that he would compromise you by going to see you.”  I could not refrain from a smile at this ingenious argument.  “Yes,” continued he with the most perfect gravity, “the emperor, seeing you preferred to himself, would be displeased with you for it.”  “So that” I replied, “the emperor expects that my private friends, and shortly, perhaps, my own children, should forsake me to please him; that seems to me rather too much.  Besides, I do not well see how a person in my situation can be compromised; and what you say reminds me of a revolutionist who was applied to, in the times of terror, to use his endeavours to save one of his friends from the scaffold.  I am afraid, said he, that my speaking in his favor would only injure him.”  The prefect smiled at my quotation, but continued that train of reasoning, which, backed as it is with four hundred thousand bayonets, always appears the soundest.  A man at Geneva said to me, “Do not you think that the prefect declares his opinion with a great deal of frankness?” “Yes,” I replied, “he says with sincerity that he is devoted to the man of power; he says with courage that he is of the strongest side; I am not exactly sensible of the merit of such an avowal.”

Several independent ladies at Geneva continued to show me marks of the greatest kindness, of which I shall always retain a deep recollection.  But even to the clerks in the custom houses, regarded themselves as in a state of diplomacy with me; and from prefects to sub-prefects, and from the cousins of one and the other, a profound terror would have seized them all, if I had not spared them, as much as was in my power, the anxiety of paying or not paying a visit.  Every courier brought reports of other friends of mine being exiled from Paris, for having kept up connections with me; it became a matter of strict duty for me to avoid seeing a single Frenchman of the least note; and very often I was even apprehensive of injuring persons in the country where I was living, whose courageous friendship never failed itself towards me.  I felt two opposite sensations, and both, I believe, equally natural; melancholy at being forsaken, and cruel anxiety for those who showed attachment to me.  It is difficult to conceive a situation in life more painful at every moment; for the space of nearly two years that I endured it, I may say truly that I never once saw the day return without a feeling of desolation at having to support the existence which that day renewed.  But why should not you leave it then? will be said, and was said incessantly to me from all quarters.  A man whom I ought not to name*, but who I trust knows how much I esteem the elevation of his character and conduct, said to me:  “If you remain, he will treat you as Elizabeth did Mary Stuart:—­nineteen years of misery, and the catastrophe at last.”  Another person, witty but unguarded in his expressions, wrote to me, that it was dishonorable to remain after so much ill-treatment.  I had no need of these recommendations to wish, passionately