At Berne, Schlegel joined the party, and Auguste de Staël separated from it, in order to return to Coppet to see after things there. The travellers pushed on, but, because of Madame de Staël’s health, in no great haste, through Switzerland and the Tyrol. Her one haunting fear all this time was that in Bavaria an agent of the French Government might have preceded her with an order for her arrest. The abject subservience of the German Governments at that time to Napoleon made it very likely that in such a case passports would be so much waste-paper. Vienna was reached in safety, and there Madame de Staël at first determined to remain three weeks, while a courier was despatched to Wilna to obtain the Russian passport from the Emperor Alexander. The first ten days of her sojourn were marked by cloudless pleasure. Security had returned to her; and, after her late repression, varied chiefly by the Prefect of Geneva’s solemn exhortations, it was a real delight to find herself in the midst of a society where Napoleon was frankly abused. But the Emperor and Empress of Austria were at Dresden, and the official mind, left to itself, soon became frightened at the idea of sheltering the dangerous authoress. Spies were stationed at her door, and cropped up, like poisonous fungi, with silent rapidity along her path. Moreover, an order had arrived for the arrest and return of Rocca as a French officer—the fact of his wounds and inability to serve being waived in the interests of persecution. At this point one pauses to ask _why_, after all, Madame de Staël herself was not arrested. There seems but little doubt that the obsequiousness of the Austrian police would have been equal to the task. Perhaps Napoleon shrank from the odium of such a proceeding; perhaps he was, in reality, rather glad to be rid of Madame de Staël. This would agree with a well-known conversation which he had held four years previously with Auguste de Staël, who, going to him to plead for his mother’s recall, was told, with insolent, good-humored contempt, that the whole of Europe, except France, was open to her; that she would not be imprisoned, as then she might have some cause to complain, but that she alone could be unhappy when allowed to wander at will through every capital of Europe except Paris. But if this explanation be accepted, it becomes difficult to account for the later persecutions of Madame de Staël at the hands of the French and Swiss police. Could it be that Savary and his underlings, through excess of zeal, interpreted their instructions with liberal severity and that Napoleon was not responsible for every individual act, but only for the angry hatred which promised approval of each and all of them?