In the morning, the Comte de Witt was true to his appointment. ‘You promised to explain to me,’ he said, ‘the meaning of his Majesty of Denmark’s words about your progress in the German language.’ ‘You know,’ I replied, ‘that often a word, a movement, or a simple inflection of a voice suddenly recalls scenes of our life which had practically vanished from our memory. The past starts up vividly with all its colours; the impressions that had gone to sleep awaken there and then, and their power is such as to give a kind of voluptuous or sensuous delight in retracing the most painful episodes and the most cruel losses. Nay, the very tears caused by these seem sweet. That’s what I felt yesterday. ‘During the course of the French Revolution, my father, or the one who stood me in stead, had constantly refused to emigrate. Proscribed for being guilty of (the wrong) patriotism and devotion, he only managed to save his head from the guillotine by hiding in a friend’s house. When the delirium of blood was over, he considered himself justified in claiming his nationality, which he had never forsaken by abandoning his country. But placed once more on the fatal lists of _émigrés_, pursued by blind and relentless hatred, once more proscribed after 18th Fructidor, he was obliged to fly in order to escape an equally horrible death. We managed to get as far as Hamburg, where we experienced all the privations attached to that kind of voluntary and hurriedly projected exile. Invited by the Comte de Fersen to come to Sweden, we left the Hanseatic city, and made our way on foot across the flats of Holstein to Copenhagen. Our exceedingly restricted resources did not admit of any other mode of travelling.