Alphonse de Lamartine

Travels in the Near East (Voyage en Orient, 1832-33)

Part II: Malta and Athens

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Memories, Impressions, Thoughts, and Places Visited During a Voyage to the Orient - Continued.
Arrival in Malta.
Athens.

Memories, Impressions, Thoughts, and Places Visited During a Voyage to the Orient - Continued

Arrival in Malta

July 22, 1832.

As we approach Malta, the low coast rises and becomes more rugged; but the aspect is bleak and barren. Soon we see the fortifications, and the bays formed by the harbours; a swarm of small boats, each manned by two oarsmen, emerge from these bays and rush towards the bow of our ship; the sea is rough, and the waves sometimes plunge them into the deep furrow we are ploughing in the sea; they seem about to be swallowed up; the tide lifts them, they race in our wake, they dance at the sides of the brig, they throw us light cables to tow us into port.

Their pilots inform us of the ten-day quarantine in force, and lead us, beneath the high fortifications of the city of Valletta, to the anchorage reserved for this. — The French consul, Dominique Miége, informs the governor, Sir Frederick Cavendish Ponsonby, of our arrival; he convenes the Council for Public Health, and reduces our quarantine to three days.

We are granted permission to take to a boat to shore, so as to stroll, in the evening, along the canals that extend from the quarantine quay. It is a Sunday. The day’s scorching sun has set in a peaceful, narrow cove in the gulf behind our ship’s bow; the sea there is flat and gleaming, slightly leaden, absolutely the colour of freshly coated pewter. The sky above is an orange hue, slightly pinkish. The tint fades as it rises above our heads and vanishes to the west; to the east, the sky is a pale grey-blue, no longer the brilliant azure of the Gulf of Naples — though neither is it the deep black of the heavens seen above the Savoy Alps. The colour of the African sky partakes of the scorching atmosphere and the harsh severity of that continent; the reflected light from these bare mountains strikes the firmament with its dry heat, and the fiery dust of the arid desert sands seems to mingle with the air that envelops it, dulling the vault of Earth. Our oarsmen are slowly bringing us within a few fathoms of land.

The low, level shore that ends a few inches above the sea is covered, for half a mile, with a row of houses that touch one another and seem to have drawn as close as possible to the water’s edge, so as to breathe its coolness and listen to its murmur. Take any one of these houses, its appearance repeated in every other facade, terrace, and balcony — by multiplying one’s view of it, and recreating a scene containing five or six hundred similar houses, one will forge an exact memory of this landscape, unique in the eyes of a European who knows neither Seville, nor Cordoba, nor Granada: it is a memory that should be etched there in its entirety, with its customary details, so as to be rediscovered amidst the sombre, dreary uniformity of our Western cities. Such memories, recovered during our days and months of snow, fog, and rain, are like the glimpse of a serene sky during a long storm — a little sunlight in the eye, a little love in the heart, a ray of faith or truth in the soul, it is all one. I cannot live without those three consolations of our earthly exile. My eyes are born of the East, my soul of love itself, and my spirit is one of those that carry within them an instinct for light, an immediate inner certainty incapable of proof, but one that does not deceive, and that consoles. Here follows a description of the scene, and of such a house:

The light is golden, soft and serene, like that which emanates from the eyes and features of a young girl before passion has etched a line on her brow, or cast a shadow beneath her eyes. This light, spread evenly over the water, earth, and sky, clothes the yellow and white stone of the houses, highlights every detail of the cornices, the corner-edges, the terrace balustrades, and the carved balconies, clearly and sharply against the blue horizon, below the airy, quivering, uncertain and misty haze for which our Western world has claimed beauty in the arts, being unable to correct that flaw in its climate. This quality of the air, the white, yellow, golden colours of the stone-work, the vigour of the highlighted contours, grants even the smallest building in the South a firmness and clarity that reassure the eye, and strike it pleasingly. Every house looks not as if it were built stone by stone, and with cement and sand, but as if it were sculpted and alive, standing upright from the living rock, seated on the earth like a block emerging from its very heart, and as durable as the soil itself.

Two broad, elegant pilasters rise at the two corners of the façade; they reach only to a height of one and a half stories; there, an elegant cornice, sculpted from gleaming stone, crowns them and serves as the base for a rich and massive balustrade that extends along the entire ridge, replacing the flat, irregular, pointed, bizarre roofs that dishonour architecture and break every harmonious line of the horizon, which crown our strange assemblages of buildings that we call cities in Germany, England, and France. Between these two broad pilasters, which project a few inches from the facade, the architect has placed only three openings: a door and two windows. The door, tall, wide, and arched, does not present its threshold to the street immediately; it opens within an exterior porch that encroaches on the quay by seven or eight feet. This porch, surrounded by a sculpted stone balustrade, serves as both an outdoor sitting room, and the entrance to the house. Let me describe one of these platforms, and I will have described them all.

A couple of men, in white jackets, with dark faces and African eyes, each holding a long pipe, are reclining, nonchalantly, on a sofa made of rushes beside the door; before them, leaning gracefully on the balustrade, three young women, in various poses, silently watch our boat pass by, or smile at our foreign appearance. The dark-haired women are clad in a black dress that reaches only to mid-calf, and a white bodice with wide, flowing, pleated sleeves, while over the shoulders and head rises a black silk half-cloak similar to the dress, covering half the face, the shoulder, and the arm which holds the cloak in place; this cloak (the għonnella or faldetta), of light fabric billowing in the breeze, is shaped like a sail billowing on a skiff, and, in its capricious folds, sometimes concealed, sometimes revealed is the mysterious figure it envelops, which seems to delight in escaping it. Sometimes these women raise their heads gracefully as they speak with other young women who lean from the upper balcony, and throw them pomegranates or oranges; others converse with young men with long moustaches, and thick black hair, wearing short, pinched-in jackets, white trousers, and red sashes.

Seated on the parapet of the steps, two young priests, in black robes and silver-buckled shoes, converse familiarly and toy with large green fans, while at the foot of the last step, a handsome mendicant friar, barefoot, and with a bald, white forehead, his body enveloped in the heavy folds of his brown robe, stands like a statue of Mendicancy beside the threshold of a rich and happy man, and watches, with detachment and indifference, this spectacle of happiness, ease, and joy. On the upper floor, on a wide balcony supported by beautiful caryatids and covered with an Indian awning adorned with curtains and fringes, sits an English family, the fortunate and impassive conquerors of present-day Malta. Moorish wet nurses, with sparkling eyes and leaden, dark complexions, hold in their arms the beautiful children of Great Britain, whose hair is blond and curling, whose skin is pink and white, and who yet endure the hot sun of Calcutta as well as they do that of Malta or Corfu. Viewing these children in their black coats, beneath the burning gaze of half-African women, they seem like beautiful white lambs clinging to the teats of desert tigresses.

On the terrace, there is a different scene; the English and the Maltese share the space. On the one side, one sees young island girls each holding a guitar beneath her arm, strumming a few notes of an old national melody as wild as the climate; on the other, a beautiful young Englishwoman, leaning melancholically on her elbow, contemplating with indifference the life passing before her eyes, or leafing through the pages containing her country’s immortal poetry.

Add to all this the Arabian horses ridden by English officers, pacing, with flowing manes, the sand of the quay; the Maltese carriages, sedan chairs on two wheels, drawn by a single Barbary horse which the driver follows on foot at the gallop, his loins tied with a red belt with long fringes, his forehead covered with the net or red cap, hanging down to his waist, of a Spanish muleteer; the wild cries from the naked children who rush into the sea and dive beneath our boat, the songs of the Greeks or Sicilians aboard the vessels anchored in the neighbouring harbour, and answering each other in chorus from one deck to another; the monotonous and skipping notes of the guitar, forming a kind of soft hum of the evening air above all these high-pitched sounds; and you will have an idea of the quay of Msida (five or so miles from Valletta) on a Sunday evening.

July 24, 1832.

We entered the port of Valletta under ‘free pratique’ (clearance to enter a port without quarantine restrictions): the Governor, Sir Frederick Ponsonby, having returned from his campaign in order to welcome us, received us at the Grand Master’s Palace at two o’clock. — An excellent figure of an honest Englishman — probity is the hallmark of such men — elevation, gravity, and nobility, such is the type of the true English nobleman. We admired the palace — magnificent and dignified simplicity — beauty in its mass and an absence of vain decoration both inside and out — vast halls — long galleries — austere paintings — a wide, gently-rising, and resounding staircase — an armoury two hundred feet long, containing armour from every period of history relating to the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem (the Hospitallers) — a library of forty thousand volumes, in which we were received by the librarian, Giuseppe Giovanni Bellanti (brother of the artist Michele Bellanti), a young Maltese cleric, quite like the Roman Catholic priests of the old school: — penetrating and gentle eyes, a meditative and smiling mouth, a pale and articulate brow, elegant and rhythmic speech, a simple, natural, and refined politeness. We talked for a long time, for he is the kind of man best suited to a long, deep, and full conversation. There is in him, as in all those distinguished clerics I met in Italy, something sad, indifferent, and resigned, which partakes of the noble and dignified resignation of a fallen power. Raised among the ruins, indeed on the ruins, of a collapsed monument, they have absorbed its melancholy and indifference to the present.

‘How’, I said to him, ‘can a man like you bear the intellectual exile and seclusion in which you live, inhabiting this deserted palace, amidst these dusty books?’ ‘It is true’, he replied, ‘I live alone, and I live sadly; the horizon of this island is limited; the noise I might raise here with my writings can scarcely resonate far, and even that which other men make elsewhere barely reaches me. But my soul sees a freer and vaster horizon, beyond which my thoughts love to wander; we have here a beautiful sky above, warm air around, a wide and blue sea under our gaze; all this suffices for the life of the senses: as for the life of the mind, it is nowhere more intense than in silence and solitude. Life thus returns directly to its source, to God, without straying, without being altered by contact with worldly objects and concerns. When Saint Paul, bringing the fruitful word of Christianity to the nations, was shipwrecked in Malta (circa 60AD, on his way to Rome) and remained here for three months to sow his ‘mustard seeds’ (see Matthew 13: 31-32, and the gospels of Mark and Luke, for the parable), he did not complain of his shipwreck and his exile, which brought to that island the early knowledge of the Word and of divine morality: should I, then, born on these barren rocks, complain if the Lord confines me here to preserve his Christian truth in hearts where so many truths are on the verge of extinction? This life has its own poetry,’ he added, ‘when I am finally free from my efforts at classification and my catalogues, perhaps I too will write the poetry of solitude and prayer.’ I left him, with regret and a longing to see him again.

