During my melancholy journey from Weimar to Coppet, I could not help envying the existence of every object that circulated in nature, even the birds and insects which were flying round me; I asked only a day, a single day, to talk to him once more, to excite his compassion; I envied those forest trees whose existence is prolonged for centuries; but the inexorable silence of the grave has something in it which confounds the human intellect; and although it is the truth of all others the best known to us, the strength of the impression it leaves can never be effaced. As I approached my father's residence, one of my friends pointed out to me on the mountain some clouds which bore the resemblance of an immense human figure, which would disappear towards the evening: it seemed to me that the heavens thus offered me the symbol of the loss I had just sustained. He was a man truly great: a man, who in no circumstances of his life ever preferred the most important of his interests to the least of his duties;--a man, whose virtues were inspired to that degree by his goodness, that he could have dispensed with principles, and whose principles were so strict that he might have dispensed with goodness. On my arrival at Coppet, I learned that my father, during the illness of nine days which had deprived me of him, had been continually and anxiously occupying himself about my fate. He reproached himself for his last book, as the cause of my exile; and with a trembling hand, he wrote, during his fever, a letter to the first consul, in which he assured him that I had nothing whatever to do with the publication of his last work, but that on the contrary, I had desired that it should not be printed. This voice of a dying man had so much solemnity! this last prayer of a man who had played so important a part in France, asking as an only favor, the return of his children to the place of their birth, and an act of oblivion to the imprudences which a daughter, then young, might have committed,--all this appeared to me irresistible: and well as I ought to have known the character of the man, that happened to me, which I believe is in the nature of all who ardently desire the cessation of a great affliction:--I hoped contrary to all expectation. The first consul received this letter, and doubtless must have thought me an extreme simpleton to flatter myself for a moment that he would be in the least moved by it. Certainly, I am in that point quite of his opinion. CHAPTER 17. Trial of Moreau.