The youthful Baranti found no scope for his talents at Coppet, and being offered an inducement to go to the metropolis so that he might have larger opportunities of advancement, he abandoned the famous authoress, and she, in loving despair, was seized with the impulse to immortalise his severance by attempting suicide, and thereby ending her passion for liaisons, virulence, and fame.  The attempt, presumably feeble, left her long years of mischievous mania for attack on the supposed author of all her woes.  She readily found amongst his enemies (and thus the enemies of France) those who yearned with her in the hope she freely and openly expressed that her native land should suffer defeats, and in this her desire was fully acquiesced in by the combination of hysterical and purblind Kings, aided by a coterie of irreconcilables, who welcomed the destruction of their fatherland in order that the man who had made it the glory and the envy of the world should be driven from it.  Many of these creatures were members of the same Senate who, a few years previously, sent Napoleon a fervent address couched in grovelling language, imploring him to cement the hold his personality had on the national life.  The following is what they say, and what they ask him to do:—­“You have brought us out of the chaos of the past, you have made us bless the benefits of the present.  Great man, complete your work, and make it as immortal as your glory!”

The authors of this whining appeal are worthy to be associated with the traitorous daughter of Jacques Necker, Minister of Finance to Louis XVI., and of those apoplectic monarchs who sought her guilty and inflammatory aid.

Then we come to another female celebrity, though less notable than Madame de Stael, who is regarded by the traducers of Napoleon as a historian because she wrote in her memoirs that which they wished the world to think of him, and because they flattered themselves that it exculpated them from the charge of injustice and mere hatred.  Madame de Stael’s book, “Considerations sur la Revolution Francaise,” made its appearance.  Its violent characteristics inflamed Charles de Remusat to urge his mother to enter into competition with this work, the result being the production of Madame de Remusat’s memoirs, edited by her grandson, M. Paul de Remusat.  Charles (her son) had reproached her for having destroyed memoirs she had written previously,[23] but lurking in her mind was the thought of all the favours she and her family had received, and her correspondence, teeming with adulation for the man whom she was now induced to declaim against.  The knowledge that she was about to expose her perfidy “worried” her, and she wrote to Charles thus:—­“If it should happen that some day my son were to publish all this, what would people think of me?” and the son, obviously influenced by the mother’s fears, delayed until the fall of the Second Empire the publication of one of the most unreliable and barefaced calumnies ever produced against a great benefactor.