e than he hated the Revolution itself.
Then again, they would naturally vapour about the necessities of strong
government. 'Yes,' said the Savoyard exile, 'but be quite sure that, to
make the monarchy strong, you must rest it on the laws, avoiding
everything arbitrary, too frequent commissions, and all ministerial
jobberies.' We may well believe how unsavoury this rational and just
talk was to people who meant by strong government a system that should
restore to them their old prerogatives of anti-social oppression and
selfish corruption. The order that De Maistre vindicated was a very
different thing from the deadly and poisonous order which was the object
of the prayers of the incorrigible royalists around him.

After staying three years at Lausanne, De Maistre went to Turin, but
shortly afterwards the Sardinian king, at the end of a long struggle,
was forced to succumb to the power of the French, then in the full tide
of success. Bonaparte's brilliant Italian campaign needs no words here.
The French entered Turin, and De Maistre, being an _emigre_, had to
leave it. Furnished with a false passport, and undergoing a thousand
hardships and dangers, he made his way, once more in the depth of a
severe winter (1797), to Venice. He went part of the way down the Po in
a small trading ship, crowded with ladies, priests, monks, soldiers, and
a bishop. There was only one small fire on board, at which all the
cooking had to be done, and where the unhappy passengers had to keep
themselves warm as they could. At night they were confined each to a
space about three planks broad, separated from neighbours by pieces of
canvas hanging from a rope above. Each bank of the river was lined by
military posts--the left by the Austrians, and the right by the French;
and the danger of being fired into was constantly present to aggravate
the misery of overcrowding, scanty food, and bitter cold. Even this
wretchedness was surpassed by the hardships which confronted the exiles
at Venice. The physical distress endured here by De Maistre and his
unfortunate family exceeded that of any other period of their
wanderings. He was cut off from the court, and from all his relations
and friends, and reduced for the means of existence to a few fragments
of silver plate, which had somehow been saved from the universal wreck.
This slender resource grew less day by day, and when that was exhausted
the prospect was a blank. The student of De Maistre's philosoph