This took place on the 19th of April, the most miserable day of my life.  What an evening, what a night I passed!  What was my grief on learning the next day that the Emperor had departed at noon, after making his adieux to his guard!  When I awoke that morning, all my resentment had been appeased in thinking of the Emperor.  Twenty times I wished to return to the palace; twenty times after his departure I wished to take post horses and overtake him; but I was deterred by the offer he had made me through M. Hubert.  “Perhaps,” I thought, “he will think it is the money which influences me; this will, doubtless, be said by those around him; and what an opinion he will have of me!” In this cruel perplexity I did not dare to decide.  I suffered all that it is possible for a man to suffer; and, at times, that which was only too true seemed like a dream to me, so impossible did it seem that I could be where the Emperor was not.  Everything in this terrible situation contributed to aggravate my distress.  I knew the Emperor well enough to be aware that even had I returned to him then, he would never have forgotten that I had wished to leave him; I felt that I had not the strength to bear this reproach from his lips.  On the other side, the physical suffering caused by my disease had greatly increased, and I was compelled to remain in bed a long while.  I could, indeed, have triumphed over these physical sufferings however cruel they might have been, but in the frightful complications of my position I was reduced to a condition of idiocy; I saw nothing of what was around me; I heard nothing of what was said; and after this statement the reader will surely not expect that I shall have anything to say about the farewell of the Emperor to his old and faithful guard, an account of which, moreover, has been often enough published for the facts to be well known concerning this event, which, besides, took place in public.  Here my Memoirs might well close; but the reader, I well believe, cannot refuse me his attention a few moments longer, that I may recall some facts which I have a right to explain, and to relate some incidents concerning the return from the Island of Elba.  I, therefore, now continue my remarks on the first of these heads, and the second will be the subject of the next chapter.

The Emperor had then already started; and as for myself, shut up alone, my country house became henceforth a sad residence to me.  I held no communication with any one whatever, read no news, and sought to learn none.  At the end of a short time I received a visit from one of my friends from Paris, who said to me that the journals spoke of my conduct without understanding it, and that they condemned it severely.  He added that it was M. de Turenne who had sent to the editors the note in which I had been so heavily censured.  I must say that I did not believe this; I knew M. de Turenne too well to think him capable of a proceeding so dishonorable, inasmuch as I had