On returning from the Emigration, there was no exile so poor but laid out the winding walks of an English garden in the ten feet of land or court-yard which he had recovered: did I myself, in days past, not plant the Vallée-aux-Loups? Was it not there that I began these Memoirs? Did I not continue them in Montboissier Park, whose appearance, disfigured by neglect, its owners were then trying to revive? Did I not lengthen them in the park at Maintenon[452], quite recently restored, a new prey for the returning democracy? The castles burnt in 1789 ought to have warned what remained of the castles to remain hidden in their ruins: but the steeples of engulfed villages which pierce through the lava of Vesuvius do not prevent new steeples and new hamlets from being planted on the surface of that same lava. [Sidenote: The Marquise de Custine.] Among the bees adjusting their hive was the Marquise de Custine[453], the heiress of the long tresses of Margaret of Provence[454], wife of St. Louis, whose blood flowed in her veins. I was present when she took possession of Fervacques[455], and I had the honour of sleeping in the bed of the Bearnese, as I had of sleeping in Queen Christina's[456] bed at Combourg. The journey was no trifling matter: we had to take on board the carriage Astolphe de Custine[457], then a child, M. Berstoecher, his tutor, an old Alsatian nurse, who spoke only German, Jenny, the lady's maid, and Trim, a famous dog which ate up the provisions for the journey. Would one not have thought that this colony was going to Fervacques for good? And yet the furnishing of the house was not quite finished when the signal for removal was given. I saw her who faced the scaffold with such great courage[458], I saw her, whiter than one of the Fates, dressed in black, her figure made thin by death, her head adorned only with her silken tresses; I saw her smile to me with her pale lips and her beautiful teeth when she left Sécherons, near Geneva, to breathe her last at Bex, at the entrance to the Valais; I heard her coffin pass at night along the deserted streets of Lausanne to take up its eternal place at Fervacques: she was hastening to hide herself in a property which she had possessed for but a moment, like her life. I had read on the corner of a chimney-piece in the _château_ those bad rhymes attributed to the lover of Gabrielle: La dame de Fervacques Mérite de vives attacques[459]. The soldier-king had said as much to many others: passing declarations of men, soon effaced and descending from beauty to beauty down to Madame de Custine. Fervacques has been sold.