Volume 2 — BOOK VIII[146] (continued 2)

"For the rest, I am again speaking of you in the accents of friendship, and I wish from the bottom of my heart that the hopes of future usefulness which they may place in me may revive the favourable dispositions which they showed me in this matter, and which are so certainly due to your person and your great talents. Work, work, my dear friend, and become illustrious. You have it in your power: the future is in your hands. I hope that the word so often given by the 'controller-general of finance' has been at least in part redeemed. That part consoles me, for I cannot bear the thought of a fine work delayed for the sake of a little assistance. Write to me; let our hearts be in communication, let our muses remain ever friends. Do not doubt but that, when I am able to move about freely in my country, I shall prepare a hive and flowers for you beside my own. My attachment is unalterable. I shall be alone so long as I am not with you. Talk to me of your work. I want to gladden you in conclusion: I wrote half of a new canto on the banks of the Elbe, and I am better pleased with it than with all the rest.

"Farewell, I embrace you tenderly, and am your friend.

"Fontanes."

Fontanes tells me that he wrote verses on changing the spot of his banishment. One can never take everything from the poet: he takes his lyre with him. Leave the swan his wings; each evening unknown streams will re-echo the melodious plaints which he would rather have sung to Eurotas.

"The future is in your hands": did Fontanes speak truly? Am I to congratulate myself on his prophecy? Alas! That promised future is already past: shall I have another?

*

Death of Fontanes.

This first and affectionate letter from the first friend whom I had in my life, the friend who walked by my side for twenty-three years from the date of that letter, reminds me painfully of my gradual isolation. Fontanes is no more; a profound sorrow, the tragic death of a son, cast him into an untimely grave. Almost all the persons of whom I have spoken in these Memoirs have disappeared; I am keeping an obituary register. A few years more and I, doomed to catalogue the dead, shall leave none to write my name in the book of the departed.

But if it must be that I remain alone, if not one being who has loved me is to stay by me to lead me to my last resting-place, I have less need than another of a guide: I have inquired the road, I have studied the places through which I should have to pass; I wished to see what happens at the last moment. Often, by the side of a pit into which a coffin was being lowered with ropes, I have heard the death-rattle of those ropes; next, I have caught the sound of the first spadeful of earth falling on the coffin: at each new spadeful the hollow sound decreased; the earth, as it filled up the vault, gradually drove the eternal silence to the surface of the grave.

Fontanes, you wrote to me, "Let our muses remain ever friends:" you have not written to me in vain.