Chapter XIX: Book II: 407 (2)

I liked the cathedral at Basle and especially the ancient cloisters. As I passed through the latter, filled with funeral inscriptions, I read the names of some Reformers. Protestantism chooses its place and takes its time badly when it sets itself in Catholic monuments; one sees less what it has reformed than what it has destroyed. Those dry pedants who thought that they would re-make a primitive Christianity within an old Christianity which had created society for fifteen centuries were unable to raise a single monument. To what would that monument have responded? What connection would it have had with the manners of the day? Men were not made like Luther[440] and Calvin in the time of Luther and Calvin; they were made like Leo X.[441] with the genius of Raphael, or like St. Louis with the Gothic genius; the few believed in nothing, the many believed in everything. And so Protestantism has as its temples only school-rooms, or as churches only the cathedrals which it has devastated: it has there established its nudity. Jesus Christ and His apostles, no doubt, did tot resemble the Greeks and Romans of their age, but they did not come to _reform_ an old creed; they came to _establish_ a new religion, to replace the gods by a God.

LUCERNE, 14 _August_ 1832.

The road from Basle to Lucerne through Aargau presents a series of valleys, some of which resemble the Valley of Argelès, minus the Spanish sky of the Pyrenees. At Lucerne, the mountains, differently grouped, shelved, profiled, coloured, end, as they withdraw one behind the other and sink away into the perspective, in the snows bordering on the Saint-Gotthard. If one suppressed the Righi and Mount Pilatus and kept only the hills, with their surfaces of grass and rabbit-warrens, which run down directly to the Lake of the Four Cantons, one would reproduce an Italian lake.

The arcades of the cloister of the cemetery surrounding the cathedral are like boxes from which this spectacle can be enjoyed. The monuments of this cemetery have for standards small iron crosses bearing a gilt Christ. In the rays of the sun, these are so many points of light escaping from the tombs; from space to space, there are holy-water fonts in which soaks a twig with which one can bless mourned ashes. I wept none there in particular, but I sprinkled the lustral dew upon the silent community of the Christians and unfortunates, my brothers. One epitaph said to me, "_Hodie mihi, cras tibi_;" another, "_Fuit homo_;" a third, "_Siste, viator; abi, viator._" And I await to-morrow; and I shall have been a man; and a traveller I stop; and a traveller I go away. Leaning against one of the arcades of the cloister, I long contemplated the theatre of the adventures of William Tell and his companions: the theatre of Helvetian liberty so well sung and described by Schiller and Johann von Müller[442]. My eyes sought in the vast picture for the presence of the most illustrious dead and my feet trod on the most unknown ashes.

When I saw the Alps again, four or five years ago, I asked myself what I had come to seek there: what, then, shall I say to-day? What shall I say to-morrow and again tomorrow? Woe to me who cannot grow old and who am always growing old!

LUCERNE, 15 _August_ 1832.

The Capuchins went this morning, according to the custom on the Feast of the Assumption, to bless the mountains. Those monks profess the religion under whose protection Swiss independence was born: that independence still endures. What will become of our modern liberty, all accursed by the blessing of the philosophers and the hangmen? It is not forty years old and it has been sold and sold again, bishoped and dealt in at every street-corner. There is more liberty in the frock of a Capuchin blessing the Alps than in all the frippery of the legislators of the Republic, the Empire, the Restoration and the Usurpation of July.

[Sidenote: Lucerne.]

A French traveller in Switzerland is touched and saddened; our history, for the misfortune of those regions, is too closely connected with their history; the blood of Helvetia has been shed for us and by us; we wasted the hut of William Tell with fire and sword; we engaged in our civil wars the peasant warrior who guarded the throne of our kings. The genius of Thorwaldsen has fixed the memory of the 10th of August at the gate of Lucerne. The Helvetian Lion lies dying, pierced by an arrow, and covering with its drooping head and one of its paws the escutcheon of France, of which we see only one of the fleurs-de-lys. The chapel consecrated to the victims, the clump of green trees which accompanies the bas-relief sculptured in the rock, the soldier escaped from the massacre of the 10th of August who shows the monument to strangers, the note from Louis XVI. ordering the Swiss to lay down their arms, the frontal presented by Madame la Dauphine to the expiatory chapel, upon which that perfect model of sorrow has embroidered the image of the immolated Lamb of God!... By what counsel does Providence, after the last fall of the throne of the Bourbons, send me to seek a refuge near this monument? At least, I can look upon it without blushing, I can lay my feeble but not perjured hand upon the shield of France, even as the lion covers it with its mighty claws, now distended in death.

Well, a member of the Diet has proposed to destroy this monument! What does Switzerland demand? Liberty? She has enjoyed it for four centuries. Equality? She has it. The republic? It is her form of government. The lightening of taxes? She pays hardly any. What does she want then? She wants to change, it is the law of beings. When a people, transformed by time, is no longer able to remain what it has been, the first symptom of its malady is a hatred of the past and of the virtues of its fathers.

I returned from the monument to the 10th of August by the great covered bridge, a kind of wooden gallery hung over the lake. Two hundred and thirty-eight triangular pictures, set between the rafters of the roof, adorn this gallery. They are popular annals in which the Swiss, as he passed, used to learn the story of his religion and his liberty.

I have seen the tame moor-fowl; I prefer the wild moor-fowl of the pond at Combourg.

In the town, I was struck by the sound of a choir of voices; it issued from a Lady-chapel. I entered that chapel and thought myself carried back to the days of my childhood. In front of four devoutly-decked altars, women were reciting the rosary and the litanies with the priest. It was like the evening-prayer by the sea-shore in my poor Brittany, and I was on the shore of the Lake of Lucerne! Thus did a man knot together the two ends of my life, the better to make me feel all that had been lost in the chain of my years.

ON THE LAKE OF LUCERNE, 16 _August_ 1832, _noon._

Alps, lower your crests, I am no longer worthy of you: young, I should be solitary; old, I am merely isolated. I would certainly depict nature again; but for whom? Who would care for my pictures? What arms, other than those of time, would, in reward, embrace my "genius," with its stripped forehead? Who would repeat my songs? What Muse should I inspire with any? Under the vault of my years, as under that of the snowy heights which surround me, no ray of sun will come to warm me. What a pity to drag across those heights tired footsteps which no one would care to follow! What a misfortune not to find myself free to wander anew until at the end of my life!

_Two o'clock._

My bark has stopped at the landing-stage of a house on the right bank of the lake, before entering the Bay of Uri. I climbed up to the orchard of that inn and came to sit under two walnut-trees which give shelter to a stable. Before me, a little to the right, on the opposite bank of the lake, the village of Schwyz unfolds itself among orchards and the inclined planes of those pastures called "Alps" in this part; it is surmounted by a rock broken into a semi-circle, the two points of which, the _Mythen_ and the _Haken_, the Mitre and the Hook, owe their names to their shapes. This horned capital rests upon turfy slopes, as the crown of the rude Helvetian independence rests on the head of a nation of shepherds. The silence around me is interrupted only by the tinkling of the bells of two heifers left in the neighbouring stable; they seem to ring out to me the glory of the pastoral liberty which Schwyz has given, with its name, to a whole people: a little canton in the neighbourhood of Naples, called "Italia," has in the same way, but with less sacred rights, communicated its name to the land of the Romans.

_Three o'clock._

We are starting; we are entering the Bay or Lake of Uri. The mountains grow taller and darker. There is the grass-grown ridge of the Grütli and the three fountains at which Fürst, Arnold von Melchthal and Stauffacher[443] swore to deliver their country; there, at the foot of the Achsenberg, is the chapel that marks the place at which Tell, jumping from Gessler's[444] bark, pushed it back with his foot to the midst of the billows.

[Sidenote: On the Lake of Lucerne.]

But did Tell and his companions ever exist? Might they not be only persons of the North, born in the songs of the Scalds, whose heroic traditions are to be found on the shores of Sweden? Are the Swiss to-day what they were at the time when they won their independence? Those bear-paths see cal-ashes roll along where Tell and his companions used to bound, bow in hand, from peak to peak: am I myself a traveller in harmony with these regions?

A storm comes luckily to assail me. We are landing in a creek, at a few paces from Tell's chapel: it is always the same God that raises the winds and the same confidence in that God that reassures men. As in former days, when crossing the Ocean, the lakes of America, the seas of Greece, of Syria, I am writing on drenched paper. The clouds, the waves, the rolling of the thunder blend better with the ancient liberty of the Alps than the voice of that effeminate and degenerate nature which my century has placed in my bosom despite myself.

ALTDORF.

I have disembarked at Flüelen and reached Altdorf, where the absence of horses will keep me one night at the foot of the Bannberg. Here, William Tell shot the apple from his son's head: the bow-shot was of the length that separates those two fountains. Let us believe, in spite of the fact that the same story was told by Saxo Grammaticus[445], as quoted first by myself in my _Essai sur les révolutions_[446]; let us have faith in religion and liberty, the two great things about man: glory and power are brilliant, not great.

To-morrow, from the top of the Saint-Gotthard, I shall greet once again that Italy which I have greeted from the summit of the Simplon and the Mont-Cenis. But of what avail is that last look cast upon the regions of the South and the Dawn? The pine-tree of the glaciers cannot descend among the orange-trees which it sees below it in the flowery valleys!

_Ten o'clock in the evening._

The storm is beginning again; the lightning-flashes twist around the rocks; the echoes swell and prolong the sound of the thunder; the roaring of the Schœchen and the Reuss welcome the bard of Armorica. It is long since I found myself alone and free; nothing in the room in which I am locked: two beds for a waking traveller who has neither loves to put to sleep, nor dreams to dream. Those mountains, that storm, this night are treasures lost for me. What life, nevertheless, I feel in the depths of my soul! Never, when the most ardent blood flowed from my heart into my veins, did I speak the language of the passions with such energy as I might do at this moment. It seems to me as though I saw my sylph of the Combourg woods issue from the flanks of the Saint-Gotthard. Hast thou come to see me again, O charming phantom of my youth? Hast thou pity for me? Thou seest, I am changed only in face: ever chimerical, devoured by a causeless and unfed fire. I am leaving the world, and I was entering it when I created thee in a moment of ecstasy and delirium. This is the hour at which I invoked thee in my tower. I can still open my Window to let thee in. If thou art not satisfied with the charms which I lavished upon thee, I will make thee a hundred times more seductive; my palette is not exhausted; I have seen more beauties and I know how to paint better than I did. Come to sit upon my knees; do not be afraid of my hair, stroke it with thy fairy or shadowy fingers: it will turn brown again under thy kisses. This head, which these falling hairs do not make wiser, is quite as mad as it was when I gave thee being, eldest daughter of my illusion, sweet fruit of my mysterious loves with my first solitude! Come, we will once more mount the clouds together; we will go with the lightning to plough, illumine, set fire to the precipices by which I shall pass to-morrow. Come! Carry me away as in former days, but do not carry me back again.

