Many years ago, staying at the Château de Fervacques, in Normandy, at Madame de Custine's, I occupied the bed-room of Henry IV.: my bed was enormous; the Bearnese had slept in it with some Florette or other: I gained royalism there, for I did not have it by nature. Moats filled with water surround the castle. The view from my window spread over meadows edged by the little River Fervacques. In those meadows I perceived, one morning, an elegant sow of extraordinary whiteness; it looked as though it might be the mother of Prince Marcassin. It lay at the foot of a willow, on the cool grass, in the dew: a young boar-pig gathered a little fine, serrate moss with its ivory tusks and came to lay it on the sleeper; it repeated this operation so many times that the white wild-sow was entirely hidden: one saw only its black feet stick out from under the downy verdure in which it was buried. Be this told to the glory of an ill-famed beast of which I should blush to have spoken at too great length, if Homer had not sung it I perceive, in fact, that this part of my Memoirs is nothing less than an Odyssey: Waldmünchen is Ithaca; the shepherd is the faithful Eumæus with his swine; I am the son of Laertes, returning after wandering on land and sea. I should, perhaps, have done better to intoxicate myself with the nectar of Evanthes, to eat the flower of the moly-plant, to linger in the land of the Lotus-eaters, to remain with Circe, or to obey the song of the Syrens saying: "Approach, come to us!" 22 _May_ 1833. If I were twenty years old, I should seek some adventures at Waldmünchen, as a means of shortening the hours; but, at my age, we have no silk ladders left, save in our memory, and we no longer scale walls except with the shadows. Formerly, I was very intimate with my body; I used to advise it to live wisely, in order to show itself quite lively and quite jolly in forty years' time. It laughed at the sermons of my soul, persisted in making merry and would not have given two doits to be one day what is called "a well-preserved man:" "Out upon you!" it used to say. "What have I to gain by being niggardly with my spring, in order to enjoy life's days when there will be none left to care to share them with me?" And it steeped itself over head and ears in happiness. I am obliged, therefore, to accept it as it now is: I took it for a walk, on the 22nd, to the south-east of the village. We followed through the marshes a little water-current which put some works in motion. They manufacture linen at Waldmünchen; breadths of linen were unrolled on the fields; young girls whose business it was to damp them ran bare-foot on the white strips, preceded by the water that spouted from their watering-pots, just as gardeners would water a border of flowers. Along the stream I thought of my friends, I was touched by their memory; then I asked what they must be saying of me in Paris: "Has he arrived? Has he seen the Royal Family? Will he come back soon?"