The women of Namur assisted me to climb into the wagon, recommended me to the driver's care, and compelled me to accept a woollen blanket. I noticed that they treated me with a sort of respect and deference: there is something superior, something delicate, in the nature of Frenchmen which other nations recognise.
The Prince de Ligne's men put me down for the second time on the road just outside Brussels, and refused to accept my last crown-piece. In Brussels, not one inn-keeper was willing to take me in. The wandering Jew, the popular Orestes, whom the ballad represents as going to that town:
Quand il fut dans la ville
De Bruxelle en Brabant[135],
met with a better reception than I, for he had always five sous in his pocket. I knocked: they opened; when they saw me they said, "Move on, move on!" and shut the door in my face. I was driven out of a café. My hair hung over my face, hidden behind my beard and mustachios; I had a hay bandage round my thigh; over my tattered uniform I wore the blanket of the Namur women, knotted round my throat by way of a cloak. The beggar in the Odyssey was more insolent, but not so poor as I.
I had at first presented myself to no purpose at the hotel where I had stayed with my brother: I made a second attempt; as I approached the door I saw the Comte de Chateaubriand stepping from a carriage with the Baron de Montboissier. He was alarmed at my spectral appearance. They looked for a room outside the hotel, for the proprietor absolutely refused to admit me. A wig-maker offered me a den suited to my wretchedness. My brother brought me a surgeon and a doctor. He had received letters from Paris: M. de Malesherbes invited him to return to France. He told me of the day's work of the 10th of August, the massacres of September, and the political news, of which I knew not a word. He approved of my plan to cross to Jersey, and advanced me twenty-five louis. My impaired sight hardly permitted me to distinguish my brother's features; I believed that that gloom emanated from myself, whereas it was the shadow which Eternity was spreading around him: without knowing it, we were seeing each other for the last time. All of us, such as we are, have only the present moment for our own: the next belongs to God; there are always two chances of not seeing again the friend who is leaving us: our death and his. How many men have never reclimbed the staircase they have descended!
Death touches us more before than after the decease of a friend: it is a piece of ourselves that is torn away, a world of childish recollections, of familiar intimacy, of affections and interests in common, that dissolves. My brother preceded me in my mother's womb; he was the first to dwell in those same sainted entrails whence I issued after him; he sat before me by the paternal hearth; he waited several years to welcome me, to give me my name in the Name of Jesus Christ, and to ally himself with the whole of my youth. My blood, mingled with his blood in the revolutionary receptacle, would have had the same savour, like a draught of milk supplied by the pasturage of the same mountain. But, if men caused the head of my elder, my god-father, to fall before its time, the years will not spare mine; already my forehead is shedding its covering; I feel an Ugolino, Time, stooping over me and gnawing at my skull:
... come'l pan perf ame si manduca[136].
The doctor could not recover from his astonishment: he looked upon that which did not kill me, which came to none of its natural crises, as a phenomenon unprecedented in the history of medicine. Gangrene had set in in my wound; they dressed it with quinine. Having obtained this first aid, I insisted on departing for Ostend. Brussels was hateful to me, I burned to leave it; it was once again filling with those heroes of domesticity who had returned from Verdun in their carriages, and whom I did not see in Brussels when I accompanied the King there during the Hundred Days.
I reached Guernsey.
I travelled pleasantly to Ostend by the canals: I found some Bretons there, my comrades-in-arms. We chartered a decked barge and went down the Channel. We slept in the hold, on the shingle which served as ballast. The strength of my constitution was at last exhausted. I could no longer speak; the motion of a rough sea broke me down completely. I swallowed scarce a few drops of water and lemon, and, when the bad weather compelled us to put in to Guernsey, they thought I was going to breathe my last: an emigrant priest read me the prayers for the dying. The captain, not wishing to have me die on board his ship, ordered me to be put down on the quay; they set me down in the sun, with my back leaning against a wall, and my head turned towards the open sea, facing that Isle of Alderney where, eight months before, I had beheld death in another shape.