The postillion who drove me belonged to Blenheim; on coming up to his village, he blew the horn: perhaps he was announcing his passage to the peasant-girl whom he loved; she leapt for joy in the midst of the same fields where twenty-seven French battalions and twelve squadrons of cavalry were taken prisoner, where the Navarre Regiment, whose uniform I have had the honour to wear, buried its standards to the mournful sound of the trumpets: those are the commonplaces of the succession of the ages. In 1793, the Republic carried off from the church at Blenheim the colours taken from the Monarchy in 1704: it avenged the Kingdom and slew the King; it cut off Louis XVI.'s head, but it allowed only France to tear the White Flag to pieces. Nothing better conveys the greatness of Louis XIV. than to find his memory at the bottom of the ravines dug by the torrent of the Napoleonic victories. That monarch's conquests left our country the frontiers that still guard it[522]. The Brienne scholar, to whom the Legitimacy gave a sword, for a moment enclosed Europe in his ante-chamber; but it escaped: the grandson of Henry IV. laid that same Europe at the feet of France; and it remained there. This does not mean that I am comparing Napoleon and Louis XIV.: men of different destinies, they belong to dissimilar centuries, to different nations; one completed an era, the other began a world. One can say of Napoleon what Montaigne says of Cæsar: "I excuse Victorie in that shee could not well give him over[523]." [Sidenote: Blenheim.] The unworthy tapestries at Blenheim Palace, which I saw with Peltier, show the Maréchal de Tallart[524] taking off his hat to the Duke of Marlborough[525], who stands in a swaggering attitude. Tallart none the less remained the favourite of the old lion; a prisoner in London, he conquered, in the mind of Queen Anne[526], the Marlborough who had beaten him at Blenheim, and he died a member of the French Academy: "He was," says Saint-Simon, "a man of middling height with somewhat jealous eyes, full of fire and spirit, but with an incessant demon of restlessness in him, owing to his ambition." I am writing history in my calash: why not? Cæsar wrote plenty in his litter: he won the battles of which he wrote; I did not lose those of which I speak. From Dillingen to Donauwörth stretches a rich plain of unequal level in which the corn-fields intermingle with the meadows: one goes closer to or further from the Danube according to the windings of the road and the bends of the river. At that height, the waters of the Danube are still yellow, like those of the Tiber. Scarce have you left the village before you see another; those villages are clean and smiling: often the walls of the houses have frescoes. A certain Italian character becomes manifest as one goes towards Austria; the inhabitant of the Danube is no longer the _Peasant of the Danube_: