Cascades rushed down from every side, leaping over beds of stones, like the torrents in the Pyrenees. The road passed through gorges hardly open to the gauge of the calash. In the neighbourhood of Gmünd, hydraulic forges mixed the echo of their stamps with that of the sluices; from their chimneys, columns of sparks escaped amid the night and the dark forests of pine-trees. At each blow of the bellows on the hearth-stone, the open roofs of the factory lit up suddenly, like the dome of St. Peter's in Rome on a holiday.
In the Karch Range, they added three couple of oxen to our horses. Our long team, on the torrent waters and in the flooded ravines, looked liked a living bridge. The chain opposite the Tauern was draped in snow.
St. Michael.
On the 23rd, at nine o'clock in the morning, I stopped at the pretty hamlet of St. Michael, at the bottom of a valley. Some tall, good-looking Austrian girls served me with a very clean breakfast in a little room whose two windows looked out over meadows and the village-church. The grave-yard, which surrounded the church, was separated from me only by a rustic yard. Wooden crosses, with semicircular inscriptions and with holy-water fonts hanging from them, rose above the grass of the old tombs: five graves as yet unturfed proclaimed five new resting-places. Some of the graves, like the borders of kitchen-gardens, were adorned with marigolds in full yellow flower; wag-tails chased grass-hoppers in this garden of the dead. A very old lame woman, leaning on a crutch, crossed the cemetery and brought back a cross that had fallen down: perhaps the law permitted her to pilfer that cross for her tomb; dead wood, in the forests, belong to him who picks it up.
Là dorment dans l'oubli des poètes sans gloire,
Des orateurs sans voix, des héros sans victoire[243].
Would not the child of Prague sleep better here, without a crown, than in the chamber in the Louvre where his father's body was laid in state?
My solitary breakfast, taken in the company of the satisfied travellers lying under my window, would have been to my taste if I had not been afflicted by too recent a death: I had heard the screams of the chicken served at my banquet. Poor young bird! It had been so happy, five minutes before my arrival! It was wandering among the grasses, the vegetables and the flowers; it was running about among the troops of goats come down from the mountain; to-night it would have gone to roost with the sun, and it was still small enough to sleep under its mother's wing.
When the calash was put to, I climbed in, surrounded by the women, and the waiters of the inn accompanied me to the carriage-door; they seemed glad to have seen me, although they did not know me and were never to see me again: they gave me so many blessings! I do not tire of this German cordiality. You never meet a peasant but takes off his hat to you and wishes you a hundred good things: in France we salute only death; insolence is accounted as liberty and equality; there is no sympathy between man and man; to envy whoever travels a little comfortably, to stand with one arm akimbo, ready to draw the sword on any one who wears a new coat or a white shirt: those are the characteristic signs of our national independence, always provided that we spend our days in the antechambers accepting the rebuffs of some upstart clodhopper. This does not take away from our high intelligence, nor prevent us from triumphing with arms in hand; but manners cannot be made à priori: for eight centuries we have been a great military nation; fifty years have not been able to change us: we have not been able to acquire a genuine love for liberty. So soon as we have a moment's rest under a transitory government, the Old Monarchy shoots up again on its stock, the old French spirit reappears: we are courtiers and soldiers, nothing more.
23 and 24 September 1833.
The last range of mountains shutting in the Province of Salzburg commands the arable region. The Tauern has glaciers; its table-land resembles all the table-lands of the Alps, but more particularly that of the Saint-Gotthard. On this table-land, crusted over with reddish, frozen moss, stands a Calvary: an ever-ready consolation, an eternal refuge for the unfortunate. Around that Calvary are buried the victims who perish amid the snows.