like mine were made to celebrate the emperor, who was a subject well worthy of the kind of enthusiasm which I had shown in Corinna.  I gave him for answer, that persecuted as I was by the emperor, any thing like praise of him coming from me, would have the air of a petition, and that I was persuaded that the emperor himself would find my eulogiums very ridiculous under such circumstances.  He combatted this opinion very strongly:  he returned to my house several times to beg me, in the name of my own interest, as he styled it, to write something in favor of the emperor, were it but a sheet of four pages; that would be sufficient, he assured me, to put an end to all the disagreeables I suffered.  He repeated what he told me to every person of my acquaintance.  Finally, one day he came to propose to me to celebrate in verse the birth of the king of Rome; I told him, laughing, that I had not a single idea on the subject, and that I should confine myself to wishes for his having a good nurse.  This joke put an end to the prefect’s negociations with me, upon the necessity of my writing in favor of the present government.

* M. de Barante, father of M. Prosper de Barante, member of the * Chamber of Peers.

A short time afterwards the physicians ordered my youngest son the baths of Aix, in Savoy, at twenty leagues from Coppet.  I chose the early part of May to go there, a time of the year when the waters are quite deserted.  I gave the prefect notice of this little journey, and went to shut myself up in a kind of village, where there was not at the time a single person of my acquaintance.  I had hardly been there ten days, before a courier arrived from the prefect of Geneva to order me to return.  The prefect of Mont-Blanc, in whose department I was, was also afraid lest I should leave Aix to go to England, as he said, to write against the emperor; and although London was not very near to Aix in Savoy, he sent his gendarmes every where about, to forbid my being furnished with post horses on the road.  I am at present tempted to laugh at all this prefectorial activity against a poor thing like myself; but at that time the very sight of a gendarme was enough to make me die with fright.  I was always alarmed lest from a banishment so rigorous the change might shortly be to a prison, which was to me more terrible than death itself.  I knew that if I was once arrested, that if this eclat were once got over, the emperor would not allow himself again to be spoken to about me, even if any one had the courage to do so; which was not very probable at that court, where terror was the prevailing sentiment every minute of the day, and in the most trifling concerns of life.