François de Chateaubriand
Mémoires d’outre-tombe
Book XXXVIII
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Translated by A. S. Kline © 2006 All Rights Reserved.
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Contents
Book XXXVIII: Chapter 1: Madame la Dauphine.
Book XXXVIII: Chapter 2: DIGRESSIONS: Springs – Mineral waters – History recalled
Book XXXVIII: Chapter 3: MORE DIGRESSIONS: The Valley of the Tepla – Its Flora
Book XXXVIII: Chapter 4: A last conversation with the Dauphine – Departure
Book XXXVIII: Chapter 5: JOURNAL FROM CARLSBAD TO PARIS: Cynthia – Eger – Wallenstein
Book XXXVIII: Chapter 10: Forbach to Paris.
The road from Prague to Carlsbad
stretches through tedious plains stained with the blood of the Thirty Years’
War. Travelling those battlefields at night, I humbled myself before the God of
Armies, who bears the sky on his arm like a shield. From the distance one saw
little wooded mountains with water at their feet. The witty medical men of
From the heights of the city tower, the Stadtturm, a tower mitred with a steeple, the sentinels sound their trumpet as soon as they see a traveller. I was welcomed with a joyous peal as a dying man, and everyone along the valley cried with delight: ‘Here comes an arthritic, a hypochondriac, a myope!’ Alas, I was better than that, I was an incurable.
At seven in the morning,
on the 31st of May I was installed at the Golden
Ecu, an inn run on behalf of the Count of Bolzano,
a very noble but ruined gentleman. Lodging at this hotel were the Count and
Countess of Cossé (who had preceded me)
and my compatriot General de Trogoff,
former Palace Governor at Saint-Cloud, born
at Landivisiau, beneath the light of the Landernau moon: a stocky little man he was an
Austrian grenadier captain in Prague during the Revolution. He came from
visiting his exiled lord, a successor to Saint Clodoald,
a monk in his time at Saint-Cloud. Trogoff, after his pilgrimage, returned to
Et moestis late loca questibus implet:
filling the place around with mournful cries.
We embraced each other
as Bretons do, Trogoff and I. The general, short and square like a Celt from La Cournaille was subtle beneath his apparent
frankness, and an amusing story-teller. He was popular with Madame la
She occupied an isolated
house, at the extremity of the town, on the right bank of the River Tepla, a little river which flows from the
mountains and traverses the length of
A servant opened the
door to me: I saw Madame la
She raised her head, which had been bowed over her work as if to hide her own emotion, and addressing me said: ‘I am happy to see you, Monsieur de Chateaubriand; the King informed me you would be arriving. You have spent the night here? You must be tired.’
I respectfully presented Madame la Duchesse de Berry’s letters; she took them, placed them on the settee beside her, and said: ‘Sit down, sit down.’ Then she took up her embroidery again with a rapid, mechanical and convulsive movement.
I said nothing; Madame
la
‘Madame,’ I at last replied, ‘Madame la Duchesse de Berry is indeed very unfortunate; she has charged me with coming to place her children under your protection during her imprisonment. It is a great relief to her in her trouble to think that Henri V has a second mother in Your Majesty.’
Pascal was right to link the greatness with
the wretchedness of mankind: who would have thought that Madame la
‘Oh, no, Monsieur de
Chateaubriand, no,’ the Princess said gazing at me and suspending her work, I
am not Queen.’ – ‘You are, Madame, you are according to the laws of the realm: Monseigneur
le Dauphin could only abdicate
because he was King.
The
I read, in a loud voice,
my letter of accreditation, in which Madame la Duchesse de Berry explained about her marriage, ordered
me to appear in
The princess had resumed her embroidery; after my speech she said: ‘Madame la Duchesse de Berry is right to put her trust in me. That is fine, Monsieur de Chateaubriand, fine: tell my sister-in-law I am very sorry for her.’
This insistence of
Madame la
‘If Madame,’ I replied, ‘will read the letter Madame la Duchesse de Berry has written, and that addressed to her children, she will perhaps discover further clarification. I hope Madame will give me a letter to carry back to Blaye.’
The letters were written
in lemon-juice. ‘I know nothing of this,’ said the Princess, ‘how are we to
proceed?’ I suggested a stove and some pieces of kindling; Madame rang the bell
whose cord hung behind the sofa. A valet de chambre appeared, was given his
orders, and set up the apparatus on the landing, outside the door of the room.
Madame rose and we went to the stove. We set it on a little table by the
staircase. I took one of the letters and held it parallel to the flames. Madame
la
We returned to our seat
in the salon. The
Madame la
I spent two hours tête-à-tête with Madame, an honour rarely granted: she seemed content. Having known me only from hostile accounts, she had no doubt thought me a violent gentleman, swollen with a sense of my own importance; she was grateful to find me a human being and a decent man. She said, cordially: ‘I am going out to take the waters; we dine at three, come if you are not in need of rest. I would like to see you there if it will not fatigue you too much.’
I do not know to what I
owed my success; but certainly the ice was broken, the obstacle removed; that
gaze which had rested, in the
Nevertheless, though I
had succeeded in setting the
At three, I went to
Madame la
Vicomtesse d’Agoult, pious these days, is an important personage as one finds her in the sanctuaries of every princess. She promotes her family whenever she can, when speaking to everyone, particularly to me: I had the goodness to find positions for her nephews; she has as many as the late Arch-Chancellor Cambacérès.
The dinner was so poor
and so meagre I left dying of hunger; it was served in Madame la
From her sofa, Madame could see, through the window, what was happening outside: she named the passers-by male and female. Two little horses arrived with two riders dressed in tartan; Madame stopped work, gazed and said: ‘It is Madame… (I forget the name) taking her children to the mountains.’ Marie-Thérèse curious, knowing the local gossip, the Princess of thrones and scaffolds descending from her heights to the level of other women, these things interested me singularly; I observed them with a kind of philosophic tenderness.
At five the
At
On Saturday, the 1st of
June, I was up at five; at six I went to the Mühlenbad
(Mill Baths): those taking the waters, male and female, crowded round the
spring, walked beneath a gallery with wooden columns, or in the garden attached
to the gallery, Madame la Dauphine arrived, dressed in a shabby robe of grey
silk; round her shoulders hung a worn-out shawl and she had an old hat on her
head. She looked as though she had patched her clothes together, like her mother in the Conciergerie. Monsieur
O’Hegerty, her riding instructor, gave her his arm. She mingled with the crowd
and presented her cup to the ladies who doled out the spring-water. No one paid
any attention to Madame la Comtesse de Marne.
Maria-Theresa, her
grand-mother, had the Mill Baths rebuilt in 1762; she also sponsored the
bell-towers in
Madame having entered
the garden, I advanced towards her: she seemed surprised with that courtier’s
attention. I rarely rose so early for royalty, except perhaps on
As a Frenchman, I found only painful memories in Carlsbad. The town takes its name from Charles IV, King of Bohemia, who went there to be healed of his three wounds received at Crecy fighting next to his father Jan. Lobkowitz claims Jan was killed by a Scotsman; a circumstance unknown to historians.
‘Sed cum Gallorum fines et amica tuetur
Arva,
‘While he was defending
the borders of
Did the poet add
The death of Jan the Blind of Bohemia at Crécy is one of the most heroic and moving moments in history. Jan wished to go to the aid of his son Charles; he said to his companions: ‘ “My lords, you are my friends: I request you to lead me so far forward that I might land a blow with my sword”; they replied that they would willingly do so…The King of Bohemia rode forward, so as to land a blow with his sword, or four or more, and fought very vigorously as did those of his company; so far forward that he drove in among the English, and all remained there, and were found the next day in that place around their lord, and all their horses lying there together.’
Few know that Jan of
Bohemia’s heart was interred at Montargis,
in the
May this memorial to a Frenchman make amends for French ingratitude, when in the days of our fresh disasters we appalled Heaven with our sacrilege, and hurled from his tomb a Prince who died for us in our former days of misfortune!
At Carlsbad the chronicles say that when Charles IV, King Jan’s son, was out hunting, one of his dogs chasing a deer fell from a hilltop into a pool of seething water. His barking brought the huntsmen running, and so the Sprudel spring was discovered. A pig scalded by the waters of Teplitz revealed them to a swineherd.
Such are the German
legends. I have been to Corinth; the ruins
of the
There are eight springs
in
The waters of the Sprudel will boil eggs and serve for
cleaning tableware; this fine phenomenon has found employment on behalf of
Monsieur Alexander Dumas has made a free translation of Lobkowitz’s Latin ode on the Sprudel.
Fons heliconiadum etc.
‘Fount sacred to the poet’s rhyming feet,
Where is the hearth that feeds your secret heat?
Whence your burning bed of lime and sulphur?
That flame whose vapours Etna lights no more,
Does it forge unknown channels where you pour,
As neighbour
of the
They publish a daily list of visitors to the Sprudel: in the ancient records you can read the names of the greatest poets and literary men of the North, Gurowski, Traller, Dunker, Weisse, Herder, Goethe; I would have liked to find that of Schiller, the object of my preference. On the current page, among the host of obscure arrivals, can be seen the name of the Comtesse de Marne; it is only printed in small capitals.
In 1830, at the very
moment of the royal family’s exit from Saint-Cloud, Christophe’s widow and
daughters were taking the waters at
At
Indigenous law has come
to anticipate the needs of death abroad; foreseeing the decease of travellers
far from their own land, it permits later exhumation. So I could rest in the
The waters of
Does it not seem to you
as if I were setting out again to write the
masterpiece of an unknown? One
thing leads me to another; I travel from
‘There are the Apennines and here are the Caucasus.’
And yet I have not yet left the valley of the Tepla.
In order to view the
I will always love woods: the Flora of Carlsbad, whose breath had embroidered the grass beneath my feet, seemed delightful to me; I found fingered sedge (carex digitata), deadly nightshade (atropa belladonna), common purple loosestrife (lythrum salicaria), St John’s wort (hypericum perforatum), hardy lily of the valley (convallaria majalis) and grey willow (salix cinerea): sweet subjects of my first herbals.
Behold my youth that comes
hanging its memories from the stems of those plants I recognized in passing. Do
you remember my botanical studies among the Seminoles,
the evening-primroses (oenotheras), the
water-lilies (nymphaeas) among whom I
set my Floridian girls, the garlands of clematis they twined round some
terrapin, our slumber on the island by the lake-shore, the rain of magnolia
petals which fell on our heads? I dare not calculate how old my fickle painted lady would be now; what would I
gather today from her brow: the wrinkles that cover mine? No doubt she sleeps
eternally among the roots of a cypress grove in
At
‘You wish to leave today, Monsieur de Chateaubriand?’
‘– If Your Majesty will allow me: I will endeavour to see Madame de Berry again in France; otherwise I would be obliged to make a voyage to Sicily, and Her Royal Highness would be deprived for too long of the reply she awaits.’
‘– Here is a message for her. I have avoided mentioning your name in order not to compromise you in case of eventualities. Read it.’
I read the note; it was
wholly in Madame la
‘
‘I have experienced real satisfaction, my dear sister, in at last receiving news of you directly. I am sorry for you with all my soul. Depend always upon my constant interest in you and above all in your dear children, who are more precious than ever to me. My existence, as long as I live, will be dedicated to them. I have not yet been able to execute your commissions to our family, my health requiring that I come here to take the waters. But I will acquit myself of them as soon as I return among them, and please believe that we, they and I, will always share the same feelings about everything.
Adieu, my dear sister, I am sorry for you from the depths of my heart, and embrace you tenderly.
M-T.’
I was struck by the
reticence in this note: certain vague expressions of attachment barely
concealed the deeper coolness. I made a respectful comment, and again pleaded
the cause of the unfortunate prisoner. Madame replied that the King would
decide. She promised me to interest herself in her sister-in-law; but there was
scant cordiality in the
Madame acknowledged it; she even denied Monsieur de Damas suddenly, while saying a few words in honour of his courage, probity and religiosity.
‘In September Henri V
will be of age: do you not think it would be helpful to form a council round
him into which might be introduced those men against whom
‘– Monsieur de Chateaubriand, by multiplying counsellors one multiplies the sources of advice; and then, who would you propose that the King choose?’
‘– Monsieur de Villèle.’
Madame, who was embroidering, arrested her needle, looked at me in astonishment, and astonished me in turn by uttering a judicious critique of the character and intellect of Monsieur de Villèle. She did not consider him an effective administrator.
‘Madame is too harsh,’ I said: ‘Monsieur de Villèle is a man of order, conciliation, moderation, and calm whose resources are endless; though he lacked the ambition to occupy the place of Premier, for which he was unacceptable, he is a Minister to retain indefinitely in the King’s council; he is irreplaceable. His presence beside Henri V would have the greatest effect.’
‘– I thought you disliked Monsieur de Villèle?’
‘- I would despise myself if, after the fall of the monarchy, I continued to nourish some feeling of petty rivalry. Our royalist divisions have already done enough harm; I abjure them with all my heart and am ready to ask pardon of those who have offended me. I beg Your Majesty to believe that it is neither a false display of generosity, nor a marker laid down in anticipation of future fortune. What have I to expect from Charles X in exile? If a Restoration is to occur, shall I not be in the depths of my grave?’
Madame looked at me affably; she had the goodness to praise me for those few words: ‘Very fine, Monsieur de Chateaubriand!’ She seemed perpetually surprised to find a Chateaubriand so different to how he had been painted.
‘– There is someone else, Madame, whom you could call on,’ I continued: ‘my noble friend, Monsieur Lainé. We are three men who ought never to swear loyalty to Philippe: I, Monsieur Lainé, and Monsieur Royer-Collard. Outside the government, and in diverse roles, we might have formed a triumvirate of some value. Monsieur Lainé took the oath through frailty, Monsieur Royer-Collard through pride; the first died of his frailty; the second lives by his pride, since he stands by what he has done, being unable to do anything which is not admirable.’
‘– You are satisfied with Monsieur le Duc de Bordeaux?’
‘– I found him delightful. They say Your Majesty spoils him a little.’
‘– Oh: not so! His health, are you satisfied with that?’
‘– He seems wonderfully well; he is delicate and a little pale.’
‘– His complexion often varies; but he is of a nervous disposition. Monsieur le Dauphin is highly esteemed in the army, is he not? Highly esteemed? They remember him, do they not?’
This brusque question,
without connection with what we had been saying, revealed a secret wound that
the days of Saint-Cloud and Rambouillet had left in the
Seeing that the hour for her walk was nearing:
‘– Has Your Majesty any orders to give me? I fear to seem importunate.’
‘– Tell your friends how
I love
‘– Ah, Madame, what has
that same
‘– No, no, Monsieur de Chateaubriand, do not forget; tell everyone that I am French, that I am French.’
Madame left me; I was obliged to halt on the stairs before leaving; I would have not dared show myself in the street; my tears still wet my eyes in recalling that scene.
