Fifty leagues of Austrian territory had still to be traversed. The police agent, who is described as carrying out his instructions with a most vexatious pertinacity, quitted the travellers at the limit of his “circle”; but Madame de Staël says that grenadiers were still found posted along the route to observe her, and she did not breathe freely until she found herself on Russian territory. Even there she could not allow herself to feel quite secure, for Napoleon’s huge army—destined by its apparent power and its oncoming doom to typify the falling might of France—was hastening by forced marches to Moscow; and Madame de Staël, to avoid meeting it, had to reach St. Petersburg by a circuitous route. Her terror of being arrested and imprisoned still abode with her; she was evidently convinced that the Emperor was furious with her for having escaped his clutches; and she began seriously to consider what she would do if any portion of the army threatened to overtake her. Her plan was to hasten on to Odessa, and thence proceed to Greece and Constantinople. Fortunately, her companions succeeded in persuading her that she could travel by post much faster than an army; and partially calmed, she at last gave herself up to some enjoyment of the scenes and people around her. Her _Dix Années d’Exil_, always vivid, becomes from this point a charming book. She is a little too optimistic, and indulges, as usual, too much in generalization, but seizes on salient points with swiftness, and describes them with remarkable force. She was delighted with her reception by the nobles and the Imperial family. Of the Czar she speaks with a fervent admiration that later generations have not shared. He had the facile amiability and conventional philanthropy of a sovereign who finds his benevolent theories so constantly crossed by circumstances as to release him, in most instances, from the responsibility of applying them. But any promise of political reform and any appeal to general principles of excellence found so ready a response in Madame de Staël’s own heart that, especially where a monarch spoke, she ceased to be severely critical. According to Galiffe, she met in Russia with immense social success, and enchanted everybody. He, personally, found her much improved since the days of her brilliant, but too self-asserting youth. Stein was struck with her air of simplicity and goodness, and sought to convey her great unaffectedness of manner by saying that “she gave herself no trouble to please”—quite a man’s judgment on a woman, and curiously inaccurate as a necessary consequence. Madame de Staël was so intensely interested in every new person who appeared to her at all distinguished, that she must always have cared supremely to please. But what Stein probably meant was that she had none of the airs and graces of worldly coquettes; and very often, when launched in conversation, she must have been more bent on convincing than seducing.