He allows his soul to be fascinated by the languor of the Savannah.

They tell each other of their native melancholy and he exhausts its pleasures as he exhausted those of love.

He returns, writes, and everyone is carried away by the charm of his magnificent style with its royal sweep and its supple, coloured, undulating phrase, as stormy as the winds that sweep over virgin forests, as brilliant as the neck of a humming-bird, and as soft as the light of the moon shining through the windows of a chapel.
He travels again; this time he goes to ancient shores; he sits down at Thermoplyae and cries: Leonidas! Leonidas! visits the tomb of Achilles, Lacedaemon, and Carthage, and, like the sleepy shepherd who raises his head to watch the passing caravans, all those great places awake when he passes through them.
Banished, exiled, laden with honours, this man who had starved in the streets will dine at the table of kings; he will be an ambassador and a minister, will try to save the tottering monarchy, and after seeing the ruin of all his beliefs, he will witness his own glorification as if he were already counted among the dead.
Born during the decline of one period and at the dawn of another, he was to be its transition and the guardian of its memories and hopes.

He was the embalmer of Catholicism and the proclaimer of liberty.

Although he was a man of old traditions and illusions, he was constitutional in politics and revolutionary in literature.