BOOK III[496

The Infirmerie de Marie-Thérèse--Letter from Madame la Duchesse de Berry from the Citadel of Blaye--Departure from Paris--M. de Talleyrand's calash--Basle--Journal from Paris to Prague, from the 14th to the 24th of May 1833, written in pencil in the carriage, in ink at the inns--The banks of the Rhine--Falls of the Rhine--Mösskirch--A storm--The Danube--Ulm--Blenheim--Louis XIV.--An Hercynian forest--The Barbarians--Sources of the Danube--Ratisbon--Decrease in social life as one goes farther from France--Religious feelings of the Germans--Arrival at Waldmünchen--The Austrian custom-house--I am refused admission into Bohemia--Stay at Waldmünchen--Letters to Count Choteck--Anxiety--The Viaticum--The chapel--My room at the inn--Description of Waldmünchen--Letter from Count Choteck--The peasant-girl--I leave Waldmünchen and enter Bohemia--A pine forest--Conversation with the moon--Pilsen--The high-roads of the North-View of Prague.

PARIS, RUE D'ENFER, 9 _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 Rue d'Enfer.

The small house which I occupy near the barrier may be 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 Infirmerie de Marie-Thérèse, founded by the care of Madame de Chateaubriand and adjoining the house; a company of builders was proposing to establish a café and _montagnes russes_[497] 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 grave-diggers.

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, lozenged fence, is a field of mixed cultivation, reserved for the provender of the cattle of the Infirmary. Beyond this field comes another piece of ground separated from the field by another breast-high wall in green open-work, interlaced with viburnums 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' nook: "_angulus ridet._[498]" 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, Sorte d'amour ayant ses charmes[499].

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, _brevem dominum._ A mall, a double avenue of chesnuts, leads from the upper to the lower garden; the ground slopes rapidly along the field between.

I did not choose these trees, as at the Vallée aux Loups, 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, 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 7th 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'Enfer 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 St. Vincent de Paul[500]! Born of a frailty, obscure and unknown as they are, I should to-day 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.

[Sidenote: Infirmerie de Marie-Thérèse.]

By pulling down a wall, I have placed myself in communication with the Infirmerie de Marie Thérèse; I find myself at the same time in a monastery, a farm, an 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 taminy gowns and white dimity caps, convalescent women, old ecclesiastics go roaming among the lilacs, azaleas, calycanthuses and rhododendrons of the flower-garden, among the rose-trees, gooseberry-bushes, strawberry-plants and vegetables of the kitchen-garden. Some of my octogenarian 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 foot-steps; they there drag their pious old age like the folds of the veil of the sanctuary.

I have as a companion a fat red-gray cat with black cross stripes, 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, when the Pontiff gave me my audiences as Ambassador. On the death of the successor of St. Peter, I inherited the cat without a master, as I have told in writing of my Roman Embassy. They called it Micetto, surnamed 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 and the sun of Michael Angelo's dome, on which it used to take its walks far removed from earth.

My house and the different buildings of the Infirmary, with their chapel and the Gothic sacristy, present the appearance of a colony or hamlet. On ceremonial days, religion hiding under my roof, the Old Monarchy in my alms-house form up in marching order. Processions composed of all our valetudinarians, preceded by the young girls of the neighbourhood, pass under the trees, singing, with the Blessed Sacrament, the cross and the banner. Madame de Chateaubriand follows them, beads in hand, proud of the flock which is the object of her solicitude. The blackbirds whistle, the red-breasts warble, the nightingales compete against the hymns. I am carried back to the Rogations, of which I have described the rustic pomp[501]; from the theory of Christianity, I have passed to its practice.

My home faces west. In the evening, the tree-tops lighted from behind imprint their black, serrate 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 that 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.

[Sidenote: Life at the Infirmary.]

We hear speak of the world, in the Infirmary, only at 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; skilful manager that she is, she lays their 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, willy-nilly, in exchange for money. She makes me serve at the sale of the chocolate manufactured for the profit of her patients, even as La Martinière took me into partnership for the trade in the gooseberry-syrup which he used to quaff to the success of his love-affairs[502]. The sainted woman also steals stumps of quills from Madame de Chateaubriand's ink-stand; she trades in them among the thorough-bred Royalists, declaring that with those precious stumps were written the "superb _Mémoire sur la captivité de madame la duchesse de Berry._"

A few good pictures of the Spanish and Italian Schools, a Virgin by Guérin, the _St. Theresa_, the last master-piece of the painter of _Corinne_[503], make us attached to the arts. As for history, we shall soon have at the hospice a sister of the Marquis de Favras and a daughter of Madame Roland: the Monarchy and the Republic have set me to expiate their ingratitude and to feed their invalids.

All are anxious to be received at 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 Jewess, 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," die at sixteen of consumption, in the common dormitory, congratulating herself upon her happiness, looking as she smiled, with great, black, half-dimmed eyes, a pale and emaciated face, at 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 Cordova and the banks of the Guadalquivir, her native stream:

"'What are you?'

"'A Spaniard.'

"'A Spaniard and here[504]!'"

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 _à l'oiseau royal._ 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 to-day be adding to the number of those portraits, I should be acting as the solace of my grand-nephews in some deserted gallery:

"That's your great-uncle François, 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 poem, in the _Almanach des Muses_, called the _Cri du cœur._"

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 Barrière du Maine when going to Méréville, to the Marais, to the Vallée aux Loups; to the right and left of the road one saw only mills, the wheels of the cranes at the stone-pits and the nursery-garden of Cels, Rousseau's old friend. Desnoyers built his rooms of a "hundred covers" for the soldiers of the Imperial Guard, who came to clink glasses between each battle won, each kingdom overthrown. A few public-houses stood round the mills, from the Barrière du Maine to the Barrière du Montparnasse. Higher up were the _Moulin janséniste_ and Lauzun's pleasure-house, by way of a contrast. Near the public-houses, acacias were planted, the poor man's shade, even as 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, song-writers and gendarmes, the Amphions and Cecropses of the police.

While the living were 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, like the "Tour des Abois:" there death brings every day the corn which it has gleaned; a mere wall 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 Gèvres, the last drop of the blood of Du Guesclin, a skeleton of another age, dozes in the midst of the plebeian sleepers.

In this new exile, I already have old friends: M. Lemoine lies there; he was secretary to M. de Montmorin 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 like so much, when it is joined to goodness of heart and singleness of character. My sick and wearied mind finds relaxation in a healthy and restful mind. I left the ashes of M. Lemoine's noble patroness on the banks of the Tiber.

[Sidenote: My daily walks.]

The boulevards which encompass the Infirmary 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 at which time gnaws, even as the herald-at-arms used to cut the jacket of an inglorious knight. 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 mile-stone, I watch 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 green-house and a gardener's 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. M. de Polignac assumed office; I sacrificed to the liberties of my country a place which charmed me; relapsed into poverty, good-bye to my green-house: _fortuna vitrea est._

The evil habit of paper and ink brings about that one cannot prevent one's self from scribbling. I have taken up my pen, not knowing what I was going to write, and have scrawled this description, at least a third too long: if I have time, I will cut it down.

I must ask pardon of 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 a swimmer's stroke from my mother's breast before the torments had assailed me. I have wandered from ship-wreck to shipwreck; 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 pell-mell 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 Berry. Come, let us return once more to the second part of my double life, the practical part:

"BLAYE CITADEL, 7 _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 vexations 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 will accomplish: for I rely without reserve on your devotion to my son. I charge you therefore, monsieur, specially to go to Prague and tell my kinsfolk that, if I refused until the 22nd 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, driven to the utmost degree, decided me to make my declaration. In the ignorance in which I am left as to the period at 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 Lucchesi-Palli, of the Princes of Campo-Franco.

"I ask you, O 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. Lay my homage at the King's feet and give my affectionate regards to my brother and my kind sister. I ask you to report to me, wherever I may be, the wishes of my children and my family. Shut up within the walls of Blaye, I find a comfort in having such an interpreter as Monsieur le Vicomte de Chateaubriand; he can reckon on my attachment for all time.

"MARIE-CAROLINE."

[Sidenote: Letters from Madame.]

NOTE

"I have felt a great satisfaction at the agreement that reigns between you and M. le Marquis de Latour-Maubourg[505], 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. Assure 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[506]. M. de Choulot 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[507] of the King of Sardinia[508] continues to call herself Princess of Carignan in spite of her marriage with M. de Montléart, to whom she has given the title of prince. Marie-Louise Duchess of Parma kept her title of Empress, when she married Count von Neipperg, and remained the guardian of her son: her other children are called Neipperg.

"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. M. le Comte Lucchesi[509], 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, Lucchesi's father, was First Lord of the Bed-chamber to my father[510]. The present King of Naples[511], having an entire confidence in him, has placed him with his young brother[512], the Viceroy of Sicily. I do not speak to you of his feelings; they agree with ours in every respect.

[Sidenote: My mission to Prague.]

"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 Lucchesi was charged by me to make the first overtures in this matter to the King of Holland[513] and the Prince of Orange; and he was of great aid 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 M. le Maréchal de Bourmont 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.

"M. C.

"BLAYE, 7 _May_ 1833.

"As I am not certain of being able to write to the Marquis de Latour-Maubourg, 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 counsels 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 Berry 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 what 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 it were a 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 comer, the gaolers, 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 grand-daughter of Henry IV.! And what mother? The mother of the orphan whose throne they were occupying! Do the hulks 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 Berry rather than submit her to the most tyrannous humiliation? Whatever indulgence was shown in this business belongs to the century, whatever infamy to the Government

Madame la Duchesse de Berry'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, O Monsieur de Chateaubriand, to convey to my dear children the expression of all my affection," etc.

O Madame la Duchesse de Berry, 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 Blaye, 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 prisoner of Blaye to find the prisoner of the Temple[514]; I shall negociate 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 grandeurs, a brougham in which I had once shone at the Court of George IV. and a travelling-calash, built in former days for the use of the Prince de Talleyrand. I had the latter 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 14th 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 dated 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 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 prolongation 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.

[Sidenote: I leave for Prague.]

Avoiding the too much beaten road of Frankfort and that of Strasburg, which runs under the line of telegraphs, I took the Basle Road with Hyacinthe Pilorge, my secretary, used to all my fortunes, and Baptiste, my _valet de chambre_ when I was "My Lord," and once more plain _valet_ on the downfall of My Lordship[515]: we get in and out of the carriage together. My cook, the famous Montmirel, 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 Altkirch, the frontier stage, a gendarme appeared and asked for my passport. On 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 Altkirch and Saint-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 Saint-Louis, the officers of the custom-house, who knew me, let me pass. I arrived gaily at the gate of Basle, where I was met by the old Swiss drum-major who, in the previous month of August, had inflicted on me "a liddle quarandine of a quarder 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 17th of May.

The landlord procured me a travelling footman called Schwartz, a native of Basle, to act as my interpreter in Bohemia. He spoke German just as my good Joseph, the Milanese tinman, spoke Greek, in Messenia, when enquiring for the ruins of Sparta.

On the same day, the 17th of May, at six o'clock in the evening, I moved out of port. As I stepped into the calash, I was amazed to see the Altkirch 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 school-boy 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 _Æneid_:

Macte animo, generose puer[516].

And the postillion whipped up the horses and I drove off quite proud of my high renown at Basle, quite astonished at being Virgil, quite charmed to be called a child: "_generose puer._"

[Sidenote: The Rhine.]

I crossed the bridge, leaving the burgesses and peasants at war in the midst of their Republic[517] 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 Canton of Basle. The exile which I had come to seek last year in the Alps seemed to me a happier life's ending, a gentler lot than the affairs of empire in which I had re-engaged. Did I cherish the smallest hope for Madame la Duchesse de 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 oath to Louis-Philippe and who nevertheless praises the fatal Ordinances must be more acceptable to Charles X. than I, who have never forsworn myself. It is too much for a 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 the Sicilian soldier who was hung in Paris at the time of the League went to the gallows; the confessor of the Neapolitans tried to put heart into him by saying on the way:

"_Allegramente! Allegramente!_"

Thus sped 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, that warlike stream, seemed pleased in the midst of that pastoral scene, like an old soldier quartered, on his march, on husbandmen.

The next morning, the 18th of May, before reaching Schaffhausen, 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 end my days in the castle overlooking the chasm. I placed at Niagara the dream of Atala, 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 Schaffhausen I continued my road towards Ulm. The country presents tilled basins, in which detached and wooded hillocks bathe their feet. In those woods, which were then being cultivated for sale, the eye saw oaks, some felled, others left standing: the first stripped of their bark where they lay, their trunks and branches white and bare, like the skeleton of a strange beast; the second bearing the fresh green of spring on their hirsute and dark, moss-grown limbs: they combined what is never found in man, the two-fold beauty of old age and youth.

In the fir-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 appetizing cleanliness unknown in our country.

Stopping for dinner, between six and seven o'clock, at Mösskirch, I sat musing at the window of my inn: herds were drinking at a fountain, a heifer leapt and frolicked like a roe-deer. Wherever men are kind to their beasts, they are lively and love man. In Germany 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 bridle-rein. Of all nations, the French are the most inhumane: do you see our postillions 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 the bit to make them go back, accompanying the whole with oaths, shouts and insults at 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 Gauls is with us still: it is only hidden under the silk of our stockings and neckcloths.

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 hours of youth, has not said with Pierre Vidal[518], the troubadour:

Don n'ai mais d'un pauc cordo Que Na Raymbauda me do, Quel reys Richartz ab Peitieus Ni ab Tors ni ab Angieus[519].

[Sidenote: Mösskirch.]

There is matter for dreams everywhere; pleasures and pains belong to all places: those women of Mösskirch who looked at the sky or at my posting-chariot, who looked at me or who looked at nothing, had not they joys and sorrows, interests of the heart, of fortune, of family, even as we have in Paris? I should have made great progress in the history of my neighbours, if dinner had not been poetically announced to the crash of a 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 calash. The sound of my postillion's little horn aroused me. I heard the murmur of a river which I could not see. We had stopped at the gate of a town; the gate opened; my passport and luggage were examined: we were entering the vast empire of His Wurtemberg 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 value of high rank and fortune: it was when I gave the fête 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 Torquato Tasso, and Alphonsus of Este[520]: I was worth more than the Prince, less than the poet; Helen was more beautiful than Leonora[521]. The representative of the heir of Francis I. and Louis XIV., I had the dream of a king of France.

They did not search me: I had nothing against the rights of sovereigns, I who recognised those of a young Monarch which the sovereigns themselves failed to recognise. 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 old, simple fellow; he asked me for _seechs Kreutzer_, 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 postillion, 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 Eridanus, the Tiber, the Cephissus, the Hermus, the Jordan, the Nile, the Guadalquivir, the Tagus, the Ebro, the Rhine, the Spree, the Seine 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.

[Sidenote: Ulm.]

I arrived at Ulm fairly early on Sunday the 19th of May, after travelling through the scene of the battles of Moreau and Bonaparte. Hyacinthe, who is a member of the Legion of Honour, was wearing the ribbon: this decoration obtained for us an incredible amount of consideration. I, wearing in my button-hole only a little flower, according to my custom, passed, until they heard my name, for a mysterious being: my Mamelukes 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 expected to see me put away Egypt in the sash of my caftan. 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? O inexplicable human nature!

The evils of war are forgotten; we have left on the soil of our conquests the spark of life. That inert mass set in 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 for the aide-de-camp who brings the order to march.

Ulm is 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 invalided, he becomes a gardener.

I went 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 newel 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 priests officiating, 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 have 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 a numerous clergy, the pomp of the celebrations, the chants, pictures, ornaments, 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 who were the architects of its wonders were other than the children of Luther and Calvin.

19 _May_ 1833.

I had left Ulm at noon, on the 19th. At Dillingen, 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 minaret 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 the passers-by 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 storeys.

Between Dillingen and Donauwörth, you cross the battle-field of Blenheim. The footsteps of the armies of Moreau over the same ground have not obliterated those of the armies of Louis XIV.; the defeat of the great King prevails in the country-side over the successes of the great Emperor.

The postillion 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 the Navarre Regiment, whose uniform I have had the honour to wear, buried its standards to the mournful sound of the trumpets: those are the commonplaces 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 Louis XVI.'s head, but it allowed only France to tear the White Flag to pieces.

Nothing better conveys the greatness of Louis XIV. than to find his memory at the bottom of the ravines dug by the torrent of the Napoleonic victories. That monarch's conquests left our country the frontiers that still guard it[522]. The Brienne scholar, to whom the Legitimacy gave a sword, for a moment enclosed Europe in his ante-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 Louis XIV.: men of different destinies, they belong to dissimilar centuries, to different nations; one completed an era, the other began a world. One can say of Napoleon what Montaigne says of Cæsar:

"I excuse Victorie in that shee could not well give him over[523]."

[Sidenote: Blenheim.]

