Let us picture, according to our enlarged knowledge, our paltry planet swimming in an ocean whose waves are suns, in that milky way, the raw matter of light, the molten metal of worlds which the hand of the Creator will shape. The distance of certain stars is so prodigious that their brightness will not be able to reach the eye that watches them until those stars are extinct: the focus before the ray. How small is man on the atom where he moves! But how great he is as an intellect! He knows when the face of luminaries is to be overcast with shadow, at what hour comets will return after thousands of years: he who lives but an instant! Microscopic insect though he be, lying unperceived in a fold of the robe of the sky, the globes cannot hide from him a single one of their movements in the depth of space. What destinies will those stars, new to us, shine upon? Is the revelation of those stars linked with some new phase of humanity? You will know, O races yet to be born; I do not know, and I am going.
Thanks to the exorbitancy of my years, my monument is finished. It is a great relief to me; I felt some one urging me: the skipper of the bark in which my seat is taken was warning me that I had but a moment left to go on board. If I had been the master of Rome, I should say, like Sulla, that I am ending my Memoirs on the very eve of my death; but I should not conclude my story with those words with which he concludes his:
"I have seen, in a dream, one of my children who showed me Metella, his mother, and exhorted me to come to enjoy repose in the breast of eternal happiness."
If I had been Sulla, glory could never have given me repose and happiness.
End of my Memoirs.
New storms will arise; men seem to have a presentiment of calamities that will surpass the afflictions with which we have been overwhelmed; already they are thinking of binding up their old wounds again in order to return to the field of battle. Still, I do not believe in the early outbreak of misfortunes; peoples and kings alike are tired out; no unforeseen catastrophe will fall upon France: what comes after me will be only the effect of the general transformation. No doubt, there will be painful stations; the world cannot change its aspect without causing suffering. But, once more, there will be no separate revolutions; it will be the great revolution approaching its end. The scenes of to-morrow do not concern me; they call for other painters: it is your turn, gentlemen!
As I write these last words, on the 16th of November 1841, my window, which looks west over the gardens of the Foreign Missions, is open: it is six o'clock in the morning; I see the pale and spreading moon; it is sinking over the spire of the Invalides scarce revealed by the first gold ray from the East: one would say that the old world was ending and the new commencing. I behold the reflections of a dawn of which I shall not see the sun rise. It but remains for me to sit down by the edge of my grave; and then I shall descend boldly, crucifix in hand, to Eternity.
[399] This book was written partly in 1834 and partly in 1841, from the 25th of September to the 16th of November.—T.