CONTENTSVOLUME VI Journal from Carlsbad to Paris—Cynthia—Eger—Wallenstein—Weissenstadt —Berneck—Memories—Bayreuth—Voltaire—Hollfeld—The church—The little girl with the basket—The inn-keeper and his maid-servant—Bamberg—The female hunchback—WÜrzburg: its canons—A drunkard—The swallow—The inn at Wiesenbach—A German and his wife—My age and appearance—Heidelberg—Pilgrims—Ruins—Mannheim—The Rhine—-The Palatinate—Aristocratic and plebeian armies—Convent and castle—A lonely inn—Kaiserslautern—SaarbrÜck—Metz—Charles X.'s Council in France—Ideas on Henry V.—My letter to Madame la Dauphine—Letters from Madame la Duchesse de Berry Journal from Paris to Venice—The Jura—The Alps—Milan—Verona—The roll-call of the dead—The Brenta—Incidental remarks—Venice—Venetian architecture—Antonio—The AbbÉ Betio and M. Gamba—The rooms in the Palace of the Doges—Prisons—Silvio Pellico's prison—The Frari—The Academy of Fine Arts—Titian's Assumption—The metopes of the Parthenon—Original drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo and Raphael—The Church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo—The Arsenal—Henry IV.—A frigate leaving for America—The Cemetery of San Cristoforo—San Michele di Murano—Murano—The woman and the child—Gondoliers—Bretons and Venetians—Breakfast on the Riva degli Schiavoni—The tomb of Mesdames at Trieste—Rousseau and Byron—Great geniuses inspired by Venice—Old and new courtezans—Rousseau and Byron compared Arrival of Madame de Bauffremont in Venice—Catajo—The Duke of Modena—Petrarch's Tomb at Arqua—The land of poets—Tasso—Arrival of Madame la Duchesse de Berry—Mademoiselle Lebeschu—Count Lucchesi-Palli—Discussion—Dinner—Bugeaud the gaoler—Madame de Saint-Priest, M. de Saint-Priest—Madame de Podenas—Our band—I refuse to go to Prague—I yield at a word—Padua—Tombs—Zanze's manuscript—Unexpected news—The Governor of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom—Letters from Madame to Charles X. and Henry V.—M. de Montbel—My note to the Governor—I set out for Prague Journal from Padua to Prague, from the 20th to the 26th of September 1833—Conegliano—The translator of the Dernier Abencerrage—Udine—Countess Samoyloff—M. de La Ferronays—A priest—Carinthia—The Drave—A peasant lad—Forges—Breakfast at the hamlet of St. Michael—The neck of the Tauern—A cemetery—Atala: how changed—A sunrise—Salzburg—A military review—Happiness of the peasants—WoknabrÜck—Reminiscences of PlancoËt—Night—German and Italian towns contrasted—Linx—The Danube—WaldmÜnchen—Woods—Recollections of Combourg and Lucile—Travellers—Prague—Madame de Gontaut—The young Frenchmen—Madame la Dauphine—An excursion to Butschirad—Butschirad—Charles X. asleep—Henry V.—Reception of the young men—The ladder and the peasant-woman—Dinner at Butschirad—Madame de Narbonne—Henry V.—A rubber—Charles X.—My incredulity touching the declaration of majority—The newspapers—Scene of the young men—Prague—I leave for France—I pass by Butschirad at night—A meeting at Schlau—Carlsbad empty—Hollfeld—Bamberg—My different St. Francis' Days—Trials of religion—France General politics of the moment—Louis-Philippe—M. Thiers—M. de La Fayette—Armand Carrel—Of some women: the lady from Louisiana—Madame Tastu—Madame Sand—M. de Talleyrand—Death of Charles X. Conclusion—Historical antecedents from the Regency to 1793—The Past—The old European order expiring—Inequality of fortunes—Danger of the expansion of intellectual nature and material nature—The downfall of the monarchies—The decline of society and the progress of the individual—The future—The difficulty of understanding it—The Christian idea is the future of the world—Recapitulation of my life—Summary of the changes that have happened on the globe during my life—End of the MÉmoires d'Outre-tombe APPENDICES I. THE MORGANATIC MARRIAGE OF THE DUCHESSE DE BERRY 229-235 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONSVOL. VIChateaubriand's Tomb THE MEMOIRS OF CHATEAUBRIANDVOLUME VI[1]BOOK VJournal from Carlsbad to Paris—Cynthia—Eger—Wallenstein—Weisaenstadt—Berneck—Memories —Bayreuth—Voltaire—Hollfeld—The church—The little girl with the basket—The inn-keeper and his maid-servant—Bamberg—The female hunchback—WÜrzburg: its canons—A drunkard—The swallow—The inn at Wiesenbach—A German and his wife—My age and appearance—Heidelberg—Pilgrims—Ruins—Mannheim—The Rhine—The Palatinate—Aristocratic and plebeian armies—Convent and castle—A lonely inn—Kaiserslautern—SaarbrÜck—Metz—Charles X.'s Council in France—Ideas on Henry V.—My letter to Madame la Dauphine—Letters from Madame la Duchesse de Berry. 1 June 1833, evening. The journey from Carlsbad to Elbogen, along the Eger, is pleasant. The castle of this little town is of the twelfth century and keeps sentry on a rock, at the entrance to the gorge of a valley. The foot of the rock, covered with trees, is contained within a bend of the Eger: hence the name of the town and the castle, Elbogen, the Elbow. The donjon was red with the last rays of the sun when I saw it from the high-road. Above the mountains and woods hung the twisted column of smoke of a foundry. I started at half-past nine from the Zwoda stage. I followed the road along which Vauvenargues passed in the retreat from Prague, the young man to whom Voltaire, in the Éloge funÈbre des officiers morts en 1741, addresses these words: "Thou art no more, O sweet hope of my remaining days; From inside my calash, I watched the stars rise. Be not afraid, Cynthia,[2] it is but the whispering of the reeds bent by our passage through their mobile forest. I have a dagger for jealous men and blood for thee. Let not this tomb cause thee any alarm; it is that of a woman once loved like thyself: Cecilia Metella lay here. How wonderful is this night in the Roman Campagna! The moon rises behind the Sabine Hill to contemplate the sea; she causes to stand forth from the diaphanous darkness the ashen-blue summits of Albano, the more distant, less deeply-graven lines of Soracte. The long canal of the old aqueducts lets fall a few globules of its waters through the mosses, columbines, gilliflowers, and joins the mountains to the city walls. Planted one above the other, the aerial porticoes, cutting into the sky, turn in mid-air the torrent of the ages and the course of the brooks. The legislatrix of the world, Rome, seated on the stone of her sepulchre, with her robe of centuries, projects the irregular outline of her tall figure into the milky solitude. Let us sit down: this pine-tree, like the goat-herd of the Abruzzi, unfolds its parasol among ruins. The moon showers her snowy light upon the Gothic crown of the tower of Metella's tomb and on the festoons of marble that link the horns of the bucrania: a graceful pomp inviting us to enjoy life, which speeds so soon. Hark! The nymph Egeria is singing beside her fountain; the nightingale warbles in the vine of the Hypogeum of the Scipios; the languid Syrian breeze indolently wafts to us the fragrance of the wild tuberoses. The palm-tree of the abandoned villa waves half-drowned in the amethyst and azure of the Phosbean light. But thou, made pale by the reflections of Diana's purity, thou, O Cynthia, art a thousand times more graceful than that palm-tree. The shades of Delia, Lalage, Lydia, Lesbia, resting on broken cornices, stammer mysterious words around thee. Thy glances cross those of the stars and mingle with their rays. To Cynthia. But, Cynthia, nothing is real except the happiness which thou canst enjoy. Those constellations which shine so brightly on thy head harmonize with thy bliss only through the illusions of a beguiling perspective. O young and fair Italian, time is ending! On those flowery carpets thy companions have already passed. A mist unfolds itself, rises and veils the eye of the night with a silvery retina; the pelican cries and returns to the strand; the woodcock alights in the horse-tails of the diamond-studded springs; the bell resounds under the dome of St. Peter's; the nocturnal plain-chant, the voice of the middle-ages, saddens the lonely monastery of Santa-Croce; the monk chants Lauds upon his knees, on the calcined columns of San Paolo; vestals prostrate themselves on the icy slab that closes their crypts; the pifferaro pipes his midnight lament before the solitary Madonna, at the condemned gate of a catacomb. 'Tis the hour of melancholy; religion awakens and love falls asleep! Cynthia, thy voice is weakening: the refrain which the Neapolitan fisherman taught thee in his swift-sailing bark, or the Venetian oarsman in his gondola, dies away on thy lips. Yield to the exhaustion of thy sleep; I will watch over thy repose. The darkness with which thy lids cover thy eyes vies in suavity with that which drowsy, perfumed Italy pours over thy brow. When the neighing of our horses is heard in the Campagna, when the morning-star proclaims the dawn, the herd of Frascati will come down with his goats and I shall not cease to soothe thee with my whispered lullaby:
