In this same year, 1838, I climbed again to that summit; I saw again that sea which I now know so well, and at the end of which rose the Cross and the Tomb victorious. The mistral was blowing; I went into the fort built by Francis I., where no longer a veteran of the army of Egypt kept guard, but where stood a conscript destined for Algiers and lost under the gloomy vaults. Silence reigned in the restored chapel, while the wind moaned without. The hymn of the Breton sailors to Our Lady of Succour returned to my mind; you know when and how I have already quoted that plaint of my early ocean days: Je mets ma confiance, Vierge, en votre secours. How many events it had needed to bring me back to the feet of the "Star of the Sea," to whom I had been vowed in my childhood! When I gazed at those votive offerings, those paintings of ship-wrecks hung all around me, it was as though I were reading the story of my life. Virgil places the Trojan hero beneath the Porches of Carthage, moved at the sight of a picture representing the burning of Troy, and the genius of the singer of Hamlet has made use of the soul of the singer of Dido. I no longer recognised Marseilles at the foot of that rock once covered with a forest sung by Lucan: I could no longer lose my way in its long, wide, straight streets. The harbour was crowded with ships; thirty-six years ago I should with difficulty have found a "boat," steered by a descendant of Pytheas[486], to carry me to Cyprus like Joinville[487]: time rejuvenates cities, reversing its action upon men. I preferred my old Marseilles, with its memories of the Bérengers[488], the Duke of Anjou[489], King René, Guise and d'Épernon[490], with the monuments of Louis XIV. and the virtues of Belsunce[491]: the wrinkles on its brow pleased me. Perhaps, in regretting the years which it has lost, I but bewail those which I have found. Marseilles received me graciously, it is true; but the rival of Athens has grown too young for me. If the _Memoirs_ of Alfieri[492] had been published in 1802 I should not have left Marseilles without visiting the rock from which the poet used to bathe. That rugged man once succeeded in attaining the charm of reverie and of expression: "After the performance," he writes, "one of my amusements, at Marseilles, was to bathe almost every evening in the sea; I had found a very agreeable spot, on a neck of land situated to the right of the harbour, where, seated on the sand, with my back leaning against a rock, which prevented me from being seen from the land side, I could behold the sky and sea without interruption. Between those two immensities, embellished by the rays of the setting sun, I passed delicious hours dreaming of future delights; and there I might unquestionably have become a poet, could I have given any language whatever to my thoughts and feelings[493]." [Sidenote: Jean Reboul.]