The ambassadors were charged, during their residence abroad, to draw up a memorandum on the condition of the peoples and the governments to which they were accredited. This series of memoranda might be useful to the historian. To-day the same injunctions are issued, but scarcely one diplomatic agent complies with it. I had too little time in my embassies to finish off long studies; nevertheless, I made drafts for them; my patience for work was not entirely unfruitful. I find this commencement of a sketch of my investigations on Germany:
"After the fall of Napoleon, the introduction of the representative governments into the Germanic Confederation reawakened in Germany those first ideas of innovation which the Revolution had originally called forth there. They fomented for some time with great violence: the youth of the country had been called to its defense by a promise of liberty; this promise had been greedily received by scholars who found in their masters the inclination which science has shown, in this century, to second liberal theories. Under the sky of Germany, this love of liberty becomes a sort of sombre and mysterious fanaticism, which is propagated by means of secret societies. Sand came to strike terror into Europe. That man, for the rest, who revealed the existence of a powerful sect, was no more than a vulgar enthusiast; he deceived himself and took a common mind for a transcendental mind: his crime went to waste itself upon a writer whose genius could not aspire to empire and had not enough of the conqueror and the king to merit a dagger-thrust.
Memorandum on Germany.
"A sort of tribunal of political inquisition and the suppression of the liberty of the press have stopped this movement of men's minds; but it must not be believed that they have broken its main-spring. Germany, like Italy, to-day desires political unity, and with this idea, which will remain dormant for a greater or lesser length of time according to events and men, one can always be sure, by arousing it, to stir the Germanic peoples. The princes or ministers who may appear in the ranks of the Confederation of the German States will hasten or delay the revolution in this country, but they will not prevent the human race from developing: every century has its dynasty. To-day there is no one left in Germany, nor even in Europe: we have passed from the giants to the dwarfs and fallen from the immense into the narrow and limited. Bavaria, by means of the bureaus formed by M. de Montgelas[144], still pushes on towards new ideas, although she has receded in the race, while the Landgraviate of Hesse would not even admit that there was a revolution in Europe. The Prince[145] who has just died wanted his soldiers, who had formerly been soldiers of Jerome Bonaparte[146], to wear powder and pig-tails: he mistook old fashions for old manners, forgetting that one can copy the first, but that one can never restore the second."
*
In Berlin and in the North, the monuments are fortresses; the sight of them alone oppresses the heart. If you see these places in populous and fertile countries, they give rise to the idea of a legitimate defense; the women and children, sitting and playing at some distance from the sentries, form a rather agreeable contrast; but a fortress on heaths, in a desert, only recalls human anger: against whom are those ramparts raised, if not against poverty and independence? You have to be myself to find a pleasure in prowling at the foot of those bastions, in hearing the wind whistle through those trenches, in seeing those breastworks raised in prevision of enemies who perhaps will never appear. Those military labyrinths, those guns mute in face of one another on salient and gazoned angles, those stone watch-towers, where you see nobody and whence no eye observes you, are of an incredible grimness. If, in the dual solitude of nature and war, you come across a daisy sheltered under the redan of a glacis, that floral amenity relieves you. When, in the castles in Italy, I saw goats suspended to the ruins and the goat-girl sitting under a parasol pine; when, on the mediæval walls with which Jerusalem is surrounded, my eyes plunged into the Valley of Cedron upon some Arab women climbing up steeps among pebble-stones, the sight was a sad one doubtless, but history was there, and the silence of the present allowed the sounds of the past to be heard all the more clearly.
I had asked for leave of absence on the occasion of the baptism of the Duc de Bordeaux. Being granted this leave, I prepared to start: Voltaire, in a letter to his niece, says that he sees the Spree flow, that the Spree empties itself into the Elbe, the Elbe into the sea, and that the sea receives the Seine; he thus came down to Paris. Before leaving Berlin, I went to pay a last visit to Charlottenburg; it was not Windsor, nor Aranjuez, nor Caserta, nor Fontainebleau[147]: the villa, supported by a hamlet, is surrounded by an English park, of small extent, from which waste land can be seen outside. The Queen of Prussia here enjoys a peace which Bonaparte's memory will no longer be able to disturb. What an uproar the conqueror made, in the old days, in this refuge of silence, when he arrived there with his flourishing trumpets and his legions blooded at Jena! It was from Berlin, after wiping the kingdom of Frederic the Great from the map, that he announced the continental blockade and prepared the Moscow campaign in his mind; his words had already carried death to the heart of an accomplished sovereign: she now sleeps at Charlottenburg, in a monumental vault; a statue, a fine portrait in marble, represents her. I wrote some verses on the tomb for which the Duchess of Cumberland asked me[148].
I arrived in Paris[149] at the time of the celebration for the baptism of M. le Duc de Bordeaux. The cradle of the descendant of Louis XIV., of which I had had the honour to pay the carriage[150], has disappeared like that of the King of Rome. In a time different from the present, Louvel's outrage would have ensured the sceptre to Henry V.; but crime no longer constitutes a right, except for the man who commits it.
Baptism of the Duc de Bordeaux.