Antecedent to Gourgaud's departure was that of Las Cases, but his journey was so impeded, his health so shaken, and his devotion so discounted, that whatever he accomplished in molding public opinion was logically subsequent to the work of the general. Spanish by origin, French by six centuries of devotion, his family was of the higher nobility. He himself had been an emigrant, but had returned to become a member of the Council of State. As a great civil official he had learned to love Napoleon and deliberately chose exile with him rather than honors and service under the restored Bourbons. In 1816 he wrote, and endeavored to forward secretly, letters containing his views as to the disgraceful treatment of Napoleon. These were intercepted and the writer was condemned in Lowe's first fury to depart. On second thought the governor begged him to remain under certain restrictions; these Las Cases would not accept, possibly because he saw himself of greater use in Europe than in St. Helena. He reached the Cape of Good Hope in January, 1817, was there detained eight months, was then forwarded to England, where he was forbidden to land, thence to Belgium, and finally, in December, a physical derelict, he found shelter in Frankfort-on-the-Main, where he lived for a time under the strictest surveillance. His faculties were soon restored to a certain rather impaired activity, and in 1818 he laid a powerful protest against the treatment of Napoleon before the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle. No less a person than the Emperor's mother was his agent and intermediary. A meeting of reactionary sovereigns and their ministers, terrified by the throes of a revolutionary spirit more and more personified in Bonaparte, could in no case be receptive to such a remonstrance, and was utterly cold and scornful in the face of Gourgaud's evidence to the well-being and kind treatment of Napoleon, already published. Even with the most enlightened and liberal public of Europe, that of Great Britain, Las Cases' controversial publications fell rather flat. Readers were weary of the theme, since O'Meara was now and had been for some time past in possession of the Napoleonic field.