fed us
suffered its anguish?

Nothing can express the gestation of the mind or the thrills which
future great works impart to those who carry them; but we love to see
the spot where we know they were conceived and lived, as if it had
retained something of the unknown ideal which once vibrated there.

His room! his room! his childhood's poor little room! It was here that
he was tormented by vague phantoms which beckoned to him and clamoured
for birth: Attala shaking the magnolias out of her hair in the soft
breeze of Florida, Velleda running through the woods in the moonlight,
Cymodocee protecting her white bosom from the claws of the leopards, and
frail Amelie and pale Rene!

One day, however, he tears himself away from the old feudal homestead,
never to return. Now he is lost in the whirl of Paris and mingles with
his fellow-men; and then he feels an impulse to travel and he starts
off.

I can see him leaning over the side of the ship, I can see him looking
for a new world and weeping over the country he has left. He lands; he
listens to the waterfalls and the songs of the Natchez; he watches the
flowing rivers and the bright scales of the snakes and the eyes of the
savages. He allows his soul to be fascinated by the languor of the
Savannah. They tell each other of their native melancholy and he
exhausts its pleasures as he exhausted those of love. He returns,
writes, and everyone is carried away by the charm of his magnificent
style with its royal sweep and its supple, coloured, undulating phrase,
as stormy as the winds that sweep over virgin forests, as brilliant as
the neck of a humming-bird, and as soft as the light of the moon shining
through the windows of a chapel.

He travels again; this time he goes to ancient shores; he sits down at
Thermoplyae and cries: Leonidas! Leonidas! visits the tomb of Achilles,
Lacedaemon, and Carthage, and, like the sleepy shepherd who raises his
head to watch the passing caravans, all those great places awake when he
passes through them.

Banished, exiled, laden with honours, this man who had starved in the
streets will dine at the table of kings; he will be an ambassador and a
minister, will try to save the tottering monarchy, and after seeing the
ruin of all his beliefs, he will witness his own glorification as if he
were already counted among the dead.

Born during the decline of one period and at the dawn of another, he was
to be its transition and the guardian of its