Meantime Bonaparte had thoroughly recovered his self-control. He declared at St. Helena that all the conspiracies of the time were alike without a head because they needed a "sword"; and that, possessing one, he alone could choose what pleased him best. To Mme. de Rémusat he said: "It was one of the epochs in my life when I was most skilful. I saw the Abbé Sieyès, and promised to put his wordy constitution into operation. I received the Jacobin leaders, and the agents of the Bourbons. I refused no one's advice, but I gave only such as was in the interest of my plans. I withdrew from the people's observation because I knew that when the time arrived curiosity to see me would throw them under my feet. Every one fell into my toils, and when I became head of the state there was not a party in France which did not cherish some hope for my success." Mme. de Staël, returning on the eighteenth of Brumaire from Switzerland to Paris, saw Barras driving to his country-seat of Grosbois. On her arrival men talked no longer of abstractions, of the Constituent Assembly, of the people, or of the Convention: it was all of a person--of what General Bonaparte had done. Her own feelings, she says, were mixed. If the battle were joined, and the Jacobins victorious, she might turn about and fly, for blood would flow once more. Still, at the thought of Bonaparte's triumph she felt a prophetic sadness. She could not mourn for liberty, for liberty had never existed in France. This was the voice of the dispirited and disheartened constitutional republicans, who knew and proposed no remedy. The royalists were fully aware of what they desired. They had been sighing for a despot in France, for another Richelieu, a fierce, intractable master, wielding a rod of iron, without which the inhabitants could never be reconstructed into a nation. In the words of a letter written somewhat earlier from Coblentz, their city of refuge on the Rhine, they desired "the union of powers in the hands of an imperious master, ... who, by a splendid and brilliant Cromwellism, would hold in awe the people whom he forced to respect and bless their own servitude." The mass of the nation were tired of war and eager for a peace that would bring prosperity, pleasure, and glory. The few honest and austere radicals went down with their greedy and noisy fellows; the Jacobin party was no more. There had been a complete rearrangement of factors in the French problem.