The unworthy tapestries at Blenheim Palace, which I saw with Peltier, show the Maréchal de Tallart[524] taking off his hat to the Duke of Marlborough[525], who stands in a swaggering attitude. Tallart none the less remained the favourite of the old lion; a prisoner in London, he conquered, in the mind of Queen Anne[526], 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 calash: why not? Cæsar wrote plenty in his litter: he won the battles of which he wrote; I did not lose those of which I speak.

From Dillingen to Donauwörth 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.

Scarce have you left the village before you see another; those 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_:

Son menton nourrissait une barbe touffue; Toute sa personne velue Représentait un ours, mais un ours mal léché[527].

But 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 Romagna, which brood upon the master-pieces 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 Donauwörth, I regretted to have arrived too late to enjoy a fine view of the Danube. On Monday the 20th, the same appearance of the landscape; yet the soil becomes less good and the peasants seem poorer. One begins again to see the pine-woods of the hills. The Hercynian forest used to project as far as this: the trees of which Pliny left us a singular description were felled 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 their Attila built their wooden palaces opposite 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 civilized 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 civilization 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 court-yard of a German baron, who employs the naiad to wash his linen. A geographer having taken it into his head to deny the fact, the noble owner brought an action against him. It was decided by a judicial verdict that the source of the Danube was in the court-yard of the said baron and could not be elsewhere. How many centuries were needed to arrive from the errors of Ptolemy[528] at this important discovery! Tacitus makes the Danube descend from Mount Abnoba: _Montis Abnobæ._ But the Hermondurian, Cheruscan, Marcomannian, Quadian barons, who are the authorities upon whom the Roman historian relies, are not so cautious as my German baron. Eudorus did not know so much, when I made him travel to the mouths of the Ister, where the Euxine, according to Racine, was to carry Mithridates in "two days[529]:"

"Having passed the Ister 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 elegies of an unfortunate poet:

"'My book, you will go to Rome, and you will go to Rome without me.'"[530]

[Sidenote: The Danube.]

The Danube, on losing its solitude, saw 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 errors[531].

After Donauwörth, one comes to Burkheim and Neuberg. At breakfast, at Ingolstadt, they served me with roe-buck: 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[532], 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[533]: I can well believe it!

Regensburg, which we call Ratisbon, presents an agreeable view to one approaching it from Donauwörth. Two o'clock was striking, on the 21st, when I pulled up before the post-office. While they were putting the horses to, 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 Tivoli, for a man who was himself praying by my side[534]; 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 Æneas: in the chapel at Ratisbon, 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 dispenser of all mercies 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 wishes for the innocence of Henry; the sombre basilica made me feel quite moved for my old King Charles.

I cared little for the house in which they used to elect the Emperors of old: which proves at least that there were elective sovereigns, even sovereigns who were judged. The eighteenth clause in Charlemagne'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 condemned to death without fair argument and enquiry."

One emperor of Germany, I know not which, on being deposed, asked only for the sovereignty of a vineyard for which he had an affection.

[Sidenote: Rastibon.]

At Ratisbon, 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 Primate, the insipid courtier of our universal Gendarme, have failed to resuscitate the dying city. The Regensburghers, dressed and 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[535], who made the earth turn, as did Copernicus[536], sleeps for ever at Ratisbon.

We left by the bridge on the Prague Road, a greatly extolled and very ugly bridge. On quitting the basin of the Danube, one climbs steep inclines: Kirn, the first stage, is perched on a rough slope from the top of which, through watery mists, I discerned dead hills and pale valleys. The facial aspect of the peasants changes; the children, yellow and bloated, have a sickly look. From Kirn to Waldmünchen, 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 languor 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 one's self die. In Austria and Prussia, the military yoke weighs upon your ideas, even as the sunless sky weighs upon your head; something, I know not what, admonishes you that 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 arts, no beauties of nature come to beguile your hours and there is nothing left to you but to plunge into gross debauchery or into those speculative truths in which the Germans indulge. For a Frenchman, at least for me, this manner of existence is impossible; without dignity, 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: its religious sentiment. If I were not too tired, I would leave the inn at Nittenau, where I am pencilling 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. That crowd, seeing me on my knees in its midst, would welcome me by virtue of the unity of a common faith. When will the day come when Philosophers in their temple shall bless a Philosopher newly-arrived by the post, and offer up a like prayer with that stranger to a God respecting whom all Philosophers are in disagreement? The rosary of the parish-priest is safer: I stand by that.

21 _May._

Waldmünchen, where I arrived on Tuesday morning, the 21st of May, is the last Bavarian village on this side of Bohemia. I was congratulating myself on being able promptly to fulfil my mission; I was only fifty leagues from Prague. I plunged into water cold as ice, I made my toilet at a spring, like an ambassador preparing for a triumphal entry; I set out and, half a league from Waldmünchen, full of confidence I accosted the Austrian custom-house. A lowered toll-gate barred the road; I got down with Hyacinthe, his red ribbon blazing. A young custom-house officer, armed with a musket, took us to the ground-floor of a house, into a vaulted room. There, sitting at his desk, as though in court, was an old and fat chief of German customs, with red hair, red mustachios, thick eye-brows, sloping over two greenish, half-opened eyes, and a spiteful look: a mixture of the Viennese police-spy and the Bohemian smuggler.

[Sidenote: Delayed at the Customs.]

He took our passports without uttering a word; the young official timidly handed me a chair, while the chief, before whom he seemed to tremble, examined the passports. I did not sit down, but went to look at some pistols hanging on the wall and a carbine leaning against a corner of the room: it reminded me of the musket with which the aga of the Isthmus of Corinth fired on the Greek peasant. After five minutes' silence, the Austrian barked out two or three words which my Baslese translated thus:

"You can't pass."

What! I couldn't pass; and why? The explanation began:

"Your description is not on the passport."

"My passport is a Foreign-Office passport"

"Your passport is an old one."

"It is not a year old; it is legally valid."

"It has not been endorsed at the Austrian Embassy in Paris."

"You are mistaken: it has."

"It has not the blank stamp on it."

"An omission on the part of the embassy; you can see, besides, that it has the _visa_ of the other foreign legations. I have just passed through the Canton of Basle, the Grand-duchy of Baden, the Kingdom of Wurtemberg, the whole of Bavaria, and I have not met with the smallest difficulty. I had merely to declare my name, and my passport was not even opened."

"Have you a public character?"

"I have been a minister in France and His Most Christian Majesty's Ambassador to Berlin, London and Rome. I am known personally to your Sovereign and to Prince Metternich."

"You can't pass."

"Shall I leave you a security? Will you give me a guard who will be responsible for me?"

"You can't pass."

"If I send an express to the Bohemian Government?"

"As you please."

I lost my patience; I began to wish the custom-house officer at the devil. As ambassador of a king on his throne, I should not have minded a few hours wasted; but as ambassador of a Princess in irons, I thought myself faithless to misfortune, a traitor to my captive Sovereign.

The man was writing: the Baslese did not translate my monologue, but there are certain French words which our soldiers have taught Austria and which she has not forgotten. I said to the interpreter:

"Explain to him that I am going to Prague to offer my devotion to the King of France."

The custom-house officer, without interrupting his writing, answered:

"Charles X. is not King of France for Austria."

I retorted:

"He is for me."

These words flung back to the Cerberus seemed to make some impression on him; he eyed me up and down. I thought that his long annotation might, in the last result, be a favourable _visa._ He scrawled something on Hyacinthe's passport as well and returned the whole to the interpreter. It appeared that the _visa_ was an explanation of the reasons which did not permit him to allow me to continue my road, so that not only was it impossible for me to go to Prague, but my passport was stamped as bad for the other places to which I might repair. I climbed back into the calash and said to the postillion:

"Waldmünchen."

My return did not surprise the landlord of the inn. He spoke a little French; he told me that a similar thing had happened before: foreigners had been obliged to stop at Waldmünchen and to send their passports to Munich to be endorsed at the Austrian Legation. My host, a very worthy man, was the postmaster of the village and undertook to forward to the Grand Burgrave of Bohemia[537] the letter of which the following is a copy:

[Sidenote: Letter to Count Von Chotek.]

WALDMÜNCHEN, 21 _May_ 1833.

"MONSIEUR LE GOUVERNEUR,

"Having the honour to be known personally to His Majesty the Emperor of Austria and to M. le Prince de Metternich, I thought that I could travel in the Austrian State with a passport which, being not yet one year old, was still legally valid and which had been endorsed by the Austrian Ambassador in Paris for Switzerland and Italy. As a matter of fact, monsieur le comte, I have travelled through Germany and my name has been sufficient to allow me to pass. Only this morning, the gentleman at the head of the Austrian custom-house at Haselbach did not think himself authorized to be equally accommodating and this for the reasons set forth in his _visa_ on my passport, enclosed, and on that of M. Pilorge, my secretary. He has compelled me, to my great regret, to retrace my steps to Waldmünchen, where I await your orders. I venture to hope, monsieur le comte, that you will be good enough to remove the little difficulty which stops me, by sending me, by the express which I have the honour of dispatching to you, the necessary permission to go to Prague and thence to Vienna.

"I am, monsieur le gouverneur, with high regard,

"Your most humble and most obedient servant,

"CHATEAUBRIAND."

"Pray pardon, monsieur le comte, the liberty which I am taking of enclosing an open note for M. le Duc de Blacas."

Some little pride appears in this letter: I was hurt; I was as much humiliated as Cicero, when, on his return in triumph from his government of Asia, his friends asked him if he came from Baiæ or from his house at Tusculum. What! My name, which flew from pole to pole, had not reached the ears of a custom-house officer in the mountains at Haselbach! A thing which seems all the more cruel when one thinks of my successes at Basle. In Bavaria, I had been addressed as "My Lord" or "Your Excellency;" a Bavarian officer, at Waldmünchen, said aloud, in the inn, that my name required no _visa_ from an Austrian ambassador. Those were great consolations, I admit; but, after all, a sad truth remained: the world contained a man who had never heard speak of me.

Who knows, however, if the Haselbach customs-officer did not know me a little! The police of all countries are so affectionately related! A politician who neither admires nor approves of the Treaties of Vienna, a Frenchman who loves the honour and liberty of France, who remains faithful to the fallen power, might well be on the index in Vienna. What a noble revenge to deal with M. de Chateaubriand as with one of those bagmen so suspicious to the spies! What a sweet satisfaction to treat as a vagabond whose papers are not in order an envoy charged to carry traitor-wise to a banished child the adieus of his captive mother!

The express left Waldmünchen on the 21st, at eleven o'clock in the morning; I calculated that it could be back on the second day, the 23rd, between twelve and four; but my imagination was at work: what was to be the fate of my message? If the Governor was a strong man and a man of the world, he would send me the permit; if he was a timid and unintelligent man, he would reply that my request did not come within his powers, he would hasten to refer it to Vienna. This little incident might at the same time please and displease Prince Metternich. I knew how he feared the newspapers; I had seen him at Verona leave the most important business and lock himself up distractedly with M. de Gentz[538] to draft out an article in reply to the _Constitutionnel_ and the _Débats._ How many days would elapse before the Imperial Minister's orders were transmitted?

On the other hand, would M. de Blacas[539] be glad to see me at Prague? Would not M. de Damas[540] think that I had come to dethrone him? Would M. le Cardinal de Latil[541] be quite free from anxiety? Would not the triumvirate turn my mishap to account to have the doors closed against me instead of opened to me? Nothing easier: a word in the Governor's ear, a word of which I should never know! In what a state of anxiety would my friends be in Paris! When the adventure was noised abroad, what would not the newspapers make of it! What wild statements would they not indulge in!

[Sidenote: Waldmünchen.]

And, if the Grand Burgrave did not think fit to reply to me, if he were away, if no one dared act in his absence, what would become of me without a passport? Where could I be sure of being recognised? At Munich? In Vienna? What postmaster would give me horses? I should be practically a prisoner at Waldmünchen.

Those are the cares that passed through my brain. I thought besides of my remoteness from what was dear to me: I have too short a time to live to waste that little. Horace said, "_Carpe diem_:" a counsel of pleasure at twenty, of reason at my age.

Tired of "ruminating on every case in my head," I heard the noise of a crowd outside; my inn stood on the village square. I looked through the window and saw a priest carrying the Last Sacraments to a dying man. What mattered to that dying man the affairs of kings, of their servants and of the world? Every one left his work and started to follow the priest; young women, old women, children, mothers with their babies in their arms repeated the prayer for the dying. On reaching the sick man's door, the priest gave the benediction with the Holy Viaticum. The by-standers knelt down and made the Sign of the Cross with lowered heads. The pass-port to Eternity will not be disowned by Him who distributes bread and opens the hostel to the traveller.

Although I had not been to bed for seven days, I was unable to stay indoors; it was only a little past one: leaving the village on the Ratisbon side, I caught sight of a white chapel, on the right, in the middle of a corn-field; I went in that direction. The door was locked; through a sloping window one saw an altar with a cross. The date of the erection of that sanctuary, 1830, was inscribed on the architrave: a monarchy was being overthrown in Paris while a chapel was being erected at Waldmünchen. The three banished generations were to come to live in a place of exile within fifty leagues of the new shelter raised to the King crucified. Millions of events are realized at one and the same time: what does a black man sleeping under a palm-tree on the bank of the Niger care for the white man who falls at the same moment under the dagger on the shore of the Tiber? What does he who weeps in Asia care for him who laughs in Europe? What did the mason who built this chapel, the Bavarian priest who exalted that Christ in 1830 care for the demolisher of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, the feller of the crosses in 1830? Events count only for those who suffer through them or benefit by them; they are nothing to those who have not heard of them, who are not touched by them. A certain race of herdsmen, in the Abruzzi, has witnessed, without descending from its mountain, the passage of the Carthaginians, the Gauls, the Romans, the Goths, the generations of the middle-ages and the men of the present age. That race has not mingled with the successive dwellers in the valley, and religion alone has mounted up to it.

Returning to the inn, I flung myself on two chairs, in the hope of sleeping; but in vain: the movement of my imagination was stronger than my lassitude. I repeated the contents of my express over and over again: dinner did not affect the matter. I went to bed amid the lowing of the herds returning from the fields. At ten o'clock, a new noise: the watchman sang the hour; fifty dogs barked, after which they went to their kennels as though the watchman had ordered them to be silent: I recognised German discipline.

Civilization has made progress in Germany since my journey to Berlin: the beds are now almost long enough for a man of ordinary stature; but the top sheet is still sewn to the blanket and the bottom sheet, which is too narrow, ends by twisting and curling up in such a way as to make you very uncomfortable; and, since I am in the country of Auguste Lafontaine[542], I will imitate his genius: I want to inform the latest posterity of what existed in my time in the room of my inn at Waldmünchen. Know then, grand-nephews, that that room was like an Italian room, with bare, white-washed walls, without any wood-work or hangings, a wide coloured band or skirting at the bottom, a ceiling with a circle of three fillets, a cornice painted with blue roses with a garland of chocolate-coloured laurel-leaves and, above the cornice, on the wall, foliage painted in red on an American-green ground. Here and there, little French and English engravings, in frames. Two windows with white cotton curtains. Between the windows, a looking-glass. In the middle of the room, a table for at least twelve people, covered with an oil-cloth with a raised ground, stamped with roses and different flowers. Six chairs upholstered in red tartan. A chest of drawers, three bedsteads round the room; in a corner, near the door, a stove in black glazed earthen-ware, of which the sides show the Bavarian arms in relief; it is topped with a receiver shaped like a Gothic crown. The door is furnished with a complicated iron mechanism capable of closing the gates of a gaol and baffling the picklocks of thieves or lovers. I describe, for the benefit of travellers, the excellent room in which I am writing this inventory, which competes with the Miser's[543]; I recommend it to future Legitimists who may be stopped by the red-headed wild-goat of Haselbach. This page of my Memoirs will give pleasure to the modern literary school.

[Sidenote: My room at the Inn.]

After counting, by the light of the night-lamp, the astragals of the ceiling and looking at the engravings of the _Young Milanese_, the _Beautiful Greeks_, the _Young Frenchwoman_, the _Young Russian_, the late King of Bavaria[544], the late Queen of Bavaria[545], who is like a lady whom I know and whose name I cannot possibly remember, I snatched a few minutes' sleep. I rose from bed at 7 o'clock on the 22nd. A bath took away the rest of my fatigue and I was interested only in my village, like Captain Cook discovering an islet in the Pacific Ocean.

Waldmünchen is built on the slope of a hill; it is not unlike a dilapidated village in the Papal States: a few house-fronts painted in fresco, an archway at either end of the main street, no ostensible shops, a dry well in the square, a frightful pavement of large flags mixed with small pebbles, of the kind which one no longer sees except in "the neighbourhood of Quimper-Corentin."

The people, whose appearance is rustic, wear no special dress. The women go with their heads bare or wrapped in a handkerchief in the manner of the Paris milk-maids; their skirts are short; they walk with Bare legs and feet, as do the children. The men are dressed, some like the men of the people in our towns, some like our old peasants. Heaven be praised, they have only hats, and the filthy cotton caps of our burgesses are unknown to them.

Every day, _ut mos_, there is a performance at Waldmünchen and I used to assist at it in the front row. At six o'clock in the morning, an old shepherd, tall and lean, goes through the village, stopping at different places; he blows a straight horn, six feet long, which one would take at a distance for a speaking-trumpet or a sheep-hook. He first produces three metallic and rather harmonious notes from it; then he sounds the quick tune of a sort of gallop or _ranz des vaches_, imitating the lowing of oxen and the grunting of pigs. The fanfare ends with a long, rising _falsetto_ note.

Suddenly from every gate debouch cows, heifers, calves, bulls; bellowing, they flood the village-square; they climb up or descend from all the circumjacent streets and, forming into columns, take the accustomed road to the pasturage. Follows the prancing squadron of swine, which look like wild boars and grunt The sheep and lambs, disposed as a rearguard, form the third part of the concert with their bleating; the geese compose the reserve: in a quarter of an hour all are out of sight

At seven o'clock in the evening, the horn is heard again; it is the herds returning. The order of the march is changed: the pigs form the van-guard, with the same music as before; a few, detached as scouts, run at hap-hazard or stop at every corner. The sheep defile; the cows, with their sons, daughters and husbands, bring up the rear; the geese waddle on the flanks. All these animals reach their own homes again, none mistakes its gate; but there are Cossacks that go marauding, madcaps that play about and refuse to go in, young bulls that persist in remaining with a mate which does not belong to their manger. Then come the women and children with their little switches; they compel the stragglers to rejoin the main body and the rebellious recruits to submit to the rules. I delighted in this performance, just as, formerly, Henry IV., at Chauny, used to be amused by the cow-keeper called "Tout-le-Monde," who collected his herds to the sound of the trumpet

[Sidenote: A study in Cattle.]

Many years ago, staying at the Château de Fervacques, in Normandy, at Madame de Custine's, I occupied the bed-room of Henry IV.: my bed was enormous; the Bearnese had slept in it with some Florette or other: I gained royalism there, for I did not have it by nature. Moats filled with water surround the castle. The view from my window spread over meadows edged by the little River Fervacques. In those meadows I perceived, one morning, an elegant sow of extraordinary whiteness; it looked as though it might be the mother of Prince Marcassin. It lay at the foot of a willow, on the cool grass, in the dew: a young boar-pig gathered a little fine, serrate moss with its ivory tusks and came to lay it on the sleeper; it repeated this operation so many times that the white wild-sow was entirely hidden: one saw only its black feet stick out from under the downy verdure in which it was buried.

Be this told to the glory of an ill-famed beast of which I should blush to have spoken at too great length, if Homer had not sung it I perceive, in fact, that this part of my Memoirs is nothing less than an Odyssey: Waldmünchen is Ithaca; the shepherd is the faithful Eumæus with his swine; I am the son of Laertes, returning after wandering on land and sea. I should, perhaps, have done better to intoxicate myself with the nectar of Evanthes, to eat the flower of the moly-plant, to linger in the land of the Lotus-eaters, to remain with Circe, or to obey the song of the Syrens saying:

"Approach, come to us!"

22 _May_ 1833.

If I were twenty years old, I should seek some adventures at Waldmünchen, as a means of shortening the hours; but, at my age, we have no silk ladders left, save in our memory, and we no longer scale walls except with the shadows. Formerly, I was very intimate with my body; I used to advise it to live wisely, in order to show itself quite lively and quite jolly in forty years' time. It laughed at the sermons of my soul, persisted in making merry and would not have given two doits to be one day what is called "a well-preserved man:"

"Out upon you!" it used to say. "What have I to gain by being niggardly with my spring, in order to enjoy life's days when there will be none left to care to share them with me?" And it steeped itself over head and ears in happiness.

I am obliged, therefore, to accept it as it now is: I took it for a walk, on the 22nd, to the south-east of the village. We followed through the marshes a little water-current which put some works in motion. They manufacture linen at Waldmünchen; breadths of linen were unrolled on the fields; young girls whose business it was to damp them ran bare-foot on the white strips, preceded by the water that spouted from their watering-pots, just as gardeners would water a border of flowers. Along the stream I thought of my friends, I was touched by their memory; then I asked what they must be saying of me in Paris:

"Has he arrived? Has he seen the Royal Family? Will he come back soon?"

And I was deliberating as to whether I would not send Hyacinthe to fetch some fresh butter and brown bread, in order to eat cress at the edge of a spring under a tuft of alder-shoots. My life was no more ambitious than that: why has Fortune fastened the skirt of my doublet to her wheel with the hem of the mantle of our Kings?

Returning to the village, I passed near the church: two outer sanctuaries prop up the wall; one of these shows St. Peter ad Vincula, with a poor-box for the prisoners: I dropped in a few kreutzers in memory of the Pellico's[546] prison and of my own cell at the Prefecture of Police. The other sanctuary showed the scene in the Garden of Olives: a scene so touching and so sublime that it is not destroyed even here by the grotesqueness of the figures.

I hurried through my dinner and hastened to the evening prayer for which I heard them ringing. As I turned the corner of the narrow street in which the church stands, a vista opened out over some distant hills: a little light still lingered on the horizon, and that dying light came from the side of France. A profound feeling gripped my heart When shall my pilgrimage be over? I passed through Germanic territory very miserably, when I was returning from the Army of the Princes, very triumphantly when, as Ambassador of Louis XVIII., I was going to Berlin: after so many and such different years, I was penetrating stealthily into the depths of that same Germany to seek the King of France banished anew.

[Sidenote: An evening service.]

I entered the church: it was quite dark; not even a lighted lamp. Through the blackness, I recognised the sanctuary, standing in a Gothic recess, only through its thicker gloom. The walls, the altars, the pillars seemed to me laden with ornaments and pictures veiled in crape; the nave was occupied by close-set parallel benches.

An old woman was reciting aloud, in German, the _Our Father_ of the rosary; women, young and old, whom I could not see, replied with the _Hail Marys._ The old woman spoke her words well, her voice was clear, her accent grave and pathetic; she was two benches away from me; her head bent slightly in the dusk each time she uttered the word Christo in some prayer which she added to the _Our Father._ The rosary was followed by the Litany of the Blessed Virgin: the _Ora pro nobis_, chanted in German by the invisible worshippers, sounded in my ear like a repetition of the word "hope:" "_espérance, espérance, espérance!_[547]" We left the church promiscuously; I went to sleep with Hope: it was long since I had clasped her in my arms; but she does not grow older and one always loves her, despite her infidelities.

According to Tacitus, the Germans believe the night to be older than the day: _nox ducere diem videtur._ Yet I have reckoned young nights and sempiternal days. The poets tell us also that Sleep is the brother of Death: I do not know; but Old Age is certainly its nearest relation.

23 _May_ 1833.

On the morning of the 23rd, Heaven mingled some sweetness with my pains: Baptiste told me that the most eminent man of the place, the brewer, had three daughters and owned my works, set out in a row among his beer-jugs. When I went out, this gentleman and two of his daughters watched me go by: what was the third young lady doing? In former days, a letter had come to me from Peru, written with her own hand by a lady, a cousin of the sun, who admired _Atala_; but to be known at Waldmünchen, under the very nose of the wolf of Haselbach, was a thousand times more glorious: it was true that this occurred in Bavaria, at a league from Austria, the curse of my renown. Do you know what would have happened if my trip to Bohemia had been taken out of my own head alone: but why should I have wanted to go to Bohemia for myself only? Once I had been stopped at the frontier, I should have gone back to Paris. There was a man who contemplated a voyage to Pekin; one of his friends met him on the Pont Royal in Paris:

"Why, I thought you were in China!"

"I have come back: those Chinamen put difficulties in my way at Canton, so I left them in the lurch."

While Baptiste was telling me of my triumphs, the passing-bell of a funeral called me to my window. The priest went by, preceded by the cross; men and women crowded after, the men in cloaks, the women in black gowns and mob-caps. The corpse, taken up at the third door from mine, was carried to the grave-yard: half-an-hour later, the procession-goers returned, _minus_ the procession. Two young women held their handkerchiefs to their eyes, one of the two uttered loud cries: they were mourning their father; the deceased was the man who had received the Viaticum on the day of my arrival.

If my Memoirs reach Waldmünchen, when I myself am no more, the family in mourning to-day will find the date of its sorrow past. Perhaps, as he lay on his bed, the dying man heard the noise of my carriage: it is the only noise of me that he will have heard upon earth.

