To see the lake better, I took a boat. One of my two boatmen spoke a Franco-Italian jargon interlarded with English. He told me the names of the mountains and of the villages on the mountains: the San Salvator, from the summit of which one discovers the dome of Milan Cathedral; Castagnola, with its olive-trees, of which the visitors put little twigs in their button-holes; Gandria, the boundary of the Canton of Ticino on the lake; the San Giorgio, crowned with its hermitage: each of those places had its history. Austria, who takes all and gives nothing, retains at the foot of Monte Caprino a village enclosed in the Ticino territory. Facing this again, on the other side, at the foot of the San Salvator, she possesses a sort of promontory on which stands a chapel; but she has graciously lent this promontory to the Luganese to execute their criminals upon and erect their gallows. Some day she will use this "high jurisdiction," exercised by her permission upon her territory, as a proof of her suzerainty over Lugano. Nowadays the condemned are no longer subjected to the penalty of the rope: their heads are chopped off; Paris has supplied the instrument, Vienna the scene of execution: presents worthy of two great monarchies. These images were pursuing me when, on the azure water, to the breath of the breeze scented by the amber of the pines, there came to pass the boats of a brotherhood which flung bouquets of flowers into the lake to the sound of horns and hautboys. Swallows sported around my sail. Among those travellers, shall I not recognise those which I met one evening as I wandered along the ancient Tibur Road and by the house of Horace? The Lydia of the poet was not then with those swallows of the plain of Tibur; but I knew that, at that very moment, another young woman was furtively taking a rose laid in the abandoned garden of a villa of Raphael's century, seeking naught but a flower on the ruins of Rome. The mountains which surround the Lake of Lugano, scarce joining their bases except on the level of the lake, resemble islands separated by narrow channels; they reminded me of the grace, the form and the verdure of the archipelago of the Azores. Was I then going to consummate the exile of my last days under those smiling porticoes where the Princesse de Belgiojoso allowed a few days to slip by of the exile of her youth? Was I then to finish my Memoirs at the entrance to that classic and historic land where Virgil and Tasso sang, where so many revolutions have been accomplished? Was I to recall my Breton destiny at the sight of those Ausonian mountains? If their curtain were to be raised, it would lay bare to me the plains of Lombardy; beyond that, Rome; beyond that, Naples, Sicily, Greece, Syria, Egypt, Carthage: distant shores which I have measured, I who do not possess the extent of ground which I press under the soles of my feet! But yet, to die here, to end here? Is it not what I want, what I am looking for? I cannot tell.