London, April to September 1822;
Revised in February 1845
ON THE outskirts of Arlon, a peasant’s cart picked me up for the sum of four sous and dropped me five leagues away on a heap of stones. Having hobbled a few feet with the aid of my crutch, I washed the bandages around my suppurating wound in a spring that flowed along the roadside. This did me great good. The smallpox had completely gone, and I felt soothed. I gave no thought to abandoning my sack, though its straps cut into my shoulders.
The first night I spent in a barn and ate nothing at all. The wife of the farmer who owned the barn refused payment for my bed. At sunrise, she brought me a big bowl of café au lait with a hunk of black bread, which I found delicious. I took to the road again feeling hardy, although often I stumbled and fell. I was joined by four or five of my comrades, who took turns carrying my sack. These men were also quite ill. We crossed paths with villagers, and, riding cart after cart through the Ardennes, we covered enough ground to reach Attert, Flamizoul, and Bellevue in the course of five days. On the sixth day, I found myself alone again. My smallpox had turned white and flattened.
After walking five or six miles, which cost me six hours’ time, I caught sight of a family of gypsies encamped on the wayside with two goats and a donkey, on the far side of a ditch, around a fire kindled with heather. I had hardly stepped into the firelight before I let myself drop, and these singular creatures hurried to help me. A young woman in rags—vibrant, dark, audacious—sang, leapt, and spun, holding her baby aslant on her breast like the hurdy-gurdy with which she might have accompanied her dance, then crouched on her heels at my side, regarded me curiously in the gleam of the fire, and took my dying hand, to tell my fortune, asking only a petit sou. This was much too dear. It would be difficult to be any wiser, tenderer, or poorer than my sybil of the Ardennes. I know not when the nomads, whose worthy son I might have been, left me; when, at dawn, I emerged from my torpor, they were no longer there. My sweet fortune-teller had gone away with the secret of my future. In exchange for my petit sou, she had placed an apple beside my head which served to freshen my mouth. I was shivering like Jeannot Lapin in the thyme and the dew; but I could neither nibble, nor scamper, nor run around and around. I roused myself nevertheless, with a notion to pay court to the Dawn.[1] She was very beautiful, and I was very ugly; her pink face proclaimed her good health: she was feeling quite a bit better than her poor Armorican Cephalus. Although both young, we were old friends, and that morning I let myself imagine that her tears were for me.
I plunged into the forest, and felt none too sad, for the solitude had restored me to my nature. I began to sing the ballad by the doomed Cazotte:
Deep down in the middle of the Ardennes,
There’s a castle high up on the rocks . . .[2]
Was it not in the keep of this same haunted castle that the King of Spain, Philip II, had imprisoned my countryman, Captain La Noue, whose grandmother was a Chateaubriand? Philip agreed to release his illustrious prisoner only if the latter would agree to have his eyes gouged out; La Noue was on the verge of accepting the proposition, so thirsty was he to return to his beloved Brittany. Alas! I was possessed of the same desire, and all I needed to lose my vision was the illness with which it had pleased God to afflict me. I did not meet “Sir Enguerrand riding home from Spain,” as the ballad says, but only poor vagabonds and peddlers who, like me, carried the whole of their fortunes on their backs. A woodcutter wearing felt knee patches passed me in the forest: I am surprised he did not take me for a dead branch and saw me down. A few crows, a few larks, and a few buntings (a species of large finch) scampered over the pathway, or perched unmoving on the stone wall, attentive to a hawk that was circling in the sky. From time to time, I heard a swineherd sound his horn as he watched over the sows and their little ones rooting for acorns beneath the oaks. I rested in a shepherd’s wheeled hut, where I found no one home but a kitten, who gave me a thousand courteous caresses. The shepherd must have been standing somewhere far off, in the center of some pasturage, with his dogs sitting at various removes from the sheep. By day, this shepherd gathered simples, for he was an herbalist and a sorcerer; by night, he gazed at the stars, for he was a Chaldean shepherd.
I stopped again, half a league or so from the shepherd’s hut, in a grazing ground frequented by tragelaphi: hunters were moving along the far edge. A spring bubbled up at my feet; at the bottom of this spring, in this very forest, Orlando innamorato, not furioso, beheld a crystal palace thronged with ladies and knights. If the paladin who went down among the glittering naiads had at least left the Golden Bridle at the water’s edge, or if Shakespeare had sent me Rosalind and the exiled Duke, they might have been most helpful to me.[3]
Having caught my breath, I continued on my way. My enfeebled thoughts floated on a wave of delirium that was not without charm: my old ghosts, hardly more substantial now than an evening shadow three-quarters effaced, were gathering around me to bid me adieu. I no longer had the power of memory. At an indeterminate distance, intermingled with strange apparitions, I seemed to see the airy forms of my family and friends. When I sat down against a milestone, I believed I could see their faces smiling at me from the doorways of distant cabins, in the blue smoke that drifted from the thatched roofs of cottages, in the treetops, in the transparent edges of the clouds, in the luminous sheaves of the sun that dragged its rays over the heather like a golden rake. These visions came from the Muses, who had come to bear witness to a poet’s death: my grave, dug with the lintels of their lyres beneath an Ardennes oak, would have been well suited to a soldier and a traveler. A few grouse lost in the hare’s form beneath the privet, made, together with the insects, some small noise around me: lives as slight and desolate as my own. I found I was no longer able to walk; I felt sicker than ever. The smallpox had come back to suffocate me.
Toward the end of the day, I was lying supine against the earth, in a ditch, my head propped on Atala’s rucksack, my crutch at my side, my eyes fixed on the sun whose gaze was going out with my own. With every sweet thought I could summon, I saluted this star that had shone upon my first youth in my father’s lands. Now we were going to rest together: she, to rise in all her glory; I, in all likelihood, never to wake again. I lost consciousness in a prayerful haze. The last sounds I heard were the fall of a leaf and the whistling of a bullfinch.