One day, as I was passing through Lyons, a lady wrote to me; she begged me to give her daughter a seat in my carriage and take her to Paris. The proposal struck me as singular; but, after all, having verified the signature, I found my unknown correspondent to be a highly respectable lady and I replied politely. The mother introduced her daughter to me, a divinity of sixteen. No sooner had the mother set eyes upon me than she blushed scarlet; her confidence forsook her: "Forgive me," she stammered; "I am none the less filled with esteem.... But you understand the proprieties.... I made a mistake.... I am so greatly surprised." I insisted, looking at my promised companion, who seemed amused at the discussion; I was lavish with protestations that I would take every imaginable care of that beautiful young person; the mother humbled herself with excuses and courtesies. The two ladies departed. I was proud of having frightened them so much. For some hours I thought myself made young again by the Dawn. The lady had fancied that the author of the _Génie du Christianisme_ was a venerable Abbé de Chateaubriand, a tall, dry, simple old man, constantly taking snuff out of a huge tin snuff-box, who might very well be trusted to take an innocent school-girl to the Sacred Heart. They used to tell in Vienna, two or three lustres ago, that I lived all alone in a certain valley called the Vallée-aux-Loups. My house was built on an island; when people wanted to see me, they had to blow a horn on the opposite bank of the river: a river at Châtenay! I then looked out through a hole: if the company pleased me, a thing that hardly ever happened, I came myself to fetch them in a little boat; if not, not. In the evening, I pulled my boat on shore and nobody was allowed to land on my island. In point of fact, I ought to have lived in this way; this Viennese story has always charmed me: M. de Metternich surely did not invent it; he is not sufficiently my friend for that. I do not know what the German traveller will have told his wife about me, nor if he went out of his way to undeceive her as to my decrepitude. I fear that I possess the drawbacks of black hair and white hair both and that I am neither young enough nor staid enough. For the rest, I was hardly in the mood for coquetry at Wiesenbach; a melancholy wind blew under the doors and through the passages of the inn: when the breeze blows, I am in love with nothing else.