Far different must have been the feelings of Murat during the anxious interval of forced leisure which he spent at this place; and I will confess, that while listening to the landlord's simple account of the manner in which he passed his time, we forgot the massacre of Madrid in the well-known anecdote of the drowning officer's rescue. During the first eight days he remained shut up in the bed-room or sitting-room which we occupied, in expectation of despatches from Buonaparte, to whom he wrote on his arrival at Cannes. At the end of this time, having received no answer, he used to beguile his impatience by rambling on the sea shore, or watching the sports of the peasants, till at length, evidently heart-sick and desperate, he set out for Toulon on the rash expedition which closed his career. "Toujours, toujours, il avoit la mine triste.--Ah! si vous l'aviez connu, vous auriez pleure son sort--il etoit un si bel homme!--d'une taille superbe!" said our honest host, whose knowledge of Murat was probably confined to his soldier-like figure, and his desolate state: he could have been no judge of the small extent of Buonaparte's obligations to his brother-in-law, whose former defection was but repaid in kind. He pointed out a green spot under the walls of an old castle which overlooked the inn, where he had frequently observed Murat lying with his face concealed in his hands, or in his more cheerful moments, watching the dances of the country people who resorted thither, and whose sports seemed to interest him considerably. It would be a task for the hand of a master poet or painter, to describe an ambitious and desperate man, softened for a time by disappointment, overleaping in thought the immeasurable distance between his present and his former self, and contemplating the sports of his youth with a sort of melancholy pleasure, yet under the influence of the strong fatality which hurried him to his end. It is by mixing somewhat of this feeling in the character of Macbeth, that Shakspeare has excited a momentary interest even for a murderer and usurper, who perceives "his life fallen into the sere and yellow leaf," and pauses for a moment in melancholy reflection as he rushes to "die with harness on his back." "Out, out, brief, candle," &c. Having spent an hour among the sunny basking places which abound in the rocks of this place, we hired a fishing-boat to convey us to the island of St. Marguerite. It was impossible to help being diverted by the uncouth appearance of our new conductors, which was two or three degrees wilder than that of poor Murat's amphibious subjects: one fellow in particular, was "A man, Cast in the roughest mould Dame Nature boasts, With back much broader than a dripping pan, And legs as thick about the calves as posts,"[53]