Macte animo, generose puer[516].
And the postillion whipped up the horses and I drove off quite proud of my high renown at Basle, quite astonished at being Virgil, quite charmed to be called a child: "generose puer."
*
The Rhine.
I crossed the bridge, leaving the burgesses and peasants at war in the midst of their Republic[517] and fulfilling in their own fashion the part which they are called upon to play in the general transformation of society. I went up the right bank of the Rhine and contemplated with a certain sadness the high hills of the Canton of Basle. The exile which I had come to seek last year in the Alps seemed to me a happier life's ending, a gentler lot than the affairs of empire in which I had re-engaged. Did I cherish the smallest hope for Madame la Duchesse de Berry or her son? No; and I was, moreover, convinced that, in spite of my recent services, I should find no friends in Prague. One who has taken the oath to Louis-Philippe and who nevertheless praises the fatal Ordinances must be more acceptable to Charles X. than I, who have never forsworn myself. It is too much for a king that one should twice have been in the right: flattering treachery is preferred to austere devotion. I went, therefore, going to Prague even as the Sicilian soldier who was hung in Paris at the time of the League went to the gallows; the confessor of the Neapolitans tried to put heart into him by saying on the way:
"Allegramente! Allegramente!"
Thus sped my thoughts while the horses were drawing me onwards; but, when I thought of the misfortunes of the mother of Henry V., I reproached myself for my regrets.
The banks of the Rhine flying along my carriage diverted me pleasantly: when one looks at a landscape out of a window, even though he be dreaming of other things, a reflection of the picture which he has under his eyes nevertheless enters into his mind. We drove through meadows decked with the flowers of May; the green was fresh in the woods, orchards and hedges. Horses, donkeys and cows, pigs, dogs and sheep, hens and pigeons, geese and turkeys were in the fields with their masters. The Rhine, that warlike stream, seemed pleased in the midst of that pastoral scene, like an old soldier quartered, on his march, on husbandmen.
The next morning, the 18th of May, before reaching Schaffhausen, I was driven to the Falls of the Rhine; I stole a few moments from the fall of kingdoms to improve myself at its image. I should have done well for myself to end my days in the castle overlooking the chasm. I placed at Niagara the dream of Atala, not yet realized; I met at Tivoli another dream, already passed away upon earth: who knows if, in the keep standing over the Falls of the Rhine, I should not have found a fairer vision which, but now wandering on its banks, would have consoled me for all the shades that I had lost!
From Schaffhausen I continued my road towards Ulm. The country presents tilled basins, in which detached and wooded hillocks bathe their feet. In those woods, which were then being cultivated for sale, the eye saw oaks, some felled, others left standing: the first stripped of their bark where they lay, their trunks and branches white and bare, like the skeleton of a strange beast; the second bearing the fresh green of spring on their hirsute and dark, moss-grown limbs: they combined what is never found in man, the two-fold beauty of old age and youth.