On the morning of the 23rd, Heaven mingled some sweetness with my pains: Baptiste told me that the most eminent man of the place, the brewer, had three daughters and owned my works, set out in a row among his beer-jugs. When I went out, this gentleman and two of his daughters watched me go by: what was the third young lady doing? In former days, a letter had come to me from Peru, written with her own hand by a lady, a cousin of the sun, who admired _Atala_; but to be known at Waldmünchen, under the very nose of the wolf of Haselbach, was a thousand times more glorious: it was true that this occurred in Bavaria, at a league from Austria, the curse of my renown. Do you know what would have happened if my trip to Bohemia had been taken out of my own head alone: but why should I have wanted to go to Bohemia for myself only? Once I had been stopped at the frontier, I should have gone back to Paris. There was a man who contemplated a voyage to Pekin; one of his friends met him on the Pont Royal in Paris: "Why, I thought you were in China!" "I have come back: those Chinamen put difficulties in my way at Canton, so I left them in the lurch." While Baptiste was telling me of my triumphs, the passing-bell of a funeral called me to my window. The priest went by, preceded by the cross; men and women crowded after, the men in cloaks, the women in black gowns and mob-caps. The corpse, taken up at the third door from mine, was carried to the grave-yard: half-an-hour later, the procession-goers returned, _minus_ the procession. Two young women held their handkerchiefs to their eyes, one of the two uttered loud cries: they were mourning their father; the deceased was the man who had received the Viaticum on the day of my arrival. If my Memoirs reach Waldmünchen, when I myself am no more, the family in mourning to-day will find the date of its sorrow past. Perhaps, as he lay on his bed, the dying man heard the noise of my carriage: it is the only noise of me that he will have heard upon earth. After the crowd had dispersed, I took the road which I had seen the funeral take in the direction of the winter sunrise. I found first a fish-pond of stagnant water, beside which a stream flowed rapidly, like life beside the tomb. Crosses on the other side of a rising ground showed me the position of the cemetery. I crossed a sunk road and made my way, through a gap in the wall, into the consecrated ground. Clay furrows represented the bodies under the soil; here and there stood crosses: they marked outlets through which the travellers had entered the new world, even as beacons at the mouth of a river indicate the passages open to ships. A poor old man was digging the grave of a child: alone, perspiring and bare-headed, he did not sing, he did not jest like the clowns in Hamlet. Further away was another grave, near which one saw a stool, a lever and a rope for the descent into Eternity. I went straight up to this grave, which seemed to say: