As soon as she had regained her liberty, Mdlle. Raucourt tried to form a company for herself, and, succeeding, took a theatre, which was soon, however, closed by order of the Government, some allusion to its severity having been discovered in one of the pieces represented. Mdlle. Raucourt thenceforward made no secret of her hostility to the Directory, which, now that the Reign of Terror was at an end, could be attacked, indirectly at least, without too much danger. Fleury tells us that Mdlle. Raucourt's costume was a constant protest against the existing order of things; which, from a feeling of gratitude towards the Royal Family, her constant patrons, and from painful feelings in connection with that guillotine beneath whose shadow she had passed, she could not but hate. "She wore on her spenser," says Fleury, "eighteen buttons in allusion to Louis XVIII., while her fan was one of those weeping-willow fans, the folds of which formed the face of Marie Antoinette." Fleury speaks, moreover, of a certain shawl worn by Mdlle. Raucourt, of which the pattern, once explained, traced to the eyes of the initiated the portraits of Louis, the Queen, and the Dauphin. One day he accompanied her to a fortune-teller who had been expected to predict the restoration of the monarchy, but who foretold instead the revival of the Comédie Française. "The woman," says Fleury, "had read the cards aright, for in 1799 an order from the First Consul re-assembled in a new association the remains of the company dispersed at the time of the Revolution." But now the theatre was burnt down; and though the Comédie Française existed as an institution, and received in 1802 a special subsidy of 100,000 francs, it was not until 1803 that, in conformity with an order from the First Consul, it took possession of the building in the Rue Richelieu, close to the Palais Royal, where it has ever since remained. As under Louis XIV., so under Napoleon, the Comédie Française followed the sovereign to his palatial residence wherever it might be; to Saint-Cloud, to Fontainebleau, to Trianon, to Compiègne, to Malmaison, and even to Erfurt and Dresden, where Talma is known to have performed before a "pit of kings." Nor did Napoleon forget the Comédie Française when he was at Moscow, during the temporary occupation and just before the fatal retreat; though it may well have been from a feeling of pride, and a desire to show how capable he was at such a critical moment of occupying himself with comparatively unimportant things, that he dated from the Kremlin his celebrated decree regulating the affairs of the principal theatre in France.