When I am tired of my gardens, the plain of Montrouge takes their place. I have seen that plain change: what have I not seen change! Twenty-five years ago, I used to pass by the Barrière du Maine when going to Méréville, to the Marais, to the Vallée aux Loups; to the right and left of the road one saw only mills, the wheels of the cranes at the stone-pits and the nursery-garden of Cels, Rousseau's old friend. Desnoyers built his rooms of a "hundred covers" for the soldiers of the Imperial Guard, who came to clink glasses between each battle won, each kingdom overthrown. A few public-houses stood round the mills, from the Barrière du Maine to the Barrière du Montparnasse. Higher up were the Moulin janséniste and Lauzun's pleasure-house, by way of a contrast. Near the public-houses, acacias were planted, the poor man's shade, even as seltzer-water is the beggar's champagne. A travelling theatre fixed the migratory population of the public-house balls; a village was formed with a paved street, song-writers and gendarmes, the Amphions and Cecropses of the police.
While the living were settling down, the dead were claiming their place. A cemetery was fenced in, not without opposition on the part of the drunkards, in an enclosure containing a ruined mill, like the "Tour des Abois:" there death brings every day the corn which it has gleaned; a mere wall separates it from the dancing, the music, the nightly uproar; the sounds of a moment, the marriages of an hour separate them from infinite silence, endless night and eternal nuptials.
I often stroll through this cemetery younger than myself, in which the worms that gnaw the dead are not yet dead; I read the epitaphs: how many women between sixteen and thirty years old have become the prey of the tomb! Happy they to have lived only in their youth! The Duchesse de Gèvres, the last drop of the blood of Du Guesclin, a skeleton of another age, dozes in the midst of the plebeian sleepers.
In this new exile, I already have old friends: M. Lemoine lies there; he was secretary to M. de Montmorin and was bequeathed to me by Madame de Beaumont. He used to bring me almost every evening, when I was in Paris, the simple conversation which I like so much, when it is joined to goodness of heart and singleness of character. My sick and wearied mind finds relaxation in a healthy and restful mind. I left the ashes of M. Lemoine's noble patroness on the banks of the Tiber.
My daily walks.
The boulevards which encompass the Infirmary share my walks with the cemetery; I no longer dream there: having no future, I have no dreams left. A stranger to the new generations, I appear to them a dusty and very bare wallet-bearer; scarce am I covered now with a rag of docked days at which time gnaws, even as the herald-at-arms used to cut the jacket of an inglorious knight. I am glad to stand aside. I like to be at a musket-shot's distance from the barrier, on the edge of a high-road and always ready to set out. From the foot of the mile-stone, I watch the mail pass: my image and life's.
When I was in Rome, in 1828, I formed a plan to build, in Paris, at the end of my hermitage, a green-house and a gardener's cottage, all to be paid for out of the savings of my embassy and the fragments of antiquities found in my excavations at Torre Vergata. M. de Polignac assumed office; I sacrificed to the liberties of my country a place which charmed me; relapsed into poverty, good-bye to my green-house: fortuna vitrea est.
The evil habit of paper and ink brings about that one cannot prevent one's self from scribbling. I have taken up my pen, not knowing what I was going to write, and have scrawled this description, at least a third too long: if I have time, I will cut it down.
I must ask pardon of my friends for the bitterness of some of my thoughts. I can laugh only with my lips; I have the spleen, a physical melancholy, a real complaint; whoever has read these Memoirs has seen what my lot has been. I was not a swimmer's stroke from my mother's breast before the torments had assailed me. I have wandered from ship-wreck to shipwreck; I feel a curse upon my life, a burden too heavy for that hut of reeds. Let not those whom I love, therefore, think themselves denied; let them excuse me, let them allow my fever to pass: between those attacks, my heart is wholly theirs.
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