After the still further losses which, in the year of the publication of this book, the French Revolution inflicted on Sardinia, Charles Emmanuel summoned Joseph de Maistre to Turin, and he remained there for the brief space during which the king retained a remnant of territory on the mainland. Then he went to the island of Sardinia, and held office at Cagliari. In 1802 he was appointed envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary at St Petersburg, and journeyed thither the next year. Although his post was no sinecure, its duties were naturally less engrossing than the official life, with intervals of uneasy exile and travelling, which he had hitherto known, and his literary activity was great. He only published a single treatise, on the _Principe générateur des Constitutions_; but he wrote his best and most famous works, _Du Pape_, _De L'église gallicane_ and the _Soirées de St Pétersbourg_, the last of which was never finished. _Du Pape_, which the second-named book completes, is a treatise in regular form, dealing with the relations of the sovereign pontiff to the Church, to temporal sovereigns, to civilization generally, and to schismatics, especially Anglicans and the Greek Church. It is written from the highest possible standpoint of papal absolutism. The _Soirées de St Pétersbourg_, so far as it is anything (for the arrangement is somewhat desultory), is a kind of _théodicée_, dealing with the fortunes of virtue and vice in this world. It contains two of De Maistre's most famous pieces, his panegyric on the executioner as the foundation of social order, and his acrimonious, and in part unfair, but also in part very damaging, attack on Locke. The _Du Pape_ is dated May 1817; on the _Soirées_ the author was still engaged at his death. Besides these works he wrote an examination of the philosophy of Bacon, some letters on the Inquisition (an institution which, as may be guessed from the remarks just noticed about the executioner, was no stumbling-block to him), and, earlier than any of these, a translation of Plutarch's "Essay on the Delay of Divine Justice," with somewhat copious notes. After 1815 he returned to Savoy, and was appointed to high office, while his _Du Pape_ made a great sensation. But the world to which he had returned was not altogether in accordance with his desires. He had domestic troubles; and chagrin of one sort and another is said to have had not a little to do with his death by paralysis on the 26th of February 1821 at Turin. Most of the works mentioned were not published till after his death, and it was not till 1851 that a collection of _Lettres et opuscules_ appeared, while even since that time fresh matter has been published.