Madame Récamier,çoisRené while admiring Bonaparte, had remained true to her hatred against the oppressor of our liberties and the enemy of Madame de Staël. As for what concerned herself, she did not give it a thought and she made light of her exile. The letters which Benjamin Constant wrote to her at this time will serve as a study, if not of the human heart, at least of the human head: there we see all that could be made of a passion by an ironical and romantic, serious and poetical intelligence. Rousseau is not more genuine, but he mingles with his imaginary loves a sincere melancholy and a real reverie.
Meanwhile, Bonaparte had landed at Cannes; the perturbation due to his approach was beginning to make itself felt. Benjamin Constant wrote Madame Récamier this note:
"Forgive me if I avail myself of circumstances to trouble you; but the opportunity is too favourable. My fate will be decided in four or five days surely; for, though you used to like not to think so, in order to have to show me less interest, I am certainly, with Marmont, Chateaubriand and Lainé, one of the four most compromised men in France. It is, therefore, certain that, if we do not triumph, I shall in a week be either an outlaw or a fugitive, or in a cell or shot. Grant me then, during the two or three days which will precede the battle, as much of your time and as many of your hours as you can. If I die, you will be glad to have done me this kindness and you would be sorry to have afflicted me. My feeling for you is my life; one sign of indifference hurts me more than, four days hence, my sentence of death could do. And, when I feel that danger is a means of obtaining a sign of interest from you, I derive from it nothing but joy.
"Were you pleased with my article, and have you heard what people say of it?"
Benjamin Constant was right, he was as much compromised as I: attached to Bernadotte, he had served against Napoleon; he had published his work _De l'esprit de conquête_, in which he handled the "tyrant" more roughly than I handled him in my pamphlet _De Bonaparte et des Bourbons._ He crowned his perils by talking in the newspapers.
On the 19th of March, at the moment when Bonaparte was at the gates of the Capital, he had the firmness to affix his signature to an article in the _Journal des Débats_ ending with this phrase: