As Chateaubriand had declined office, and narrowly escaped death in consequence, when Napoleon murdered the Duke d'Enghien, his life, from that period to the Restoration of the Bourbons, was one of retirement and observation. The important part which he took in the Restoration, by the publication of his celebrated pamphlet _De Buonaparte et des Bourbons_, restored him to political life. The effect produced by that work was immense, and the placing of the ancient race of monarchs on the throne was in a great degree owing to it; for, at a crisis when the intentions of the Allies were yet undecided, and Austria openly supported the strong party in France which inclined for a regency with Marie Louise at its head, it swelled immensely the numbers of the decided Royalists, and gave a definite and tangible object to their hitherto vague and divided aspirations. It was written with prodigious rapidity, and bears marks of the haste of its composition in the vehemence of its ideas and the occasional exaggeration of its assertions; but it was the very thing required for a national crisis of unexampled importance, when every hour was fraught with lasting consequences, and every effort of genius was required for laying the foundation of a new order in European society. Of the first conception and subsequent completion of this remarkable work he gives the following account:-- "I had been permitted to return to my solitary valley. The earth trembled under the footsteps of stranger armies: I wrote like the last Roman, amidst the din of barbarian invasion. During the day, I traced lines as agitated as the events which were passing: at night, when the roar of cannon was no longer heard in my solitary woods, I returned to the silence of the years which sleep in the tomb, and to the peace of my earlier life. The agitated pages which I wrote during the day, became, when put together, my pamphlet _On Buonaparte and the Bourbons_. I had so high an idea of the genius of Napoleon, and the valour of our soldiers, that the idea of a foreign invasion, successful in its ultimate results, never entered into my imagination; but I thought that such an invasion, by making the French see the dangers to which the ambition of Napoleon had exposed them, would lead to an interior movement, and that the deliverance of the French would be the work of their own hands. It was under that impression that I wrote my notes, in order that, if our political assemblies should arrest the march of the Allies, and separate themselves from a great man who had become their scourge, they should know to what haven to turn. The harbour of refuge appeared to me to be in the ancient authority, under which our ancestors had lived during eight centuries, but modified according to the changes of time. During a tempest, when one finds himself at the gate of an old edifice, albeit in