Barras flaunted his cynical sensuality and shameless waste in the face of a bankrupt society; and austere revolutionaries, beguiled into the enervating atmosphere of the gilded salons, sold their principles with a stroke of the same pen that restored some illustrious proscribed one to his family. “Every one of us was soliciting the return of some _émigré_ among his friends,” writes Madame de Staël. “I obtained several recalls at this period; and in consequence the deputy Legendre, almost a man of the people, denounced me from the tribune of the Convention. The influence of women and the power of good society seemed very dangerous to those who were excluded, but whose colleagues were invited to be seduced. One saw on _decadis_, for Sundays existed no longer, all the elements of the old and new _régime_ united, but not reconciled.” Into this seething world Madame de Staël threw herself with characteristic activity. Legendre’s attack upon her, foiled by Barras, could not deter her from interference. Her mind being fixed upon some ideal Republic, she was anxious to blot out all record of past intolerance. The prospect of restoring an aristocrat to his home, or of shielding him from fresh dangers, invariably proved irresistible to her. Nevertheless she was quick to perceive and to signalize the folly of the reactionaries; and she felt but scant sympathy with the mad attempt at a monarchical restoration known in history as the 13th Vendémiaire. She uttered no word of palliation for the massacres committed by the Royalists in Lyons and Marseilles, and she was more than willing to admit the benefits conferred on France by the first six months of the Government of the Directory. But she could not be happy at the continued exclusion of the nobles and clericals, and any appeal from one of them touched her with all the force of old association. Talleyrand had not returned from America when her eloquence induced Chénier to address the Convention in favor of his recall. Montesquion next claimed her attention, and in consequence of all this she became an object of suspicion and was accused of exciting revolt. The Government, indeed, thought her so dangerous that, at one moment, when she was at Coppet, they ordered her to be arrested and brought to Paris, there to be imprisoned. Barras, however, defended her, as she relates, “with warmth and generosity,” and, thanks to him, she was enabled to return, a free agent, to France.