Mercy! Where can I hide? Who will deliver me? Who will save me from this persecution? Return to me, fair days of misery and loneliness! Come back to life, companions of my exile! Come, old comrades of the pallet and the camp-bed, let us go into the country, into the little garden of some despised tavern, and drink a cup of bad tea on a wooden bench, while we talk of our mad hopes and our ungrateful country, discuss our troubles, and seek means to assist each other or to succour one of our kinsmen in yet worse plight than ourselves! [Sidenote: Kensington Gardens.] That is how I feel, that is how I speak to myself in these first days of my embassy in London. I escape from the melancholy which besets me beneath my roof only by saturating myself with a less weighty melancholy in Kensington Gardens. These gardens, at least, have not changed; the trees alone have grown taller; in them, ever solitary, the birds build their nests in peace. It is no longer even the fashion to meet there, as in the days when the loveliest of Frenchwomen, Madame Récamier[448], used to walk there followed by the crowd. From the edge of the deserted lawns of Kensington, I love to watch, across Hyde Park, the crowd of horses, the carriages of the fashionable world, among which figures my empty tilbury; while I, once more a poor little emigrant noble, walk along the path in which the exiled confessor was wont to say his breviary. It was in Kensington Gardens that I projected the _Essai historique_; that, on reading over the diary of my travels beyond sea, I drew from it the loves of _Atala_; it was there too, after wandering far away in the fields beneath a lowering sky, which assumed a golden hue and became, as it were pervaded with polar light, that I jotted down in pencil the first sketch of the passions of _René._ At night I deposited in the _Essai historique_ and the _Natchez_ the harvest of my dreams of the day. The two manuscripts marched abreast, although I often wanted money to buy paper for them, and was obliged, for lack of thread, to fasten the sheets together with splinters torn from the mantel-boards of my garret. These spots where I received my first inspirations impress me with a sense of their power; they reflect upon my present the gentle light of my recollections; I feel in the mood to resume my pen. So many hours are wasted in embassies! I have as much spare time here as in Berlin to continue my Memoirs, the edifice which I am building up out of ruins and dead bones. My secretaries in London ask leave to go to picnics in the morning, to balls at night: by all means! The men in their turn, Peter, Valentine, Lewis, go to the ale-house, and the maids, Rose, Peggy, Mary, for a walk through the streets: I am delighted. They leave me the key of the hall-door: _monsieur l'ambassadeur_ is left in charge of his own house; if any one knocks, he will open the door. Everybody has gone out; I am alone: let us get to work.