Journal from Carlsbad to Paris--Cynthia--Eger--Wallenstein--Weisaenstadt--Berneck--Memories --Bayreuth--Voltaire--Hollfeld--The church--The little girl with the basket--The inn-keeper and his maid-servant--Bamberg--The female hunchback--Würzburg: its canons--A drunkard--The swallow--The inn at Wiesenbach--A German and his wife--My age and appearance--Heidelberg--Pilgrims--Ruins--Mannheim--The Rhine--The Palatinate--Aristocratic and plebeian armies--Convent and castle--A lonely inn--Kaiserslautern--Saarbrück--Metz--Charles X.'s Council in France--Ideas on Henry V.--My letter to Madame la Dauphine--Letters from Madame la Duchesse de Berry. 1 _June_ 1833, _evening._ The journey from Carlsbad to Elbogen, along the Eger, is pleasant. The castle of this little town is of the twelfth century and keeps sentry on a rock, at the entrance to the gorge of a valley. The foot of the rock, covered with trees, is contained within a bend of the Eger: hence the name of the town and the castle, Elbogen, the Elbow. The donjon was red with the last rays of the sun when I saw it from the high-road. Above the mountains and woods hung the twisted column of smoke of a foundry. I started at half-past nine from the Zwoda stage. I followed the road along which Vauvenargues passed in the retreat from Prague, the young man to whom Voltaire, in the _Éloge funèbre des officiers morts en 1741_, addresses these words: "Thou art no more, O sweet hope of my remaining days; I have always beheld in thee the most unfortunate of men and the most tranquil." From inside my calash, I watched the stars rise. Be not afraid, Cynthia,[2] it is but the whispering of the reeds bent by our passage through their mobile forest. I have a dagger for jealous men and blood for thee. Let not this tomb cause thee any alarm; it is that of a woman once loved like thyself: Cecilia Metella lay here. How wonderful is this night in the Roman Campagna! The moon rises behind the Sabine Hill to contemplate the sea; she causes to stand forth from the diaphanous darkness the ashen-blue summits of Albano, the more distant, less deeply-graven lines of Soracte. The long canal of the old aqueducts lets fall a few globules of its waters through the mosses, columbines, gilliflowers, and joins the mountains to the city walls. Planted one above the other, the aerial porticoes, cutting into the sky, turn in mid-air the torrent of the ages and the course of the brooks. The legislatrix of the world, Rome, seated on the stone of her sepulchre, with her robe of centuries, projects the irregular outline of her tall figure into the milky solitude. Let us sit down: this pine-tree, like the goat-herd of the Abruzzi, unfolds its parasol among ruins. The moon showers her snowy light upon the Gothic crown of the tower of Metella's tomb and on the festoons of marble that link the horns of the bucrania: a graceful pomp inviting us to enjoy life, which speeds so soon.