Returning to my inn, I
changed into my travelling clothes. While they were getting the carriage ready,
Trogoff chattered away. He told me again
that the
I was right; that very
evening Monsieur le Duc de
At six in the evening, I
set off for
The road from
I left the relay post at Zwoda at nine-thirty. I followed the road along which Vauvenargues passed during the retreat from Prague; that young man to whom Voltaire, in the funeral oration for the officers who died in 1741, addressed these words: ‘You are no more, O sweet hope of my last days; I have always seen you as the most unfortunate of men, and the most tranquil.’
From the depths of my calash, I watched the stars rise.
‘Do not fear, Cynthia; it is only the susurration of the reeds bent by our passage through their motionless forest. I have a knife for the jealous, and courage to defend you. Let not this tomb cause you terror; it is that of a woman once loved as you: Cecilia Metella rests here.
How fine this night in
the Roman Campagna! The moon rises behind the Sabine Hills to gaze at the sea;
she causes the ash-blue summits of Albano, and
the more distant and less deeply engraved outlines of Soracte, to emerge from the diaphanous
shadows The long line of ancient aqueducts allows a few drops of moisture to seep
over the moss, the columbines, the wallflowers, and joins the mountains to the
city walls. Set one above another, the aerial arches cut across the sky, sending
the torrent of ages and the courses of rivers along the breeze. Law-giver to
the world,
Let us sit here: this
pine-tree, like a goat-herd of Abruzzo,
deploys its umbrella among the ruins. The moon lets fall its light like snow
over the Gothic crown of the
Listen! The nymph Egeria sings beside her fount; the nightingale
is heard in the vine beside the Scipios’
hypogeia; the languishing breeze of
But there is no reality,
Cynthia, in the happiness you enjoy. Those constellations so bright above you
are only in harmony with your delight by the illusions of false perspective.
Girl of
A mist unwinds, ascends and forms a silvery retina for the eye of night; a pelican cries and returns to the shore; a woodcock plunges among the horsetails of diamantine founts; the bell of St Peter’s echoes from the cupola; nocturnal plain-song, voice of the Middle Ages, deepens the melancholy of the isolated monastery of Holy Cross; a monk kneels and recites Lauds, among the calcified pillars of St Paul’s; vestals prostrate themselves on the icy slabs that pave their crypts; the fife-player whistles his midnight plaint before the solitary Madonna, at the sealed door of a catacomb. Hour of sadness, when religion wakes and love sleeps!
Cynthia your voice is
weakening: it dies on your lips, that refrain the Neapolitan fisherman brought
you in his boat skimming the waves, or the Venetian oarsman in his light
gondola. Go to the absences of your repose; I will protect your sleep. The
night whose lids cover your eyes subtly disputes with that which
“A fascicle of jasmine
and narcissi, an alabaster Hebe, not long arisen
from the recesses of an excavation, or fallen from the pediment of a temple,
lies on that bed of anemones: no Muse, you are wrong. That jasmine, that
alabaster Hebe, is a sorceress of
Wind from the orange-groves of Palermo that sighs around Circe’s isle; breeze that passes over Tasso’s tomb, that caresses the nymphs and cupids of the Farnesina; you who play among the Raphael Virgins of the Vatican, among the statues of the Muses, you who dip your wings in the little cascades of Tivoli; genii of the arts who thrive on masterpieces and flutter among memories, come: you alone I will permit to breathe Cynthia’s slumber.
And you, majestic daughters of Pythagoras, you Fates in your linen robes, fatal sisters seated beside the axis of the spheres, turn the thread of Cynthia’s destiny on golden spindles; make them descend from your fingers and rise again to your hands in ineffable harmony; immortal weavers, open the ivory gate to those dreams that rest on a woman’s breast without oppressing it. I will sing of you, O canephorus of the Roman rites, young Charite fed on ambrosia in Venus’ lap, smile sent from the East to glide across my life; forgotten violet in the garden of Horace………………”’
….. ‘Mein Herr? Ten kreutzers for the toll (dix kreutzers bour la parrière)’
A plague on your crutches! I was in another place! I was so in flight! The Muse will not return! That cursed Eger, at which we are arriving, is the cause of my unhappiness.
The nights are fatal in
Wallenstein, at the moment of his assassination, is moved by the death of Max Piccolomini, loved by Thekla: ‘The flower of my life has vanished; he was dear to me like an image of my youth. He changed reality for me to a beautiful dream.’
Wallenstein withdraws to his place of repose: ‘Night advances; there is no sound of movement in the castle: let us go, light the way; take care not to wake me too late; I think I will sleep deeply, after the day’s harsh deeds’
The murderers’ knives
snatch Wallenstein from his dreams of ambition, as the voice of the gatekeeper
put an end to my dream of love. And Schiller, and Benjamin Constant (who showed fresh talent in
imitating the German play), have gone to join Wallenstein, while I recall their
triple fame at the gates of
1st of June 1833.
I pass through
I arrived at Weissenstadt at nine in the morning; at the same moment, a kind of hired wagon arrived carrying a young lady with stylish hair; she had the look of what she probably was: a creature destined for pleasure, a brief tale of love, then the hospital and a common grave. Errant joys, may Heaven be not too harsh with your theatricals! There are so many actors worse than you in this world.
