although no election had given them their authority, they exercised so
much influence upon what was decided that in any particular case their
fellow-adepts were sure spontaneously to obey any impulse that they might
choose to impart. The meetings of the Burschen took place upon a little
hill crowned by a ruined castle, which was situated at some distance from
Erlangen, and which Sand and Dittmar had called the Ruttli, in memory of
the spot where Walter Furst, Melchthal, and Stauffacher had made their
vow to deliver their country; there, under the pretence of students'
games, while they built up a new house with the ruined fragments, they
passed alternately from symbol to action and from action to symbol.

Meanwhile the association was making such advances throughout Germany
that not only the princes and kings of the German confederation, but also
the great European powers, began to be uneasy. France sent agents to
bring home reports, Russia paid agents on the spot, and the persecutions
that touched a professor and exasperated a whole university often arose
from a note sent by the Cabinet of the Tuileries or of St. Petersburg.

It was amid the events that began thus that Sand, after commending
himself to the protection of God, began the year 1817, in the sad mood in
which we have just seen him, and in which he was kept rather by a disgust
for things as they were than by a disgust for life. On the 8th of May,
preyed upon by this melancholy, which he cannot conquer, and which comes
from the disappointment of all his political hopes, he writes in his
diary:

"I shall find it impassible to set seriously to work, and this idle
temper, this humour of hypochondria which casts its black veil over
everything in life,--continues and grows in spite of the moral activity
which I imposed on myself yesterday."