Then, Edgar, I was to find you again, and it was the spot of my birthplace, the paternal acres which in our common land seem to us a second country.

The night was dark, no moon, no stars; I had just left Grenoble and was passing through Voreppe, a little village not without some importance because in the neighborhood of the Grande Chartreuse, which, at this season of the year, attracts more curiosity-hunters than believers—­suddenly the horses stopped, I heard a rumbling noise outside, and a crimson glare lighted up the carriage windows.  I might have taken it for sunset, if the sun had not set long since.

I got out and found the only inn of the village on fire; great was the confusion in the small hamlet, there was a general screaming, struggling and running about.  The innkeeper with his wife, children, and servants emptied the stables and barns.  The horses neighed, the oxen bellowed, and the pigs, feeling that they were predestined to be roasted anyhow, offered to their rescuers an obstinate and philosophical resistance.

Meantime the notables of the place, formed in groups, discussed magisterially the origin of a fire which no one made an effort to stay.  Left alone, it brightened the night, fired the surrounding hills and shot its jets and rockets of sparks far into the sky.  You, a poet, would have thought it fine.  Sublime egotist that you are, everything is effect, color, mirages, decorations.  Endeavoring to make myself useful in this disaster, I thought I heard it whispered around me that some travellers remained in the inn, who, if not already destroyed, were seriously threatened.

Among others a young stranger was mentioned who had come that day from the Grande Chartreuse, which she had been visiting.  I went straight to the innkeeper who was dragging one of his restive pigs by the tail, reminding me of one of the most ridiculous pictures of Charlet.  “All right,” said the man, “all the travellers are gone, and as to those who remain—­” “Then some do remain?” I asked, and by insisting learned that an Englishwoman occupied a room in the second story.

I hate England—­I hate it absurdly, in true, old-fashioned style.  To me England is still “Perfidious Albion.”

You may laugh, but I hate in proportion to the love I bear my country.  I hate because my heart has always bled for the wounds she has opened in the bosom of France.  Yes, but coward is he who has the ability to save a fellow-creature, yet folds his arms, deaf to pity!  My enemy in the jaws of death is my brother.  If need be I would jump into the flood to save Sir Hudson Lowe, free to challenge him afterwards, and try to kill him as I would a dog.