I carried with me only my youth and my illusions: I was deserting a world whose dust I had trod and whose stars I had counted for a world of which the soil and the sky were both unknown to me. What was to become of me if I attained the object of my voyage? While I roamed upon the polar shores, the years of discord which have crushed so many generations with so loud a noise would have fallen silently over my head; society would have renewed its aspect in my absence. It is probable that I should never have had the misfortune to write; my name would have remained unknown, or would have won only a peaceful renown of the kind which is less than glory, which is scorned by envy and left to happiness. Who knows whether I would have recrossed the Atlantic, whether I would not have settled down among the solitudes explored and discovered at my peril and risk, like a conqueror in the midst of his conquests! [Sidenote: We set sail.] But no, I was to return to my native land, there to undergo altered miseries, to become something quite different from what I had been! The sea in whose lap I was born was about to become the cradle of my second life; she bore me upon my first voyage as though in the bosom of my foster-mother, in the arms of the confidant of my first tears and my first pleasures. The ebb-tide, in the absence of the wind, carried us out to sea; the lights of the shore grew smaller and smaller, and disappeared. Exhausted with my reflections, with vague regrets, with even vaguer hopes, I went below to my cabin: I lay down to rest, rocked in my hammock to the sound of the billows which caressed the side of the vessel. The wind rose; the unfurled sails, which hung flapping about the masts, filled out, and when, next morning, I went up on deck, the land of France was out of sight. Here toy destinies changed: "Again to sea!" as Byron sings. [218] This book was written in Paris between June and December 1821, and revised in December 1846.--T. [219] The _Moniteur_ of Sunday 29 April 1821 contains the following, under the heading, Paris, 28 April: "M. le Vicomte de Chateaubriand, French Minister Plenipotentiary in Berlin, arrived in Paris on the day before yesterday." The Duc de Bordeaux was christened at Notre-Dame on the 1st of May 1821.--B. [220] Villèle left the Cabinet on the 27th of July 1821; Chateaubriand resigned his ambassadorship on the 31st of July.--B. [221] Marigny has greatly changed since my sister occupied it. It has been sold and now belongs to Messieurs de Pommereul, who nave rebuilt it and much improved it.--_Author's Note._ [222] Antoine Auguste Bruzen de Lamartinière (1662-1746), compiler of the _Dictionnaire géographique, historique et critique._ He was born and spent his youth at Dieppe, and was the nephew of Richard Simon (_vide infra_).--T. [223] Richard Simon (1638-1712), an early Rationalist, author of a number of works on the Old and New Testaments, which were promptly condemned by the Holy See.--T.