I began to turn my eyes towards my native land. A great revolution had been operated. Bonaparte had become First Consul and was restoring order by means of despotism; many exiles were returning; the upper Emigration, especially, hastened to go and collect the remnants of its fortune: loyalty was dying at the head, while its heart still beat in the breasts of a few half-naked country-gentlemen. Mrs. Lindsay had left; she wrote to Messrs, de Lamoignon to return; she also invited Madame d'Aguesseau[359], sister of Messrs, de Lamoignon, to cross the Channel. Fontaines wrote to me to finish the printing of the _Génie du Christianisme_ in Paris. While remembering my country, I felt no desire to see it again; gods more powerful than the paternal lares kept me back; I had neither goods nor refuge in France; my motherland had become to me a bosom of stone, a breast without milk: I should not find my mother there, nor my brother, nor my sister Julie. Lucile still lived, but she had married M. de Caud and no longer bore my name; my young "widow" knew me only through a union of a few months, through misfortune and through an absence of eight years. [Illustration: George III.] Had I been left to myself, I do not know that I should have had the strength to leave; but I saw my little circle dissolving; Madame d'Aguesseau proposed to take me to Paris: I let myself go. The Prussian Minister procured me a passport in the name of La Sagne, an inhabitant of Neuchâtel. Messrs. Dulau stopped the printing of the _Génie du Christianisme_, and gave me the sheets that had been set up. I separated the sketches of _Atala_ and _René_ from the _Natchez_; the remainder of the manuscript I locked into a trunk, of which I entrusted the deposit to my hosts in London, and I set out for Dover with Madame d'Aguesseau: Mrs. Lindsay was awaiting us at Calais. [Sidenote: I return to France.] It was thus that I quitted England in 1800; my heart was differently occupied from the manner in which it is at the time of writing, in 1822. I brought back from the land of exile only dreams and regrets; to-day my head is filled with scenes of ambition, of politics, of grandeurs and Courts, so ill suited to my nature. How many events are heaped up in my present existence! Pass, men, pass; my turn will come. I have unrolled only one-third of my days before your eyes; if the sufferings which I have borne have weighed upon my vernal serenity, now, entering upon a more fruitful age, the germ of _René_ is about to develop, and bitterness of another kind will be blended with my narrative! What shall I not have to tell in speaking of my country; of her revolutions, of which I have already shown the fore-ground; of the Empire and of the gigantic man whom I have seen fall; of the Restoration in which I played so great a part, that Restoration glorious to-day, in 1822, although nevertheless I am able to see it only through I know not what ill-omened mist?