To this song, which belongs to the history of my time, I replied from Switzerland by a letter which is printed at the head of my pamphlet on the Briqueville[362] Motion. I said to M. de Béranger: "From the place whence I wrote to you, monsieur, I can see the country-house where Lord Byron lived and the roofs of Madame de Staël's château. Where is the bard of Childe-Harold? Where is the author of Corinne? My too long life is like those Roman roads bordered with funeral monuments[363]." I returned to Geneva; I next took Madame de Chateaubriand to Paris and brought back the manuscript directed against the Briqueville Motion for the banishment of the Bourbons, a motion which was taken into consideration in the sitting of the Deputies of the 17th of September of this year 1831: some attach their lives to success, others to misfortune. PARIS, RUE D'ENFER, _end of November_ 1831. Returning to Paris on the 11th of October, I published my pamphlet at the end of the same month; it is entitled, _De la nouvelle proposition relative au banissement de Charles X. et de sa famille, ou suite de mon dernier écrit: De la Restauration et de la Monarchie élective._ When these posthumous Memoirs appear, will the daily polemics, the events of which men are enamoured at this present hour of my life, the adversaries against whom I am fighting, will even the act of banishment of Charles X. and his Family count for anything? There you have the drawback of all diaries: you find in them ardent discussions of subjects that have become indifferent; the reader sees pass, like shadows, a host of persons whose very names he does not remember: silent supernumeraries, who fill the back of the stage. Yet it is in these dryasdust portions of the chronicles that one gathers the observations and facts of the history of mankind and men. I placed first at the commencement of the pamphlet the decree brought forward successively by Messieurs Baude and Briqueville. After examining the five courses that lay open after the Revolution of July, I said: "The worst of the periods through which we have passed seems to be that in which we are, because anarchy reigns in men's reasons, morals and intellects. The existence of nations is longer than that of individuals: a paralytic man often remains stretched on his couch for many years before disappearing; an infirm nation lies long on its bed before expiring. What the new Royalty needed was buoyancy, youth, intrepidity, to turn its back upon the past, to march with France to meet the future.