[446] Cf. Chateaubriand, Essai sur les révolutions: the chapter entitled, La Suisse pauvre et vertueuse, in which the author describes as "very doubtful" the story of Tell and the apple.—B.
[447] The Duc de Reichstadt had died on the 22nd of July 1832, a month earlier than the date of Chateaubriand's journey.—T.
[448] Alexander Count Suwaroff (1729-1800), after defeating the French at Cassano, the Trebbia and Novi, in April, June and August 1799, was himself defeated by Masséna, who had already beaten one Russian army at Zurich (25-26 September 1799). Suwaroff was recalled in disgrace and died in the following year.—T.
"At Mount Adula's foot, amid a thousand reeds,
The still Rhine, proud of how his great stream speeds,
Slept with one hand upon his tilted urn,
To the grateful music of the just-born burn."—T.
[450] "One's country's to be found where'er the soul's enchanted."—T.
[451] St. Nicholas Bishop of Myra (d. circa 342), the patron saint of sailors, thieves, virgins and children. The Church honours St. Nicholas on the 6th of December.—T.
[452] Clara Wendel was one of a company of vagabonds arrested, in 1825, for the murder, on the 15th September 1816, of Xavier Keller, a State councillor of Lucerne, the cause of whose death had for many years been a mystery. Revelations made by the band showed that Xavier Keller had been the victim of a political crime, the instigators of which were two official persons of Lucerne. Five individuals, including a brother and sister of Clara Wendel, had been guilty of committing this crime. The trial excited an European interest and ended in a number of condemnations. Clara Wendel was sentenced to imprisonment for life and served her sentence in the prison at Lucerne.—B.
[453] On the 5th of June 1832, Alexandre Dumas had followed the funeral of General Lamarque in the uniform of an artillery-man; it was rumoured that he had distributed arms at the Porte Saint-Martin. On the 9th of June, a newspaper announced that the author had been arrested with arms in his hands and that he had been shot on the morning of the 6th. An aide-de-camp of the King's hurried to his house, found him in perfect health and informed him that the question of his arrest had been seriously discussed. He was advised to go to spend a month or two abroad, in order that he might be forgotten. He put his dramatic affairs in order, obtained some money from Harel (no easy matter) and, on the 21st of July 1832, left for Switzerland, furnished with a regular passport. He returned to Paris at the commencement of October. His Impressions de Voyage, the publication of which began in 1833, have remained the best of his works. In the third volume, he tells of his visit to the author of the Génie du Christianisme, in a chapter entitled, Les Poules de M. de Chateaubriand.—B.
[454] Cf. Vol. I., p. 72, n. I.—T.