the Austrian arms in the battles of Essling and Wagram,
had cooled the national attachment to the sovereign, which had
formerly been very strong. The same thing has happened to all the
sovereigns who have treated with the emperor Napoleon; he has made
use 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 dispatchin