At Bischoffsheim, where I dined, a fair onlooker appeared at my state banquet: a swallow, a real Procne, with a reddish breast, came to perch at my open window, on the iron bar from which swung the sign of the Golden Sun; then it warbled most sweetly, looking at me as though it knew me and without showing the least alarm. I have never complained of being awakened by the daughter of Pandion; I have never, like Anacreon, called her a "chatterer;" I have always, on the contrary, hailed her return with the song of the children of the isle of Rhodes:
"She comes, the swallow comes, bringing good seasons and a joyful time! Open the window, do not despise the swallow[21]!"
"François," said my fellow-guest at Bischoffsheim, "my great-great-grandmother used to live at Combourg, under the rafters of the roof of your turret; you used to keep her company every year, in autumn, in the reeds in the pond, when you went dreaming, of an evening, with your sylph. She landed on your native rock, on the very day when you embarked for America, and she followed your sail for some time. My grandmother built her nest in Charlotte's window; eight years after, she arrived at Jaffa with you: you have mentioned this in your Itinéraire?[22] My mother, while twittering to the dawn, fell one day into your room at the Foreign Office[23]; you opened the window for her. My mother has had many children: I who am speaking to you am of her last nest; I have met you before on the old Tivoli Road in the Roman Campagna: do you remember? My feathers were so black and so glossy! You looked at me sadly. Would you like us to fly away together?"
"Alas, my dear swallow, who know my story so well, you are extremely kind; but I am a poor moulting bird, and my feathers will never come back; I cannot, therefore, fly away with you. And you could not carry me: I am too heavy with sorrows and years. And then, where should we go? Spring and beautiful climates are no longer of my season. For you, the air and love; for me, the ground and loneliness. You are going away: may the dew cool your wings! May a hospitable yard offer to your tired flight, when you are crossing the Ionian Sea! May a peaceful October save you from shipwreck! Greet the olive-trees of Athens and the palm-trees of Rosetta for me. If I am no more when the flowers bring you back, I invite you to my funeral banquet: come at sunset to snap up the gnats on the grass of my grave; like you, I love liberty and I have lived on little[24]."
3 and 4 June 1833.
I set out myself by land, a few moments after the swallow had set sail. The night was overcast; the moon hovered, weakened and wasted, among the clouds; my eyes, half-asleep, closed as they looked at it; I felt as though I were expiring in the mysterious light which illumines the shadows: "I felt," says Manzoni, "I know not what peaceful depression, the fore-runner of the last rest."
I stopped at Wiesenbach: a solitary inn, a narrow, cultivated valley between two wooded hills. A German from Brunswick, a traveller like myself, hearing my name pronounced, came running up to me. He pressed my hand, spoke to me of my works; his wife, he told me, was learning to read French in the Génie du Christianisme. He did not cease to express surprise at my "youth:"
"But," he added, "that is the fault of my judgment; I ought to think you, from your last works, as young as you look."
My age and appearance.
My life has been mixed up with so many events that, in my readers' heads, I have the ancientness of those events themselves. I often speak of my grey head; this is calculated vanity on my part, so that people may exclaim, when they see me: