When the calash was put to, I climbed in, surrounded by the women, and the waiters of the inn accompanied me to the carriage-door; they seemed glad to have seen me, although they did not know me and were never to see me again: they gave me so many blessings! I do not tire of this German cordiality. You never meet a peasant but takes off his hat to you and wishes you a hundred good things: in France we salute only death; insolence is accounted as liberty and equality; there is no sympathy between man and man; to envy whoever travels a little comfortably, to stand with one arm akimbo, ready to draw the sword on any one who wears a new coat or a white shirt: those are the characteristic signs of our national independence, always provided that we spend our days in the antechambers accepting the rebuffs of some upstart clodhopper. This does not take away from our high intelligence, nor prevent us from triumphing with arms in hand; but manners cannot be made _à priori_: for eight centuries we have been a great military nation; fifty years have not been able to change us: we have not been able to acquire a genuine love for liberty. So soon as we have a moment's rest under a transitory government, the Old Monarchy shoots up again on its stock, the old French spirit reappears: we are courtiers and soldiers, nothing more. 23 _and_24 _September_ 1833. The last range of mountains shutting in the Province of Salzburg commands the arable region. The Tauern has glaciers; its table-land resembles all the table-lands of the Alps, but more particularly that of the Saint-Gotthard. On this table-land, crusted over with reddish, frozen moss, stands a Calvary: an ever-ready consolation, an eternal refuge for the unfortunate. Around that Calvary are buried the victims who perish amid the snows. What were the hopes of the travellers passing, like myself, through this spot when the snow-storm surprised them? Who are they? Who has wept for them? How do they rest there, so far from their kindred, their country, hearing each winter the roar of the tempests whose breath carried them off the earth? But they sleep at the foot of the Cross; Christ, their sole companion, their only friend, nailed to the sacred wood, leans towards them, is covered with the same hoar-frost that whitens their graves: in the celestial regions, He will present them to His Father and warm them in His breast. The descent of the Tauern is long, bad and dangerous; I was delighted with it: it reminds one, at one time by its cascades and its wooden bridges, at another by the narrowness of its chasm, of the Valley of the Pont-d'Espagne at Cauterets or the Domo d'Ossola slope of the Simplon; but it is far from leading to Granada or Naples. We find no gleaming lakes, no orange-trees at the bottom: it is unprofitable to give one's self so much trouble to come to some potato-fields.