Those are the true, the only events of my real life! What mattered to me, at the moment when I was losing my sister, the thousands of soldiers falling on the battlefields, the destruction of thrones, the changes in the face of the world? Lucile's death struck at the sources of my soul: it was my childhood in the midst of my family, the first vestiges of my existence, that were disappearing. Our life resembles those frail buildings, shored up in the sky by flying buttresses: they do not crumble at once, but become loose piecemeal; they still support some gallery or other, while already they have become separated from the chancel or vault of the edifice. Madame de Chateaubriand, still bruised by Lucile's imperious whims, saw only a deliverance for the Christian who had gone to rest in the Lord. Let us be gentle if we would be regretted; the loftiness of genius and the higher qualities are mourned only by the angels. But I cannot enter into the consolation of Madame de Chateaubriand. * [Sidenote: My journey to the East.] When, returning to Paris by the Burgundy road, I caught sight of the cupola of the Val-de-Grâce and the dome of Sainte-Geneviève, which overlooks the Jardin des Plantes, my heart was broken: one more companion of my life left on the wayside! We went back to the Hôtel de Coislin, and although M. de Fontanes, M. Joubert, M. de Clausel, M. Molé came to spend the evenings with me, I was distraught by so many memories and thoughts that I was utterly exhausted. Remaining alone behind the objects that had quitted me, like a foreign mariner whose engagement has expired, and who has neither home nor country, I struck the shore with my foot; I longed to swim in a new ocean to refresh myself and cross it. Nursed on Mount Pindus, a crusader to Hierosolyma, I was impatient to go to mingle my loneliness with the ruins of Athens, my tears with those of the Magdalen. I went to see my family[690] in Brittany, returned to Paris, and left for Trieste on the 13th of July 1806; Madame de Chateaubriand accompanied me as far as Venice, where M. Ballanche came to join her. As my life is set forth hour by hour in the _Itinéraire_, I should have no more to say here, if I had not kept some hitherto unknown letters written or received during and after my voyage. Julien, my servant and companion, wrote his own Itinerary side by side with mine, just as passengers on a vessel keep their private logs on a journey of discovery. The little manuscript which he places at my disposal will serve as a check upon my narrative: I shall be Cook, he will be Clarke[691]. In order to bring into clearer light the different manner in which one is impressed according to one's place in the social order and in the intellectual hierarchy, I will mingle my narrative with Julien's[692]. I shall let him begin by speaking first, because he relates some days' sailing without me from Modon to Smyrna. JULIEN'S ITINERARY.