Ulm is a clean little town, with no particular character; its dismantled ramparts have been converted into kitchen-gardens or walks, which happens to all ramparts. Their fortune has something in common with that of the military: the soldier bears arms in his youth; when invalided, he becomes a gardener.
I went to see the cathedral, a Gothic fabric with a tall spire. The aisles are divided into two narrow vaults, supported by a single row of pillars, so that the interior of the edifice partakes at one time of the character of the cathedral and the basilica. The pulpit has for a canopy a graceful steeple ending in a point, like a mitre; the inside of this steeple consists of a newel around which winds a helicoid vault in stone filigree-work. Symmetrical spikes, piercing the outside, seem destined to carry candles; these used to light up this tiara when the bishop preached on feast-days. Instead of priests officiating, I saw little birds hopping in that granite foliage; they were celebrating the Word that gave them a voice and wings on the fifth day of the Creation.
The nave was deserted; in the apse of the church, two separate groups of boys and girls were receiving religious instruction.
The Reformation, as I have already said, makes a mistake when it shows itself in the Catholic monuments upon which it has encroached; it cuts a mean and shameful figure there. Those tall porches call for a numerous clergy, the pomp of the celebrations, the chants, pictures, ornaments, silk veils, draperies, laces, gold, silver, lamps, flowers and incense of the altars. Protestantism may say as much as it pleases that it has returned to Primitive Christianity; the Gothic churches reply that it has denied its fathers: the Christians who were the architects of its wonders were other than the children of Luther and Calvin.
19 May 1833.
I had left Ulm at noon, on the 19th. At Dillingen, the horses were wanting. I stayed an hour in the High Street, having as a recreation the sight of a stork's nest, planted on a chimney as though on a minaret at Athens; a number of sparrows had insolently made their nests in the bed of the peaceful "queen with the long neck." Below the stork, a lady, living on the first floor, looked at the passers-by in the shade of a half-raised blind; below the lady was a wooden saint in a niche. The saint will be thrown down to the pavement, the woman from her window into the grave: and the stork? It will fly away: thus will end the three storeys.
Between Dillingen and Donauwörth, you cross the battle-field of Blenheim. The footsteps of the armies of Moreau over the same ground have not obliterated those of the armies of Louis XIV.; the defeat of the great King prevails in the country-side over the successes of the great Emperor.
The postillion who drove me belonged to Blenheim; on coming up to his village, he blew the horn: perhaps he was announcing his passage to the peasant-girl whom he loved; she leapt for joy in the midst of the same fields where twenty-seven French battalions and twelve squadrons of cavalry were taken prisoner, where the Navarre Regiment, whose uniform I have had the honour to wear, buried its standards to the mournful sound of the trumpets: those are the commonplaces of the succession of the ages. In 1793, the Republic carried off from the church at Blenheim the colours taken from the Monarchy in 1704: it avenged the Kingdom and slew the King; it cut off Louis XVI.'s head, but it allowed only France to tear the White Flag to pieces.
Nothing better conveys the greatness of Louis XIV. than to find his memory at the bottom of the ravines dug by the torrent of the Napoleonic victories. That monarch's conquests left our country the frontiers that still guard it[522]. The Brienne scholar, to whom the Legitimacy gave a sword, for a moment enclosed Europe in his ante-chamber; but it escaped: the grandson of Henry IV. laid that same Europe at the feet of France; and it remained there. This does not mean that I am comparing Napoleon and Louis XIV.: men of different destinies, they belong to dissimilar centuries, to different nations; one completed an era, the other began a world. One can say of Napoleon what Montaigne says of Cæsar: