On the evening of the 19th, Madame de Chateaubriand had sent a servant to the Carrousel, with instructions not to return until he had the certainty of the flight of the King. At midnight, as the man had not come in, I went to my room. I had just gone to bed, when M. Clausel de Coussergues entered. He told us that His Majesty had left and had gone in the direction of Lille. He brought me this news on the part of the Chancellor, who, knowing me to be in danger, was violating secrecy on my behalf and sent me twelve thousand francs recoverable on my salary as Minister to Sweden. I was obstinately bent on remaining, not wishing to leave Paris until I should be physically certain of the royal removal. The servant who had been sent to reconnoitre returned: he had seen the Court carriages go by. Madame de Chateaubriand pushed me into her carriage, at four o'clock in the morning on the 20th of March. I was in such a fit of fury that I knew neither where I was going nor what I was doing. We passed out through the Barrière Saint-Martin. At dawn, I saw crows coming down peacefully from the elms on the high-road where they had spent the night, to take their first meal in the fields, without troubling their heads about Louis XVIII. and Napoleon: they were not obliged to leave their country and, thanks to their wings, they were able to laugh at the bad road along which I was being jolted. Old friends of Combourg, we were more alike in the old days when, at break of day, we used to breakfast on mulberries from the brambles in the thickets of Brittany! The roadway was broken up, the weather rainy, Madame de Chateaubriand poorly: she looked every moment through the little window at the back of the carnage to see if we were not being pursued. We slept at Amiens, where Du Cange[256] was born; next at Arras, the birth-place of Robespierre[257]: there I was recognised. When we sent for horses, on the morning of the 22nd, the postmaster said that they had been engaged for a general who was taking to Lille the news of "the triumphal entry of the Emperor-King into Paris;" Madame de Chateaubriand was dying of fright, not for herself, but for me. I ran to the post-office and removed the difficulty with money.