I withdrew immediately on receiving the above intimation to the house of a most excellent and intelligent lady*, to whom I ought to acknowledge I was recommended by a person who held an important office in the government*; I shall never forget the courage with which he offered me an asylum himself:  but he would have the same good intentions at present, when he could not act in that manner without completely endangering his existence.  In proportion as tyranny is allowed to advance, it grows, as we look at it, like a phantom, but it seizes with the strength of a real being.  I arrived then, at the country seat of a person whom I scarcely knew, in the midst of a society to which I was an entire stranger, and bearing in my heart the most cutting chagrin, which I made every effort to disguise.  During the night, when alone with a female who had been for several years devoted to my service, I sat listening at the window, in expectation of hearing every moment the steps of a horse gendarme; during the day I endeavoured to make myself agreeable, in order to conceal my situation.  I wrote a letter from this place to Joseph Bonaparte, in which I described with perfect truth the extent of my unhappiness.  A retreat at ten leagues distance from Paris, was the sole object of my ambition, and I felt despairingly, that if I was once banished, it would be for a great length of time, perhaps for ever.  Joseph and his brother Lucien generously used all their efforts to save me, and they were not the only ones, as will presently be seen.

* Madame de Latour. * Regnault de Saint-Jean-d’Angely.

Madame Recamier, so celebrated for her beauty, and whose character is even expressed in her beauty, proposed to me to come and live at her country seat at St. Brice, at two leagues from Paris.  I accepted her offer, for I had no idea that I could thereby injure a person so much a stranger to political affairs; I believed her protected against every thing, notwithstanding the generosity of her character.  I found collected there a most delightful society, and there I enjoyed for the last time, all that I was about to quit.  It was during this stormy period of my existence, that I received the speech of Mr. Mackintosh; there I read those pages, where he gives us the portrait of a jacobin, who had made himself an object of terror during the revolution to children, women and old men, and who is now bending himself double under the rod of the Corsican, who ravishes from him, even to the last atom of that liberty, for which he pretended to have taken arms.  This morceau of the finest eloquence touched me to my very soul; it is the privilege of superior writers sometimes, unwittingly, to solace the unfortunate in all countries, and at all times.  France was in a state of such complete silence around me, that this voice which suddenly responded to my soul, seemed to me to come down from heaven; it came from a land of liberty.  After having passed a few days with Madame Recamier, without hearing my