At the outlet of Heidelberg, the hills to the right and left of the Necker fall away, and one enters upon a plain. A winding embankment, raised a few feet above the level of the corn-fields, is delineated between two rows of cherry-trees harshly treated by the wind and of walnut-trees "often by the wayfarers attacked[28]." At the entrance to Mannheim, one drives through hop-vines, whose long, dry props were as yet decorated to only one third of their height by the climbing creeper. Julian the Apostate wrote a pretty epigram against beer; the Abbé de La Bletterie[29] imitated it with some elegance: Tu n'es qu'un faux Bacchus ... J'en atteste le véritable. . . . . . . . Que le Gaulois, pressé d'une soif éternelle Au défaut de la grappe ait recours aux épis, De Cérès qu'il vante le fils: Vive le fils de Semèle[30]. A few orchards, some walks shaded by willow-trees of all sizes form a verdant suburb to Mannheim. The houses in the town have often only one storey above the ground-floor. The main street is wide and planted with trees in the middle: one more down-fallen city. I do not like false gold, and so I did not want any Mannheim gold; but I certainly have "Toulouse gold[31]," to judge by the disasters of my life: yet who has more than I respected the Temple of Apollo? 3 _and_ 4 _June_ 1833. I crossed the Rhine at two o'clock in the afternoon. At the moment of passing, a steam-boat came up stream. What would Cæsar have said if he had met such a machine while he was building his bridge? On the other side of the Rhine, opposite Mannheim, one finds Bavaria again, as a result of the odious slashings and jobbings of the Treaties of Paris, Vienna and Aix-la-Chapelle. Every one cut out his share with scissors, without any regard for reason, humanity or justice, without troubling about the slice of population that fell into a pair of royal chops. [Sidenote: The Palatinate.] Driving through the Cisrhenan Palatinate, I reflected how this country had once formed a department of France, how white Gaul was girt about by the Rhine, the "blue sash" of Germany. Napoleon and the Republic before him had realized the dream of several of our kings, above all of Louis XIV. So long as we do not occupy our natural frontiers, there will be war in Europe, because the interest of self-preservation drives France to seize the boundaries necessary to her national independence. Here we have planted trophies to claim back in due season. The plain between the Rhine and the Monts Tonnerre looks sad; earth and men seem to say that their fate is not settled, that they belong to no people; they appear to be expecting new invasions, as it were new river-floods. The Germans of Tacitus devastated great spaces on their frontiers and left them empty between these and their enemies. Woe to the border populations that till the battlefields on which the nations are to meet!