"Has he arrived? Has he seen the Royal Family? Will he come back soon?"
And I was deliberating as to whether I would not send Hyacinthe to fetch some fresh butter and brown bread, in order to eat cress at the edge of a spring under a tuft of alder-shoots. My life was no more ambitious than that: why has Fortune fastened the skirt of my doublet to her wheel with the hem of the mantle of our Kings?
Returning to the village, I passed near the church: two outer sanctuaries prop up the wall; one of these shows St. Peter ad Vincula, with a poor-box for the prisoners: I dropped in a few kreutzers in memory of the Pellico's[546] prison and of my own cell at the Prefecture of Police. The other sanctuary showed the scene in the Garden of Olives: a scene so touching and so sublime that it is not destroyed even here by the grotesqueness of the figures.
I hurried through my dinner and hastened to the evening prayer for which I heard them ringing. As I turned the corner of the narrow street in which the church stands, a vista opened out over some distant hills: a little light still lingered on the horizon, and that dying light came from the side of France. A profound feeling gripped my heart When shall my pilgrimage be over? I passed through Germanic territory very miserably, when I was returning from the Army of the Princes, very triumphantly when, as Ambassador of Louis XVIII., I was going to Berlin: after so many and such different years, I was penetrating stealthily into the depths of that same Germany to seek the King of France banished anew.
An evening service.
I entered the church: it was quite dark; not even a lighted lamp. Through the blackness, I recognised the sanctuary, standing in a Gothic recess, only through its thicker gloom. The walls, the altars, the pillars seemed to me laden with ornaments and pictures veiled in crape; the nave was occupied by close-set parallel benches.
An old woman was reciting aloud, in German, the Our Father of the rosary; women, young and old, whom I could not see, replied with the Hail Marys. The old woman spoke her words well, her voice was clear, her accent grave and pathetic; she was two benches away from me; her head bent slightly in the dusk each time she uttered the word Christo in some prayer which she added to the Our Father. The rosary was followed by the Litany of the Blessed Virgin: the Ora pro nobis, chanted in German by the invisible worshippers, sounded in my ear like a repetition of the word "hope:" "espérance, espérance, espérance![547]" We left the church promiscuously; I went to sleep with Hope: it was long since I had clasped her in my arms; but she does not grow older and one always loves her, despite her infidelities.
According to Tacitus, the Germans believe the night to be older than the day: nox ducere diem videtur. Yet I have reckoned young nights and sempiternal days. The poets tell us also that Sleep is the brother of Death: I do not know; but Old Age is certainly its nearest relation.
23 May 1833.
On the morning of the 23rd, Heaven mingled some sweetness with my pains: Baptiste told me that the most eminent man of the place, the brewer, had three daughters and owned my works, set out in a row among his beer-jugs. When I went out, this gentleman and two of his daughters watched me go by: what was the third young lady doing? In former days, a letter had come to me from Peru, written with her own hand by a lady, a cousin of the sun, who admired Atala; but to be known at Waldmünchen, under the very nose of the wolf of Haselbach, was a thousand times more glorious: it was true that this occurred in Bavaria, at a league from Austria, the curse of my renown. Do you know what would have happened if my trip to Bohemia had been taken out of my own head alone: but why should I have wanted to go to Bohemia for myself only? Once I had been stopped at the frontier, I should have gone back to Paris. There was a man who contemplated a voyage to Pekin; one of his friends met him on the Pont Royal in Paris: