"I excuse Victorie in that shee could not well give him over[523]."
Blenheim.
The unworthy tapestries at Blenheim Palace, which I saw with Peltier, show the Maréchal de Tallart[524] taking off his hat to the Duke of Marlborough[525], who stands in a swaggering attitude. Tallart none the less remained the favourite of the old lion; a prisoner in London, he conquered, in the mind of Queen Anne[526], the Marlborough who had beaten him at Blenheim, and he died a member of the French Academy:
"He was," says Saint-Simon, "a man of middling height
with somewhat jealous eyes, full of fire and spirit, but with
an incessant demon of restlessness in him, owing to his
ambition."
I am writing history in my calash: why not? Cæsar wrote plenty in his litter: he won the battles of which he wrote; I did not lose those of which I speak.
From Dillingen to Donauwörth stretches a rich plain of unequal level in which the corn-fields intermingle with the meadows: one goes closer to or further from the Danube according to the windings of the road and the bends of the river. At that height, the waters of the Danube are still yellow, like those of the Tiber.
Scarce have you left the village before you see another; those villages are clean and smiling: often the walls of the houses have frescoes. A certain Italian character becomes manifest as one goes towards Austria; the inhabitant of the Danube is no longer the Peasant of the Danube:
Son menton nourrissait une barbe touffue;
Toute sa personne velue
Représentait un ours, mais un ours mal léché[527].
But the sky of Italy is lacking here: the sun is low and pale; those close-sown market-towns are not the little cities of the Romagna, which brood upon the master-pieces of the arts hidden underneath them: you scratch the ground, and that tillage makes some marvel of the antique chisel shoot up like a blade of corn.
At Donauwörth, I regretted to have arrived too late to enjoy a fine view of the Danube. On Monday the 20th, the same appearance of the landscape; yet the soil becomes less good and the peasants seem poorer. One begins again to see the pine-woods of the hills. The Hercynian forest used to project as far as this: the trees of which Pliny left us a singular description were felled by generations now buried with the secular oaks.