While I was making these reflections on this tiller of the soil, as I had made others of a different kind at the sight of Mirabeau and Danton, Fontanes obtained a private audience of him whom he pleasantly called "the controller-general of finance:" he came out of it greatly satisfied, for M. du Theil had promised to encourage the publication of my works, and Fontanes thought only of me. It was impossible to be a better man than he: timid where he himself was concerned, he became all courage in matters of friendship; he proved this to me at the time of my resignation on the occasion of the death of the Duc d'Enghien[243]. In conversation, he burst into ludicrous fits of literary rage. In politics, he reasoned falsely: the crimes of the Convention had inspired him with a horror of liberty. He detested the newspapers, the band of false philosophers, the whole science of ideas, and he communicated that hatred to Bonaparte, when he became connected with the master of Europe. We went for walks in the country; we stopped under some of those spreading elm-trees scattered about the fields. Leaning against the trunk of these elms, my friend told me of his early journey to England before the Revolution, and of the verses he then addressed to two young ladies who had grown old in the shadow of the towers of Westminster: towers which he found standing as he had left them, while at their base lay buried the illusions and the hours of his youth. We often dined at some solitary tavern in Chelsea, on the Thames, where we talked of Milton and Shakespeare: they had seen what we saw; they had sat, like ourselves, on the bank of that stream, a foreign stream to us, the national stream to them. We returned to London, at night, by the faltering rays of the stars, drowned one after the other in the fog of the city. We reached our lodging, guided by uncertain glimmers which scarcely showed us the road across the coal smoke hovering red around every lamp: thus speeds the poet's life. We saw London in detail; as an old exile, I acted as _cicerone_ to the new recruits of banishment which the Revolution demanded, young or old: there is no legal age for misfortune. In the course of one of these excursions, we were surprised by a rain-storm, mingled with thunder, and obliged to take shelter in the passage of a mean house, of which the door had been left open by accident. There we met the Duc de Bourbon[244]: I saw for the first time, at this Chantilly[245], a prince who was not yet the Last of the Condés. [Sidenote: The Duc of Bourbon.] The Duc de Bourbon, Fontanes and I, all three outlaws, seeking a shelter from the same storm, on foreign soil, under a poor man's roof! _Fata viam invenient._ Fontanes was recalled to France. He embraced me, expressing wishes for a speedy meeting. On arriving in Germany, he wrote me the following letter: "28 July 1798.