After the crowd had dispersed, I took the road which I had seen the funeral take in the direction of the winter sunrise. I found first a fish-pond of stagnant water, beside which a stream flowed rapidly, like life beside the tomb. Crosses on the other side of a rising ground showed me the position of the cemetery. I crossed a sunk road and made my way, through a gap in the wall, into the consecrated ground.

Clay furrows represented the bodies under the soil; here and there stood crosses: they marked outlets through which the travellers had entered the new world, even as beacons at the mouth of a river indicate the passages open to ships. A poor old man was digging the grave of a child: alone, perspiring and bare-headed, he did not sing, he did not jest like the clowns in Hamlet. Further away was another grave, near which one saw a stool, a lever and a rope for the descent into Eternity.

I went straight up to this grave, which seemed to say:

"Here is a fine opportunity!"

At the bottom of the hole lay the recent coffin, covered with a few shovelfuls of white dust, while awaiting the rest. A piece of linen was gleaming upon the grass: the dead took care of their shroud. Far from his country, the Christian has it always in his power suddenly to waft himself there; he has but to visit man's last resting-place around the churches: the cemetery is the family field and religion the universal mother-land.

It was noon when I returned; by every calculation, the express could not be back before three o'clock; nevertheless every stamping of horses made me run to the window: as the hour approached, I grew convinced that the permit would not come.

To destroy the time, I asked for my bill; I set myself to reckon up the chickens I had eaten: a greater than I did not disdain this trouble. Henry Tudor, seventh of the name, in whom ended the Wars of the Roses, red and white, even as I am going to unite the white and the tricolour cockades, Henry VII.[548] initialled one after the other the pages of a little account-book which I have seen:

"To a woman for three apples, 12 pence; for discovering three hares, 6 shillings 8 pence; to Master Bernard, the blind poet, 100 shillings [this was better than Homer]; to a little man at Shaftesbury, 20 shillings."

We have many little men to-day, but they cost more than twenty shillings.

[Sidenote: Country road to Waldmünchen.]

At three o'clock, the hour at which the express might be back, I went with Hyacinthe along the road to Haselbach. It was a windy day, the sky was strewn with clouds that passed across the sun, casting their shadows over the fields and fir-groves. We were preceded by a herd of cattle from the village, which raised, as it went, the noble dust of the army of the Grand-duke of Quirocia, to which the Knight of the Mancha so valiantly gave battle[549]. A Calvary rose at the top of one of the ascents of the road; from there one discerned a long ribbon of the high-way. Seated in a ravine, I questioned Hyacinthe:

"Sister Anne, seest thou no one coming?"

Some village carts seen from afar made our hearts beat; as they approached, they proved to be empty, like everything that bears dreams. I had to return home and dine very sadly. A plank offered after the shipwreck: the diligence was to pass at six o'clock; might it not bring the Governor's reply? Six o'clock struck: no diligence. At a quarter past six, Baptiste entered the room:

"The ordinary post from Prague has just arrived; there is nothing for Monsieur."

The last ray of hope was extinguished.

Scarcely had Baptiste left my room, when Schwartz appeared, waving a big letter, with a big seal, in the air and shouting:

"Here is de bermid!"

I threw myself upon the dispatch; I tore open the envelope: it contained, together with a letter from the Governor, the permit and a note from M. de Blacas. Here is M. le Comte de Chotek's letter:

"PRAGUE, 23 _May_ 1833.

"MONSIEUR LE VICOMTE,

"I much regret that, at your entrance into Bohemia, you should have met with difficulties and a delay in your journey. But, in view of the very severe orders prevailing on our frontiers regarding all the travellers who come from France, orders which you yourself must think very natural in the circumstances, I cannot but approve of the conduct of the head of the customs at Haselbach. In spite of the quite European celebrity of your name, you must be so good as to excuse this official, who has not the honour to know you personally, if he had doubts as to the identity of your person, the more so as your passport was endorsed only for Lombardy, and not for all the Austrian States. As to your plan for travelling to Vienna, I am writing about it to-day to Prince Metternich and will hasten to communicate his reply to you immediately after your arrival in Prague.

"I have the honour to send you herewith the reply of M. le Duc de Blacas and I beg you to be good enough to accept the assurance of the high regard with which I have the honour to be, etc.

"The Comte de CHOTEK."

This reply was polite and proper: the Government could not abandon the inferior authority, which had, after all, done its duty. I had myself, in Paris, foreseen the cavilling of which my old passport might become the cause. As for Vienna, I had referred to it with a political object, in order to set M. le Comte de Chotek's mind at rest and show him that I was not trying to avoid the Prince de Metternich.

[Sidenote: I receive my permit.]

At eight o'clock in the evening, on Thursday the 23rd of May[550], I drove off. Who would believe it: I left Waldmünchen with a sort of regret! I had already grown used to my hosts; my hosts had grown accustomed to me. I knew all the faces at the windows and doors; when I walked out, they used to welcome me with a kindly air. The neighbourhood came running up to witness the departure of my calash, as dilapidated as was the monarchy of Hugh Capet. The men took off their hats, the women gave me a little nod of congratulation. My adventure was the subject of the village gossip; every one took my part: the Bavarians and the Austrians detest one another; the first were proud at having allowed me to pass.

I had often noticed, standing on the threshold of her cottage, a young Waldmünchen girl with a face like a Virgin in Raphael's first manner. Her father, with the peasant's civil bearing, used to take off his broad-brimmed felt hat to the ground to me and give me a greeting in German which I returned cordially in French: standing behind him, his daughter used to blush as she looked at me over the old man's shoulder. I caught sight of my virgin again, but she was alone. I waved good-bye to her with my hand; she remained motionless; she seemed astonished; I tried to imagine I know not what vague regrets in her thought: I left her like a wild flower which one has seen in a ditch by the road-side and which has scented one's way. I passed the flocks of Eumæus; he uncovered his head grown grey in the service of the sheep. He had finished his day's work; he was returning to sleep with his ewes, while Ulysses went to continue his wanderings.

I had said to myself, before receiving the permit:

"If I get it, I shall crush my persecutor."

On arriving at Haselbach, it happened to me, as to George Dandin, that my accursed good-nature was too much for me[551]; I had no heart for the triumph. Like a real poltroon, I cowered in a comer of the carriage, and Schwartz showed the order from the Governor; I should have suffered too much from the customs-officer's confusion. He, on his side, did not appear and did not even have my trunk searched. Peace be with him! Let him pardon me for the insults which I addressed to him, but which, owing to a remnant of spite, I will not erase from my Memoirs.

As one leaves Bavaria on that side, a vast black forest of pine-trees serves as a porch to Bohemia. Mists hovered in the valleys, the light was fading and the sky, towards the west, was the colour of peach-blossoms; the horizons fell till they almost touched the earth. Light is lacking at that latitude and, with light, life; all is dim, wintry, pale; winter seems to charge summer to keep the hoar-frost for it until its speedy return. A small piece of the moon, which shone faintly, pleased me; all was not lost, since I found a face that I knew. It seemed to say to me:

"What? Are you there? Do you remember how I saw you in other forests? Do you remember the pretty things you used to say to me when you were young? Really, you used to talk very nicely about me. Why are you so silent now? Where are you going alone and so late? Will you never end recommencing your career?"

O moon, you are right; but, if I did speak of your charms, you know the services which you used to do me: you used to light my steps, at the time when I wandered with my phantom of love; to-day, my head is silvered like your face, and you are surprised to find me solitary! And you scorn me! Yet I have spent whole nights wrapped in your veils: dare you deny our meetings on the lawns and by the sea-side? How often have you looked upon my eyes passionately fixed on yours! Ungrateful and mocking planet, you ask me where I am going so late: it is hard to be reproached with the continuation of my journeys. Ah, if I travel as much as you, I do not grow young again as you do, you who return monthly into the brilliant circle of your cradle! I reckon no new moons: my abatement has no limit other than my complete disappearance and, when I go out, I shall not rekindle my torch as you do yours.

I travelled all night; I passed through Teinitz, Stankau and Staab. In the morning of the 24th, I went on to Pilsen, the "beautiful barrack," Homeric style. The town is stamped with that air of melancholy which prevails in this country. At Pilsen, Wallenstein[552] hoped to seize a sceptre: I too was in quest of a crown, but not for myself.

The country is cut and slashed with heights called Bohemian mountains: paps whose tip is marked by pine-trees and whose swelling outlined by the green of the harvests.

[Sidenote: And leave Bavaria.]

The villages are scarce. A few fortresses, hungering for prisoners, roost on the rocks like old vultures. Between Zditz and Beraun, the mountains on the right become bald. One goes through a village: the roads are spacious, the posts well equipped; all points to a monarchy that imitates Old France.

Johann the Blind[553], under Philip of Valois[554], the ambassadors of George[555], under Louis XI.: by what forest paths did they pass? Of what use are the modern roads of Germany? They will remain deserted, for there is no history, art nor climate to call foreigners to their lonely causeways. For purposes of commerce it is unnecessary that the public thoroughfares should be so wide and so costly to keep in repair: the richest trade in the world, that of India and Persia, is conducted on the backs of mules, asses and horses, by narrow paths, hardly traced over the mountain-chains or sandy zones. The present high-roads, in unfrequented countries, will serve only for war, as vomitories for the use of the new Barbarians who, issuing from the North with the immense bustle of fire-arms, will come to flood regions favoured by intellect and the sun.

At Beraun passes the little river of the same name, rather spiteful, like all curs. In 1748, it rose to the level marked on the walls of the post-house. After Beraun, gorges twist round a few hills and spread out at the entrance to an upland. From this upland the road plunges into a valley with vague lines, the lap of which is occupied by a hamlet. There commences a long ascent which leads to Duschnik, the posting-station and the last stage. Soon, descending towards an opposite eminence, at the top of which stands a cross, one discerns Prague, on both banks of the Moldau. It is in that town that the sons of St. Louis are ending a life of exile, that the heir of their House is beginning a life of proscription, while his mother languishes in a fortress on the soil from which he has been driven. Frenchmen, you have sent the daughter of Louis XVI. and Marie-Antoinette, her to whom your fathers opened the gates of the Temple, to Prague: you have not cared to keep among you that unique monument of greatness and virtue! O my old King, you whom I love to call my master, because you have fallen! O young lad, whom I was the first to proclaim King, what am I to say to you? How shall I dare to appear in your presence, I who am not banished, I who am free to return to France, free to return my last breath to the air which fired my breast when I breathed for the first time, I whose bones may rest in their native land. Captive of Blaye, I am going to see your son!

[Footnote 496: This book was written, first, in Paris, on the 9th of May 1833 and the following days, and then, from the 14th to the 24th of May, on the road from Paris to Prague.--T.]

[Footnote 497: An erection of a similar character to the modern switchback railway.--T.]

[Footnote 498: HOR.: _Od._ II, vi. 14.--T.]

[Footnote 499: LA FONTAINE:

"Pity and tears, A sort of love not without charm."--T.]

[Footnote 500: St. Vincent of Paul (1576-1660) founded the Congregation of Lazarists, or Mission Priests, in 1625, the Institution of Sisters of Charity in 1634, and the Foundling Hospital in Paris in 1648. Still later, he founded, in 1653, the Hospice of the Name of Jesus and, two years later, the general hospital for the poor of Paris. St. Vincent was canonized in 1737 and is honoured on the 19th of July.--T.]

[Footnote 501: _Cf._ the _Génie du Christianisme_, Part IV. Book I. Chap. 8: _Des Rogations._--T.]

[Footnote 502: _Cf._ Vol. I. p. 106.--T.]

[Footnote 503: Gérard.--T.]

[Footnote 504: LOPE DE VEGA.--_Author's Note._]

[Footnote 505: Marie Victor Nicolas de Fay, Marquis de Latour-Maubourg (1768-1850), was an officer in the Body-guard under Louis XVI. He emigrated in 1792, returned to France after the 18 Brumaire, served under Bonaparte in Egypt, Germany, Spain and Russia, and lost a leg and thigh at Leipzig (16 October 1813). He was created a baron of the Empire in 1808 and a count of the Empire in 1814. In the same year, the Restoration created him a peer of France. He received a marquisate in 1817 and was sent to London as Ambassador. In 1819, he was appointed Minister for War and, in 1821, Governor of the Invalides. Latour-Maubourg resigned his offices and his peerage after the Revolution of 1830 and joined the Bourbons in exile. He was appointed Governor to the Duc de Bordeaux (Henry V.) in 1835.--T.]

[Footnote 506: Olga Nicolaiëvna Grand duchess of Russia, later Queen of Wurtemberg (1822-1892), married in 1846 to Charles Frederic Alexander Prince Royal, later Charles I. King of Wurtemberg.--T.]

[Footnote 507: Maria Christina Albertina Carlotta of Saxe-Courlande, Princess of Savoy-Carignan (1779-1851), married, first, Charles Emanuel Ferdinand Prince of Savoy-Carignan, by whom she became the mother of Prince Charles Albert, later King of Sardinia (_vide infra_). The Prince of Carignan died in 1800 and his widow married the Prince de Montléart.--T.]

[Footnote 508: Charles Albert King of Sardinia (1798-1849) succeeded on the death, without male issue, of his cousin King Charles Felix, in 1831. He abdicated, immediately after losing the Battle of Novara against the Austrians (23 March 1849), in favour of his son Victor Emanuel II. Charles Albert died, a few months after, at Oporto (28 July 1849).--T.]

[Footnote 509: Ettore Conte di Lucchesi-Palli (1805-1864) is described by some genealogists as Marchese di Lucchesi-Palli di Campo Franco e Pignatelli, Duca Della Gracia. He married the Duchesse de Berry in 1831 and had several children by her.--T.]

[Footnote 510: Francis I. King of the Two Sicilies (1777-1830).--T.]

[Footnote 511: Ferdinand II. King of the Two Sicilies (1810-1859), half-brother to the Duchesse de Berry, had succeeded his father at the death of the latter on the 8th of November 1830.--T.]

[Footnote 512: Charles Ferdinand Prince of Capua (1811-1862).--T.]

[Footnote 513: William I. King of the Netherlands had united Belgium and Holland under his sceptre since 1815. But, after the Insurrection of Brussels on the 25th August 1830, the Belgian Congress had voted the deposal of the House of Orange-Nassau. On the 21st of July 1831, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg was elected and proclaimed King of the Belgians. William I. continued to hold the Citadel of Antwerp, refused to recognise the new kingdom and persisted in his resistance even after the Siege of Antwerp and the capitulation of the citadel (23 December 1832). On the date when the Duchesse de Berry wrote her Note (7 May 1833), he had not yet yielded. It was only on the 21st of May that he signed a convention for the suspension of hostilities and the resumption of navigation on the Scheldt and the Meuse. He did not definitely agree to the separation of Holland and Belgium until five years later, in 1838. He abdicated in 1840, was succeeded by his son, William II., the Prince of Orange mentioned above, and died suddenly, in Berlin, on the 12th of December 1843, in his seventy-first year.--T.]

[Footnote 514: Queen Marie-Thérèse (the Dauphine-Duchesse d'Angoulême).--T.]

[Footnote 515: The prefix of "My Lord" and "His Lordship," _Monseigneur et sa seigneurie_, were borne by those nobles only who were peers of France. Chateaubriand resigned his peerage, in 1830, by refusing to take the oath of allegiance to Louis-Philippe.--T.]

[Footnote 516: The verse in the _Æneid_ (IX. 641) is as follows:

Macte nova virtute, puer! sic itur ad astra.

It was Statius who, slightly modifying Virgil's verse, said (_Th._ VII. 280):

Macte animo, generose puer! sic itur ad astra.

_Cf._ Vol. I, p. 56.--T.]

[Footnote 517: Serious troubles had lately broken out in the Canton of Basle between the peasants of the country and the burgesses of the town. The former claimed the right of a separate constitution and administration, as the conditions of joint government offered them by the town did not seem fair to them. Before long, the dispute came to an armed quarrel, attended with some bloodshed.--B.]

[Footnote 518: Pierre Vidal (_d._ 1229), the Provençal troubadour, who accompanied Richard Cœur-de-Lion to Cyprus in 1190.--T.]

[Footnote 519:

"Richer I with ribbon owed To the favour of Raimbaude Than King Richard with Poitiers And with Tours and with Angiers."--T.]

[Footnote 520: Alphonsus II. of Este, Duke of Ferrara and Modena (1533-1597), the patron and persecutor of Tasso and brother of Leonora of Este (_vide infra_).--T.]

[Footnote 521: Leonora of Este (_d._ 1581), sister of Alphonsus II. Tasso went mad for love of her in 1577.--T.]

[Footnote 522: They were lost to France by the second Napoleon in 1870.--T.]

[Footnote 523: Florio's MONTAIGNE, Booke II. Chap. 33: _The Historie of Spurina._--T.]

[Footnote 524: Camille d'Hostun, Maréchal Duc de Tallart (1652-1728), defeated the Imperials at Speyer, in 1703, and was beaten by Marlborough and Prince Eugene at Blenheim, or Hochstadt, in 1704. He was taken prisoner and carried to England, where he was kept captive for eight years. During his stay in London, where he had before been Ambassador, he intrigued to bring about Marlborough's disgrace. On his return to France, he was created a duke and peer and, later, a member of the Council of Regency. He became a minister of State under Louis XV. and was a member of the Academy of Science, but not of the French Academy, as Chateaubriand says in error.--B.]

[Footnote 525: John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722), Captain-general of the English Forces from 1702 to 1711.--T.]

[Footnote 526: Anne Queen of Great Britain and Ireland (1655-1714), long under the influence of Marlborough and his wife. This influence did, in fact, come to an end in 1711, the year before Tallart's release.--T.]

[Footnote 527: LA FONTAINE, _Le Paysan du Danube_:

"Upon his chin there grew a bushy beard; His person shaggy and weird Resembled a bear, but an unlicked bear at that."--T.]

[Footnote 528: Claudius Ptolemæus, known as Ptolemy (_fl._. 150), the famous Alexandrian astronomer, geographer and mathematician:

"Ptolemy believed that the sun, planets and stars revolved round the earth. His error in calculating the circumference of the globe warranted Columbus in supposing that the distance from the western coast of Europe to the eastern coast of Asia was about one-third less than it actually is; and thus encouraged the enterprise which led to the discovery of America" (JEBB: _Greek Literature_, Part III. Chap. II.: _From Augustus to Justinian_).--T]

[Footnote 529: RACINE, _Mithridate_, Act III. sc. i.:

Doutez-vous que l'Euxin ne me porte en deux jours Aux lieux où le Danube y vient finir son cours.

"Do you doubt that the Euxine will take me in two days To the spot where the Danube its last tribute pays."--T.

"We are told that, on hearing these verses from _Mithridate_, an old soldier, who had waged war in those countries, exclaimed aloud:

"'Yes, certainly, I doubt it.'

"He was quite right." (LA HARPE: _Cours de Littérature_, Part II. Book i. Chap. 3.)-B.]

[Footnote 530: CHATEAUBRIAND: _Martyrs_, Book VII.--T.]

[Footnote 531: I omit a stanza of eight lines quoted from Régnier-Desmarais.--T.]

[Footnote 532: George Neville, Archbishop of York (_circa_ 1433-1476), a younger brother of Warwick the King-maker. He was Lord Chancellor from 1460 to 1467 and became Archbishop of York in 1465.--T.]

[Footnote 533: There is a play upon words here which I cannot render: _butor_, in French means a bittern and also a booby, a block-head, a dolt.--T.]

[Footnote 534: _Cf._ the _Lettre à M. de Fontanes._--B.]

[Footnote 535: Johann Kepler (1571-1630), the German astronomer, inventor of the laws of planetary motion known as Kepler's Laws and author of _De Motibus Stella Martis_ (1609).--T.]

[Footnote 536: Copernicus (1473-1543), the founder of modern Astronomy and author of _De Orbium Cœlestium Revolutionibus_ (1543).--T.]

[Footnote 537: Karl Count von Chotek (1783-1868) was appointed Governor of the Tyrol in 1819, Court Chancellor in 1825 and Grand Burgrave of Bohemia in 1826; he retained this post until 1843.--T.

The Marquis de Villeneuve speaks of Count von Chotek as follows, in his Memoirs on Charles X. in exile:

"His title of Grand Burgrave corresponds in its functions with those of our prefects, with less additional burdens and less diversity in the matter of details. But his prefecture was a whole kingdom. He ruled four millions of inhabitants. Although he possessed an immense fortune, he occupied a modest house. His political opinions bore a strong impress of Liberalism."--B.]

[Footnote 538: Friedrich von Gentz (1764-1832), a German publicist and diplomatist (_Cf._ Vol. III. p. 79, n. 1), first in the Prussian and, later, in the Austrian service, was Chief secretary at the Congresses of Vienna (1814-1815), Aix-la-Chapelle (1818), Carlsbad and Vienna (1819), Troppau (1820), Laibach (1821) and Verona (1822).--T.]

[Footnote 539: The Duc de Blacas d'Aulps (_cf._ Vol. III. p. 100, n. 1) had followed King Charles X. into exile and exercised a preponderating influence over the little Court in Prague. He died in Prague on the 17th of November 1839.--B.]

[Footnote 540: Anne Hyacinthe Maxence Baron de Damas (1785-1862) was only six years old when he emigrated from France with his family. At the age of ten, he was entered as a cadet in the artillery-school in St. Petersburg; he served with distinction in the Russian Army and was a brigadier-general in 1813. At the First Restoration, he was attached to the Duc d'Angoulême as a lord of the Bed-chamber and aide-de-camp. Louis XVIII. made him a lieutenant-general in 1815. In the Spanish Campaign of 1823, at the head of a division, he handled his troops so well that, at Llers and Llado (15 and 16 September), he captured a whole column of the enemy. In reward for his services, the Baron de Damas was created a peer of France, on the 9th of October 1823, and appointed Minister for War on the 19th of the same month. One year later, he succeeded Chateaubriand at the Foreign Office; and, in 1828, he found himself involved in the fall of the Villèle Cabinet. In 1827, after the death of the Duc de Rivière, he became Governor to the Duc de Bordeaux, followed his pupil into exile, and retained his functions till 1833. In 1834, he retired to his estate of Hautefort and devoted the remainder of his life to passionate well-doing.--B.]

[Footnote 541: The Cardinal de Latil (_cf._ p. 18, n. 3, _supra_) was First Chaplain to Charles X., followed his master into exile, and did not return to France until 1836, after the King's death. He himself died in 1839, in the same year as the Duc de Blacas.--B.]

[Footnote 542: August Heinrich Julius Lafontaine (1759-1831), author of a number of novels of a domestic character which attained a great popularity.--T.]

[Footnote 543: _Cf._ MOLIÈRE: L'_Avare_, Act II. sc. i.--T.]

[Footnote 544: Maximilian I. King of Bavaria (1756-1825).--T.]

[Footnote 545: Maria Wilhelmina Augusta of Hesse-Dannstadt, Queen of Bavaria (1765-1796), is, I presume, the Queen referred to: Maximilian's second consort, Frederica Carolina Wilhelmina of Baden (1776-1841) did not die till eight years later.--T.]

[Footnote 546: Silvio Pellico (1788-1854), an Italian poet and prose-writer, arrested as a _Carbonaro_ in 1820 and imprisoned for two years in Milan and Venice. In 1822, he was condemned to death, but his sentence was commuted and he was kept as a prisoner, from 1822 to 1830, at the Spielberg, near Brünn. Pellico's chief works are his tragedies, _Francesca da Rimini_ and _Laodamia_, and his autobiographical work, _Le mie Prigioni_ (1833), which achieved an immense popularity throughout Europe.--T.]

[Footnote 547: The two last syllables of the German _Bitte für uns!_ and the French _espérance_ form a rough rhyme.--T.]

[Footnote 548: Henry VII. King of England (1457-1509) united the Houses of Lancaster (in his own person) and York (in that of his wife, Queen Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV.). He was noted for his avarice.--T.]

[Footnote 549: _Cf._ CERVANTES: _El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha_, Part I. Chap. 18.--T.]

[Footnote 550: And not Thursday the 24th, as the earlier editions have it.--B.]

[Footnote 551: _Cf._ MOLIÈRE: _George Dandin_, Act. III. sc. 10.--T.]

[Footnote 552: Albrecht Eusebius von Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland, Mecklemburg and Sagan (1583-1634), the famous Austrian general. There is little or no doubt that he was contemplating treachery and intending to make himself independent in Bohemia, when he was outlawed by the Emperor Ferdinand II., in January 1634. He was on the point of going over to the Swedes, who were then on the borders of Bohemia, when he was assassinated, at Eger, on the 25th of February 1634.--T.]

[Footnote 553: John King of Bohemia (_circa_ 1296-1346), surnamed the Blind, King of Bohemia, of the House of Luxemburg, from 1310 to 1346. He was killed at the Battle of Crécy, 26 August 1346.--T.]

[Footnote 554: Philip VI. King of France (1293-1350), the first King of the House of Valois. He ascended the throne in 1328 and in his reign (1338) began the Hundred Years' War with England.--T.]

[Footnote 555: George Podiebrad, King of Bohemia (1420-1471), was elected King in 1458. He subsequently joined the Hussite sect and, in 1466, commenced a persecution of the Catholics, with the result that he was dethroned in 1468.--T.]