We several times climbed and descended, talking the while, this narrow strip of grass which separates the boisterous stream from the silent hillock: how many persons are there whom one can weary with what one has been and carry back with one on the track of one's days? We spoke of those days, always painful and always regretted, in which the passions form the happiness and the martyrdom of youth. Now I am writing this page at midnight, while all is at rest around me, and through my window I see a few stars glimmering over the Alps. Madame Récamier is going to leave us: she will return in the spring, and I shall spend the winter in evoking my vanished hours, in summoning them one by one before the tribunal of my reason. I do not know if I shall be very impartial nor if the judge will not be too indulgent towards. the culprit I shall spend next summer in the land of Jean Jacques. God grant that I may not catch the dreamer's malady. And then, when autumn shall have returned, we shall go to Italy: "_Italian!_" that is my eternal refrain. GENEVA, _October_ 1832. Prince Louis Napoleon having given me his pamphlet entitled, _Rêveries politiques_, I wrote him this letter: "PRINCE, "I have read attentively the little pamphlet which you were so good as to entrust to me. I have jotted down, as you wished, a few reflections, springing naturally from yours, which I had already submitted to your judgment. You know, Prince, that my young King is in Scotland, that, so long as he lives, there can be no other King of France for me than he; but, if God, in his impenetrable counsels, had rejected the House of St. Louis, if the habits of our country did not render the republican state possible, there is no name which goes better with the glory of France than yours. "I am, etc., etc. "CHATEAUBRIAND." PARIS, RUE D'ENFER, _January_ 1833. I had dreamt much of that approaching future which I had made for myself and which I thought so near. At night-fall, I used to go wandering in the windings of the Arve, in the direction of Salève. One evening, I saw M. Berryer enter; he was returning from Lausanne and told me of the arrest of Madame la Duchesse de Berry[477]; he did not know any details. My plans for repose were once more upset. When the mother of Henry V. believed in her success, she discharged me; her misfortune destroyed her last note and recalled me to her defense. I started on the spot from Geneva, after writing to the ministers. On arriving in my Rue d'Enfer, I addressed the following circular letter to the editors of the newspapers: "SIR, "I arrived in Paris on the 17th of this month and wrote, on the 18th, to M. the Minister of Justice[478] to ask if the letter which I had had the honour to send him from Geneva, on the 12th, for Madame la Duchesse de Berry had reached him and if he had had the goodness to forward it to Madame.