"Mein Herr, ten kreutzers vor de durnbike!" A plague upon you with your "crutches!" I had changed my sky! I was just in the right mood! The Muse will not return! That accursed Eger, to which we are coming, is the cause of my unhappiness. The nights are fatal at Eger. Schiller shows us Wallenstein, betrayed by his accomplices, going to the window of a room in the fortress of Eger: Am Himmel ist geschÄftige Bewegung, Wallenstein, on the point of being assassinated, expresses himself in touching terms on the death of Max Piccolomini[4], beloved by Thekla[5]: Die Blume ist hinweg aus meinem Leben Wallenstein retires to his place of rest: Sieh, es ist Nacht geworden; auf dem Schloss The dagger of the murderers snatches Wallenstein from his dreams of ambition, even as the voice of the turnpike-man put an end to my dream of love. Both Schiller and Benjamin Constant, who gave proof of a new talent by imitating the German tragic poet, have gone to join Wallenstein, while I, at the gates of Eger, recall their treble fame. Bavaria. 2 June 1833. I passed through Eger and, on Saturday the 1st of June, at day-break, entered Bavaria: a tall red-haired girl, bare-foot and bare-headed, came to open the turnpike to me, like Austria in person. The cold lasted: the grass in the moats was covered with a white hoar-frost; wet foxes came out of the oat-fields; grey, zig-zag, wide-spreading clouds hung across in the sky like eagles' wings. I arrived at Weissenstadt at nine o'clock in the morning; at the same moment, a sort of gig was carrying away a young woman driving without a hat; she looked very much like what she probably was: joy, love's short fortune, then the hospital and the common grave. Strolling pleasure, may Heaven not be too severe on your boards! There are so many actors worse than yourself in this world! Before entering the village, I passed through "wastes:" this word was at the point of my pencil; it belonged to our old Frankish tongue: it describes the aspect of a desolate country better than the word "lande," which means earth. I still know the song which they used to sing in the evening when crossing the waste-lands: C'est le chevalier des Landes: After Weissenstadt comes Berneck. On leaving Berneck, the road is lined with poplar-trees, whose winding avenue filled me with an indescribable sentiment of mingled pleasure and sadness. On ransacking my memory, I found that they resembled the poplars with which the high-road was formerly laid out at the entrance to Villeneuve-sur-Yonne on the Paris side. Madame de Beaumont is no more; M. Joubert is no more; the poplars are felled and, after the fourth fall of the Monarchy, I am passing at the feet of the poplars at Berneck:
Youth laughs at those disappointments; it is charming, happy: in vain do you tell it that the time will come when it too will know a similar bitterness; it thrusts you aside with its light wing and flies away in search of pleasures: it is right, if it dies with them. Here is Bayreuth, a reminiscence of another sort. This town stands in the middle of a hollow plain of crops mixed with meadow-land: it has wide streets, low houses, a weak population. In the time of Voltaire and Frederic II., the Margravine of Bayreuth was famous; her death inspired the bard of Ferney with the only ode in which he displayed any lyrical talent: Tu ne chanteras plus, solitaire Sylvandre, The poet here praises himself justly, were it not that there was no one less solitary in the world than Voltaire-Sylvander. The poet adds, addressing the Margravine: Des tranquilles hauteurs de la philosophie, Bayreuth. From the height of a palace, it is easy to look down with calm eyes upon the poor devils who pass along the street; but those lines are none the less mightily true.... Who could feel them better than myself? I have seen so many phantoms defile through the dream of life! At this very moment, have I not been looking on the three royal larvÆ in the Castle in Prague and on the daughter of Marie-Antoinette at Carlsbad? In 1733, just a century ago, what was it occupied men's minds? Had they the least idea of what is now? When Frederic was married, in 1733, under the rough tutelage of his father, had he, in Mathew Laensberg[11], seen M. de Tournon[12] Intendant of Bayreuth and leaving his intendance for the "Prefectship" of Rome? In 1933, the traveller passing through Franconia will ask of my shade if I could have guessed the facts of which he will be a witness. While I was breakfasting, I read some lessons which a German lady, young and pretty, of course, was writing to a master's dictation:
That is true, mademoiselle, you and je have little money; you are satisfied, as it seems, and you laugh at a ton of gold; but, if, by chance, I were not satisfied, you must agree that, for me, a ton of gold might be rather pleasant. On leaving Bayreuth, one goes up. Slender pruned firs represented to me the pillars of the mosque at Cairo or the Cathedral of Cordova, but shrunk and blackened, like a landscape reproduced in the camera obscura. The road runs on from hill to hill and valley to valley: the hills wide, with a tuft of wood on their brows; the valleys narrow and green, but badly watered. At the lowest point of these valleys, one sees a hamlet marked by the campanile of a little church. The whole of Christian civilization was formed in this way: the missionary, become a parish-priest, stopped; the Barbarians cantoned themselves around him, like flocks gathering round the shepherd. In former days, those remote habitations would have made me dream more than one kind of dream; to-day, I dream not at all and am nowhere at ease. Baptiste, suffering from over-fatigue, compelled me to stop at Hollfeld. While supper was being made ready, I climbed the rock which overlooks a part of the village. Upon that rock rises a square belfry; swifts screamed as they swept round the roof and fronts of the turret. That scene consisting of a few birds and an old tower had not repeated itself since the days of my childhood at Combourg; my heart was quite oppressed by it. I went down to the church on a hanging ground towards the west; it was surrounded by its grave-yard abandoned by the new deceased. The old dead only marked out their furrows there: a proof that they had tilled their field. The setting sun, pale and drowned, on the horizon, in a fir-plantation, lit up the lonely refuge where no other man than I stood erect. When shall I be recumbent in my turn? We are beings of nothingness and darkness; our impotency and our potency are strongly characterized: we cannot, at will, procure for ourselves either light or life; but nature, by giving us eye-lids and a hand, has put night and death at our disposal. Entering the church, whose door was half-open, I knelt down with the intention of saying an Our Father and Hail Mary for the repose of my mother's soul: a servitude of immortality laid upon Christian souls in their mutual affection. Suddenly I thought I heard the shutter of a confessional open; I fancied that Death, instead of a priest, was about to appear at the penance grating. At that very moment, the bell-ringer came to lock the door of the church: I had only time to leave. The little basket-carrier. Returning to the inn, I met a little basket-carrier: she had bare legs and feet; her skirt was short, her bodice torn; she walked stooping and with her arms crossed. Together we climbed a steep road; she turned her sun-burnt face a little to my side; her pretty and dishevelled head was glued against her basket. Her eyes were black; her mouth was half open to facilitate her breathing; one saw that, under her burdened shoulders, her young breast had as yet felt no other weight than the spoils of the orchards. She tempted one to talk to her of roses: "Ρόδα μ'εἴ ρηχας[13]." I applied myself to casting the adolescent vintager's horoscope: will she grow old at the wine-press, unknown and happy as the mother of a family? Will she be carried off to the camps by a corporal? Will she fall a prey to some Don Juan? The abducted village-girl loves her ravisher as much with astonishment as with passion: he transports her to a marble palace on the Straits of Messina, under a palm-tree beside a spring, opposite the sea displaying its azure billows and Etna belching flames. I had reached this point in my story, when my companion, turning to the left in a wide open space, went towards some lonely dwellings. As she was about to disappear, she stopped, cast a last look at the stranger, and then, bowing her head to pass, with her basket, under a low door-way, entered a cottage, like a little shy cat gliding into a barn among the sheaves. Let us go on to find in her prison Her Royal Highness Madame la Duchesse de Berry: Je la suivis, mais je pleurai My host at Hollfeld is a curious man: he and his maid-servant are inn-keepers with extreme reluctance; they abhor travellers. When they espy a carriage from afar, they go to hide themselves, cursing those vagabonds who have nothing to do but scour the high-roads, those idle persons who disturb an honest publican and prevent him from drinking the wine which he is obliged to sell to them. The old servant sees that her master is being ruined, but she is waiting for a stroke of Providence in his favour; like Sancho, she will say: "Sir, accept this fine Kingdom of Micomicon which falls from heaven into your hand." Once the first movement of ill-humour is past, the couple, in the interval between two bouts, put a good face on the matter. The chamber-maid murders a trifle of French, squints for two and has an air of saying to you: "I have seen finer sparks than you in Napoleon's armies!" She smelt of tobacco and brandy, like glory by the camp-fire; she ogled me with a provoking and wicked glance: how sweet it is to be loved at the very moment when one had given up all hopes of it! But, Javotte, you come too late for my "broken and mortified temptations," as a Frenchman of old said; my sentence is passed: "Harmonious veteran, take thy rest," M. Lerminier[15] has said to me. You see, fair and friendly stranger, I am forbidden to listen to your song: VivandiÈre du regiment, There you have another reason why I withstand your seductions; you are frivolous; you would betray me. Fly away then, Dame Javotte of Bavaria, like your predecessor, Madame Isabeau[17]. 2 June 1833. I have left Hollfeld, I am passing through Bamberg at night. All is sleeping: I see only a tiny light whose feeble glimmer comes from the back of a room to grow wan at a window. What is waking here: pleasure or sorrow, love or death? At Bamberg, in 1815, Berthier, Prince of NeufchÂtel, fell from a balcony into the street[18]: his master was about to fall from a greater height. Sunday 2 June. At Dettelbach, reappearance of the vines. Four growths mark the limit of four natures and four climates: the birch, the vine, the olive and the palm, always going towards the sun. The Hunchback. After Dettelbach, two stages to WÜrzburg, and a female hunchback seated behind my carriage; it was Terence's Andria: Inopia.... egregia forma.... Ætate integra.[19] The postillion wanted to make her get down; I objected, for two reasons: first, because I should have been afraid lest that fairy should have thrown a spell over me; secondly, because, having read in a biography of myself that I am a hunchback, all female hunchbacks are my sisters. Who can satisfy himself that he is not hunchbacked? Who will ever tell you that you are? If you look at yourself in the glass, you cannot say at all; do we ever see ourselves as we are? You will find a turn in your figure that suits you to perfection. All hunchbacks are proud and happy; the advantages of the hump are hallowed in song. At the entrance to a lane, my hunchback, in her ragged finery, stepped majestically to the ground: carrying her burden, like all mortals, Serpentina plunged into a corn-field and disappeared among spikes taller than herself. At mid-day, on the 2nd of June, I had reached the top of a hill from which one descried WÜrzburg: the citadel on a height, the town below, with its palace, its steeples and its turrets. The palace, although thick-set, would be handsome even in Florence; in case of rain, the Prince could give shelter to all his subjects in his mansion without giving up his own apartments. The Bishop of WÜrzburg was formerly the Sovereign Bishop: the nomination was in the gift of the canons of the Chapter. After his election, he passed, stripped to the waist, between his colleagues drawn up in two rows, who scourged him. It was hoped that the princes, offended at this manner of consecrating a royal back, would refrain from presenting themselves as candidates. To-day this would be of no avail: there is not a descendant of Charlemagne but would consent to be whipped for three days on end to obtain the crown of Yvetot. I have seen the Emperor of Austria's brother Duke of WÜrzburg[20]; he used to sing very prettily at Fontainebleau, in the Galerie de FranÇois Ier, at the concerts of the Empress JosÉphine. They kept Schwartz two hours at the passport-office. Left with my unharnessed carriage in front of a church, I went in: I prayed with the Christian crowd which represents the old society in the midst of the new. A procession went out and marched round the church: why am I not a monk on the walls of Rome? The times to which I belong would be realized in me. When the first seeds of religion budded in my soul, I opened out like a virgin soil which, cleared of its brambles, bears its first harvest. Came a dry and icy wind, and the soil was parched. The sky took pity on it; it gave it its tepid dews; then the wind blew again. This alternation of faith and doubt long made my life a mixture of despair and unspeakable delights. O my good, sainted mother, pray Jesus Christ for me: your son needs redeeming more than other men! I left WÜrzburg at four o'clock and took the Mannheim Road. I entered the Grand-duchy of Baden; I found a village in a merry mood; a drunkard gave me his hand, shouting: "Long live the Emperor!" Everything that has happened since the fall of Napoleon is null and void in Germany. The men who rose to snatch their national independence from Bonaparte's ambition dream only of him, so greatly did he stir the imagination of the nations, from the Bedouins in their tents to the Teutons in their huts. As I went towards France, the children became noisier in the hamlets, the postillions drove faster, life sprang up once more. The Swallow. At Bischoffsheim, where I dined, a fair onlooker appeared at my state banquet: a swallow, a real Procne, with a reddish breast, came to perch at my open window, on the iron bar from which swung the sign of the Golden Sun; then it warbled most sweetly, looking at me as though it knew me and without showing the least alarm. I have never complained of being awakened by the daughter of Pandion; I have never, like Anacreon, called her a "chatterer;" I have always, on the contrary, hailed her return with the song of the children of the isle of Rhodes:
"FranÇois," said my fellow-guest at Bischoffsheim, "my great-great-grandmother used to live at Combourg, under the rafters of the roof of your turret; you used to keep her company every year, in autumn, in the reeds in the pond, when you went dreaming, of an evening, with your sylph. She landed on your native rock, on the very day when you embarked for America, and she followed your sail for some time. My grandmother built her nest in Charlotte's window; eight years after, she arrived at Jaffa with you: you have mentioned this in your ItinÉraire?[22] My mother, while twittering to the dawn, fell one day into your room at the Foreign Office[23]; you opened the window for her. My mother has had many children: I who am speaking to you am of her last nest; I have met you before on the old Tivoli Road in the Roman Campagna: do you remember? My feathers were so black and so glossy! You looked at me sadly. Would you like us to fly away together?" "Alas, my dear swallow, who know my story so well, you are extremely kind; but I am a poor moulting bird, and my feathers will never come back; I cannot, therefore, fly away with you. And you could not carry me: I am too heavy with sorrows and years. And then, where should we go? Spring and beautiful climates are no longer of my season. For you, the air and love; for me, the ground and loneliness. You are going away: may the dew cool your wings! May a hospitable yard offer to your tired flight, when you are crossing the Ionian Sea! May a peaceful October save you from shipwreck! Greet the olive-trees of Athens and the palm-trees of Rosetta for me. If I am no more when the flowers bring you back, I invite you to my funeral banquet: come at sunset to snap up the gnats on the grass of my grave; like you, I love liberty and I have lived on little[24]." 3 and 4 June 1833. I set out myself by land, a few moments after the swallow had set sail. The night was overcast; the moon hovered, weakened and wasted, among the clouds; my eyes, half-asleep, closed as they looked at it; I felt as though I were expiring in the mysterious light which illumines the shadows: "I felt," says Manzoni, "I know not what peaceful depression, the fore-runner of the last rest." I stopped at Wiesenbach: a solitary inn, a narrow, cultivated valley between two wooded hills. A German from Brunswick, a traveller like myself, hearing my name pronounced, came running up to me. He pressed my hand, spoke to me of my works; his wife, he told me, was learning to read French in the GÉnie du Christianisme. He did not cease to express surprise at my "youth:" "But," he added, "that is the fault of my judgment; I ought to think you, from your last works, as young as you look." My age and appearance. My life has been mixed up with so many events that, in my readers' heads, I have the ancientness of those events themselves. I often speak of my grey head; this is calculated vanity on my part, so that people may exclaim, when they see me: "Ah, he is not so old!" A man is at ease with white hair: he can boast of it; to glory in having black hair would be in bad taste: a fine matter for triumph, to be as your mother made you! But to be as time, misfortune and wisdom have dressed you, that is fine! My little artifice has succeeded sometimes. Quite recently a priest asked to see me; he stood dumb at the sight of me; at last recovering his speech, he cried: "Ah, monsieur, so you will be able to fight a long time yet for the faith!" One day, as I was passing through Lyons, a lady wrote to me; she begged me to give her daughter a seat in my carriage and take her to Paris. The proposal struck me as singular; but, after all, having verified the signature, I found my unknown correspondent to be a highly respectable lady and I replied politely. The mother introduced her daughter to me, a divinity of sixteen. No sooner had the mother set eyes upon me than she blushed scarlet; her confidence forsook her: "Forgive me," she stammered; "I am none the less filled with esteem.... But you understand the proprieties.... I made a mistake.... I am so greatly surprised." I insisted, looking at my promised companion, who seemed amused at the discussion; I was lavish with protestations that I would take every imaginable care of that beautiful young person; the mother humbled herself with excuses and courtesies. The two ladies departed. I was proud of having frightened them so much. For some hours I thought myself made young again by the Dawn. The lady had fancied that the author of the GÉnie du Christianisme was a venerable AbbÉ de Chateaubriand, a tall, dry, simple old man, constantly taking snuff out of a huge tin snuff-box, who might very well be trusted to take an innocent school-girl to the Sacred Heart. They used to tell in Vienna, two or three lustres ago, that I lived all alone in a certain valley called the VallÉe-aux-Loups. My house was built on an island; when people wanted to see me, they had to blow a horn on the opposite bank of the river: a river at ChÂtenay! I then looked out through a hole: if the company pleased me, a thing that hardly ever happened, I came myself to fetch them in a little boat; if not, not. In the evening, I pulled my boat on shore and nobody was allowed to land on my island. In point of fact, I ought to have lived in this way; this Viennese story has always charmed me: M. de Metternich surely did not invent it; he is not sufficiently my friend for that. I do not know what the German traveller will have told his wife about me, nor if he went out of his way to undeceive her as to my decrepitude. I fear that I possess the drawbacks of black hair and white hair both and that I am neither young enough nor staid enough. For the rest, I was hardly in the mood for coquetry at Wiesenbach; a melancholy wind blew under the doors and through the passages of the inn: when the breeze blows, I am in love with nothing else. From Wiesenbach to Heidelberg, one follows the course of the Necker, cased by hills which carry forests on a bank of sand and red sulphate. How many rivers I have seen flow! I met pilgrims from WalthÜren: they formed two parallel lines on either side of the high-road; the carriages passed in the middle. The women walked bare-foot, beads in hand, with a parcel of linen on their heads; the men bare-headed, also carrying their beads in their hands. It was raining; in some places the watery clouds crept along the sides of the hills. Boats loaded with timber went down the river, others went up, under sail, or in tow. In the broken places in the hills were hamlets standing among the fields, in the midst of rich vegetable-gardens adorned with Bengal roses and different flowering shrubs. Pilgrims, pray for my poor little King: he is exiled, he is innocent; he is commencing his pilgrimage while you are performing yours and I ending mine. If he is not to reign, it will always be a certain glory to me to have fastened the wreck of so great a fortune to my life-boat God alone sends the fair wind and opens the harbour. |
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