A knock at my door: it is not thou, it is the guide! The horses have arrived, we must start. Of this dream all that remains is the rain, the wind and I, an endless dream, an eternal storm.

17 _August_ 1832 (AMSTEG).

From Altdorf to here, a valley between mountains close together, as one sees everywhere; the noisy Reuss in the middle. At the Hart Inn, a little German student, who has come from the Rhone glaciers and who said to me:

"You gome vrom Altdorf this morning? You go vast!"

He thought I was on foot, like himself; then, seeing my _char-à-bancs_:

"Oh! Horses! Dat's tifferent!"

If the student were willing to "swap" his young legs for my _char-à-bancs_ and my even worse car of glory, with what pleasure would I take his stick, his grey blouse and his blonde beard! I should go to the Rhone glaciers; I should talk the language of Schiller to my mistress; and I should ponder deeply on Teutonic liberty: he would go his way old as time, bored as one dead, undeceived by experience, having fastened round his neck, like a bell, a fame by which he would be more wearied after a quarter of an hour than by the din of the Reuss. The exchange will not take place: good bargains are not for my use. My scholar is going; he said to me, taking off and putting back his Teuton cap, with a little nod of the head:

"_Permis!_"

One more shadow vanished. The scholar does not know my name; he will have met me and will never know it: I am delighted with this idea; I yearn for obscurity with more eagerness than formerly I longed for light; the latter worries me either as making my miseries visible or as showing me objects which I can no longer enjoy: I am in a hurry to pass the torch to my neighbour.

Three little boys are drawing the cross-bow: William Tell and Gessler are everywhere. Free peoples retain the remembrance of the foundations of their independence. Ask a poor little boy in France if he has ever thrown the hatchet in memory of King Hlodwigh or Khlodwig or Clovis!

The new Saint-Gotthard road, on leaving Amsteg, goes to and fro in a zig-zag for two leagues, now joining the Reuss, now quitting it when the fissure of the torrent grows wider. On the perpendicular reliefs of the landscape, slopes flat or tufted with beech-clumps, peaks shooting into the sky, domes topped with ice, summits bald or retaining a few stripes of snow, like locks of white hair; in the valley, bridges, posts made of blackened planks, walnut-trees and fruit-trees which gain in luxury of branches and leaves what they lose in succulence of fruits. The Alpine nature forces those trees to become wild again; the sap breaks through in spite of the grafting: a vigorous character bursts the bonds of civilization.

A little higher, on the right margin of the Reuss, the scene changes: the stream flows with cascades in a pebbly rut, under a double and triple avenue of pines; this is like the valley of Pont d'Espagne at Cauterets. On the skirts of the mountain, the larch-trees grow on the sharp edges of the rock; holding fast by their roots, they resist the shock of the tempests.

The road and a few potato-patches alone bear witness to man's presence in this spot: he must eat and he must walk; that sums up his history. The herds, consigned to the pasture-lands in the loftier regions, do not appear in sight; birds, none; eagles, no question of them: the great eagle fell into the ocean when crossing to St. Helena; there is no flight so high or so strong but falters in the immensity of the skies. The royal eaglet has just died.[447] Other eaglets of July 1830 were announced to us; apparently they have come down from their eyry to nestle with the feather-legged pigeons. They will never carry off chamois in their talons: weakened by the domestic light, their blinking glance will never contemplate from the summit of the Saint-Gotthard the free and dazzling sun of France's glory.

After crossing the Pfaffensprung Bridge and passing round the pap of the village of Wasen, one again takes the right bank of the Reuss; at either extremity, cascades gleam white among the sods, spread like green tapestries on the travellers' passage. Through a defile, one perceives the Ranz glacier, which joins the Furka glaciers.

At last, one makes one's way into the Valley of Schöllenen, where the first ascent of the Saint-Gotthard commences. This valley is a notch two thousand feet in depth, cut out of a solid block of granite. The faces of the block form gigantic overhanging walls. The mountains no longer present aught save their flanks and their ardent and reddened crests. The Reuss thunders down its vertical bed, lined with stones. The ruin of a tower bears witness to a former time, even as nature here points to unremembered ages. Supported in the air by walls along the granite masses, the road, an immobile torrent, winds parallel to the mobile torrent of the Reuss. Here and there, stone-work vaults form a shelter for the traveller against the avalanche; one turns for yet a few more paces in a sort of tortuous gallery, and suddenly, at one of the volutes of the shell, finds one's self face to face with the Devil's Bridge.

[Sidenote: The Devil's Bridge.]

This bridge to-day intersects the arch of the new bridge, which is higher, built behind it and overlooks it; the old bridge thus debased no longer resembles anything but a short two-storeyed aqueduct. The new bridge, when one comes from Switzerland, conceals the cascade at the back. To enjoy the rain-bows and the leaping of the cascade, one must stand upon the bridge; but, when one has seen the Falls of Niagara, no water-fall remains. My memory is constantly contrasting my journeys with my journeys, mountains with mountains, rivers with rivers, forests with forests, and my life destroys my life. The same thing happens to me with respect to societies and men.

The modern roads, which the Simplon has taught us to make and which the Simplon effaces, have not the picturesque effect of the old roads. The latter, bolder and more natural, avoided no difficulty; they scarcely deviated from the course of the torrents; they rose and descended with the ground, surmounted the rocks, plunged into the precipices, passed under the avalanches, taking nothing away from the pleasure of the imagination and the joy of danger. The old Saint-Gotthard Road, for instance, was adventurous in quite a different way from the present road. The Devil's Bridge deserved its reputation, when, on approaching it, one saw the cascade of the Reuss above, and when it marked out an obscure arch, or rather a narrow path, through the gleaming spray of the fall. Then, at the end of the bridge, the road ascended perpendicularly to reach the chapel of which we still see the ruin. At least, the inhabitants of Uri have had the pious thought of building another chapel at the cascade.

Lastly, it was not men like ourselves who crossed the Alps in former days: it was hordes of Barbarians or Roman legions; caravans of merchants, knights, _condottieri_, freebooters, pilgrims, prelates, monks. Strange adventures were related. Who built the Devil's Bridge? Who flung the Devil's Rock into the Wasen Thal? Here and there rose castle-keeps, crosses, oratories, monasteries, hermitages, preserving the memory of an invasion, a meeting, a miracle, or a misfortune. Each mountain tribe kept its language, its dress, its manners, its customs. It is true, one did not find, in a desert, an excellent inn; one drank no champagne there; one read no newspapers; but, if there were more robbers on the Saint-Gotthard, there were less cheats in society. What a fine thing is civilization! I leave that "pearl" to the "handsome first lapidary."

Suwaroff[448] and his soldiers were the last travellers in this defile, at the end of which they met Masséna.

After passing out from the Devil's Bridge and the Urner Loch tunnel, one reaches the Urseren Thai, closed by redans like the stone benches of an arena. The Reuss flows peacefully in the midst of the verdure; the contrast is striking: it is thus that society seems tranquil after and before revolutions; men and empires slumber at two steps from the abyss into which they are about to fall.

At the village of Hospital commences the second ascent, leading to the summit of the Saint-Gotthard, which is overrun by masses of granite. Those voluminous, swollen, broken masses, festooned at their tops with a few garlands of snow, resemble the fixed and frothy waves of an ocean of stone upon which man has left the undulation of his road.

Au pied du mont Adule, entre mille roseaux,
Le Rhin, tranquille et fier du progrès de ses eaux,
Appuyé d'une main sur son urne penchante,
Dormait au bruit flatteur de son onde naissante[449].

[Sidenote: The Saint-Gotthard.]

Very fine lines, but inspired by the marble rivers of Versailles. The Rhine does not spring from a bed of reeds: it rises from a bed of hoar-frost; its urn, or rather its urns are of ice; its origin is congenerous with those peoples of the North of which it became the adopted stream and the martial girdle. The Rhine, born of the Saint-Gotthard in the Grisons, sheds its waters into the sea of Holland, Norway and England; the Rhone, also a child of the Saint-Gotthard, bears its tribute to the Neptune of Spain, Italy and Greece: sterile snows form the reservoirs of the fecundity of the ancient world and the modern world.

Two pools, on the Saint-Gotthard table-land, give birth, one to the Ticino, the other to the Reuss. The source of the Reuss is lower than the source of the Ticino, so that, by digging a canal of a few hundred paces, one would throw the Ticino into the Reuss. If one were to repeat this work in the case of the principal tributaries of those streams, one would produce strange metamorphoses in the regions at the foot of the Alps. A mountaineer can afford himself the pleasure of suppressing a river, of fertilizing or sterilizing a country: there is something to take down the pride of power.

It is a marvellous thing to see the Reuss and the Ticino bid each other an eternal farewell and take their opposite ways down the two sides of the Saint-Gotthard: their cradles touch; their destinies are separate: they go to seek different lands and different suns; but their mothers, always united, do not cease, from the height of solitude, to feed their disunited children.

There was formerly, on the Saint-Gotthard, a hospice served by Capuchins; now one sees only the ruins of it; there remains of religion but a cross of worm-eaten wood with its Christ: God remains when men withdraw.

On the Saint-Gotthard upland, a desert in mid-sky, one world ends and another commences: the German names are replaced by Italian names. I take leave of my companion, the Reuss, which had brought me, as I went up, from the Lake of Lucerne, to go down to the Lake of Lugano with my new guide, the Ticino.

The Saint-Gotthard is hewn perpendicularly on the Italian side; the road which plunges into the Val Tremola does credit to the engineer obliged to trace it in the narrowest gorge. Seen from above, this road is like a ribbon folded and folded again; seen from below, the walls supporting the embankments give the impression of the works of a fortress, or resemble those dykes which are built one above the other to resist the invasion of the waters. Sometimes, also, the double row of mile-stones planted regularly on both sides of the road suggests a column of soldiers descending the Alps once more to invade unhappy Italy.

_Saturday_, 18 _August_ 1832 (LUGANO).

During the night I passed Airolo, Bellinzona and the Val Levantina: I did not see the ground, I only heard the torrents. In the sky, the stars rose among the cupolas and needles of the mountains. The moon was not at first above the horizon, but her dawn spread before her by degrees, like those "glories" with which the fourteenth-century painters used to surround the head of the Virgin: she appeared at last, scooped out and reduced to a quarter of her disc, on the denticulated top of the Furca; the tips of her crescent were like wings, one would have said of a white dove escaping from its nest in the rocks: by her light, enfeebled and rendered more mysterious, the hollowed-out luminary revealed to my eyes the Lago Maggiore at the end of the Val Levantina. Twice I had seen that lake, once when proceeding to the Congress of Verona, and again when going on my embassy to Rome. I then contemplated it in the sun, on the high-way of prosperity; now I caught a glimpse of it at night, from the opposite bank, on the road of misfortune. Between my journeys, separated by only a few years, a monarchy fourteen centuries old had passed away.

It is not that I bear those political revolutions the smallest grudge; by restoring me to liberty, they have restored me to my own nature. I have still pith enough to reproduce the first fruit of my dreams, fire enough to renew my connexion with the imaginary creature of my desires. The time and the world which I have traversed have been for me but a double solitude in which I have kept myself such as Heaven made me. Why should I complain of the swiftness of the days, since I lived in one hour as much as those who spend years in living?

[Sidenote: Lugano.]

Lugano is a little town of Italian aspect: porticoes as at Bologna, people keeping house in the streets as at Naples, Renascence architecture, roofs without cornices, long and narrow windows, bare or adorned with a pediment and pierced up to the architrave. The town leans against a vine-grown hill-side commanded by two superposed mountain plains, one covered with pastures, the other with forests: the lake lies at its feet.

On the topmost summit of a mountain to the east of Lugano, exists a hamlet whose women, tall and fair-skinned, have the reputation of the Circassians. The eve of my arrival was the festival of that hamlet; people had gone on a pilgrimage to beauty: that tribe is doubtless some remains of a race of northern Barbarians preserved unmixed above the populations of the plain.

I have been taken to the different houses that had been mentioned to me as likely to suit me: I found one of them charming, but the rent was much too high.

To see the lake better, I took a boat. One of my two boatmen spoke a Franco-Italian jargon interlarded with English. He told me the names of the mountains and of the villages on the mountains: the San Salvator, from the summit of which one discovers the dome of Milan Cathedral; Castagnola, with its olive-trees, of which the visitors put little twigs in their button-holes; Gandria, the boundary of the Canton of Ticino on the lake; the San Giorgio, crowned with its hermitage: each of those places had its history.

Austria, who takes all and gives nothing, retains at the foot of Monte Caprino a village enclosed in the Ticino territory. Facing this again, on the other side, at the foot of the San Salvator, she possesses a sort of promontory on which stands a chapel; but she has graciously lent this promontory to the Luganese to execute their criminals upon and erect their gallows. Some day she will use this "high jurisdiction," exercised by her permission upon her territory, as a proof of her suzerainty over Lugano. Nowadays the condemned are no longer subjected to the penalty of the rope: their heads are chopped off; Paris has supplied the instrument, Vienna the scene of execution: presents worthy of two great monarchies.

These images were pursuing me when, on the azure water, to the breath of the breeze scented by the amber of the pines, there came to pass the boats of a brotherhood which flung bouquets of flowers into the lake to the sound of horns and hautboys. Swallows sported around my sail. Among those travellers, shall I not recognise those which I met one evening as I wandered along the ancient Tibur Road and by the house of Horace? The Lydia of the poet was not then with those swallows of the plain of Tibur; but I knew that, at that very moment, another young woman was furtively taking a rose laid in the abandoned garden of a villa of Raphael's century, seeking naught but a flower on the ruins of Rome.

The mountains which surround the Lake of Lugano, scarce joining their bases except on the level of the lake, resemble islands separated by narrow channels; they reminded me of the grace, the form and the verdure of the archipelago of the Azores. Was I then going to consummate the exile of my last days under those smiling porticoes where the Princesse de Belgiojoso allowed a few days to slip by of the exile of her youth? Was I then to finish my Memoirs at the entrance to that classic and historic land where Virgil and Tasso sang, where so many revolutions have been accomplished? Was I to recall my Breton destiny at the sight of those Ausonian mountains? If their curtain were to be raised, it would lay bare to me the plains of Lombardy; beyond that, Rome; beyond that, Naples, Sicily, Greece, Syria, Egypt, Carthage: distant shores which I have measured, I who do not possess the extent of ground which I press under the soles of my feet! But yet, to die here, to end here? Is it not what I want, what I am looking for? I cannot tell.

LUCERNE, 20, 21 _and_ 22 _August_ 1832.

I left Lugano without sleeping there; I have re-crossed the Saint-Gotthard, I have seen again what I had seen: I have found nothing to correct in my sketch. At Altdorf, everything was changed since twenty-four hours ago: no more storm, no more apparition in my lonely room. I came to spend the night in the inn at Flüelen, having twice covered the road the ends of which come out upon two lakes and are held by two nations joined by the same political bond and separate in every other respect I crossed the Lake of Lucerne; it had lost a portion of its merit in my eyes: it is to the Lake of Lugano what the ruins of Rome are to the ruins of Athens, the fields of Sicily to the gardens of Armida.

For the rest, it is vain for me to exert myself to attain the Alpine exaltation of the mountain authors: I waste my pains.

Physically, that virgin and balmy air, which is supposed to revive my strength, rarefy my blood, clear my tired head, give me an insatiable hunger, a dreamless sleep, produces none of those effects for me. I breathe no better, my blood circulates no faster, my head is no less heavy under the sky of the Alps than in Paris. I have as much appetite in the Champs-Élysées, as on the Montanvers, I sleep as well in the Rue Saint-Dominique as on the Mont Saint-Gotthard, and, if I have dreams in the delicious plain of Montrouge, the fault lies with the sleep.

Morally, in vain do I scale the rocks: my mind becomes no loftier for it, my soul no purer; I carry with me the cares of earth and the weight of human turpitudes. The calm of the sublunary region of a marmot is not communicated to my awakened senses. Poor wretch that I am, across the mists that roll at my feet I always perceive the full-blown face of the world. A thousand fathoms climbed into space change nothing in my view of the sky; God appears no greater to me from the top of a mountain than from the bottom of a valley. If, to become a robust man, a saint, a towering genius, it were merely a question of searing over the clouds, why do so many sick men, miscreants and fools not take the trouble to clamber up the Simplon? Surely they must be very obstinately bent upon their infirmities.

[Sidenote: A plague upon mountains!]

The landscape is created only by the sun; it is the light that makes the landscape. A Carthaginian shore, a heath on the edge of Sorrento, a border of dried canes in the Roman Campagna are more magnificent, when lit up by the rays of the setting sun or the dawn, than all the Alps on this side of the Gauls. Those holes which they call valleys, where one sees nothing at full noon-day; those high fixed screens dubbed mountains; those soiled torrents which bellow with the cows on their banks; those violet-coloured faces, those goitrous necks, those dropsical bellies: a plague upon them!

If the mountains of our climes can justify the panegyrics of their admirers, it is only when they are wrapped in the night of which they thicken the chaos: the effect of their angles, their protuberances, their sweeping lines, their immense projected shadows is heightened by moonlight. The stars carve and engrave them on the sky in pyramids, cones, obelisks, in an architecture of alabaster, now casting over them a gauzy veil and harmonizing them with uncertain tints, faintly washed with blue; now sculpturing them one by one and separating them by lines of great precision. Every valley, every reduct, with its lakes, its rocks, its forests, becomes a temple of silence and solitude. In winter, the mountains offer us the image of the polar zones; in autumn, under a rainy sky, in their different shades of darkness, they resemble grey, black, bistre lithographs: the tempests also suit them, as do the vapours, half mists, half clouds, which roll at their feet or hang suspended at their flanks.

But are the mountains not favourable to meditations, to independence, to poetry? Do fine deep solitudes, mingled with sea, receive nothing from the soul, add nothing to its delights? Does a sublime nature not render us more susceptible to passion, and does passion not make us better understand a sublime nature? Is an intimate love not increased by the vague love of all the beauties of the senses and the intelligence which surround it, even as similar principles attract and blend with one another? Does not the feeling of the infinite, entering through a vast spectacle into a limited feeling, grow and spread to the boundaries at which commences an eternity of life?

I admit all this; but let us well understand one another: it is not the mountains that exist such as we think that we see them then; it is the mountains as the passions, the talents and the muses have drawn their lines, coloured their skies, their snows, their peaks, their declivities, their irised cascades, their "soft" atmosphere, their light and tender shadows: the landscape is on Claude Lorrain's palette, not on the Campo Vaccino. Make me to love, and you shall see that a solitary apple-tree, weather-beaten, flung crooked-wise amid the wheat-fields of the Beauce; the flower of an arrow-head in a marsh; a little water-course in a road; a scrap of moss, a fern, a tuft of maiden-hair fern on the side of a rock; a moist, smoky sky; a tomtit in a vicarage garden; a swallow, flying low, on a rainy day, under the thatch of a barn or along a cloister; even a bat taking the place of the swallow around a country steeple, fluttering on its gauzy wings in the last gloaming of the twilight: all these little things, attached to a few memories, will become enchanted by the mystery of my happiness or the sadness of my regrets. On the upshot, it is the youth of life, it is the persons that make fine sites. The ice-floes of Baffin's Bay can be smiling, with company after one's heart: the banks of the Ohio and the Ganges mournful, in the absence of all affection. A poet has said:

La patrie est aux lieux où l'âme est enchantée[450].

It is the same with beauty.

Here is too much about mountains: I love them as great solitudes; I love them as the frame, the border and the distance of a fine picture; I love them as the rampart and refuge of liberty; I love them as adding something infinite to the passions of the soul: equitably and reasonably, that is all the good to be said of them. If I am not to settle down on the other side of the Alps, my journey across the Saint-Gotthard will remain a disconnected fact, an optical view in the midst of the pictures of my Memoirs: I will put out the lamp and Lugano will relapse into darkness.

[Sidenote: Lucerne cathedral.]

Scarce arrived at Lucerne, I quickly hastened once more to the cathedral, the _Hofkirche_, built on the site of a chapel dedicated to St. Nicholas[451], the patron saint of sailors: this primitive chapel served also as a beacon, for, during the night, it was seen lighted up in a supernatural manner. It was Irish missionaries that preached the Gospel in the almost desert country of Lucerne; they brought it the liberty which their unhappy mother-land has not enjoyed. When I returned to the cathedral, a man was digging a grave; in the church, they were finishing a service around a bier, and a young woman was having a child's cap blessed at an altar: she placed it, with a visible expression of joy, in a basket which she carried on her arm, and went away laden with her treasure. The next day, I found the grave in the cemetery closed up, a vessel of holy water placed on the fresh earth, and some fennel-seed sprinkled for the little birds: already they were alone, beside that corpse of a night.

I took some walks in the neighbourhood of Lucerne, in magnificent pine-woods. The bees, whose hives are placed above the farm-doors, under the shelter of the overhanging roofs, live with the peasants. I saw the famous Clara Wendel[452] go to Mass behind her companions in captivity, in her prison dress. She is very common; I found in her the look of all those brutes in France who are present at so many murders, without for that reason being more distinguished than a fierce beast, in spite of all that the theory of crime and the admiration of slaughter would attribute to them. A simple foot-soldier, armed with a carbine, here takes the convicts to perform their day's work and brings them back to the prison.

This evening, I prolonged my walk along the Reuss, to a chapel built on the road: one goes up to it by a little Italian portico. From this portico, I saw a priest praying alone on his knees inside the oratory, while, on the top of the mountains, I saw the last gleams of the setting sun. On returning to Lucerne, I heard women saying the rosary in the cottages; the voices of children made the responses to the maternal adoration. I stopped, I listened through the twining vines to those words addressed to God from within a hut. The comely and graceful young girl who waits on me at the Golden Eagle also most regularly says her _Angelus_ as she draws the curtains of the windows in my room. When I come in, I give her a few flowers which I have gathered; she says to me, gently patting her breast with her hand:

"_Per me?_"

I answer:

"For you."

There our conversation ends.

LUCERNE, 26 _August_ 1832.

Madame de Chateaubriand has not yet arrived: I shall take a trip to Constance. M. A. Dumas[453] is here; I had already seen him at David's, while he was being modelled by the great sculptor. Madame de Colbert[454], with her daughter Madame de Brancas, is also passing through Lucerne[455]. It was at Madame de Colbert's, in Beauce, that, nearly twenty years ago, I wrote, in these Memoirs, the story of my youth at Combourg[456]. The places seem to travel with me: they are as mobile, as fleeting as my life.

The mail-post brings me a very fine letter from M. de Béranger, in reply to that which I wrote to him on leaving Paris: this letter has already been printed as a note, with a letter from M. Carrel, in the Congrès de Vérone[457].

[Sidenote: Constance.]

GENEVA, _September_ 1832.

Going from Lucerne to Constance, one passes through Zurich and Winterthur. Nothing pleased me at Zurich, except the memory of Lavater[458] and Gessner[459], the trees of an esplanade overlooking the lakes, the course of the Limmat, an old crow and an old elm; I prefer this to all Zurich's historic past, with due deference even to the Battle of Zurich. Napoleon and his captains, passing from victory to victory, brought the Russians to Paris.

Winterthur is a new and industrial little market-town, or rather one long clean street. Constance has an air of belonging to nobody; it is open to all the world. I entered it, on the 27th of August, without seeing a custom-house officer or a soldier and without being asked for my passport.

Madame Récamier had arrived, three days earlier[460], to pay a visit to the Queen of Holland. I was waiting for Madame de Chateaubriand, who was coming to join me at Lucerne. I proposed to weigh whether it would not be preferable to settle first in Swabia, remaining free to go down into Italy later.

In the decayed town of Constance, the inn was very gay; they were making preparations for a wedding. The day after my arrival, Madame Récamier wanted to escape the rejoicings of our hosts: we took a boat on the lake and, crossing the sheet of water from which the Rhine flows to become a river, we reached the strand of a park. Setting foot on land, we passed through a hedge of willows, on the other side of which we found a sanded walk winding among thickets of shrubs, groups of trees and grassy lawns. A summer-house stood in the middle of the gardens and an elegant villa leant against a forest of old trees. I noticed on the grass some meadow-saffron, always melancholy for me because of the reminiscences of my various and numerous autumns. We strolled at random and then sat down on a bench at the edge of the water. From the summer-house in the grove rose harmonies of harp and horn which ceased when, charmed and surprised, we began to listen: it was a scene from a fairy-tale. The harmonies did not recommence and I read to Madame Récamier my description of the Saint-Gotthard; she asked me to write something on her tablets, already half-filled with details of the death of J. J. Rousseau. Below these last words of the author of the _Héloïse_: "Wife, open the window, that I may see the sun again," I wrote these words in pencil:

"What I wanted on the Lake of Lucerne, I have found on the Lake of
Constance: the charm and intelligence of beauty. I do not want to
die like Rousseau; I want to see the sun for long, if I am to end
my life near you. Let my days expire at your feet, like those waves
whose murmur you love.--28 _August_ 1832."

The blue of the lake kept watch behind the foliage; on the southern horizon, gathered the summits of the Grisons Alps; a breeze passing to and fro across the willows harmonized with the rise and fall of the billows: we saw no one; we did not know where we were.

As we returned to Constance, we saw Madame la Duchesse de Saint-Leu and her son Louis Napoleon[461]: they came up to Madame Récamier. I had not known the Queen of Holland under the Empire; I knew that she had shown herself generous at the time of my resignation on the death of the Duc d'Enghien and when I tried to save my cousin Armand; under the Restoration, when Ambassador in Rome, I had had only relations of politeness with Madame la Duchesse de Saint-Leu; unable to go to her myself, I had left the secretaries and attachés free to pay their court to her, and I had invited Cardinal Fesch to a diplomatic dinner of cardinals. Since the last fall of the Restoration, chance had made me exchange a few letters with Queen Hortense and Prince Louis. These letters are a rather singular monument of faded grandeurs; here they are:

[Sidenote: Letter from Queen Hortense.]

MADAME DE SAINT-LEU, AFTER READING THE LAST LETTER OF M. DE
CHATEAUBRIAND

"ARENENBERG, 15 _October_ 1831.

"M. de Chateaubriand has too much genius not to have understood
the whole extent of the Emperor Napoleons. But his so brilliant
imagination required more than admiration: memories of youth, an
illustrious fortune attracted his heart; he devoted his person
and talent to them and, like the poet who lends to everything the
sentiment which animates him, he clothed what he loved with the
features which were to kindle his enthusiasm. Ingratitude did not
discourage him, for misfortune was always there to draw it to him;
nevertheless his wit, his reason, his truly French sentiments make
him the antagonist of his party in spite of himself. He loves,
of the olden times, only honour, which makes men faithful, and
religion, which makes men good; the glory of his country, which
makes its strength; liberty of conscience and opinion, which gives
a noble impulse to the faculties of men; the aristocracy of merit,
which opens up a career to every intelligence: these constitute
his domain more than any others. He is therefore a Liberal, a
Napoleonist and even a Republican rather than a Royalist And
therefore new France, its new lights would know how to appreciate
him, whereas he will never be understood by those whom he has set
so near to the Divinity in his heart; and, if there be now naught
left for him but to sing unhappiness, were it the most interesting,
high misfortunes have become so common in this age of ours that his
brilliant imagination, without any real object or motive, will die
out for want of nutriment sufficiently lofty to inspire his fine
talent.

"HORTENSE."

AFTER READING A NOTE SIGNED, "HORTENSE"

"M. de Chateaubriand is exceedingly flattered and in the highest
degree grateful for the sentiments of good-will so gracefully
expressed in the first part of the note; in the second there lurks
the seductiveness of a woman and a queen which might carry with it
a self-love less sophisticated than M. de Chateaubriand's.

"There are certainly to-day plenty of occasions of infidelity among
such high and numerous misfortunes; but, at the age to which M. de
Chateaubriand has attained, reverses which reckon but few years
would scorn his homage: needs therefore must he remain attached to
his old unhappiness, however much he might be tempted by younger
adversities.

"CHATEAUBRIAND.

PARIS, 6 _November_ 1831."

PRINCE LOUIS NAPOLEON TO THE VICOMTE DE CHATEAUBRIAND

"ARENENBERG, 4 _May_ 1832.

"MONSIEUR LE VICOMTE,

"I have just read your last pamphlet. How happy the Bourbons are
to be supported by a genius such as yours! You raise a cause with
the same arms that have served to lay it low; you find words that
send a thrill through every French heart. All that is national
finds an echo in your soul; thus, when you speak of the great man
who rendered France illustrious during twenty years, the loftiness
of the subject inspires you, your genius embraces it entirely,
and then your mind, naturally pouring itself out, surrounds the
greatest glory with the greatest thoughts.

"I too, monsieur le vicomte, grow enthusiastic on behalf of all
that contributes to the honour of my country; that is why, giving
vent to my impulse, I venture to express to you the sympathy which
I feel for one who displays so much patriotism and so much love of
liberty. But, permit me to tell you, you are the only formidable
defender of the Old Monarchy; you would make it national, if one
could believe that it would think as you do; and so, to give it any
worth, it is not enough to declare yourself on its side, but rather
to prove that it is on yours.

"However, monsieur le vicomte, if we differ in opinions, at least
we are agreed in the wishes which we form for France's happiness.

"Pray accept, etc., etc.

"LOUIS-NAPOLÉON BONAPARTE."

[Sidenote: And Louis Napoleon.]

THE VICOMTE DE CHATEAUBRIAND TO THE COMTE DE SAINT-LEU (PRINCE
LOUIS NAPOLEON)

"PARIS, 19 _May_ 1832.

"MONSIEUR LE COMTE,

"It is never easy to reply to praises; but, when he who awards them
with as much wit as propriety is moreover in a social condition
to which peerless memories are attached, then the difficulty is
doubled. At least, Monsieur, we meet in a common sympathy; you with
your youth, as I with my old days, desire the honour of France. It
needed no more for either of us, to die of confusion or laughter,
than to see the juste-milieu blockaded in Ancona[462] by the
soldiers of the Pope. Ah, Monsieur, where is your uncle? To others
than yourself I should say:

"'Where is the guardian of kings and the master of Europe?'

"In defending the cause of the Legitimacy, I entertain no
illusions; but I think that every man who cares for public esteem
must remain faithful to his oaths: Lord Falkland, a friend of
liberty and an enemy of the Court, got himself killed at Newbury in
the army of Charles I. You shall live, Monsieur le Comte, to see
your country free and happy; you are passing through ruins among
which I shall remain, because I myself form part of those ruins.

"I had for a moment entertained the flattering hope of laying
the tribute of my respect, this summer, at the feet of Madame la
Duchesse de Saint-Leu: fortune, accustomed to baffle my plans, has
deceived me once again. I should have been happy to thank you by
word of mouth for your obliging letter; we should have spoken of a
great glory and of France's future, two things, Monsieur le Comte,
which touch you nearly.

"CHATEAUBRIAND."

Have the Bourbons ever written letters to me similar to those which I have just produced? Did they ever entertain the idea that I rose above this versifier or that pamphleteering politician?

When, as a little boy, I used to wander, the companion of the herdsmen, over the heaths of Combourg, could I have believed that a time would come at which I should walk between the two highest powers on earth, powers now overthrown, giving my arm on one side to the family of St. Louis, on the other to that of Napoleon: hostile magnificences which alike lean, in the misfortune which brings them together, on the feeble and faithful man, the man scorned by the Legitimacy?