After the remnants of the sanctuary of peace come the fragments of the lair of war: the demolished bastions, mantlets, curtains, trunnions of a fortress. Ramparts crumble even as cloisters. The castle was ambushed in a rugged path to close it to the enemy: it did not keep time and death from passing.
From Dunkheim to Frankenstein, the road pushes through a valley so narrow that it will scarcely hold a carriage way; the trees descending from two opposite slopes join and embrace in the ravine. I have followed similar dales between Messenia and Arcadia, but for the good road: Pan knew nothing about civil engineering. Flowering broom and a jay carried me back to the recollection of Brittany; I remember the pleasure which the cry of that bird gave me in the mountains of Judea. My memory is a panorama; there the most varied sites and skies, with their scorching sun or their foggy horizon, come to paint themselves on the same canvas.
The inn at Frankenstein is placed in a meadow in the mountains, watered by a stream. The postmaster speaks French; his young sister, or his wife, or his daughter is charming. He complains of being a Bavarian; he busies himself with the cultivation of forests; to me he represented an American planter.
At Kaiserslautern, where I arrived at night as at Bamberg, I passed through the region of dreams: what did all those sleeping inhabitants see in their slumbers? If I had time, I would tell the story of their visions. Nothing would have reminded me of earth, if two quails had not called to one another from cage to cage. In the fields in Germany, from Prague to Mannheim, one meets only carrion crows, sparrows and larks; but the towns are full of nightingales, warblers, thrushes, quails: plaintive prisoners, male and female, who greet you at the bars of their gaol when you pass. The windows are decked with pinks, mignonette, roses, jasmine. The northern nations have the tastes of another clime; they love the arts and music: the Germans came to fetch the vine in Italy; their sons would gladly repeat the invasion to conquer birds and flowers in the same spots.
Prussia.
The change in the post-boy's jacket told me, on Tuesday the 4th of June, at Saarbrück, that I was entering Prussia. I saw a squadron of hussars ride past under the window of my inn; they looked very spirited: I was as spirited as they; I would cheerfully have helped to give those gentry a drubbing, even though a lively feeling of respect makes me attached to the Prussian Royal Family, even though the outbursts of the Prussians in Paris were but reprisals for Napoleon's brutality in Berlin; but, if history has the time to enter into the cold justice which connects consequences with their origins, the man who witnesses living facts is carried away by those facts, without going back to the past to seek the causes from which they sprang and which excuse them. My country has done me great harm; but how gladly I would offer up my blood for her! Oh, what strong heads, what consummate politicians, above all, what good Frenchmen were those negociators of the Treaties of 1815!
A few hours yet, and my native soil will once more quiver beneath my steps. What shall I hear? Since three weeks I have known nothing of what my friends have been saying and doing. Three weeks! A long space of time for man whom one moment carries away, for empires which three days suffice to overthrow! And my prisoner of Blaye: what has become of her? Shall I be able to convey to her the answer which she is awaiting? If ever the person of an ambassador should be sacred, it is mine; my diplomatic career was consecrated near the Head of the Church; it has been completely sanctified near an unfortunate monarch: I have negociated a new family compact among the children of the Bearnese; I have carried and brought back its deeds from prison to exile and from exile to prison.
4 and 5 June.
As I passed the border which separates the territory of Saarbrück from that of Forbach, France did not show herself to me in a brilliant manner: first, a cripple seated in a wooden bowl; then, another man who crawled on his hands and knees, dragging his legs after him like two crooked tails or two dead snakes; next, appeared, in a cart, two swarthy, wrinkled old women, the van-guard of the women of France. It was enough to make one go back again to the Prussian Army.