Thus I have known public and private life. I have four times crossed the sea; I have followed the sun in the East, touched upon the ruins of Memphis, Carthage, Sparta and Athens; I have prayed at the tomb of St. Peter and worshipped on Golgotha. Poor and rich, powerful and weak, happy and miserable, a man of action, a man of thought, I have placed my hand in the century, my mind in the desert; effective existence has shown itself to me in the midst of illusions, even as the land appears to sailors in the midst of mists. If those facts spread over my dreams, like the varnish that preserves fragile paintings, do not disappear, they will mark the place through which my life passed. [Sidenote: My several careers.] In each of my three careers, I placed an important object before myself: as a traveller, I aimed at discovering the polar world; as a man of letters, I have striven to reconstruct religion from its ruins; as a statesman, I have endeavoured to give the nations the system of balanced monarchy, to restore France to her rank in Europe, to give back to her the strength which the Treaties of Vienna had taken from her; I have at least assisted in winning that one of our liberties which is worth all the others: the liberty of the press. In the divine order of things, religion and liberty; in the human order, honour and glory (which are the human generation of religion and liberty): that is what I have desired for my country. Of the French authors of my own period, I may be said to be the only one who resembles his works: a traveller, soldier, publicist, minister, it is amid forests that I have sung the forests, aboard ship that I have depicted the Ocean, in camp that I have spoken of arms, in exile that I have learnt to know exile, in Courts, in affairs of State, in Parliament that I have studied princes, politics and laws. The orators of Greece and Rome played their part in the republic and shared its fate; in Italy and Spain, at the end of the Middle Ages and under the Renascence, the leading intellects in letters and the arts took part in the social movement. How stormy and how fine were the lives of Dante, of Tasso, of Camoens, of Ercilla, of Cervantes! In France, of old, our songs and stories came to us from our pilgrimages and battles; but, commencing from the reign of Louis XIV., our writers have too often been men leading detached lives, and their talents have perchance expressed the spirit, but not the deeds of their age.