Thirty-six years must be reckoned between the things which commence my Memoirs and those upon which I am now engaged. How shall I resume with any spirit the narration of a subject formerly replete for me with passion and fire, when it is no longer with living beings that I am about to converse, when it becomes a question of arousing lifeless effigies from the depths of Eternity, of descending into a funeral vault there to play at life? Am I not myself almost dead? Have my opinions not changed? Do I see objects from the same point of view? Have not the general and prodigious events which have accompanied or followed the personal events that so greatly perturbed me diminished their importance in the eyes of the world, as well as in my own eyes? Whosoever prolongs his career feels his hours grow cold; he no longer finds on the morrow the interest which he felt on the eve. When I seek in my thoughts, there are names and even persons that escape my memory, and yet they may have caused my heart to throb: vanity of man forgetting and forgotten! It is not enough to say to one's dreams, to love, "Revive!" for them to come to life again: the realm of shadows can be opened only with the golden bough, and it needs a young hand to pluck it. _Aucuns venants des Lares patries_[375]. [Sidenote: Aspect of France in 1800.] Imprisoned for eight years in Great Britain, I had seen only the English world, so different, especially at that time, from the European world. As the Dover packet approached Calais, in the spring of 1800, my gaze preceded me on shore. I was struck by the needy aspect of the country: scarce a few masts were to be seen in the harbour; inhabitants in carmagnole jackets and cotton caps came along the jetty to meet us: the conquerors of the Continent made themselves known to me by a clatter of wooden shoes. When we came alongside, the gendarmes and custom-house officers leapt on deck to inspect our luggage and our passports: in France a man is always suspected, and the first thing we perceive in our business, as well as in our amusements, is a cocked hat or a bayonet. Mrs. Lindsay was waiting for us at the inn; the next day we set out with her for Paris: Madame d'Aguesseau, a young kinswoman of hers, and I. On the road one saw hardly any men; blackened and sun-burnt women, bare-footed, their heads bare or covered with a kerchief, were tilling the fields: one would have taken them for slaves. I ought rather to have been struck by the independence and virility of that land where the women wielded the mattock while the men wielded the musket. The villages looked as though a conflagration had passed over them; they were wretched and half demolished: mud or dust on every hand, dunghills and rubbish-heaps.