"Ah, he is not so old!"
A man is at ease with white hair: he can boast of it; to glory in having black hair would be in bad taste: a fine matter for triumph, to be as your mother made you! But to be as time, misfortune and wisdom have dressed you, that is fine! My little artifice has succeeded sometimes. Quite recently a priest asked to see me; he stood dumb at the sight of me; at last recovering his speech, he cried:
"Ah, monsieur, so you will be able to fight a long time yet for the faith!"
One day, as I was passing through Lyons, a lady wrote to me; she begged me to give her daughter a seat in my carriage and take her to Paris. The proposal struck me as singular; but, after all, having verified the signature, I found my unknown correspondent to be a highly respectable lady and I replied politely. The mother introduced her daughter to me, a divinity of sixteen. No sooner had the mother set eyes upon me than she blushed scarlet; her confidence forsook her:
"Forgive me," she stammered; "I am none the less filled with esteem.... But you understand the proprieties.... I made a mistake.... I am so greatly surprised."
I insisted, looking at my promised companion, who seemed amused at the discussion; I was lavish with protestations that I would take every imaginable care of that beautiful young person; the mother humbled herself with excuses and courtesies. The two ladies departed. I was proud of having frightened them so much. For some hours I thought myself made young again by the Dawn. The lady had fancied that the author of the Génie du Christianisme was a venerable Abbé de Chateaubriand, a tall, dry, simple old man, constantly taking snuff out of a huge tin snuff-box, who might very well be trusted to take an innocent school-girl to the Sacred Heart.
They used to tell in Vienna, two or three lustres ago, that I lived all alone in a certain valley called the Vallée-aux-Loups. My house was built on an island; when people wanted to see me, they had to blow a horn on the opposite bank of the river: a river at Châtenay! I then looked out through a hole: if the company pleased me, a thing that hardly ever happened, I came myself to fetch them in a little boat; if not, not. In the evening, I pulled my boat on shore and nobody was allowed to land on my island. In point of fact, I ought to have lived in this way; this Viennese story has always charmed me: M. de Metternich surely did not invent it; he is not sufficiently my friend for that.
I do not know what the German traveller will have told his wife about me, nor if he went out of his way to undeceive her as to my decrepitude. I fear that I possess the drawbacks of black hair and white hair both and that I am neither young enough nor staid enough. For the rest, I was hardly in the mood for coquetry at Wiesenbach; a melancholy wind blew under the doors and through the passages of the inn: when the breeze blows, I am in love with nothing else.
From Wiesenbach to Heidelberg, one follows the course of the Necker, cased by hills which carry forests on a bank of sand and red sulphate. How many rivers I have seen flow! I met pilgrims from Walthüren: they formed two parallel lines on either side of the high-road; the carriages passed in the middle. The women walked bare-foot, beads in hand, with a parcel of linen on their heads; the men bare-headed, also carrying their beads in their hands. It was raining; in some places the watery clouds crept along the sides of the hills. Boats loaded with timber went down the river, others went up, under sail, or in tow. In the broken places in the hills were hamlets standing among the fields, in the midst of rich vegetable-gardens adorned with Bengal roses and different flowering shrubs. Pilgrims, pray for my poor little King: he is exiled, he is innocent; he is commencing his pilgrimage while you are performing yours and I ending mine. If he is not to reign, it will always be a certain glory to me to have fastened the wreck of so great a fortune to my life-boat God alone sends the fair wind and opens the harbour.
Heidelberg.