From the _château_, we entered the park; the early autumn began to redden and to loosen a few leaves; the wind fell by degrees and let one hear a stream that turns a mill. After following the alleys along which she had been accustomed to walk with Madame de Staël, Madame Récamier wanted to greet her ashes. At some distance from the park stands a coppice mingled with taller trees and surrounded by a damp and dilapidated wall. This coppice resembles those clusters of trees in the midst of plains which sportsmen call "covers:" it is there that death has driven its prey and shut up its victims. A burial-place had been built beforehand in that wood to receive M. Necker, Madame Necker and Madame de Staël: when the last of these arrived at the trysting-place, they walled-up the door of the crypt. The child of Auguste de Staël remained outside, and Auguste himself, who died before his child, was laid under a stone, at his relations' feet. On the stone are carved these words taken from Scripture: WHY SEEK YOU THE LIVING WITH THE DEAD[475]? I did not go into the wood; Madame Récamier alone obtained permission to enter it. Remaining seated on a bench before the surrounding wall, I turned my back on France, and fixed my eyes, now on the summit of Mont Blanc, now on the Lake of Geneva: the golden clouds covered the horizon behind the dark line of the Jura; it was as though a halo of glory were rising above a long coffin. On the other side of the lake, I saw Lord Byron's[476] house, the ridge of which was touched by a ray of the setting sun. Rousseau was no more there to admire that spectacle, and Voltaire, who had also disappeared, had never cared about it. It was at the foot of the tomb of Madame de Staël that so many illustrious absentees on the same shore presented themselves to my recollection: they seemed to come to seek the shade their equal to fly away into the sky with her and escort her during the night At that moment, Madame Récamier, pale and in tears, came out from the funeral grove herself like a shadow. If ever I have felt at one time the vanity and the verity of glory and life, it was at the entrance of that silent, dark, unknown wood, where she sleeps who had so much lustre and fame, and when seeing what it is to be truly loved. [Sidenote: With Madame Récamier.] That same evening, the day after my devotions to the dead of Coppet, tired of the edge of the lake, I went, still with Madame Récamier, in search of less frequented walks. We discovered, going down the Rhone, a narrow gorge through which the stream flows bubbling under several mills, between rocky cliffs intersected by meadows. One of these meadows stretches at the foot of a hill on which a house is planted amid a cluster of elms.