On reaching the beach, I saw a calm sea wrinkled by not the slightest breath; the surge, thin as gauze, unrolled itself over the sand noiselessly and foamlessly. An astonishing sky, all resplendent with constellations, crowned my head. The crescent of the moon soon sank and hid itself behind a mountain. In the gulf lay only one bark at anchor, and two boats: to the left appeared the Antibes light-house, to the right the Lérins Isles; before me, the main sea opened out to the South in the direction of Rome, to which Bonaparte had first sent me. The Lérins Isles, now called the Sainte-Marguerite Isles, of old received a few Christians fleeing before the Barbarians. St. Honoratus[423], coming from Hungary, landed on one of those rocks: he climbed a palm-tree, made the sign of the Cross, and all the serpents died, that is to say, paganism disappeared and the new civilization was born in the West. Fourteen hundred years later, Bonaparte came to end that civilization in the parts in which the saint had commenced it. The last solitary of those hermitages was the Man in the Iron Mask, if the Iron Mask is a reality. From the silence of the Golfe Juan, from the peace of the islands of the anchorites of old, issued the noise of Waterloo, which crossed the Atlantic to die out at St Helena. [Sidenote: In praise of indifference.] One can imagine what I felt, between the memories of two societies, between a world extinct and a world ready to become extinct, at night, on that deserted sea-board. I left the beach in a sort of religious consternation, leaving the billows to pass and pass again, without obliterating them, over the traces of Napoleon's last step but one. At the end of each great epoch of time, one hears some voice, doleful with regrets of the past, sound the curfew: thus moaned they who saw vanish Charlemagne, St. Louis, Francis I., Henry IV. and Louis XIV. What could I not say, in my turn, eye-witness that I am of two or three lapsed worlds? When one has met, as I have, Washington and Bonaparte, what remains there to look at behind the plough of the American Cincinnatus and the tomb at St Helena? Why have I survived the age and the men to whom I belonged by the date of my birth? Why did I not fall with my contemporaries, the last of an exhausted race? Why have I remained alone to seek their bones in the dust and darkness of a full catacomb? I am disheartened at lasting. Ah, if only I possessed the indifference of one of those old long-shore Arabs whom I met in Africa! Seated cross-legged on a little rope mat, their head wrapped in their burnoose, they while away their last hours in following with their eyes, in the azure of the sky, the beautiful flamingo flying along the ruins of Carthage; lulled by the murmuring of the waves, they half forget their existence and, in a low voice, sing a song of the sea: they are going to die. [356] The Empress Joséphine died at the Malmaison on the 29th of May 1814.--B. [357] 29 June 1815.--B.