not the question.
The imagination can produce just as fine things without them; it is
a power wholly creative; the imaginary beings which it animates are
endowed with life as truly as the real beings which it brings to life
again. We believe in Othello as we do in Richard III., whose tomb is
in Westminster; in Lovelace and Clarissa as in Paul and Virginia, whose
tombs are in the Isle of France. It is with the same eye that we must
watch the performance of its characters, and demand of the Muse only her
artistic Truth, more lofty than the True--whether collecting the traits
of a character dispersed among a thousand entire individuals, she
composes from them a type whose name alone is imaginary; or whether she
goes to their tomb to seek and to touch with her galvanic current the
dead whose great deeds are known, forces them to arise again, and drags
them dazzled to the light of day, where, in the circle which this fairy
has traced, they re-assume unwillingly their passions of other days, and
begin again in the sight of their descendants the sad drama of life.

ALFRED DE VIGNY.

1827.

CINQ-MARS

BOOK 1.

CHAPTER I. THE ADIEU

Fare thee well! and if forever,
Still forever fare thee well!

LORD BYRON.

Do you know that charming part of our country which has been called the
garden of France--that spot where, amid verdant plains watered by wide
streams, one inhales the purest air of heaven?

If you have travelled through fair Touraine in summer, you have no doubt
followed with enchantment the peaceful Loire; you have regretted the
impossibility of determining upon which of its banks you would choose to
dwell with your beloved. On its right bank one sees valleys dotted with
white houses surrounded by woods, hills yellow with vines or white
with the blossoms of the cherry-tree, walls covered with honeysuckles,
rose-gardens, from which pointed roofs rise suddenly. Everything reminds
the traveller either of the fertility of the land or of the antiquity
of its monuments; and everything interests him in the work of its busy
inhabitants.

Nothing has proved useless to them; it seems as if in their love for
so beautiful a country--the only province of France never occupied by
foreigners--they have determined not to lose the least part of its soil,
the smallest grain of its sand. Do you fancy that this ruined tower is
inhabited only by hideous night-birds? No; at the sou