French Government would endeavor to obtain the removal of
these _proscrits_ from the Canton de Vaud, and stating that the said Canton
was the _foyer_ of Jacobinical principles, and the place where Napoleon's
return from Elba was planned and accelerated, and thro' which the
conveyance of intelligence backwards and forwards was conducted. I have no
doubt that in this petition more is meant than meets the ear; that the
Oligarchs of Bern, as well as the Ultras of France, have a share in it, and
that it may be considered not so much as an attempt to compel the Canton to
refuse asylum to these exiles, as to excite the Great Powers to enforce the
abolition of the independence of Vaud, and to replace it under the dominion
and authority of the Canton of Bern.

Everybody here, however, sees thro' the drift of this petition, and many
persons whose names are put down as having signed it, have written to their
friends at Lausanne, to declare not only that they never signed such a
petition, but their entire ignorance even of the agitation of the question
till they saw the petition itself in print. The French government, however,
has not ventured to act any further upon it, than to make a pompous display
of the royalist zeal and _bon esprit_ that pervades the Department of the
Doubs.

I see a good deal of Mlle Michaud. I find her conversation extremely
agreeable. She had lent to me an Italian work by Verri entitled _Le notti
Romane al sepolcro di Stipione_. She is a very rigid Catholic, having been
educated by a priest of very strict ideas. Her devotion however does not
render her less cheerful or less amiable. She having expressed a wish to
hear the Protestant church service, I offered to accompany her and we went
together one Sunday to the Cathedral Church at Lausanne. But it
unfortunately happened that on that day a sermon was preached which must
have given a great deal of pain to her filial feelings. Mr Levade, the
minister, took it into his head to give a political sermon, in which, after
a great deal of commonplace abuse of Voltaire, Rousseau and the French
Revolution, and very fulsome adulation towards the English government (a
subject which was brought in by the head and shoulders), of that _island_
(as he termed it) _surrounded by the Ocean_, he lavished a great deal of
still more fulsome adulation on the Bourbons; and then most wantonly and
unnecessarily began a furious declamation against the _regicides_ as he
termed them,