_Le Peintre de Saltzbourg, journal des émotions d'un coeur souffrant, suivi des Méditations du Cloître_, is the title of the first edition, published in Paris, 1803. The _Méditations du Cloître_, a sort of appendix to this edition of the romance, possesses a certain interest as the expression of one of the ideas prevailing among the young generation. It is written with the same intention as _René_, being, namely, a plea for the restoration of monasteries. It is a monologue, spoken by a being peculiarly unhappy in his own estimation, who bewails the absence of any monastery wherein to take refuge, and naïvely seeks to prove his vocation for the life of a Trappist by a perfect torrent of complaint. "I, who am still so young and yet so unhappy, who have too early gauged life and society, and am completely estranged from the fellow-men who have wounded my heart, I, bereft of every hope which has hitherto deluded me, have sought a haven in my misery and found none." Hereon follows a long panegyric on monks and nuns, those "angels of peace, who did nought but pray, console the wretched, educate the young, tend the sick, help the needy, follow the condemned to the scaffold, and bind up the wounds of heroes." How explain the fact that these devout men and women have brought down on themselves a fury of persecution unequalled in the annals of fanaticism? How can the legislators of the eighteenth century have had so little knowledge of the human heart as not to understand, not to divine the existence of those needs, to supply which religion founded monasteries? "To the present generation political circumstances have given the education that fell to the lot of Achilles. We have been fed on the blood and the marrow of lions; and now that a government which leaves nothing to chance and which determines the future has set limits to the dangerous development of the powers of youth, saying to them: 'Thus far and no farther!'--do they understand now what melancholy occurrences result from so much suppressed passion and unemployed strength, how many temptations to crime exist in a passionate, melancholy, world-weary heart? With bitterness, with horror, I set it down: Werther's pistol and the executioner's axe have already made a clearing amongst us. The present generation rises up and demands the cloisters of old." Assuredly a humble and sentimental desire for a generation nourished on the marrow of lions! But we discern defiance behind the meekness, and the demand is not to be taken literally. It is impatient despondency grasping at random at any means of alleviating its woe.