Finally, one evening Madame de Staël went to the theatre at Blois, and, on leaving it, was surrounded by a curious crowd. Some officious person communicated this fact, probably with various others, some true, some false, to the Minister of Police, who wrote to the Prefect of the department to complain that his master’s celebrated foe was the centre of a little court. In a short time the blow fell. No answer came from Napoleon, but, instead of it, the announcement that her book had been seized, that all copies of it were destroyed, and that the authoress was to leave France within three days either for America or Coppet. At the same time, the Prefect of Loir and Cher demanded the surrender of the MS. of the work. Fortunately Madame de Staël possessed a rough copy, which she gave him, while her son saved the real one. She wrote to Savary, Duke of Rovigo (“permitted,” she says bitingly “to hide his name under a title”), and represented to him that the interval allowed her for her departure was insufficient. She received a reply which has become classic for its baseness, its insolence, and its ludicrous arrogance. All the littleness and none of the force of Napoleon was reflected from the mind of his underling. He told her that she need not seek for the cause of her exile in the silence regarding the Emperor which she had observed in her work, for that no place in it could have been found worthy of him! For the rest, the air of France did not suit her, and as for its inhabitants, they were not yet reduced to taking as models the nations whom she admired. Her last work was not French, and it was he (this worthy official) who had forbidden it to be printed. Savary thus claimed for himself, and not for his master, the glory of this precious proceeding; but as nobody suspected him of acting except under orders, he blew this trumpet to the desert air. The blow to Madame de Staël was a terrible one. Her first impulse was to go to America; but fearing the long sea-voyage for her daughter at that season of the year (it was October), she once again set her face most reluctantly towards Coppet. This place, which she henceforward describes as a “prison,” was shortly afterwards made further distasteful to her by a change of Prefect. Monsieur de Barante, who was a friend of hers, was removed, and the successor appointed to him, M. Capelle, was one of the functionaries now turned out by the gross from the Imperial mould. He regarded Napoleon as a deity and himself as a prophet, and conceived the brilliant idea of distinguishing himself by persuading Madame de Staël to write something flattering of the Emperor. Naturally he failed; the mind of a bureaucrat prostrate before the fetich of his own alarmed idolatry alone could have conceived the possibility of success. And naturally, again, his failure rankled, and caused him to visit his disappointment on the creator of it by numerous small vexations. CHAPTER XII. MADAME DE STAËL’S SECOND MARRIAGE.