The Church of Saint John, the island’s cathedral, is full of character — all the gravity one can expect from such a monument in such a place — grandeur, nobility, richness. The keys of the island of Rhodes, carried to Malta by the knights after their loss of the former (in 1522), hang on either side of the altar, a symbol of eternal regret or hope forever disappointed. A superb vault, painted entirely by ‘the Calabrian’, Mattia Preti, is a work worthy of modern Rome in its finest artistic period.

Only one painting drew my attention, in the Chapel of the Election; it is by Michelangelo da Caravaggio, whom the knights of the time had summoned to the island to paint the vault of St. John’s. He undertook the work, though the impetuosity and irritability of his wild nature prevailed; he feared being constrained to a lengthy stay. He left his masterpiece here in Malta, the Beheading of St. John the Baptist (1608). If our modern painters, who pursue Romanticism systematically instead of embracing it naturally, viewed this magnificent work, they would find their supposed invention already realised. Here is fruit born of the tree, not moulded artificially in wax and painted in false colours; here are picturesque poses, an energetic composition, profound feeling, truth and dignity combined; vigorous contrasts, and yet unity and harmony, horror and beauty simultaneously — such is this painting. It is one of the finest I have ever seen. Here is the art the painters of the current school seek. It is here; it is found. Let them search no more. Nothing is new in Nature or the arts. Everything done has been done before — everything said has been said before — everything dreamed of has already been dreamed. Every century plagiarises past centuries; for all of us, artists or thinkers, perishable and fleeting, copy in different ways our immutable, eternal model, Nature — that thought, both single and diverse, of the Creator!

July 25, 1832.

From the summit of the observatory overlooking the Grand Master’s Palace, one obtains a panoramic view of the towns, ports, and countryside of Malta; bare, formless, colourless fields, arid as the desert; the city, like a turtle-shell washed ashore, seemingly carved from a single block of living rock; the varied scenes of terraced roofs at nightfall; and women seated on these terraces. This is how David caught sight of Bathsheba. Nothing is more graceful and seductive than those white or black figures, like shadows, appearing in the moonlight on the roofs of the multitude of houses. Women are only seen there, or in church, or on their balconies; all their speech and language is in the eyes; all love a long drawn-out mystery that words can in no way alter; a lengthy drama unfolds thus, and resolves itself without words. This silence, their appearances at certain times, these encounters in identical places, these intimacies of distance, these mute expressions, are perhaps the first and most divine manifestation of love, a feeling beyond words which like music expresses, in a language apart, what no language can express.

These aspects, these thoughts, rejuvenate the soul; they make one feel the one inexhaustible gift that God has bestowed upon the earth, and regret that the hours of life are so swift and so mingled with other things. Two feelings alone would suffice for human beings, even if they lived to the age of the ancient rocks: the contemplation of God and Love. Love and religion are the two thoughts, or rather the single thought, of the peoples of the South; they seek nothing else, these suffice. We pity them, yet we should envy them. What is there in common between our artificial passions, between the tumultuous agitations of our idle thoughts, and these two true thoughts that alone occupy the lives of these children of the sun: love and religion; one gracing the present, the other gracing the future?

And so, despite contrary prejudices, I have always been struck by the profound, rarely-troubled calm of the faces of the South, and by the repose, serenity, and happiness pervading the habits and visages of this silent multitude that breathes, lives, loves, and sings before one’s very eyes — their song the superfluity of happiness and impressions in an overflowing soul! People sing in Rome, Naples, Genoa, Malta, Sicily, Greece, Ionia, on the shore, on the sea, on the rooftops; one hears the slow recitative of the fisherman, the sailor, the shepherd, or the vague drone of the guitar on serene nights. It is the music of happiness, whatever any may say. They are slaves, you think? What is the nature of their lot? Slavery or freedom, misfortune, or happiness, according to conventional opinion! Misfortune or happiness are, more correctly, merely elements of our own thinking. What does it matter to these crowds, peaceful people who breathe the sea breeze or bask in the warm rays of the sun of Sicily, Malta, or the Bosphorus, whether the laws are made by a priest, a pasha, or a parliament? Does it change anything in their relationship with Nature, the only sphere that truly occupies their thoughts? No, undoubtedly not: every free, every absolutist society resolves itself into servitudes, more or less keenly felt. We are slaves to the variable and capricious laws we make for ourselves; they are slaves to the immutable laws of Nature that God imposes upon them. All of this, as regards happiness or misfortune, amounts to the same thing. Human dignity and the progress of human intelligence and morality? Surely not! Yet, one should examine the matter before making that declaration.

Take a hundred people at random from among these enslaved nations, and a hundred from among our so-called free peoples, and compare them. In which group is there more or less morality and virtue? — I know, but shudder to say it. — Whoever reads this later might suspect me of a bias toward despotism or a contempt for liberty. — They would be wrong! — I love liberty, that difficult and ennobling endeavour on behalf of humanity — just as I love virtue for its merit and not for its reward; but where it is a question of happiness, as a philosopher I examine the matter, and say, like Montaigne: What do I know? (‘Que scais-je?’ Michel de Montaigne’s motto) The truth is that our political issues, deemed so crucial in our high schools, and in our cafés and clubs, are petty enough when viewed from afar, from amidst the ocean, or high in the Alps, amidst the depths or the heights of philosophical and religious contemplation. — such issues interest only the few who have bread and time to spare — the greater majority of the people deal only with Nature. A beautiful, good, and divine religion: that is a form of politics the mass of people can utilise. The principle of life is lacking in our own, that is why we stumble and fall, and fall again, and fail to advance: — the breath of life is lacking in us; we create forms, but the soul does not descend to vivify them. Lord, breathe life into us, or we perish!

Malta, July 28, 29 and 30, 1832.

We have been obliged to remain at Malta due to Julia’s illness. She is quite recovered; we decided to journey to Smyrna (Izmir), halting at Athens on the way. There, my wife and child will settle, while I travel on, alone, through Asia, to visit other parts of the Orient. We weighed anchor and were about to leave the port when a vessel arrived from the Archipelago; it announced the capture of several ships by Greek pirates and the massacre of their crews. The French consul, Dominique Miège, advised us to wait a few days: Captain Edmund Lyons (later Admiral the Lord Lyons, Baron Lyons of Christchurch), of the English frigate HMS Madagascar, offered to escort our brig to Nafplio (also Nafplion or Nauplio), in the Morea, and even to tow us if the brig’s speed was slower than his frigate’s; he accompanied this offer with every obliging courtesy that could augment its value: we accepted; we departed on Wednesday, August 1st at eight in the morning. Hardly had we set sail when the captain, whose vessel was flying past us, furled his sails and waited for us. He had the crew throw a barrel overboard to which a cable was attached; we fished for the barrel and the cable, and followed, like a horse on a rein, that floating mass that carves the waves, and seems not to notice our weight.

I was unacquainted with Captain Lyons, who had been commanding one of the ships of the English Levant station for six years (previously as captain of HMS Blonde); I was not even known to him by name; I had not met him before in Malta, since he was in quarantine. And yet here was an officer of another nation, often a rival and hostile one to our own, who, at our first request, had agreed to slow his course by two or three days, subject his ship and crew to a manoeuvre that is often very perilous (that of towing another vessel), and hear them murmur perhaps at his unparalleled condescension toward an unknown Frenchman — all this out of a singular feeling of nobility of spirit, and sympathy for the anxieties of a woman and the suffering of a child. There is the English officer in all his personal generosity; there was the man himself in all the dignity of his character, and his mission. I shall never forget the gesture or the man; one who sometimes comes aboard to inquire about our well-being and to reiterate his pleasure in protecting us and seems to me one of the most loyal and open-minded people I have ever met. Nothing about him recalls the supposed roughness of the sailor, other than the firmness of a man accustomed to battling against the most terrible of the elements, which is admirably combined, in his still young and handsome face, with gentleness of soul, loftiness of thought, and grace of character.

Having arrived in Malta as strangers, we watched with regret as its white walls sank into the distance beneath the waves. Its houses, which we regarded with indifference just a few days ago, now possess a character and a language. We know those who live there, and benevolent glances follow the distant sails of our two ships from the heights of the terraces.

The English are a great people, both morally and politically; but, generally speaking, they are not a sociable people. Concentrated in the sacred and gentle intimacy of the family home, when they leave it, it is not for pleasure, nor the need to communicate their souls or spread their sympathy; it is custom, and vanity that guides them. Vanity is the soul of English society; it is vanity that constructs the cold, staid, and rigidly structured form of that society; it is vanity, after all, that has created all classifications of rank, titles, dignities, and wealth, by which only human beings are marked, and which have rendered the individual a complete abstraction, by considering only the name, the dress, the social form. Are the English otherwise in their colonies? I can well believe so, based on what we experienced in Malta. Upon our arrival, we received from all who comprise that fine colony the most selfless and cordial marks of interest and goodwill. Our stay there was nothing but a brilliant and continuous show of hospitality. Sir Frederick Cavendish Ponsonby (the brother of Lady Caroline Lamb) and Lady Emily Ponsonby, his wife, a couple destined to represent worthily everywhere, he, the virtuous and noble simplicity of the great English lords, she, the gentle and graceful modesty of high-ranking women in her country; the family of Sir Frederick Hankey (Chief Secretary to the Government at Malta); George Nugent-Grenville (the 2nd Baron Nugent, was appointed one of the Lords of the Treasury in 1830, but resigned his position in August 1832, to become Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands) and Madame Nugent (Anne Lucy, second daughter of Major-General the Hon. Vere Poulett), Sir Hector Greig (First Secretary to the Island of Malta, and Inspector of Quarantine), and Monsieur Frere (John Hookham Frere, diplomat and author) the former ambassador to Spain (in 1808) welcomed us less as travellers than as friends. We saw them for eight days; we may never see them again; but we carry away from their kind cordiality an impression etched on the heart. Malta was for us the colony of hospitality; something chivalrous and hospitable, reminiscent of its former owners, can be found in these palaces, now possessed by a nation worthy of the high rank it occupies in civilisation. One may dislike the English, but it is impossible not to respect them.

The government of Malta is harsh and narrow; it is not worthy of England, which taught liberty to the world, to maintain in one of its possessions two classes, citizens and freedmen. In the English colonies, the provincial governments and local parliaments would readily join forces with the noble representatives of the mother country. The seeds of liberty and nationality, respected among conquered peoples, are the source of future virtue, strength, and dignity for all humanity. The shadow of the English flag should cover only free men.

August 1, 1832, at midnight.

Having set sail this morning in heavy seas, we were met with absolute calm thirty miles out to sea; it still persists. There is no wind in the sky, save for a few stray breezes that occasionally rustle the sails of the two vessels; they cause these great stretches of canvas to give out a sonorous throb, an irregular beat, like the convulsive flapping of the wings of a dying bird; the sea is flat and polished like the blade of a sword; not a ripple; but, here and there, broad cylindrical undulations slide beneath the ship and shake it, like subterranean tremors. Then the entire mass of the masts, yards, shrouds, and sails creaks and shudders, as if under an excessively heavy wind. We have not advanced a single mile in an hour; The pieces of orange peel that Julia throws into the sea float perfectly still around the brig, and the helmsman gazes nonchalantly at the stars, distracted, his hand untroubled by the helm. We have released the cable that tethered us to the English frigate, because the two ships, no longer able to steer, risked colliding together in the darkness.

We are now about five hundred paces from the frigate. Lighted lamps shine through the gunports at the rear of the large and handsome cabins occupied by the officers that crown her stern. A lantern, which the eye might mistake for one of the lights in the firmament, is raised and attached to the tip of the mizzenmast, to rally us during the night. While our eyes are fixed on that floating beacon which is to guide us, delightful music suddenly rises from the luminous sides of the frigate, and resonates beneath its cloud of sails as if they were the sonorous vaults of a church.

The harmonies vary and follow one another for several hours, spreading far and wide, over this enchanted, slumbering sea, all the sounds we have heard in the most delightful hours of our lives. All the melodious reminiscences of our cities, our theatres, our pastoral airs, return to carry our thoughts back to times that are no more, to beings now separated from us by time or death!

Tomorrow, in a few hours perhaps, the terrible sounds of a hurricane that make the masts scream, the repeated blows of the waves on the hollow sides of the ship, the distress cannon, the thunder, the convulsive voices of two elements at war, and of the crew who fight against their combined fury, will take the place of this serene and majestic music!

These thoughts arise in every heart, and a complete silence reigns on both decks. Each person recalls some significant melody, deeply imprinted in their memory, that they once heard in some happy or sorrowful circumstance of their life; each thinks more tenderly of what they have left behind. Deep concern is expressed by the defiance with which human beings seemingly challenge the storm. It is such moments that one must register in one’s mind forever; they contain, those few minutes, deeper impressions, more colour, greater vivacity, than entire years spent amidst the prosaic vicissitudes of ordinary life. The heart is full, and longs to overflow. It is then that the most ordinary person feels themself a poet to the very core; it is then that the finite and the infinite enter through every pore; it is then that one wants to burst forth, or simply reveal, to a sympathetic heart or all humankind, in the language of the spirit, what is happening in the mind; it is then that one would improvise songs worthy of earth and heaven; ah, if only we possessed a language in which to do so! But there is no such language, especially among the French; no, we have not the language in which to utter philosophy, love, religion, or poetry; mathematics is the language of our people; its words are dry, precise, and colourless like the numbers themselves. Let us go sleep.

Same date, August 1, 2 a.m.

I cannot sleep; I have roused my feelings too much; I return on deck — let me paint the scene — the moon has disappeared beneath an orange mist that veils the endless horizon. It is indeed night, but night at sea, that is to say, roofing a pellucid element that reflects the slightest glimmer of the firmament, and which seems to retain a luminous impression of the day. The night is not black; it is pale and pearly like the colour of ice when a light shines on it from the side or is placed behind it. The air, too, seems deadened and asleep on this soft layer of waves. Not a sound, not a breath, not even the canvas flapping against the yards, not even a trace of foam murmuring in the brig’s wake or along the sides of the vessel, which also seems asleep.

I watch this mute scene of rest, emptiness, silence and serenity: I breathe the warm, light air my chest feeling neither heat, nor coolness, nor weight, and say to myself: ‘This must be the air that one breathes in the land of departed souls, in the regions of immortality, in that divine atmosphere where everything is immutable, voluptuous, perfect.’

Glancing to the other side of the ship, I realised I have forgotten the English frigate; I have been gazing in the opposite direction: she is there, on the waves, a few cables’ lengths from us. I turned around by chance, and my eyes fell on that majestic colossus, which rested motionless, immense, without the slightest sway of its keel, as if on a pedestal of polished marble.

The gigantic, black mass of the ship’s hull stood out in dark relief against its silvery base, silhouetted against the blue of the sky and the sea; not a breath of life escaped that majestic edifice; nothing indicated, either to the eye or the ear, that it was animated by so much intelligence and life, populated by so many thoughtful and active beings. One might have mistaken it for one of those great storm-wrecked vessels, adrift without a rudder, which the navigator encounters with dread in the solitude of the Southern Sea, aboard which not a voice remains to say how she perished; a floating register of death, without a name or date, that the sea leaves to float awhile before engulfing her completely.

Above the dark hull of the frigate, its cloudy sails, pyramiding around the masts, were clustered picturesquely. They rose story upon story, yard upon yard, forming a thousand bizarre shapes, unfurled in broad, deep folds, like the many tall turrets of a Gothic castle grouped around its keep; they lacked the movement and the brilliant, golden colour of sails seen from afar on the waves during the day; rather, motionless, dull, and tinged by the night with a slate grey, they resembled an immense flock of bats, or unknown seabirds, huddled together on a gigantic tree, hanging from its bare branches in the moonlight of a winter night. The shadow of this cloud of sails descended upon us from above, obscuring half the horizon. Never did a more colossal or stranger vision appear to Ossian’s mind in a dream of ocean: all the poetry of the waves was there. The blue line of the horizon merged with that of the sky; everything above and below it had the appearance of a single ethereal fluid in which we swam. All this bodiless and boundless vagueness heightened the effect of the frigate’s vast aspect on the waves, and plunged the soul, along with the eye, into the same depths of illusion. It seemed to me that the frigate, the aerial pyramid of its sails, and we ourselves, were all together lifted, and borne away, like celestial bodies, into the liquid abyss of the ether, resting on nothing, hovering, due to an inner force, over the azure void of the universal firmament.

We spend several similar days and nights aboard; a flat calm, a fiery sky; immense waves roll from the Adriatic Gulf into the African sea: they are vast cylinders, slightly fluted and golden, at morning and evening, like the columns of the temples of Rome or Paestum.

I spend my days on the bridge; I write a few stanzas for Monsieur de Montherot (François de Montherot, politician and playwright) my brother-in-law (he had married Marie Suzanne Clémentine de Lamartine, who died in 1824) entitled ‘Thoughts at Sea’ (‘Pensées en Voyage’):

‘Ami, plus qu’un ami, frère de sang et d’âme’ etc.

Friend, more than a friend, brother in blood and soul’ etc

August 6, 1832, at sea.

On the 6th, at noon, we see, beneath the white clouds on the horizon, the uneven peaks of the mountains of Greece: the sky is pale and grey as if on the Thames or the Seine in October; a storm, at sunset, tears apart the black curtain of fog which trails over the sea; there are bursts of thunder, lightning flashes, and a strong breeze from the southeast brings us the freshness and humidity of our rainy autumn winds.

The gale blows us off course, and we find ourselves very close to the coast of Navarino (Pilos); we can make out the two islets that guard the entrance to its harbour, and the beautiful mountain with its twin peaks that crowns Navarino. It was there that the cannons of Europe once cried out to a resurrected Greece: Greece answered them poorly; freed from the Turks by the heroism of her sons, and by the assistance of Europe, she is now prey to her own ravages; she has spilt the blood of Capo d’Istra (Ioannis Kapodistrias, the Greek statesman, assassinated in 1831) who dedicated his life to the cause. That assassination of one of its foremost citizens ill-suits the beginning of a supposed era of renewal and virtue. It is painful that the thought of that great crime is among the first to come to mind when considering a land to which people sail seeking images of patriotism and glory.

As the ship approaches the Gulf of Modon (Methoni), the shores of the Peloponnese emerge and take shape; rising from the floating fog that envelops them. These shores, which travellers speak of with disdain, seem to me, on the contrary, exquisitely sculpted by Nature: great mountain ranges with graceful undulating lines. I can scarcely tear my gaze away. The scene is empty, yet brimming with the past: memory populates everything! This dark cluster of hills, capes, and valleys, which the eye can take in entirely, like a small island in the ocean, and but a dot on the map, has of itself produced more noise, glory, splendour, virtue, and crime than entire continents. This heap of islands and mountains, from which almost simultaneously sprang Miltiades, Leonidas, Thrasybulus, Epaminondas, Demosthenes, Alcibiades, Pericles, Plato, Aristides, Socrates, and Phidias; this land that devoured Xerxes’ army of two million men, that sent its colonists to Byzantium, Asia, and Africa, that created or renewed the arts of the mind and the manual arts, and brought them, in a century and a half, to a point of perfection such that they have become our models, and are no longer surpassed; this land, whose history is our history, whose Olympus is still the heaven of our imagination; this land from which philosophy and poetry took flight to illumine the rest of the globe, and to which they return ceaselessly like children to their cradle: lies there! Every wave bears me toward her; I can almost touch her. Her appearance moves me deeply, though far less than if all these memories had not withered in my mind, through having been endlessly rehashed before my powers of thought could comprehend them. Greece is to me like a book whose beauties are tarnished, because we have been made to read before we could understand.

However, all is not lost. There is still a lingering echo of all those great names in my heart; something holy, sweet, and fragrant rises, with that horizon, within my soul. I thank God for having seen, in passing through this land, this country of the doers of great things, as Epaminondas is said to have called his homeland.

Throughout my youth I longed to do what I am now doing, to see what I now see. A desire finally fulfilled brings happiness. At the sight of these long-dreamed-of horizons, I experience what I have felt all my life in the possession of anything I have ardently desired: a calm, contemplative pleasure that turns inward, a repose of mind and soul that pauses for a moment, and says to itself: ‘Let us rest here, and enjoy!’ But ultimately, such joys of the mind and imagination are cold. The happiness of the soul is absent; which lies only in love, human or divine but always love.

Same day, August 6, in the evening.

We are sailing pleasantly, with a favourable wind driving us on, between Cape Matapan and the island of Cythera.

A Greek pirate ship approached us, while the frigate was a few leagues out at sea in pursuit of a suspicious vessel. This Greek brig was only a cable’s length away. We all went on deck: we prepared for battle; our cannons were loaded; the deck was littered with muskets and pistols. The captain ordered the commander of the Greek brig to withdraw. The latter, seeing twenty-five well-armed men on our deck, decided not to risk boarding. He moved away, then returned a second time, and almost reached us. We were about to open fire. He withdrew again, in apology, remaining within pistol range for fifteen minutes. He claimed that his, like ours, was a merchant ship returning to the Archipelago. I observed his crew. Never have I seen faces in which crime, murder, and plunder were written in more hideous characters.

Fifteen or twenty bandits could be seen, some in Albanian dress, others in tattered European clothing, sitting, lying down, or moving about along the sides of the ship. All were armed with pistols and daggers whose handles gleamed with silver engraving. There was a fire lit on deck, over which two elderly women were frying fish. A young girl of fifteen or sixteen appeared from time to time among these hags: a heavenly figure, an angelic apparition, amidst these infernal characters. One of the old women pushed her back several times into the hold; she retired weeping. An argument apparently broke out between some of the crew: two daggers were drawn and brandished. The captain, who was casually smoking his pipe, leaning on the helm, threw himself between the two bandits, knocking one of them to the deck: all was calm; the young Greek woman returned, wiping her eyes with the long braids of her hair; she seated herself at the foot of the mainmast. One of the old women knelt behind her, and combed the girl’s long hair. The wind freshened. The Greek pirate vessel set course for Cythera, and in the blink of an eye was cloaked by it sails, and soon no more than a white speck on the horizon.

We put out to sea to wait for the frigate, which fired a cannon to warn us. Within a few hours, she reached us. The other Greek pirate ship she was pursuing had escaped. It had entered one of the inaccessible coves along the coast, where the pirates always take refuge after such encounters.

Note from the same day, 11 a.m.

Whenever a powerful impression stirs my soul, I feel the need to express it, to write to someone what I feel, to find somewhere a joy reflecting my joy, an echo of what has struck me. Isolated feeling is not complete: mankind was created twofold.

Alas! When I look around me now, there is already so much emptiness. My daughter Julia, and my wife Marianne (Mary Anne Elisa de Lamartine) fill it by themselves; but Julia is still so young, that I can only tell her what is within her reach. That is, of the future, that will soon be the present for us all; but as to the past, where is it now? The person who would have enjoyed my happiness the most at this moment is my mother. In everything that happens to me, whether happy or sad, my thoughts involuntarily turn to her. I think I see her, hear her, speak to her, write to her. Someone we remember so vividly is never absent; what lives so completely, so powerfully within us is not dead to us. I still share with her, as I did during her life, all my impressions, which so quickly and entirely became hers; which were embellished, coloured, and illumined in her radiant imagination. An imagination that was always only sixteen years old! I seek it, in thought, in the modest and pious solitude at Milly (Milly-Lamartine), where she raised us, where she thought of me when the vicissitudes of my youth separated us. I see her there still, receiving, reading, and commenting on my letters, more intoxicated than I myself by my impressions. A vain dream! She is no longer there; she dwells in the world of realities; my fleeting dreams are nothing to her anymore: but her spirit is with me, it visits, it follows me, it protects me; my conversation is with her, in the eternal realms.

Before reaching maturity, I lost most of those I loved most, or who loved me most, here below. My life as regards love became concentrated; my heart now has only a few hearts to take refuge in; my memory has scarcely anything left but tombs to rest upon on Earth; I live more with the dead than with the living. If God were to strike such blows two or three more times around me, I feel I might be become detached entirely from my own self; for I could no longer contemplate myself, no longer love myself in others; and it is only there that it is possible for me to so love.

From a very young age, indeed, I loved my own self: childhood is selfish. It was fine then, at sixteen, at eighteen, when I did not as yet know myself, when I knew even less than I do about life; but now, I have experienced too much, known too much, to cling to this form of existence termed the human self. What is a man? And how foolish to attach the slightest importance to what I feel, think, or write! What place do I hold in the world? What void will I leave? One of a few days’ duration, in one or two hearts; a place in the sun; my dog seeking my presence; trees I once loved no longer witnessing my return to their shade: that is all! And all of that will pass away in turn. We must feel the futility of existence the day we are no longer needed by anyone, the moment when we can no longer be cherished. The only true reality, here below, I have always felt, is love, love in all its forms.

August 7, evening, 6 o’clock.

The lofty shores of Laconia are over there, a few cannon shots distant. We coast along in a pleasant breeze; they glide majestically before us. Leaning on the ship’s rail, my gaze absorbs those classic forms of the mountains of Greece, so as to lodge them in my memory: they unfold in waves of stone and earth; they rise, fall, and gather before me like the clouds of his soul’s homeland before the spirit of Ossian (the narrator and purported author of a cycle of epic poems presented in 1762/3, by the Scottish poet James Macpherson, as authentic translations of an original oral work by a legendary Gaelic bard). I have spent an hour or two silently reviewing the hills and recalling the sonorous names of this dead land. The Chromius (Taygetus) Mountains, where the Eurotas rises, thrust their rounded peaks into the air, like domes of gilded copper beneath the sun’s rays which strike them, and set the layer of clouds ablaze; they seem transparent as the air that envelops them, and from which they can hardly be distinguished; one would swear that one sees, through them, the glow of another sun that has already set, or the immense reverberation of a distant fire.

One of these mountains, among others, presents to one’s eyes the shape of an inverted crescent; it seems as if hollowed out, opening an aerial furrow for the sun, which sinks into the dusty golden vapour rising towards its disc. The nearer ridges, which the sun has already crossed, are tinged with purplish violet or pale lilac; they swim in an atmosphere as rich as a painter’s palette; closer still, other hills, already covered with the evening shadow, seem clothed in dense black forests; finally, those that form the foreground, those that we skirt and whose foam washes the cliffs, are plunged in darkness, the eye distinguishing only a few coves where the numerous pirates of these shores take refuge, and a few jutting promontories that bear, like Napoli di Malvasia (Monemvasia, on the east coast of the Morea, the site of ancient Epidaurus Limera), cities or fortresses on their steep summits.

These mountains, seen from the deck of a ship, at this very hour, when night drapes them in its thousand illusory colours, may be the most beautiful earthly forms my eyes have ever beheld; and then the ship is floating so gently, inclined like a mobile balcony over the sea that murmurs as it caresses its keel! The air is so warm and fragrant! The sails create such beautiful sounds with every breath of the evening breeze! Almost everything I love is here, tranquil, happy, safe, gazing at and enjoying the view beside me. Julia, and her mother, are leaning, close to me, against the shrouds. The child’s face radiates light at every fresh aspect, every name, every historical event her mother recounts; her eyes traverse with ours all these scenes whose marvellous dramas are already familiar to her. There is profound intelligence in her gaze; one sees there the vibrant, warm, rapid thought of a mind blossoming beneath the attentions of the ardent and loving mind of her mother; she seems to rejoice as much as we do, especially because she sees us engaged and happy: for this child’s soul lives on the sustenance ours provides; a tear comes to her eye if she sees me sad and dreamy; her features are a simultaneous reflection of mine, and our smiles of joy are always rewarded with a similar smile on her lips. How beautiful she is, then!

I have viewed, from every angle, the hills of Rome and Sabina; these surpass them in the variety of their formations, the majesty of their shapes, and the dazzling splendour of their hues; their lines are infinite; a volume would be needed to describe what a painting could convey in a glance. But to be seen in all their imagined beauty, they must be perceived at dusk; then they are clothed, as long ago, with forests and green pastures, rustic cottages, shepherds and their flocks; the shadows adorn them; they have no need, then, of the mists of the past, and the allure of distance, which the history of the people who graced them does, in order to capture and seduce our thoughts. Nothing should be seen in broad daylight, in the light of the present; in this sad world, only that which is ideal is truly beautiful. Illusion in all things is an element of beauty, except as regards love and virtue.

Same date, August 7, 8 p.m.

The breeze is cooler; we are sailing on a pretty sea before the mouths of various gulfs; we are approaching Cape San Angelo, ancient Cape Malea, we will soon reach it.

August 8th, in the morning.

The wind failed; we spent the night, without making any progress, a short distance from Cape Malea (Maleas).

Same day, August 8, noon.

The breeze is gentle and propels us towards the cape. The frigate towing us carves a flat track, murmuring ahead, while we fly in its wake through sprays of foam, which its keel throws off as it flees from us. Captain Lyons, who knows these waters, wishes us to enjoy the view of the cape, and the land, by passing no more than a hundred fathoms from the coast.

At the tip of Cape San Angelo, or Malea, which juts far out into the sea, begins the narrow passage that timid sailors avoid by keeping the island of Cythera to port. The cape is known as the Cape of Storms to Greek sailors. Only pirates dare to brave it, knowing they will not be followed there. The wind blows from this cape with such force and fury that it often sends stones hurtling from the mountain onto the decks of passing vessels.

On the steep, inaccessible slope of the rock that forms the cape’s tooth, one sharpened by storms and the breaking waves, chance has left three boulders, detached from the summit, suspended; their fall halted halfway down. They sit there forming something like a seabird’s nest leaning over the foaming abyss. In a patch of reddish earth, also held in place by these three uneven rocks, five or six stunted fig trees are rooted, their twisted branches with broad grey leaves hanging over the noisy chasm that swirls at their feet. The eye can discern no path, no passable escarpment by which one might reach this little mound of vegetation. However, a small, low house can be distinguished beneath the fig trees, a house as grey and sombre as the rock on which it rests, and from which it is, at first glance, indistinguishable. Above the flat roof of the house rises a small, empty pointed arch, like those above the doorways of Italian convents: a bell hangs from it; to the right, one sees the ancient ruin of some red brick buildings, in which three arches open; these lead to a small terrace that extends in front of the house.

Eagles would fear to build their nests in such a place, without a tree or a bush to shelter them from the ever-roaring wind, the eternal crashing of the sea, and the foam that licks ceaselessly at the polished rock, under a perpetually scorching sky. Yet a man has done what the birds have not: he has chosen it as his refuge. He lives there: we caught sight of him; he is a hermit. We rounded the cape so close to shore that we could make out his long white beard, his staff, his rosary, and his brown felt hood like those worn by sailors in winter. He knelt as we passed, his face turned toward the sea, as if he were imploring heaven’s aid for these strangers making their perilous passage. The wind, which bursts furiously from the gorges of Laconia began to resound in our sails, as soon as we rounded the cape causing the two ships to pitch and toss, and covering the sea with foam as far as the eye could see. A new gulf opened before us. The hermit, so as to follow our progress, climbed to the crest of one of the three summits; we could distinguish him there, kneeling and motionless, while we were still in sight of the cape.

Who is this man? He must have a soul thrice tempered, to have chosen this dreadful place; he must have a heart and senses hungry for strong, eternal emotions, to live in such a location, alone with the boundless horizon, the tempests, and the roar of the waves; his only spectacle from time to time a passing ship, its masts creaking, its sails in tatters, the distress cannon firing, and the sailors crying their peril.

These three fig trees, this small, inaccessible field, this spectacle of the elements’ convulsive struggle, these harsh, austere, meditative impressions on the soul — this was one of the dreams of my childhood and youth. By an instinct, later confirmed by knowledge of humankind, I never envisaged happiness anywhere but in solitude; only later did I envisage love there: now I would set, there, love, God, and meditative thought. But that wild platform, suspended between sea and sky, shaken by the ceaseless clash of air and waves, still charms my heart. Only to stand there, in the posture of a mountain bird, its foot yet touching the sharp peak of the rock, already beating its wings to soar higher into the realms of light! Any strong-minded person, in such a place, might well become a saint or a great poet; perhaps both. But what a violent upheaval that man’s life must have undergone for him to reject the company of others, his situation stirring such thoughts and longings in me, God knows! In any case, he cannot be ordinary, one who has felt the voluptuous need to cling like a hanging vine to the cliff-walls of such an abyss, and to sway there, passing his whole life amidst the tumult of the elements, the dread harmony of the storms, alone, seeking his ideal, before Nature and before God.

