When Trajan threw a bridge over the Danube, Italy heard, for the first time, that name so fatal to the world of antiquity, the name of the Goths. The road was opened up to myriads of savages who marched to the Sack of Rome. The Huns and their Attila built their wooden palaces opposite the Coliseum, on the bank of the stream which was the rival of the Rhine and, like the latter, the enemy of the Tiber. The hordes of Alaric crossed the Danube, in 376, to overthrow the civilized Greek Empire, at the same spot where the Russians traversed it, in 1828, with the design of overthrowing the Barbaric Empire seated on the ruins of Greece. Could Trajan have guessed that a civilization of a new kind would one day be established on the other side of the Alps, on the borders of the stream which he had almost discovered? Born in the Black Forest, the Danube goes to die in the Black Sea. Where does its chief source lie? In the court-yard of a German baron, who employs the naiad to wash his linen. A geographer having taken it into his head to deny the fact, the noble owner brought an action against him. It was decided by a judicial verdict that the source of the Danube was in the court-yard of the said baron and could not be elsewhere. How many centuries were needed to arrive from the errors of Ptolemy[528] at this important discovery! Tacitus makes the Danube descend from Mount Abnoba: Montis Abnobæ. But the Hermondurian, Cheruscan, Marcomannian, Quadian barons, who are the authorities upon whom the Roman historian relies, are not so cautious as my German baron. Eudorus did not know so much, when I made him travel to the mouths of the Ister, where the Euxine, according to Racine, was to carry Mithridates in "two days[529]:"

"Having passed the Ister near its mouth.... I discovered a stone tomb on which grew a laurel. I pulled out the grasses which covered some Latin characters, and soon I succeeded in reading this first verse of the elegies of an unfortunate poet:

"'My book, you will go to Rome, and you will go to Rome
without me.'"[530]

The Danube.

The Danube, on losing its solitude, saw recurring on its banks the evils inseparable from society: plagues, famines, destructive fires, sacks of towns, wars and those divisions incessantly springing up from human passions and errors[531].

*

After Donauwörth, one comes to Burkheim and Neuberg. At breakfast, at Ingolstadt, they served me with roe-buck: it is a great pity to eat that charming beast. I have always been horrified at reading the account of the inaugural banquet of George Neville, Archbishop of York[532], in 1466: they roasted four hundred swans singing in chorus their funeral hymn! There is also a question at that repast of four hundred bitterns[533]: I can well believe it!

Regensburg, which we call Ratisbon, presents an agreeable view to one approaching it from Donauwörth. Two o'clock was striking, on the 21st, when I pulled up before the post-office. While they were putting the horses to, which always takes long in Germany, I entered a neighbouring church, called the Old Chapel, and painted white and gilded like new. Eight old black priests, with white hair, were singing vespers. I had once prayed, in a chapel at Tivoli, for a man who was himself praying by my side[534]; in one of the pits at Carthage, I had offered up my vows to St. Louis, who died not far from Utica and who was more philosophical than Cato, more sincere than Hannibal, more pious than Æneas: in the chapel at Ratisbon, I had a thought of recommending to Heaven the young King whom I had come to seek; but I feared the wrath of God too much to ask for a crown: I besought the dispenser of all mercies to grant the orphan happiness and to give him a disdain for power.

I hurried from the Old Chapel to the cathedral. It is smaller than that of Ulm, but more religious and handsomer in style. Its stained-glass windows wrap it in the darkness appropriate to contemplation. The white chapel was better suited to my wishes for the innocence of Henry; the sombre basilica made me feel quite moved for my old King Charles.

I cared little for the house in which they used to elect the Emperors of old: which proves at least that there were elective sovereigns, even sovereigns who were judged. The eighteenth clause in Charlemagne's will says:

"If any of our grandsons, born or to be born, be accused, we order that their heads be not shaved, their eyes not put out, their limbs not cut off, nor they condemned to death without fair argument and enquiry."