"But it is less difficult to discover the North-West Passage than to create a people, as you have done."
"Well, well, young man!" he exclaimed, giving me his hand.
He invited me to dinner for the next day, and we parted.
General Washington.
I took care to keep the appointment. We were only five or six guests at table. The conversation turned upon the French Revolution. The general showed us a key from the Bastille. These keys, as I have already said, were rather silly toys which passed from hand to hand at that time. The consigners of locksmiths' wares might, three years later, have sent to the President of the United States the bolt of the prison of the monarch who bestowed liberty upon France and America. If Washington had seen the "victors of the Bastille" disporting themselves in the gutters of Paris, he would have felt less respect for his relic. The seriousness and strength of the Revolution did not spring from those blood-stained orgies. At the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685, the same mob from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine demolished the Protestant temple at Charenton with as much ardour as when it laid waste the church of Saint-Denis in 1793.
I left my host at ten o'clock in the evening, and never saw him again; he went away the next day, and I continued my journey.
Such was my meeting with the citizen soldier, the liberator of a world. Washington descended to the grave before a vestige of fame had become attached to my footsteps; I passed before him as the most unknown of beings; he was in all his lustre, I in all my obscurity; my name perhaps did not linger one whole day in his memory: well for me, nevertheless, that his looks fell upon me! I have felt warmed by them for the rest of my life: there is virtue in a great man's looks.
*
Bonaparte is but lately dead[465]. As I have just knocked at Washington's door, it is natural that the parallel between the founder of the United States and the Emperor of the French should occur to my mind: the more so since, at the time when I am writing these lines, Washington himself is no more. Ercilla[466], singing and battling in Chile, stops in the middle of his journey to describe the death of Dido; why should not I stop at the commencement of my ramble through Pennsylvania to compare Washington with Bonaparte? I might have delayed my notice of them until I came to the time at which I met Napoleon; but should I happen to sink into the grave before reaching the year 1814 in my chronicle, the reader would never know what I had to say on the subject of the two mandataries of Providence. I remember the case of Castelnau[467]: he was Ambassador to England like myself, and like me wrote a part of his life in London. On the last page of Book VII., he says to his son, "I will treat of this fact in the Eighth Book," and the Eighth Book of Castelnau's Memoirs does not exist: that is a warning to me to take advantage of life while it lasts.
Washington does not, like Bonaparte, belong to the race that surpasses human stature. There is nothing astonishing attached to his person; he is not placed upon a vast stage; he is not engaged in a struggle with the ablest captains and the most powerful monarchs of the time; he does not rush from Memphis to Vienna, from Cadiz to Moscow: he defends himself with a handful of citizens in a land not yet famous, within the narrow circle of the domestic hearth. He delivers none of those battles in which the triumphs of Arbela and Pharsalia are renewed; he overturns no thrones to build up others from their ruins; he does not send word to the kings at his gate: