From the Christian and pagan struggles, the precocious heresies of Bohemia, the importation of foreign interests and foreign manners, resulted a state of confusion favourable to lying. Bohemia passed as the native land of the sorcerers.
Some old poems, discovered, in 1817, by M. Hanka[607], the Librarian of the Prague Museum, in the archives of the church at Königinhof, have become famous. A young man whom I have pleasure in naming, the son of an illustrious scholar, M. Ampère, has made known the spirit of those lays. Czelakovsky[608] has spread popular songs in the Slav idiom.
The Poles think the Bohemian dialect effeminate: it is the quarrel of the Doric and Ionic. The Lower Breton of Vannes treats the Lower Breton of Tréguier as a barbarian. Slav as well as Magyar lends itself to the translation of all languages: my poor Atala has been rigged out in a robe of Hungarian point-lace; she also wears an Armenian dolman and an Arab veil.
Bohemian literature.
There is another literature that has flourished in Bohemia: the modern Latin literature. The prince of this literature, Bohuslas Hassenstein, Baron Lobkowitz[609], born in 1462, took ship, in 1490, in Venice and visited Greece, Syria, Arabia and Egypt Lobkowitz preceded me in those celebrated places by three hundred and sixteen years and, like Lord Byron, sang his pilgrimage. With what a difference in mind, heart, thoughts, manners have we, at an interval of over three centuries, meditated on the same ruins and under the same sun: Lobkowitz, the Bohemian; Byron, the Englishman; and I, the child of France!
At the time of Lobkowitz' voyage, wonderful monuments, since overthrown, were standing. It must have been an astonishing spectacle, that of barbarism in all its strength, holding civilization on the ground under its feet, the janissaries of Mahomet II.[610] drunk with opium, victories and women, scimitar in hand, their foreheads girt with the blood-stained turban, drawn up in line for the assault on the rubbish of Egypt and Greece: and I have seen the same barbarism, among the same ruins, struggling under the feet of civilization.
As I surveyed the town and suburbs of Prague, the things which I have just told came to apply themselves on my memory like transfers on a canvas. But, in whatever corner I happened to be, I saw Hradschin and the King of France leaning on the windows of that castle, like a ghost over-towering all those shades.
Prague, 29 May 1833.
Having finished my review of Prague, I went, on the 29th of May, to dine at the Castle, at six o'clock. The King was in high spirits. When we left the table, sitting down on the sofa in the drawing-room, he said:
"Chateaubriand, do you know that the National which arrived this morning declares that I had the right to issue my Ordinances?"