One day, on returning alone to the Vallée, I was told by Benjamin, the gardener, that a fat strange gentleman had come and asked for me; that, finding me out, he had said he would wait for me; that he had had an omelette made for him; and that, afterwards, he had flung himself on my bed. I went upstairs, entered my room, and saw something enormous asleep; shaking that mass, I cried: "Hi! Hi! Who are you?" The mass gave a start and sat up. Its head was covered with a woollen cap; it wore a smock and trousers of spotted wool, all in one piece; its face was smeared with snuff, and its tongue hung out. It was my cousin Moreau! I had not seen him since the camp at Thionville. He was back from Russia and wanted to enter the excise. My old _cicerone_ in Paris went to die at Nantes. Thus disappeared one of the early characters of these Memoirs. I hope that, stretched on a couch of daffodils, he still talks of my verses to Madame de Chastenay, if that agreeable shade has descended to the Elysian Fields. * [Sidenote: The _Martyrs._] The _Martyrs_ appeared in the spring of 1809. It was a conscientious piece of work. I had consulted critics of taste and knowledge: Messieurs de Fontanes, Bertin, Boissonade[10], Malte-Brun[11]; and I had accepted their judgment. Hundreds and hundreds of times I had written, unwritten and rewritten the same page. Of all my writings, this is the most noted for the correctness of the language. I had made no mistake in the scheme of the book: at present, when my ideas have become general, no one denies that the struggles of two religions, one ending, the other commencing, afford one of the richest, most fruitful and most dramatic subjects for the Muses. I thought, therefore, that I might venture to cherish some all too foolish hopes; but I was forgetting the success of my first book: in this country you must never reckon on two close successes; one destroys the other. If you have some sort of talent for prose, beware of showing any for poetry; if you are distinguished in literature, lay no claim to politics: such is the French spirit and its poverty. The self-loves alarmed, the jealousies surprised by an author's good fortune at the outset combine and lie in wait for the poet's second publication, to take a signal vengeance: Tous, la main dans l'encre, jurent de se venger[12]. I must pay for the silly admiration which I had obtained by trickery at the time of the appearance of the _Génie du Christianisme_; I must be made to restore what I had stolen! Alas, they need not have taken such pains to rob me of that which I myself did not think that I deserved! If I had delivered Christian Rome, I asked only for an obsidional crown[13], a plait of grass culled in the Eternal City.