Delighted with this thought, I went to breakfast in a café on the Riva degli Schiavoni. The bread was new, the tea scented, the cream as in Brittany, the butter as in the Prévalais; for butter, thanks to the progress of enlightenment, has improved everywhere: I have eaten excellent butter at Granada. The bustle of a harbour always delights me: barge-masters were picnicking; vendors of fruit and flowers offered me lemons, grapes and nosegays; fishermen got ready their tartans; naval cadets, stepping into a long-boat, went off to their lessons in naval tactics on board the flag-ship; gondolas were taking passengers to the Trieste steam-boat. Yet it was that same Trieste which was like to have had me cut down on the steps of the Tuileries by Bonaparte, as he threatened when, in 1807, I took it upon myself to write in the _Mercure_: "It was reserved for us to find at the back of the Adriatic the tomb of two king's daughters[127] whose funeral oration we had heard delivered in an attic in London. Ah, at least the grave that holds those noble ladies will have once heard its silence broken; the sound of a Frenchman's foot-steps will have made two Frenchwomen start in their coffins! The respects of a poor gentleman, at Versailles, would have been nothing to princesses; the prayer of a Christian, on foreign soil, will perhaps have been agreeable to saints." Some few years, it seems to me, have passed, since I began to serve the Bourbons: they have enlightened my fidelity, but they will not tire it I am breakfasting on the Riva degli Schiavoni, while waiting for the exile. VENICE, _September_ 1833. From the little table at which I sit, my eyes wander over all the roads: a breeze from the offing cools the air; the tide is rising; a three-master is coming in. The Lido on one side, the Doge's Palace on the other, the lagoons in the middle: that is the picture. It is from this port that so many glorious fleets set sail; old Dandolo sallied forth in all the pomp of naval chivalry, of which Villehardouin[128], who began our language and our Memoirs, has left us a description: "And when the ships were laden with arms, and meats, and knights, and sergeants, and the shields were arrayed all round in the form of a frieze, and the banners waved, of which there were so many fair ones, never did fairer fleets sail from any port." The morning scene in Venice also puts me in mind of the story of Captain Olivet and Zulietta, which was so well told: