"You're dining with the King? We shall meet again."
And we parted.
Prague, 28 and 29 September.
I found myself free at three o'clock: they dined at six. Not knowing what to do with myself, I went for a walk through avenues of apple-trees worthy of Normandy. The fruit-crop from those mock orange-trees in good years amounts to the value of eighteen thousand francs. The calvilles are exported to England. They are not made into cider, as the Bohemian beer-monopoly is opposed to it. According to Tacitus, the Germans had words to express spring, summer and winter, but none for autumn, of which they knew neither the name nor the gifts: nomen ac bona ignorantur. Since Tacitus' time, a Pomona has come to dwell among them.
Feeling very tired, I sat down on the steps of a ladder leaning against the trunk of an apple-tree. I was there in the Œil-de-bœuf of the château of Butschirad or at the railing of the Council-chamber. Looking at the roof which covered the three generations of my Kings, I called to mind the complaint of the Arab Maoual:
"Here we saw vanish below the horizon the stars which we love to see rise under the sky of our country."
Full of these melancholy ideas, I fell asleep. A gentle voice woke me. A Bohemian peasant-woman came to gather apples; throwing forward her breast and lifting her head, she made me a Slav bow with a queenly smile: I thought I should fall from my roosting-place; I said to her in French:
"You are very beautiful; I thank you!"
I saw from her look that she had understood me: apples always play a part in my encounters with "Bohemians[267]." I climbed down from my ladder like one of those condemned men of feudal times delivered by the presence of a young woman. Thinking on Normandy, Dieppe, Fervacques, the sea, I resumed my way to the Trianon of Charles X.'s old age.
We sat down to table, namely, the Prince and Princesse de Bauffremont, the Duc and Duchesse de Narbonne, M. de Blacas, M. de Damas, M. O'Heguerty, I, M. le Dauphin and Henry V.: I would rather have seen the young men there than myself. Charles X. did not come in to dinner: he was nursing himself, in order to be able to start on the morrow. The banquet was noisy, thanks to the young Prince's prattle: he never ceased talking of his ride on horseback, his horse, his horse's pranks on the grass, his horse's snorting in the ploughed fields. This conversation was most natural, and yet it grieved me; I liked our old talk on travels and history better.