At the end of November, seeing that the repairs to my cottage were not progressing, I determined to go and superintend them. We arrived at the Vallée in the evening. We did not take the ordinary road, but went in through the gate at the foot of the garden. The soil of the drives, soaked through with rain, prevented the horses from going; the carriage upset. A plaster bust of Homer, placed beside Madame de Chateaubriand, dashed through the window and broke its neck: a bad omen for the Martyrs, at which I was then working.
The house, full of workmen laughing, singing, and hammering, was warmed by blazing shavings and lighted by candle-ends; it looked like a hermitage illuminated at night by pilgrims, in the woods. Delighted to find two rooms made fairly comfortable, in one of which supper had been laid, we sat down to table. The next morning, awakened by the sound of the hammers and the songs of the husbandmen, I saw the sun rise with less anxiety than the master of the Tuileries.
I was in an endless enchantment; without being Madame de Sévigné, I went, provided with a pair of wooden clogs, to plant my trees in the mud, to pass up and down the same walks, to look again and again at every smallest corner, to hide wherever there was a tuft of brushwood, saying to myself that this would be my park in the future: for then the future was not lacking. When striving, to-day, by force of memory to re-open the closed horizon, I no longer find the same, but I meet with others. I lose myself in my vanished thoughts; the illusions into which I fall are perhaps as fair as their predecessors; only they are no longer so young: what I used to see in the splendour of the south, I now perceive by the light of the sunset. If, nevertheless, I could cease to be harassed by dreams! Bayard, summoned to surrender a place, replied:
"Wait till I have made a bridge of dead bodies, to pass over with my garrison."
I fear that, to go out, I shall need to pass over the bodies of my fancies.
My trees, being as yet small, did not gather the sounds of the autumn winds; but, in spring, the breezes which inhaled the breath of the flowers of the neighbouring fields retained it and poured it over my valley.
I made some additions to my cottage; I improved the appearance of its brick walls with a portico supported by two black marble columns and two white marble caryatides: I remembered that I had been to Athens. My plan was to add a tower to the end of my pavilion; meantime I made counterfeit battlements on the wall separating me from the road: I thus anticipated the mediæval mania which is stupefying us at present. The Vallée-aux-Loups is the only thing that I regret of all that I have lost; it is written that nothing shall remain to me. After the loss of my Valley, I planted the Infirmerie de Marie-Thérèse[6], which also I have lately left. I defy fate now to fix me to the smallest morsel of earth; henceforth I shall have for a garden only those avenues, honoured with such fine names, around the Invalides, along which I stroll with my one-armed or limping colleagues. Not far from those walks, Madame de Beaumont's cypress lifts its head; in those deserted spaces, the great and frivolous Duchesse de Châtillon once leant upon my arm. Now I give my arm only to time: it is very heavy!
I worked with delight at my Memoirs, and the Martyrs made progress; I had already read some books to M. de Fontanes. I had settled down in the midst of my memories as in a large library; I consulted this and then that, and next closed the register with a sigh, for I perceived that the light, in penetrating into it, destroyed its mystery. Light up the days of life, and they will no longer be what they are.
In the month of July, I fell ill and was obliged to return to Paris. The doctors rendered the illness dangerous. In the time of Hippocrates, there was a dearth of dead in the lower regions, says the epigram: thanks to our modern Hippocrates, there is an abundance to-day.
This was perhaps the only moment at which, when near death, I felt a desire to live. When I felt myself lapsing into faintness, which often happened, I used to say to Madame de Chateaubriand: