While I was in this state, I received a letter from Madame Recamier, that beautiful person who has received the admiration of the whole of Europe, and who has never abandoned an unfortunate friend.  She informed me, that on her road to the waters of Aix in Savoy, to which she was proceeding, she intended stopping at my house, and would be there in two days.  I trembled lest the lot of M. de Montmorency should also become hers.  However improbable it was, I was ordained to fear every thing from hatred so barbarous and minute, and I therefore sent a courier to meet Madame Recamier, to beseech her not to come to Coppet.  To know that she who had never failed to console me with the most amiable attention was only a few leagues distant from me; to know that she was there, so near to my habitation, and that I was not allowed to see her again, perhaps for the last time! all this I was obliged to bear.  I conjured her not to stop at Coppet; she would not yield to my entreaties; she could not pass under my windows without remaining some hours with me, and it was with convulsions of tears that I saw her enter this chateau, in which her arrival had always been a fete.  She left me the next day, and repaired instantly to one of her relations at fifty leagues distance from Switzerland.  It was in vain; the fatal blow of exile smote her also; she had had the intention of seeing me, and that was enough; for the generous compassion which had inspired her, she must be punished.  The reverses of fortune which she had met with made the destruction of her natural establishment extremely painful to her.  Separated from all her friends, she has passed whole months in a little provincial town, a prey to the extremes of every feeling of insipid and melancholy solitude. %Such was the lot to which I was the cause of condemning the most brilliant female of her time; and thus regardless did the chief of the French, that people so renowned for their gallantry, show himself towards the most beautiful woman in Paris.  In one day he smote virtue and distinguished birth in M. de Montmorency; beauty in Madame Recamier, and if I dare say it, the reputation of high talents in myself.  Perhaps he also flattered himself with attacking the memory of my father in his daughter, in order that it might be truly said that in this world, under his reign, the dead and the living, piety, beauty, wit, and celebrity, all were as nothing.  Persons made themselves culpable by being found wanting in the delicate shades of flattery towards him, in refusing to abandon any one who had been visited by his disgrace.  He recognises but two classes of human creatures, those who serve him, and those, who without injuring, wish to have an existence independent of him.  He is unwilling that in the whole universe, from the details of housekeeping to the direction of empires, a single will should act without reference to his.