"'It is a great pity that the varlet should drive out the master; for the rest, my soul is God's, my heart the King's and my body is in the hands of the wicked: let them do with it what they please.'" The Achille de Harlay who walks in that garden to-day is M. Vidocq[418], and the Duc de Guise is Coco Lacour; we have changed great men for great principles. How free we are now! How free was I especially at my window, watching that good gendarme standing sentry at the foot of my staircase and prepared to shoot me flying, if I had sprouted wings! There was no nightingale in my garden, but there were plenty of frisky, shameless, quarrelsome sparrows, which are to be found everywhere, in the country, in town, in palaces, in prisons, and which perch as gaily on the instrument of death as on a rose-bush: to one that can fly away, what matter earthly sufferings? Madame de Chateaubriand obtained permission to see me. She had spent thirteen months, under the Terror, in the Rennes prisons, with my two sisters Lucile and Julie; her imagination, remaining under the impression, can no longer endure the idea of a prison. My poor wife had a violent attack of hysterics, on entering the Prefect's Offices, and this was an obligation the more which I owed to the _juste-milieu._ On the second day of my detention, the examining magistrate, the Sieur Desmortiers[419], arrived, accompanied by his clerk. M. Guizot had obtained the appointment as attorney-general to the Royal Court at Rennes of one M. Hello[420], a writer and, consequently, an envious and irritable man, like all who spoil paper in a triumphing party. M. Guizot's creature, finding my name and those of M. le Duc de Fitz-James and M. Hyde de Neuville mixed up in the proceedings that were being conducted against M. Berryer at Nantes, wrote to the Minister of Justice that, if he were the master, he would not fail to have us arrested and included in the trial, both as accomplices and as witnesses for the prosecution. M. de Montalivet had thought it his duty to yield to the advice of M. Hello: there was a time when M. de Montalivet used to come to me to ask my opinion and my ideas relating to the elections and the liberty of the press. The Restoration, which made M. de Montalivet a peer, was unable to make him a man of intelligence, and that is no doubt why it makes him "feel sick" to-day. [Sidenote: The examining magistrate.] So M. Desmortiers, the examining magistrate, entered my room; a mawkish air was spread like a layer of honey over a contracted and violent face: Je m'appelle Loyal, natif de Normandie, Et suis huissier à verge, en dépit de l'envie[421].