One emperor of Germany, I know not which, on being deposed, asked only for the sovereignty of a vineyard for which he had an affection.
Rastibon.
At Ratisbon, in former days the factory of sovereigns, they used to coin emperors, often of inferior standard; this industry has died away: one of Bonaparte's battles and the Prince Primate, the insipid courtier of our universal Gendarme, have failed to resuscitate the dying city. The Regensburghers, dressed and slovenly like the people of Paris, have no particular physiognomy. The town, in the absence of a sufficient number of inhabitants, is dull; grass and thistles are laying siege to its suburbs: soon they will have hoisted their plumes and their lances on its turrets. Kepler[535], who made the earth turn, as did Copernicus[536], sleeps for ever at Ratisbon.
We left by the bridge on the Prague Road, a greatly extolled and very ugly bridge. On quitting the basin of the Danube, one climbs steep inclines: Kirn, the first stage, is perched on a rough slope from the top of which, through watery mists, I discerned dead hills and pale valleys. The facial aspect of the peasants changes; the children, yellow and bloated, have a sickly look. From Kirn to Waldmünchen, the poverty of the landscape increases: one sees few more hamlets; only huts made of pine logs, plastered with mud, as on the more barren necks of the Alps.
France is the heart of Europe; as one goes further from it, social life decreases: a man might judge the distance at which he is from Paris by the greater or lesser languor of the country to which he is retiring. In Spain and Italy, the diminution in movement and the progress of death are less noticeable: in the former country, a new people, a new world, Christian Arabs occupy your attention; in the latter, the charms of climate and art, the enchantment of love and ruins leave you no time for depression. But, in England, despite the perfection of physical society, in Germany, despite the morality of the inhabitants, one feels one's self die. In Austria and Prussia, the military yoke weighs upon your ideas, even as the sunless sky weighs upon your head; something, I know not what, admonishes you that you cannot write, speak, nor think with independence; that you must lop off from your existence the whole of the nobler portion, leaving man's chief faculty to lie idle within you, as a useless gift of God. No arts, no beauties of nature come to beguile your hours and there is nothing left to you but to plunge into gross debauchery or into those speculative truths in which the Germans indulge. For a Frenchman, at least for me, this manner of existence is impossible; without dignity, I fail to understand life, which is difficult to understand even with all the seductions of liberty, glory and youth.
However, one thing charms me in the German people: its religious sentiment. If I were not too tired, I would leave the inn at Nittenau, where I am pencilling this diary; I would go to the evening prayer with those men, women and children whom a church calls with the sound of its bell. That crowd, seeing me on my knees in its midst, would welcome me by virtue of the unity of a common faith. When will the day come when Philosophers in their temple shall bless a Philosopher newly-arrived by the post, and offer up a like prayer with that stranger to a God respecting whom all Philosophers are in disagreement? The rosary of the parish-priest is safer: I stand by that.
21 May.
Waldmünchen, where I arrived on Tuesday morning, the 21st of May, is the last Bavarian village on this side of Bohemia. I was congratulating myself on being able promptly to fulfil my mission; I was only fifty leagues from Prague. I plunged into water cold as ice, I made my toilet at a spring, like an ambassador preparing for a triumphal entry; I set out and, half a league from Waldmünchen, full of confidence I accosted the Austrian custom-house. A lowered toll-gate barred the road; I got down with Hyacinthe, his red ribbon blazing. A young custom-house officer, armed with a musket, took us to the ground-floor of a house, into a vaulted room. There, sitting at his desk, as though in court, was an old and fat chief of German customs, with red hair, red mustachios, thick eye-brows, sloping over two greenish, half-opened eyes, and a spiteful look: a mixture of the Viennese police-spy and the Bohemian smuggler.
Delayed at the Customs.
He took our passports without uttering a word; the young official timidly handed me a chair, while the chief, before whom he seemed to tremble, examined the passports. I did not sit down, but went to look at some pistols hanging on the wall and a carbine leaning against a corner of the room: it reminded me of the musket with which the aga of the Isthmus of Corinth fired on the Greek peasant. After five minutes' silence, the Austrian barked out two or three words which my Baslese translated thus: