*
A letter for Madame la Dauphine and a note for the two children were added to the letter addressed to me.
There were left to me, of my past grandeurs, a brougham in which I had once shone at the Court of George IV. and a travelling-calash, built in former days for the use of the Prince de Talleyrand. I had the latter repaired, in order to make it capable of going against nature; for, by origin and habit, it is disinclined to run after fallen kings. On the 14th of May, the anniversary of the murder of Henry IV., at half-past eight in the evening, I set out in search of Henry V., child, orphan and outlaw.
I was not without anxiety as to my passport: taken out at the Foreign Office, it bore no description, and it was dated eleven months back; it had been delivered for Switzerland and Italy and had already served to enable me to leave France and return; different visas witnessed these several circumstances. I did not care either to have it renewed or to ask for a fresh one. The police of every country would have, been warned, every telegraph set in motion; at every custom-house they would have searched my trunks, my carriage, my person. If my papers had been seized, what a pretext for persecution, what domiciliary visits, what arrests! What a prolongation of the royal captivity! For it would have been proved that the Princess had secret means of correspondence outside. It was therefore impossible for me to call attention to my departure by asking for a passport: I placed my trust in my star.
I leave for Prague.
Avoiding the too much beaten road of Frankfort and that of Strasburg, which runs under the line of telegraphs, I took the Basle Road with Hyacinthe Pilorge, my secretary, used to all my fortunes, and Baptiste, my valet de chambre when I was "My Lord," and once more plain valet on the downfall of My Lordship[515]: we get in and out of the carriage together. My cook, the famous Montmirel, retired when I left the ministry, declaring that he would not return "to office" till I did. It had been wisely decided, by the Introducer of Ambassadors under the Restoration, that any ambassador who died re-entered "private life:" Baptiste had re-entered domestic service.
When we reached Altkirch, the frontier stage, a gendarme appeared and asked for my passport. On seeing my name, he told me that he had served in the Spanish Campaign, in 1823, under my nephew Christian, a captain in the Dragoons of the Guard. Between Altkirch and Saint-Louis, I met a rector and his parishioners; they were making a procession against the cock-chafers, nasty insects much multiplied since the Days of July. At Saint-Louis, the officers of the custom-house, who knew me, let me pass. I arrived gaily at the gate of Basle, where I was met by the old Swiss drum-major who, in the previous month of August, had inflicted on me "a liddle quarandine of a quarder of an hour;" but the cholera was over and I put up at the Three Kings, on the banks of the Rhine; it was ten o'clock on the morning of the 17th of May.
The landlord procured me a travelling footman called Schwartz, a native of Basle, to act as my interpreter in Bohemia. He spoke German just as my good Joseph, the Milanese tinman, spoke Greek, in Messenia, when enquiring for the ruins of Sparta.
On the same day, the 17th of May, at six o'clock in the evening, I moved out of port. As I stepped into the calash, I was amazed to see the Altkirch gendarme among the crowd; I did not know if he had not been sent after me: he had simply escorted the mail from France. I gave him some money to drink to the health of his old captain.
A school-boy came up to me and threw a paper to me with the inscription, "To the Virgil of the Nineteenth Century;" it contained this passage, altered from the Æneid: