I had not been a quarter of an hour in the inn at Metz, when behold Baptiste coming in a great state of excitement: mysteriously he drew from his pocket a white paper parcel, containing a seal; M. le Duc de Bordeaux and Mademoiselle had charged him with that seal, telling him to give it me "only on French soil." They had been very anxious the whole night before my departure, fearing lest the jeweller would not have time to finish the work. The seal has three faces: on one is engraved an anchor; on the second, the two words which Henry said to me at our first interview: "Yes, always!" on the third, the date of my arrival in Prague. The brother and sister begged me to wear the seal "for love of them." The mystery of this present, the order given by the two exiled children to hand me the token of their memory "only on French soil" filled my eyes with tears. The seal shall never leave me; I shall wear it "for love of Louise and Henry." I would have liked to see, at Metz, the house of Fabert[39], the common soldier who became a marshal of France and who received the collar of the Orders, his nobility tracing its origin only to his sword. The Barbarians our fathers, at Metz, butchered the Romans[40] surprised in the midst of the debauchery of a feast; our soldiers have waltzed, in the monastery of Alcobaça, with the skeleton of Iñez de Castro[41]: sorrows and pleasures, crimes and follies, fourteen centuries separate you and you are all alike completely past. The eternity commenced just now is as old as the eternity dating from the first death, the murder of Abel. Nevertheless, men, during their ephemeral appearance on this globe, persuade themselves that they are leaving some trace behind them: why, good Heaven, yes, every fly has its shadow! I left Metz and passed through Verdun, where I was so unhappy and where Carrel's lonely friend lives to-day[42]. I skirted the heights of Valmy; I do not care to speak of it any more than of Jemmapes: I should be afraid lest I should find a crown there. Châlons reminded me of a great weakness of Bonaparte, who banished beauty there[43]. Peace be with Châlons, which tells me that I still have friends! At Château-Thierry, I found my idol, La Fontaine. It was the hour of the Angelus: Jean's wife was no longer there, and Jean had returned to Madame de La Sablière[44]. As I grazed the wall of Meaux Cathedral, I repeated Bossuet's[45] own words to him: "Man reaches his tomb dragging behind him the long chain of his hopes deceived." [Sidenote: Back in Paris.] In Paris, I passed the quarters in which I had lived with my sisters in my youth; next, the Palace of Justice, commemorative of my trial; next, the Prefecture of Police, which served me as a prison. I have returned at last to my hospice, thus winding off the skein of my days. The frail insect of the sheep-folds drops at the end of a silken thread to the ground, where the foot of some ewe will soon crush it. PARIS, RUE D'ENFER, 6 _June_ 1833.