After reading the above lines again, in 1839, I will add that, having, in 1837, visited M. Carrel's grave, I found it much neglected, but I saw a black wooden cross which the dead man's sister Nathalie had planted near him. I paid Vaudran, the grave-digger, eighteen francs that remained owing for trellis-work; I instructed him to tend the grave, to sow grass on it and keep it adorned with flowers. At each new season, I go to Saint-Mandé to discharge what is due and to make sure that my intentions have been faithfully fulfilled[322]. As I am preparing to end my recollections and taking a last look round, I perceive women whom I have involuntarily forgotten; like angels grouped at the bottom of my picture, they stand leaning against the frame to watch the end of my life. In former days, I met women who were known or celebrated in different ways. Women have changed their manner of being to-day: are they worth more, are they worth less? It is only natural that I should incline towards the past; but the past is surrounded by a mist through which objects assume an agreeable and often deceptive complexion. My youth, to which I can never go back again, produces the effect upon me of a grandmother; I hardly remember it and I should be charmed to see it once more. [Sidenote: A Lady from Louisiana.] A Louisianan lady came to see me from the Mississippi: I thought that I was setting eyes upon the virgin of the last loves. Célestine wrote me several letters: they might have been dated from the "Moon of the Flowers;" she showed me fragments of Memoirs which she had composed in the savannahs of Alabama. Some time after, Célestine wrote to me that she was busy with a dress for her presentation at the Court of Philip: I resumed my bear's skin. Célestine has changed into an alligator from the water of the Floridas: may Heaven grant her peace and love, for as long as those things last! There are persons who, by thrusting themselves between you and the past, prevent your memories from coming to your recollection; there are others who become mingled from the first with what you have been. Madame Tastu[323] produces this latter effect. She has a natural turn of expression; she has left the Gallic jargon to those who believe that they make themselves younger by disguising themselves in the cloaks of our ancestors. Favorinus[324] said to a Roman who affected to talk the language of the Twelve Tables[325]: "You want to speak with the mother[326] of Evander." Since I have touched upon antiquity, I will say a few words on the women of its peoples and descend the ladder down to our own time. The Greek women sometimes celebrated philosophy; more often they followed another divinity: Sappho[327] has remained the immortal sibyl of Cnidus; we know very little now of what Corinna[328] did after she had conquered Pindar[329]. Aspasia taught Socrates to know Venus: