal of the government to allow you to come to me, after the two requests which I have made. Of all the numberless fixations which I have had to undergo, this is certainly the most painful. I had so many things to tell you, so much advice to ask of you. Since I must relinquish the thought of seeing you, I will at least try, by the only means left to me, to send you the commission which I intended to give you, and which you all accomplish, for I rely without reserve on your devotion to my son. I charge you therefore, monsieur, especially to go to Prague, and tell my kinsfolk that, if I refused until the twenty-second of February to declare my secret marriage, my design was the better to serve my son's cause, and to prove that a mother, a bourbon, was not afraid to endanger her life. I proposed to make my marriage known only when my son came of age, but the threats of the government, the moral tortures, given to the utmost degree, decided me to make my declaration. In the ignorance in which I am left as to the period of which my liberty will be restored to me, after so many frustrated hopes, the time has come to give to my family, and to the whole of Europe, an explanation which shall prevent injurious suppositions. I would have liked to be able to give it earlier, but absolute sequestration and unsurmountable difficulties in communicating with the outside have prevented me until now. You will tell my family that I was married in Italy to Count Hector Lucchese Pali, of the Princess of Campo Franco. I ask you, au monsieur de Chateaubriand, to convey to my dear children the expression of all my affection for them. Be sure to tell Henry that I rely more than ever on all his efforts to become daily worthier of the love and admiration of Frenchmen. Tell Louise how happy I should be to embrace her, and that her letters have been my only consolation. Only my homage are the king's feet, and give my affectionate regards to my brother and my kind sister. I ask you to report to me, whereof I may be, the wishes of my children and my family. Shut up within the walls of play. I find a comfort in having such an interpreter as Monsieur de Bichon to Chateaubriand. He can reckon on my attachment for all time. Note. I have felt great satisfaction at the agreement that rains between you and Monsieur de Marquis de la Tourmobile, as I attach a great value to this in the interest of my son. You can show Madame la Dauphine the letter which I am writing to you. Be sure, my sister, that so soon as I have recovered my liberty, I shall think nothing more urgent than to send her all the papers relating to political affairs. My great wish would have been to proceed to Prague, so soon as I was free. But the sufferings of all kinds that I have undergone, have so greatly destroyed my health that I shall be obliged to stop some time in Italy, so as to recover a little, and not to frighten my poor children too much by the change in me. Study my son's character, his good qualities, his inclinations, even his faults. You will tell the king, Madame la Dauphine and myself, what there is to correct, to change, to make perfect, and you will let France know what she has to expect from her young king. Through my different relations with the Emperor of Russia, I know that he has on several occasions very favourably received propositions for a marriage between my son and the Princess Olga. Monsieur de Chulot will give you the most precise information, touching the persons who are at present at Prague. Desiring to remain French above all, I ask you to obtain leave from the king for me to keep my title of princess and my name. The mother of the king of Sardinia continues to call herself Princess of Carignan, in spite of her marriage with Monsieur de Montréal, to whom she has given the title of prince. Marie-Louise Duchess of Parma kept her title of Empress, when she married Count von Neyperg, and remained the guardian of her son. Her other children are called Neyperg. I beg you to set out as promptly as possible for Prague, as I desire more eagerly than I can tell you that you should arrive in time for my family to learn all these details, only through you. I wish the fact of your departure to be as little known as possible, or at least that no one will be aware that you are the bearer of a letter from me, so as not to reveal my only means of correspondence, which is so precious, although very rare. Monsieur le Count Lucchese, my husband, is descended from one of the four oldest families in Sicily, the only ones that remain of the twelve companions of Tancred. This family has always been noted for the noblest devotion to the cause of its kings. The Prince de Campo Franco, Lucchese's father, was first lord of the bed-chamber to my father. The present king of Naples, having an entire confidence in him, has placed him with his young brother, the vice-roy of Sicily. I do not speak to you of his feelings. They agree with us in every respect. Convinced as I am that the only way to be understood by the French is always to address to them the language of honour and to make them look towards glory, I have had the thought of marking the commencement of my son's reign by joining Belgium to France. Count Lucchese was charged by me to make the first overtures in this matter to the king of Holland, and the Prince of Orange, and he was upgraded in obtaining a good hearing for them. I was not so fortunate as to conclude this treaty, the object of all my wishes, but I believe that there are still chances of success. Before leaving the Vendée, I gave Monsieur le Marichal de Beaumont powers to continue this affair. No one is more capable than he to carry it to a successful issue because of the esteem which he enjoys in Holland. MC. Blay, 7 May, 1833. As I am not certain of being able to write to the Marquis de Lotto-Moborgue, try to see him before your departure. You can tell him whatever you think fit, but in the most absolute secrecy. Arrange with him as to the direction to be given to the newspapers. I was moved at reading these documents. The daughter of so many kings, that woman fallen from so high a station, after closing her ear to my councils, had the noble courage to apply to me, to forgive me for foreseeing the failure of her enterprise. Her confidence went to my heart and honoured me. Madame de Berrie had judged me rightly. The very nature of that enterprise which made her lose all, did not alienate me. To play for a throne, glory, the future and destiny is no vulgar thing. The world understands that a princess can be an heroic mother. But one must be consigned to execration. What is unexampled in history is the immodest torture inflicted on a weak woman, alone, cut off from assistance, overwhelmed by all the forces of a government conspiring against her, as though to her question of conquering a formidable power. Parents themselves abandoning their daughter to the laughter of the lackeys, holding her by her four limbs so that she may be delivered in public, calling the authorities from their corner, the jailers, spies, passers-by, to see the child brought forth from their prisoner's womb, even as though they had called France to witness the birth of her king. And what prisoner? The granddaughter of Henry IV. And what mother? The mother of the orphan whose throne they were occupying. Do the halts contain a family so low-born, as to conceive the thought of branding one of its children with so great an ignominy? Would it not have been nobler to kill Madame la Duchesse de Berri, rather than submit her to the most tyrannous humiliation? What have indulgence was shown in this business belongs to the sentry, whatever infamy to the government? Madame la Duchesse de Berri's letter and note are remarkable in more than one place. The portion relating to the incorporation of Belgium and the marriage of Henry V shows a head capable of serious things. The portion concerning the family in Prague is touching. The princess fears that she will be obliged to stop in Italy, so as to recover a little and not to frighten her poor children too much by the change in her. What can be sadder and more sorrowful? She adds, I ask you, monsieur de Chateaubriand, to convey to my dear children the expression of all my affection, et cetera. Oh, Madame la Duchesse de Berri, what can I do for you? I, a weak creature, already half broken down. But how to refuse anything to such words as these? Shut up within the walls of play. I find a comfort in having such an interpreter as monsieur de Chateaubriand. He can reckon on my attachment for all time. Yes. I will set out on the last and greatest of my embassies. I shall go on the part of the prison of play, to find the prison of the temple. I shall negotiate a new family compact, take the kisses of a captive mother to her exiled children, and present letters in which courage and misfortune accredit me to innocence and virtue. A letter for Madame la Dauphine and a note for the two children were added to the letter addressed to me. There were left to me of my past grandres a broom in which I had won shone at the court of George IV, and a travelling collage built in former days for the use of the plans to talion. I had the letter repaired in order to make it capable of going against nature, for by origin and habit it is disinclined to run after fallen kings. On the fourteenth of May, the anniversary of the murder of Henry IV, at half-past eight in the evening, I set out in search of Henry V, child, orphan, and outlaw. I was not without anxiety as to my passport. Taken out at the foreign office, it bore no description, and it was stated eleven months back. It had been delivered for Switzerland and Italy, and had already served to enable me to leave France and return. Different visas witnessed these several circumstances. I did not care either to have it renewed or to ask for a fresh one. The police of every country would have been warned every telegraph set in notion. The police of every country would have been warned every telegraph set in motion. At every custom house they would have searched my trunks, my carriage, my person. If my papers had been seized, what a pretext for persecution! What domiciliary visits! What arrests! What a prolingation of the royal captivity! For it would have been proved that the princess had secret means of correspondence outside. It was therefore impossible for me to