He does not know how to entertain as the head of his household, how to welcome guests and be gracious or even polite to his pretended courtiers; he himself declares that[3141] "they go two years without speaking to him, and six months without seeing him; he does not like them, their conversation displeases him." When he addresses them it is to browbeat them; his familiarities with their wives are those of the gendarme or the pedagogue, while the little attentions he inflicts upon them are indecorous criticisms or compliments in bad taste. They know that they are spied upon in their own homes and responsible for whatever is said there; "the upper police is constantly hovering over all drawing-rooms."[3142] For every word uttered in privacy, for any lack of compliance, every individual, man or woman, runs the risk of exile or of being relegated to the interior at a distance of forty leagues.[3143] And the same with the resident gentry in the provinces; they are obliged to pay court to the prefect, to be on good terms with him, or at least attend his receptions; it is important that their cards should be seen on his mantel piece.[3144] Otherwise, let them take heed, for it is he who reports on their conduct to the minister Fouché or to Savary who replaced him. In vain do they live circumspectly and confine themselves to a private life; a refusal to accept an office is unpardonable; there is a grudge against them if they do not employ their local influence in behalf of the reign.[3145] Accordingly, they are, under the empire as under the republic, in law as in fact, in the provinces as well as at Paris, privileged persons the wrong way, a suspicious class under a special surveillance" and subject to exceptional rigor.[3146] In 1808,[3147] Napoleon orders Fouché "to draw up ... among the old and wealthy families who are not in the system... a list of ten in each department, and of fifty for Paris," of which the sons from sixteen to eighteen years of age shall be forced to enter Saint-Cyr and from thence go into the army as second lieutenants. In 1813, still "in the highest classes of society," and arbitrarily selected by the prefects, he takes ten thousand other persons, exempt or redeemed from the conscription, even the married, even fathers of families, who, under the title of guards of honor, become soldiers, at first to be slaughtered in his service, and next, and in the mean time, to answer for the fidelity of their relatives. It is the old law of hostages, a resumption of the worst proceedings of the Directory for his account and aggravated for his profit.--Decidedly, the imperial Régime, for the old royalists, resembles too much the Jacobin régime; they are about as repugnant to one as to the other, and their aversion naturally extends to the whole of the new society.--As they comprehend it, they are more or less robbed and oppressed for a quarter of a century. In order that their hostility