banishment at all spoken of, I persuaded myself that Bonaparte had renounced it.  Nothing is more common than to tranquillize ourselves against a threatened danger, when we see no symptoms of it around us.  I felt so little disposition to enter into any hostile plan or action against this man, that I thought it impossible for him not to leave me in peace; and after some days longer, I returned to my own country seat, satisfied that he had adjourned his resolution against me, and was contented with having frightened me.  In truth I had been sufficiently so, not to make me change my opinion, or oblige me to deny it, but to repress completely that remnant of republican habit which had led me the year before, to speak with too much openness.

I was at table with three of my friends, in a room which commanded a view of the high road, and the entrance gate; it was now the end of September.  At four o’clock, a man in a brown coat, on horseback, stops at the gate and rings:  I was then certain of my fate.  He asked for me, and I went to receive him in the garden.  In walking towards him, the perfume of the flowers, and the beauty of the sun particularly struck me.  How different are the sensations which affect us from the combinations of society, from those of nature!  This man informed me, that he was the commandant of the gendarmerie of Versailles; but that his orders were to go out of uniform, that he might not alarm me; he shewed me a letter signed by Bonaparte, which contained the order to banish me to forty leagues distance from Paris, with an injunction to make me depart within four and twenty hours; at the same time, to treat me with all the respect due to a lady of distinction.  He pretended to consider me as a foreigner, and as such, subject to the police:  this respect for individual liberty did not last long, as very soon afterwards, other Frenchmen and Frenchwomen were banished without any form of trial.  I told the gendarme officer, that to depart within twenty four hours, might be convenient to conscripts, but not to a woman and children, and in consequence, I proposed to him to accompany me to Paris, where I had occasion to pass three days to make the necessary arrangements for my journey.  I got into my carriage with my children and this officer, who had been selected for this occasion, as the most literary of the gendarmes.  In truth, he began complimenting me upon my writings.  “You see,” said I to him, “the consequences of being a woman of intellect, and I would recommend you, if there is occasion, to dissuade any females of your family from attempting it.”  I endeavoured to keep up my spirits by boldness, but I felt the barb in my heart.