VOLUME VI

BOOK V 3-40

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

BOOK VI 41-76

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

BOOK VII 77-118

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

BOOK VIII 119-145

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

BOOK IX 146-198

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.

BOOK X 199-225

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
II. UNPUBLISHED FRAGMENTS OF THE MÉMOIRES D'OUTRE-TOMBE 236-247
III. THE LAST YEARS OF CHATEAUBRIAND 248
IV. THE TRANSLATOR'S SECOND NOTE 263

INDEX

Chateaubriand's Tomb
The Duchesse de Berry
The Duc and Duchesse d'angoulême
Louis Philippe
Adolphe Thiers
The Vicomtesse de Chateaubriand

[Pg 1]

Journal 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[Pg 2] the Éloge funèbre des officiers morts en 1741, addresses these words:

"Thou art no more, O sweet hope of my remaining days;
I have always beheld in thee the most unfortunate of men
and the most tranquil."

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.[Pg 3] Thy glances cross those of the stars and mingle with their rays.

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,
Des Thurmes Fahne jagt der Wind, schnell geht
Der Wolken Zug, die Mondeszichel wankt,
Und durch die Nacht zucht ungewisse Helle[3].

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
.    .    .    .    .    .    .
Denn er stand neben mir, wie meine Jugend,
Er machte mir das Wirkliche zum Traum[6].

Wallenstein retires to his place of rest:

Sieh, es ist Nacht geworden; auf dem Schloss
Ist's auch schon stille. Leucine, Kämmerling!
[Pg 5].    .    .    .    .    .    .
Ich denke einen langen Schlaf zu thun;
Denn dieser letzten Tage Qual war gross.
Sorgt, dass sie nicht zu zeitig mir erwecken[7].

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.

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:
Malheureux chevalier!
Quand il fut dans la lande,
A ouï les sings sonner[8].

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[Pg 6] 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,
Dans ce palais des arts, où les sons de ta voix
Contre les préjugés osaient se faire entendre,
Et de l'humanité faisaient parler les droits[9].

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,
Ta pitié contemplait, avec des yeux sereins,
Les fantômes changeants du songes de la vie,
Tant de rêves détruits, tant de projets si vains[10].

[Pg 7]

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,[Pg 8] 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.

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:

[Pg 9]

"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
De ne pouvoir plus suivre qu'elle[14].

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:

[Pg 10]

"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,
Javotte l'on me nomme,
Je vends, je donne, et bois gaîment
Mon vin et mon rogomme.
J'ai le pied leste et l'œil mutin,
Tin tin, tin tin, tin tin, tin tin,
R'lin lin tin[16].

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[Pg 11] 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.

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[Pg 12] 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 I^er, 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.

[Pg 13]

As I went towards France, the children became noisier in the hamlets, the postillions drove faster, life sprang up once more.

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[Pg 14] 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,[Pg 15] 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 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[Pg 16] 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[Pg 17] 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.

As one approaches Heidelberg, the bed of the Necker, strewn with rocks, widens. One sees the wharf of the town and the town itself, which wears a pleasant mien. The back-ground of the whole picture ends in a tall earthly horizon: it seems to bar the stream.

A red-brick triumphal arch marks the entrance to Heidelberg. To the left, on a hill, stand the ruins of a medieval castle. Apart from their picturesque effect and some popular traditions, the remains of the Gothic period interest only the nations whose work they are. Does a Frenchman trouble his head about the lords Palatine, the princesses Palatine, plump, white and blue-eyed though they may have been? One forgets them for St. Geneviève of Brabant[25]. Those modern ruins have nothing in common with modern nations, excepting their outward aspect of Christianity and their feudal character.

It is different, leaving out the sun, with the monuments of Greece and Italy; these belong to all nations: they commence their history; their inscriptions are written in languages known to all civilized men. The ruins even of renovated Italy possess a general interest, because they are stamped with the seal of the arts and the arts come within the public domain of society. A fresco by Domenichino[26] or Titian that becomes obliterated, a palace by Michael Angelo or Palladio[27] that crumbles throw the genius of all the centuries into mourning.

At Heidelberg, they show a tun of inordinate proportions, a drunkards' Coliseum in ruins: at least no Christian has lost his life in that amphitheatre of the Vespasians of the Rhine; his reason, yes: that is no great loss.

At the outlet of Heidelberg, the hills to the right and left of the Necker fall away, and one enters upon a plain. A winding embankment, raised a few feet above the level of the corn-fields, is delineated between two rows of cherry-trees[Pg 18] harshly treated by the wind and of walnut-trees "often by the wayfarers attacked[28]."

At the entrance to Mannheim, one drives through hop-vines, whose long, dry props were as yet decorated to only one third of their height by the climbing creeper. Julian the Apostate wrote a pretty epigram against beer; the Abbé de La Bletterie[29] imitated it with some elegance:

Tu n'es qu'un faux Bacchus ...
J'en atteste le véritable.
.      .      .      .      .    .    .
Que le Gaulois, pressé d'une soif éternelle
Au défaut de la grappe ait recours aux épis,
De Cérès qu'il vante le fils:
Vive le fils de Semèle[30].

A few orchards, some walks shaded by willow-trees of all sizes form a verdant suburb to Mannheim. The houses in the town have often only one storey above the ground-floor. The main street is wide and planted with trees in the middle: one more down-fallen city. I do not like false gold, and so I did not want any Mannheim gold; but I certainly have "Toulouse gold[31]," to judge by the disasters of my life: yet who has more than I respected the Temple of Apollo?

3 and 4 June 1833.

I crossed the Rhine at two o'clock in the afternoon. At the moment of passing, a steam-boat came up stream. What would Cæsar have said if he had met such a machine while he was building his bridge?

On the other side of the Rhine, opposite Mannheim, one finds Bavaria again, as a result of the odious slashings and jobbings of the Treaties of Paris, Vienna and Aix-la-Chapelle.[Pg 19] Every one cut out his share with scissors, without any regard for reason, humanity or justice, without troubling about the slice of population that fell into a pair of royal chops.

Driving through the Cisrhenan Palatinate, I reflected how this country had once formed a department of France, how white Gaul was girt about by the Rhine, the "blue sash" of Germany. Napoleon and the Republic before him had realized the dream of several of our kings, above all of Louis XIV. So long as we do not occupy our natural frontiers, there will be war in Europe, because the interest of self-preservation drives France to seize the boundaries necessary to her national independence. Here we have planted trophies to claim back in due season.

The plain between the Rhine and the Monts Tonnerre looks sad; earth and men seem to say that their fate is not settled, that they belong to no people; they appear to be expecting new invasions, as it were new river-floods. The Germans of Tacitus devastated great spaces on their frontiers and left them empty between these and their enemies. Woe to the border populations that till the battlefields on which the nations are to meet!

As I approached ——, I saw a sad sight: a wood of young fir-trees, five or six feet high, felled and bound into faggots, a forest mown like grass. I have spoken of the cemetery of Lucerne, where the children's burials throng on one side. I never felt more keenly the need to end my wanderings, to die under the protection of a friendly hand laid upon my heart to interrogate it, when they shall say:

"It has stopped beating."

From the edge of my tomb I would like to be able to cast back a glance of satisfaction over my many years, just as a pontiff, on reaching the sanctuary, blesses the long line of the priests who have served as his retinue.

Louvois[32] burnt down the Palatinate; unfortunately it was Turenne's hand that held the torch. The Revolution laid waste the same country, the witness and victim by turns of our aristocratic and plebeian struggles. It is enough to name the warriors to judge of the difference of the times: on the one side, Condé, Turenne, Créqui[33], Luxembourg,[Pg 20] La Force[34], Villars[35]; on the other, Kellermann, Hoche, Pichegru, Moreau. Let us deny none of our victories; military glories especially have known only enemies of France and held only one opinion: on the battle-field, honour and danger level all ranks. Our fathers called the blood that flowed from a non-mortal wound "volatile blood:" a phrase typical of the contempt for death natural to Frenchmen in every century. Institutions can alter nothing in this national genius. The soldiers who, after the death of Turenne[36], said, "Let the Pie loose, we shall encamp where she stops," would have been quite as good as Napoleon's grenadiers.

On the heights of Dunkheim, the first rampart of the Gauls on that side, one discovers the seats of camps and military positions to-day empty of soldiers: Burgundians, Franks, Goths, Huns, Suevi, so many waves of the Barbarian deluge, have by turns assailed those heights.

Not far from Dunkheim, one sees the remains of a monastery. The monks enclosed within that retreat had seen many armies passing round at their feet; they had shown hospitality to many warriors; there some crusader had ended his life, changed his helm for the frock; there were passions which called for silence and rest before the last rest and the last silence. Did they find what they sought? Those ruins will not tell.

After the remnants of the sanctuary of peace come the fragments of the lair of war: the demolished bastions, mantlets, curtains, trunnions of a fortress. Ramparts crumble even as cloisters. The castle was ambushed in a rugged path to close it to the enemy: it did not keep time and death from passing.

From Dunkheim to Frankenstein, the road pushes through a valley so narrow that it will scarcely hold a carriage way; the trees descending from two opposite slopes join and embrace in the ravine. I have followed similar dales between Messenia and Arcadia, but for the good road: Pan knew nothing about civil engineering. Flowering broom and a[Pg 21] jay carried me back to the recollection of Brittany; I remember the pleasure which the cry of that bird gave me in the mountains of Judea. My memory is a panorama; there the most varied sites and skies, with their scorching sun or their foggy horizon, come to paint themselves on the same canvas.

The inn at Frankenstein is placed in a meadow in the mountains, watered by a stream. The postmaster speaks French; his young sister, or his wife, or his daughter is charming. He complains of being a Bavarian; he busies himself with the cultivation of forests; to me he represented an American planter.

At Kaiserslautern, where I arrived at night as at Bamberg, I passed through the region of dreams: what did all those sleeping inhabitants see in their slumbers? If I had time, I would tell the story of their visions. Nothing would have reminded me of earth, if two quails had not called to one another from cage to cage. In the fields in Germany, from Prague to Mannheim, one meets only carrion crows, sparrows and larks; but the towns are full of nightingales, warblers, thrushes, quails: plaintive prisoners, male and female, who greet you at the bars of their gaol when you pass. The windows are decked with pinks, mignonette, roses, jasmine. The northern nations have the tastes of another clime; they love the arts and music: the Germans came to fetch the vine in Italy; their sons would gladly repeat the invasion to conquer birds and flowers in the same spots.

The change in the post-boy's jacket told me, on Tuesday the 4th of June, at Saarbrück, that I was entering Prussia. I saw a squadron of hussars ride past under the window of my inn; they looked very spirited: I was as spirited as they; I would cheerfully have helped to give those gentry a drubbing, even though a lively feeling of respect makes me attached to the Prussian Royal Family, even though the outbursts of the Prussians in Paris were but reprisals for Napoleon's brutality in Berlin; but, if history has the time to enter into the cold justice which connects consequences with their origins, the man who witnesses living facts is carried away by those facts, without going back to the past to seek the causes from which they sprang and which excuse them. My country has done me great harm; but how gladly I would offer up my blood for her! Oh, what strong heads, what consummate politicians, above all, what good Frenchmen were those negociators of the Treaties of 1815!

[Pg 22]

A few hours yet, and my native soil will once more quiver beneath my steps. What shall I hear? Since three weeks I have known nothing of what my friends have been saying and doing. Three weeks! A long space of time for man whom one moment carries away, for empires which three days suffice to overthrow! And my prisoner of Blaye: what has become of her? Shall I be able to convey to her the answer which she is awaiting? If ever the person of an ambassador should be sacred, it is mine; my diplomatic career was consecrated near the Head of the Church; it has been completely sanctified near an unfortunate monarch: I have negociated a new family compact among the children of the Bearnese; I have carried and brought back its deeds from prison to exile and from exile to prison.

4 and 5 June.

As I passed the border which separates the territory of Saarbrück from that of Forbach, France did not show herself to me in a brilliant manner: first, a cripple seated in a wooden bowl; then, another man who crawled on his hands and knees, dragging his legs after him like two crooked tails or two dead snakes; next, appeared, in a cart, two swarthy, wrinkled old women, the van-guard of the women of France. It was enough to make one go back again to the Prussian Army.

But presently I found a handsome young soldier walking with a young girl; the soldier was pushing the young girl's wheel-barrow before him and she was carrying the trooper's pipe and sword. Further on, another young girl holding the tail of a plough and an aged ploughman goading the oxen; further on, an old man begging for a blind child; further on, a cross. In a hamlet, a dozen children's heads, at the window of an unfinished house, looked like a group of angels in a glory. Here is a tiny girl of five or six, sitting on the threshold of a cottage-door, with bare head, fair hair, a dirty face, pulling a little grimace because of a cold wind blowing; with her two white shoulders peeping from a torn frock, her arms crossed over her knees drawn up close to her chest, looking at what was going on around her with the curiosity of a bird, Raphael would have sketched her; as for me, I felt inclined to steal her from her mother.

At the entrance to Forbach, a troop of learned dogs appeared: the two biggest harnessed to the costume-wagon; five or six others of different tails, noses, sizes and colours[Pg 23] followed the baggage, each with its piece of bread in its mouth. Two grave instructors, one carrying a big drum, the other carrying nothing, led the band. Go, my friends, go round the world as I have done, in order to learn to know the nations. You have your place in the world just as much as I; you are quite as good as the dogs of my kind. Give a paw to Diane, to Mirza, to Pax, with your hat on your ear, your sword by your side, your tail sticking out like a trumpet between the skirts of your coat: dance for a bone, or for a kick, as we men do; but do not go making the mistake of jumping for the King!

Reader, bear with these arabesques; the hand that traced them will never do you any other harm: it is withered. Remember, when you see them, that they are only the freakish scrolls drawn by a painter on the vault of his tomb.

At the custom-house, an elderly junior clerk made a pretense at examining my calash. I had got a five-franc piece ready; he saw it in my hand, but dared not take it, because of his superiors, who were watching him. He took off his cap, on the pretext of searching me better, laid it on the seat in front of me and said, in an under-tone:

"In my cap, please."

Oh, what a great phrase! It comprises the history of the human race; how often have liberty, loyalty, friendship, devotion, love said:

"In my cap, please!"

I shall give that phrase to Béranger for the chorus of a song.

I was struck, on entering Metz, by something which I had not noticed in 1821; the modern fortifications surround the Gothic fortifications: Guise and Vauban[37] are two names that go well together.

Our years and our memories lie in regular and parallel strata at different depths of our life, deposited by the waves of time that pass over us in succession. It was from Metz, in 1792, that the column issued which was engaged under the walls of Thionville with our little corps of Emigrants. I am returning from my pilgrimage to the retreat of the banished Prince whom I served in his first exile. I then gave him a little of my blood; I have just been weeping with him: at my age, we have little left but tears.

[Pg 24]

In 1821, M. de Tocqueville[38], my brother's brother-in-law, was Prefect of the Moselle. The trees, no thicker than laths, which M. de Tocqueville planted, in 1820, at the gates of Metz now give shade. There is a scale to measure our days by; but man is not like wine, he does not improve when reckoned by vintages. The ancients used to steep roses in their Falernian; when an amphora of a hundred-year-old consulate was uncorked, it perfumed the banquet. The clearest intelligence might be mingled with old years, and no one would be tempted to get tipsy with it.

I had not been a quarter of an hour in the inn at Metz, when behold Baptiste coming in a great state of excitement: mysteriously he drew from his pocket a white paper parcel, containing a seal; M. le Duc de Bordeaux and Mademoiselle had charged him with that seal, telling him to give it me "only on French soil." They had been very anxious the whole night before my departure, fearing lest the jeweller would not have time to finish the work.

The seal has three faces: on one is engraved an anchor; on the second, the two words which Henry said to me at our first interview: "Yes, always!" on the third, the date of my arrival in Prague. The brother and sister begged me to wear the seal "for love of them." The mystery of this present, the order given by the two exiled children to hand me the token of their memory "only on French soil" filled my eyes with tears. The seal shall never leave me; I shall wear it "for love of Louise and Henry."

I would have liked to see, at Metz, the house of Fabert[39], the common soldier who became a marshal of France and who received the collar of the Orders, his nobility tracing its origin only to his sword.

The Barbarians our fathers, at Metz, butchered the Romans[40] surprised in the midst of the debauchery of a feast; our soldiers have waltzed, in the monastery of Alcobaça, with the skeleton of Iñez de Castro[41]: sorrows and pleasures, crimes[Pg 25] and follies, fourteen centuries separate you and you are all alike completely past. The eternity commenced just now is as old as the eternity dating from the first death, the murder of Abel. Nevertheless, men, during their ephemeral appearance on this globe, persuade themselves that they are leaving some trace behind them: why, good Heaven, yes, every fly has its shadow!

I left Metz and passed through Verdun, where I was so unhappy and where Carrel's lonely friend lives to-day[42]. I skirted the heights of Valmy; I do not care to speak of it any more than of Jemmapes: I should be afraid lest I should find a crown there.

Châlons reminded me of a great weakness of Bonaparte, who banished beauty there[43]. Peace be with Châlons, which tells me that I still have friends!

At Château-Thierry, I found my idol, La Fontaine. It was the hour of the Angelus: Jean's wife was no longer there, and Jean had returned to Madame de La Sablière[44].

As I grazed the wall of Meaux Cathedral, I repeated Bossuet's[45] own words to him:

"Man reaches his tomb dragging behind him the long chain of his hopes deceived."

In Paris, I passed the quarters in which I had lived with my sisters in my youth; next, the Palace of Justice, commemorative of my trial; next, the Prefecture of Police, which served me as a prison. I have returned at last to my hospice, thus winding off the skein of my days. The frail insect of the sheep-folds drops at the end of a silken thread to the ground, where the foot of some ewe will soon crush it.

Paris, Rue d'Enfer, 6 June 1833.

On alighting from my carriage and before going to bed, I wrote a letter to Madame la Duchesse de Berry to give her an account of my mission. My return had put the police into a flutter; the telegraph announced it to the Prefect of Bordeaux and the commandant of the fortress of Blaye:[Pg 26] orders were given to redouble the measures of supervision; it appears even that Madame was put on board before the day fixed for her departure[46]. My letter missed Her Royal Highness by a few hours and was taken to her in Italy.

If Madame had made no declaration; if even, after that declaration, she had denied the consequences of it; much more if, on arriving in Sicily, she had protested against the part which she had been compelled to play in order to escape from her gaolers, France and Europe would have believed her word, so greatly was Philip's Government under suspicion. All the Judases would have suffered punishment for the spectacle which they gave to the world in the smoking-room at Blaye. But Madame would not consent to retain a political character by denying her marriage; what one gains, by a lie, in reputation for cleverness one loses in consideration: any former sincerity which you may have professed hardly avails to defend you. When a man who enjoys public esteem demeans himself, he is no longer sheltered within his name, but behind his name. Madame, by her admission, escaped from the gloom of her prison: the female eagle, like the male eagle, has need of liberty and sunlight.

M. le Duc de Blacas, in Prague, had announced to me the formation of a council of which I was to be the head, with M. the Chancellor[47] and M. le Marquis de Latour-Maubourg: I was going to become alone (still according to M. le Duc) the Council of Charles X., absent on some business. I was shown a plan: the machinery was very complicated; M. de Blacas' work retained a few arrangements made by the Duchesse de Berry, when she, on her side, had laid claim to organizing the State by coming madly, but bravely, to place herself at the head of her Kingdom in partibus. The ideas of that adventurous woman were not at all lacking in good sense: she had divided France into four great military governments, chosen the commanders, appointed the officers, embodied the soldiers and, without troubling whether all her people had joined the flag, she would herself have hastened to carry it; she did not doubt but that she would find in the fields St. Martin's[48] cope or the Oriflamme, Galaor[49] or Bayard. Blows of battle-axes and bullets from fire-locks, retreats into the forests, perils in the homes of a few faithful friends, caves,[Pg 27] castles, cottages, escalades: all this suited and delighted Madame. There is something eccentric, original and captivating in her character that will make her live. The future will take her as it pleases, in spite of correct persons and sober-minded cowards.

I should have brought to the Bourbons, if they had sent for me, the popularity which I enjoyed by my two-fold claim as a writer and a statesman. I could have no doubt of that popularity, for I had received the confidences of every shade of opinion. People had not confined themselves to generalities; each had pointed out to me what he desired in case of eventualities; many had confessed their genius to me and rendered obvious to me the place for which they were eminently fitted. Everybody, friends and enemies alike, sent me to be about the person of the Duc de Bordeaux. By the different combinations of my opinions and my fortunes, by the ravages of death, which had successively carried away the men of my generation, I seemed to be the only one left for the choice of the Royal Family.

I might feel tempted by the part awarded to me: there was something calculated to flatter my vanity, as an unknown servant and rejected by the Bourbons, in the idea of being the support of their House; of holding out my hand to Philip Augustus, St. Louis, Charles V., Louis XII., Francis I., Henry IV. and Louis XIV. in their tombs; of protecting with my feeble renown the blood, the crown and the shades of so many great men: I alone against faithless France and dishonoured Europe.

But to arrive at that what should I have had to do? What the commonest mind would have done: fawn upon the Court of Prague, overcome its antipathies, conceal my ideas from it until I was in a position to develop them.

And, certainly, those ideas went far: if I had been the young Prince's governor, I should have striven to gain his confidence. If he had recovered his crown, I should have advised him to wear it only to lay it aside at the proper time. I would have liked to see the Capets disappear in a manner worthy of their greatness. What a fine, what an illustrious day that would have been when, after setting up religion, perfecting the Constitution of the State, enlarging the rights of citizens, breaking the last fetters of the press, emancipating the commons, destroying monopoly, striking the balance between wages and labour, consolidating property and restricting its abuses, reviving industry, reducing taxation,[Pg 28] re-establishing our honour among the nations, extending our frontiers and thus securing our independence against the foreigner; when, after accomplishing all these things, my pupil would have said to the nation solemnly called together:

"Frenchmen, your education is finished with mine. My first ancestor, Robert the Strong[50], died for you, and my father asked for mercy for the man who took his life. My sires raised and formed France through barbarism; now the march of events, the progress of civilization compel you to dispense with a protector. I am descending the throne; I confirm all the benefits of my fathers, while releasing you from your oaths to the Monarchy."

Say if that end would not have surpassed all that is most wonderful in that dynasty! Say if ever a magnificent enough temple could have been raised to its memory! Compare that end with that which the decrepit sons of Henry IV. would make, stubbornly pinning themselves to a throne swamped by democracy, trying to preserve their power with the aid of measures of police, measures of violence, methods of corruption, and dragging on for a few short moments a degraded existence!

"Let them make my brother King," said the child Louis XIII., after the death of Henry IV., "I do not want to be King."

Henry V. has no other brother than his people: let him make it King.

To arrive at this resolution, chimerical though it may seem, one would have to feel the greatness of one's race, not because one was descended from an old stock, but because one was the heir of men through whom France became powerful, enlightened and civilized.

Now, as I have just said, the way to be called upon to set to work on that plan would have been to wheedle the weaknesses of Prague, to raise magpies with the child of the throne like Luynes[51], to flatter Concini[52] like Richelieu. I had[Pg 29] begun well at Carlsbad; a little note of submission and gossip would have forwarded my business. To bury myself alive in Prague was no easy matter, it is true; for not only should I have had to overcome the repugnance of the Royal Family, but the hatred of the foreigners as well. My ideas are odious to the Cabinets; they know that I detest the Treaties of Vienna, that I would make war at any price to give France the necessary frontiers and to restore the balance of power in Europe.

However, by giving signs of repentance, by weeping, by expiating my sins of national honour, by beating my breast, by admiring for my penance the genius of the blockheads who govern the world, I might perhaps have been able to crawl into the Baron de Damas' place; then, suddenly standing erect, I should have flung away my crutches.

But, alas, where is my ambition? Where is my faculty of dissimulation? Where is my art of enduring constraint and boredom? Where is my capacity for attaching importance to anything whatsoever? I took up my pen two or three times, I began to draft two or three letters in obedience to Madame la Dauphine, who had ordered me to write to her. Soon, revolting against myself, I wrote at one dash and after my own manner the letter which was to break my neck. I knew it quite well; I weighed the results quite well: it matters little. And to-day, now that the thing is done, I am delighted at having sent the whole business to the devil and flung my "governorship " out of so wide a window. I shall be told:

"Could you not have expressed the same truths by stating them less crudely?"

Yes, yes, by diluting, beating about the bush, employing honeyed words, bleating, quavering:

Son œil tout pénitent ne pleure qu'eau béniste[53].

I cannot do that.

Here is the letter, abridged, however, by almost half its length, which will make the hair of our drawing-room diplomatists rise up in dismay: the Duc de Choiseul was somewhat of my humour; therefore he spent the end of his end at Chanteloup:

[Pg 30]

After writing this letter, I resumed the habits of my life: I found my old priests again, the lonely corner in my garden, which seemed to me much finer than Count Chotek's garden, my Boulevard d'Enfer, my Cimetière de l'Ouest, my Memoirs reminding me of my past days and, above all, the select little society of the Abbaye-aux-Bois. The kindness of a serious friendship makes the thoughts abound; a few moments of the commerce of the soul suffice for the needs of my nature; I afterwards make up for this expenditure of intelligence by twenty-two hours of inaction and sleep.

Paris, Rue d'Enfer, 25 August 1833.

While I was beginning to breathe, I saw one morning the traveller enter my house who had handed a packet from me to Madame la Duchesse de Berry at Palermo; he brought me this reply from the Princess:

[Pg 39]

Madame de Berry refers in her letter to a little manifesto[59] which was issued after she left Blaye and which was of no great value, because it said neither yes nor no. The letter, on the other hand, is curious as an historical document, since it reveals the feelings of the Princess towards her kinsmen-gaolers and points to the sufferings endured by her. Marie-Caroline's reflections are just; she expresses them with spirit and pride. Again, one likes to see that courageous and devoted mother, whether fettered or free, constantly occupied with the interests of her son. There, at least in that heart, are youth and life to be found. It cost me an effort once more to undertake a long journey; but I was too much touched by the confidence of that poor Princess to refuse to obey her wishes and to abandon her on the high-road. M. Jauge came to the assistance of my poverty, as he had done the first time.

I took the field again with a dozen volumes scattered[Pg 40] around me. Now, while I was peregrinating da capo in the Prince de Bénévent's calash, he was eating in London in the manger of his fifth master, in expectation of the accident which will send him, perhaps, to sleep at Westminster, among saints, kings and wise men: a burial to which his religion, fidelity and virtues have justly entitled him.

[Pg 41]

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.

7 to 10 September, on the road.

I left Paris on the 3rd of September 1833, taking the Simplon Road through Pontarlier.

Salins, lately burnt to the ground, had been built up again; I preferred it with its Spanish tumble-down ugliness[61]. The Abbé d'Olivet[62] was born on the banks of the Furieuse; Voltaire's first master, who received his pupil at the Academy, had nothing in common with the paternal stream.

The great storm which caused so many shipwrecks in the Channel assailed me on the Jura. I arrived at night on the "wastes" of the Lévier stage. The caravanserai built of wooden planks, brilliantly lighted and filled with travellers taking shelter suggested not a little the keeping of a witches'[Pg 42] sabbath. I refused to stop; they brought the horses. When it came to closing the lanterns of the calash, a great difficulty arose; the hostess, an extremely pretty young witch, lent a hand, laughing. She took care to hold her candle-end, protected by a glass tube, close up to her face, so as to be seen.

At Pontarlier, my old host, a great Legitimist during his life-time, was dead. I supped at the inn called the National: a good omen for the newspaper of that name. Armand Carrel is the chief of those men who did not lie during the Days of July.

The Castle of Joux defends the approaches to Pontarlier; it has seen two men succeed one another in its donjons, both of whom the Revolution will bear in memory: Mirabeau and Toussaint-Louverture[63], the black Napoleon, imitated and killed by the white Napoleon.

The hurricane increased: I encountered its greatest violence between Pontarlier and Orbe. It increased the size of the mountains, rang the bells in the hamlets, drowned the roar of the torrents in that of the thunder, and swept down howling upon my calash, like a heavy squall on the sail of a ship. When low-lying lightning-flashes cracked across the heaths, one saw flocks of sheep stand motionless, their heads hidden between their fore-feet, presenting their tails tucked in and their shaggy quarters to the showers of rain and hail beaten up by the wind. The voice of the man calling the time from the summit of a mountain belfry sounded like the cry of the last hour.

At Lausanne, all was smiling-again: I had often visited that town before; I no longer know a soul there.

At Bex, while they were harnessing to my carriage the horses which had perhaps drawn the bier of Madame de Custine, I stood leaning against the door of the house where my hostess of Fervacques died. She had been celebrated[Pg 43] before the revolutionary tribunal for her long hair. In Rome, I have seen beautiful fair hair taken from a tomb.

In the Rhone Valley, I met an almost naked little girl, dancing with her goat; she asked for alms of a rich young man, well-dressed, who was posting past with a laced courier in front and two footmen sitting behind the glittering chariot. And you imagine that such a distribution of property can exist? You think that it does not justify popular risings?

Sion brings back to me an epoch in my life: after being secretary of embassy in Rome, I was appointed Minister Plenipotentiary to the Valais by the First Consul[64].

At Brigg, I left the Jesuits struggling to raise up again what cannot be raised up[65]: uselessly established at the foot of time, they are crushed beneath its mass, like their monastery beneath the weight of the mountains.

This was the tenth time of my crossing the Alps: I had told them all that I had to tell them in the different years and different circumstances of my life. Ever regretting what he has lost, ever rapt in memories, ever marching towards the grave in tears and isolation: that is man.

The images borrowed from mountain scenery have particularly sensible relations with our fortunes: this one passes in silence, like the outpouring of a spring; that one attaches a noise to his course, like a torrent; that other flings away his existence, like a cataract that appeals and disappears.

The Simplon already wears an abandoned air, even as the life of Napoleon; even as that life, it has nothing left but its glory: it is too great a work to belong to the little States upon which it has devolved. Genius has no family; its inheritance falls by right of escheat to the common crowd, which nibbles at it and plants a cabbage where a cedar grew.

The last time that I crossed the Simplon, I was going as Ambassador to Rome; I fell; the herds whom I had left on the top of the mountain are there yet: snows, clouds, tumble-down rocks, pine-forests and the turmoil of[Pg 44] waters incessantly encompass the hut threatened by the avalanche. The most living person in those chalets is the goat. Why die? I know. Why be born? I cannot tell. Still, admit that the foremost sufferings, moral sufferings, the torments of the mind are wanting among the dwellers in the region of the chamois and the eagles. When I went to the Congress of Verona, in 1822, the station on the peak of the Simplon was kept by a Frenchwoman: in the middle of a cold night and of a squall of wind which prevented me from seeing her, she talked to me of the Scala in Milan; she was expecting ribbons from Paris: her voice, the only thing about that woman that I know, was very sweet through the darkness and the gale.

The descent to Domo d'Ossola appeared to me more and more wonderful; a certain play of light and shadow increased its magic. One was caressed by a little breath which our old tongue called the aure: a sort of early morning-breeze, bathed and scented with the dew. I once more beheld the Lago Maggiore, on which I was so melancholy in 1828 and of which I caught sight from the Valley of Bellinzona in 1832. At Sesto-Calende, Italy presented herself: a blind Paganini sang and played the fiddle at the edge of the lake as I crossed the Ticino.

On entering Milan, I again saw the magnificent avenue of tulip-trees of which no one speaks; the travellers apparently take them for plane-trees. I protest against this silence, in memory of my savages: it is surely the least that America can do, to give shade to Italy. One might also plant magnolias at Genoa, mixed with palm-trees and orange-trees. But who dreams of such a thing? Who thinks of beautifying the earth? That care is left to God. The governments are occupied with their fall, and men prefer a card-board tree on the stage of a fantoccini theatre to the magnolia-tree whose roses would scent the cradle of Christopher Columbus.

In Milan, the annoyance about the passports is as stupid as it is brutal. I did not pass through Verona without emotion; it was there that my active political career had its real beginning. My mind thought on what the world might have become if that career had not been interrupted by a contemptible jealousy.

Verona, so lively in 1822, thanks to the presence of the sovereigns of Europe, had, in 1833, returned to silence; the Congress had passed as completely in its lonely streets as the[Pg 45] Court of the Scaligers and the Senate-house of the Romans. The arenas whose benches I had seen filled with a hundred thousand spectators yawned deserted; the buildings which I had admired under the illuminations embroidered on their architecture wrapped themselves, grey and bare as they were, in an atmosphere of rain.

How many ambitions were stirring among the actors at Verona! How many destinies of nations were examined, discussed and weighed! Let us call the roll of those wooers of dreams; let us open the book of the Day of Wrath: Liber scriptus proferetur[66]; monarchs, princes, ministers, here is your ambassador, your colleague returned to his post: where are you? Answer.

The Emperor of Russia, Alexander?

"Dead."

The Emperor of Austria, Francis I.[67]?

"Dead."

The King of France, Louis XVIII.?

"Dead."

The King of France, Charles X.[68]?

"Dead."

The King of England, George IV.?

"Dead."

The King of Naples, Ferdinand I.?

"Dead."

The Duke of Tuscany[69]?

"Dead."

Pope Pius VII.?

"Dead."

The King of Sardinia, Charles Felix[70]?

"Dead."

The Duc de Montmorency, French Foreign Minister?

"Dead."

Mr. Canning, English Foreign Minister?

"Dead."

[Pg 46]

M. de Bernstorff, Prussian Foreign Minister?

"Dead."

M. de Gentz, of the Austrian Chancery?

"Dead."

Cardinal Consalvi, Secretary of State to His Holiness?

"Dead."

M. de Serre, my colleague on the Congress[71]?

"Dead."

M. d'Aspremont, my secretary of embassy?

"Dead."

Count Neipperg, the husband of Napoleon's widow?

"Dead."

Countess Tolstoi?

"Dead."

Her tall young son?

"Dead."

My host in the Lorenzi Palace?

"Dead."

If so many men inscribed with me on the roll of the Congress have had their names inserted in the obituary; if nations and royal dynasties have perished; if Poland has succumbed; if Spain is again annihilated; if I have been to Prague to enquire after the flying remnants of the great House whose representative I was at Verona: what, then, are earthly things? No one remembers the speeches which we made round the table of Prince Metternich; but, O power of genius, no traveller will ever hear the lark sing in the fields of Verona without recalling Shakespeare! Each of us, by digging to different depths in his memory, finds another layer of dead, other extinct sentiments, other illusions which uselessly he suckled, like those of Herculaneum, at the breast of Hope.

On leaving Verona, I was obliged to change my measure to compute the time that was past; I was going back twenty-seven years, for I had not made the journey from Verona to Venice since 1806. At Brescia, at Vicenza, at Padua, I passed by the walls of Palladio, Scamozzi[72], Franceschini, Nicholas of Pisa[73], Friar John.

The banks of the Brenta disappointed my hopes; they had remained more smiling in my imagination: the dykes raised[Pg 47] along the canal conceal the marches too much. Several villas have been demolished; but a few very elegant ones still remain. There, perhaps, lives Signor Pococurante[74], whom the city ladies with their sonnets disgusted, to whom the two pretty girls began to grow very indifferent, to whom music grew tiresome after half an hour, who thought Homer mortally tedious, who detested the pious. Æneas, the boy Ascanius, the silly King Latinus, the ill-bred Amata and the insipid Lavinia, who saw nothing extraordinary in Horace' journey to Brundusium and his account of his bad dinner, who declared that he never read Tully and still less Milton, that barbarian who spoiled Tasso's hell and the devil.

In spite of my semi-disappointment and many gods in the little gardens, I was charmed with the mulberry-trees, the orange-trees, the fig-trees and the softness of the air, I who, such a short time before, was travelling through the fir-groves of Germany and over the mountains of the Czechs, where the sun looks ill.

I arrived on the 10th of September, at break of day, at Fusina, which Philippe de Comines[76] and Montaigne call "Chaffousine." At half past ten, I had landed in Venice. My first care was to send to the post-office: there was nothing addressed to me direct, nor indirectly to Paolo; of Madame la Duchesse de Berry, no news at all. I wrote to Count Griffi, the Neapolitan Minister in Florence, to ask him to let me know the movements of Her Royal Highness.

Having everything in order, I resolved patiently to await the Princess: Satan sent me a temptation. I longed, at his diabolical suggestion, to stay alone, for a fortnight, at the Hôtel de l'Europe, to the detriment of the Legitimate Monarchy. I wished the august traveller bad roads, without reflecting that my restoration of King Henry V. might be delayed for half a month! Like Danton, I crave pardon for it of God and men.

[Pg 48]

Venice, Hôtel de l'Europe, 10 September 1833.

Salve, Italuni Regina....
. . . . .
Nec tu semper eris[77].

O d'Italia dolente
Eterno lumine....
Venezia[78]!

In Venice, one can imagine one's self on the deck of a superb galley lying at anchor, on the Bucentaur, where a feast is being given in your honour and from whose side you see wonderful things all around. My inn, the Hôtel de l'Europe, is situated at the entrance to the Grand Canal, opposite the Dogana di Mare, the Giudecca and San Giorgio Maggiore. When one goes up the Grand Canal, between its two rows of palaces, so marked by their centuries, so varied in architectural style, when one moves from the Piazza to the Piazzetta, when one contemplates the basilica and its domes, the Palace of the Doges, the Procuratie Nuove, the Zucca, the Torre dell' Orologio, the campanile of St Mark's and the Column of the Lion, all mingled with the sails and masts of the shipping, the movement of the crowd and the gondolas, the azure of the sky and sea, the freaks of a dream or the frolics of an Oriental imagination present nothing more fantastic. Sometimes Cicéri[79] paints and collects upon a canvas, for the illusions of the stage, monuments of all shapes, all times, all countries, all climates: it is still Venice.

Those double-gilt edifices, so profusely embellished by Giorgione[80], Titian, Paul Veronese[81], Tintoretto[82], Giovanni[Pg 49] Bellini[83], Paris Bordone[84], the two Palmas[85], are filled with bronzes, marbles, granites, porphyries, precious antiques, rare manuscripts; their internal magic is equal to their external magic; and when, in the bland light that illumines them, one discovers the illustrious names and noble memories attached to their vaults, one cries with Philippe de Comines:

"'Tis the most triumphant city that ever I saw!"

And yet it is no longer the Venice of the Minister of Louis XI.; the Venice the Bride of the Adriatic and mistress of the seas; the Venice that gave emperors to Constantinople, kings to Cyprus, princes to Dalmatia, the Peloponnesus, Crete; the Venice that humiliated the German Cæsars and received the Popes as suppliants at her inviolable hearths; the Venice of whom monarchs esteemed it an honour to be the citizens, to whom Petrarch[86], Pletho[87], Bessarion[88] bequeathed the remnants of Greek and Latin literature saved from the shipwreck of barbarism; the Venice, a republic in the midst of Feudal Europe, that served as a buckler to Christianity; the Venice, the "setter-up of lions," that trampled on the ramparts of Ptolemaïs[89], Ascalon[90], Tyre[91] and overthrew the Crescent at Lepanto[92]; the Venice whose doges were men of learning and whose merchants knights; the Venice that laid low the Orient or bought its perfumes, that brought back from Greece conquered turbans or recovered master-pieces; the Venice that issued victorious from the ungrateful League of Cambrai; the Venice that triumphed through her feasts, her courtezans and her arts, as through her arms and her great men; the Venice that was at once Corinth, Athens and Carthage, adorning her head with rostral crowns and floral diadems.

[Pg 50]

It is no longer even the city through which I passed when I went to visit the shores that had witnessed her glory; but, thanks to her voluptuous breezes and agreeable waters, she retains a charm: it is especially to declining countries that a beautiful climate is a necessity. There is civilization enough in Venice to lend a niceness to existence. The seduction of the sky prevents one from requiring greater human dignity: an attractive virtue is exhaled from those vestiges of greatness, those traces of the arts which surround one. The ruins of an old state of society which produced such things as these, while giving you a distaste for a new state of society, leave you no desire for a future. You love to feel yourself die with all that is dying around you; you have no other care than to adorn what remains of your life as it is gradually laid aside. Nature, which causes young generations to reappear amongst ruins as quickly as it covers those ruins with flowers, keeps for the most enfeebled races the habit of the passions and the enchantment of pleasure.

Venice never knew idolatry: she grew up Christian in the island where she was reared, far from the brutality of Attila. The women descended from the Scipios, the Pauli and the Eustochie escaped from Alaric's violence in the Grotto of Bethlehem. Standing apart from all other cities, the eldest daughter of ancient civilization without ever having been dishonoured by conquest, Venice contains neither Roman remains nor monuments of the Barbarians. Nor does one see there what one sees in the north and west of Europe, in the midst of industrial progress: I refer to those new structures, those whole streets built in a hurry, in which the houses remain either unfinished or empty. What could one build here? Wretched dens which would show the poverty of conception of the sons after the magnificence of the genius of the fathers; white-washed hovels which would not reach to the first storey of the gigantic residences of the Foscaris and the Pesaros. When one sees the trowel of mortar and the handful of plaster that have had to be applied, for an urgent repair, against a marble capital, one is shocked. Better the rotten planks boarding up Grecian or Moorish windows, the rags hung out to dry on graceful balconies, than the imprint of the mean hand of our century.

Why cannot I lock myself up in this town which harmonizes so well with my destiny, in this city of poets, where Dante, Petrarch, Byron passed! Why cannot I finish writing[Pg 51] my Memoirs by the light of the sun that falls upon these pages! At this moment the luminary is still burning my Floridan savannahs and is setting here at the end of the Grand Canal. I can no longer see it; but, through an opening in this wilderness of palaces, its rays strike the ball of the Dogana, the lateen-sails of the boats, the yards of the ships and the porch of the convent of San Giorgio Maggiore. The tower of the monastery, changed into a rosy column, is reflected in the waves; the white front of the church is so brightly lighted that I can pick out the smallest details of the chisel. The outlines of the shops of the Giudecca are painted with a Titian light; the gondolas on the canal and the harbour are swimming in the same light. Venice is there, seated on the shore, like a beautiful woman about to die away with the day-light: the evening breeze lifts up her balmy tresses; she dies saluted by all the graces and all the smiles of nature.

Venice, September 1833.

In Venice, in 1806, there was a young Signor Armani, the Italian translator or a friend of the translator of the Génie du Christianisme. His sister, as he said, was a nun: monaca. There was also a Jew, on his way to the farce of Napoleon's Grand Sanhedrim[93], who had his eyes on my purse; then M. Lagarde, the chief of the French spies, who gave me dinner: my translator, his sister, the Jew of the Sanhedrim are either dead or no longer live in Venice. At that time, I was staying at the Hotel of the Golden Lion, near the Rialto; that hotel has changed its position. Almost opposite my old inn is the Palazzo Foscari, which is falling. Back, all that old lumber of my life! I should go mad with ruins: let us speak of the present.

I have tried to depict the general effect of the architecture of Venice; in order to receive an impression of the details, I have been up and down and again up the Grand Canal, I[Pg 52] have visited and revisited the Piazza San Marco. It would need volumes to exhaust that subject. Count Cicognara's[94] Fabbriche più conspicue di Venezia supply the features of the monuments; but the exposition is not clear. I will content myself with noting down two or three of the most frequently recurring arrangements.

From the capital of a Corinthian column is described a semicircle, the point of which descends upon the capital of another Corinthian column: exactly in the middle of those shafts rises a third, of the same dimensions and the same order; from the capital of that central column two epicycles spring to right and left, the ends of which also come to lie upon the capitals of other columns. The result of this design is that the arches, in crossing each other, give birth to ogives at their point of intersection[95], so that a charming admixture is formed of two architectural styles, the full Roman arch and the ogive of Arab-Gothic or "Mediæval" origin; but it is certain that the latter exists in the so-called Cyclopean monuments; I have seen very pure specimens of it in the tombs of Argos[96].

The Ducal Palace presents twines reproduced in some other palaces, particularly in the Palazzo Foscari: the columns support pointed arches; those arches leave voids between them: between those voids the architect has placed two roses. The rose depresses the extremity of the two ellipses. Those roses, which meet at a point of their circumference in the fore front of the building, become a kind of row of wheels upon which the rest of the edifice is carried.

In every structure, the base is commonly broad; the monument diminishes in thickness as it encroaches on the sky. The Ducal Palace is the exact opposite of that natural scheme of architecture: the base, pierced by light porticoes surmounted by a gallery of arabesques indented with four-leaved open trefoils, supports an almost bare square mass: one would say it was a fortress built upon pillars, or rather an inverted building planted on its light coping with its thick root in the air.

[Pg 53]

Remarkable in the Venetian monuments are the architectural masks and heads. In the Palazzo Pesaro, the entablature of the first storey, of the Doric order, is decorated with heads of giants; the Ionic order of the second storey is bound by heads of knights which stretch horizontally from the wall, with their faces looking towards the water: some are wrapped in a chin-piece, others have their visors half-lowered; all wear helmets whose plumes bend round into ornaments under the cornice. Lastly, on the third storey, of the Corinthian order, we see heads of female statues with their hair differently knotted.

In St. Mark's, embossed with domes, encrusted with mosaics, loaded with incoherent spoils of the East, I found myself at the same time in San Vitale at Ravenna, in St. Sophia in Constantinople, in St. Saviour's in Jerusalem and in those lesser churches of the Morea, Chios and Malta: St. Mark's, a monument of Byzantine architecture, composite of victory and conquest raised to the Cross, is a trophy, as is the whole of Venice. The most remarkable effect of its architecture is its darkness under a brilliant sky; but to-day, the loth of September, the deadened light from the outside harmonized with the gloomy basilica. They were completing the Forty Hours ordered to obtain fine weather. The fervour of the faithful praying against rain was great: the Venetians look upon a grey and watery sky as the plague.

Our prayers were granted: the evening became charming; at night I went for a walk on the quay. The sea lay smooth; the stars mingled with the scattered lights of the boats and ships anchored here and there. The cafés were full, but one saw no Pulcinelli, Greeks nor Moors: everything comes to an end. A Madonna, brightly illuminated at the crossing of a bridge, attracted the crowd: young girls were devoutly telling their beads on their knees; they made the Sign of the Cross with their right hand and stopped the passers-by with their left. Returning to my inn, I went to bed and to sleep to the singing of the gondoliers stationed under my windows.

I have as my guide Antonio, the oldest and best-informed of the ciceroni of the place; he knows the palaces, statues and pictures by heart

On the 11th of September, I paid a visit to the Abbé Betio and M. Gamba[97], the keepers of the Library: they received[Pg 54] me with extreme politeness, although I had no letter of recommendation.

As one goes through the rooms of the Ducal Palace, one passes from wonders to wonders. There the whole history of Venice unrolls itself, painted by the greatest masters: their pictures have been described a hundred times.

Among the antiques, I remarked, like everybody else, the group of Leda and the Swan and the Ganymede ascribed to Praxiteles. The Swan is prodigious in its embrace and its voluptuousness; Leda is too compliant. The eagle of the Ganymede is not a real eagle; it looks the best-tempered beast in the world. Ganymede, charmed at being carried off, is enchanting: he talks to the eagle, which talks to him.

Those antiques are placed at either end of the magnificent rooms of the Library. I contemplated, with the sacred respect of the poet, a manuscript of Dante's and gazed, with the greed of the traveller, upon the map of the world of Fra Mauro[98] (1460). Africa, however, does not appear to be traced upon it so correctly as they say. They ought, above all, in Venice, to explore the archives: they would find invaluable documents there.

From the painted and gilded halls, I passed to the prisons and the dungeons; the same palace presents the microcosm of society, joy and sorrow. The prisons are under the leads, the dungeons on the level of the water of the canal and on two storeys. A thousand tales are told of strangulations and secret beheadings[99]; by way of compensation we hear that a prisoner[Pg 55] left those dungeons fat, plump and rosy, after eighteen years spent in captivity: he had lived like a toad inside a rock. All honour to the human race! What a fine thing it is!

Plenty of philanthropic phrases stain the vaults and walls of the underground cells, since the day when our Revolution, so adverse to blood,

.    .    .    .    .     dans cet affreux séjour
D'un coup de hache a fait entrer le jour[100].

In France, the gaols were crammed with victims who were got rid of by cutting their throats; but, in the prisons of Venice, they set free the shades of men who had, perhaps, never been there. The gentle butchers who sliced the throats of children and old men, the kind spectators who assisted at the guillotining of women were melted at the progress of humanity, so well proved by the opening of the Venetian dungeons. As for me, I have a hard heart; I am not like those heroes of sensibility. No old headless ghosts appeared before my eyes in the Palace of the Doges; only it seemed to me that I saw in the cells of the aristocracy what the Christians saw when they shattered the idols: nests of mice escaping from the heads of the gods. That is what happens to every power that is disembowelled and exposed to the light: it lets out the vermin which we used to adore.

The Bridge of Sighs connects the Ducal Palace with the prisons of the town; it is divided into two separate passages: through one of these, the ordinary prisoners entered; through the other, the State prisoners went before the tribunal of the Inquisitors or the Ten. This bridge presents a graceful exterior, and the façade of the prison is admired: beauty cannot be dispensed with in Venice, even for tyranny and misfortune! Pigeons make their nests in the windows of the gaol; little doves, all covered with down, flutter their wings and moan at the bars, while waiting for their mother. In former days, innocent creatures used to be cloistered almost on leaving the cradle; their parents never saw them again except through the gratings of the parlour or the wicket of the door.

Venice, September 1833.

You can readily imagine that, in Venice, I necessarily thought of Silvio Pellico[101]. M. Gamba had told me that the[Pg 56] Abbé Betio was the master of the Palace and that, by applying to him, I should be able to make my researches. The excellent librarian, to whom I had recourse one morning, took a big bunch of keys and led me, along several passages and up various stair-cases, to the garrets of the author of Le mie Prigioni.

M. Silvio Pellico has made only one mistake; he has spoken of his gaol as of one of those famous prison-cells high up in the air, marked by their roofing sotto i piombi. Those prisons are, or rather were five in number, in that portion of the Ducal Palace which adjoins the Ponte della Paglia and the canal of the Bridge of Sighs. Pellico did not dwell there; he was incarcerated at the other end of the Palace, near the Ponte degli Canonici, in a building contiguous to the Palace, which building had been transformed, in 1820, into a gaol for political prisoners. However, he was also "under the leads," for a plate of that metal formed the roofing of his hermitage.

The description which the prisoner gives of his first and second room is exact to the last particular. Through the window of the first room, one looks out on the roof of St. Mark's; one sees the well in the inner yard of the Palace, a corner of the Piazza, the different steeples of the town and, beyond the lagoons, on the horizon, mountains in the direction of Padua. The second room is recognised by its big window and by another smaller and higher window: it was through the big one that Pellico used to perceive his companions in misfortune in a detached building opposite and, on the left, above, the dear children who used to talk to him from their mother's casement.

To-day all those chambers are deserted, for men remain[Pg 57] nowhere, not even in the prisons; the bars of the windows have been removed and the walls and ceilings white-washed. The gentle and learned Abbé Betio, living in this abandoned part of the Palace, is its peaceful and solitary guardian.

The rooms which immortalize Pellico's captivity are lofty and airy; they command a splendid view; they are the prison for a poet; there would not be much to say about them, admitting the tyranny and absurdity: but the death sentence for a speculative opinion! The Moravian[102] dungeons! Ten years taken from life, youth and talent! And the gnats, those nasty animals by which I myself am being eaten up at the Hôtel de l'Europe, hardened though I be by the weather and the mosquitoes of Florida! For the rest, I have often been worse lodged than was Pellico in his belvedere in the Ducal Palace, notably in the prefecture of the doges of the French Police, where I was obliged to climb up on a table to enjoy the light.

The author of Francesca da Rimini thought of Zanze in his gaol; I, in mine, sang of a young girl whom I had just seen die. I was very anxious to know what became of Pellico's little guardian. I have set persons to make researches: if I find out anything, I will tell you.

Venice, September 1833.

A gondola landed me at the Frari, where we French, accustomed as we are to the Grecian or Gothic exteriors of our own churches, are not much struck by those outsides of basilicas in brick, ungrateful and common to the eye; but, in the inside, the harmony of the lines and the disposition of the masses produce a simplicity and a calmness of composition that enchant one.

The tombs in the Frari, placed in the lateral walls, decorate the building without obstructing it The magnificence of the marbles blazes forth on every side, charming foliage bears witness to the finish of the old Venetian sculpture. On one of the squares of the pavement in the nave are these words:

Here Lies Titian, the Rival of Zeuxis and Apelles

This stone is opposite one of the painter's master-pieces. Canova has his gorgeous sepulchre not far from Titian's[Pg 58] flag-stone; this sepulchre is the replica of the monument which he had conceived for Titian himself and which he executed afterwards for the Archduchess Maria Christina[103]. The remains of the sculptor of the Hebe and the Magdalen are not all collected in this work: thus Canova inhabits the representation of a tomb made by himself, not for himself, which tomb is but his semi-cenotaph.

From the Frari, I proceeded to the Manfrini Gallery. The portrait of Ariosto is speaking. Titian painted his mother, an old matron of the people, squalid and ugly: the artist's pride shows itself in the exaggeration of this woman's years and poverty.

At the Academy of Fine Arts, I hurried fast to the picture of the Assumption, discovered by Cicognara[104]: ten large male figures at the bottom of the picture; observe the man rapt in ecstasy on the left, watching Mary. The Virgin, above this group, rises in the centre of a semicircle of cherubs; there is a multitude of admirable faces in that glory: a woman's head, on the right, at the point of the crescent, of unspeakable beauty; two or three heavenly spirits flung horizontally across the sky, in the bold, picturesque manner of Tintoretto. I am not sure that a standing angel does not experience some feeling of a too terrestrial love. The Virgin is largely proportioned; she is clad in a red drapery; her blue scarf floats in the air; her eyes are raised towards the Eternal Father, who appeared at the zenith. Four positive colours, brown, green, red and blue, cover the picture: the aspect of the whole is sombre, the character unideal, but of an incomparable truth and natural vivacity. Nevertheless, I prefer the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, by the same painter, which hangs in the same room.

Facing the Assumption and very cleverly lighted is Tintoretto's Miracle of St. Mark, a vigorous scene which seems dug out of the canvas with the chisel and mallet rather than the brush.

I went on to the plaster-casts from the metopes of the Parthenon; these plasters had a three-fold interest for me:[Pg 59] in Athens, I had seen the voids left by the ravages committed by Lord Elgin[105] and, in London, the kidnapped marbles of which I found the mouldings in Venice. The roving destiny of those master-pieces was linked with mine, and yet Phidias did not fashion my clay.

I was unable to tear myself away from the original drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo and Raphael. Nothing is more interesting than those sketches of genius abandoned alone to its studies and its whims: it admits you to its intimacy; it initiates you into its secrets; it informs you by what steps and by what efforts it has attained perfection: one is enraptured at seeing how it was mistaken, how it perceived its error and corrected it. Those pencil-strokes drawn on the corner of a table on a wretched piece of paper retain a marvellous richness and natural artlessness. When you reflect that Raphael's hand has passed over those immortal scraps, you are angry with the glass which prevents you from kissing those holy relics.

I refreshed myself, after my admiration at the Academy of Fine Arts, with an admiration of a different kind at Santi Giovanni e Paolo, even as one rests one's mind by a change of reading. This church, whose unknown architect followed in the foot-steps of Niccola Pisano, is rich and spacious. The apse into which the high altar retires represents a kind of erect shell; two other sanctuaries accompany this shell laterally: they are tall and narrow, with many-centred vaultings, and are separated from the apse by rabbeted channels.

The ashes of the Doges Mocenigo[106], Morosini[107], Vendramin[108] and several other heads of the Republic[109] rest here. Here also is the skin of Antonio Bragadino[110], the defender of Famagusta, to whom Tertulliano expression may be[Pg 60] applied: "a living skin." Those illustrious remains inspire a great and painful sentiment: Venice herself, the magnificent catafalco of her warlike magistrates, the two-fold coffin of their ashes, is now no more than a living skin.

Stained-glass windows and red curtains, while veiling the light in Santi Giovanni e Paolo, increase the religious effect. The numberless columns brought from the East and from Greece have been planted in the basilica, like avenues of exotic trees. A storm rose while I was roaming in the church: when will the trumpets sound that shall rouse all these dead? I said as much under Jerusalem, in the Valley of Jehoshaphat. Returning to my hotel after those visits, I thanked God for having transported me from the porkers of Waldmünchen to the pictures of Venice.

Venice, September 1833.

After my discovery of the prisons in which material Austria tries to stifle Italian intellects, I went to the Arsenal. No monarchy, however powerful it be or have been, has presented a similar nautical compendium.

An immense space, enclosed by crenellated walls, contains four docks for large ships, yards for building those ships, establishments for all that concerns the military and merchant navy, from the rope-yard to the gun-foundry, from the work-shop where they carve the oar of the gondola to that where they square the keel of a seventy-four, from the rooms devoted to the old armour captured in Constantinople, in Cyprus, in the Morea, at Lepanto to the rooms in which modern armour is exhibited: the whole mingled with galleries, columns, works of architecture raised and designed by the chief masters.

In the naval arsenals of Spain, England, France, Holland, one sees only that which is connected with the objects of those arsenals; in Venice, the arts are allied to industry. The monument to Admiral Emo[111], by Canova, awaits you beside the carcass of a ship; rows of guns meet your eye through long porticoes: the two colossal lions from the Piræus keep the gate of the dock from which a frigate is about to issue for a world which Athens did not know and which was discovered by the genius of modern Italy.

In spite of those fine remains of Neptune, the Arsenal no longer recalls those lines of Dante:

[Pg 61]

In the Venetians' arsenal as boils
Through wintry months tenacious pitch, to smear
Their unsound vessels; for the inclement time
Sea-faring men restrains, and in that while
His bark one builds anew, another stops
The ribs of his that hath made many a voyage,
One hammers at the prow, one at the poop,
This shapeth oars, that other cables twirls,
The mizen one repairs, and main-sail rent[112].

All this animation is over: the emptiness of seven-eighths of the arsenal, the extinct furnaces, the boilers gnawed with rust, the rope-walks without wheels, the dock-yards without shipwrights bear witness to the same death that has smitten the palaces. Instead of the throng of carpenters, sail-makers, seamen, caulkers, ship's lads, one sees a few galley-slaves dragging their fetters: two of them were eating off the breech of a gun; at that iron table they could at least dream of liberty.

When formerly those galley-slaves rowed on board the Bucentaur, they wore a purple tunic thrown over their branded shoulders, to make them look like kings cleaving the waves with gilded paddles; they gladdened their toil with the clank of their chains, even as in Bengal, at the Feast of the Durga, the nautch-girls, dressed in gold gauze, accompany their dances with the sound of the rings with which their necks, arms and legs are adorned. The Venetian convicts married the doge to the sea and themselves renewed their indissoluble union with slavery.

Of those many fleets which bore the crusaders to the shores of Palestine and forbade any foreign sail to be displayed to the winds of the Adriatic, there remain a model of the Bucentaur, Napoleon's cutter, a savages' canoe and some designs of ships drawn in chalk on the black-board of the school of the Naval Guard.

A Frenchman coming from Prague to Venice and expecting the mother of Henry V. must needs be touched at seeing the armour of Henry IV. in the Venice Arsenal. The sword which the Bearnese wore at the Battle of Ivry[113] used to be joined to that armour: that sword is no longer there.

By a decree of the Grand Council of Venice, dated 3 April 1600:

[Pg 62]

Charles X., Louis XIX. and Henry V., descendants of "Enrico di Borbone," are therefore nobles of the Republic of Venice, which no longer exists, even as they are Kings of France in Bohemia, even as they are canons of St. John Lateran in Rome, and always by right of Henry IV.; I have represented them in this last quality: they have lost their president's cap and their amice, and I have lost my embassy. And yet I was so well off in my stall in St. John Lateran! What a beautiful church! What a beautiful sky! What admirable music! Those songs have lasted longer than my grandeurs and those of my Canon-King.

My glory annoyed me greatly at the Arsenal; it shines on my forehead unknown to myself: Field-marshal Pallucci, Admiral and Commandant-General of the Navy, recognised me by my horns of fire. He hastened up to me, himself showed me several curiosities and then, excusing himself for his inability to accompany me any longer, because of a council over which he had to preside, he placed me in the hands of a superior officer.

We met the captain of the frigate which was on the point of sailing. He accosted me without ceremony and said to me, with that sailor's frankness which I like so much:

"Monsieur le vicomte"—as though he had known me all his life—"have you any message for America?"

"No, captain: be sure to give her my compliments; it is long since I saw her!"

I cannot see a vessel without dying of longing to go with her: if I were free, the first ship sailing for the Indies would have a chance of carrying me away. How I regretted not to have been able to accompany Captain Parry[114] to the Arctic regions! My life is at its ease only in the midst of the clouds and the seas: I always cherish the hope that it will disappear under a sail. The weighty years which we heave into the waves of time are not anchors: they do not delay our course.

[Pg 63]

Venice, September 1833.

In the Arsenal, I was not far from the Isola di San Cristoforo, which serves to-day as a cemetery. This island used to contain a convent of Capuchins; the convent has been pulled down and its site is nothing more than a square enclosure. The tombs are not very many in number, or at least they are not raised above the level and grassy ground. Against the west wall are fixed five or six stone monuments; little black wooden crosses, with a white date, are scattered about the enclosure: that is how they now bury the Venetians whose forefathers rest in the mausoleums of the Frari and Santi Giovanni e Paolo. Society, as it grows larger, has humbled itself: democracy has overtaken death.

On the edge of the cemetery, on the east side, one sees the vaults of the Schismatic Greeks and those of the Protestants; they are separated from each other by a wall and again separated from the Catholic burials by another wall: sad dissents whose memory is perpetuated in the asylum where all quarrels end! Close by the Greek cemetery is another recess which protects a hole into which the still-born children are thrown to Limbo. Happy creatures! You have passed from the darkness of the maternal womb into everlasting darkness, without going through the light!

Near this hole lie bones dug into the ground like roots, as each new grave is cleared: some, the older ones, are white and dry; others, more recently disinterred, are yellow and damp. Lizards run about those remains, glide in between the teeth, through the eyes and nostrils, come out through the mouth and ears of the skulls, their houses or nests. Three or four butterflies hovered over the mallow-flowers entwined with those bones, an image of the soul under that sky which resembles that under which the story of Psyche was invented. One skull still had a few hairs of the same shade as my own. Poor old gondolier! Did you at least steer your bark better than I have steered mine?

A common grave remains open in the enclosure; they had just lowered a physician beside his old practice. His black coffin was covered with earth only at the top and its naked side awaited the side of another dead man to warm it Antonio had stuffed his wife in there, a fortnight ago, and it was the defunct doctor who had dispatched her: Antonio blessed a requiting and avenging God and[Pg 64] bore his misfortune patiently. The coffins of private individuals are taken to that dismal dwelling-place in private gondolas, followed by a priest in another gondola. As the gondolas look like hearses, they suit the ceremony. A larger wherry, an "omnibus" of Cocytus, performs the service of the hospitals. Thus we find renewed the Egyptian burials and the fables of Charon and his ferry-boat.

In the cemetery beside Venice stands an octagonal chapel dedicated to St. Christopher[115]. This saint, taking a child on his shoulders at the ford of a river, found it heavy; now the child was the Son of Mary, who holds the globe in His hand: the altar-picture represents this fair adventure.

And I too have tried to carry a child-king, but I did not perceive that he was sleeping in his cradle with ten centuries: a load too heavy for my arms.

I observed in the chapel a wooden candle-stick: the taper was extinguished; a holy-water font for blessing the burials; and a little book: Pars Ritualis Romani pro usu ad exsequianda corpora defunctorum; when we are already forgotten, Religion, our immortal and never wearied kinswoman, mourns us and follows us: exsequor fugam. A tinder-box contained a steel; God alone disposes of the spark of life. Two quatrains written on common paper were fastened up on the inner panels of two of the three doors of the building:

Quivi dell' uom le frali spoglie ascoce
Pallida morte, O passegier, t'addita, etc.

The only somewhat striking tomb in the cemetery was raised in advance by a woman who subsequently delayed eighteen years in dying: the inscription informs us of this circumstance; thus this woman for eighteen years hoped in vain for her sepulchre. What sorrow nourished this hope within her?

[Pg 65]

On a little black wooden cross appears this other inscription:

Virginia Acerbi, Anno 72, 1824.
Morta nel bacio del Signore.

The years are harsh to a fair Venetian woman.

Antonio said to me:

"When this cemetery is full, they will give it a rest and bury the dead in the Isola di San Michele di Murano[116]."

The expression was a correct one: when the harvest is gathered, one lets the soil lie fallow and ploughs other furrows elsewhere.

Venice, September 1833.

We have been to see that other field awaiting the Great Husbandman. San Michele di Murano is a smiling monastery with a graceful church, porticoes and a white cloister. The windows of the convent give a view, over the porticoes, of Venice and the lagoons; a garden filled with flowers meets the turf whose compost is still being prepared under the fresh-coloured skin of some young girl. This charming retreat is given over to Franciscans; it would better suit nuns singing like the little pupils of Rousseau's Scuole:

Give me, I entreat you, a cell here in which to finish my Memoirs.

Fra Paolo[117] is buried at the entrance to the church; that seeker after noise must be very wroth at the silence that surrounds him.

Pellico, when sentenced to death, was lodged at San Michele before being transported to the fortress of the Spielberg. The president of the tribunal before which Pellico appeared takes the poet's place at San Michele; he is buried in the cloister; he will not leave that prison.

[Pg 66]

Not far from the tomb of the magistrate is that of a foreign woman married at the age of twenty-two years, in the month of January; she died in the month of February following. She did not want to go beyond the honeymoon; her epitaph says:

If it were true!

Back, that doubt; back, the thought that no anguish rends annihilation! Atheist, when death buries its nails into your heart, who knows but that, in the last moment of consciousness, before the destruction of the ego, you will feel an atrocity of pain capable of filling eternity, an immensity of suffering of which a human being can have no idea in the circumscribed limits of time! Ah yes, ci revedremo!

I was too near the island and town of Murano not to visit the factories whence came the mirrors in my mother's room at Combourg[118]. I did not see those factories, which are now closed; but they spun out before my eyes, like the thread of our frail lives, a slender cord of glass: it was of that glass that the bead was made that hung from the nose of the little Iroquois at the Falls of Niagara: the hand of a Venetian girl had rounded off the ornament of a savage girl[119].

I met a finer sight than Mila. A woman was carrying a swaddled child; the delicate complexion, the captivating glance of that Muranese are idealized in my memory. She looked sad and preoccupied. Had I been Lord Byron, this would have been a favourable opportunity for making an experiment with seduction on poverty; a little money goes a long way here. Then I should have played the desperate solitary beside the waves, intoxicated with my success and my genius. Love seems a different thing to me: I have lost sight of René since many a year; but I doubt if he sought the secret of his pains in his pleasures.

Every day, after my excursions, I sent to the post, but there was nothing there: Count Griffi did not reply from Florence; the public papers permitted to exist in this land of independence would not have dared to state that a traveller had alighted at the White Lion. Venice, where the gazettes[120] were born, is reduced to reading the placards which advertise[Pg 67] on the same bill the opera of the day and the Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. The Alduses[121] will not come forth from their tombs to embrace, in my person, the defender of the liberty of the press. I had therefore to wait Returning to my inn, I dined and amused myself with the company of the gondoliers stationed, as I have said, under my window at the entrance to the Grand Canal.

The gaiety of those sons of Nereus never forsakes them: clothed by the sun, they are fed by the sea. They do not lie about idly like the lazzaroni in Naples: ever stirring, they are sailors who lack ships and work, but who would still carry on the trade of the world and win the Battle of Lepanto, if the days of Venetian liberty and glory were not past.

At six o'clock in the morning, they come to their gondolas, fastened to posts with their prows aground. Then they begin to scrape and wash their barchette at the Traghetti, just as dragoons curry, brush and sponge their horses on picket. The ticklish sea-horse is restive and refuses to stand still under the movements of its horseman, who draws water in a wooden vessel and pours it over the sides and into the well of the craft. He several times repeats the aspersion, taking care to discard the water from the surface of the sea in order to obtain the cleaner water below. Then he scrubs the oars, polishes the brasses and the glass of the little black deck-house, dusts the cushions and carpets and rubs up the iron head of the prow. The whole is not done without a few words of humour or affection addressed, in the pretty Venetian dialect, to the skittish or docile gondola.

When the gondola's toilet is completed, the gondolier proceeds to make his own. He combs his hair, shakes out his jacket and his blue, red or grey cap, washes his face, feet and hands. His wife, daughter or mistress brings him a bowl containing a mess of vegetables, bread and meat. Breakfast over, each gondolier awaits Fortune, singing: he has her before his eyes, one foot in the air, holding out her scarf to the wind and serving as a weather-cock, at[Pg 68] the top of the monument of the Dogana di Mare. Does she give the signal? The favoured gondolier, with oar upraised, starts out at the back of his craft, even as Achilles used to fly in former days, or as one of Franconi's[122] circus-riders gallops to-day on the crupper of a fiery steed. The gondola, shaped like a skate, glides over the water as over ice: "Sia, stati! Sta longo!" that does for the whole day. Then night comes, and the calle will see my gondolier singing and drinking with his zitella the half-sequin which I leave him, as I go off most certainly to replace Henry V. on the throne.

Venice, September 1833.

I was trying to find out, when I woke, why I liked Venice so much, when I suddenly remembered that I was in Brittany: it was the force of kindred that found utterance within me. Was there not, in Cæsar's time, in Armorica, a country of the Veneti[123]: civitas Venetorum, civitas Venetica? Has not Strabo "said that they said" that the Veneti[124] were the descendants of the Veneti of Gaul?

It has been contradictorily held that the fishermen of Morbihan were a colony of the pescatori of Palestrina: Venice, then, would be the mother and not the daughter of Vannes[125]. One can reconcile this by supposing, which for that matter is very probable, that Vannes and Venice were mutually brought to bed of one another. I therefore look upon the Venetians as Bretons; the gondoliers and I are cousins, sprung from the horn of Gaul: cornu Galliæ.[126]

Delighted with this thought, I went to breakfast in a café on the Riva degli Schiavoni. The bread was new, the tea scented, the cream as in Brittany, the butter as in the Prévalais; for butter, thanks to the progress of enlightenment, has improved everywhere: I have eaten excellent butter at[Pg 69] Granada. The bustle of a harbour always delights me: barge-masters were picnicking; vendors of fruit and flowers offered me lemons, grapes and nosegays; fishermen got ready their tartans; naval cadets, stepping into a long-boat, went off to their lessons in naval tactics on board the flag-ship; gondolas were taking passengers to the Trieste steam-boat. Yet it was that same Trieste which was like to have had me cut down on the steps of the Tuileries by Bonaparte, as he threatened when, in 1807, I took it upon myself to write in the Mercure:

Some few years, it seems to me, have passed, since I began to serve the Bourbons: they have enlightened my fidelity, but they will not tire it I am breakfasting on the Riva degli Schiavoni, while waiting for the exile.

Venice, September 1833.

From the little table at which I sit, my eyes wander over all the roads: a breeze from the offing cools the air; the tide is rising; a three-master is coming in. The Lido on one side, the Doge's Palace on the other, the lagoons in the middle: that is the picture. It is from this port that so many glorious fleets set sail; old Dandolo sallied forth in all the pomp of naval chivalry, of which Villehardouin[128], who began our language and our Memoirs, has left us a description:

[Pg 70]

"And when the ships were laden with arms, and meats, and knights, and sergeants, and the shields were arrayed all round in the form of a frieze, and the banners waved, of which there were so many fair ones, never did fairer fleets sail from any port."

The morning scene in Venice also puts me in mind of the story of Captain Olivet and Zulietta, which was so well told:

This adventure ended with an eccentricity on the part of Rousseau and Zulietta's phrase:

"Lascia le donne e studia la matematica."

Lord Byron also gave up his life to paid Venuses: he filled the Mocenigo Palace with those Venetian beauties, who had " taken refuge," according to him, "under the fazzioli." Sometimes, perturbed by a feeling of shame, he fled, and spent the night on the water in his gondola. He had, as his favourite sultana, Margherita Cogni, surnamed, from her husband's condition, the Fornarina[130]:

In these two stories of Rousseau and Byron, one feels the difference in social position, character and education between the two men. Through the charm of the style of the author of the Confessions peeps something vulgar, cynical, in bad form, in bad taste; the obscenity of expression peculiar to that period still further spoils the picture. Zulietta is superior to her lover in elevation of feeling and in habitual elegance: it is almost a fine lady smitten with the puny secretary of a paltry ambassador[131]. The same inferiority appears again when Rousseau arranges to bring up, with his friend Carrio, at their common expense, a little girl of eleven years whose favours, or rather whose tears, they were to share.

Lord Byron bears himself differently: he shines forth with the manners and the fatuousness of the aristocracy; a peer of Great Britain, playing with the woman of the people whom he has seduced, he raises her to himself by his caresses and the magic of his talent Byron arrived in Venice rich and famous: Rousseau landed there poor and unknown; everybody knows the palace that blabbed the errors of the noble heir of the English commodore[132]: no cicerone could point out to you the house in which the plebeian son of the humble clock-maker of Geneva hid his pleasures. Rousseau does not even speak of Venice; he seems to have lived in it without seeing it: Byron has sung it admirably[133].

You have seen in these Memoirs what I have said of the relations of imagination and destiny that seem to have existed between the historian of René and the poet of Childe Harold. Here I point to another of those conjunctures so[Pg 73] nattering to my pride. Does not the dark-haired Fornarina of Lord Byron bear a certain family likeness to the fair-haired Velléda of the Martyrs, her elder?

I should blush to show myself between Byron and Jean-Jacques, without knowing what place posterity will award me, if these Memoirs were to appear during my life; but, when they see the light, I shall have gone and for all time, like my illustrious predecessors, to a distant shore; my shade will be delivered to the breath of opinion, vain and light like the little that will remain of my ashes.

Rousseau and Byron had one feature in common in Venice: neither showed any feeling for the arts. Rousseau, who had wonderful gifts for music, does not seem to know that,[Pg 74] near Zulietta, there existed pictures, statues, monuments; and yet with what charm do those master-pieces mate with love, whose object they divine and whose flame they increase! As to Lord Byron, he "loathes the infernal din" of Rubens' colours, he "spits upon" all the pictures of saints with which the churches are glutted; he never met a picture or statue coming within a league of his thought. He prefers to those deceitful arts the beauty of a few mountains, a few seas, a few horses, a certain Morean lion and a tiger which he saw supping in Exeter Change. Is there not a little prejudice in all this?

Que d'affectation et de forfanterie[135]!

Venice, September 1833.

But what, then, is this town in which all the lofty intelligences have arranged to meet? Some have visited it themselves; others have sent their Muses there. Something would have been lacking to the immortality of those talents, if they had not hung pictures on that temple of voluptuousness and glory. Without again recalling the great poets of Italy, the geniuses of the whole of Europe placed their creations there: there breathed Shakespeare's Desdemona, very different from Rousseau's Zulietta and Byron's Margherita, that chaste Venetian who declares her love to Othello:

And bade me, if I had a friend that lov'd her,
I should but teach him how to tell my story,
And that would woo her[136].

There appeared Otway's[137] Belvidera, who says to Jaffeir:

Oh smile, as when our loves were in their spring.
.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .
Oh lead me to some desert wide and wild,
Barren as our misfortunes, where my soul
May have its vent, where I may tell aloud
To the high heavens, and every list'ning planet,
With what a boundless stock my bosom's fraught;
[Pg 75]Where I may throw my eager arms about thee,
Give loose to love, with kisses kindling joy,
And let off all the fire that's in my heart[138].

Goethe, in our time, has celebrated Venice, and the gentle Marot[139], who first made his voice heard at the awakening of the French Muses, took refuge in Titian's native place. Montesquieu wrote:

When, in too undraped a picture, the author of the Lettres persanes depicts a Mussulman woman surrendered in Paradise to two "heavenly men," does he not seem to have painted the courtezan of Rousseau's Confessions and her of Byron's Memoirs? Was not I, between my two Floridans, like Anaïs between her two angels[141]? But the "painted girls" and I were not immortal.

Madame de Staël gives Venice over to the inspiration of Corinne: the latter hears the sound of the cannon that announces "the obscure sacrifice of a young girl[142] ...a solemn counsel, which a woman resigned to her fate gives to those who still struggle with destiny." ...Corinne climbs to the top of the tower of St. Mark's, contemplates the city and the waves, turns her eyes towards Greece "enveloped in clouds;" at night she sees "nothing but the reflection of the lanterns which light the gondolas:" they give her the idea of "spectres gliding upon the water, guided by a little star[143]."

Oswald departs; Corinne darts out of the room to recall him: "The rain then fell in torrents, a most violent wind arose;" Corinne descends to the banks of the canal:

There again you have Lord Byron's Margherita.

I find an unspeakable pleasure in meeting the masterpieces of those great masters in the very place for which they were made. I breathe freely in the midst of the immortal band, like a humble traveller admitted to the hospitable hearth of a rich and beautiful family.

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.

Between Venice and Ferrara, 16 to 17 September 1833.

There was an immense interval between those dreamings and the truths to which I returned when calling at the Princesse de Bauffremont's hotel; I had to jump from 1806, with the memories of which year I had been occupied, to 1833, the year in which I found myself in reality: Marco Polo[146] fell from China into Venice, after an absence of exactly twenty-seven years.

Madame de Bauffremont displays the name of Montmorency wonderfully in her face and manner: she might very well, like that Charlotte, the mother of the Grand Condé and the Duchesse de Longueville, have been loved by Henry IV. The princess told me that Madame la Duchesse de Berry had written me a letter from Pisa which I had not received: Her Royal Highness was arriving at Ferrara, where she hoped to see me.

It cost me a pang to leave my retreat; I needed another week to complete my survey: I especially regretted that I was not able to carry through the adventure of Zanze[147]; but my time belonged to the mother of Henry V., and, whenever I am following a certain road, there comes a jolt that flings me into another path.

[Pg 78]

I departed, leaving my luggage at the Hôtel de l'Europe, counting on returning with Madame. I found my calash at Fusina: they took it out of an old coach-house, like a jewel from the Crown Wardrobe. I left the bank which perhaps takes its name from the three-pronged fork of the King of the Sea: Fuscina.

On arriving at Padua, I said to the postillion:

"The Ferrara Road."

This road is charming, as far as Monselice: extremely graceful hills, orchards of fig-trees, mulberry-trees and willows festooned with vines, gay meadows, ruined castles. I passed the Catajo, all dressed out with soldiers: the Abbé Lenglet[148], a very learned man otherwise, mistook that manor-house for China. The Catajo does not belong to Angelica[149], but to the Duke of Modena[150]. I ran plump up against His Highness, who was deigning to go on foot along the high-road. This Duke is the scion of the Princes invented by Machiavelli[151]: he has the spirit not to recognise Louis-Philippe.

The village of Arqua shows Petrarch's tomb, sung, together with its site, by Lord Byron[152]:

"Che fai, che pensi? che pur dietro guardi
Nel tempo, che tornar non pote omai,
Anima sconsolata?"

[Pg 79]

All this country, within a diameter of forty leagues, is the native soil of the writers and poets: Livy[153], Virgil[154], Catullus[155], Ariosto[156], Guarini[157], the Strozzis[158], the three Bentivoglios[159], Bembo[160], Bartoli[161], Bojardo[162], Pindemonte[163], Varano[164], Monti[165] and a crowd of other celebrated men owe their birth to this land of the Muses. Tasso himself was of Bergamasque origin[166]. Of the later Italian poets, I have seen only one of the two Pindemontes. I have known neither Cesarotti[167] nor Monti; I should have been happy to meet Pellico and Manzoni, the parting rays of Italian glory.

The Euganean Hills, which I crossed, were gilded by the gold of the setting sun with an agreeable variety of shapes and a great purity of outline: one of those hills resembled the chief pyramid of Sakkarah, when it imprints itself at sunset on the Libyan horizon.

[Pg 80]

I continued my journey at night through Rovigo; a sheet of mist covered the earth. I did not see the Po, except when crossing at Lagoscuro. The carriage stopped; the postillion summoned the ferry-boat with his bugle. The silence was complete; only, on the other side of the river, the baying of a dog and the distant cascades, with their treble echo, made answer to his horn: the proscenium of Tasso's Elysian empire, which we were about to enter.

A ripple on the water, through the mist and the darkness, announced the coming of the ferry-boat; it glided along the towing-rope fastened to boats at anchor. I reached Ferrara between four and five o'clock, on the morning of the 16th; I alighted at the Three Crowns Hotel: Madame was expected there.

Wednesday 17.

As Her Royal Highness had not arrived, I visited the church of San Paolo: I saw nothing but tombs there; for the rest, not a soul, except those of a few dead men and mine, which is hardly living. At the back of the choir hung a picture by Guercino[168].

The cathedral is deceptive: you see a front and sides encrusted with bas-reliefs representing sacred and profane subjects. Over this exterior run other ornaments usually placed in the interior of Gothic edifices, such as rudentures, Arab corbels, nimbused soffits, galleries with small columns, pointed arches and trefoils, disposed in the thickness of the walls. You enter, and you stand dumbfounded at the sight of a new church with spherical vaults, with massive pillars. Something of that incongruity exists in France, both physically and morally: in our old castles, they are contriving modern closets, with plenty of pigeon—holes, alcoves and clothes-presses. Break into the souls of a good many of those men tabarded with historic names: what do you find there? Backstair tendencies.

I was quite abashed at the sight of that cathedral: it seemed to have been turned, like a gown worn inside out; a burgess' wife of the time of Louis XV. cloaked as a castellan's lady of the twelfth century[169].

[Pg 81]

Ferrara, formerly so much fretted by its women, its pleasures and its poets, is almost uninhabited: in places where the streets are wide, they are deserted and sheep could browse there. The dilapidated houses do not gather fresh life, as at Venice, from the architecture, the ships, the sea and the native gaiety of the place. Standing at the gate of the so unfortunate Romagna, Ferrara, under the yoke of an Austrian garrison[170], has something of the face of a persecuted victim: it seems to wear everlasting mourning for Tasso; ready to fall, it is bent like an old woman. As the only monument of the day, rises half from the ground a criminal court, with unfinished prisons. Whom will they send to those cells of recent construction? Young Italy. Those new gaols, topped with cranes and bound with scaffoldings, like the palaces in Dido's city, touch hands with the old cell of the singer of the Gerusalemme.

Ferrara, 18 September 1833.

If there be a life that should make one despair of happiness for men of talent, it is Tasso's. The beautiful sky upon which his eyes looked when they opened to the light was a deceptive sky:

Torquato Tasso lost Bernardo Tasso[171] at Ostiglia. Torquato has killed Bernardo as a poet; he has made him live as a father.

Drawn from obscurity by the publication of Rinaldo[172], Tasso was summoned to Ferrara. He made his first appearance there amid the festivals on the occasion of the marriage[Pg 82] of Alphonsus II. with the Archduchess Barbara. He there met Leonora, Alphonsus' sister: love and misfortune ended in giving his genius all its beauty.

Tasso read the stanzas of the Gerusalemme, as he composed them, to Alphonsus' two sisters, Lucrezia and Leonora. He was sent to the Cardinal Ippolito of Este[174], who was settled at the Court of France: he pawned his clothes and furniture to take that journey, while the cardinal whom he was honouring with his presence made Charles IX. the gorgeous present of one hundred Barbary horses with their Arab riders superbly dressed. Left at first in the stables, Tasso was afterwards presented to the Poet-King, the friend of Ronsard. In a letter which has been preserved for us, he judges the French harshly. He wrote a few verses of his Gerusalemme in an abbey of men in France with which Cardinal Ippolito was endowed; this was Châlis, near Ermenonville, where Jean-Jacques Rousseau was to dream and die: Dante also had passed obscurely through Paris.

Tasso returned to Italy in 1571 and did not witness the Massacre of St. Bartholomew[175]. He went straight to Rome and from there came back to Ferrara. Aminta was played with great success. Although he became the rival of Ariosto, the author of Rinaldo admired the author of Orlando to such a degree that he refused the homage of that poet's nephew:

[Pg 83]

This modesty, so little known in our time, did not disarm jealousy. Torquato beheld the feasts given by Venice to Henry III. returning from Poland, when a manuscript of the Gerusalemme was printed by stealth: the minute criticism of the friends whose tastes he consulted alarmed him. Perhaps he showed himself too sensitive; but perhaps he had built the success of his love-affairs on his hopes of fame. He imagined himself set about by pitfalls and treasons; he was obliged to defend his life. His stay at Belriguardo, where Goethe evokes his shade, failed to calm him. Says the great German poet, who makes the great Italian poet speak:

Thus like the nightingale, conceal'd in shade,
From his love-laden breast he fills the air
And neighbouring thickets with melodious plaint:
His blissful sadness and his tuneful grief
Charm every ear, enrapture every heart[176].
.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .
And what is more deserving to survive,
And silently to work for centuries,
Than the confession of a noble love
Confided modestly to gentle song[177]?

Says Goethe again, interpreting Leonora's sentiments:

How charming is it in the mind's clear depths
One's self to mirror    .    .    .    .
.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .
To feel his presence, and with him to near,
With airy tread, the future's hidden realm!
Thus should old age and time their influence lose.
.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .
All that is transient in his song survives;
Still art thou young, still happy, when the round
Of changeful time shall long have borne thee on[178].

The singer of Erminia conjures Leonora (still in the lines of the poet of Germania) to banish him to one of her loneliest villas:

Oh, send me thither! There let me be yours!
And I will tend thy trees, construct the shed
[Pg 84]That shields thy citrons from autumnal blasts,
Fencing them round with interwoven reeds!
Flowers of the fairest hues shall strike their roots,
And ev'ry path be trimm'd with nicest care[179].

The story of Tasso's loves was lost: Goethe found it again.

The sorrows of the Muses and the scruples of religion were beginning to impair Tasso's reason. He was subjected to a temporary confinement. He escaped almost naked: wandering in the mountains, he borrowed the rags of a shepherd and, thus disguised, arrived at his sister Cornelia's. The caresses of this sister and the charms of his native country allayed his sufferings for a moment:

But he could not remain where he was born. A spell drew him to Ferrara: love is the real mother-land! Coldly received by Duke Alphonsus, he withdrew once more; he wandered through the little Courts of Mantua, Urbino, Turin, singing to pay for the hospitality shown him. He said to the Metauro, Raphael's native stream:

Armida had passed to Raphael's cradle; she was to preside over the enchantments of the Farnesina.

