That world, have I really penetrated into it? Christopher Columbus saw an apparition which showed him the land of his dreams before he had discovered it; Vasco de Gama met the giant of the storms on his road: which of those two great men presaged my future? What I should have loved above all would have been a life glorious through a brilliant result, and obscure through its destiny. Do you know which were the first European ashes to rest in America? They were those of Bjorn the Scandinavian: he died on landing at Winland, and was buried by his companions on a promontory. Who knows that[536]? Who knows of him whose sail preceded the vessel of the Genoese pilot to the New World? Bjorn sleeps on the point of an unknown cape, and since a thousand years his name has been handed down to us only by the sagas of the poets, in a language no longer spoken. * [Sidenote: Italy.] I had begun my wanderings in an opposite direction to that of other travellers. The old forests of America had displayed themselves to me before the old cities of Europe. I happened upon the latter when they were at the same time renewing their youth and dying in a fresh revolution. Milan was occupied by our troops; they were completing the demolition of the castle, that witness to the wars of the Middle Ages. The French army was settling in the plains of Lombardy as a military colony. Guarded here and there by their comrades on sentry, these strangers from Gaul, with forage-caps on their heads and sabres by way of reaping-hooks over their round jackets, presented the appearance of gay and eager harvesters. They moved stones, rolled guns, drove waggons, ran up sheds and huts of brushwood. Horses pranced, curveted, reared among the crowd, like dogs fawning on their masters. Italian women sold fruit on their flat baskets at the market of that armed fair; our soldiers made them presents of their pipes and steels, saying to them as the ancient barbarians, their ancestors, said to their beloved: "I, Fotrad, son of Eupert, of the race of the Franks, give to thee, Helgine, my dear wife, in honour of thy beauty (_in honore pulchritudinis tuæ_), my dwelling in the quarter of the Pines[537]."