Once the house was bought, the best that I could do was to live in it; I have arranged it as it is. From the windows of the drawing-room one sees first what the English call a "pleasure-ground," a proscenium consisting of a lawn and some blocks of shrubs. Beyond this enclosure, on the other side of wall, the height of a man's breast, surmounted by a white, lozenged fence, is a field of mixed cultivation, reserved for the provender of the cattle of the Infirmary. Beyond this field comes another piece of ground separated from the field by another breast-high wall in green open-work, interlaced with viburnums and Bengal roses; these marches of my State embrace a clump of trees, a meadow and an alley of poplars. This nook is extremely solitary; it does not smile to me like Horace' nook: "angulus ridet.[498]" On the contrary, I have sometimes shed tears there. The proverb says that "youth must have its fling." The decline of life also has some freaks to overlook:
Les pleurs et la pitié,
Sorte d'amour ayant ses charmes[499].
My trees are of a thousand kinds. I have planted twenty-three cedars of Lebanon and two druid oaks: they make game of their short-lived master, brevem dominum. A mall, a double avenue of chesnuts, leads from the upper to the lower garden; the ground slopes rapidly along the field between.
I did not choose these trees, as at the Vallée aux Loups, in memory of the spots which I have visited: he who takes pleasure in recollection cherishes hopes. But, when one has no children, nor youth, nor country, what attachment can one bear to trees whose foliage, flowers, fruits are no longer the mysterious numerals employed in the calculation of the periods of illusion. In vain people say to me, "You are growing younger:" do they think that they will make me take my wisdom-teeth for my milk-teeth? And even the latter have been given me only to eat a bitter loaf under the Royalty of the 7th of August. For the rest, my trees are not much interested to know whether they serve as a calendar for my pleasures or as a death-certificate of my years; they increase daily, from the day that I decrease: they wed those of the grounds of the Foundling Hospital and the Boulevard d'Enfer which surround me. I do not see a single house; I should be less separated from the world at two hundred leagues from Paris. I hear the bleating of the goats which feed the abandoned orphans. Ah, if I had been, like these, in the arms of St. Vincent de Paul[500]! Born of a frailty, obscure and unknown as they are, I should to-day be some nameless workman, having no concern with men, nor knowing either why or how I entered life or how and why I was to quit it.
Infirmerie de Marie-Thérèse.
By pulling down a wall, I have placed myself in communication with the Infirmerie de Marie Thérèse; I find myself at the same time in a monastery, a farm, an orchard and a park. In the morning, I wake to the sound of the Angelus; I hear from my bed the singing of the priests in the chapel; I see from my window a Calvary which stands between a walnut-tree and an elder-tree: cows, chickens, pigeons and bees; sisters of Charity in black taminy gowns and white dimity caps, convalescent women, old ecclesiastics go roaming among the lilacs, azaleas, calycanthuses and rhododendrons of the flower-garden, among the rose-trees, gooseberry-bushes, strawberry-plants and vegetables of the kitchen-garden. Some of my octogenarian vicars were exiled with me: after mingling my poverty with theirs on the lawns of Kensington, I have offered the grass-plots of my hospice to their failing foot-steps; they there drag their pious old age like the folds of the veil of the sanctuary.
I have as a companion a fat red-gray cat with black cross stripes, born at the Vatican in the Raphael Gallery: Leo XII. brought it up in a skirt of his robe, where I used to watch it with envy, when the Pontiff gave me my audiences as Ambassador. On the death of the successor of St. Peter, I inherited the cat without a master, as I have told in writing of my Roman Embassy. They called it Micetto, surnamed the Pope's Cat. In this capacity it enjoys an extreme consideration among pious souls. I strive to make it forget exile, the Sistine Chapel and the sun of Michael Angelo's dome, on which it used to take its walks far removed from earth.
My house and the different buildings of the Infirmary, with their chapel and the Gothic sacristy, present the appearance of a colony or hamlet. On ceremonial days, religion hiding under my roof, the Old Monarchy in my alms-house form up in marching order. Processions composed of all our valetudinarians, preceded by the young girls of the neighbourhood, pass under the trees, singing, with the Blessed Sacrament, the cross and the banner. Madame de Chateaubriand follows them, beads in hand, proud of the flock which is the object of her solicitude. The blackbirds whistle, the red-breasts warble, the nightingales compete against the hymns. I am carried back to the Rogations, of which I have described the rustic pomp[501]; from the theory of Christianity, I have passed to its practice.
My home faces west. In the evening, the tree-tops lighted from behind imprint their black, serrate outlines on the horizon. My youth returns at that hour; it revives those lapsed days which time has reduced to the unsubstantiality of phantoms. When the constellations pierce through their blue arch, I remember that splendid firmament which I admired from the bosom of the American forests or the lap of the Ocean. The night is more favourable than the day to the traveller's reminiscences: it hides from his eyes the landscapes that would remind him of the regions which he inhabits; it shows him only the luminaries, which look the same under the different latitudes of the same hemisphere. Then he recognises those stars which he contemplated in such a country, at such a time; the thoughts which he entertained, the feelings which he underwent in the different portions of the world shoot up and fix themselves at the same point in the sky.
Life at the Infirmary.