Since I have been so cruelly persecuted by the Emperor, I have lost all kind of confidence in destiny; I have however a stronger belief in the protection of providence, but it is not in the form of happiness on this earth.  The result is, that all resolutions terrify me, and yet exile obliges me frequently to adopt some.  I dreaded the sea, although every one said, all the world makes this passage, and no harm happens to any one.  Such is the language which encourages almost all travellers:  but the imagination does not allow itself to be chained by this kind of consolation, and that abyss, from which so slight an obstacle separates you, is always tormenting to the mind.  Mr. Schlegel saw the terror I felt about the frail vessel which was to carry us to Stockholm.  He showed me, near Abo, the prison in which one of the most unfortunate kings of Sweden, Eric XIV. had been confined some time before he died in another prison near Gripsholm.  “If you were confined there,” he said to me, “how much would you envy the passage of this sea, which at present so terrifies you.”  This just reflection speedily gave another turn to my ideas, and the first days of our voyage were sufficiently pleasant.  We passed between the islands, and although there was more danger close to the land than in the open sea, one never feels the same terror which the sight of the waves appearing to touch the sky makes one experience.  I made them show me the land in the horizon, as far as I could perceive it; infinity is as fearful to the sight as it is pleasant to the soul.  We passed by the isle of Aland, where the plenipotentiaries of Peter I. and Charles XII. negociated a peace, and endeavored to fix boundaries to their ambition in this frozen part of the world, which the blood of their subjects alone had been able to thaw for a moment.  We hoped to reach Stockholm the following day, but a decidedly contrary wind obliged us to cast anchor by the side of an island entirely covered with rocks interspersed with trees, which hardly grew higher than the stones which surrounded them.  We hastened, however, to take a walk on this island, in order to feel the earth under our feet.

I have always been very subject to ennui, and far from knowing how to occupy myself at those moments of entire leisure which seem destined for study.

 Here the manuscript breaks off.

After a passage which was not without danger, my mother was landed safely at Stockholm.  She was received in Sweden with the greatest kindness, and spent eight months there, and it was there she wrote the present journal.  Shortly after, she departed for London, and there published her work on Germany, which the Imperial police had suppressed.  But her health, already cruelly affected by Bonaparte’s persecutions, having suffered from the fatigues of a long voyage, she felt herself obliged without farther delay to undertake the history of the political life of her father, and to adjourn to a future period all other labors, until she had finished that which her filial affection made her regard as a duty.  She then conceived the plan of her Considerations on the French Revolution.  That work even she was not spared to finish, and the manuscript of her Ten Years’ Exile remained in her portfolio in the state in which I now publish it.