The minister
of police had given notice, in corsair terms, that at thirty-eight
leagues I was a good prize. In this manner, when the emperor
exercises the arbitrary power of banishment, neither the exiled
persons, nor their friends, nor even their children, can reach
his presence to plead the cause of the unfortunates who are thus
torn from the objects of their affection and their habits; and these
sentences of exile, which are now irrevocable, particularly where
women are the objects, and which the emperor himself has rightly
termed proscriptions, are pronounced without the possibility of
making any justification be heard, supposing always that the crime
of having displeased the emperor admits of any.
Although the forty leagues were ordered me, I was necessitated to
pass through Orleans, a very dull town, but inhabited by several
very pious ladies, who had retired thither for an asylum. In walking
about the town on foot, I stopped before the monument erected to the
memory of Joan of Arc: certainly, thought I to myself, when she
delivered France from the power of the English, that same France was
much more free, much more France than it is at present. One feels a
singular sensation in wandering through a town, where you neither know,
nor are known to a soul. I felt a kind of bitter enjoyment in picturing
to myself my isolated situation in its fullest extent, and in still
looking at that France which I was about to quit, perhaps for ever,
without speaking to a person, or being diverted from the impression
which the country itself made upon me.
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