How many times has England, in the space of a few hundred years, been destroyed? Through how many revolutions has she not passed to come to the brink of a greater, a more deep-laid revolution, which will envelop posterity! I have seen those famous British parliaments in all their mightiness: what will become of them? I have seen England in her ancient manners and in her ancient prosperity: everywhere the little lonely church with its steeple, Gray's country churchyard, everywhere narrow and gravelled roads, valleys filled with cows, heaths spotted with sheep, parks, country-houses, towns; few large forests, few birds, the sea-breeze. It was not those plains of Andalusia, where I found the old Christians and the young loves among the voluptuous remains of the palace of the Moors in the midst of the aloes and palm-trees:

Quid dignum memorare tuis, Hispania, terris
Vox humana valet?

There was not that Roman Campagna, whose irresistible charm is incessantly calling after me; those waves and that sun were not the waves and the sun that bathe and light the promontory on which Plato[224] taught his disciples, that Sunium where I heard the cricket sing, in vain asking Minerva for the hearth of the priests of her temple; but after all, such as she was, this England, surrounded by her ships, covered with her herds and professing the cult of her great men, was charming and redoubtable.

To-day her valleys are darkened by the smoke of forges and workshops, her roads changed into iron ways; and along those roads, in lieu of Milton and Shakespeare, move wandering boilers. Already the nurseries of knowledge, Oxford and Cambridge, are assuming a deserted aspect: their colleges and their Gothic chapels, half-abandoned, distress the eye; in their cloisters, near the sepulchral stones of the middle ages, lie, forgotten, the marble annals of the ancient peoples of Greece: ruins guarding ruins.

By these monuments, around which the void was beginning to form, I left that part of my spring days which I had re-found; I parted a second time with my youth, on the same shore where I had abandoned it formerly: Charlotte had suddenly reappeared like that luminary, the delight of the shades, which, delayed by the flight of the months, should rise in the middle of the night. If you are not too weary, read in these Memoirs of the effect which the sudden vision of that woman produced upon me in 1822. When she had distinguished me before, I did not know those other Englishwomen who came to flock round me in my hour of power and renown: their homage was as fickle as my fortune. To-day, after sixteen new years have passed away since my embassy in London, after so many new destructions, my eyes are carried back to the daughter of the land of Desdemona and Juliet: she counts now in my memory only from the day on which her unexpected presence rekindled the torch of my recollections. A new Epimenides[225], awakened after a long sleep, I fix my gaze upon a beacon so much the brighter in that the others are extinguished along the shore; one alone excepted will shine long after me.

I did not finish telling all that concerns Charlotte in the preceding pages of these Memoirs: she came with a part of her family to see me in France, when I was a minister, in 1823. Through one of those inexplicable miseries of mankind, preoccupied as I was with a war on which depended the fate of the French Monarchy, something must no doubt have been lacking in my voice, for Charlotte, returning to England, left me a letter in which she shows herself hurt at the coldness of my reception. I have dared neither to write to her nor to send back to her some literary fragments which she had restored to me and which I had promised to return to her augmented. If it were true that she had had a genuine reason to complain, I would fling into the fire all that I have told of my first sojourn across the sea.

Often the thought has come to me to go to solve my doubts; but could I return to England, I, who am weak enough not to dare to visit the paternal rock on which I have marked out my tomb? I am afraid nowadays of my sensations: time, removing my young years, has made me like those soldiers whose limbs have been left on the battle-field; my blood, having a less long road to travel, rushes into my heart with so rapid a flow that that old organ of my joys and sorrows throbs as though ready to burst. The wish to burn all that concerns Charlotte, although she is treated with religious respect, is mingled in my mind with the longing to destroy these Memoirs: if they still belonged to me, or if I could buy them back, I should succumb to the temptation. I have so great a distaste for everything, so great a contempt for the present and for the immediate future, so firm a conviction that men, henceforth, taken all together as a public (and that for several centuries), will be pitiable, that I blush to consume my last moments in the relating of past things, in the depicting of a finished world, of which the language and the name will no more be understood.

Memories of Lady Sutton.

Man is as much deceived by the success of his wishes as by their disappointment: I had desired, contrary to my natural instinct, to go to the Congress; taking advantage of a prejudice of M. de Villèle's, I had induced him to force M. de Montmorency's hand. Well, my real inclination was not for that which I had obtained; I should doubtless have felt some spite, if I had been compelled to remain in England; but soon the idea of going to see Lady Sutton, of making a journey through the three kingdoms would have mastered the impulse of a superadded ambition which is not inherent in my nature. God ordained differently, and I left for Verona: thence the change in my life, thence my ministry, the Spanish War, my triumph, my fall, soon followed by that of the Monarchy.