"After these very natural complaints,çoisRené which have involuntarily escaped me, one thought comes to console me: I began my literary career with a work in which I considered Christianity in its poetic and moral aspects; I end it with a work in which I regard the same religion in its philosophical and historical aspects: I began my political career under the Restoration, I end it with the Restoration. It is not without a secret satisfaction that I observe this consistency with myself."
I have not abandoned the resolution which I conceived at the moment of the catastrophe of July. I have been considering the ways and means of living abroad: difficult ways and means, because I have nothing; the purchaser of my works has all but made me a bankrupt, and my debts prevent me from finding anyone willing to lend me money.
Be this as it may, I shall go to Geneva[340] with the sum that has accrued to me from the sale of my last pamphlet[341]. I am leaving a procuration to sell the house in which I write this page for the sake of the order of dates. If I find a customer for my bed, I can find another bed outside France. In these uncertainties and movements, it will be impossible for me, until I am settled somewhere, to resume the sequence of my Memoirs at the place where I interrupted them[342]. I shall continue, therefore, to write down the things of the actual moment of my life; I shall communicate these things by means of the letters which I may happen to write on the road or during my different stoppages; I shall afterwards join the intermediary facts by a "journal" which will fill up the intervals between the dates of those letters.
"Here I am, too far away from you. I have never made so sad a journey: wonderful weather, nature all arrayed, the nightingale singing, a starry night; and all this for whom? I shall indeed have to return to where you are, unless you be willing to come to my aid[344]."
"I spent the day, yesterday, in wandering beside the Rhone; I contemplated the town where you were born, the hill upon which rose the convent where you were chosen as the fairest: an expectation which you did not disappoint; and you are not here, and years have elapsed, and you have since been exiled to your birth-place, and Madame de Staël is no more, and I am leaving France! One singular personage[345] belonging to those old days has appeared before me: I send you his note, because of its unexpectedness and its surprise. This personage, whom I had never seen, is planting pines in the mountains of Lyonnais. It is a long cry from there to the Rue Feydeau and the _Maison à vendre_: what different parts men play on earth!