Besides such passages as this, scarcely likely to please the French king, there was the special ground for his objection that his immediate ancestor, Egalite, was introduced into the story, and depicted in no favorable light his efforts to inflame the popular violence for his selfish ends, his hypocrisy, his cowardice, and so on, being held up to contempt. Mrs. Marcet, when she read all this, came breathless to Harriet Martineau to ask her how she could have made such a blunder as to write a story that plainly would (and, of course, in fact, did) put an end to the official patronage of her series in France, and would destroy for ever any hopes that she might have entertained of being received at the Court of Louis Philippe? Greatly surprised was the good lady at finding Harriet's reverence for that monarch so limited in extent. She replied to her kind friend that she "wrote with a view to the people, and especially the most suffering of them; and the crowned heads must for once take their chance for their feelings." At the very moment that Mrs. Marcet's remonstrance was made, Miss Martineau was writing a story of a character likely to be even more distasteful to the Emperor of Russia than this one to the King of the French. She had found it difficult to illustrate the theory of the currency in a story treating of the existence of civilized people. The only situation in which she could find persons, above the rank of savages, transacting their exchanges by aid of a kind of money which made the business only one remove from bartering, was amongst the Polish exiles in Siberia. She therefore wrote _The Charmed Sea_, a story founded upon the terrible facts of the lives of the exiled Poles "in the depths of Eastern Siberia," working in "a silver-mine near the western extremity of the Daourian Range, and within hearing of the waters of the Baikal when its storms were fiercest." Had the melancholy tale been written in the service of the Poles, it could not have been more moving. So powerful, and interesting was it, indeed, that the criticism of the _Edinburgh Review_ was that the fiction too entirely overpowered the political economy. The arrival of _The Charmed Sea_ in Russia changed the favorable opinion which the Czar had previously been so kind as to express about the _Illustrations_. He had been purchasing largely of the French translation of the series for distribution amongst his people. But now he issued a proclamation ordering every copy in Russia of every number to be immediately burnt, and forbidding the author ever to set foot upon his soil. Austria, equally concerned in the Polish business, followed this example, and a description of Harriet Martineau's person was hung in the appointed places, amidst the lists of the proscribed, all over Russia, Austria, and Austrian-Italy. Despots, at least, had no admiration for her politics.