I am settled at the Pâquis[352] with Madame de Chateaubriand; I have made the acquaintance of M. Rigaud, Chief Syndic of Geneva: above his house, by the edge of the lake, going up the Lausanne Road, you find the villa of two clerks of M. de Lapanouze[353], who have spent 1,500,000 francs in building it and laying out their gardens. When I pass on foot before their dwelling-house, I wonder at Providence, which has placed witnesses of the Restoration at Geneva in them and in me. What a fool I am! What a fool! The Sieur de Lapanouze went through royalism and misery with me: see to what his clerks have risen for having favoured the Conversion of the Funds, which I had the simplicity to oppose and by virtue of which I was turned out Here are the gentlemen: they drive up in an elegant tilbury, hat on ear, and I am obliged to step into a ditch lest the wheel should carry off a skirt of my old frock-coat. And yet I have been a peer of France, a minister, an ambassador, and in a cardboard box I have all the principal Orders of Christendom, including the Holy Ghost and the Golden Fleece. If the clerks of the Sieur César de Lapanouze, now millionaires, cared to buy my box of ribbons for their wives, they would do me a lively pleasure. Nevertheless all is not roses for the Messieurs B---: they are not yet Genevese nobles, that is to say, they have not yet reached the second generation; their mother still lives in the lower part of the town and has not risen to the Saint-Pierre quarter, the Faubourg Saint-Germain of Geneva; but, with God's help, nobility will follow on money. It was in 1805 that I saw Geneva for the first time. If two thousand years had elapsed between the dates of my two journeys, would they be further separated from each other than they are? Geneva belonged to France; Bonaparte was shining in all his glory, Madame de Staël in all hers; there was no more question of the Bourbons than if they had never existed. And Bonaparte, and Madame de Staël, and the Bourbons: what has become of them? And I, I am still there! M. de Constant, a cousin of Benjamin Constant, and Mademoiselle de Constant, an old maid full of wit, virtue and talent, live in their cottage of "Souterre" on the bank of the Rhone; they are overlooked by another country-house, which was formerly M. de Constant's: he sold it to the Princesse Belgiojoso[354], a Milanese exile, whom I saw pass like a flower through the fête which I gave in Rome for the Grand-duchess Helen. During my boating excursions, an old oarsman tells me of the deeds of Lord Byron, whose house we see standing on the Savoyard side of the lake. The noble peer would wait for a tempest to rise before setting sail; from the deck of his felucca, he leapt into the waves and swam in the midst of the gale to land at the feudal prisons of Bonivard: he was always the actor and the poet. I am not so eccentric: I also love the storms; but my loves with them are secret, and I do not confide them to the boatmen.