of them as receivers to levy imposts on his account; he has forced them to squeeze their subjects to pay him the taxes he demanded; and when it has suited him to dethrone these sovereigns, the people, previously alienated from them by the very wrongs they had committed in obedience to the emperor, have not raised an arm to defend them against him.  The emperor Napoleon has the art of making countries said to be at peace, so singularly miserable that any change is agreeable to them, and having been once compelled to give men and money to France, they scarcely feel the inconvenience of being wholly united to it.  They are wrong, however, for any thing is better than to lose the name of a nation, and as the miseries of Europe are caused by one man, care should be taken to preserve what may be restored when he is no more.

Before I reached Vienna, as I waited for my second son, who was to rejoin me with my servants and baggage, I stopped a day at Molk, that celebrated abbey, placed upon an eminence, from which Napoleon had contemplated the various windings of the Danube, and praised the beauty of the country upon which he was going to pounce with his armies.  He frequently amuses himself in this manner in making poetical pieces on the beauties of nature, which he is about to ravage, and upon the effects of war, with which he is going to overwhelm mankind.  After all, he is in the right to amuse himself in all ways, at the expense of the human race, which tolerates his existence.  Man is only arrested in the career of evil by obstacles or remorse; no one has yet opposed to Napoleon the one, and he has very easily rid himself of the other.  For me, who, solitary, followed his footsteps on the terrace from which the country could be seen to a great distance, I admired its fertility, and felt astonished at seeing how soon the bounty of heaven repairs the disasters occasioned by man.  It is only moral riches which disappear altogether, or are at least lost for centuries.

CHAPTER 7.

Residence at Vienna.

I arrived at Vienna on the 6th of June, very fortunately just two hours before the departure of a courier whom Count Stackelberg, the Russian ambassador, was dispatching to Wilna, where the emperor Alexander then was.  M. de Stackelberg, who behaved to me with that noble delicacy which is so prominent a trait in his character, wrote by this courier for my passport, and assured me that within three weeks I might reckon on having an answer.  It then became a question where I was to pass these three weeks; my Austrian friends, who had given me the most amiable reception, assured me that I might remain at Vienna without the least fear.  The court was then at Dresden, at the great meeting of all the German princes, who came to present their homage to the emperor of France.  Napoleon had stopped at Dresden under the pretext of still negociating there to avoid the war with Russia, in