officer—the fact of his wounds and inability to serve being waived in the interests of persecution. At this point, one pauses to ask why, after all, Madame de Staël herself was not arrested. There seems but little doubt that the obsequiousness of the Austrian police would have been equal to the task. Perhaps Napoleon shrank from the odium of such a proceeding; perhaps he was, in reality, rather glad to be rid of Madame de Staël. This would agree with a well-known conversation which he had held four years previously with Auguste de Staël, who, going to him to plead for his mother's recall, was told, with insolent, good-humoured contempt, that the whole of Europe, except France, was open to her; that she would not be imprisoned, as then she might have some cause to complain, but that she alone could be unhappy when allowed to wander at will through every capital of Europe except Paris.
But if this explanation be accepted, it becomes difficult to account for the later persecutions of Madame de Staël at the hands of the French and Swiss police. Could it be that Savary and his underlings, through excess of zeal, interpreted their instructions with liberal severity, and that Napoleon was not responsible for every individual act, but only for the angry hatred which promised approval of each and all of them?
However this may be, Madame de Staël's fears were not long in reasserting themselves. Too impatient to wait for the passport, she started with her son and daughter for Galicia, having extracted from a friend the promise of hurrying after her as soon as the expected paper arrived. In her Memoirs she admits that this was a mistake; for at Vienna she had friends to intercede in her favour, while in Galicia
