MADAME DE STAiiL AND NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 275 her in another. In another he says that " her approach bodes mischief," and he will not have her on French soil. In another, alluding to her father, M. Neckar, the banker and financier, he winds up an angry order by saying : " that foreign family have done mischief enough in France already." How honorable to this lady, the ran- corous hostility of such a man in such a place. Banished from the city which she loved above all other places in the world, she flew to literature as a resource against the tedium of exile. Corinne, which contained the results of an Italian tour, made her famous. Next, she turned her long residence in Germany to account by writing a work upon that country, which has since taken its place as one of the classics of French literature. In its composition she most scrupulously avoided writing a sentence, a phrase, a word, an allusion which the police at Paris could construe in a sense hostile to the imperial government. Corinne had been allowed to appear ; why not i' Allemagne ? The manuscript being complete, she sent it for publica- tion to the Jiouse in Paris that had published her Corinne, some years before. A few days after a decree was made public to the effect that no work could thenceforth be printed in France until it had been examined by censors. I notice in the Napoleon Correspondence that the emperor scolded the minister of police for employing in this decree the odious word censeurs, because it savored of the tyranny of the Bourbon kings. He did not like the word, but events soon showed that he approved the thing. The work was submitted to the censors, and the author came to a place forty leagues from Paris to make altera- tions and read the proofs. The manuscript was read with the closest attention, but nothing was found objectionable in it except here and there a sentence or a phrase. To afford the reader an idea of the necessary timidity of
