I was told that neither
myself nor my son would be allowed to go one league backwards. I
know not if the emperor, or M. de Metternich were informed of all
these absurd acts, but I encountered at Brunn, in the agents of
government, a dread of compromising themselves which appeared to me
quite worthy of the present French regime; and it must even be
admitted that when the French are afraid, they are more excusable,
for under the emperor Napoleon they run the risk of exile,
imprisonment, or death.

The governor of Moravia, a man in other respects very estimable,
informed me that I was ordered to go through Gallicia as quickly as
possible, and that I was forbid stopping more than twenty-four hours
at Lanzut, where I had the intention of going. Lanzut is the estate
of the princess Lubomirska, the sister of prince Adam Czartorinski,
marshal of the Polish Confederation, which the Austrian troops were
going to support. The princess Lubomirska was herself generally
respected from her personal character, and the liberal use which she
made of her splendid fortune; besides, her attachment to the house
of Austria was conspicuous, and although a Pole by birth, she had
never participated in the spirit of opposition which has always been
exhibited in Poland to the Austrian government. Her nephew and
niece, Prince Henry and the princess Theresa, with whom I had the
honor to be intimate, are both of them endowed with the most
brilliant and amiable qualities; they might no doubt be supposed to
entertain a strong attachment to their Polish country, but it was
then rather difficult to make a crime of this opinion, when the
prince of Schwarzenberg was sent at the head of thirty thousand men
to fight for the restoration of Poland. To what miserable shifts are
those princes reduced, who are constantly told that they must yield
to circumstances? it is proposing to them to govern with every wind.
The successes of Bonaparte excite the envy of the greater part of
the governors of Germany; they persuade themselves that they were
beat because they were too honest, whereas it was because they had
not been honest enough. If the Germans had imitated the Spaniards,
if they had said:--whatever be the consequences, we will not bear a
foreign yoke: they would still be a nation, and their princes would
not be dangling, I do not say in the anti-chambers of the emperor
Napoleon, but in those of all the persons on whom a ray of his favor
is fallen. The empe