Scarce had Dupaty left Rome when Goethe came to take his place[653]. Did the president of the Parliament of Bordeaux ever hear speak of Goethe? And nevertheless the name of Goethe lives on this earth whence that of Dupaty has vanished. It is not that I love the mighty genius of Germany; I have little sympathy for the poet of matter: I feel Schiller, I understand Goethe. There may be great beauties in the enthusiasm which Goethe experiences in Rome for Jupiter: excellent critics think so; but I prefer the God of the Cross to the God of Olympus. I look in vain for the author of Werther along the banks of the Tiber; I find him only in this phrase:

"My present life is as it were a dream of youth; we shall see if I am fated to enjoy it, or to recognise that this too is vain, as so many others have been."

When Napoleon's eagle allowed Rome to escape from its claws, she fell back into the bosom of her peaceful pastors: then Byron appeared at the crumbling walls of the Cæsars[654]; he flung his distressed imagination over so many ruins, like a mourning cloak. Rome, thou hadst a name, he gave thee another; that name will cling to thee; he called thee:

"The Niobe of nations! there she stands,
Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe;
An empty urn within her wither'd hands,
Whose holy dust was scatter'd long ago[655]."

After that last storm of poetry, Byron was not long in dying[656]. I might have seen Byron at Geneva, and I did not see him; I might have seen Goethe at Weimar, and I did not see him; but I saw Madame de Staël die, who, disdaining to live beyond her youth, passed swiftly to the Capitol with Corinne: imperishable names, illustrious ashes, which have associated themselves with the name and the ashes of the Eternal City[657].

*

Thus have the changes in manners and persons proceeded from century to century in Italy; but the great transformation has been worked, above all, by our two occupations of Rome.

The "Roman Republic," established under the influence of the Directorate, ridiculous as it was with its two "consuls" and its "lictors" (scurvy facchini taken from the populace), for all that, made excellent innovations in the civil laws: it was from the prefectures, invented by that "Roman Republic," that Bonaparte borrowed the institution of his own prefects.

The "Roman Republic."

We brought to Rome the germ of an administration which had no existence; Rome, become the chief town of the Department of the Tiber, was superlatively well ruled. Its mortgage system it owes to us. The suppression of the convents, the sale of ecclesiastical property sanctioned by Pius VII. have diminished the faith in the permanence of the consecration of religious things. The famous Index, which still makes a little noise on our side of the Alps, makes none at all in Rome: for a few bajocchi you obtain permission to read the forbidden work with a safe conscience. The Index is one of those works which remain as evidences of the old times in the midst of the new. In the Republics of Rome and Athens, were not the titles of "King," the names of the great families adhering to the Monarchy respectfully preserved? It is only the French who foolishly take offense at their tombs and their annals, who hurl down the crosses, devastate the churches, out of grudge against the clergy of the Year of Grace 1000 or 1100. There is nothing more puerile or more stupid than those reminiscent outrages; nothing which would tend more to the belief that we are incapable of anything serious whatsoever, that the true principles of liberty will for ever remain unknown to us. Far from despising the past, we ought, as all nations do, to treat it as a venerable greybeard, who sits by our fireside telling what he has seen: what harm can he do us? He instructs and amuses us with his stories, his ideas, his language, his manners, his habits of former days; but he is without strength, and his hands are weak and trembling. Can it be that we are afraid of that contemporary of our fathers, who would already be with them in the tomb, if he could die, and who has no authority, save that of their dust?