Same date. August 8.

A few leagues from the cape, the sea is more serene. Frail Greek boats, without decks, in full sail, pass by us in the deep valleys of the waves: they are full of women and children going to sell baskets of melons and grapes in Hydra. The slightest breath of wind makes them heel over until their sails are well-nigh submerged. To protect themselves from the waves, they have only a stretch of canvas that raises the exposed sides a few feet; they are often hidden from our view by the swell and the foam; they rise again like corks bobbing on the crests. What a life! It is the life of almost all Greeks: water is their element; they play amidst it as the children of our hamlets play amidst the heathland of our mountain slopes. The destiny of their country was written by Nature: it is the sea.

Same date. August 8.

There are the distant peaks of the island of Crete rising to our right; there is Mount Ida covered in snow, which appears from here like the tall sail of a ship on the sea.

We enter a vast gulf, the Gulf of Argolis, and sail downwind with the speed of a flight of gulls; the rocks, the mountains, the islands on both shores flee like dark clouds before us. Night falls; we can already see the end of the gulf, which is ten leagues distant; the masts of three squadrons anchored off Nafplion stand out like a winter forest against the sky and the plain of Argos. Soon the darkness is complete; fires are lit on the mountain slopes and in the woods, where the Greek shepherds are tending their flocks; the ships fire their evening cannons. We see all the gunports of these sixty anchored vessels gleam in succession, like the streets of a large city as its streetlights are lit; We enter this maze of ships, and anchor, in the middle of the night, near a small fort that protects the harbour of Nafplion (Nauplia) opposite the city, and in the shadow of the Palamidi Fortress.

August 9.

I rise with the sun, eager to see the Gulf of Argos up close at last — and Argos, and Nafplion, the present capital of Greece (from 1828 to 1834). Utter disappointment: Nafplion is a wretched little town built on the edge of the deep, narrow gulf, on a strip of land carved from the high mountains that cover this entire coast. The houses have no native character whatsoever; they are built in the style of the most common dwellings found in the villages of France or Savoy. Most are in ruins, and sections of walls, felled by cannon fire in the last war, still lie in the middle of the streets. Two or three new houses, painted in garish colours, adorn the quay, and a few cafés and wooden shops jut out on stilts into the sea. These cafés, and the balconies over the water, are crowded with several hundred Greeks in their most elaborate, but dirtiest, attire; they sit or lie on the planks or on the sand, forming a thousand picturesque groups. All the faces are beautiful, but sad and fierce; a weight of idleness hangs heavy on every visage. Neapolitan idleness is gentle, serene, and cheerful: it is the nonchalance of happiness; Greek idleness is heavy, morose, and sombre: a vice that exacts its own punishment. We turn our eyes away from Nafplion, we admire the beautiful fortress of Palamidi, which reigns over the entire mountainside which overlooks the city; its crenellated walls resemble the serrations of natural rock.

But where is Argos? A vast curve of bare and barren plain, intersected by marshland, is visible at the end of the gulf; it is bordered on all sides by grey mountain ranges. At the end of this plain, about five miles inland, one can see a hillock with a few walls on its fortified summit, with a ruined village sheltering in its shadow: such is Argos. Nearby is the tomb of Agamemnon. Yet what do I care about Agamemnon and his empire? I have lost the interest of youth in these historical relics, along with my urge for knowledge of them. I wish for nothing more than a valley in Arcadia; I prefer a tree, a spring beneath a rock, an oleander on the bank of a river beneath the collapsed arch of a bridge covered in vines, to the monuments of any of those classical kingdoms, which bring to mind only the feeling of boredom they inflicted on me in childhood.

August 10.

We spent two days in Nafplion; Julia is causing us concern again. We are staying here a few more days until she is completely recovered. We lodge at a shabby inn, opposite a Greek barracks. The soldiers lie about all day in the shade of the ruined walls, in the middle of the streets, and in the city squares; their costumes are rich and picturesque; their features bear the imprint of misery, despair, and all the ferocious passions that civil war kindles and foments in savage souls. Complete anarchy reigns at this moment in the Morea. Every day one faction triumphs over the other, and we hear the gunfire of the Klephts (anti-Ottoman insurgents) and the followers of Theodorus Kolokotronis (leader in the Greek War of Independence) who are fighting on the far side of the gulf against the government troops. With every messenger coming down from the mountains, we learn of the burning of a city, the pillaging of a plain, the massacre of a population, by one of the parties ravaging their own homeland. One cannot leave the gates of Nafplion without being exposed to gunfire. Prince Constantin Karadja (a minister of the Ottoman Empire, born in Nafplion) has kindly offered me an escort of his palikaria (a palikari was a Greek or Albanian soldiers in the pay of the Sultan of Turkey) to visit the tomb of Agamemnon, and Brigadier-General William Corbet (an Irishman who fought for the French under Napoleon), who commands the French troops, is willing to add a detachment of his soldiers; I refused; I did not want to expose, for the sake of vain curiosity, the lives of his men, which I would eternally reproach myself for.

August 12, 1832.

This morning, I attended a session of the Greek parliament. The chamber is a wooden shed; the walls and roof are made of poorly joined fir planks; the members of parliament are seated on raised benches around a sandy area: they are talking about their roles.

We sat down on a pile of stones at the door of the hall to watch them arrive. They appeared, one after another, on horseback, each accompanied by an escort of varying size, depending on the leader’s importance. The deputy dismounted, and his palikaria, laden with magnificent weapons, gathered some distance away on the small plain surrounding the hall. The plain resembled a military camp or a caravanserai.

The deputies’ demeanour is martial and proud; they speak without confusion or interruption, their voices moved yet firm, measured, and harmonious. They are no longer the ferocious figures that once daunted the eye in the streets of Nafplion; they are the leaders of a heroic people, still holding the rifles or sabres with which they have just achieved their liberation, and deliberating together on how to secure the triumph of liberty. Their parliament is a council of war.

Nothing could be simpler and yet more imposing than the spectacle of this armed nation deliberating amidst the ruins of its homeland, beneath a wooden vault erected in the open field, while the soldiers polish their weapons at the gate of this senate, and the horses neigh, eager to return to the mountain tracks. Among these leaders are admirable and heroic figures possessed of beauty and intelligence; these are the mountain dwellers. The Greek merchants of the islands are easily recognisable by their more effeminate features, and cunning facial expressions. The commerce and ease of the cities have stripped their faces of nobility and strength, imprinting them with the mark of vulgar skill and cautiousness that characterises them.

August 13, 1832.

A delightful party was given on board by Vice-Admiral Henry Hotham, who commands the English station in the harbour of Nafplio. He showed us round his three-decker, the Saint Vincent, and staged a mock naval battle for us. A ship manned by sixteen hundred men, and seen thus at the moment of combat, is a masterpiece of human ingenuity.

An excellent man, whose countenance and manner combined that rare blend of the nobility of the old warrior and the benevolent gentleness of the philosopher, a common characteristic of the handsome faces of men of the English aristocracy. He offered us one of his warships to escort us to Smyrna. I refused, and requested the like favour from Rear-Admiral Hugon (Gaud-Amable Hugon), who commanded the French squadron. He was willing to give us the brig Le Génie commanded by Captain Cuneo d’Ornano (Annibal Nicolas Cuneo d’Ornano); but the latter can only escort us as far as Rhodes.

I am dining at the home of Monsieur Achille Rouen, the French Minister to Greece; I myself held this post during the Restoration. He offered me his sympathy on not having retained it. Monsieur Rouen, who has spent all the dark days of Greek anarchy in Nafplion, longs for his release. He finds solace in the severity of his exile by welcoming his compatriots and by representing, with perfect grace and cordiality, the noble protection of France in a country whose past and future are to be cherished.

August 15, 1832.

I write little: my soul is withered and dreary like the dreadful land that surrounds us; bare rocks, reddish or black earth, dusty creeping shrubs, marshy plains in which the icy north wind, even in August, whistles over mounds of reeds: that is all. This land of Greece is nothing but the shroud of a people now; it resembles an ancient sepulchre robbed of its bones; the very stones are scattered and browned by the centuries. Where is the beauty then, of this much-vaunted Greece? Where is the golden and transparent sky? All is dull and cloudy, like a gorge in Savoy or Auvergne in the last days of autumn. The violence of the north wind, which drives noisy waves to the end of the gulf where we are anchored, prevents us from leaving.

August 18, 1832, at sea, anchored in front of the Gardens of Hydra (a feature on the island of Hydra, in the Saronic Gulf)

Finally, we set sail last night with a lovely southeasterly breeze; we slept in our hammocks. By seven o’clock we had left the gulf; the sea was calm and gently lapped against the sides of the brig. We were in the channel that runs between the mainland and the islands of Hydra and Spetses.

Around noon we were taken aback, near the mainland opposite Hydra. Fierce gusts of wind, coming from all directions, made manoeuvring perilous. Our sails were torn; we risked the masts breaking; for three hours we fought relentlessly against the furious gale; the sailors were exhausted; the captain was concerned for the ship’s fate; finally, we managed to reach the shelter of a high cliff, an anchorage known to sailors, opposite the charming hill called the Gardens of Hydra. We dropped anchor there, a mile from the coast, and not far from the brig of war Le Génie, which had taken a like course.

A day of rest on a still choppy sea, buffeted by the wind whistling through our masts. We went ashore by boat; this is the most beautiful spot we have yet visited in Greece: high mountains dominate the landscape; they still retain some layers of soil, with pale green meadows on their rounded slopes; they descend in soft contours, a few olive groves at their feet; further on, they extend in gentle slopes to the Hydra canal, looking like a broad river rather than an arm of the sea. There, one can rest one’s eyes on a few country houses surrounded by gardens and orchards; and on cultivated fields, clusters of chestnut and holm oak trees, flocks of sheep, and a few Greek labourers working the land. We set our dogs loose and hunted all day in the mountains, returning with game.

The town of Hydra, which covers the entire small island of that name, gleamed, white and resplendent on the other side of the channel, dazzling like stone hewn only yesterday. The island, from here, offers not an inch of soil to the eye: everything is stone; the town covers everything; the houses stand perpendicularly one upon another, a sanctuary for free trade and Greek opulence despite Turkish domination. One can measure the growth or decline of civilisation, as regards a nation, by the locations of its towns and villages: whenever security and independence are on the increase, the towns descend from the mountains to the plains; whenever tyranny and anarchy hold sway, they re-ascend the cliffs, or take refuge on the reefs. In the Middle Ages the towns of Italy, and those on the Rhine, and in France, were eagles’ nests perched on the summits of inaccessible rocks.

Same date. August 18.

The night is calm. We are spending the fine evening on deck. We will leave tomorrow, unless the northerly wind picks up again, and with the same force.

Athens

August 18, 1832, at sea.

We weighed anchor at three in the morning. A wind that rendered the vessel manageable allowed us to approach the tip of the continent jutting into the Saronic Gulf; but there a new storm assailed us, even more violent than the day before; we were instantly separated from the two ships sailing alongside. The waves were enormous; we rolled from one abyss to another, the yards drenched by the waves, and the foam leaping on deck. The captain tried stubbornly to double the cape; after several hours of fruitless manoeuvring, he succeeded: we were now in the open sea, but the wind was so strong that the brig was drifting considerably. We were forced to set a course for the mountains that rise on the western side of the gulf.

We are sailing at ten knots, in a damp mist, flakes of foam leaping above from the bow and both sides of the ship. From time to time the horizon brightens, and we glimpse Cape Colonna (Akra Sounio), whitening before us. We hope to anchor this evening below those temple columns, and pay homage to the memory of the divine Plato, who came to meditate, two thousand years before us, on that same promontory of Sounion (Sunium). My gaze never leaves the mountains of Attica on the horizon, from which the storm is driving us, towards the west. Finally, as the sun sets, the wind eases; off the island of Aegina, the captain tacks the ship. We reach well-nigh calm waters, sheltered by the island and the mainland coast, and at nightfall enter another region of the gulf formed by that island and the beautiful shores of Corinth. The sea is like a mirror, and we seem to be sailing on a waveless river, whose gentle current carries us to our anchorage. We drop anchor, just as night falls, in a vast enchanted lake, encircled by dark mountains, the rising moon casting its white glow on the Acropolis of Corinth, and the columns of the temple on Aegina (the Temple of Aphaia). We are a few hundred paces from the island, opposite gardens shaded by beautiful plane trees. A few white houses, gleam amidst the greenery. Rest and a quiet supper on deck, after a day of perils and fatigue; such is the life of travellers and of those on shore.

To our right lies the island of Aegina, a tongue of land, dotted with a few cypress trees, vines, and fig trees jutting from its steep dark slopes; the township terminates it; less oddly situated than the few Greek towns we have seen so far; the white-walled gymnasium, erected by order of Ioannis Kapodistrias, stands at its centre — a museum; I avoid visiting… I am tired of museums — graveyards of the arts. Fragments detached from their place, and purpose, and from the whole to which they belonged, are dead; dusty marble without life. — I go ashore alone, and spend two delightful hours in a garden of cypress and orange trees belonging to Georgios (Georgios Voulgaris, appointed by the Ottomans) the Bey of Hydra.

At ten o’clock, I return to the ship; as I descend the ladder, I find half the deck literally covered with heaps of watermelons and melons, immense baskets filled with bunches of grapes of all shapes and colours, some weighing three to four pounds, figs from Attica, and all the flowers that the season and the climate can provide. I am told that it was the governor of Aegina, Nicolas Scuffo, who, having learned the previous day from my Greek pilot of my passage through the gulf, came to visit me with a boat laden with this gift from his land. He recognised my name as that of a friend of Greece and brought me the first token of the prosperity that so many generous hearts have wished for her. He announced his return this evening. I requested a boat from Captain Cuneo d’Ornano and went to Aegina to offer my thanks to the governor; I met him at sea. We returned to my ship together. A distinguished man, and a witty conversationalist: we spoke of Greece, its future state, and its present crisis. I find with sorrow that the religious spirit is extinguished in Greece; the clergy, steeped in ignorance, is despised; the commercial spirit alone lacks sufficient virtue to revive a people; I fear for the latter: at the first European crisis, all will fall apart again. Greece is like Italy: composed of the most intelligent, courageous and brilliant individuals, but with no common bond — similarly, here there are Greeks, but no nation!

Having departed Aegina at noon on the 18th, we watched the sun descend into the golden valley that winds along the Isthmus of Corinth, between Acrocorinth and the mountains of Attica; it set that entire part of the sky ablaze, and it was there that, for the first time, we encountered that splendour of the firmament which lends its charm and glory to the Orient. Salamis, the tomb of Xerxes’ fleet in (480BC), lay some miles ahead: a grey coast, blackish earth, with no other attraction than its name — its naval battle and the memory of Themistocles prompts the traveller to salute it with respect. The mountains of Attica raised their dark peaks above Salamis, and to the right, on one of the receding summits of Aegina, the temple of Zeus Panhellenios (now attributed to the local mother-goddess Aphaia), gilded by the last rays of day, rose above this scene, one of the most beautiful as regards its natural setting, and cast a religious glow over the memory of past places and times. Humanity’s religious thought mingles with everything and consecrates everything; but the religion of the Greeks, a religion of the mind and imagination, not of the heart, makes no impression on me whatsoever: those gods of the people were merely a play of poetry and art, gods feigned and dreamt of — nothing serious, nothing real, nothing drawn from the depths of nature and the human soul, until Socrates and Plato! With them, begins the religion of reason! Then comes Christianity, which received from its divine founder the word and the key to human destiny! The ages of barbarity the Christian religion was obliged to traverse to reach us has often altered and disfigured his image; but if he had encountered Plato and Pythagoras, where would we not have arrived? We will still arrive there, thanks to him, through his being, and with him.

A settled calm causes us to sit for six hours motionless on the transparent sea, amidst the tinted vapours of the Saronic Gulf. The Acropolis, with the Parthenon, rises like an altar three leagues before us, detached from Mount Pentelicus, Mount Hymettus, and Mount Anchesmus (Lycabettus); indeed, Athens is an altar to the gods, the most beautiful pedestal upon which past centuries might well have placed a statue of ‘Humanity’! Today its aspect is sombre, sad, black, arid, desolate; a weight on the heart; nothing living, green, graceful, animated; nature exhausted, which only God could revive: liberty alone will not suffice. — For the poet or painter: ‘It is all done with!’ is inscribed on these barren mountains, on these capes whitened by collapsed temples, on those marshy or stony moors which retain nothing but their sonorous names. An apocalyptic land which seems stricken by some divine curse, by the words of some mighty prophet; a Jerusalem of the nations, in which there is no longer even a tomb; that is my impression of Athens and all the shores of Attica, the islands and the Peloponnese.

Arriving at Piraeus, at eight in the morning on August 19th, we dropped anchor. The horses were waiting for us on the beach; we mounted. I found a donkey, on which we placed a woman’s saddle for Julia; and we set off. For a mile or more, the plain, though possessed of a light, manageable, and fertile soil is completely bare and uncultivated. During the war, the Turks burned the olive-trees there whose groves extended to the sea; a few blackened trunks still remain. We entered however the olive and fig trees that encircle the group of hills comprising Athens like a verdant belt. We followed the still-evident foundations of the long wall, built by Themistocles, which connected the city to Piraeus. Several Turkish fountains, shaped like wells and surrounded by rustic troughs of rough stone, are placed at intervals. Greek labourers and a few Turkish soldiers lay around the fountains, drinking in turn. Finally, we passed beneath the high ramparts and the black rocks that serve as the pedestal for the Parthenon.

The Parthenon itself did not seem to grow larger, but rather to shrink, as we approached it. — The effect of this edifice, the most beautiful that human hands have erected on earth, in the judgment of every age, falls far short of expectations when seen in this light; and the pompous descriptions devised by travellers, painters, and poets cause a sadness at heart on viewing a reality so far removed from their images. It is not gilded as if by petrified rays of the Greek sun; it fails to soar in the air like some aerial island bearing a divine monument; it does not shine from afar over sea and the land, like a lighthouse proclaiming: ‘Here is Athens! Here humankind exhausted its genius and offered its challenge to the future!’ — No, none of that. Above your head, you see ancient, blackened walls rising irregularly, marked with white patches. These stains are marble debris from the monuments that already crowned the Acropolis before its restoration by Pericles and Phidias. These walls, flanked at intervals by other supporting ones, are crowned with a Byzantine square tower and Venetian battlements. They enclose a broad mount that once contained almost all the sacred monuments of the city of Theseus. At the end, facing towards the gulf, stands the Parthenon, or Temple of Minerva (the Roman Athene), that virgin goddess sprung from the mind of Jupiter (the Roman Zeus). This temple, whose columns are blackish, is marked here and there with patches of dazzling whiteness: they are the marks of the Turkish cannon fire, or the hammers of the iconoclasts. Its shape is a rectangle; it seems too low and too small for its monumental position. It fails to proclaim: ‘It is I, the Parthenon, what else.’ One must ask one’s guide, and even when he has answered, one still has doubts.

Further on, at the foot of the Acropolis, one passes beneath a dark, low gate, under which some ragged Turks are lying beside their rich and beautiful weapons, and you are in Athens. The first monument worthy of sight is the Temple of Olympian Zeus, whose magnificent columns rise alone in a deserted, bare square, to the right of what was once ancient Athens, a worthy portico to a city of ruins! A few steps from there, one enters the city, that is to say, an inextricable labyrinth of narrow paths strewn with sections of collapsed walls, broken tiles, stones and pieces of marble heaped pell-mell, now descending into the courtyard of a collapsed house, now climbing the stairs or even onto the roof of another. In these small, white, sordid hovels, ruins built of ruins, are dirty and foul dens, in which families of Greek commoners are crammed together and buried. Here and there, a few women with dark eyes and gracious Athenian faces, emerged onto their doorsteps, at the sound of our horses’ hooves, smiled at us with kind and astonished expressions, and greeted us with Attic courtesy: ‘Welcome to Athens, foreign lords!’

After a quarter of an hour’s walk, amidst the same scenes of devastation and the same heaps of collapsed walls and roofs, we arrived at the modest home of Monsieur Gaspari, the agent of the Greek consulate in Athens. I had that morning sent him a letter commending me to his kindness. I had no need of it: kindness is the hallmark of almost all our agents abroad. Monsieur Gaspari received us as newly-arrived friends; and while he sent his son to find lodgings for us in some house still standing, one of his daughters, a true Athenian lady, a beautiful and graceful image of the hereditary beauty of the women of her country, served us, with eagerness and modesty, iced orange juice in porous earthenware vases of antique shape. After refreshing ourselves for a moment in this humble refuge of simple and cordial hospitality, so sweet to encounter under a burning sky, two thousand miles from one’s homeland, at the end of a day of storm, sun, and dust, Monsieur Gaspari led us to the lower part of the city, descending amidst the same ruins, to a clean, white house, recently built, in which an Italian, M***, had established an inn. A few whitewashed and neatly furnished rooms, a courtyard cooled by a spring and a patch of shade, at the foot of the stairs a beautiful white marble lioness, abundant fruits and vegetables, honey from Mount Hymettus, a product maligned by Monsieur de Chateaubriand (see the ‘Itinerary, Paris to Jerusalem and Back: Part I, Greece’), Greek servants who understood Italian, attentive and intelligent, all of this was worth double the value to us, given the desolation and absolute nakedness of Athens.

You could not find better lodgings on the roads of Italy, England, or Switzerland. May this inn endure and prosper for the comfort and well-being of future travellers! But, alas! For forty-eight days, no stranger had crossed its threshold or disturbed its silence.

In the evening, Monsieur Gropius (Georg Christian Gropius, the archaeologist and diplomat) kindly made himself available to show Athens to us, and explain its sights. As fortunate as Chateaubriand had been, having been guided through the ruins of Athens by Monsieur Fauvel (Louis-François-Sébastian Fauvel, the French vice-consul at Athens, when Chateaubriand visited in 1806), we found in Monsieur Gropius a second Fauvel. Monsieur Gropius has been an Athenian for thirty-two years and, like his mentor, is building his retirement home among the ruins of a city where he spent his youth, and which he helps, as best he can, to emerge from beneath its poetic layers of ancient dust. Austria’s consul in Greece, and a man of erudition and wit, he combines the most conscientious and profound scholarship as regards antiquity with that naive good nature and unassuming grace of character which is the hallmark of the true and worthy children of learned Germany. Unjustly accused by Lord Byron in his biting notes on Athens (see ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto II’), Monsieur Gropius chose not to deliver offence for offence, nor seek to tarnish the memory of the great poet; he only grieved that his name had been repeated in edition after edition, and delivered into the hands of fanatics ignorant of antiquity; but he had no desire to justify himself, and when one is on the spot, and witnesses the constant efforts this distinguished man makes to restore a word to an inscription, a lost fragment to a statue, or a form and a date to a monument, one is sure that Monsieur Gropius has never profaned what he adores, nor made a vile trade of the noblest and most disinterested of studies, the study of antiquities.

In the company of such a man, days are worth years to an ignorant traveller like myself. I asked him to spare me the doubtful antiquities, the conventionally-celebrated buildings, the systematic tour of Athens’ sights. I abhor falsehood and effort in everything, but especially in displays of admiration. I wish to see only what God or man has made beautiful; beauty that is present, real, palpable, speaking to the eye and the soul, not the beauty of place and time: historical or critical beauty — that belongs to scholars — we poets desire beauty that is evident and perceptible — we are not beings made for abstraction, but for Nature and instinct: thus, have I traversed Rome many a time; thus, have I visited the seas and the mountains; thus, have I read the philosophers, historians, and poets; thus I have visited Athens.

It was a pure and lovely evening: the scorching sun descended, shrouded in a violet mist, above the narrow, dark ridge that forms the Isthmus of Corinth, and struck with its last rays of light the battlements of the Acropolis, which curve like the summit of a tower over the wide, undulating valley where the shadow of Athens sleeps silently. We went along nameless, untraceable paths, constantly passing through breaches in dilapidated garden walls, or roofless houses, or ruins heaped on the white dust that shrouds the Attic soil. As we descended toward the bottom of the deep, deserted valley shaded by the Temple of Theseus, the Pnyx, the Areopagus, and the Hill of the Nymphs, we discovered a wide expanse of the modern city unfolding to our left, though identical in every way to that which we had seen elsewhere. A confused, vast, bleak, disordered jumble of collapsed houses, sections of walls still standing, sunken roofs, ravaged gardens and courtyards, and piles of stones blocking the paths and tumbling about underfoot; all the colour of recent destruction, that dull, flabby, discoloured grey which lacks even for the eye the sanctity of bygone times, and the grace of ancient ruins. No vegetation, except for three or four palm trees like Turkish minarets still towering above the mutilated city; here and there a few houses of vulgar, modern design, recently rebuilt by Europeans or Greeks from Constantinople — houses as in our villages of France, or in England, with tall, graceless roofs, numerous narrow windows, and an absence of terraces, architectural lines, or adornment — lodgings for a single lifetime only, built to await their impending destruction; but none of those palaces a civilised people erects confidently for both themselves and future generations. Amidst all this chaos, a few rare sections of the Panathenaic stadium, a few blackened columns of Hadrian’s Arch and the Roman Agora, the dome of the Tower of the Winds, and Diogenes’ Lantern (the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates), catch the eye but fail to detain it. — Before us, standing out from the grey mound on which it rises, was the Temple of Theseus (formerly known as the Theseion, correctly the Hephaisteion), isolated, exposed on all sides, entire on its pedestal of rock — this temple, after the Parthenon, the most beautiful, according to the specialists, of those which ancient Greece erected to its gods and heroes.

Approaching the monument, convinced by what I had read of its beauty, I was astonished to receive only a cold and sterile impression; my heart sought to feel moved, my eyes sought to admire. Nothing. I felt only what one experiences at the sight of a flawless work, a negative pleasure, but a real and strong impression, a new, powerful, involuntary delight? No. The temple is too small; it is a sublime artistic toy! It is not a monument for the gods, for mankind, for the ages. I felt only a single moment of ecstasy: it was when, seated at the western corner of the building, on its last steps, my gaze took in at once, along with the magnificent harmony of its forms and the majestic elegance of its columns, the empty and darker space of its portico, and on its inner frieze the admirable bas-reliefs of the battles of the Lapiths and Centaurs; and above, through the central opening, the blue and resplendent sky, spreading a mystical and serene light over the cornices, and the projecting forms of the bas-relief figures: they seemed then to live and move. Great artists of every kind alone possess this gift of imbuing their works with life — alas, to their cost — on the Parthenon, for example, only two figures remain, Mars and Venus, half-crushed by two enormous fragments of the cornice that, in sliding, have lodged against their heads; but these two figures alone are worth more to me than anything I have seen previously in sculpture: they live as no canvas or free-standing marble sculpture ever has. One suffers, feeling the crushing weight upon them; one longs to relieve their limbs, which seem to bend and stiffen under this mass; one feels that Phidias’ chisel trembled, his hand on fire, when these sublime figures were born beneath his fingers. One feels (and this is no illusion, it is the truth, the painful truth) that the artist infused his own individuality, his own life-blood, into the forms, into the veins, of the images he created, and that it is the force of his own living being that we see pulsating in these living forms, in these limbs ready to move, in these to lips ready to speak.

No, the Temple of Theseus is not worthy of its renown; it does not live as a monument, it says naught of what it ought to say: it possesses beauty, undoubtedly, but a cold, lifeless beauty from which only an artist’s eye can remove the shroud and wipe away the dust. As for myself, I admired what I saw, but left without any wish to view it a second time. Yet, I have never left the beautiful stones of the Vatican colonnade, the majestic and colossal shadow of St. Peter’s in Rome, without a pang of regret, without the desire to return!

Higher up, after climbing a dark hill covered with reddish pebbles and thistles, one arrives at the Pnyx, the site of those stormy assemblies of the Athenian people, which witnessed their fickle ovations for their orators or favourites. Enormous blocks of black stone, some as large as twelve or thirteen cubic feet in size, resting one upon another, once supported the terrace where the people gathered. Higher still, at a distance of about fifty paces, one sees an enormous square block, into which steps have been carved doubtless used by the orator to ascend to this platform, which overlooked the people, the city, and the sea. It has none of the elegant character of the days of Pericles; it suggests the Roman style; it is a place full of memories. Demosthenes spoke from there, and stirred or calmed the ocean of people, more tempestuous than the Aegean whose murmur he could hear behind him.

I sat there, alone and pensive, and remained almost till nightfall, reviving effortlessly its whole story, the most beautiful, the most urgent, the most vibrant of all the tales of the sword or the word. What a brilliant age! And what genius, grandeur, wisdom, light, even virtue (for not far from there Socrates died) was displayed at that time! The present hour in Europe, and especially in France the vulgar Athens of modern times, resembles that hour. — But only the upper echelons in France and Europe evoke ancient Athens; the mass of the people are still uncivilised!

Suppose Demosthenes were to utter a speech in his fiery, sonorous, and colourful language at a popular gathering in one of our present-day cities: who there would understand it? Inequality of education, a barrier to enlightenment, is the great obstacle to our achieving a completely modern society. The people are the masters, but they are not fully capable of assuming the role; that is why they cause destruction everywhere, and raise nothing beautiful, lasting, or majestic anywhere! All the Athenians understood Demosthenes, grasped the language, and were able to comprehend the laws and the arts. They were an elite people; with the passions of the masses, but not their ignorance; they committed crimes, but avoided foolish actions. Such is no longer the case: that is why democracy, necessary in principle, seems impossible to achieve in practice among large modern populations. Only time can render people capable of governing themselves. Their education is provided by revolution.

The fate of the orator, individuals like Demosthenes or Mirabeau the only pair truly worthy of the name orator, is more appealing than that of the philosopher or the poet; the orator wields both the language in all its glory, and the power of the masses, whom he acts upon, and through. He is a philosopher-king, if he is a true philosopher, yet that dread weapon, the people, breaks in his hands, and wounds, and kills him; moreover, what he achieves, what he says, what he stirs in humanity — passions, principles, fleeting interests — all is transient, mortal, by its very nature. The poet, on the contrary, and by poet I mean whoever embodies ideas in bronze, in stone, in prose, or in rhythmic verse; the poet evokes only what is imperishable in Nature and the human heart; times pass, languages alter, but great poetry lives on, always complete in itself, always as fine and as new, always with the same power to sway the minds of its readers; the poet’s fate is less human, but more divine! The poet is therefore greater than the orator.

The ideal would be to combine both roles: none has ever done so; yet there is no incompatibility between action and thought in a mature intellect. Action is the daughter of thought, but human beings, jealous of all pre-eminence, never attribute more than one supreme power to the same mind. Nature is more liberal! People banish from the realm of action all who excel in the realm of thought and speech; they would never ask a Plato to make the laws, nor a Socrates to govern even a small town.

I sent word to Youssouf Bey, the Turkish governor of Attica (Youssouf was the cousin, sword-bearer, and deputy in Athens of Pasha Omar in Negroponte, an alternative name for Euboea), to ask permission to go up to the citadel with my friends and visit the Parthenon. He sent a janissary to accompany me. We left on the 20th at five in the morning, accompanied by Georg Gropius. All visitors are rendered silent before the incomparable impression of the Parthenon, that temple of temples built by Ictinus, commissioned by Pericles, and decorated by Phidias. It is the unique and exclusive epitome of beauty in architecture and sculpture; a sort of divine revelation of ideal beauty received one day by artists of excellence, and transmitted by them to posterity in blocks of imperishable marble and in sculptures that will live forever.

This monument, as it once was, entire in its setting, on its natural pedestal, its tiers adorned with unrivalled statues, its grandiose forms, its execution perfect in every detail, its material, its colour, its petrified light; this monument inspired admiration, for centuries, without ever sating it. Seen as I saw it, its majestic remnants mutilated by Theodosius I’s hammers (following his edict of 380AD), by Venetian bombs and the explosion of the powder magazine (in 1687) ordered by Francesco Morosini, and by the cannons of the Turks and the Greeks (in 1821-22), immense pieces of its columns lying on its platform, its capitals collapsed, its triglyphs shattered by Lord Elgin’s agents, its statues carried off in English ships (Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, a Scottish nobleman, diplomat, and controversial collector, procured the sculptures known as the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon, and from other structures on the Acropolis), what remained was still enough for me to feel it the most perfect poem written in stone on the face of the earth; and yet, I also feel it is too small; the effect fails, or is destroyed. I spent delightful hours lying in the shade of the Propylaea, my eyes fixed on the crumbling pediment of the Parthenon. I could feel all of antiquity in what is the most divine of its works, a feeling that renders the rest scarcely worth the words with which one might describe them!

The Parthenon’s appearance, more than its history, reveals the colossal grandeur of a people. Pericles’ name is undying! What a civilisation! Superhuman indeed, that century which found a great man to demand, an architect to conceive, a sculptor to adorn it, others to execute statues, workmen to cut the stone, and a people ready to pay for its construction, and with eyes to understand and admire such an edifice (the Parthenon was built between 447 and 432 BC, with the main construction effort completed by 438 BCE, and sculptural work continuing until 432). When will there be again such an era and such a people? Nothing suggests it. As mankind ages, the species is losing its vitality, its verve, the disinterestedness necessary for true art! The Propylaea and the Temple of Erechtheus (the Erechtheion or Temple of Athena Polias) with its Caryatids, stand beside the Parthenon. Masterpieces in themselves, but subsumed within this masterpiece; the mind, struck too forcefully by the sight of the greatest of these edifices, no longer has the strength to admire the others; one must view them and then depart — weeping less over the devastation of this superhuman work of humankind than over our inability to ever equal such sublimity and harmony.

Such are the revelations that heaven does not grant twice to Earth: like the Book of Job, or the Song of Songs, Homer’s epics, or the music of Mozart! They are created, seen, heard; then no longer created, no longer seen, no longer heard, till the end of time. Blessed are they through whom the divine breath passes! They die, but they have proven to humankind what it is capable of, while God calls them to Himself so they might celebrate Him elsewhere and in language even more powerful! I wandered all day, mute, among those ruins, and I returned, my eyes dazzled by forms and colours, my heart full of emotion and admiration! Gothic art is beautiful; but it lacks order and light — order and light, those two principles of all eternal creation! Farewell forever to the Gothic.

Of all the forms of literature, the most difficult, in my opinion, is translation. Now, to travel is also to translate; it is to convey to the eye, the mind, the soul of the reader, the places, colours, impressions, and feelings that Nature or human monuments grant the traveller. One must know how to look, feel, and express: and express in what manner? Not with lines and colours, like the painter, which is relatively easy and straightforward; not with sounds, like the musician; but with ideas, with words that are neither sounds, lines, nor colours. Such were the reflections that filled my thoughts, seated on the steps of the Parthenon, with Athens, the olive groves of Piraeus, and the blue of the Aegean Sea before my eyes, and over me the majestic shadow of the frieze of the temple of temples. I wished to bear away, within myself, a living memory, a written memory of that moment in my life! I felt that the chaos of marble, so sublime, so picturesque in my eyes, would vanish from memory, and I wished to be able to retrieve it once more amidst the commonplaces of my future life. Let me attempt a description, then: it will not be the Parthenon itself, but it will at least be a shadow of that great shadow which cloaked me today.

From the midst of the ruins that were once Athens, a city which the cannons of the Greeks and Turks have pulverised, scattering debris throughout the valley and over the two hills where the city of Athene once stood, a mount rises, sheer on all sides. Enormous walls encircle it; and, covered at their base by fragments of white marble, higher up by the debris of ancient friezes and columns, they terminate here and there in Venetian battlements. This mount resembles a magnificent pedestal carved by the gods themselves so as to set their altars there. Its summit, levelled to receive the bases of these temples, is scarcely more than five hundred feet long by two to three hundred feet wide. It overlooks all the hills that formed the contours of ancient Athens; it overlooks the valleys of Pentelicus, the course of the Ilissos, the plain of Piraeus, the chain of valleys and peaks that curves and extends as far as Corinth, and finally the sea dotted with the islands of Salamis and Aegina, on whose summits the pediments of temples of Zeus Panhellenios gleam. The view is still admirable today, even though all the hills are bare and reflect, like polished bronze, the reverberating rays of the Attic sun. But what a horizon Plato must have had before his eyes, when Athens, alive and clothed in its thousand lesser temples, hummed at his feet like an overflowing beehive; when the great wall of Piraeus traced out a bustling avenue of stone and marble all the way to the sea, along which the population of Athens passed and repassed endlessly like waves; when Piraeus itself and the port of Phalerum, and the sea of Athens, and the Gulf of Corinth, were covered with forests of masts or sparkling sails; when the slopes of all the mountains, from those that hide Marathon to the Acropolis of Corinth, together forming an amphitheatre, a semicircular arc ninety miles long, were clothed in forests, pastures, olive-trees and vines, and when villages and towns decorated the splendid belt of mountains on all sides!

From here, I can view the thousand paths that descend from those mountains, traced on the slopes of Hymettus, through all the winding gorges and valleys, which, like stream beds, flow towards Athens. I can hear again the noises rising from the city, the hammer blows of the stonecutters in the marble quarries of Mount Pentelicus, the rumble of blocks falling down its precipitous slopes, and all those sounds that fill the outskirts of a great capital with life and noise. On the city side, I can almost see the religious population of Athens ascending the Sacred Way, carved into the very side of the Acropolis, coming to implore Athene’s aid, and to burn incense to all the well-known deities in the very place where I now sit, and where I breathe only the dust of their temples.

Let us imagine the Parthenon rebuilt: it is easy, the temple has lost only its frieze and its interior compartments. The exterior walls, sculpted by Phidias, and the columns, or fragments of those columns, are still here. The Parthenon was entirely built of white marble, called Pentelic marble, named after the nearby mountain from which it was quarried. It was designed as a rectangle, surrounded by a peristyle of forty-six Doric columns. Each column is six feet in diameter at its base and thirty-four feet high. The columns rest directly on the temple pavement and have no bases. At each end of the temple, there is, or once was, a portico of six columns. The overall dimensions of the building were two hundred and twenty-eight feet long by one hundred and one feet wide; its height was sixty-five feet. It presented to the eye only the majestic simplicity of its architectural lines. It was a single idea captured in stone, unified and intelligible at a glance, like all ancient thought. One had to approach it to contemplate the richness of the materials, and the inimitable perfection of the details and the ornamentation. Pericles intended it to be as much an assemblage of masterpieces produced by genius and human hands as a tribute to the gods; or rather, here was the whole of Greek genius, offering itself, in the guise of this emblem, as a tribute to the divine. The names of those who we know to have carved a stone or sculpted a statue for the Parthenon have become immortal.

Let us forget the past, now, and look around us at this site which time, war, barbaric religions, and foolish people, have trampled underfoot for more than two thousand years.

Only a few columns are missing from the forest of white columns: they have fallen, in intact, gleaming blocks, onto the paving stones or the walls of neighbouring temples. Some, like the great oaks of the forest of Fontainebleau, have remained leaning against other columns; some have slipped from the top of the parapet that encircles the Acropolis, and lie, in enormous shattered blocks, piled one upon another, like the quarry remnants rejected by the architect. Their sides are gilded with that coating produced by sunlight that the centuries spread across marble; their fragments are as white as yesterday’s worked ivory. On this side of the temple, they form a hanging chaos of marble of every shape and colour, thrown about and piled high in the most bizarre and majestic disorder: from afar, one would think one was seeing the foam of enormous waves breaking on and whitening a sea-battered headland. The eye cannot tear itself away. We gaze at them, we follow their lines, we admire them and pity them with the feeling we would have for beings who once possessed or conceivably still possess senses. The effect of these ruins is the most sublime effect human beings have ever been able to produce, because they are the ruins of the most beautiful building ever made!

If one walks beneath the peristyle and the porticoes, one might imagine oneself present at the moment the building was nearing completion; the interior walls are so well preserved, the marble surfaces so gleaming and polished, the columns so straight, the surviving parts of the structure so admirably intact, that everything seems to have sprung fresh from the craftsman’s hands: except that the Parthenon’s sole roof is the sky, sparkling with light, and, through the gaps in the walls, the eye plunges onwards towards the immense, sweeping horizon of Attica. The entire ground surrounding the temple is strewn with fragments of sculpture or blocks of stone that seem to await the hands that will raise them to their place in the monument. One’s feet constantly strike against masterpieces of the Greek chisel: one lifts them, and tosses them away, to pick up a more interesting fragment; and one finally tires of this lost work; the mere remnants of a pulverised masterpiece. One’s footsteps are printed on marble dust; one ends by gazing at it all with indifference, unmoved and silent, absorbed in contemplation of the whole, and in the thousand thoughts that arise from each element of the ruins.

Such thoughts are of the very nature of the scene where they are conceived; they are as solemn as these ruins of bygone times, as these majestic witnesses to the littleness of humanity; but they are also as serene as the sky above us, bathed in a harmonious and pure light, as lofty as the pedestal of the Acropolis itself, which seems to hover above the earth, as sacredly resigned as this monument erected to a divine idea, which God allowed to crumble to make way for ideas even more divine!

I feel no sadness here; the soul is light, though meditative; my thought embraces the realm of divine will, and of human destiny; it marvels that it was given to mankind to rise so high in the arts, and in the trappings of material civilisation; it comprehends also that God then shattered this admirable mould, that of an incomplete thought; and that the unity of the divine, finally recognised by Socrates in this very city, drew the breath of life from all the religions born of human imagination in earlier times; that these temples collapsed upon their gods; and that the idea of the one God instilled in the human mind was worth more than these marble dwellings where only shadows of that idea were worshipped. As religion became more spiritual, the pagan temples disappeared, the statues of demigods descended gradually from their pedestals, and the temples become plainer and simpler as they increasingly exemplified the majestic idea of a single God proven by reason and worshipped by virtue.

The End of Part II of Lamartine’s ‘Voyage en Orient’

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