The Teplitz Valley.
And nevertheless I have not yet left the Teplitz Valley.
*
To obtain a view of the whole of the Valley of the Tepl, I climbed a hill, through a wood of pine-trees: the perpendicular columns of these trees formed an acute angle with the slanting rays of the sun; some had their tops, two thirds, one half, a quarter of their trunks where the others had their feet.
I shall always love the woods: the flora of Carlsbad, whose breath seemed to have embroidered the grass under my footsteps, seemed charming to me; I met again the fingered sedge, the common night-shade, the small loose-strife, the perforated St. John's wort, the hardy lily-of-the-valley, the white willow: sweet subjects of my early anthologies.
See my youth coming to hang its reminiscences on the stalks of those plants which I recognised in passing. Do you remember my botanical studies among the Seminoles, my cenotheras, my nymphæas, with which I decked my Floridans, the garlands of clematis with which they entwined the tortoise, our sleep on the island by the lake-side, the shower of roses from the magnolia-tree that fell upon our heads? I dare not calculate the age which my fickle "painted girl" would have reached by now; what should I gather on her brow to-day? The wrinkles that lie on my own. She is no doubt sleeping for ever beneath the roots of a cypress-grove of Alabama; and I, who bear in my memory those distant, unknown recollections, I am alive! I am in Bohemia, not with Atala and Céluta, but near Madame la Dauphine, who is going to give me a letter for Madame la Duchesse de Berry.
*
At one o'clock, I was at Madame la Dauphine's orders.
"You wish to leave to-day, Monsieur de Chateaubriand?"
"If Your Majesty will permit me. I shall try to find Madame de Berry in France; otherwise I should be obliged to make the journey to Sicily, and Her Royal Highness would be kept too long waiting for the answer which she expects."