CHAPTER 8.

Departure from Vienna.

Obliged to make my election, I decided at last for Gallicia, which would conduct me to the country I preferred, namely, to Russia.  I flattered myself, that once at a distance from Vienna, all these vexations, excited no doubt by the French government, would cease; and that at all events, I might, if it was necessary, quit Gallicia, and regain Bucharest by Transylvania.  The geography of Europe, such as Napoleon has constituted it, is but too well learned by misfortune; the turnings which I was obliged to take to avoid his power were already near two thousand leagues; and now at my departure even from Vienna I was constrained to borrow the Asiatic territory to escape from it.  I departed, therefore, without having received my Russian passport, hoping thereby to quiet the uneasiness which the subaltern police of Vienna appeared to feel about the presence of a female who was in disgrace with the emperor Napoleon.  I requested one of my friends to rejoin me, by travelling night and day, as soon as the answer from Russia arrived, and I proceeded on my road.  I did very wrong in taking this step, for at Vienna I was protected by my friends and by public opinion; I could there easily address myself to the emperor or to his prime minister:  but once confined to a provincial town, I had only to do with the stupid wickedness of a subaltern, who wished to make a merit with the French government, of his conduct towards me; this was the method he took.

I stopped for some days at Brunn, the capital of Moravia, where an English colonel, a Mr. Mills, was detained in exile; he was a man of the most perfect goodness and obliging manners, and according to the English expression, altogether inoffensive.  He was made dreadfully miserable, without the least pretence or utility.  But the Austrian ministry is apparently persuaded that it will derive an air of strength from turning persecutor; its counsellors are not mistaken; and as was said by a man of wit, their manner of governing in matters of police, resembles the sentinels placed upon the half destroyed citadel of Brunn,—­they keep a strict guard round the ruins.  Scarcely had I arrived at Brunn when all sorts of difficulties were started about my passports, and those of my companions.  I asked permission to send my son to Vienna, to give the necessary explanations upon these points.  I was told that neither myself nor my son would be allowed to go one league backwards.  I know not if the emperor, or M. de Metternich were informed of all these absurd acts, but I encountered at Brunn, in the agents of government, a dread of compromising themselves which appeared to me quite worthy of the present French regime; and it must even be admitted that when the French are afraid, they are more excusable, for under the emperor Napoleon they run the risk of exile, imprisonment, or death.