When I saw the Alps again, four or five years ago, I asked myself what I had come to seek there: what, then, shall I say to-day? What shall I say to-morrow and again tomorrow? Woe to me who cannot grow old and who am always growing old! LUCERNE, 15 _August_ 1832. The Capuchins went this morning, according to the custom on the Feast of the Assumption, to bless the mountains. Those monks profess the religion under whose protection Swiss independence was born: that independence still endures. What will become of our modern liberty, all accursed by the blessing of the philosophers and the hangmen? It is not forty years old and it has been sold and sold again, bishoped and dealt in at every street-corner. There is more liberty in the frock of a Capuchin blessing the Alps than in all the frippery of the legislators of the Republic, the Empire, the Restoration and the Usurpation of July. [Sidenote: Lucerne.] A French traveller in Switzerland is touched and saddened; our history, for the misfortune of those regions, is too closely connected with their history; the blood of Helvetia has been shed for us and by us; we wasted the hut of William Tell with fire and sword; we engaged in our civil wars the peasant warrior who guarded the throne of our kings. The genius of Thorwaldsen has fixed the memory of the 10th of August at the gate of Lucerne. The Helvetian Lion lies dying, pierced by an arrow, and covering with its drooping head and one of its paws the escutcheon of France, of which we see only one of the fleurs-de-lys. The chapel consecrated to the victims, the clump of green trees which accompanies the bas-relief sculptured in the rock, the soldier escaped from the massacre of the 10th of August who shows the monument to strangers, the note from Louis XVI. ordering the Swiss to lay down their arms, the frontal presented by Madame la Dauphine to the expiatory chapel, upon which that perfect model of sorrow has embroidered the image of the immolated Lamb of God!... By what counsel does Providence, after the last fall of the throne of the Bourbons, send me to seek a refuge near this monument? At least, I can look upon it without blushing, I can lay my feeble but not perjured hand upon the shield of France, even as the lion covers it with its mighty claws, now distended in death. Well, a member of the Diet has proposed to destroy this monument! What does Switzerland demand? Liberty? She has enjoyed it for four centuries. Equality? She has it. The republic? It is her form of government. The lightening of taxes? She pays hardly any. What does she want then? She wants to change, it is the law of beings. When a people, transformed by time, is no longer able to remain what it has been, the first symptom of its malady is a hatred of the past and of the virtues of its fathers.