I shall evermore remember certain evenings passed in this refuge of friendship: on returning from walking we gathered near a fresh-water basin, which stood in the middle of a grass-plot in the kitchen-garden. Madame Joubert, Madame de Beaumont and I sat down on a bench; Madame Joubert's son rolled on the grass at our feet; that child has already disappeared. M. Joubert walked alone on a gravel path; two watch-dogs and a cat played around us, while pigeons cooed on the edge of the roof. What happiness for a man newly landed from exile, after spending eight years in profound abandonment, excepting a few days quickly lapsed! It was generally on these evenings that my friends made me talk of my travels: I have never described the desert of the New World so well as at that time. At night, when the windows of our rustic drawing-room were opened, Madame de Beaumont noted different constellations, telling me that I should remember one day that she had taught me to know them: since I have lost her, I have several times, not far from her grave in Rome, in the midst of the Campagna, looked in the firmament for the stars whose names she told me: I have seen them shining above the Sabine Hills; the protracted rays of those stars shot down and struck the surface of the Tiber. The spot where I saw them over the woods of Savigny, the spots where I have seen them since, the fitfulness of my destinies, that sign which a woman had left for me in the sky to remind me of her: all this broke my heart. By what miracle does man consent to do what he does upon earth, he who is doomed to die? One day, in our retreat, we saw a man enter stealthily by one window and go out by another: it was M. de Laborie[416]; he was escaping from Bonaparte's claws. Shortly after appeared one of those souls in pain which are of a different species from other souls and which, on their passage, mingle their unknown misfortune with the vulgar sufferings of mankind: it was Lucile, my sister. [Sidenote: I meet my sisters.] After my arrival in France, I had written to my family to inform them of my return. Madame la Comtesse de Marigny, my eldest sister, was the first to come to me, went to the wrong street, and met five Messieurs Lassagne, of whom the last climbed up through a cobbler's trap-door to answer to his name. Madame de Chateaubriand came in her turn: she was charming, and full of the qualities calculated to give me the happiness which I found with her after we came together again. Madame la Comtess de Caud, Lucile, came next. M. Joubert and Madame de Beaumont became smitten with a passionate fondness and a tender pity for her. Then commenced between them a correspondence which ended only with the death of the two women who had bent over towards one another like two flowers of the same species on the point of fading away. Madame Lucile having stopped at Versailles on the 30th of September 1802, I received this note from her: