Of the modern French authors of my own period, I may be said to be the only one whose life resembles his works: a traveller, soldier, poet, publicist, it is amid forests that I have sung the forest, aboard ship that I have depicted the sea, in camp that I have spoken of arms, in exile that I have learnt to know exile, in Courts, in affairs of State, in Parliament that I have studied princes, politics, law and history. The orators of Greece and Rome played their part in the republic and shared its fate. In Italy and Spain, at the end of the Middle Ages and at the Renascence, the leading intellects in letters and the arts took part in the social movement. How stormy and how fine were the lives of Dante, of Tasso, of Camoëns, of Ercilla, of Cervantes! In France our ancient poets and historians sang and wrote in the midst of pilgrimages and battles: Thibaut Count of Champagne, Villehardouin, Joinville borrow the felicity of their style from their adventurous careers; Froissart travels the highways in search of history, and learns it from the mouths of the knights and abbots whom he meets, by whose side he rides along the roads. But, commencing from the reign of François I., our writers have been men leading detached lives, and their talents have perchance expressed the spirit but not the deeds of their age. If I were destined to live, I should represent in my person, as represented in my Memoirs, the principles, the ideas, the events, the catastrophes, the idylls of my time, the more in that I have seen a world end and a world commence, and that the conflicting characters of that ending and that commencement lie intermingled in my opinions. I have found myself caught between two ages as in the conflux of two rivers, and I have plunged into their waters, turning regretfully from the old bank upon which I was born, yet swimming hopefully towards the unknown shore at which the new generations are to land.