Before penetrating the village, I crossed the wastes: the word finds itself at the tip of my pencil; it belongs to our ancient Frankish language: it provides a better description of desolate countryside than the word lande, which means moor.
I still remember the song they sing in the evening crossing the moors:
It was the Knight of Landes:
The Knight of Misfortune!
When he was in the ‘lande’,
To hear the bells give tune!
After
Weissenstadt comes Berneck. Leaving
Berneck, the road is bordered by poplars, whose winding avenue inspired in me a
feeling of pleasure and sadness combined. Searching my memory, I found they
resembled the poplars with which the highroad was once lined on entering Villeneuve-Sur-Yonne from
The young lady laughs at her errors; she is charming, joyous; you may announce in vain that moment when she will sink as deeply into bitterness; she will shock you with her flightiness, and wing her way towards her pleasures: she is right, so long as she dies along with them.
Here is Bayreuth, a memory of another kind. The town
is situated in the midst of a plain with mixed cultivation of grass and
cereals: the streets are wide, the houses low, the population light. At the
time of Voltaire and Frederick II, the Margravine of
‘You will sing no longer, lonely Sylvander,
In the
Dared to speak against prejudice, and sang there,
Allowing Humanity’s rights to be heard.’
The poet would be right in praising himself, if it were not that no one in the world was less solitary than Voltaire-Sylvander. The poet adds, addressing the Margravine:
‘From philosophy’s tranquil heights your pity,
Looked down on the world with eyes serene,
The vanishing phantoms of lifelong reverie,
So many vain ideas, so many ruined dreams.’
From the heights of the
Palace, it is easy to look down with eyes serene on the poor devils passing by
in the street, but those lines are no less powerful in meaning…Who feels that
more than I? I have seen so many phantoms during my lifelong reverie! At this
very moment have I not been contemplating the three royal shades in the
While I was lunching, I read the lessons that a German lady, of necessity young and pretty, wrote down from her teacher’s dictation:
‘The one he is happy, is rich. You and me have little money; but we is happy. We are thuss to my mind richer than those who has a ton of gold, and he.’
It is true, mademoiselle, you and me have little money; you are happy, so it appears, and scorn a ton of gold; but if by chance I was not happy, then you might agree that a ton of gold might be very acceptable to me.
Leaving
Baptiste, suffering from an excess of fatigue forced me to stop at Hollfeld. While supper was being prepared, I climbed a rock which overlooks part of the village. On this rock stands a square belfry; martins called as they skimmed the roof and sides of the tower. Since my childhood at Combourg, that scene composed of a few birds and an old tower had not recurred; I felt my heart compress. I descended to the church over ground sloping to the west; it was encircled by its cemetery devoid of recent burials. Only the ancient dead have traced their furrows there; proof that they worked the fields. The setting sun, pale and smothered by a fir grove on the horizon, lit the solitary sanctuary where no one stood but me. When will I lie down in turn? Beings of nothingness and shadow, our powerlessness and our power are deeply characteristic of us: we cannot procure light and life for ourselves at will; but nature, in giving us eyelids and hands, has put night and death at our disposal.
Entering the church whose portal was ajar, I knelt with the intention of saying a Pater and an Ave for the repose of my mother’s soul; immortal duties imposed on Christian souls in their mutual tenderness. There, I thought I heard the door of a confessional open; I imagined that the dead, instead of a priest, would appear at the penitent’s grill. At that very moment the bell-ringer was about to close the church door, I only had time enough to leave.
Returning to the inn, I met a little girl carrying a basket on her back: she had bare feet and legs; her dress was short, her blouse torn; she walked with bowed back and folded arms. We climbed a steep street together; she turned her sunburnt face towards me a little; her pretty tousled hair stuck to her basket behind. Her eyes were black; her mouth was half-open to allow her to breathe: you could see that, beneath her burdened shoulders, her young breast had known nothing but the weight of the orchards’ harvest. She made one wish to speak to her of roses: Pόδα μ’ εϊρηκας (Aristophanes).
I set to drawing up the horoscope of the adolescent fruit-picker: will she grow old at the cider-press, the mother of an obscure but happy family? Will she be led off to the camps by some corporal? Will she fall prey to some Don Juan? The seduced village girl loves her ravisher as well as the astonishment of love; he transports her to a palace of marble on the Straits of Messina, beneath a palm-tree beside a fountain, facing the sea with azure wave, and Etna spouting flame.
I was at this point in my thought, when my companion, turning to the left in a large square, headed towards some isolated habitations. At the moment of vanishing, she stopped; she cast a last glance at the stranger; then, lowering her head to allow herself and her basket to pass beneath a low doorway, she entered a cottage, like a little wild cat slipping into a barn among the sheaves. Let us return to Her Royal Highness Madame la Duchesse de Berry in her prison.
‘I followed her, but grieved also
At having none but her to follow.’
My host at Hollfeld is a
singular man; he and his serving-woman are innkeepers as a last resort; they
have a horror of travellers. When they see a carriage in the distance, they go
and hide while cursing these vagabonds who have nothing to do but travel the
highroads, these idlers who disturb an honest tavern-keeper and stop him
drinking the wine he is forced to sell them. The old woman perceives that her
master will ruin himself; but she awaits a gift of
Once the initial bout of moodiness has passed, the couple, half-tipsy, are fine. The servant speaks a little broken French, stares fiercely at you, and has the air of saying: ‘I have seen better gallants like you in Napoleon’s army!’ She had known the pipe and brandy as well as the glory of the camps; she ogled me malignly and with irritation: how sweet it is to be loved at the very moment when one has lost all expectation of being so! But, Javotte, you arrive too late on the scene of my bruised and shattered hopes, as an old French writer has it; my sentence has been pronounced: ‘Harmonious old man, take your rest,’ Monsieur Lerminier tells me. You see, kindly stranger, I am forbidden from listening to your song:
‘Purveyor to the Regiment,
Javotte is my name.
I sell, I give, and gaily drink
My brandy and my wine.’
Nimble feet, looks that win,
Tin tin, tin tin, tin tin, tin tin
R’lin tin tin.
That is why I refuse to be seduced by you; you are thoughtless; you will betray me. Away with you then, Javotte of Bavaria, like your predecessor Madame Isabeau.
2nd of June 1833.
Leaving Hollfeld, I passed through Bamberg at night. Everyone was asleep; I only saw one little light whose feeble gleam shone from the depths of a room dimmed by the window. What was awake there: pleasure or pain; love or death?
At
Sunday, the 2nd of June.
At Dettelbach, the vineyards reappear. Four kinds of vegetation mark the boundaries of four habitats and four climates; silver birch, vines, olive-trees and palm-trees, progressing ever sunwards.
Beyond Dettelbach, two relay posts before Würzburg a female hunchback seated herself at the back of my carriage; she was the Girl from Andros of Terence: Inopia…egregia forma, aetate integra: Poor…of surpassing beauty, in the flower of youth. The coachman wanted her to descend; I opposed this for two reasons: firstly because I feared the witch might cast a spell on me: secondly because having read in a biography of me that I was a hunchback myself, all female hunchbacks are my sisters. Who can re-assure you that you are not a hunchback? Who will refrain from ever telling you that you are one? If you look at yourself in a mirror, you see nothing; does one ever see what one is? You will find your waist measurement suits you marvellously. All hunchbacks are proud and happy; popular songs swear to the advantages of a hunched back. At the entrance to a track, my lady hunchback, adjusting herself, set foot to earth majestically: charged with her burden, like all mortals, Serpentine pushed her way into a cornfield, and disappeared among ears of wheat taller than she.
At
The Bishop of Würzburg was once sovereign over the nominations for canons of the chapter. After his election, he passed, nude to the waist, between his confreres ranged in two files; they whipped him. One would expect that Princes, shocked by this method of consecrating the royal back, would refuse to join the ranks. Today they would not succeed: there is no descendant of Charlemagne who would accept being whipped for three days in order to obtain the crown of Yvetot.
I have met the Emperor of Austria’ brother, the Duke of Würzburg; he sang very agreeably in Francis I’s gallery at Fontainebleau, at the Empress Josephine’s concerts.
Schwartz
was detained for two hours at the passport bureau. Left, with my horseless
vehicle, in front of a church, I entered: I prayed with the Christian
congregation, who represent the old society in the new. A procession left to
make a circuit of the church; if only I were a monk in the ruins of
When the first seeds of religion germinated in my soul, I bloomed, as virgin earth, freed from its brambles, bears its first crops. A cold and arid North Wind rises and the ground is parched. The sky takes pity on it; it grants its cool dew; then the North Wind blows again. That alternation of doubt and faith has long made my life a mixture of despair and ineffable joy. My good and saintly mother, pray to Jesus Christ for me: more than other men your son needs redemption.
I left Würzburg at four and took the road to Mannheim. Entering the Duchy of Baden,
through a village which was in the midst of celebrations, a drunken man grasped
my hand shouting: ‘Long live, the
Emperor!’ Everything that has happened since the Fall of Napoleon has not
occurred as far as
The nearer I came to
At Bischofsheim, where I dined, a pretty curiosity appeared at my grand repast: a swallow, truly Procne with her reddened throat, she came to perch at my open window, on the iron bracket that supported the sign of the Golden Sun; then she uttered the sweetest song in the world, regarding me with a look of recognition and without showing the least fear. I am never sorry to be woken by the daughter of Pandion; I have never called her a babbler as Anacreon does; I have always, on the contrary, welcomed her return with the children’s song from the Isle of Rhodes: ‘She comes, she comes, the swallow comes, bringing fine weather and lovely days! Open your doors, never scorn her, the swallow.’
‘François,’ said my
table-guest in Bischofscheim, ‘my great-great-grandmother lived at Combourg, beneath the eaves of the tower
roof; you kept her company every autumn, in the reeds by the lake, when you
dreamed at evening with your sylph. She flew around your native cliffs the very
day you embarked for
– ‘Alas, dear swallow, who could know my
story better than you, you are extremely kind; but I am a poor bird in moult,
and my feathers will not renew; so I cannot fly with you. Too weighed down by
sorrows and years, it would be impossible for you to carry me. And then, where
would we go? Spring and fair climes are no longer my season. Love and the air
are yours, earth and loneliness mine. You are going; may the dew refresh your
wings! May a hospitable spar offer itself to your weary flight, as you cross
the
3rd and 4th of June 1833.
