At the end of one day, receiving no answer, and fearing (but why?) to attract attention to herself by remaining any longer in one inn, she sought the shelter of another; and is extremely—one cannot really help thinking needlessly—eloquent in describing her anguish during these self-imposed peregrinations. At last Joseph's letter came. He not only forwarded her the permission to go to Berlin, but added several valuable letters of introduction, and took leave of her in the kindest terms.
Accompanied by her children and Benjamin Constant, she started, hating the postillions for their boasted speed, and feeling that every step taken by the horses was a fresh link in the ever-lengthening and indestructible chain of which one end was Paris and the other her heart.
What Constant's feelings were she does not say, and speaks of his accompanying her as a spontaneous act of friendship. But he had been exiled as well as herself; and although his desire to go to Germany had partly determined hers, and neither wished to separate from the other, there are indications that Constant quitted France as reluctantly as his companion.
Their relations were already varied by alternate periods of shine and storm; and although her influence over him was still immense, it had begun, as was inevitable with such a man, to fret him. And probably some doubts that were not political, and some sufferings that had their root in another cause than exile, played their part in the extreme agitation of Madame de Staël's mind at this period.
