The Princesse de Bauffremont, _née_ de Montmorency[253], was going to Butschirad[254] to congratulate the Kings of France, _née_ Bourbons: what could be more natural? On the 25th, at nightfall, I entered some woods. Carrion-crows flew screaming through the air; their thick flights whirled above the trees whose tops they were making ready to crown. Behold me returning to my early youth: I saw once more the crows in the Mall at Combourg[255]; I imagined myself renewing my family life in the old castle[256]: O memories, you pierce the heart like a sword! O Lucile[257], we are parted by many years: now the crowd of my days has passed and, in dispersing, allows me to see your image more clearly! I reached Thabor at night: its square, surrounded by arcades, struck me as immense; but the moonlight is deceptive. On the morning of the 26th, a mist wrapped us in its boundless solitude. At about ten o'clock, it seemed to me that I was passing between two lakes. I was now only a few leagues from Prague. [Sidenote: Prague.] The fog lifted. The approaches by the Linz Road are livelier than by the Ratisbon Road; the landscape is less insipid. One sees villages, country-houses with woods and ponds. I met a woman with a resigned and pious face, going bent under the weight of an enormous basket; two old market-women with apples spread out for sale beside a ditch; a young girl and a young man sitting on the grass, the man smoking, the girl glad, spending the day beside her friend and the night in his arms; children at a cottage-door playing with cats or driving geese to the common; turkeys in coops going to Prague, like myself, for Henry V.'s coming of age; next, a shepherd blowing his horn, while Hyacinthe, Baptiste, the Venetian _cicerone_ and My Excellency jolted along in our patched calash: such are the destinies of life. I would not give a doit for the best of them. Bohemia had nothing new to show me: my ideas were fixed on Prague. PRAGUE, 29 _September_ 1833.