My home faces west. In the evening, the tree-tops lighted from behind imprint their black, serrate outlines on the horizon. My youth returns at that hour; it revives those lapsed days which time has reduced to the unsubstantiality of phantoms. When the constellations pierce through their blue arch, I remember that splendid firmament which I admired from the bosom of the American forests or the lap of the Ocean. The night is more favourable than the day to the traveller's reminiscences: it hides from his eyes the landscapes that would remind him of the regions which he inhabits; it shows him only the luminaries, which look the same under the different latitudes of the same hemisphere. Then he recognises those stars which he contemplated in such a country, at such a time; the thoughts which he entertained, the feelings which he underwent in the different portions of the world shoot up and fix themselves at the same point in the sky. [Sidenote: Life at the Infirmary.] We hear speak of the world, in the Infirmary, only at the two public collections and a little on Sundays: on those days, our hospice changes into a kind of parish-church. The Sister Superior pretends that beautiful ladies come to Mass in the hope of seeing me; skilful manager that she is, she lays their curiosity under contribution: by promising to show me to them, she attracts them to the laboratory; once she has entrapped them, she forces sweet-stuff on them, willy-nilly, in exchange for money. She makes me serve at the sale of the chocolate manufactured for the profit of her patients, even as La Martinière took me into partnership for the trade in the gooseberry-syrup which he used to quaff to the success of his love-affairs[502]. The sainted woman also steals stumps of quills from Madame de Chateaubriand's ink-stand; she trades in them among the thorough-bred Royalists, declaring that with those precious stumps were written the "superb _Mémoire sur la captivité de madame la duchesse de Berry._" A few good pictures of the Spanish and Italian Schools, a Virgin by Guérin, the _St. Theresa_, the last master-piece of the painter of _Corinne_[503], make us attached to the arts. As for history, we shall soon have at the hospice a sister of the Marquis de Favras and a daughter of Madame Roland: the Monarchy and the Republic have set me to expiate their ingratitude and to feed their invalids.