Before continuing these literary investigations I must interrupt them for a moment to take leave of my uncle de Bedée; alas, that means taking leave of the first joy of my life: _freno non remorante dies_[250]! See the old sepulchres in the old crypts: themselves overcome by age, decrepit and without memory, having lost their epitaphs, they have forgotten the very names of those whose ashes they contain. I had written to my uncle on the subject of my mother's death: he replied with a long letter containing some touching words of regret; but three-quarters of his double folio sheet were devoted to my genealogy. He begged me above all, when I should return to France, to look up the title-deeds of the "Bedée quartering," entrusted to my brother. And so, to this venerable Emigrant, exile, ruin, the destruction of his kin, the sacrifice of Louis XVI. alike failed to make the fact of the Revolution clear to him; nothing had happened, nothing come to pass; he had gone no farther than the States of Brittany and the Assembly of the Nobles. This fixity of ideas in man is very striking in the midst and as it were in presence of the alteration of his body, the flight of his years, the loss of his relations and friends. [Sidenote: Death of my uncle de Bedée.] On his return from the Emigration, my uncle de Bedée went to live at Dinan, where he died, six leagues from Monchoix, without having seen it again. My cousin Caroline[251], the oldest of my three cousins, still lives. She has remained an old maid in spite of the formal requests for her hand made in her former youth. She writes me letters, badly spelt, in which she addresses me in the second person singular, calls me "chevalier," and talks to me of our good time: _in illo tempore._ She was endowed with a pair of fine dark eyes and a comely figure; she danced like the Camargo[252], and she seems to recollect that I bore a fierce passion for her in secret. I reply in the same tone, laying aside, in imitation of her, my years, my honours and my reputation: "Yes, dear Caroline, your chevalier," etc. It must be some six or seven lustres since we met: Heaven be praised for it, for God alone knows, if we came to embracing, what kind of figure we should cut in each other's eyes!