"However,çoisRené I notice the littleness of present society less when I find myself alone. Left to the solitude in which Bonaparte has left the world, I scarcely hear the feeble generations which pass and mewl on the edge of the desert."
"In Milan, in less than a quarter of an hour, I counted seventeen hunchbacks passing under the window of my inn. The German flogging has deformed young Italy.
"I saw St. Charles Borromeo[507] in his sepulchre, after touching his birthplace at Arona. He reckoned two hundred and forty-four years of death. He was not beautiful.
"At Borgo San Donnino, Madame de Chateaubriand came running into my room in the middle of the night: she had seen her clothes and her straw hat fall off the chairs over which they were hung. She had concluded from this that we were in an inn haunted by ghosts or inhabited by robbers. I had noticed no shock as I lay in bed; nevertheless it was the case that an earthquake had been felt in the Apennines: that which overturns cities is able to throw down a woman's clothes. I said as much to Madame de Chateaubriand; I also told her that, in Spain, in the Vega del Xenil, I had passed without accident through a village which had been turned upside down the day before by a subterranean concussion. These lofty consolations did not have the smallest success, and we hastened to leave this cave of murderers.
"The continuation of my journey has displayed to me on every hand the flight of men and the inconstancy of fortune. At Parma, I found the portrait of Napoleon's widow that daughter of the Cæsars is now the wife of Count Neipperg; that mother of the conqueror's son has presented that son with brothers[508]: she allows the debts which she piles up to be guaranteed by a little Bourbon[509] who lives at Lucca and who, if it is expedient, is to inherit the Duchy of Parma.
"Bologna appears to me less deserted than at the time of my first journey. I have been received here with the honours with which ambassadors are pestered. I have visited a fine cemetery: I never forget the dead; they are our family.
"I have never so much admired the Carraccis[510] as in the new gallery at Bologna. It seemed to me as though I were seeing Raphael's St. Cecilia for the first time, so much more divine is it here than at the Louvre, under our sooty sky."