"This city,çoisRené which Rome bore in her advanced age, had, from its birth, something of the old age of its mother. Upon the whole, I should not mind living here; I should like to go to the French Column, raised in memory of the Battle of Ravenna. There were the Cardinal de Medici[531] and Ariosto[532], Bayard[533] and Lautrec, brother to the Comtesse de Chateaubriand. There the handsome Gaston de Foix[534] was killed at the age of twenty-four.
"'Notwithstanding all the artillery fired by the Spaniards,' says the _Loyal Serviteur_, 'the French marched on; never since God created Heaven and earth was a crueller nor fiercer assault between French and Spaniards. They rested in front of one another to recover their breath; then, lowering their visors, began again worse than ever, crying "France!" and "Spain!'"
"Of all those warriors there remained but a few knights who then, become freed-men of glory, put on the frock.
"One saw also in some cabin a young girl who, in turning her spindle, caught her dainty fingers in the hemp; she was not accustomed to that life: she was a Trivulzis. When, through her half-open door, she saw two billows join each other on the bosom of the waters, she felt her sadness increase: that woman had been beloved by a great king. She continued to go slowly, by a lonely way, from her cabin to an abandoned church and from the church to her cabin.
"The old forest through which I passed was composed of solitary pines: they resembled the masts of galleys settled in the sand. The sun was near its setting when I left Ravenna; I heard the distant sound of a bell tolling: it was summoning the faithful to prayer."
"Returning to Forli, I left it once again without having seen on its crumbling ramparts the place where the Duchess Caterina Sforza[535] declared to her enemies, who were preparing to murder her only son, that she could still be a mother. Pius VII., born at Cesena, was a monk in the admirable convent of Madonna del Monte.
"Near Savignano, I passed across the ravine of a little torrent: when I was told that I had crossed the Rubicon, it seemed to me as though a curtain was raised and that I saw the land of Cæsar's time. My own Rubicon is life: it is long since I cleared its first bank.