ges, or had been
laid in the graves by the road-side, and I was now the only commandant.
Perhaps even this circumstance was the means of saving my life. My new
responsibility compelled me to make some exertion; and I felt that, live
or die, I might still earn an honourable name. Even in those darkest hours,
the thought that Clotilde might ask where and how I finished my
ill-fortuned career, and perhaps give a moment's sorrow to one who
remembered her to the last, had its share in restoring me to a sense of
the world. In that sort of fond frenzy, which seems so fantastic when it
is past, but so natural, and is actually so irresistible while it is in
the mind, I wrote down my feelings, wild as they were--my impossible hopes,
and a promise never to forget her while I remained in this world, and, if
there could be an intercourse between the living and the dead, in that
world to which I felt myself hastening. I then bade her a solemn and
heartfelt farewell. Placing the paper in my bosom, with a locket
containing a ringlet of her beautiful hair, which Marianne had contrived
to obtain for me, the only legacy I had to offer, I felt as if I had done
my last duty among mankind.

Still we wandered on, through a country which had the look of a boundless
cemetery. Not a peasant was met; not a sound of human labour, joy or
sorrow, reached the ear; not a smoke rose from mansion or cottage; all was
still, except when the wind burst in bitter gusts over the plain, or the
almost ceaseless rain swelled into sheets, and sent the rivers roaring
down before us. If the land had never been inhabited, or had been swept of
its inhabitants by an avenging Providence, it could not have been more
solitary. I never conceived the idea of the wilderness before. It was the
intensity of desolation.

We seemed even to make no progress. We began to think that the scene would
never change. But one evening, when the troop had lain down under the
shelter of a knoll, my sergeant, a fine Hungarian, whose eyes had been
sharpened by hussar service on the Turkish border, aroused me, saying that
he had discovered French horse-tracks in advance of us. We were all
instantly on the alert, the horse-tracks were found to be numerous, and it
was evident that a strong body of the enemy's cavalry had managed to get
in between us and the army. It is true that there was a treaty, in which
the unmolested movement of the duke was an article. But, it might have
been annulled;