What a fascination for any man who should not have counted his heap of years, and who should have asked illusions of the world and the storm! It is difficult indeed for me to remember my autumn when, at my receptions, I see pass before me those women of spring-time who penetrate among the flowers, the concerts and the lights of my successive galleries: as who should sway swans swimming towards radiant climes. To what _désennui_ are they going? Some seek what they already love, others what they do not yet love. At the end of the road, they will fall into those sepulchres, always open here, into those ancient sarcophaguses which serve as basins to fountains hanging from porticoes; they will go to swell so many light and charming ashes. Those waves of beauties, diamonds, flowers and feathers roll to the sound of Rossini's music, which is re-echoed and grows feebler from orchestra to orchestra. Is that melody the sigh of the breeze to which I listened in the savannahs of the Floridas, the moan which I heard in the Temple of Erechtheus at Athens? Is it the distant wailing of the north winds, which rocked me on the ocean? Could my sylph be hidden beneath the form of some of these brilliant Italian women? No: my hamadryad has remained united to the willow of the meadows where I used to talk with her on the further side of the hedge at Combourg. I have little in common with these frolics of the society which has attached itself to my steps at the end of my race; and yet this fairy-scene contains a certain intoxication that flies to my head: I get rid of it only by going to cool my brow in the solitary square of St. Peter's or in the deserted Coliseum. Then the puny sights of the earth are lost, and I find nothing equal to the sudden change of scene but the old melancholy of my early days. [Sidenote: The exiled Bonapartes.] I will now set forth here my relations, as Ambassador, with the Bonaparte Family, in order to clear the Restoration of one of the calumnies that are incessantly being thrown at its head. France did not act alone in banishing the members of the Imperial Family; she merely obeyed the hard necessity put upon her by the force of arms; it was the Allies who provoked that banishment: diplomatic conventions, formal treaties pronounce the exile of the Bonapartes, lay down the very places they are to live at, forbid a minister or ambassador to deliver a passport, by himself, to Napoleon's kinsmen; the visa of the four other ministers or ambassadors of the four other contracting Powers is exacted. To such a degree did the blood of Napoleon frighten the Allies, even when it did not flow in his own veins!