On the day when the signal of opposition was exhibited in the tribunate by my friend, I had invited several persons whose society I was fond of, but all of whom were attached to the new government.  At five o’clock I had received ten notes of apology; the first and second I bore tolerably well, but as they succeeded each other rapidly, I began to be alarmed.  In vain did I appeal to my conscience, which advised me to renounce all the pleasures attached to the favour of Bonaparte:  I was blamed by so many honorable people, that I knew not how to support myself on my own way of thinking.  Bonaparte had as yet done nothing exactly culpable; many asserted that he preserved France from anarchy:  in short, if at that moment he had signified to me any wish of reconciliation, I should have been delighted:  but a step of that sort he will never take without exacting a degradation, and, to induce that degradation, he generally enters into such passions of authority, as terrify into yielding every thing.  I do not wish by that to say that Bonaparte is not really passionate:  what is not calculation in him is hatred, and hatred generally expresses itself in rage:  but calculation is in him so much the strongest, that he never goes beyond what it is convenient for him to show, according to circumstances and persons.  One day a friend of mine saw him storming at a commissary of war, who had not done his duty; scarcely had the poor man retired, trembling with apprehension, when Bonaparte turned round to one of his aides-du-camp, and said to him, laughing, I hope I have given him a fine fright; and yet the moment before, you would have believed that he was no longer master of himself.

When it suited the first consul to exhibit his ill-humour against me, he publicly reproached his brother Joseph for continuing to visit me.  Joseph felt it necessary in consequence to absent himself from my house for several weeks, and his example was followed by three fourths of my acquaintance.  Those who had been proscribed on the 18th Fructidor, pretended that at that period, I had been guilty of recommending M. de Talleyrand to Barras, for the ministry of foreign affairs:  and yet, these people were then continually about that same Talleyrand, whom they accused me of having served.  All those who behaved ill to me, were cautious in concealing that they did so for fear of incurring the displeasure of the first consul.  Every day, however, they invented some new pretext to injure me, thus exerting all the energy of their political opinions against a defenceless and persecuted woman, and prostrating themselves at the feet of the vilest Jacobins, the moment the first consul had regenerated them by the baptism of his favor.