Your Majesty has been told that I regretted Paris because of the Museum and Talma: this is an agreeable jest upon exile, in other words upon the misfortune which Cicero and Bolingbroke have declared to be the most insupportable of all; but, if I were to love the master-pieces of art which France owes to Your Majesty's conquests, if I were to love those beautiful tragedies, the images of heroism: would it be for you, Sire, to blame me for it? Is not the happiness of each individual compounded of the nature of his faculties? And, if Heaven has given me talents, have I not the imagination which renders the enjoyment of the arts and the mind necessary? So many people ask of Your Majesty real advantages of every kind! Why should I blush to ask of you friendship, poetry, music, pictures, all that ideal existence which I can enjoy without swerving from the submission which I owe to the Monarch of France?" This unpublished letter was worth preserving[387]. Madame de Staël was not, as has been contended, a blind and implacable enemy. She was listened to no more than I, when I also saw myself obliged to write to Bonaparte to ask him for the life of my cousin Armand. Alexander and Cæsar would have been touched by this letter so lofty in tone, written by so famous a woman; but the confidence of the merit which judges itself the equal of the supreme dominion, that sort of familiarity of the intellect which places itself on the level of the master of Europe to treat with him as from crown to crown appeared to Bonaparte but the arrogance of a disordered self-esteem. He thought himself set at defiance by all that had any independent greatness; to him baseness seemed fidelity, pride revolt: he did not know that true talent recognises no Napoleons save in genius, that it has its right of entry into the palaces as into the temples, because it is immortal. Madame de Staël left Chaumont and returned to Coppet[388]; Madame Récamier again hastened to go to her; M. Mathieu de Montmorency also remained devoted to her. Both were punished for it; they were smitten with the very penalty which they had gone to console: the forty leagues' distance from Paris was inflicted on them[389]. Madame Récamier retired to Châlons-sur-Marne[390] influenced in her selection by its propinquity to Montmirail[391], where Messieurs de La Rochefoucauld-Doudeauville resided.