My report on reaching Paris made a great noise; it was reprinted by M. Le Normant the Younger, who risked his life upon this occasion, and for whom I had all the difficulty in the world to obtain a barren warrant of printer to the King. Bonaparte acted, or allowed others to act, in a manner unworthy of him: on the occasion of my report, they did what the Directory had done on the appearance of Cléry's Memoirs; they falsified fragments of it: I was made to propose to Louis XVIII. stupid ideas for the revival of feudal rights, for the tithes of the clergy, for the recovery of the national property, as though the printing of the original piece in the _Moniteur de Gand_ at a fixed and known date, did not confound the imposture. The pseudonymous writer entrusted with the production of an insincere pamphlet was a soldier fairly high up in rank: he was dismissed after the Hundred Days; his dismissal was ascribed to his conduct towards me; he sent his friends to me; they begged me to intervene, lest a man of merit should lose his sole means of existence: I wrote to the Minister of War and obtained a retiring-pension for this officer[278]. He is dead: his wife has remained attached to Madame de Chateaubriand by a feeling of gratitude to which I was far from having any claim. Certain proceedings are too highly prized; the most ordinary persons are susceptible to such feelings of generosity. A name for virtue is cheaply acquired: the superior mind is not that which pardons, but that which has no need of pardon. I do not know where Bonaparte, at St. Helena, discovered that I had "rendered essential services at Ghent:" if he judged the part I played too favourably, at least there lay behind his opinion an appreciation of my political value. * I avoided at Ghent, as far as I could, intrigues, which were opposed to my character and contemptible in my eyes; for, at bottom, I perceived in our paltry catastrophe the catastrophe of society. My refuge against the idlers and rogues was the Enclos du Béguinage. I used to walk round that little world of veiled or tuckered women, consecrated to different Christian works: a calm region, placed like the African quicksands on the edge of the tempests. There no incongruity shocked my ideas, for the sentiment of religion is so lofty that it is never irrelevant to the gravest revolutions: the solitaries of the Thebaid and the Barbarians, destroyers of the Roman world, are in no way discordant facts or mutually exclusive existences.