Surprised by a storm in the neighbourhood of Vercelli, Tasso celebrated the night which he had passed in a noble-man's house in the beautiful dialogue known as the Padre di famiglia. At Turin, he was refused admission at the gates, so wretched was his condition. Hearing that Alphonsus[180] was about to contract a new marriage, he again took the road for Ferrara. A divine spirit attached itself to the steps of this god hidden under the garb of the shepherds of Admetus; he thought that he saw and heard that spirit; one day, seated by the fire and seeing the sun-light on the window:

"Ecco ramico spirito," he said, "che cortesemente è venuto a favellarmi."

[Pg 85]

And Torquato conversed with a sun-beam. He re-entered the fatal city even as the bird flings itself into the jaws of the serpent that fascinates it. Disowned and spurned by the courtiers, taunted by the servants, he launched out into complaints, and Alphonsus ordered him to be locked up in a mad-house in the Hospital of Sant' Anna.

Then the poet wrote to one of his friends:

The prisoner implored the whole earth and even his pitiless persecutor; he drew from his lyre accents which ought to have made the walls to fall with which his wretchedness was girt about:

Piango il morir; non piango il morir solo,
Ma il modo  .    .    .    .    .    .
.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .
Mi saria di conforto, aver la tomba,
Ch' altra mole innalzar credea co' carmi.

Lord Byron wrote a poem called the Lament of Tasso; but he cannot get away from himself and substitutes himself everywhere for the persons whom he sets before us; even as his genius lacks tenderness, his "lament" is no more than an imprecation.

Tasso addressed the following petition to the Council of the Ancients of Bergamo:

Tasso was refused ink, pens, or paper. He had sung the "magnanimous Alphonsus," and the magnanimous Alphonsus thrust into a madman's cell him who had shed imperishable lustre on his ungrateful head. In a most graceful sonnet, the prisoner beseeches a cat to lend him the brightness of its eyes to replace the light of which he has been deprived; a harmless raillery which proves the poet's gentleness and the excess of his distress:

Fatemi luce a scriver queste carmi.

At night, Tasso imagined that he heard strange noises, the tolling of funeral knells. Ghosts tormented him:

"I am worn out," he cried, "I succumb!"

Attacked by a serious illness, he thought that he saw the Virgin save him by a miracle:

Egrio io languiva, e d'alto, sonno avvinto.
.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .
Giacea con guancia di pallor dipinta,
Quando di luce incoronata    .    .    .
Maria, pronta scendesti al mio dolore.

Montaigne visited Tasso reduced to this excess of adversity and showed him no compassion. At the same time, Camoens was ending his life in an alms-house in Lisbon: what consoled him, as he lay dying on a pallet? The verses of the prisoner of Ferrara. The captive author of the Gerusalemme, admiring the mendicant author of the Lusiadas, said to Vasco de Gama:

Tant' oltre stende il glorioso volo
Che i tuoi spalmate legni andar men lungo.

Thus did the voice from the Eridanus resound on the banks of the Tagus; thus did two illustrious sufferers of a like genius and a like destiny congratulate each other across the seas, from hospital to hospital, putting mankind to shame.

How many kings, great men and fools, drowned to-day in oblivion, but believing themselves, towards the close of the[Pg 87] sixteenth century, persons worthy of remembrance, were ignorant of the very names of Tasso and Camoens! In 1754, for the first time, was read "the name of Washington, in the account of an obscure combat delivered in the back-woods between a troop of French, English and savages[181]: which clerk at Versailles, which purveyor to the Parc-aux-Cerfs, which man, above all, of the Court or the Academy would have cared, at that time, to change names with that American planter[182]?"

Ferrara, 18 September 1833.

Envy hastened to spread its poison over open wounds. The Accademia della Crusca declared that "the Gerusalemme Liberata was a cold and heavy compilation, obscure and unequal in style, full of ridiculous lines and barbarous words, with no single beauty to redeem its innumerable defects."

A fanatical love for Ariosto dictated that verdict. But the shout of popular admiration drowned the academic blasphemies: it was no longer possible for Duke Alphonsus to prolong the captivity of a man who was guilty only of singing that captivity. The Pope[183] claimed the deliverance from the honour of Italy.

Tasso was released from prison[184], but none the happier for it Leonora was dead. He dragged himself from town to town with his sorrows. At Loretto, ready to die with hunger, he was on the point, says one of his biographers, "of taking up the hand that had built Armida's palace."

In Naples, he experienced some of the sweet sentiment of country:

E donde
Partii fanciullo, or dopo tanti lustri
Torno  .    .    .    .    .    .
Canuto ed egro alle native sponde.

He preferred to sumptuous abodes a cell at the Convent of Montoliveto. During a journey which he took to Rome,[Pg 88] fever having laid hold of him, a hospital was once more his refuge.

Returning from Rome and Florence to Naples, laying the blame of his ills on his immortal poem, he rewrote it and spoilt it. He commenced his cantos, Delle sette Giornato del Monde Creato, a subject treated by Du Bartas[185]. Tasso makes Eve issue from Adam's bosom, while God:

.    .    .    .  irrigò di placida quiete
Tutte le membra al sonnachioso ...

The poet weakens the biblical image, and, in the gentle creations of his lyre, woman becomes no more than man's first dream. The sorrow of leaving uncompleted a pious work which he regarded as an expiatory hymn decided Tasso to condemn his profane songs to destruction.

Less respected by society than by the robbers, the poet received from Marco Sciarra[186], the famous leader of condottieri, the offer of an escort to take him to Rome[187]. He was presented[Pg 89] at the Vatican, and the Pope addressed him in these words:

"Torquato, you do honour to the crown that honoured those who wore it before you."

Posterity has confirmed this eulogy. Tasso replied to the praises by quoting this line from Seneca:

Magnifica verba mors prope admota excutit.

Attacked by an evil which he foresaw was to cure all the others, he retired to the Convent of Sant' Onofrio, on the 1st of April 1595. He climbed up to his last refuge during a tempest of wind and rain. The monks received him at the gate where Domenichino's frescoes are fading away to-day. He greeted the fathers:

"I come to die among you."

O hospitable cloisters, deserts of religion and poetry, you have lent your solitude to outlawed Dante and to dying Tasso!

All succour was unavailing. On the seventh morning of the fever, the Pope's[188] doctor declared to the patient that he had very little hope. Tasso kissed him and thanked him for announcing such good news to him. Next he looked up to the sky and, with an abundant outpouring of the heart, gave thanks to God for His mercies.

His weakness increased; he wished to receive the Eucharist in the church of the monastery: he dragged himself there leaning on the monks and returned carried in their arms. When he was stretched once more upon his couch, the prior asked him as to his last wishes.

"I have troubled very little about fortune's gifts during my life; I care still less for them at my death. I have no will to make."

"Where will you have your burying-place?"

"In your church, if you will deign to do my remains so great an honour."

"Will you dictate your epitaph yourself?"

Thereupon, turning towards his confessor:

[Pg 90]

"Father, write: I return my soul to God, who gave it me, and my body to the earth, whence it came. I bequeath to this monastery the sacred image of my Redeemer."

He took in his hands a crucifix which the Pope had given him, and pressed it to his lips.

Seven more days passed by. The tried Christian having solicited the favour of the Holy Oils, Cardinal Cintio arrived, bringing the blessing of the Sovereign Pontiff. The dying man displayed great joy at this:

"Here," said he, "is the crown which I came to Rome to seek; I hope to triumph to-morrow with its aid."

Virgil sent to beg Augustus to fling the Æneid into the fire; Tasso entreated Cintio to burn the Gerusalemme. Thereafter, he desired to be left alone with his crucifix.

The cardinal had not reached the door when his tears, till then violently restrained, burst forth: the bell was tolled, and the monks, chanting the prayers for the dead, wept and lamented in the cloisters. At this sound, Torquato said to the charitable recluses, whom he seemed to see wander around him like shadows:

"Friends, you think you are leaving me; I am only going before you."

Thenceforth, he held no converse except with his confessors and a few fathers great in doctrine. When he was on the point of breathing his last, they gathered this stanza from his lips, the fruit of his life's experience:

"If death were not, there would be nothing upon earth more miserable than man."

On the 25th of April 1595, about the middle of the day, the poet cried:

"In manus tuas, Domine....[189]"

The remainder of the verse was scarcely audible, as though it had been uttered by a departing traveller.

The author of the Henriade expires at the Hôtel de Villette, on a quay of the Seine[190], and rejects the aid of the Church; the bard of the Gerusalemme dies a Christian at Sant' Onofrio: compare and see what beauty faith lends to death.

All that is related of Tasso's posthumous triumph appears to me to be open to suspicion. His ill-fortune was even more persistent than has been supposed. He did not die at the hour indicated for his triumph: he survived that projected triumph by twenty-five days. He did not lie to his destiny:[Pg 91] he was never crowned, not even after death; his remains were not exposed at the Capitol in senator's robes amid the throng and the tears of the people: he was buried, as he had ordered, in the Church of Sant' Onofrio. The stone with which they covered him, again according to his wish, bore neither date nor name; ten years later, Manso, Marchese Della Villa[191], Tasso's last friend and Milton's host composed the admirable epitaph:

Manso succeeded only with difficulty in having it carved; for the monks, who religiously observed testamentary wishes, objected to any inscription: and yet, without the Hic jacet or the words, Torquati Tassi ossa, Tasso's ashes would have been lost in the hermitage on the Janiculum, as Poussin's have been at San Lorenzo in Lucina.

Cardinal Cintio formed the plan of erecting a mausoleum to the singer of the Holy Sepulchre; the plan was abortive. Cardinal Bevilacqua drew up a pompous epitaph destined for the slab of another future mausoleum, and the thing went no further. Two centuries later, the brother of Napoleon thought about a monument at Sorrento: Joseph soon bartered Tasso's cradle for the Cid's tomb.

Lastly, in our own days, a grand funeral decoration has been begun in honour of the Italian Homer, once poor and wandering like the Greek Homer: will the work be completed? As for me, I prefer to any marble tumulus the little stone in the chapel of which I spoke as follows in the Itinéraire:

[Pg 92]

The Italian committee entrusted with the necrolithic[196] labours asked me to collect for them in France and to distribute the indulgences of the Muses to every faithful donor of a few mites towards the poet's monument. July 1830 came: my fortune and credit began to look like the fate of Tasso's ashes. Those ashes seem to possess a virtue that rejects any display of opulence, repels any lustre, shrinks from any honours: little men want big tombs, big men little ones.

The god who laughs at all my dreams, after hurling me from the Janiculum with the old Conscript Fathers, has brought me back to Tasso in another way. Here I am able to form a still better opinion of the poet whose three daughters were born at Ferrara: Armida, Erminia and Clorinda.

Where is the House of Este to-day? Who thinks of the Obizzos[197], the Nicholases[198], the Hercules[199]? Whose name lingers in those palaces? Leonora's. What do we look for at Ferrara? Alphonsus' dwelling-house? No; Tasso's prison. Whither do men go in procession from century to century? To the sepulchre of the persecutor? No; to the cell of the persecuted.

Tasso, in these parts, obtains an even more memorable victory: he makes us forget Ariosto; the stranger leaves the bones of the singer of Orlando at the Museum and hastens in search of the cell of the singer of Rinaldo at Sant' Anna. Seriousness befits the tomb: one abandons the man who[Pg 93] laughed for the man who cried. During life, happiness may have its merit; after death, it loses its value: in the eyes of the future, only unhappy existences are beautiful. To those martyrs of intelligence, pitilessly immolated upon earth, their adversities are reckoned to the increase of their glory; they sleep in the grave with their immortal sufferings, like kings with their crowns. We vulgar unfortunates are of too little account that our troubles should, among posterity, become the ornament of our lives. Stripped though I be of everything as I complete my course, my tomb will not be a temple, but a cool place; Tasso's fate will not be mine; I shall deceive the affectionate and harmonious predictions of friendship:

Le Tasse, errant de ville en ville,
Un jour, accablé de ses maux,
S'assit près du laurier fertile
Oui, sur la tombe de Virgile,
Étend toujours ses verts rameaux, etc.[200]

I lost no time in carrying my homage to that son of the Muses, so nobly consoled by his brothers: as a rich ambassador, I had subscribed towards his mausoleum in Rome; as a poor pilgrim in exile's train, I went to kneel in his prison at Ferrara. I know that fairly well-founded doubts are raised as to the identity of the spots; but, like all true believers, I set history at defiance: that crypt, whatever men may say, is the very place in which the pazzo per amore lived for seven whole years; one had necessarily to pass through those cloisters; one came to that gaol where the daylight stole in through the iron bars of an air-hole, where the low-hanging vault that freezes your head drips saltpetrous water on a damp soil that petrifies your feet.

On the walls, outside the prison and all around the grating, one reads the names of the worshippers of the god: the statue of Memnon, quivering with harmony under the touch of dawn, was covered with the declarations of the several witnesses of the prodigy. I did not daub my ex-voto; I hid[Pg 94] myself in the crowd, whose secret prayers must, by reason of their very humility, be more acceptable to Heaven.

The buildings in which Tasso's prison is enclosed to-day belong to a hospital open to every infirmity; they have been placed under the protection of the Saints: Sancto Torquato sacrum. At some distance from the blest cell is a dilapidated yard; in the middle of that yard, the porter cultivates a garden-plot surrounded by a hedge of mallows: the pale-green palissade was loaded with large and beautiful flowers. I gathered one of those roses, the colour of royal mourning, that seemed to me to be growing at the foot of a Calvary. Genius is a Christ: denied, persecuted, scourged, crowned with thorns, crucified by men and for men, it dies leaving them the light and rises again to be worshipped.

Ferrara, 18 September 1833.

I went out on the morning of the 18th and, on returning to the Three Crowns, found the street blocked with people; the neighbours were gaping at the windows. An escort of one hundred men of the Austrian and Papal troops occupied the inn. The corps of officers of the garrison, the magistrates of the town, the generals, the Pro-legate were awaiting Madame, whose coming had been announced by a courier wearing the French arms. The stair-case and drawing-rooms were decorated with flowers. Never was finer reception arranged for an exile.

When the carriages came in sight, the drums beat a salute, the music of the regiments burst forth, the soldiers presented arms. Madame, in the midst of the throng, was put to it to descend from her calash, when it drew up in front of the hotel; I had hastened up; she recognised me among the crowd. She held out her hand to me across the established authorities and the beggars who flung themselves upon her, and said:

"'My son is your King;' do help me to pass through."

I did not find her very much changed, though she was thinner; she had something of a sprightly, little girl.

I walked in front of her; she gave her arm to M. de Lucchesi; Madame de Podenas[201] followed her. We climbed the stairs and entered the apartments between two rows of grenadiers, amid the clatter of arms, the sound of trumpets, the cheers of the spectators. They took me for the majordomo,[Pg 95] they applied to me to be presented to the mother of Henry V. My name was linked to those names in the minds of the crowd.

You must know that Madame was received with the same tokens of respect from Palermo to Ferrara, notwithstanding the Notes of Louis-Philippe's envoys. M. de Broglie had had the audacity to ask the Pope to send away the outlaw; Cardinal Bernetti replied:

I am no great believer in this dispatch, but I was keenly struck by one contrast: in France, the Government lavishes insults upon a woman of whom it is afraid; in Italy, they remember only the name, the courage and the misfortunes of Madame la Duchesse de Berry.

I was obliged to accept my improvised role of First Lord of the Bed-chamber. The Princess was very funny: she wore a gown of greyish cloth, fitting close to her figure; on her head, a sort of little widow's cap or the biggin of a child or naughty school-girl. She ran here, there and everywhere, like a giddy goose; rushed about heedlessly, in the midst of the curious throng, with an air of assurance, just as she had sped through the woods of the Vendée. She looked at no one, recognised no one; I was obliged to catch her disrespectfully by her dress, or to bar her road, saying:

"Madame, there is the Austrian Commandant, that officer. in white; Madame, there is the commandant of the pontifical troops, that officer in blue; Madame, there is the Pro-legate, that tall young priest in black."

She stopped, spoke a few words in Italian or French, not too appropriate, but roundly, frankly, prettily, so that their very unpleasantness was not displeasing. It was a sort of manner resembling nothing that one had ever known before. It made me feel almost ill at ease, and yet I had no anxiety as to the effect produced by the little woman who had escaped from the flames and gaol.

A comical piece of confusion followed. I must say one thing with all modest reserve: the vain noise of my life grows in volume as the real silence of that life increases. I[Pg 96] am unable nowadays to alight at an inn, either in France or abroad, without being at once besieged. For old Italy, I am the defender of religion; for young Italy, the defender of liberty; for the authorities I have the honour of being Sua Eccellenza GIA Ambasciadore di Francia at Verona and in Rome. Ladies, all doubtless of rare beauty, have lent the language of Angelica and Aquilante il Nero to the Floridan Atala and the Moor Aben-Hamet. I therefore see scholars arrive, old priests with wide skull-caps, women, whom I thank for their translations and their favours; next, mendicanti, too well-bred to believe that an ex-ambassador is as poor a beggar as their lordships.

Now, my admirers had hurried to the Hôtel des Trois-Couronnes, together with the crowd attracted by Madame la Duchesse de Berry: they got me up into a corner of a window and began to address me in an harangue the end of which they went off to recite to Marie-Caroline. In their mental confusion, the two troops sometimes mixed up the patron and the patroness: I was greeted as "Your Royal Highness," and Madame told me that she had been complimented on the Génie du Christianisme; we exchanged our mutual fames. The Princess was charmed at having written a work in four volumes, and I was proud to have been taken for the daughter of kings.

Suddenly, the Princess disappeared: she went off on foot, with Count Lucchesi, to see Tasso's cell; she was a judge of prisons. The mother of the banished orphan, of the child-heir of St. Louis, Marie-Caroline leaving the Fortress of Blaye and seeking in the town of Renée of France[202] only a poet's prison-cell is an unique thing in the history of fortune and human glory. The venerables of Prague would have passed through Ferrara a hundred times without taking such an idea into their heads; but Madame de Berry is a Neapolitan and a country-woman of Tasso, who said:

"Ho desiderio di Napoli, come l'anime ben disposte del paradiso."

It was when I was in opposition and disgrace; the Ordinances were secretly simmering at the Palace and still joyously lying at the bottom of men's hearts. One day, the Duchesse[Pg 97] de Berry saw an engraving representing the singer of the Gerusalemme at the bars of his cell:

"I hope," she said, "that we shall soon see Chateaubriand like that."

Words of prosperity, of which we must take no more notice than of a rash word spoken in drunkenness. I was to join Madame in Tasso's very dungeon, after suffering in the prisons of the police on her behalf. What loftiness of sentiment it showed in the noble Princess, how great a mark of esteem she gave me, when she applied to me in the hour of her misfortune, after the desire that she had expressed! If her first wish appraised my talents too highly, her confidence was less mistaken as to my character.

Ferrara, 18 September 1833.

M. de Saint-Priest[203], Madame de Saint-Priest and M. A. Sala[204] arrived. The latter had been an officer in the Royal Guards; he has been substituted in my publishing arrangements for M. Delloye[205], a major in the same guards.

[Pg 98]

Two hours after Madame's arrival, I saw Mademoiselle Lebeschu[206], my fellow-Breton; she hastened to tell me of the hopes that they were good enough to place in me. Mademoiselle Lebeschu figures in the Carlo-Alberto trial.

On returning from her poetic visit, the Duchesse de Berry sent for me: I found her waiting for me with M. le Comte de Lucchesi and Madame de Podenas.

Count Lucchesi-Palli is tall and dark: Madame calls him a Tancred on the distaff side. His manners towards the Princess his wife are a master-piece of propriety: neither humble nor arrogant; a respectful mixture of the authority of the husband and the submission of the subject.

Madame at once talked business with me; she thanked me for coming in reply to her invitation; she told me that she was going to Prague, not only to join her family, but to obtain her son's deed of majority: she next declared that she was going to take me with her.

This declaration, for which I was not prepared, struck me with consternation: to return to Prague! I put forward the objections that suggested themselves to my mind.

If I went to Prague with Madame and she obtained her[Pg 99] wish, the honours of the victory would not belong wholly to the mother of Henry V., and that would be a bad thing; if Charles X. persisted in refusing to grant the deed of majority, I being present (and I was persuaded that he would so persist), I should lose my credit. It seemed to me better, therefore, that I should be kept as a sort of reserve force, in case Madame should fail in her negociation.

Her Royal Highness opposed these arguments: she maintained that she would be able to put forth no strength in Prague, if I did not accompany her; that I frightened her great relations; that she consented to leave to me the glory of the victory and the honour of linking my name with her son's accession.

M. and Madame de Saint-Priest entered in the middle of this discussion and laid great stress on the Princess's view of the matter. I persisted in my refusal. Dinner was announced.

Madame was very lively. She described to me, in the most amusing fashion, her contests with General Bugeaud[207] at Blaye. Bugeaud used to attack her on politics and lose his temper; Madame lost her temper even more than he did his: they screamed like a pair of eagles and she ended by turning him out of the room. Her Royal Highness kept back certain details which she would perhaps have communicated to me if I had remained with her. She gave Bugeaud no rest; she pulled him to pieces finely:

"You know," she said, "that I asked for you four times? Bugeaud passed on my demands to d'Argout[208]. D'Argout sent back word to Bugeaud that he was a fool, that he[Pg 100] ought to have refused your admission at once and on the face of it: he has such good taste, that M. d'Argout."

Madame laid stress on the rhyme of those two words[209], with her Italian accent.

Meanwhile the rumour of my refusal had spread among our faithful friends and was beginning to alarm them. Mademoiselle Lebeschu came, after dinner, to read me a lecture in my room; M. de Saint-Priest, an intelligent and sensible man, first sent M. Sala to me, and then replaced him and urged me in his turn: "they had sent M. de La Ferronnays on to Hradschin, in order to remove the first difficulties. M. de Montbel had arrived; he had been told to go to Rome to obtain a copy of the marriage-contract, which was drawn up in due and proper form and which was in Cardinal Zurla's keeping[210].

"Supposing," continued M. de Saint-Priest, "that Charles X. should refuse his consent to the deed of majority, would it not be well if Madame were to obtain a declaration from her son? What should be the nature of that declaration?"

"A very short Note," I replied, "in which Henry would protest against Philip's usurpation."

M. de Saint-Priest conveyed my words to Madame. My resistance continued to occupy the minds of the Princess's environment Madame de Saint-Priest, with her nobility of sentiment, appeared to entertain the keenest regret. Madame de Podenas had not lost the habit of that serene smile which shows her beautiful teeth: her calm was the more perceptible in the midst of our agitation.

We were not unlike a strolling company of French actors playing at Ferrara, by permission of the worshipful magistrates of the town, in the Fugitive Princess or the Persecuted Mother. The scene represented, on the right, Tasso's prison; on the left, Ariosto's house; at the back, the castle in which the feasts of Leonora and Alphonsus took place. This royalty without a kingdom; those anxieties of a Court contained in two wandering carriages and having the Hôtel des Trois-Couronnes for its palace at night; those State councils held in a room at an inn: all that completed the variety of the scenes of my fortune. I put off my knight's helm in the wings and resumed my straw hat; I travelled with the de jure monarchy rolled up in my[Pg 101] portmanteau, while the de facto monarchy flaunted its baubles at the Tuileries. Voltaire calls upon all the royalties to spend their carnival in Venice with Achmet III.[211]: Ivan[212] Emperor of All the Russias, Charles Edward King of England, the two Kings of the Polacks[213], Theodore[214] King of Corsica and four Serene Highnesses.

For myself, I will say with Candid[215]:

"Gentlemen, how came you all to be kings? I must confess that neither my friend Martin here nor myself have any such titles."

It was eleven o'clock in the evening; I was hoping that I had won my case and obtained my exeat from Madame. I was very far out in my reckoning! Madame does not so soon relinquish a wish; she had not questioned me about France, because, preoccupied as she was with my resistance to her plan, she was making that her business of the moment. M. de Saint-Priest entered my room and brought me the rough draft of a letter which Her Royal Highness proposed to write to Charles X.:

"What!" I exclaimed, "Madame persists in her resolve?[Pg 102] She wants me to take that letter? But it would be impossible for me, even materially, to cross Germany: my passport is only for Switzerland and Italy!"

"You will accompany us as far as the Austrian frontier," replied M. de Saint-Priest; "Madame will take you in her carriage; after crossing the frontier, you will return to your calash and you will arrive thirty-six hours before us."

I hastened to the Princess; I renewed my insistence; the mother of Henry V. said to me:

"Do not desert me."

This word put an end to the struggle; I yielded; Madame appeared over-joyed[216]. Poor woman, she had wept so much! How could I have held out against courage, adversity, fallen grandeur reduced to hide themselves beneath my "protection!" Another Princess, Madame la Dauphine, also had thanked me for my useless services: Carlsbad and Ferrara were two places of banishment, under different suns, where I had gathered the noblest honours of my life.

Madame set out pretty early in the morning, on the 19th, for Padua, where she arranged to meet me; she was to stop at the Catajo, at the Duke of Modena's. I had a hundred things to see at Ferrara: palaces, pictures, manuscripts; I had to be content with Tasso's prison. I started a few hours after Her Royal Highness. I arrived at Padua at night. I sent Hyacinthe to Venice to fetch my luggage, as scanty as a German student's, and I went to bed sadly at the Golden Star, which has never been mine.

Padua, 20 September 1833.

On Friday 20 September, I spent a part of the morning in writing to tell my friends of my change of destination. The persons of Madame's suite arrived in succession.

Having nothing left to do, I went out with a cicerone. We visited the two churches of Santa Giustina and San Antonio di Padova. The first, the work of Jerome of Brescia, is most majestic: from below, in the nave, you do not see a single one of the windows, which are pierced very high above,[Pg 103] so that the church is lighted without your knowing whence the light comes. This church contains many good pictures by Paul Veronese, Liberi[217], Palma[218] and others.

San Antonio di Padova, known as Il Santo, presents a Grecianized Gothic monument, a style peculiar to the old churches of Venetia. The Cappella del Santo is by Giacomo Sansovino[219] and Francesco[220] his son: one perceives it at once; the ornaments and the form are in the same manner as the loggetta in the steeple of St. Mark.

A signora, in a green gown and a straw hat covered with a veil, was praying before the Cappella del Santo; a servant in livery was also praying, behind her: I presumed that she was offering up her prayers for the relief of some moral or physical ailment; I was not mistaken. I saw her again in the street: she was a woman of about forty, pale and thin, walking stiffly and with a look of suffering; I had guessed her love or her paralysis. She had left the church with hope: during the space of time while she was sending up her fervent orisons to Heaven, did she not forget her pain, was she not really cured?

Il Santo abounds in mausoleums, among which Bembo's is famous. In the cloisters stands the tomb of young d'Orbesan, who died in 1595:

Gallus eram, putavi, morior, opes una parentum!

D'Orbesan's French epitaph ends with a line which a great poet would like to have written:

Car il n'est si beau jour qui n'amène sa nuit[221].

Charles Gui Patin[222] is buried in the cathedral: his wag of[Pg 104] a father[223] was no longer there to save him, he who had "treated a gentleman of seven years old, who was bled thirteen times and cured in a fortnight, as though by a miracle."

The ancients excelled in funeral inscriptions:

Camoens, among the moderns, composed the most magnificent of epitaphs, that of John III. of Portugal[225]:

My Paduan cicerone was a chatterbox, very different from my Antonio of Venice: he spoke to me at every turn of "that great tyrant Angelo[226];" in the streets, he told me the name of every shop and every café; at Il Santo, he would absolutely show me the well-preserved tongue of the preacher of the Adriatic[227]. Might not the tradition of those sermons[Pg 105] come from the songs which, in the middle-ages, the fishermen, following the example of the Ancient Greeks, used to sing to the fishes to charm them? A few of these pelagic ballads still remain to us, in Anglo-Saxon.

Of Livy, no news; were he alive, I would gladly, like the inhabitant of Gades, make the journey to Rome expressly to see him; I would gladly, like Panormita[228], have sold my field to buy a few fragments of the History of Rome, or, like Henry IV., promised a province for a "Decade[229]." A mercer of Saumur did not go so far: having purchased a manuscript of Livy's, by way of old papers, from the apothecary of the convent of the Abbey of Fontevrault, he used it quite simply to make drums for battledores.

When I returned to the Stella d'Oro, Hyacinthe was back from Venice. I had charged him to call on Zanze to make my excuses for having gone away without seeing her. He found the mother and daughter in a great state of anger; she had just been reading Mie Prigioni. The mother said that Silvio was a "villain:" he had allowed himself to write that Brollo had pulled him, Pellico, by his leg when he, Pellico, had climbed up on a table. The daughter exclaimed:

"Pellico is a slanderer, and an ungrateful one to boot. After the services which I have done him, he now tries to dishonour me."

She threatened to have the work seized and to sue the author in the law-courts; she had begun to write a refutation of the book: Zanze is not only an artist, but a woman of letters.

Hyacinthe asked her to give me the unfinished refutation; she hesitated and then handed him the manuscript: she was pale and tired from her labours. The old gaoler's wife still claimed to sell her daughter's embroidery and mosaic work. If ever I go back to Venice, I will discharge my debt better to Madame Brollo than I did to Abou Gosch, the chief of the Arabs in the mountains of Jerusalem: I had promised him a bale of rice from Damietta and I never sent it.

Here is Zanze's commentary:

[Pg 106]

Translation