19 May 1833.
At ten o'clock at night, I got into the carriage again; I fell asleep to the patter of the rain on the hood of the calash. The sound of my postillion's little horn aroused me. I heard the murmur of a river which I could not see. We had stopped at the gate of a town; the gate opened; my passport and luggage were examined: we were entering the vast empire of His Wurtemberg Majesty. I greeted in memory the Grand-duchess Helen, the graceful and delicate flower now confined in the hot-houses of the Volga. On only one single day did I conceive the value of high rank and fortune: it was when I gave the fête to the young Russian Princess in the gardens of the Villa Medici. I felt how the magic of the sky, the charm of the spot, the spell of beauty and power can inebriate one; I imagined myself both Torquato Tasso, and Alphonsus of Este[520]: I was worth more than the Prince, less than the poet; Helen was more beautiful than Leonora[521]. The representative of the heir of Francis I. and Louis XIV., I had the dream of a king of France.
They did not search me: I had nothing against the rights of sovereigns, I who recognised those of a young Monarch which the sovereigns themselves failed to recognise. The vulgarity, the modernity of the custom-house and the passport formed a contrast with the storm, the Gothic gate, the sound of the horn and the noise of the torrent.
Instead of the lady of the castle whom I was prepared to deliver from oppression, I found, on leaving the town, an old, simple fellow; he asked me for seechs Kreutzer, raising his left hand, which held a lantern, to the level of his grey head, putting out his right hand to Schwartz on the box and opening his mouth like the gills of a hooked pike: Baptiste, wet and sick as he was, could not hold himself for laughing.
And what was this torrent over which I had just passed. I asked the postillion, who cried:
"Donau!"
The Danube! One more famous river crossed by me unknowingly, even as I had descended into the bed of the oleanders of the Eurotas without knowing it! What has it availed me to drink of the waters of the Mississippi, the Eridanus, the Tiber, the Cephissus, the Hermus, the Jordan, the Nile, the Guadalquivir, the Tagus, the Ebro, the Rhine, the Spree, the Seine and a hundred other obscure or celebrated rivers? Unknown, they have not given me their peace; illustrious, they have not communicated to me their glory: they will be able to say only that they have seen me pass as their banks see their waves pass.
Ulm.
I arrived at Ulm fairly early on Sunday the 19th of May, after travelling through the scene of the battles of Moreau and Bonaparte. Hyacinthe, who is a member of the Legion of Honour, was wearing the ribbon: this decoration obtained for us an incredible amount of consideration. I, wearing in my button-hole only a little flower, according to my custom, passed, until they heard my name, for a mysterious being: my Mamelukes at Cairo used to insist, whether I would or no, that I was a general of Napoleon disguised as a literary man; they would not give in and every quarter of an hour expected to see me put away Egypt in the sash of my caftan. And yet it is among nations whose villages we have burnt and whose harvests we have laid waste that those sentiments exist. I rejoiced in this glory; but, if we had done nothing but good to Germany, should we be as greatly regretted there? O inexplicable human nature!
The evils of war are forgotten; we have left on the soil of our conquests the spark of life. That inert mass set in movement continues to ferment because its intelligence is commencing. When travelling nowadays, we see the nations watching, knapsack on back: ready to start, they seem to be waiting for us in order to place us at the head of the column. A Frenchman is always taken for the aide-de-camp who brings the order to march.