My eight fellow-countrymen, after being stopped at Eger, had obtained permission to continue their journey, but under the care of an officer of police. It was curious, in 1833, to meet a convoy of servants of the Throne and the Altar, dispatched by the French Legitimacy and escorted by a policeman! In 1822, at Verona, I had seen cages full of Carbonari pass, accompanied by gendarmes. What is it that the sovereigns want? Whom do they recognise as friends? Do they fear the too-great crowds of their partisans? Instead of being touched by their fidelity, they treat men devoted to their crowns as propagandists and revolutionaries[273].
The post-master at Schlau had just invented the accordion[274]: he sold me one; the whole night I played upon its bellows, the sound of which carried away for me the memories of this world.
Carlsbad, through which I passed on the 30th of September, was deserted, like an opera-house after the performance. I met at Eger the extortioner who had made me tumble from the moon where I was spending the month of June with a lady from the Roman Campagna[275].
At Hollfeld, no swifts[276], no little girl with her basket[277]; this saddened me. Such is my nature: I idealize real personages and impersonate dreams, making matter and mind change places. A little girl and a bird to-day swell the crowd of the beings of my creation with whom my imagination is peopled, like those day-flies which sport in a ray of the sun. Forgive me, I am speaking of myself: I notice it when it is too late.
Here is Bamberg. Padua reminded me of Livy[278]; at Bamberg, Father Horrion recovered the first portion of the third and of the thirtieth books of the Roman historian. While I was supping in the birthplace of Joachim Camerarius[279] and Clavius[280], the librarian of the town came to greet me on account of my fame, the greatest in the world, according to him, which warmed the marrow of my bones. Next, a Bavarian general came running up. At the door of the inn, the crowd surrounded me when I made for my carriage. A young woman had climbed upon a mile-stone, as did the Sainte-Beuve to see the Duc de Guise go by. She laughed:
"You are laughing at me?" I asked.
"No," she replied, in French, with a German accent, "it is because I am so glad!"
And return to France.
From the 1st to the 4th of October, I saw again the places which I had seen three months before. On the 4th, I reached the French frontier. To me St. Francis' Day is, every year, a day for examining my conscience. I turn my eyes upon the past; I ask myself where I was, what I was doing on each previous anniversary. This year 1833 found me wandering, a slave to my roving destinies. At the end of the road I saw a cross; it stood in a cluster of trees which silently dropped a few dead leaves upon the Man-God crucified. Twenty-seven years before, I spent St. Francis' Day at the foot of the real Golgotha.