Some little pride appears in this letter: I was hurt; I was as much humiliated as Cicero, when, on his return in triumph from his government of Asia, his friends asked him if he came from Baiæ or from his house at Tusculum. What! My name, which flew from pole to pole, had not reached the ears of a custom-house officer in the mountains at Haselbach! A thing which seems all the more cruel when one thinks of my successes at Basle. In Bavaria, I had been addressed as "My Lord" or "Your Excellency;" a Bavarian officer, at Waldmünchen, said aloud, in the inn, that my name required no visa from an Austrian ambassador. Those were great consolations, I admit; but, after all, a sad truth remained: the world contained a man who had never heard speak of me.
Who knows, however, if the Haselbach customs-officer did not know me a little! The police of all countries are so affectionately related! A politician who neither admires nor approves of the Treaties of Vienna, a Frenchman who loves the honour and liberty of France, who remains faithful to the fallen power, might well be on the index in Vienna. What a noble revenge to deal with M. de Chateaubriand as with one of those bagmen so suspicious to the spies! What a sweet satisfaction to treat as a vagabond whose papers are not in order an envoy charged to carry traitor-wise to a banished child the adieus of his captive mother!
The express left Waldmünchen on the 21st, at eleven o'clock in the morning; I calculated that it could be back on the second day, the 23rd, between twelve and four; but my imagination was at work: what was to be the fate of my message? If the Governor was a strong man and a man of the world, he would send me the permit; if he was a timid and unintelligent man, he would reply that my request did not come within his powers, he would hasten to refer it to Vienna. This little incident might at the same time please and displease Prince Metternich. I knew how he feared the newspapers; I had seen him at Verona leave the most important business and lock himself up distractedly with M. de Gentz[538] to draft out an article in reply to the Constitutionnel and the Débats. How many days would elapse before the Imperial Minister's orders were transmitted?
On the other hand, would M. de Blacas[539] be glad to see me at Prague? Would not M. de Damas[540] think that I had come to dethrone him? Would M. le Cardinal de Latil[541] be quite free from anxiety? Would not the triumvirate turn my mishap to account to have the doors closed against me instead of opened to me? Nothing easier: a word in the Governor's ear, a word of which I should never know! In what a state of anxiety would my friends be in Paris! When the adventure was noised abroad, what would not the newspapers make of it! What wild statements would they not indulge in!
Waldmünchen.
And, if the Grand Burgrave did not think fit to reply to me, if he were away, if no one dared act in his absence, what would become of me without a passport? Where could I be sure of being recognised? At Munich? In Vienna? What postmaster would give me horses? I should be practically a prisoner at Waldmünchen.
Those are the cares that passed through my brain. I thought besides of my remoteness from what was dear to me: I have too short a time to live to waste that little. Horace said, "Carpe diem:" a counsel of pleasure at twenty, of reason at my age.
Tired of "ruminating on every case in my head," I heard the noise of a crowd outside; my inn stood on the village square. I looked through the window and saw a priest carrying the Last Sacraments to a dying man. What mattered to that dying man the affairs of kings, of their servants and of the world? Every one left his work and started to follow the priest; young women, old women, children, mothers with their babies in their arms repeated the prayer for the dying. On reaching the sick man's door, the priest gave the benediction with the Holy Viaticum. The by-standers knelt down and made the Sign of the Cross with lowered heads. The pass-port to Eternity will not be disowned by Him who distributes bread and opens the hostel to the traveller.
*
Although I had not been to bed for seven days, I was unable to stay indoors; it was only a little past one: leaving the village on the Ratisbon side, I caught sight of a white chapel, on the right, in the middle of a corn-field; I went in that direction. The door was locked; through a sloping window one saw an altar with a cross. The date of the erection of that sanctuary, 1830, was inscribed on the architrave: a monarchy was being overthrown in Paris while a chapel was being erected at Waldmünchen. The three banished generations were to come to live in a place of exile within fifty leagues of the new shelter raised to the King crucified. Millions of events are realized at one and the same time: what does a black man sleeping under a palm-tree on the bank of the Niger care for the white man who falls at the same moment under the dagger on the shore of the Tiber? What does he who weeps in Asia care for him who laughs in Europe? What did the mason who built this chapel, the Bavarian priest who exalted that Christ in 1830 care for the demolisher of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, the feller of the crosses in 1830? Events count only for those who suffer through them or benefit by them; they are nothing to those who have not heard of them, who are not touched by them. A certain race of herdsmen, in the Abruzzi, has witnessed, without descending from its mountain, the passage of the Carthaginians, the Gauls, the Romans, the Goths, the generations of the middle-ages and the men of the present age. That race has not mingled with the successive dwellers in the valley, and religion alone has mounted up to it.