Chapter XXII: Book III: 496 (1)

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."