call attention to my departure by asking for a passport. I placed my trust in my star. Avoiding the too much beaten road of Frankfurt and that of Strasbourg, which runs under the line of telegraphs, I took the Basel road with Iosant Pillage, my secretary, used to all my fortunes, and baptized my valet de Champ when I was my lord, and once more plain valet on the downfall of my lordship. We get in and out of the carriage together. My cook, the famous Marmuelle, retired when I left the ministry, declaring that he would not return to office till I did. It had been wisely decided by the introducer of ambassadors under the restoration, that any ambassador who died re-entered private life. Baptiste had re-entered domestic service. When we reached Artkirch, the frontier stage, a gendarme appeared and asked for my passport. When seeing my name, he told me that he had served in the Spanish campaign in 1823 under my nephew Christian, a captain in the dragoons of the guard. Between Artkirch and St. Louis, I met a rector and his parishioners. They were making a procession against the cock-chafers, nasty insects much multiplied since the days of July. At St. Louis, the officers of the custom house, who knew me, led me pass. I arrived gaily at the gate of Basel, where I was met by the old Swiss drum-majo who, in the previous month of August, had inflicted on me a little quarantine of a quarter of an hour. But the cholera was over, and I put up at the Three Kings, on the banks of the Rhine. It was ten o'clock on the morning of the seventeenth of May. The landlord procured me a travelling footman called Schwartz, a native of Basel, to act as my interpreter in Bohemia. He spoke German just as my good Joseph, the Milanese tinman, spoke Greek in Messenia when inquiring for the ruins of Sparta. On the same day, the seventeenth of May, at six o'clock in the evening, I moved out of Porte. As I stepped into the collage, I was amazed to see the Artkirch gendarme among the crowd. I did not know if he had not been sent after me. He had simply escorted the mail from France. I gave him some money to drink to the health of his old captain. A schoolboy came up to me and threw a paper to me with the inscription to the Virgil of the nineteenth century. It contained this passage altered from the Aeneid, Magte animo generose puer. And the postelium ripped up the horses, and I drove off, quite proud of my high renown at Basel, quite astonished at being Virgil, quite charmed to be called a child, generose puer. I crossed the bridge, leaving the Burgesses and peasants at war in the midst of their republic, and fulfilling in their own fashion the part which they are called upon to play, in the general transformation of society. I went up the right bank of the Rhine, and contemplated with a certain sadness, the high hills of the Kanton of Basel. The exile which I had come to seek last year in the Alps, seemed to me a happier life-sending, a gentler lot than the affairs of empire in which I had re-engaged. Did I cherish the smallest hope for my name Nandusha-St-Berry or her son? No. And I was moreover convinced that, in spite of my recent services, I should find no friends in Prague. One who has taken the earth to Louis-Philippe, and who nevertheless praises the fatal ordinances, must be more acceptable to Cholster-Tent than I, who have never foresworn myself. It is too much for King that one should twice have been in the right. Flattering treachery is preferred to austere devotion. I went therefore going to Prague even as a Sicilian soldier who was hung in Paris at the time of the League went to the Gallows. And a confessor of the Neapolitan's tried to put heart into him by saying on the way, alegramente, alegramente. Thus spared my thoughts while the horses were drawing me onwards, but when I thought of the misfortunes of the mother of Henry V, I reproached myself for my regrets. The banks of the Rhine flying along my carriage diverted me pleasantly. When one looks at a landscape out of a window, even though he be dreaming of other things, a reflection of the picture which he has under his eyes nevertheless enters into his mind. We drove through meadows decked with the flowers of May. The green was fresh in the woods, orchards and hedges. Horses, donkeys and cows, pigs, dogs and sheep, hens and pigeons, geese and turkeys were in the fields with their masters. The Rhine and that warlike stream seemed pleased in the midst of that pastoral scene, like an old soldier quartered on his march on husband-men. The next morning, the eighteenth of May, before reaching Schauffhausen, I was driven to the falls of the Rhine. I stole a few moments from the fall of Kingdoms to improve myself at its image. I should have done well for myself to earn my days in the castle overlooking the chasm. I placed at Niagara the dream of Attala not yet realized. I met at Tivoli another dream, already passed away upon earth. Who knows if, in the keep standing over the falls of the Rhine, I should not have found a fairer vision which, but now wandering on its banks, would have consoled me for all the shades that I had lost. From Schauffhausen I continued my road towards Ulm. The country presents tilled basins in which detached and wooded hillocks bade their feet. In those woods which were then being cultivated for sale, the ice or oaks, some felled, others left standing. The first stripped of their bark where they lay, the trunks and branches, white and bare, like the skeleton of a strange beast, the second bearing the fresh green of spring on their her suit and dark moss-grown limbs, they combined what is never found in man, the two-fold beauty of old age and youth. In the fur plantations of the plain, uprootings had left empty spaces, the land had been turned into meadows, those circuses of grass in the middle of the slate-grey forests have something severe and smiling, and recall the prairies of the new world. The cottages retain the Swiss character, the hamlets and inns are distinguished by that appetising cloneliness unknown in our country. Stopping for dinner between six and seven o'clock at Moschurg, I sat musing at the window of my inn. Herds were drinking at a fountain, a heifer leapt and froliced like a rodea. Wherever men are kind to their beasts, they are lively and love man. In German and England the horses are not beaten, they are not ill-treated with words, they back towards the pole of themselves, they start and stop at the least sound of the voice, at the smallest movement of the bridal rain. Of all nations the French are the most inhumane. Do you see our postillians harnessing their horses? They drive them into the shafts with kicks of their boots in the flanks, with blows of their whip-handles on the head, breaking their mouths with a bit to make them go back, accompanying the whole with oaths, shouts and insults and the poor brute. Beasts of burden are compelled to draw or carry loads, which are beyond their strength and to oblige them to go on. The drivers cut up their hides with twists of the thong. The fierceness of the galls is with us still. It is only hidden under the silk of our stockings and neckloths. I was not alone in gaping. The women were doing as much at all the windows of their houses. I have often asked myself when passing through unknown hamlets, would you live here? I have always answered, why not? Who in the mad arse of youth has not said with Pierre Vidal the troubadour? D'un aimait d'un poc cordeaux, canare en modeaux, me d'eau, carrer richart, apetiers, niab toasts, niab angers. There's matter for dreams everywhere. Pleasures and pains belong to all places. There's women of muskier, who looked at the sky, who are my posting chariot, who looked at me, or who looked at nothing. Had not they joys and sorrows, interests of the heart, or fortune, or family, even as we have in Paris, I should have made great progress in the history of my neighbours. If dinner had not been particularly announced to the crash over Thunder Clap, that was much ado about little. 19 May, 1833. At ten o'clock at night I got into the carriage again. I fell asleep to the patter of the rain on the hood of the collage. The sound of my postillian's little horn arouse me. I heard the murmur of a river which I could not see. We had stopped at the gate of a town. The gate open, my passport and luggage were examined, we were entering the vast empire of his Württemberg Majesty. I greeted in memory the grand duchess Helen, the graceful and delicate flower now confined in the hot houses of the Volga. On only one single day did I conceive the valley of high rank and fortune. It was when I gave the fit to the young Russian princess in the gardens of the Villa Medici. I felt how the magic of the sky, the charm of the spot, the spell of beauty and power, can inebriate one. I imagined myself both Torquata Tassau and Alphonsus of Este. I was worth more than the prince, less than the peat. Helen was more beautiful than Leonora. The representative of the air of Francis I and Louis Cartos, I had the dream of a king of France. They did not search me. I had nothing against the rites of sovereigns. I who recognized those of a young monarch which the sovereigns themselves failed to recognize. The vulgarity, the modernity of the custom house and the passport formed a contrast with the storm, the gothic gate, the sound of the horn and the noise of the torrent. Instead of the lady of the castle whom I was prepared to deliver from oppression, I found on leaving the town an all simple fellow. He asked me for Zeke's Kreuzer, raising his left hand which held a lantern to the level of his grey head, putting out his right hand to Schwartz on the box, and opening his mouth like the gills of a hooked pike. Baptiste, wet and sick as he was, could not hold himself for laughing. And what was this torrent over which I had just passed? I asked the postillian who cried, Donau! The Danube. One more famous river crossed by me unknowingly, even as I had descended into the bed of the oleanders of the Eurotas without knowing it. What has it availed me to drink of the waters of the Mississippi, the Aridanus, the Tiber, the Cephisus, the Hermes, the Jordan, the Nile, the Guadalcuvier, the Tegas, the Ebro, the Rhine, the Spree, the Sin, and a hundred other obscure or celebrated rivers? Unknown, they have not given me their peace. illustrious they have