"And you, daughter of the Cæsars[77], come forth from your palace with your young son[78] in your arms; come, to add mercy to greatness; come, to soften victory and to temper the glitter of arms by the gentle majesty of a queen and a mother." In the manuscript which was handed back to me, the commencement of the speech, which relates to the opinions of Milton, was struck out from one end to the other by Bonaparte's hand. A part of my protest against the isolation from affairs of State, in which it was desired to keep literature, was also stigmatized with the pencil. The eulogy of the Abbé Delille, which recalled the Emigration and the fidelity of the poet to the misfortunes of the Royal Family and to the sufferings of his companions in exile, was placed between brackets; the eulogy of M. de Fontanes had a cross set against it. Almost all that I said of M. Chénier, of his brother, of my own, of the expiatory altars which were being prepared at Saint-Denis was slashed with pencil marks. The paragraph commencing with the words, "M. Chénier worshipped liberty," etc., had a double longitudinal line drawn through it. Nevertheless, the agents of the Empire, when publishing the speech, kept this paragraph pretty correctly. All was not ended when they had handed me back my speech; they wanted to force me to write a second. I declared that I stood by the first, and that I would write no other. The committee then declared to me that I should not be received into the Academy. Gracious, generous and courageous persons, unknown to myself, interested themselves in me. Mrs. Lindsay, who at the time of my return to France, in 1800, had brought me from Calais to Paris, talked to Madame Gay[79]; the latter addressed herself to Madame Regnaud de Saint-Jean-d'Angély, who asked the Duc de Rovigo to leave me alone. The women of that time interposed their beauty between power and misfortune. [Sidenote: Bonaparte's comments.] All this perturbation was prolonged, by the decennial prizes, until the year 1812. Bonaparte, who was persecuting me, sent to the Academy to ask, in the matter of those prizes, why they had not put the _Génie du Christianisme_ on their list. The Academy explained; several of my colleagues wrote their unfavourable judgment of my work. I might have said what a Greek poet said to a bird: "Daughter of Attica, nurtured on honey, thou who singest so well, thou snatchest a grasshopper, a fine songstress like thyself, and carriest her for food to thy young ones. Both of you have wings, both inhabit these regions, both celebrate the birth of spring: wilt thou not restore to her her liberty? It is not just that a songstress should die by the beak of one of her fellows[80]."