CHAPTER 6.

Passage through Austria;—­1812.

In this manner, after ten years of continually increasing persecutions, first sent away from Paris, then banished into Switzerland, afterwards confined to my own chateau, and at last condemned to the dreadful punishment of never seeing my friends, and of being the cause of their banishment:  in this manner was I obliged to quit, as a fugitive, two countries, France and Switzerland, by order of a man less French than myself:  for I was born on the borders of that Seine where his tyranny alone naturalizes him.  The air of this fine country is not a native air to him:  can he then comprehend the pain of being banished from it, he who considers this fertile country only as the instrument of his victories?  Where is his country? it is the earth which is subject to him.  His fellow citizens? they are the slaves who obey his orders.  He complained one day of not having had under his command, like Tamerlane, nations to whom reasoning was unknown.  I imagine that by this time he is satisfied with Europeans:  their manners, like their armies, now bear a sufficient resemblance to those of Tartars.

I had nothing to fear in Switzerland, as I could always prove that I had a right to be there; but to leave it, I had only a foreign passport:  I must go through one of the confederated states, and if any French agent had required the government of Bavaria to hinder me from passing, who does not know with what regret, but at the same time, with what obedience it would have executed the orders thus received?  I entered into the Tyrol with a great respect for that country, which had fought from attachment to its ancient masters, but with a great contempt for such of the Austrian ministers as had advised the abandonment of men compromised by their attachment to their sovereign.  It is said that a subaltern diplomatist, head of the spy department in Austria, thought proper one day, during the war, to maintain at the emperor’s table, that the Tyrolese should be abandoned:  M. de H., a gentleman of the Tyrol, counsellor of state in the Austrian service, who in his actions and writings has exhibited the courage of a warrior, and the talents of an historian, replied to these unworthy observations with the contempt they deserved:  the emperor signified his entire approbation to M. de H., and showed by that at least that his private feelings were strangers to the political conduct which he was made to adopt.  Thus it is that the greater part of the European sovereigns, at the moment of Bonaparte making himself master of France, who were extremely upright persons as individuals, were already become mere cyphers as kings, as the government of their states was entirely committed to circumstances and to their ministers.