in a voice so manly and so pathetic that the tears came to my eyes. Whilst themselves keeping step and twisting their hemp, they appeared to be spinning out the old corporal's dying moments: there was something, I cannot say what, in that glory peculiar to Béranger, thus lonesomely revealed by two sailors singing a soldier's death within view of the sea.
Dieppe.
The cliff reminded me of a monarchical greatness, the road of a plebeian celebrity: I compared in thought the men at the two extremities of society, and I asked myself to which of those eras I should have preferred to belong. When the present shall have disappeared like the past, which of those two renowns will the most attract the notice of posterity?
And yet, if facts were all, if, in history, the value of names did not counterbalance the value of events, what a difference between my time and the time which elapsed between the deaths of Henry IV. and Mazarin[371]! What are the troubles of 1648 compared to that Revolution which has devoured the old world, of which it, the Revolution, will die perhaps, leaving behind it neither an old nor a new state of society? Had not I to paint in my Memoirs pictures of incomparably higher importance than the scenes related by the Duc de La Rochefoucauld[372]? At Dieppe itself, what was the careless and voluptuous idol of seduced and rebellious Paris by the side of Madame la Duchesse de Berry[373]? The salvoes of artillery which announced to the sea the presence of the royal widow resound no longer[374]; the flattery of powder and smoke has left nothing upon the shore save the moaning of the waves.
The two daughters of Bourbon, Anne Geneviève and Marie Caroline, have departed; the two sailors singing the song of the plebeian poet will plunge into the abyss; Dieppe no longer contains myself: it was another "I," an "I" of my early days, now past, that formerly inhabited these regions, and that "I" has succumbed, for our days die before ourselves. Here you have seen me, a sub-lieutenant in the Navarre Regiment, drilling recruits on the pebbles; you have seen me here again, exiled under Bonaparte; you shall find me here again when the days of July surprise me in this place. Behold me here once more; I here resume my pen to continue my confessions.
In order that we may understand one another, it is well to cast a glance at the present state of my Memoirs.
*
What happens to every contractor working on a large scale has happened to me: I have, in the first place, built the outer wings of my edifice, and then, removing and restoring my scaffoldings in different positions, I have raised the stone and the mortar for the intermediate structures: it used to take several centuries to complete a Gothic cathedral. If Heaven grant me life, the work will be finished by stages of my various years; the architect, always the same, will have changed only in age. For the rest, it is a punishment to preserve one's intellectual being intact, imprisoned in a worn-out material covering. St Augustine, feeling that his clay was falling from him, said to God, "Be Thou a tabernacle unto my soul," and to men he said, "When you shall have known me in this book, pray for me."
Thirty-six years must be reckoned between the things which commence my Memoirs and those upon which I am now engaged. How shall I resume with any spirit the narration of a subject formerly replete for me with passion and fire, when it is no longer with living beings that I am about to converse, when it becomes a question of arousing lifeless effigies from the depths of Eternity, of descending into a funeral vault there to play at life? Am I not myself almost dead? Have my opinions not changed? Do I see objects from the same point of view? Have not the general and prodigious events which have accompanied or followed the personal events that so greatly perturbed me diminished their importance in the eyes of the world, as well as in my own eyes? Whosoever prolongs his career feels his hours grow cold; he no longer finds on the morrow the interest which he felt on the eve. When I seek in my thoughts, there are names and even persons that escape my memory, and yet they may have caused my heart to throb: vanity of man forgetting and forgotten! It is not enough to say to one's dreams, to love, "Revive!" for them to come to life again: the realm of shadows can be opened only with the golden bough, and it needs a young hand to pluck it.