Full of these melancholy ideas, I fell asleep. A gentle voice woke me. A Bohemian peasant-woman came to gather apples; throwing forward her breast and lifting her head, she made me a Slav bow with a queenly smile: I thought I should fall from my roosting-place; I said to her in French: "You are very beautiful; I thank you!" I saw from her look that she had understood me: apples always play a part in my encounters with "Bohemians[267]." I climbed down from my ladder like one of those condemned men of feudal times delivered by the presence of a young woman. Thinking on Normandy, Dieppe, Fervacques, the sea, I resumed my way to the Trianon of Charles X.'s old age. We sat down to table, namely, the Prince and Princesse de Bauffremont, the Duc and Duchesse de Narbonne, M. de Blacas, M. de Damas, M. O'Heguerty, I, M. le Dauphin and Henry V.: I would rather have seen the young men there than myself. Charles X. did not come in to dinner: he was nursing himself, in order to be able to start on the morrow. The banquet was noisy, thanks to the young Prince's prattle: he never ceased talking of his ride on horseback, his horse, his horse's pranks on the grass, his horse's snorting in the ploughed fields. This conversation was most natural, and yet it grieved me; I liked our old talk on travels and history better. The King came and chatted to me. He complimented me again on the note on the majority: it pleased him because it left the abdications on one side as an accomplished thing, required no signature except Henry's and revived no sores. According to Charles X., the declaration would be sent from Vienna to M. de Pastoret before my return to France; I bowed with an incredulous smile. His Majesty, after striking me on the shoulder according to his custom, asked: "Chateaubriand, where are you going now?" "Quite foolishly to Paris, Sire." "No, no, not foolishly," replied the King, seeking, with a sort of uneasiness, to discover what was at the back of my thought The newspapers were brought in; the Dauphin took possession of the English journals; suddenly, amid profound silence, he translated aloud the following passage from the _Times_: "The Baron de--- is here; he is four feet high, seventy--five years old and as brisk as though he were fifty." And Monseigneur said nothing more. The King retired; M. de Blacas said to me: "You ought to come to Leoben with us." The proposal was not seriously meant. Besides, I was not at all anxious to be present at a family scene; I wished neither to divide relations nor to meddle with dangerous reconciliations. When I half saw a chance of becoming the favourite of one of the two powers, I shuddered; the post did not seem fast enough to take me away from my possible honours. I trembled before the shadow of fortune even as the Philistines trembled before the shadow of Richard's horse.