And I was deliberating as to whether I would not send Hyacinthe to fetch some fresh butter and brown bread, in order to eat cress at the edge of a spring under a tuft of alder-shoots. My life was no more ambitious than that: why has Fortune fastened the skirt of my doublet to her wheel with the hem of the mantle of our Kings? Returning to the village, I passed near the church: two outer sanctuaries prop up the wall; one of these shows St. Peter ad Vincula, with a poor-box for the prisoners: I dropped in a few kreutzers in memory of the Pellico's[546] prison and of my own cell at the Prefecture of Police. The other sanctuary showed the scene in the Garden of Olives: a scene so touching and so sublime that it is not destroyed even here by the grotesqueness of the figures. I hurried through my dinner and hastened to the evening prayer for which I heard them ringing. As I turned the corner of the narrow street in which the church stands, a vista opened out over some distant hills: a little light still lingered on the horizon, and that dying light came from the side of France. A profound feeling gripped my heart When shall my pilgrimage be over? I passed through Germanic territory very miserably, when I was returning from the Army of the Princes, very triumphantly when, as Ambassador of Louis XVIII., I was going to Berlin: after so many and such different years, I was penetrating stealthily into the depths of that same Germany to seek the King of France banished anew. [Sidenote: An evening service.] I entered the church: it was quite dark; not even a lighted lamp. Through the blackness, I recognised the sanctuary, standing in a Gothic recess, only through its thicker gloom. The walls, the altars, the pillars seemed to me laden with ornaments and pictures veiled in crape; the nave was occupied by close-set parallel benches. An old woman was reciting aloud, in German, the _Our Father_ of the rosary; women, young and old, whom I could not see, replied with the _Hail Marys._ The old woman spoke her words well, her voice was clear, her accent grave and pathetic; she was two benches away from me; her head bent slightly in the dusk each time she uttered the word Christo in some prayer which she added to the _Our Father._ The rosary was followed by the Litany of the Blessed Virgin: the _Ora pro nobis_, chanted in German by the invisible worshippers, sounded in my ear like a repetition of the word "hope:" "_espérance, espérance, espérance!_[547]" We left the church promiscuously; I went to sleep with Hope: it was long since I had clasped her in my arms; but she does not grow older and one always loves her, despite her infidelities. According to Tacitus, the Germans believe the night to be older than the day: _nox ducere diem videtur._ Yet I have reckoned young nights and sempiternal days. The poets tell us also that Sleep is the brother of Death: I do not know; but Old Age is certainly its nearest relation. 23 _May_ 1833.