[495] Lucius Junius Brutus, Roman Consul (fl.. 509 B.C.), condemned his own sons, Titus and Tiberius, to death, for conspiring to restore Tarquin.—T.
BOOK III[496]
The Infirmerie de Marie-Thérèse—Letter from Madame la Duchesse de Berry from the Citadel of Blaye—Departure from Paris—M. de Talleyrand's calash—Basle—Journal from Paris to Prague, from the 14th to the 24th of May 1833, written in pencil in the carriage, in ink at the inns—The banks of the Rhine—Falls of the Rhine—Mösskirch—A storm—The Danube—Ulm—Blenheim—Louis XIV.—An Hercynian forest—The Barbarians—Sources of the Danube—Ratisbon—Decrease in social life as one goes farther from France—Religious feelings of the Germans—Arrival at Waldmünchen—The Austrian custom-house—I am refused admission into Bohemia—Stay at Waldmünchen—Letters to Count Choteck—Anxiety—The Viaticum—The chapel—My room at the inn—Description of Waldmünchen—Letter from Count Choteck—The peasant-girl—I leave Waldmünchen and enter Bohemia—A pine forest—Conversation with the moon—Pilsen—The high-roads of the North-View of Prague.
Paris, Rue d'Enfer, 9 May 1833.
I have brought the sequence of the most recent facts up to this day; shall I at last be able to resume my work? This work consists of the different portions of these Memoirs which are not yet finished, and I shall have some difficulty in applying myself to them again ex abrupto, for my head is filled with the things of the moment; I am not in the mood suited for gathering my past in the calm where it is sleeping, agitated though it was when in the state of life. I have taken up my pen to write; what on and what about I know not.
On glancing through the journal in which, for the last six months, I have kept a record of what I do and of what happens to me, I see that most of the pages are dated from the Rue d'Enfer.
The small house which I occupy near the barrier may be worth sixty thousand francs or so; but, at the time of the rise in the price of ground, I bought it much dearer and I have never been able to pay for it: it was a question of saving the Infirmerie de Marie-Thérèse, founded by the care of Madame de Chateaubriand and adjoining the house; a company of builders was proposing to establish a café and montagnes russes[497] in the aforesaid house, a noise which does not go very well with the death-agony.
Am I not glad of my sacrifices? Certainly: one is always glad to succour the unfortunate; I would willingly share the little I possess with those in need; but I do not know that this disposition amounts to virtue in my case. My goodness is like that of a condemned man who is lavish of that for which he will have no use in an hour's time. In London, the convict whom they are about to hang sells his skin for drink: I do not sell mine, I give it to the grave-diggers.