3rd and 4th of June 1833.

I crossed the Rhine at two in the afternoon; at the instant I passed, a steamboat was ascending the river. What would Caesar have thought if he had encountered such a vessel when building his bridge?

On the other side of the Rhine, facing Mannheim, one is again in Bavaria, due to a series of odious sequestrations and the machinations of the Treaties of Paris, Vienna and Aix-la-Chapelle. Everyone has played a part in these hatchet-jobs, without regard to logic, humanity, or justice and without concern for the section of the population that fell into the royal maw.

In travelling through the Palatinate this side of the Rhine, I reflected that the area was formerly a department of France (Mont-Tonnerre), that Gaul in white was circled by the Rhine, Germany’s blue sash. Napoleon, and the Republic before him, realised the dream of several of our kings and especially Louis XIV. As long as we fail to occupy our natural frontiers there will be war in Europe, because self-preservation forces France to seize borders essential to her national independence. Here, we have planted trophies to reclaim at a future time and place.

The plain between the Rhine and the TonnerreMountains (Donnersberg) is melancholy; the soil and the men seem to say that their fate is not settled, that they belong to no nation; they appear to be waiting on a new armed invasion, like a new inundation of the river. The Germans of Tacitus laid large areas on their frontiers waste, between themselves and their enemies, and left them empty. Ill luck to those populations near borders who cultivate battlefields where nations are to meet!

Further on I saw a sad sight: a wood of six-foot pine saplings cut and tied for faggots, a forest cut unripe. I have spoken about the cemetery at Lucerne: there the children’s sepulchres are squeezed together, apart. I have never felt more deeply the desire to end my life, to die beneath the guardianship of a friendly hand applied to my heart, as a test, when they say: ‘It no longer beats.’ At the edge of my grave I would like to be able to look back with satisfaction on my numerous years, as a Pontiff arriving at the sanctuary blesses the long train of priests who will serve as his cortege.

Louvois set the Palatinate alight; alas the hand that held the torch was that of Turenne’s shade. The Revolution ravaged the same area, witness and victim, time and again, to our aristocratic and plebeian victories. It is enough to name the generals to identify the change of century: on the one hand, Condé, Turenne, Créquy, Luxembourg, La Force, Villars; on the other Kellerman, Hoche, Pichegru, Moreau. Let us not disown any of our triumphs; military glory above all has not gone only to France’s enemies, and has not been only of one class: on the battlefield honour and danger level rank. Our forefathers called the blood issuing from a wound that was not mortal sang volage: idle blood: a phrase characteristic of that disdain for death natural to Frenchman in all centuries. Institutions have no effect on this national spirit. The soldiers who said, after Turenne’s death: ‘Let Piebald runfree: we will camp where she halts’, would have understood the worth of Napoleon’s grenadiers perfectly.

On the heights of Durkheim, the premier rampart of the Gauls on this bank of the Rhine, you will find the sites of camps and military positions now devoid of soldiers: Burgundians, Franks, Goths, Huns, Swabians, waves of the Barbarian deluge, assailed these heights in turn.

Not far from Durkheim are the ruins of an abbey. The monks enclosed in that retreat had a fine view of the armies circling at their feet; they gave good hospitality to the soldiers; there, some crusader ended his life, changing his helm for a hood; there lived passions that summoned silence and repose before the last repose and the final silence. Did they find what they sought? These ruins will not tell.

After the debris of the sanctuary of peace comes the litter of a den of war, the razed bastions, mantlets, curtain-walls, and emplacements of a fortress. The ramparts are crumbling like the cloisters. The castle was sited in a vulnerable pass as a defence against the enemy: it has not prevented time and death from passing by.

From Durkheim to Frankenstein, the road threads its way through a valley so narrow that it barely allows access for a vehicle; the trees descending from the opposite embankments meet and embrace in the ravine. Between Messenia and Arcadia, I followed similar valleys, to the better track nearby: Pan knew nothing of bridges and highways.

Flowering broom and a jay brought back memories of Brittany; I remember the pleasure I derived from that bird’s cry in the mountains of Judea. My memory is a panorama; there, on the same screen the most diverse sites and skies come to paint themselves with their burning suns or their misted horizons.

The inn at Frankenstein is set in a mountain meadow, watered by a brook. The post-master speaks French; his young sister, or wife, or daughter is charming. He complains about being Bavarian; he busies himself with exploiting the forests; he reminded me of an American timber-man.

At Kaiserslautern, which I entered at night as I had Bamberg, I traversed a region of dreams: what did all those sleeping inhabitants see in their sleep? If I had the time, I would compose the history of their dreams; nothing would have recalled me to earth if two quails had not called from one cage to another. In the fields in Germany, between Prague and Mannheim, one only meets with crows, larks and sparrows; but the towns are full of nightingales, warblers, thrushes and quails; plaintive prisoners of both sexes whom you greet at the bars of their gaol as you pass. The windows are embellished with carnations, mignonettes, roses and jasmine. The Northern races have the tastes of a different clime; they love the arts and music: the Germans went to seek the vine in Italy; their descendants willingly repeat the invasion to win from the same places birds and flowers.

The coachman changing his jacket alerted me, on Tuesday the 4th of June, at Saarbruck, that I was entering Prussia. Beneath the window of my inn I saw a squadron of hussars file by; they had an animated air: I felt likewise; I would have cheerfully vied at giving those gentlemen a beating, even though a lively feeling of respect attracted me to the Prussian royal family, even though the tempers of the Prussians in Paris had only been reprisals for Napoleon’s brutalities in Berlin; but if historians have time to undertake such cool judgements, deducing consequences from principles, the man who is a witness to current events is dragged along by those events, without seeking in the past the causes from which they emerge and which excuse them. She has done me plenty of harm, my country; but how joyfully I would give my blood for her! Oh, those firm minds, those consummate politicians, above all those fine Frenchmen, who negotiated the treaties of 1815!

A few more hours, and my native land will once more quiver under my feet. What shall I find? For three weeks I have known nothing of my friends’ words or actions. Three weeks! A long stretch of time for a man, whom an instant can snatch away, for an empire which three days can overturn! And my prisoner of Blaye, what has become of her? Shall I be able to hand her the message she awaits? If the person of any ambassador ought to be sacred, it should be mine; my diplomatic career was rendered holy in proximity to the Head of the Church; it completed its sanctification in proximity to that of an unfortunate monarch: I have negotiated a new family pact between the descendants of the Béarnais; I have fetched and carried messages between prison and exile, exile and prison.