Lucerne.
A French traveller in Switzerland is touched and saddened; our history, for the misfortune of those regions, is too closely connected with their history; the blood of Helvetia has been shed for us and by us; we wasted the hut of William Tell with fire and sword; we engaged in our civil wars the peasant warrior who guarded the throne of our kings. The genius of Thorwaldsen has fixed the memory of the 10th of August at the gate of Lucerne. The Helvetian Lion lies dying, pierced by an arrow, and covering with its drooping head and one of its paws the escutcheon of France, of which we see only one of the fleurs-de-lys. The chapel consecrated to the victims, the clump of green trees which accompanies the bas-relief sculptured in the rock, the soldier escaped from the massacre of the 10th of August who shows the monument to strangers, the note from Louis XVI. ordering the Swiss to lay down their arms, the frontal presented by Madame la Dauphine to the expiatory chapel, upon which that perfect model of sorrow has embroidered the image of the immolated Lamb of God!... By what counsel does Providence, after the last fall of the throne of the Bourbons, send me to seek a refuge near this monument? At least, I can look upon it without blushing, I can lay my feeble but not perjured hand upon the shield of France, even as the lion covers it with its mighty claws, now distended in death.
Well, a member of the Diet has proposed to destroy this monument! What does Switzerland demand? Liberty? She has enjoyed it for four centuries. Equality? She has it. The republic? It is her form of government. The lightening of taxes? She pays hardly any. What does she want then? She wants to change, it is the law of beings. When a people, transformed by time, is no longer able to remain what it has been, the first symptom of its malady is a hatred of the past and of the virtues of its fathers.
I returned from the monument to the 10th of August by the great covered bridge, a kind of wooden gallery hung over the lake. Two hundred and thirty-eight triangular pictures, set between the rafters of the roof, adorn this gallery. They are popular annals in which the Swiss, as he passed, used to learn the story of his religion and his liberty.
I have seen the tame moor-fowl; I prefer the wild moor-fowl of the pond at Combourg.
In the town, I was struck by the sound of a choir of voices; it issued from a Lady-chapel. I entered that chapel and thought myself carried back to the days of my childhood. In front of four devoutly-decked altars, women were reciting the rosary and the litanies with the priest. It was like the evening-prayer by the sea-shore in my poor Brittany, and I was on the shore of the Lake of Lucerne! Thus did a man knot together the two ends of my life, the better to make me feel all that had been lost in the chain of my years.
On the Lake of Lucerne, 16 August 1832, noon.
Alps, lower your crests, I am no longer worthy of you: young, I should be solitary; old, I am merely isolated. I would certainly depict nature again; but for whom? Who would care for my pictures? What arms, other than those of time, would, in reward, embrace my "genius," with its stripped forehead? Who would repeat my songs? What Muse should I inspire with any? Under the vault of my years, as under that of the snowy heights which surround me, no ray of sun will come to warm me. What a pity to drag across those heights tired footsteps which no one would care to follow! What a misfortune not to find myself free to wander anew until at the end of my life!
Two o'clock.