This despotic, laconic mode of insisting on learning everything in two words had its inconveniences. One day he asked the master of the woods at Fontainebleau, "How many acres of wood are here?" The master, an honest man, stopped to recollect. "Bah!" and the under-master came forward and said any number that came into his head. Buonaparte immediately took the mastership from the first, and gave it to the second. "Qu'arrivait-il?" continued Prony; "the rogue who gave the guess answer was soon found cutting down and selling quantities of the trees, and Buonaparte had to take the rangership from him, and reinstate the honest hesitater." Prony is, you know, one of the most absent men alive. "Once," he told me, "I was in a carriage with Buonaparte and General Caffarelli: it was at the time he was going to Egypt. He asked me to go. I said, I could not; that is, I would not; and when I had said those words I fell into a reverie, collecting in my own head all the reasons I could for not going to Egypt. All this time Buonaparte was going on with some confidential communication to me of his secret intentions and views; and when it was ended, le seul mot, Arabie, m'avait frappé l'oreille. Alors, je voudrais m'avoir arraché les cheveux," making the motion so to do, "pour pouvoir me rapeller ce qu'il venait de me dire. But I never could recall one single word or idea." "Why did you not ask Caffarelli afterwards?" "I dared not, because I should have betrayed myself to him." Prony says that Buonaparte was not obstinate in his own opinion with men of science about those things of which he was ignorant; but he would bear no contradiction in tactics or politics. _May 29._ Madame Recamier has no more taken the veil than I have, and is as little likely to do it. She is still beautiful, still dresses herself and her little room with elegant simplicity, and lives in a convent [Footnote: The Abbaye aux Bois.] only because it is cheap and respectable. M. Recamier is living; they have not been separated by anything but misfortune. We have at last seen a comedy perfectly well acted--the first representation of a new piece, _Les Folliculaires_: it was received with thunders of applause, admirably acted in every character to the life. It was in ridicule of journalists and literary young men. LA CELLE, M. DE VINDÉ'S COUNTRY HOUSE, _June 4._ Is it not curious that, just when you wrote to us, all full of Mrs. Strickland at Edgeworthstown, we should have been going about everywhere with Mr. Strickland at Paris? I read to him what you said about his little girl and Foster as he was going with us to a breakfast at Cuvier's, and he was delighted even to tears.