The images borrowed from mountain scenery have particularly sensible relations with our fortunes: this one passes in silence, like the outpouring of a spring; that one attaches a noise to his course, like a torrent; that other flings away his existence, like a cataract that appeals and disappears.
The Simplon.
The Simplon already wears an abandoned air, even as the life of Napoleon; even as that life, it has nothing left but its glory: it is too great a work to belong to the little States upon which it has devolved. Genius has no family; its inheritance falls by right of escheat to the common crowd, which nibbles at it and plants a cabbage where a cedar grew.
The last time that I crossed the Simplon, I was going as Ambassador to Rome; I fell; the herds whom I had left on the top of the mountain are there yet: snows, clouds, tumble-down rocks, pine-forests and the turmoil of waters incessantly encompass the hut threatened by the avalanche. The most living person in those chalets is the goat. Why die? I know. Why be born? I cannot tell. Still, admit that the foremost sufferings, moral sufferings, the torments of the mind are wanting among the dwellers in the region of the chamois and the eagles. When I went to the Congress of Verona, in 1822, the station on the peak of the Simplon was kept by a Frenchwoman: in the middle of a cold night and of a squall of wind which prevented me from seeing her, she talked to me of the Scala in Milan; she was expecting ribbons from Paris: her voice, the only thing about that woman that I know, was very sweet through the darkness and the gale.
The descent to Domo d'Ossola appeared to me more and more wonderful; a certain play of light and shadow increased its magic. One was caressed by a little breath which our old tongue called the aure: a sort of early morning-breeze, bathed and scented with the dew. I once more beheld the Lago Maggiore, on which I was so melancholy in 1828 and of which I caught sight from the Valley of Bellinzona in 1832. At Sesto-Calende, Italy presented herself: a blind Paganini sang and played the fiddle at the edge of the lake as I crossed the Ticino.
On entering Milan, I again saw the magnificent avenue of tulip-trees of which no one speaks; the travellers apparently take them for plane-trees. I protest against this silence, in memory of my savages: it is surely the least that America can do, to give shade to Italy. One might also plant magnolias at Genoa, mixed with palm-trees and orange-trees. But who dreams of such a thing? Who thinks of beautifying the earth? That care is left to God. The governments are occupied with their fall, and men prefer a card-board tree on the stage of a fantoccini theatre to the magnolia-tree whose roses would scent the cradle of Christopher Columbus.
In Milan, the annoyance about the passports is as stupid as it is brutal. I did not pass through Verona without emotion; it was there that my active political career had its real beginning. My mind thought on what the world might have become if that career had not been interrupted by a contemptible jealousy.
Verona, so lively in 1822, thanks to the presence of the sovereigns of Europe, had, in 1833, returned to silence; the Congress had passed as completely in its lonely streets as the Court of the Scaligers and the Senate-house of the Romans. The arenas whose benches I had seen filled with a hundred thousand spectators yawned deserted; the buildings which I had admired under the illuminations embroidered on their architecture wrapped themselves, grey and bare as they were, in an atmosphere of rain.
The roll-call of the dead.
How many ambitions were stirring among the actors at Verona! How many destinies of nations were examined, discussed and weighed! Let us call the roll of those wooers of dreams; let us open the book of the Day of Wrath: Liber scriptus proferetur[66]; monarchs, princes, ministers, here is your ambassador, your colleague returned to his post: where are you? Answer.