"A sort of tribunal of political inquisition and çoisRenéthe suppression of the liberty of the press have stopped this movement of men's minds; but it must not be believed that they have broken its main-spring. Germany, like Italy, to-day desires political unity, and with this idea, which will remain dormant for a greater or lesser length of time according to events and men, one can always be sure, by arousing it, to stir the Germanic peoples. The princes or ministers who may appear in the ranks of the Confederation of the German States will hasten or delay the revolution in this country, but they will not prevent the human race from developing: every century has its dynasty. To-day there is no one left in Germany, nor even in Europe: we have passed from the giants to the dwarfs and fallen from the immense into the narrow and limited. Bavaria, by means of the bureaus formed by M. de Montgelas[144], still pushes on towards new ideas, although she has receded in the race, while the Landgraviate of Hesse would not even admit that there was a revolution in Europe. The Prince[145] who has just died wanted his soldiers, who had formerly been soldiers of Jerome Bonaparte[146], to wear powder and pig-tails: he mistook old fashions for old manners, forgetting that one can copy the first, but that one can never restore the second."
In Berlin and in the North, the monuments are fortresses; the sight of them alone oppresses the heart. If you see these places in populous and fertile countries, they give rise to the idea of a legitimate defense; the women and children, sitting and playing at some distance from the sentries, form a rather agreeable contrast; but a fortress on heaths, in a desert, only recalls human anger: against whom are those ramparts raised, if not against poverty and independence? You have to be myself to find a pleasure in prowling at the foot of those bastions, in hearing the wind whistle through those trenches, in seeing those breastworks raised in prevision of enemies who perhaps will never appear. Those military labyrinths, those guns mute in face of one another on salient and gazoned angles, those stone watch-towers, where you see nobody and whence no eye observes you, are of an incredible grimness. If, in the dual solitude of nature and war, you come across a daisy sheltered under the redan of a glacis, that floral amenity relieves you. When, in the castles in Italy, I saw goats suspended to the ruins and the goat-girl sitting under a parasol pine; when, on the mediæval walls with which Jerusalem is surrounded, my eyes plunged into the Valley of Cedron upon some Arab women climbing up steeps among pebble-stones, the sight was a sad one doubtless, but history was there, and the silence of the present allowed the sounds of the past to be heard all the more clearly.
