On returning to my inn, I resumed my travelling-dress. While the carriage was being got ready, Trogoff let his tongue run on; he told me again and again that Madame la Dauphine was very pleased with me, that she made no attempt to conceal her satisfaction, that she spoke of it to anyone who was willing to listen to her.
"It's an immense thing, this journey of yours!" shouted Trogoff, trying to drown the voices of his two nightingales. "You will see some results from it!"
I did not believe in any result.
I was right. They were expecting M. le Duc de Bordeaux that same evening. Although everybody knew of his arrival, they had made a mystery of it to me. I was careful not to show that I was informed of the secret.
And take my leave.
At six o'clock in the evening, I was rolling towards Paris. Whatever may be the greatness of misfortune in Prague, the pettiness of the life of princes reduced to itself is difficult to swallow; to drink the last drop of it, one must have burnt one's palate and intoxicated one's self with a glowing faith.
Alas, a new Symmachus, I bewail the abandonment of the altars; I raise my hands towards the Capitol; I invoke the majesty of Rome! But if the god should have turned into wood and Rome fail to come to life again in its dust?
[556] This book was written in Prague, from the 24th to the 30th of May 1833, and at Carlsbad, on the 1st of June.—T.
[557] When Charles X. arrived in England, in August 1830, he accepted the hospitality of a Catholic Jacobite family, the Welds, which thus paid the Bourbons the debt of Stuarts. The head of that family, Cardinal Weld, offered the King of France the use of Lulworth Castle, in Dorsetshire, not far from the little town of Wareham. After a stay of two months at Lulworth, the Royal Family went to live at Holyrood Palace, in Edinburgh, where they remained for two years. On the 25th of October 1832, Charles X. arrived in Prague, at the Castle of Hradschin, which the Emperor of Austria, Francis I., had put at his disposal until he was able to find a private residence. Here Charles X. spent three years and a half. In the month of May 1836, he hired from Count Coronini his property of Graffenberg, situated at one end of the town of Gorlitz, on a rising ground which overlooks it.—B.