M. de Lavalette was thick-set, wore a plum-coloured coat, and carried a gold-headed cane: he became my man of business, if I have ever had any business. He had been an officer of the buttery to the King, and what I did not eat up[5] he drank. At the end of November, seeing that the repairs to my cottage were not progressing, I determined to go and superintend them. We arrived at the Vallée in the evening. We did not take the ordinary road, but went in through the gate at the foot of the garden. The soil of the drives, soaked through with rain, prevented the horses from going; the carriage upset. A plaster bust of Homer, placed beside Madame de Chateaubriand, dashed through the window and broke its neck: a bad omen for the _Martyrs_, at which I was then working. The house, full of workmen laughing, singing, and hammering, was warmed by blazing shavings and lighted by candle-ends; it looked like a hermitage illuminated at night by pilgrims, in the woods. Delighted to find two rooms made fairly comfortable, in one of which supper had been laid, we sat down to table. The next morning, awakened by the sound of the hammers and the songs of the husbandmen, I saw the sun rise with less anxiety than the master of the Tuileries. I was in an endless enchantment; without being Madame de Sévigné, I went, provided with a pair of wooden clogs, to plant my trees in the mud, to pass up and down the same walks, to look again and again at every smallest corner, to hide wherever there was a tuft of brushwood, saying to myself that this would be my park in the future: for then the future was not lacking. When striving, to-day, by force of memory to re-open the closed horizon, I no longer find the same, but I meet with others. I lose myself in my vanished thoughts; the illusions into which I fall are perhaps as fair as their predecessors; only they are no longer so young: what I used to see in the splendour of the south, I now perceive by the light of the sunset. If, nevertheless, I could cease to be harassed by dreams! Bayard, summoned to surrender a place, replied: "Wait till I have made a bridge of dead bodies, to pass over with my garrison." I fear that, to go out, I shall need to pass over the bodies of my fancies. My trees, being as yet small, did not gather the sounds of the autumn winds; but, in spring, the breezes which inhaled the breath of the flowers of the neighbouring fields retained it and poured it over my valley.