The resistance of the tribunate, feeble as it was, displeased the first consul; not that it was any obstacle to his designs, but it kept up the habit of thinking in the nation, which he wished to stifle entirely. He put into the journals among other things, an absurd argument against the opposition. Nothing is so simple or so proper, was it there said, as an opposition in England, because the king is the enemy of the people; but in a country, where the executive government is itself named by the people, it is opposing the nation to oppose its representative. What a number of phrases of this kind have the scribes of Napoleon deluged the public with for ten years! In England or America the meanest peasant would laugh in your face at a sophism of this nature; in France, all that is desired, is to have a phrase ready, with which to give to one's interest the appearance of conviction. Very few persons showed themselves strangers to the desire of having places; a great number were ruined, and the interest of their wives and children, or of their nephews and nieces, if they had no children, or of their cousins, if they had no nephews, obliged them, they said, to seek employment from the government. The great strength of the heads of the state in France, is the prodigious taste that the people have for places; vanity even makes them more sought for, than the emolument attached to them. Bonaparte received thousands of petitions for every office, from the highest to the lowest. If he had not had naturally a profound contempt for the human race, he would have conceived it in running over petitions, signed by names illustrious from their ancestry, or celebrated by revolutionary actions in complete opposition to the new functions they were ambitious of fulfilling. The winter of 1801 at Paris was made extremely agreeable to me, by the readiness with which Fouche granted the applications I made to him for the return of different emigrants: in this way he left me, in the midst of my disgrace, the pleasure of being useful, and I retain a most grateful recollection to him for it. It must be confessed, that in the actions of women, there is always a little coquetry, and that the greater part of their very virtues are mixed with the desire of pleasing, and of being surrounded by friends, whose attachment to them is heightened by the feeling of obligation. In this point of view only, can our sex be pardoned for being fond of influence: but there are occasions when we ought even to sacrifice the pleasure of obliging to preserve our dignity: for we may do every thing for the sake of others, excepting to degrade our character. Our own conscience is as it were the treasure of the Almighty, which we are not permitted to make use of for the advantage of others.