Au banquet de la vie, infortuné convive, J'apparus un jour et je meurs; Je meurs, et sur ma tombe, où lentement j'arrive, Nul ne viendra verser des pleurs!
Louis's verses had affected me; I took the pencil from him, and, withdrawing for an instant to the end of the room, I wrote in my turn the following verses, which will die with me unknown to all; they were the first verses that sprung from my heart, and not from my imagination. I read them out without daring to raise my eyes to her, to whom they were addressed. They ran thus--
but, no! I efface them! My love was all my genius, and they have departed together.
As I finished reading the verses, I saw on Julie's face, on which the light of the lamp fell, such a tender expression of surprise and such superhuman beauty, that I stood uncertain, as my verses had expressed it, between the woman and the angel,--between love and adoration. This latter feeling predominated at last in my heart, and in that of my friend. We fell on our knees before the sofa, and kissed the end of the black shawl which enveloped her feet. The verses seemed to her merely an instantaneous and solitary expression of my feelings towards her; she praised them, but never mentioned them again. She much preferred our familiar discourse, or even our pensive silence in each other's company, to these exercises of the mind which profane our feelings rather than reveal them, Louis left us after a few days.
In consequence of these first verses of mine, which were but one feeble strophe of the perpetual hymn of my heart, she requested me to write an ode for her, which she would address as a tribute of admiration, and as a specimen of my talents, to one of the men of her Paris acquaintance, for whom she felt the greatest respect and attachment, M. de Bonald. I knew nothing of him but his name, and the well-deserved renown that attached to it as that of a Christian, a philosopher, and a legislator. I fancied that I was to address a modern Moses, who derived from the rays of another Mount Sinai the divine light which he shed upon human laws. I wrote the ode in one night, and read it the next morning, beneath a spreading chestnut-tree, to her who had inspired it. She made me read it three times over, and in the evening she copied it with her light and steady hand. Her writing flew upon the paper like the shadow of the wings of thought, with the swiftness, elegance, and freedom of a bird on the wing. The next day she sent it to Paris. M. de Bonald replied by many obliging auguries respecting my talents. This was the beginning of my acquaintance with that most excellent man, whose character I have always admired and loved since, without sharing his theocratical doctrines. My approval of his creed, of which I knew nothing, was at that time a concession to my love; at a later period it would have been an homage rendered to his virtues. M. de Bonald was, like M. de Maistre, a prophet of the past, one of those men whose ideas were of bygone days, and to whom we bow with veneration, as we see them seated on the threshold of futurity; they will not pass onward, but tarry to listen to the sublime lament of all that dies in the human mind.