I passed through Eger and, on Saturday the 1st of June, at day-break, entered Bavaria: a tall red-haired girl, bare-foot and bare-headed, came to open the turnpike to me, like Austria in person. The cold lasted: the grass in the moats was covered with a white hoar-frost; wet foxes came out of the oat-fields; grey, zig-zag, wide-spreading clouds hung across in the sky like eagles' wings. I arrived at Weissenstadt at nine o'clock in the morning; at the same moment, a sort of gig was carrying away a young woman driving without a hat; she looked very much like what she probably was: joy, love's short fortune, then the hospital and the common grave. Strolling pleasure, may Heaven not be too severe on your boards! There are so many actors worse than yourself in this world! Before entering the village, I passed through "_wastes_:" this word was at the point of my pencil; it belonged to our old Frankish tongue: it describes the aspect of a desolate country better than the word "_lande_," which means earth. I still know the song which they used to sing in the evening when crossing the waste-lands: C'est le chevalier des Landes: Malheureux chevalier! Quand il fut dans la lande, A ouï les sings sonner[8]. After Weissenstadt comes Berneck. On leaving Berneck, the road is lined with poplar-trees, whose winding avenue filled me with an indescribable sentiment of mingled pleasure and sadness. On ransacking my memory, I found that they resembled the poplars with which the high-road was formerly laid out at the entrance to Villeneuve-sur-Yonne on the Paris side. Madame de Beaumont is no more; M. Joubert is no more; the poplars are felled and, after the fourth fall of the Monarchy, I am passing at the feet of the poplars at Berneck: "Give me," says St. Augustine, "a man who loves, and he will understand what I say." Youth laughs at those disappointments; it is charming, happy: in vain do you tell it that the time will come when it too will know a similar bitterness; it thrusts you aside with its light wing and flies away in search of pleasures: it is right, if it dies with them. Here is Bayreuth, a reminiscence of another sort. This town stands in the middle of a hollow plain of crops mixed with meadow-land: it has wide streets, low houses, a weak population. In the time of Voltaire and Frederic II., the Margravine of Bayreuth was famous; her death inspired the bard of Ferney with the only ode in which he displayed any lyrical talent: Tu ne chanteras plus, solitaire Sylvandre, Dans ce palais des arts, où les sons de ta voix Contre les préjugés osaient se faire entendre, Et de l'humanité faisaient parler les droits[9]. The poet here praises himself justly, were it not that there was no one less solitary in the world than Voltaire-Sylvander. The poet adds, addressing the Margravine: