Wallenstein retires to his place of rest:
Sieh, es ist Nacht geworden; auf dem Schloss
Ist's auch schon stille. Leucine, Kämmerling!
. . . . . . .
Ich denke einen langen Schlaf zu thun;
Denn dieser letzten Tage Qual war gross.
Sorgt, dass sie nicht zu zeitig mir erwecken[7].
The dagger of the murderers snatches Wallenstein from his dreams of ambition, even as the voice of the turnpike-man put an end to my dream of love. Both Schiller and Benjamin Constant, who gave proof of a new talent by imitating the German tragic poet, have gone to join Wallenstein, while I, at the gates of Eger, recall their treble fame.
Bavaria.
2 June 1833.
I passed through Eger and, on Saturday the 1st of June, at day-break, entered Bavaria: a tall red-haired girl, bare-foot and bare-headed, came to open the turnpike to me, like Austria in person. The cold lasted: the grass in the moats was covered with a white hoar-frost; wet foxes came out of the oat-fields; grey, zig-zag, wide-spreading clouds hung across in the sky like eagles' wings.
I arrived at Weissenstadt at nine o'clock in the morning; at the same moment, a sort of gig was carrying away a young woman driving without a hat; she looked very much like what she probably was: joy, love's short fortune, then the hospital and the common grave. Strolling pleasure, may Heaven not be too severe on your boards! There are so many actors worse than yourself in this world!
Before entering the village, I passed through "wastes:" this word was at the point of my pencil; it belonged to our old Frankish tongue: it describes the aspect of a desolate country better than the word "lande," which means earth. I still know the song which they used to sing in the evening when crossing the waste-lands:
C'est le chevalier des Landes:
Malheureux chevalier!
Quand il fut dans la lande,
A ouï les sings sonner[8].
After Weissenstadt comes Berneck. On leaving Berneck, the road is lined with poplar-trees, whose winding avenue filled me with an indescribable sentiment of mingled pleasure and sadness. On ransacking my memory, I found that they resembled the poplars with which the high-road was formerly laid out at the entrance to Villeneuve-sur-Yonne on the Paris side. Madame de Beaumont is no more; M. Joubert is no more; the poplars are felled and, after the fourth fall of the Monarchy, I am passing at the feet of the poplars at Berneck: