I listened again. (_Joie et sentiments de reconnaissance après l’orage. Allegretto._) And I suddenly realized how unsubstantial, for all their thickness, are the towers wherein each dwells isolated from some near happiness, shut off from some close beatitude, that for a dissolving touch might be his own. And I found that the completed harmonies of the lovely finale, “_Herr, wir danken Dir_,” were seeking my mortal ear, and my soul was being regained to tranquillity. My mind was turned from untimely vanishings, or the despair of men of middle life who go up to battle, and from all the company of those who “have wrapped about themselves the blue-black cloud of death,” and I saw again visions, felicities, progressions, accomplishments. Then, not bearing less beneficent harmonies, I went out, and Hope, with lovely, veiled, outcast, undesired Peace, accompanied me through the warm Savoyan night. But they left me at the door of my dwelling, as the one-armed _concierge_ saluted me, and the one-legged lift-man (symbols of my real world) took me up-stairs. Now I am alone with thoughts of him who gave to melody its eternal fashion and to music itself its furthest soul, and would that you had listened with me!... You who will not, Peace!... M. Guérin’s book-loving, artistic, perceptive son, _en permission_, with a dreadful cold, was at lunch, Colonel ——, and several other men. Mr. G., whose family have been part owners of the Lunéville porcelain-factories for one hundred and fifty years, is charming, erudite, and afterward, over our coffee by his library fire, we talked politics and literature and music. I had just been reading Madame de Staël’s _De l’Allemagne_, not at all in favor just now, which I had picked up on her centenary. “_Une exaltée_,” said one of the officers. “That is not enough to say of one who always had the courage of her convictions,” I answered, and recalled the conversation between her and Benjamin Constant when under the Consulate he threw himself into the opposition. “_Voilà_,” he said, “_votre salon rempli de personnes qui vous plaisent; si je parle demain, il sera désert; pensez-y_.”[14] And she answered, “_Il faut suivre sa conviction_.” “She certainly followed out her convictions; but what did Madame de Staël know of the Germans?” pursued the colonel. “She saw them in the quite factitious setting of the Weimar Court, and was intoxicated by the play of mind. Those _beaux esprits_ presented the character and the future of their race, through rose-colored clouds of Romanticism, to one of the most charming and gifted women another race had ever produced, _et puis elle rentre et elle écrit de l’Allemagne! Cela serait comique si ce n’était pas si triste._”