on her road to the waters of Aix in Savoy, to
which she was proceeding, she intended stopping at my house, and
would be there in two days. I trembled lest the lot of M. de
Montmorency should also become hers. However improbable it was, I
was ordained to fear every thing from hatred so barbarous and
minute, and I therefore sent a courier to meet Madame Recamier, to
beseech her not to come to Coppet. To know that she who had never
failed to console me with the most amiable attention was only a few
leagues distant from me; to know that she was there, so near to my
habitation, and that I was not allowed to see her again, perhaps for
the last time! all this I was obliged to bear. I conjured her not to
stop at Coppet; she would not yield to my entreaties; she could not
pass under my windows without remaining some hours with me, and it
was with convulsions of tears that I saw her enter this chateau, in
which her arrival had always been a fete. She left me the next day,
and repaired instantly to one of her relations at fifty leagues
distance from Switzerland. It was in vain; the fatal blow of exile
smote her also; she had had the intention of seeing me, and that was
enough; for the generous compassion which had inspired her, she must
be punished. The reverses of fortune which she had met with made the
destruction of her natural establishment extremely painful to her.
Separated from all her friends, she has passed whole months in a
little provincial town, a prey to the extremes of every feeling of
insipid and melancholy solitude. %Such was the lot to which I was
the cause of condemning the most brilliant female of her time; and
thus regardless did the chief of the French, that people so renowned
for their gallantry, show himself towards the most beautiful woman
in Paris. In one day he smote virtue and distinguished birth in M.
de Montmorency; beauty in Madame Recamier, and if I dare say it, the
reputation of high talents in myself. Perhaps he also flattered
himself with attacking the memory of my father in his daughter, in
order that it might be truly said that in this world, under his
reign, the dead and the living, piety, beauty, wit, and celebrity,
all were as nothing. Persons made themselves culpable by being found
wanting in the delicate shades of flattery towards him, in refusing
to abandon any one who had been visited by his disgrace. He
recognises but two classes of human creatures, those who serve him,
and those, who wi