There is matter for dreams everywhere; pleasures and pains belong to all places: those women of Mösskirch who looked at the sky or at my posting-chariot, who looked at me or who looked at nothing, had not they joys and sorrows, interests of the heart, of fortune, of family, even as we have in Paris? I should have made great progress in the history of my neighbours, if dinner had not been poetically announced to the crash of a thunder-clap: that was much ado about little. 19 _May_ 1833. At ten o'clock at night, I got into the carriage again; I fell asleep to the patter of the rain on the hood of the calash. The sound of my postillion's little horn aroused me. I heard the murmur of a river which I could not see. We had stopped at the gate of a town; the gate opened; my passport and luggage were examined: we were entering the vast empire of His Wurtemberg Majesty. I greeted in memory the Grand-duchess Helen, the graceful and delicate flower now confined in the hot-houses of the Volga. On only one single day did I conceive the value of high rank and fortune: it was when I gave the fête to the young Russian Princess in the gardens of the Villa Medici. I felt how the magic of the sky, the charm of the spot, the spell of beauty and power can inebriate one; I imagined myself both Torquato Tasso, and Alphonsus of Este[520]: I was worth more than the Prince, less than the poet; Helen was more beautiful than Leonora[521]. The representative of the heir of Francis I. and Louis XIV., I had the dream of a king of France. They did not search me: I had nothing against the rights of sovereigns, I who recognised those of a young Monarch which the sovereigns themselves failed to recognise. The vulgarity, the modernity of the custom-house and the passport formed a contrast with the storm, the Gothic gate, the sound of the horn and the noise of the torrent. Instead of the lady of the castle whom I was prepared to deliver from oppression, I found, on leaving the town, an old, simple fellow; he asked me for _seechs Kreutzer_, raising his left hand, which held a lantern, to the level of his grey head, putting out his right hand to Schwartz on the box and opening his mouth like the gills of a hooked pike: Baptiste, wet and sick as he was, could not hold himself for laughing. And what was this torrent over which I had just passed. I asked the postillion, who cried: "Donau!"