A sudden conversion took place within my mind. Rinaldo beheld his weakness in the mirror of honour in Armida's gardens; I was not Tasso's hero, but the same looking-glass showed me my image in the midst of an American orchard. The clash of arms, the world's tumult resounded in my ears under the thatch of a mill hidden in unknown woods. I abruptly interrupted my travels, and said to myself:
"Go back to France."
Thus it happened that my sense of duty upset my early plans, and occasioned the first of the revolutions that have marked my career. The Bourbons no more needed that a cadet of Brittany should return from across the seas to offer them his obscure devotion than they have needed his services since he has emerged from his obscurity. Had I lit my pipe with the newspaper which changed the course of my life, and continued my journey, no one would have remarked my absence; my life was at that time as unknown and weighed as little as the smoke from my calumet. A simple contest between myself and my conscience flung me upon the world's stage. I could have acted as I pleased, since I alone was a witness of the struggle; but, of all witnesses, that is the one before whose eyes I should most fear to blush.
Why is it that the solitudes of Erie and Ontario present themselves to my thoughts today with a charm which the brilliant spectacle of the Bosphorus is not able to possess in my memory? It is because, at the time of my journey in the United States, I was full of illusions: the troubles of France commenced at the same time as the commencement of my existence; nothing was complete in myself or in the land of my birth. Those days are dear to me because they recall to me the innocence of sentiments inspired by the family and the pleasures of youth.
Fifteen years later, after my journey in the Levant, the Republic, swollen with ruins and tears, had discharged itself like a torrent from the deluge into despotism. I no longer deluded myself with chimeras; my recollections, thenceforth taking their source in society and passions, lacked candour. Deceived in both my pilgrimages to the West and to the East, I had failed to discover the passage to the Pole, I had failed to snatch glory on the banks of Niagara, where I had gone in search of it, and I had left it seated on the ruins of Athens.
After setting out to be a traveller in America and returning to be a soldier in Europe, I did not go the whole length of either of those careers: an evil genius snatched the staff and the sword from my hand, and put the pen there in its stead. Fifteen more years have elapsed since, finding myself at Sparta, and contemplating the sky during the night, I recalled the countries that had already witnessed my peaceful or troubled sleep: on the commons of England, in the plains of Italy, upon the high-seas, in the Canadian forests, I had already saluted the same stars which I saw shine upon the land of Helen and Menelaus. But what would it avail me to complain to the stars, the fixed witnesses of my vagrant destinies? One day their gaze will cease to tire itself by pursuing me; meantime, indifferent to my fate, I will not ask those stars to move it with a gentler influence nor to restore to me that portion of life which the traveller leaves behind in the places at which he touches.
Were I to revisit the United States today, I should no longer recognize them: there where I left forests, I should find tilled fields; there where I traced a path for myself across the thickets, I should travel on the high-roads; at Natchez, instead of Céluta's hut, stands a town of some five thousand inhabitants; Chactas might today be sent to Congress. I have lately received a pamphlet printed among the Cherokees and addressed to myself, in the interests of those savages, as "the defender of the liberty of the press."
In the land of the Muskhogulges, the Seminoles, the Chickasaws, we find a city of Athens, another of Marathon, another of Carthage, another of Memphis, another of Sparta, another of Florence; there is a County of Columbia and a County of Marengo: the glory of every country has placed a name in the same wastes where I met Father Aubry and the obscure Atala. Kentucky exhibits a Versailles; a territory called Bourbon has a Paris for its capital.
All the exiles, all the fugitives from oppression who have taken refuge in America have carried there the memory of their country.
Falsi Simoentis ad undam
Libabat cineri Andromache[521].