Those agitated pages which I composed by day were notes relating to the events of the moment which, when collected, formed my pamphlet _De Bonaparte et des Bourbons._ I had so high an opinion of the genius of Napoleon and the gallantry of our soldiers that an invasion by the foreigner which should be successful in its ultimate result could not enter into my head; but I thought that this invasion, by making France realize the danger to which Napoleon's ambition had brought her, would lead to a movement from within and that the enfranchisement of the French would be worked by their own hands. It was with this idea that I was writing my notes, so that, if our political assemblies should stay the march of the Allies and resolve to sever from a great man who had become a scourge, they should know to whom to resort; the shelter seemed to me to lie in the authority, modified in accordance with the times, under which our ancestors had lived during eight centuries: when, in a storm, one finds nothing within reach but an old edifice, all in ruins though it be, one retires to it. In the winter of 1813 to 1814, I took an apartment in the Rue de Rivoli, opposite the first gate of the garden of the Tuileries, before which I had heard the death of the Duc d'Enghien cried. As yet there was nothing to be seen in that street except the arcades built by the Government and a few houses rising here and there with their lateral denticulation of projecting stones. It needed nothing less than the spectacle of the calamities weighing on France to maintain the aversion which Napoleon inspired and at the same time to protect one's self against the admiration which he caused to revive so soon as he acted: he was the proudest genius of action that ever existed; his first campaign in Italy and his last campaign in France (I am not speaking of Waterloo) are his two finest campaigns: he was Condé in the first, Turenne in the second, a great warrior in the former, a great man in the latter; but they differed in their results: by the one he gained the Empire, by the other he lost it. His last hours of power, all uprooted, all barefoot as they were, could not be drawn from him, like a lion's tooth, save by the efforts of the arms of Europe. The name of Napoleon was still so formidable that the hostile armies crossed the Rhine in terror; they unceasingly looked behind them, in order well to assure themselves that their retreat would be possible; masters of Paris, they trembled yet. Alexander[95], casting his eyes towards Russia while entering France, congratulated the persons who were able to go away, and wrote his anxieties and regrets to his mother[96]. [Sidenote: His campaign in France.]