I myself was on my way overland a little after the swallow had appeared. The night was cloudy; the moon swam, dim and waning, among the clouds; my eyes, half-shut, closed while gazing at her; I felt as though I was expiring in the mysterious light which illuminates the shades: ‘I experienced a quiet despondency, precursor of the last repose.’ (Manzoni)
I stopped at Wiesenbach: a solitary inn, in a narrow cultivated valley between two wooded hills. A German from Brunswick, a traveller like myself, hearing my name pronounced, approached me. He grasped my hand, and spoke to me about my works; his wife, he said, learnt to read French by studying Le Génie du Christianisme. He commented endlessly on my astonishing youthfulness. ‘But,’ he added, ‘my judgement is at fault; from your recent works I ought to have believed you to be as young as you appear there.’
My life has been involved with so many events that I possess, in my readers’ minds, the antiquity of those same events. I often talk about my grey hair: a calculated move on the part of my self-esteem, so that on seeing me people cry: ‘Oh, he is not so very old!’ People are comfortable with their white hair: they can boast of it; to glorify oneself for having black hair would be in very bad taste: a great subject for a triumph to be as your mother made you! But to have the look of the age, misfortune and wisdom you have acquired, that is fine! My little ruse sometimes succeeded. Lately a priest expressed the desire to meet me; he remained silent on seeing me; at last recovering his speech, he cried: ‘Oh, my dear sir, you will battle for the faith for ages yet!’
One day, passing through
Lyons, a lady wrote to me; she begged me to
grant a place in my carriage to her daughter and escort her to
At
I have no idea what the German traveller might have said about me to his wife, or whether he would have hastened to disabuse her of my dilapidation. I fear the disadvantages of possessing dark hair and white hair, and of being neither young nor a sage. Moreover, I was scarcely in the mood for coquetry in Wiesenbach; a gloomy northerly moaned beneath the doors and through the corridors of the hostelry: when the wind blows, I am no more amorous than it.
From Wiesenbach to Heidelberg, you follow the course of the
Approaching
A triumphal arch of red
stone announces the entrance to
It is otherwise (without
counting the sunlight) with the monuments of
In
On exit from
Entering Mannheim you pass through hop fields: their long dry poles were as yet only adorned to a third of their height with the climbing plants; Julian the Apostate made a pretty epigram against beer; the Abbé de La Bletterie has imitated it with a degree of elegance:
‘You are naught but a false Bacchus…
I bear witness to the true.
…………………………………………
Let
the
In default of the grape employ the ears
Of Ceres whose son he cheers:
Long live the son of Semele!’
Orchards, with walks
shaded with willows on every side, form the verdant suburbs of
3rd and 4th of June 1833.
I crossed the
On the other side of the
In travelling through
the
The plain between the
Further on I saw a sad sight: a wood of six-foot pine saplings cut and tied for faggots, a forest cut unripe. I have spoken about the cemetery at Lucerne: there the children’s sepulchres are squeezed together, apart. I have never felt more deeply the desire to end my life, to die beneath the guardianship of a friendly hand applied to my heart, as a test, when they say: ‘It no longer beats.’ At the edge of my grave I would like to be able to look back with satisfaction on my numerous years, as a Pontiff arriving at the sanctuary blesses the long train of priests who will serve as his cortege.
Louvois set the
On the heights of Durkheim, the premier rampart of the Gauls
on this bank of the
Not far from Durkheim are the ruins of an abbey. The monks enclosed in that retreat had a fine view of the armies circling at their feet; they gave good hospitality to the soldiers; there, some crusader ended his life, changing his helm for a hood; there lived passions that summoned silence and repose before the last repose and the final silence. Did they find what they sought? These ruins will not tell.
After the debris of the sanctuary of peace comes the litter of a den of war, the razed bastions, mantlets, curtain-walls, and emplacements of a fortress. The ramparts are crumbling like the cloisters. The castle was sited in a vulnerable pass as a defence against the enemy: it has not prevented time and death from passing by.
From Durkheim to Frankenstein, the road threads its way through a valley so narrow that it barely allows access for a vehicle; the trees descending from the opposite embankments meet and embrace in the ravine. Between Messenia and Arcadia, I followed similar valleys, to the better track nearby: Pan knew nothing of bridges and highways.
Flowering broom and a
jay brought back memories of
The inn at Frankenstein is set in a mountain meadow, watered by a brook. The post-master speaks French; his young sister, or wife, or daughter is charming. He complains about being Bavarian; he busies himself with exploiting the forests; he reminded me of an American timber-man.
At Kaiserslautern, which I entered at
night as I had Bamberg, I traversed a
region of dreams: what did all those sleeping inhabitants see in their sleep?
If I had the time, I would compose the history of their dreams; nothing would
have recalled me to earth if two quails had not called from one cage to
another. In the fields in Germany, between Prague and Mannheim, one only meets
with crows, larks and sparrows; but the towns are full of nightingales,
warblers, thrushes and quails; plaintive prisoners of both sexes whom you greet
at the bars of their gaol as you pass. The windows are embellished with
carnations, mignonettes, roses and jasmine. The Northern races have the tastes
of a different clime; they love the arts and music: the Germans went to seek
the vine in
The coachman changing
his jacket alerted me, on Tuesday the 4th of June, at Saarbruck, that I was entering
A few more hours, and my native land will once more quiver under my feet. What shall I find? For three weeks I have known nothing of my friends’ words or actions. Three weeks! A long stretch of time for a man, whom an instant can snatch away, for an empire which three days can overturn! And my prisoner of Blaye, what has become of her? Shall I be able to hand her the message she awaits? If the person of any ambassador ought to be sacred, it should be mine; my diplomatic career was rendered holy in proximity to the Head of the Church; it completed its sanctification in proximity to that of an unfortunate monarch: I have negotiated a new family pact between the descendants of the Béarnais; I have fetched and carried messages between prison and exile, exile and prison.
4th and 5th of June 1833.
Crossing the border which separates the territory of Saarbruck from that of Forbach, France did not show herself to me at her most brilliant: first an amputee, then another man crawling along on hands and knees, dragging his legs after him like two twisted tails or dead snakes; then in a cart appeared two old women, blackened, wrinkled, the vanguard of French womanhood. There was something to turn the Prussian army.
But afterwards I encountered a fine young foot-soldier with a young girl; the soldier was pushing the girls’ wheelbarrow in front of him, while she carried the trooper’s pipe and sabre. Further on another young girl held the handle of a plough, while an old ploughman prodded the oxen; further on an old man begging for a blind child; further on a wayside cross. In a hamlet, a dozen children’s heads, at the window of an unfinished house, resembled a group of angels in glory. Behold a little boy of five or six, sitting on the threshold of a cottage; bare-headed, blond-haired, with a dirty visage, pulling a face because of the cold breeze; his white shoulders emerging from a torn canvas smock, his arms crossed over his legs hunched towards his chest, watching everything going on around with birdlike curiosity; Raphael would have sketched him, I wanted to take him to his mother.
Entering Forbach, a troop of trained dogs appeared: the two largest were hitched to the costume-wagon; five or six more with varying tails, muzzles, waists and coats followed the baggage, each with a piece of bread in its mouth. Two grave looking trainers, one carrying a big drum, the other carrying nothing at all, led the band. Come, my friends, make a tour of the earth with me, so as to learn how to comprehend the nations. You hold as great a place in the world as I; you like the dogs of my species well enough. Present your paw to Diana, Mirza and Pax, hat over your ear, sword at your side, tail in the air between the wings of your coat; dance for a bone or a blow from a foot as we men do; but don’t fall flat when you leap for the King!
Reader, suffer these arabesques; the hand that wrote them will do you no other ill; it is withered. Remember, as you read them, that they are only the capricious scrawls traced by a painter on the arch of his tomb.
At the customs post, an old clerk made a semblance of inspecting my calash. I had a hundred sous coin ready; he saw it in my hand but dared not take it in case his superiors were watching. He took off his helmet under the pretext of rummaging more freely, placing it on the cushion in front of me, saying, in a low voice: ‘In my helmet, please.’ Oh! The grand phrase! It contains the whole history of the human race; how often liberty, loyalty, devotion, friendship, love have said: ‘In my helmet, please!’ I will give that phrase to Béranger as a refrain for one of his songs.
I was struck, on entering Metz, by something I had not noticed in 1821; modern fortifications enveloping the Gothic fortifications: Guise and Vauban are two names rightly associated with one another.
Our years and our
memories are laid down in regular and parallel layers, at different depths of
our existence, deposited by the tides of time that pass over us in succession.
It was from
In 1821 Monsieur de Tocqueville, my brother’s
brother-in-law, was Prefect of the
I had not been in the inn at Metz a quarter of an hour when Baptiste appeared greatly agitated: with a deal of mystery he took a piece of white paper from his pocket in which a seal was wrapped; Monsieur le Duc de Bordeaux and Mademoiselle had entrusted this seal to him, telling him only to hand it to me on French soil. They had been anxious the whole night before my departure, fearing that the jeweller would not have time to complete the work.
The seal had three
facets: on one an anchor was engraved: on the second the two words that Henri
had said to me during our first interview: ‘Yes,
always!’ on the third the date of my arrival in
I enjoyed seeing Fabert’s house in
At Metz, those Barbarians our ancestors cut the throats of Romans surprised in the midst of festive debauchery; our own soldiers waltzed to the monastery of Alcobaça with the skeleton of Inès de Castro: tragedies and pleasures, crime and folly, fourteen centuries separate you, and yet you are utterly past, both one and the other. Eternity begun this moment is as ancient as eternity dated from the first death, the murder of Abel. Nevertheless men, during their ephemeral appearance on this earth, persuade themselves that they have left some trace behind: oh yes, ev