CHAPTER 10.

New symptoms of Bonaparte’s ill will to my father and myself.  —­Affairs of Switzerland.

At the beginning of the winter 1802-3, when I saw by the papers that so many illustrious Englishmen, and so many of the most intelligent persons in France were collected in Paris, I felt, I confess, the strongest desire to be among them.  I do not dissemble, that a residence in Paris has always appeared to me the most agreeable of all others; I was born there—­there I have passed my infancy and early youth—­and there only could I meet the generation which had known my father, and the friends who had with us passed through the horrors of the revolution.  This love of country, which has attached the most strongly constituted minds, lays still stronger hold of us, when it unites the enjoyments of intellect with the affections of the heart, and the habits of imagination.  French conversation exists nowhere but in Paris, and conversation has been since my infancy, my greatest pleasure.  I experienced such grief at the apprehension of being deprived of this residence, that my reason could not support itself against it.  I was then in the full vivacity of life, and it is precisely the want of animated enjoyment, which leads most frequently to despair, as it renders that resignation very difficult, without which we cannot support the vicissitudes of life.

The prefect of Geneva had received no orders to refuse me my passports for Paris, but I knew that the first consul had said in the midst of his circle, that I would do well not to return; and he was already in the habit, on subjects of this nature, of dictating his pleasure in conversation, in order to prevent his being called upon, by the anticipation of his orders.  If he had in this manner said, that such and such an individual ought to go and hang himself, I believe that he would have been displeased, if the submissive subject had not in obedience to the hint, bought a rope and prepared the gallows.  Another proof of his ill will to me, was the manner in which the French journals criticized my romance of Delphine, which appeared at this time; they thought proper to denounce it as immoral, and the work which had received my father’s approbation was condemned by these courtier criticks.  There might be found in that book, that fire of youth, and ardour after happiness, which ten years, and those years of suffering, have taught me to direct in another manner.  But my censors were not capable of feeling this sort of error, and merely acted in obedience to that voice which ordered them to pull to pieces the work of the father, prior to attacking that of the daughter.  In fact we heard from all quarters, that the true reason of the first consul’s anger, was this last work of my father, in which the whole scaffolding of his monarchy was delineated by anticipation.  My father, and also my mother, during her life-time, had both the