Let us leave these memories; memories grow old and dim like hopes. My life is about to change, to speed under other skies, in other valleys. First love of my youth, you flee with all your charms! I have just seen Charlotte again, it is true; but after how many years did I see her again? Sweet glimpse of the past, pale rose of the twilight which borders the night, long after the sun has set! * [Sidenote: The _Essai Historique._] Life has often been represented (by me first of all) as a mountain which we climb on one side and descend on the other: it would be as true to compare it to an Alp, to the bare, ice-crowned summit which has no reverse. Following up this figure, the traveller always climbs upwards and never down; he then sees more clearly the space which he has covered, the paths which he has not taken, although by doing so he could have risen by a gentler slope: he looks down with sorrow and regret upon the point where he commenced to stray. Thus I must mark at the publication of the _Essai historique_ the first step which led me out of the peaceful road. I finished the first part of the great work which I had planned; I wrote the last word between the idea of death (I had fallen ill again) and a vanished dream: _In somnis venit imago conjugis._[196] The _Essai_, printed by Baylis, was published by Deboffe in 1797[197]. This date marks one of the turning-points in my life. There are moments at which our destiny, whether because it yields to society, or obeys the laws of nature, or begins to make us what we shall have to remain, suddenly turns aside from its first line, like a river which changes its course with a sudden bend. The _Essai_ offers the compendium of my existence as a poet, a moralist, a publicist, and a politician. To say that I hoped, in so far at least as I am capable of hoping, to make a great success with the work, goes without saying: we authors, petty prodigies of a prodigious era, make a claim to keep up intelligence with future races; but we do not, I firmly believe, know where posterity lives, and we put the wrong address. When we grow numb in our graves, death will freeze our words, written or sung, so hard that they will not melt like the "frozen words" of Rabelais.