4th and 5th of June 1833.

Crossing the border which separates the territory of Saarbruck from that of Forbach, France did not show herself to me at her most brilliant: first an amputee, then another man crawling along on hands and knees, dragging his legs after him like two twisted tails or dead snakes; then in a cart appeared two old women, blackened, wrinkled, the vanguard of French womanhood. There was something to turn the Prussian army.

But afterwards I encountered a fine young foot-soldier with a young girl; the soldier was pushing the girls’ wheelbarrow in front of him, while she carried the trooper’s pipe and sabre. Further on another young girl held the handle of a plough, while an old ploughman prodded the oxen; further on an old man begging for a blind child; further on a wayside cross. In a hamlet, a dozen children’s heads, at the window of an unfinished house, resembled a group of angels in glory. Behold a little boy of five or six, sitting on the threshold of a cottage; bare-headed, blond-haired, with a dirty visage, pulling a face because of the cold breeze; his white shoulders emerging from a torn canvas smock, his arms crossed over his legs hunched towards his chest, watching everything going on around with birdlike curiosity; Raphael would have sketched him, I wanted to take him to his mother.

Entering Forbach, a troop of trained dogs appeared: the two largest were hitched to the costume-wagon; five or six more with varying tails, muzzles, waists and coats followed the baggage, each with a piece of bread in its mouth. Two grave looking trainers, one carrying a big drum, the other carrying nothing at all, led the band. Come, my friends, make a tour of the earth with me, so as to learn how to comprehend the nations. You hold as great a place in the world as I; you like the dogs of my species well enough. Present your paw to Diana, Mirza and Pax, hat over your ear, sword at your side, tail in the air between the wings of your coat; dance for a bone or a blow from a foot as we men do; but don’t fall flat when you leap for the King!

Reader, suffer these arabesques; the hand that wrote them will do you no other ill; it is withered. Remember, as you read them, that they are only the capricious scrawls traced by a painter on the arch of his tomb.

At the customs post, an old clerk made a semblance of inspecting my calash. I had a hundred sous coin ready; he saw it in my hand but dared not take it in case his superiors were watching. He took off his helmet under the pretext of rummaging more freely, placing it on the cushion in front of me, saying, in a low voice: ‘In my helmet, please.’ Oh! The grand phrase! It contains the whole history of the human race; how often liberty, loyalty, devotion, friendship, love have said: ‘In my helmet, please!’ I will give that phrase to Béranger as a refrain for one of his songs.

I was struck, on entering Metz, by something I had not noticed in 1821; modern fortifications enveloping the Gothic fortifications: Guise and Vauban are two names rightly associated with one another.

Our years and our memories are laid down in regular and parallel layers, at different depths of our existence, deposited by the tides of time that pass over us in succession. It was from Metz, in 1792, that the column emerged which engaged our little corps of émigrés below Thionville. I am entering it from a pilgrimage to the retreat of my banished Prince whom I served in his first exile. I gave a few drops of my blood for him then, I have come from weeping beside him now; at my age one scarcely has any tears left.

In 1821 Monsieur de Tocqueville, my brother’s brother-in-law, was Prefect of the Moselle. The saplings, thin as canes that Monsieur de Tocqueville planted in 1820 at the gates of Metz, now give shade. Behold a scale to measure our days; but man is not like the vine, he does not improve by adding the leaves of his years. The ancients infused Falernian wine with rose-petals; when one decanted an amphora from a vintage Consulate, it perfumed the feast. The clearest knowledge would be so infused with its old age that no one would be tempted to get drunk on it.

I had not been in the inn at Metz a quarter of an hour when Baptiste appeared greatly agitated: with a deal of mystery he took a piece of white paper from his pocket in which a seal was wrapped; Monsieur le Duc de Bordeaux and Mademoiselle had entrusted this seal to him, telling him only to hand it to me on French soil. They had been anxious the whole night before my departure, fearing that the jeweller would not have time to complete the work.

The seal had three facets: on one an anchor was engraved: on the second the two words that Henri had said to me during our first interview: ‘Yes, always!’ on the third the date of my arrival in Prague. The brother and sister begged me to employ the seal for love of them. The mystery of this gift, the order from the two exiled children only to reveal this witness to their memory to me on the soil of France, brought tears to my eyes. The seal will never leave me; I will carry it for love of Louise and Henri.

I enjoyed seeing Fabert’s house in Metz, a soldier who became a Marshal of France, and who refused the ribbon of the Order, his nobility only aspiring to a sword.

At Metz, those Barbarians our ancestors cut the throats of Romans surprised in the midst of festive debauchery; our own soldiers waltzed to the monastery of Alcobaça with the skeleton of Inès de Castro: tragedies and pleasures, crime and folly, fourteen centuries separate you, and yet you are utterly past, both one and the other. Eternity begun this moment is as ancient as eternity dated from the first death, the murder of Abel. Nevertheless men, during their ephemeral appearance on this earth, persuade themselves that they have left some trace behind: oh yes, every fly casts a shadow!

Leaving Metz, I passed through Verdun where I was so miserable, where Carrel’s lonely friend lives now. I passed along the heights of Valmy; I have no more wish to speak of it than Jemmapes: I would be in fear of stumbling over a crown there.

Châlons recalled a great error Bonaparte committed; he exiled beauty there. Peace to Châlons which reminded me that I still had friends.

At Château-Thierry, I found my god again, La Fontaine. It was the hour of prayer: Jean’s wife was no longer there, and Jean returned to Madame la Sablière’s house.

Clipping the wall of the cathedral at Meaux, I re-phrased Bossuet’s words for him; ‘Man arrives at the grave dragging behind him the long chain of his false hopes.’

In Paris I passed the quarters I had inhabited in my youth with my sisters; then the Palais de Justice, recalling my trial; then the Prefecture of Police, which served me as a prison. I am finally in my hospice once again, unwinding thus the thread of my days. The fragile insect that lives in sheep-barns descends towards the earth on the end of its silken line, where a ewe’s feet will crush it.