A comical piece of confusion followed. I must say one thing with all modest reserve: the vain noise of my life grows in volume as the real silence of that life increases. I am unable nowadays to alight at an inn, either in France or abroad, without being at once besieged. For old Italy, I am the defender of religion; for young Italy, the defender of liberty; for the authorities I have the honour of being _Sua Eccellenza_ GIA _Ambasciadore di Francia_ at Verona and in Rome. Ladies, all doubtless of rare beauty, have lent the language of Angelica and Aquilante il Nero to the Floridan Atala and the Moor Aben-Hamet. I therefore see scholars arrive, old priests with wide skull-caps, women, whom I thank for their translations and their favours; next, _mendicanti_, too well-bred to believe that an ex-ambassador is as poor a beggar as their lordships. Now, my admirers had hurried to the Hôtel des Trois-Couronnes, together with the crowd attracted by Madame la Duchesse de Berry: they got me up into a corner of a window and began to address me in an harangue the end of which they went off to recite to Marie-Caroline. In their mental confusion, the two troops sometimes mixed up the patron and the patroness: I was greeted as "Your Royal Highness," and Madame told me that she had been complimented on the _Génie du Christianisme_; we exchanged our mutual fames. The Princess was charmed at having written a work in four volumes, and I was proud to have been taken for the daughter of kings. Suddenly, the Princess disappeared: she went off on foot, with Count Lucchesi, to see Tasso's cell; she was a judge of prisons. The mother of the banished orphan, of the child-heir of St. Louis, Marie-Caroline leaving the Fortress of Blaye and seeking in the town of Renée of France[202] only a poet's prison-cell is an unique thing in the history of fortune and human glory. The venerables of Prague would have passed through Ferrara a hundred times without taking such an idea into their heads; but Madame de Berry is a Neapolitan and a country-woman of Tasso, who said: "_Ho desiderio di Napoli, come l'anime ben disposte del paradiso._" It was when I was in opposition and disgrace; the Ordinances were secretly simmering at the Palace and still joyously lying at the bottom of men's hearts. One day, the Duchesse de Berry saw an engraving representing the singer of the _Gerusalemme_ at the bars of his cell: "I hope," she said, "that we shall soon see Chateaubriand like that." Words of prosperity, of which we must take no more notice than of a rash word spoken in drunkenness. I was to join Madame in Tasso's very dungeon, after suffering in the prisons of the police on her behalf. What loftiness of sentiment it showed in the noble Princess, how great a mark of esteem she gave me, when she applied to me in the hour of her misfortune, after the desire that she had expressed! If her first wish appraised my talents too highly, her confidence was less mistaken as to my character.