On my arrival at Coppet, I learned that my father, during the illness of nine days which had deprived me of him, had been continually and anxiously occupying himself about my fate.  He reproached himself for his last book, as the cause of my exile; and with a trembling hand, he wrote, during his fever, a letter to the first consul, in which he assured him that I had nothing whatever to do with the publication of his last work, but that on the contrary, I had desired that it should not be printed.  This voice of a dying man had so much solemnity! this last prayer of a man who had played so important a part in France, asking as an only favor, the return of his children to the place of their birth, and an act of oblivion to the imprudences which a daughter, then young, might have committed,—­all this appeared to me irresistible:  and well as I ought to have known the character of the man, that happened to me, which I believe is in the nature of all who ardently desire the cessation of a great affliction:—­I hoped contrary to all expectation.  The first consul received this letter, and doubtless must have thought me an extreme simpleton to flatter myself for a moment that he would be in the least moved by it.  Certainly, I am in that point quite of his opinion.

CHAPTER 17.

Trial of Moreau.

The trial of Moreau still proceeded, and although the journals preserved the most profound silence on the subject, the publicity of the pleadings was sufficient to rouse the minds, and never did the public opinion in Paris show itself so strongly against Bonaparte as it did at that period.  The French have more need than any other people of a certain degree of liberty of the press; they require to think and to feel in common; the electricity of the emotions of their neighbours is necessary to make them experience the shock in their turn, and their enthusiasm never displays itself in an isolated manner.  Whoever wishes to become their tyrant therefore does well to allow no kind of manifestation to public opinion; Bonaparte joins to this idea, which is common to all despots, an artifice peculiar to the present time, to wit, the art of proclaiming some factitious opinion in journals which have the appearance of being free, they make so many phrases in the sense which they are ordered.  It must be confessed that our French writers are the only ones who can in this manner every morning embellish the same sophism, and who hug themselves in the very superfluity of servitude.  While the instruction of this famous affair was in progress, the journals informed Europe that Pichegru had strangled himself in the Temple; all the gazettes were filled with a surgical report, which appeared very improbable, notwithstanding the care with which it was drawn up.  If it is true that Pichegru had perished the victim of assassination, let us figure to ourselves the situation of a brave general, surprised by cowards in the bottom