What were the hopes of the travellers passing, like myself, through this spot when the snow-storm surprised them? Who are they? Who has wept for them? How do they rest there, so far from their kindred, their country, hearing each winter the roar of the tempests whose breath carried them off the earth? But they sleep at the foot of the Cross; Christ, their sole companion, their only friend, nailed to the sacred wood, leans towards them, is covered with the same hoar-frost that whitens their graves: in the celestial regions, He will present them to His Father and warm them in His breast.
The descent of the Tauern is long, bad and dangerous; I was delighted with it: it reminds one, at one time by its cascades and its wooden bridges, at another by the narrowness of its chasm, of the Valley of the Pont-d'Espagne at Cauterets or the Domo d'Ossola slope of the Simplon; but it is far from leading to Granada or Naples. We find no gleaming lakes, no orange-trees at the bottom: it is unprofitable to give one's self so much trouble to come to some potato-fields.
At the stage, half-way down the descent, I found myself among my family in the room of the inn: the walls were hung with the Adventures of Atala, in six prints. My daughter did not suspect that I should pass that way, nor had I hoped to meet an object so dear to me on the brink of a torrent called, I believe, the Dragon. Poor Atala! She had grown very ugly, very old; she was greatly changed! She wore big feathers on her head and a short, tight skirt round her hips, like the lady savages of the Théâtre de la Gaîté. Vanity turns everything into money; I carried my head high before my works in the depths of Carinthia like Cardinal Mazarin before the pictures in his gallery. I felt inclined to say to mine host:
"I made that!"
I had to separate from my first-born, although with less difficulty than on the island in the Ohio.
As far as Werfen, nothing attracted my attention, unless it were the manner in which they put the second crop of grass to dry: they drive stakes of fifteen to twenty feet in height into the ground; they roll the unbleached grass round those stakes, not too tightly: it dries there and blackens. At a certain distance, those columns look just like cypress-trees or like trophies planted in memory of the flowers mown down in those dales.
Salzburg.
24 September, Tuesday.
Germany was determined to revenge herself for my ill-humour against her. In the Salzburg Plain, on the morning of the 24th, the sun appeared to the east of the mountains which I had left behind me; some rocky peaks on the west lit up with its first softest rays. Darkness still hovered over the plain, half green, half tilled, whence rose a smoke, like the steam of man's sweat. Salzburg Castle, raising the summit of the hill that commands the town, encrusted the blue sky with its white surface. With the ascending sun, there rose, from out of the bosom of the cool exhalation of the dew, avenues, clusters of wood, red-brick houses, cottages rough-plastered with gleaming white lime, mediæval towers slashed and pierced, old champions of time, wounded in the head and breast, left standing alone on the battle-field of the centuries. The autumnal light of the scene had the violent tint of the colchicums which blossom at this season of the year and with which the meads along the banks of the Salza were strewn. Flights of crows left the creepers and holes of the ruins and descended upon the fields; their gleaming wings were glazed with rose in the reflection of the dawn.