Six years before, during the Days of July, passing in front of the colonnade of the Louvre, near an open grave, I met young men who carried me back to the Luxembourg, when I was going to make my protest in favour of a Royalty which they had just overthrown[320]; after six years, I was returning, on the anniversaries of the July festivals, to associate myself with the regrets of those young Republicans, even as they had associated themselves with my fidelity. How strange is destiny! Armand Carrel breathed his last in the house of an officer of the Royal Guard[321] who did not take the oath to Philip; I, a Royalist and a Christian, have had the honour of bearing a corner of the pall which covered noble ashes, but which will not hide them.
Many kings, princes, ministers, men who thought themselves powerful, have gone off before me: I have not condescended to raise my hat to their coffin or devote a word to their memory. I have found more to study and depict in the intermediary ranks of society than in those which make men wear their livery; a gold-laced cloak is not worth the morsel of flannel which the bullet drove into Carrel's body.
Carrel, who remembers you? The mediocrities and poltroons whom your death delivered from your superiority and their fears and I, who was not of your views. Who thinks of you? Who remembers you? I congratulate you on having, at one step, finished a journey whose prolonged passage becomes so disgusting and so lonely, on having brought the end of your march within the range of a pistol, a distance which to you appeared still too great and which you hastened to reduce to a sword's length.
I envy those who have departed before me: like Cæsar's soldiers at Brundusium, from the top of the rocks on shore I cast my eyes upon the main sea and gaze towards Epirus to look if I can see the ships which have taken over the first legions come back to carry me across in my turn.
After reading the above lines again, in 1839, I will add that, having, in 1837, visited M. Carrel's grave, I found it much neglected, but I saw a black wooden cross which the dead man's sister Nathalie had planted near him. I paid Vaudran, the grave-digger, eighteen francs that remained owing for trellis-work; I instructed him to tend the grave, to sow grass on it and keep it adorned with flowers. At each new season, I go to Saint-Mandé to discharge what is due and to make sure that my intentions have been faithfully fulfilled[322].
As I am preparing to end my recollections and taking a last look round, I perceive women whom I have involuntarily forgotten; like angels grouped at the bottom of my picture, they stand leaning against the frame to watch the end of my life.
In former days, I met women who were known or celebrated in different ways. Women have changed their manner of being to-day: are they worth more, are they worth less? It is only natural that I should incline towards the past; but the past is surrounded by a mist through which objects assume an agreeable and often deceptive complexion. My youth, to which I can never go back again, produces the effect upon me of a grandmother; I hardly remember it and I should be charmed to see it once more.
A Lady from Louisiana.
A Louisianan lady came to see me from the Mississippi: I thought that I was setting eyes upon the virgin of the last loves. Célestine wrote me several letters: they might have been dated from the "Moon of the Flowers;" she showed me fragments of Memoirs which she had composed in the savannahs of Alabama. Some time after, Célestine wrote to me that she was busy with a dress for her presentation at the Court of Philip: I resumed my bear's skin. Célestine has changed into an alligator from the water of the Floridas: may Heaven grant her peace and love, for as long as those things last!
There are persons who, by thrusting themselves between you and the past, prevent your memories from coming to your recollection; there are others who become mingled from the first with what you have been. Madame Tastu[323] produces this latter effect. She has a natural turn of expression; she has left the Gallic jargon to those who believe that they make themselves younger by disguising themselves in the cloaks of our ancestors. Favorinus[324] said to a Roman who affected to talk the language of the Twelve Tables[325]: