If the student were willing to "swap" his young legs for my char-à-bancs and my even worse car of glory, with what pleasure would I take his stick, his grey blouse and his blonde beard! I should go to the Rhone glaciers; I should talk the language of Schiller to my mistress; and I should ponder deeply on Teutonic liberty: he would go his way old as time, bored as one dead, undeceived by experience, having fastened round his neck, like a bell, a fame by which he would be more wearied after a quarter of an hour than by the din of the Reuss. The exchange will not take place: good bargains are not for my use. My scholar is going; he said to me, taking off and putting back his Teuton cap, with a little nod of the head:
"Permis!"
One more shadow vanished. The scholar does not know my name; he will have met me and will never know it: I am delighted with this idea; I yearn for obscurity with more eagerness than formerly I longed for light; the latter worries me either as making my miseries visible or as showing me objects which I can no longer enjoy: I am in a hurry to pass the torch to my neighbour.
Three little boys are drawing the cross-bow: William Tell and Gessler are everywhere. Free peoples retain the remembrance of the foundations of their independence. Ask a poor little boy in France if he has ever thrown the hatchet in memory of King Hlodwigh or Khlodwig or Clovis!
The new Saint-Gotthard road, on leaving Amsteg, goes to and fro in a zig-zag for two leagues, now joining the Reuss, now quitting it when the fissure of the torrent grows wider. On the perpendicular reliefs of the landscape, slopes flat or tufted with beech-clumps, peaks shooting into the sky, domes topped with ice, summits bald or retaining a few stripes of snow, like locks of white hair; in the valley, bridges, posts made of blackened planks, walnut-trees and fruit-trees which gain in luxury of branches and leaves what they lose in succulence of fruits. The Alpine nature forces those trees to become wild again; the sap breaks through in spite of the grafting: a vigorous character bursts the bonds of civilization.
A little higher, on the right margin of the Reuss, the scene changes: the stream flows with cascades in a pebbly rut, under a double and triple avenue of pines; this is like the valley of Pont d'Espagne at Cauterets. On the skirts of the mountain, the larch-trees grow on the sharp edges of the rock; holding fast by their roots, they resist the shock of the tempests.
The road and a few potato-patches alone bear witness to man's presence in this spot: he must eat and he must walk; that sums up his history. The herds, consigned to the pasture-lands in the loftier regions, do not appear in sight; birds, none; eagles, no question of them: the great eagle fell into the ocean when crossing to St. Helena; there is no flight so high or so strong but falters in the immensity of the skies. The royal eaglet has just died.[447] Other eaglets of July 1830 were announced to us; apparently they have come down from their eyry to nestle with the feather-legged pigeons. They will never carry off chamois in their talons: weakened by the domestic light, their blinking glance will never contemplate from the summit of the Saint-Gotthard the free and dazzling sun of France's glory.
*
After crossing the Pfaffensprung Bridge and passing round the pap of the village of Wasen, one again takes the right bank of the Reuss; at either extremity, cascades gleam white among the sods, spread like green tapestries on the travellers' passage. Through a defile, one perceives the Ranz glacier, which joins the Furka glaciers.