"'You met him on his course, madame; perhaps he would have extended you a helping hand, after having reached the summit of his mountain.'
"'I must speak with him,' said Madame de Staël; 'I have been injured in his opinion.'
"'I think so too,' replied the queen, 'but you would judge him ill, if you considered him capable of hating any one. He believed you to be his enemy, and he feared you, which was something very unusual for him,' added she, with a smile. 'Now that he is unfortunate, you will show yourself his friend, and prove yourself to be such, and I am satisfied that he will receive you well.'
"Madame de Staël also occupied herself a great deal with the young princes, but she met with worse success with them than with us. It was perhaps in order to judge of their mental capacity, that she showered unsuitable questions upon them.
"'And will you also be as fond of war as he is?'
"'Yes, if it did not cause so much misery.'
'Is it true that he often made you repeat a fable commencing with the words, "The strongest is always in the right?"'
"'Madame, he often made us repeat fables, but this one not oftener than any other.'
"Young Prince Napoleon, a boy of astounding mental capacity and precocious judgment, answered all these questions with the greatest composure, and, at the conclusion of this examination, turned to me and said quite audibly: 'This lady asks a great many questions. Is that what you call being intellectual?'
"After the departure of our distinguished visitors, we all indulged in an expression of opinion concerning them, and young Prince Napoleon was the one upon whom the ladies had made the least flattering impression, but he only ventured to intimate as much in a low voice.
"I for my part had been more dazzled than gladdened by this visit. One could not avoid admiring this genius in spite of its inconsiderateness, and its wanderings, but there was nothing pleasing, nothing graceful and womanly, in Madame de Staël's manner[36]."
[Footnote 36: Cochelet, Mémoires sur la Reine Hortense, vol. i., pp. 429-440.]
The restoration was accomplished. The allies had at last withdrawn from the kingdom, and Louis XVIII. was now the independent ruler of France. In him, in the returned members of his family, and in the emigrants who were pouring into the country from all quarters, was represented the old era of France, the era of despotic royal power, of brilliant manners, of intrigues, of aristocratic ideas, of ease and luxury. Opposed to them stood the France of the new era, the generation formed by Napoleon and the revolution, the new aristocracy, who possessed no other ancestors than merit and valorous deeds, an aristocracy that had nothing to relate of the _oeil de boeuf_ and the _petites maisons_, but an aristocracy that could tell of the battle-field and of the hospitals in which their wounds had been healed.