Madame de Staël was still haunted by a foreboding of evil. Such presentiments were very common with her. She had the quick, indefinable instinct of imaginative minds, and felt that subtle vibration of events which precedes, or perhaps causes, change in them. Probably she hardly knew what she anticipated; and yet, when the news of Napoleon's escape from Elba arrived, it seemed as if the expected disaster could only be that. An hour after she met M. de la Valette, and said to him: "If Bonaparte triumph, liberty is lost; and if he be beaten, our national independence is over."
A few days of utter consternation followed—a pause of bewildered, incapable silence, through which, as Châteaubriand graphically says, "the sound of Bonaparte's advancing footsteps echoed." Then came the news of one town and province after another rallying round the standard of the resurgent conqueror. Ney departed, vowing to bring back his former master in an iron cage; and the vain boast, so quickly yet not ludicrously disproved, inspired as little confidence as it deserved.
The Court prepared for ignominious flight, and Madame de Staël had no choice but to follow its example. But a few months previously she had by chance become aware of a conspiracy against Napoleon's life, and, for all her hatred of him, had been so moved by the menace of peril to her ancient and implacable foe, that she had found means to despatch a warning to him. Yet now, when she heard of his return, all her terror of him revived in its pristine force, bringing back with it the flood of agitated imagination which had so long poisoned her life.
Villemain has left a record of the evening of the
