At Ghent, I took walks by myself, as I do wherever I go. The barges gliding along narrow canals, obliged to cross ten or twelve leagues of pasture-land to reach the sea, appeared to be sailing over the grass; they reminded me of the canoes of the savages in the wild-oat marshes of Missouri. Standing at the edge of the water, while they were dipping lengths of brown holland, I let my eyes wander over the steeples of the town; its history appeared to me on the clouds in the sky: the citizens of Ghent revolting against Henri de Châtillon, the French governor; the wife[284] of Edward III.[285] bringing forth John of Gaunt[286], the stock of the House of Lancaster; the popular reign of van Artevelde[287]: "Good people, who moves you? Why are you so incensed against me? In what can I have angered you?" "You must die!" cried the people: it is what Time cries to all of us. Later, I saw the Dukes of Burgundy; the Spaniards came. Then the pacification, the sieges and the captures of Ghent. When I had done musing among the centuries, the sound of a little bugle or a Scotch bagpipe would rouse me. I saw living soldiers hastening to join the buried battalions of Batavia: ever destructions, powers overthrown; and, at last, a few faded shadows and some names that had passed. Sea-board Flanders was one of the first cantonments of the companions of Clodion[288] and Clovis. Ghent, Bruges and the surrounding country furnished nearly a tenth of the grenadiers of the Old Guard: that terrible army was in part drawn from the cradle of our fathers, and came in its turn to be exterminated beside that cradle. Did the Lys[289] give its flower to the arms of our Kings? Spanish manners leave the impress of their character: the buildings of Ghent retraced for me those of Granada, less the sky of the Vega. A large town almost bereft of inhabitants, deserted streets, canals as deserted as the streets.... twenty-six islands formed by those canals, which were not the canals of Venice, a huge piece of ordnance of the middle ages: that is what replaced at Ghent the city of the Zegris[290], the Duero and the Xenil[291] the Generalife and the Alhambra; old dreams of mine, shall I ever see you more? * [Sidenote: The Duchesse de Lévis.] Madame la Duchesse d'Angoulême, who had taken ship on the Gironde, came to us by way of England with General Donnadieu[292] and M. Desèze[293], of whom the latter had crossed the ocean wearing his blue ribbon across his waistcoat. The Duc and Duchesse de Lévis[294] followed in the Princess' suite: they had flung themselves into the diligence and escaped from Paris by the Bordeaux road. Their fellow-travellers talked politics: "That scoundrel of a Chateaubriand," said one of them, "is no such fool! He had his carriage waiting packed in his court-yard for three days: the bird has flown. They would have made short work of him, if Napoleon had caught him!"