not communicated to me their glory. They will be able to say only that they have seen me pass as their banks see their waves pass. I arrived at Olm fairly early on Sunday, the 19th of May, after travelling through the scene of the battles of Morro and Bonaparte. Iesant, who is a member of the Legion of Honor, was wearing the ribbon. This decoration obtained for us an incredible amount of consideration. I, wearing in my buttonhole only a little flower, according to my custom, passed until they heard my name, for a mysterious being. My mamma looks at Cairo used to insist whether I would or no, that I was a general of Napoleon disguised as a literary man. They would not give in, and every quarter of an hour I expected to see me put away Egypt in the sash of my kaftan. And yet it is among nations whose villages we have burnt, and whose harvests we have laid waste, that those sentiments exist. I rejoiced in this glory. But if we had done nothing but good to Germany, should we be as greatly regretted there? Oh, inexplicable human nature! The evils of war are forgotten. We have left on the soil of our conquest the spark of life. That inert mass at a movement continues to ferment, because its intelligence is commencing. When travelling nowadays we see the nations watching, knapsack on back. Ready to start they seem to be waiting for us in order to place us at the head of the column. A Frenchman is always taken from the Eddecombe who brings the order to march. Almost a clean little town, with no particular character. Its dismantled ramparts have been converted into kitchen gardens or walks, which happens to all ramparts. Their fortune has something in common with that of the military. The soldier bears arms in his youth, when invalidated he becomes a gardener. I want to see the cathedral, a gothic fabric with a tall spire. The aisles are divided into two narrow vaults supported by a single row of pillars, so that the interior of the edifice partakes at one time of the character of the cathedral and the basilica. The pulpit has for a canopy a graceful steeple ending in a point like a mitre. The inside of this steeple consists of a nule, around which winds a helicoid vault in stone filigree work. Symmetrical spikes piercing the outside seem destined to carry candles. These used to light up this tiara when the bishop preached on feast days. Instead of presofficiating, I saw little birds hopping in that granite foliage. They were celebrating the word that gave them a voice and wings, on the fifth day of the creation. The nave was deserted. In the apse of the church, two separate groups of boys and girls were receiving religious instruction. The reformation, as I've already said, makes a mistake when it shows itself in the catholic monuments, upon which it has encroached. It cuts a mean and shameful figure there. Those tall porches call for numerous clergy, the pomp of the celebrations, the chants, pictures, ornament, silk veils, draperies, laces, gold, silver, lamps, flowers, and incense of the altars. Protestantism may say as much as it pleases that it has returned to primitive Christianity. The Gothic churches reply that it has denied its fathers. The Christians were the architects of its wonders, were other than the children of Luther and Calvin. 19 May 1833 I had left Almetnoon on the 19th. At Dillingan the horses were wanting. I stayed an hour in the high street, having as a recreation the sight of a stork's nest planted on a chimney as though on a millerette at Athens. A number of sparrows had insolently made their nests in the bed of the peaceful queen with the long neck. Below the stork, a lady living on the first floor, looked at her past the spy in the shade of a half-raised blind. Below the lady was a wooden saint in a niche. The saint will be thrown down to the pavement, the woman from her window into the grave, and the stork it will fly away, thus will end the three stories. Between Dillingan and Donalwood you cross a battlefield at Blenheim. The footsteps of the armies of Morro over the same ground have not obliterated those of the armies of Lucartos. The defeat of the great king prevails in the countryside over the successors of the great emperor. The postillum who drove me belonged to Blenheim. On coming up to his village he blew the horn. Perhaps he was announcing his passage to the peasant girl whom he loved. She leapt for joy in the midst of the same fields where twenty-seven French battalions and twelve squadrons of cavalry were taken prisoner, where then of our regiment, whose uniform I have had the honour to wear, buried its standards to the mournful sound of the trumpets. Those are the common places of the succession of the ages. In 1793 the republic carried off from the church at Blenheim the colours taken from the monarchy in 1704. It avenged the kingdom and slew the king. It cut off Lucer's head, but it allowed only France to tear the white flag to pieces. Nothing better conveys the greatness of Lucartos than to find his memory at the bottom of the ravines dug by the torrent of the Napoleonic victories. That monarch's conquest left our country the frontiers had still guarded. The Brion scholar to whom the legitimacy gave a sword, for a moment enclosed Europe in his anti-chamber. But it escaped. The grandson of Henry IV laid that same Europe at the feet of France, and it remained there. This does not mean that I am comparing Napoleon and Lucartos. Men of different destinies, they belonged to dissimilar centuries, to different nations. One completed an era, the other began a world. One can say of Napoleon what Montaigne says of Caesar. I excused Victory in that she could not well give him over. The unworthy tapestries at Blenheim Palace, which I saw with Pellier, show the marriage show to Tala taking off his hat to the Duke of Marlborough, who stands in a swaggering attitude. Tala nonetheless remained the favorite of the old lion. A prisoner in London he conquered, in the mind of Queen Anne, the Marlborough who had beaten him at Blenheim, and he died a member of the French Academy. He was, says Saint Simon, a man of middling height, with somewhat jealous eyes, full of fire and spirit, but with an incessant demon of restlessness in him, owing to his ambition. I am writing history in my collage, why not? Caesar wrote plenty in his litter. He won the battles of which he wrote. I did not lose those of which I speak. From Dillingan to Donau-Woodt, stretches a rich plain of unequal level, in which the corn fields intermingle with the meadows. One goes closer to or further from the Danube, according to the windings of the road and the bends of the river. At that height the waters of the Danube are still yellow, like those of the Tiber. Do you scarce have you left the village before you see another? The villages are clean and smiling. Often the walls of the houses have frescoes. A certain Italian character becomes manifest as one goes towards Austria. The inhabitant of the Danube is no longer the peasant of the Danube. Saint Monton, Naurice, Imbarbe, Tufiou, Tutsapersan Vellu, Refresante, Un Aux, Mais Un Aux, Malleche. The sky of Italy is lacking here. The sun is low and pale. Those close-sown market-towns are not the little cities of the Romania, which brood upon the masterpieces of the arts hidden underneath them. You scratch the ground, and that tillage makes some marvel of the antique chisel shoot up like a blade of corn. At Donau-Woodt I regret to have arrived too late to enjoy a fine view of the Danube. On Monday the twentieth the same appearance of the landscape. But the soil becomes less good, and the peasant seem poorer. One begins again to see the pine-woods of the hills. The Hussainian forest used to project as far as this. The trees of which Pliny left us a singular description were fell by generations now buried with the secular oaks. When Trajan threw a bridge over the Danube, Italy heard for the first time that name so fatal to the world of antiquity, the name of the Goths. The road was opened up to myriads of savages who marched to the sack of Rome. The Huns and the Attila, built their wooden palaces, soft as at the Coliseum, on the bank of the stream which was the rival of the Rhine, and like the latter, the enemy of the Tiber. The hordes of Alaric crossed the Danube in 376 to overthrow the civilised Greek empire, at the same spot where the Russians traversed it in 1828, with the design of overthrowing the barbaric empire seated on the ruins of Greece. Could Trajan have guessed that a civilisation of a new kind would one day be established on the other side of the Alps, on the borders of the stream which he had almost discovered? Born in the Black Forest, the Danube goes to die in the Black Sea. Where does its chief source lie? In the courtyard of a German baron who employs the Nair to wash this linen, a geographer having taken it into his head to deny the fact the noble owner brought an action against him. He was decided by a judicial verdict that the source of the Danube was in the courtyard of the said baron and could not be elsewhere. How many centuries were needed to arrive from the eras of Ptolemy had this important discovery. Tacitus makes the Danube descend from Mount Abnobah, Montes Abnobah. But the Hermondurian, Churroscan, Markomanian, Quadian barons, who are the authorities upon the Russian history relies, are not so cautious as my German baron. Doris did not know so much when I made him travel to the mouths of the Easter, whether you could sign. According to Racine was to carry Mithridates in two days. Having passed the Easter near its mouth, I discovered a stone tomb, on which grew a laurel. I pulled out the grasses which covered some Latin characters, and soon I succeeded in reading this first verse of the Eliges of an unfortunate poet. My book you will go to Rome, and you will go to Rome without me. The Danube, on losing its solitude, saw a recurring on its banks, the evils inseparable from society, plagues, famines, destructive fires, sacks of towns, wars, and those divisions incessantly springing up from human passions and eras. After Donavut, one comes to Burkheim and Neuberg. At breakfast at Ingolstadt, they serve me with robuck. It is a great pity to eat that charming beast. I have always been horrified at reading the account of the inaugural banquet of George Neville, Archbishop of York, in 1466. They roasted four hundred swans singing in chorus their funeral hymn. There is also a question at that repast of four hundred bitterns. I can well believe it. Regensburg, which we call Rattisbon, presents an agreeable view to one approaching it from Donavut. Two o'clock was striking on the twenty-first when I pulled out before the post office. While they were putting the horses too, which always takes long in Germany, I entered a neighbouring church called the Old Chapel, and painted white and gilded like new. Eight old black priests with white hair were singing vespers. I had once prayed in a chapel at Tiberley, for a man who was himself praying by my side. In one of the pits at Carthage I had offered up my vows to St. Louis, who died not far from Utica and who was more philosophical than Cato, more sincere than Hannibal, more pious than Aeneas. In the chapel at Rattisbon I had a thought of recommending to heaven the young king whom I had come to seek. But I feared the wrath of God too much to ask for a crown. I besought the dispense of all nurses to grant the orphan happiness, and to give him a disdain for power. I hurried from the old chapel to the cathedral. It is smaller than that of Ulm, but more religious and handsomer in style. Its stained glass windows wrap it in the darkness appropriate to contemplation. The white chapel was better suited to my daughters for the innocence of Henry. The somber basilica made me feel quite moved for my old King Charles. I cared little for the house in which they used to elect the Empress of Old, which proves at least that there were elective sovereigns, even sovereigns who were judged. The eighteenth clause in Charmaine's Will says, If any of our grandsons born or to be born be accused. We order that their heads be not shaved, their eyes not put out, their limbs not cut off, nor they condemn to death, without fair argument and enquiry. One Emperor of Germany, I know not of which, from being deposed, asked only for the sovereignty of a vineyard, for which he had an affiction. At Rattisbon, in former days the factory of sovereigns, they used to coin emperors, often of inferior standard. This industry has died away. One of Bonaparte's battles and the Prince's primate, the insipid quartier of our universal condom, have failed to resuscitate the dying city. The Regensburgers, dressed in slovenly like the people of Paris, have no particular physiognomy. The town, in the absence of a sufficient number of inhabitants, is dull. Grass and thistles are laying siege to its suburbs. Soon they will have hoisted their plumes and their lances on its turrets. Kepler, who made the earth turn as did Copernicus. Sleeps were ever at Rattisbon. We left by the bridge of the Prague road, a greatly extolled and very ugly bridge. On quitting the basin of the Danube, one climbs deep in climbs. Cairn, the first age, is perched on a rough slope from the top of which through watery mists, I discern dead hills and pale valleys. The facial aspect of the presence changes. The children, yellow and bloated, have a sickly look. From Cairn to Valdmuchen, the poverty of the landscape increases. One sees few more hamlets, only huts made of pine logs, plastered with mud, as on the more barren necks of the Alps. France is the heart of Europe. As one goes further from it, social life decreases. A man might judge the distance at which he is from Paris by the greater or lesser angle of the country to which he is retiring. In Spain and Italy, the diminution in movement and the progress of death are less noticeable. In the former country, a new people, a new world, Christian Arabs occupy your attention. In the latter, the charms of climate and art, the enchantment of love and ruins leave you no time for depression. But in England, despite the perfection of physical society, in Germany, despite the morality of the inhabitants, one feels oneself die. In Austria and Prussia, the military yoke weighs upon your ideas, even as the Sunday sky weighs upon your head. Something, I know not what, admonishes you cannot write, speak, nor think with independence, that you must lop off from your existence the whole of the nobler portion, leaving man's chief faculty to lie idle within you as a useless gift of God. No art, no beauties of nature come to beguile your ours, and there's nothing left to you but to plunge into gross debauchery or into those speculative truths in which the Germans indulge. For Frenchmen, at least for me, I fail to understand life, which is difficult to understand even with all the seductions of liberty, glory, and youth. However, one thing charms me in the German people, it's religious sentiment. If I were not too tired, I would leave the inn at Nittenau, where I am penciling this diary. I would go to the evening prayer with those men, women and children whom a church calls with the sound of its bell. Not声, nothing or humanセ方面 by virtue of the unity of a common faith. When the day come, when the philosophers in the attainable shall, bless a philosopher newly arrived by the post and offer her a light prayer with that stranger to her God, respecting whom all philosophers are in disagreement, the rosary of the parish priest is safer.