In Berlin and in the North, the monuments are fortresses; the sight of them alone oppresses the heart. If you see these places in populous and fertile countries, they give rise to the idea of a legitimate defense; the women and children, sitting and playing at some distance from the sentries, form a rather agreeable contrast; but a fortress on heaths, in a desert, only recalls human anger: against whom are those ramparts raised, if not against poverty and independence? You have to be myself to find a pleasure in prowling at the foot of those bastions, in hearing the wind whistle through those trenches, in seeing those breastworks raised in prevision of enemies who perhaps will never appear. Those military labyrinths, those guns mute in face of one another on salient and gazoned angles, those stone watch-towers, where you see nobody and whence no eye observes you, are of an incredible grimness. If, in the dual solitude of nature and war, you come across a daisy sheltered under the redan of a glacis, that floral amenity relieves you. When, in the castles in Italy, I saw goats suspended to the ruins and the goat-girl sitting under a parasol pine; when, on the mediæval walls with which Jerusalem is surrounded, my eyes plunged into the Valley of Cedron upon some Arab women climbing up steeps among pebble-stones, the sight was a sad one doubtless, but history was there, and the silence of the present allowed the sounds of the past to be heard all the more clearly. I had asked for leave of absence on the occasion of the baptism of the Duc de Bordeaux. Being granted this leave, I prepared to start: Voltaire, in a letter to his niece, says that he sees the Spree flow, that the Spree empties itself into the Elbe, the Elbe into the sea, and that the sea receives the Seine; he thus came down to Paris. Before leaving Berlin, I went to pay a last visit to Charlottenburg; it was not Windsor, nor Aranjuez, nor Caserta, nor Fontainebleau[147]: the villa, supported by a hamlet, is surrounded by an English park, of small extent, from which waste land can be seen outside. The Queen of Prussia here enjoys a peace which Bonaparte's memory will no longer be able to disturb. What an uproar the conqueror made, in the old days, in this refuge of silence, when he arrived there with his flourishing trumpets and his legions blooded at Jena! It was from Berlin, after wiping the kingdom of Frederic the Great from the map, that he announced the continental blockade and prepared the Moscow campaign in his mind; his words had already carried death to the heart of an accomplished sovereign: she now sleeps at Charlottenburg, in a monumental vault; a statue, a fine portrait in marble, represents her. I wrote some verses on the tomb for which the Duchess of Cumberland asked me[148].