her is not bad. She has intelligence, a good deal of
intelligence. But she is unaccustomed to any kind of discipline. She
would not be six months in Paris before I should be obliged to put her
in the Temple or at Bicetre. I should be sorry to do this, because it
would make a noise and that would injure me in public Opinion."

It makes but little difference whether she abstains from talking
politics: "people talk politics in talking about literature, the fine
arts and morality, about everything in the world; women should busy
themselves with their knitting," and men keep silent or, if they do
talk, let it be on a given subject and in the sense prescribed.

Of course, the inspection of publications is still more rigorous and
more repressive, more exacting and more persistent.--At the theatre,
where the assembled spectators become enthusiastic through the quick
contagion of their sensibilities, the police cut out of the "Heraclius"
of Corneille and the "Athalie" of Racine[6256] from twelve to
twenty-five consecutive lines and patch up the broken passages as
carefully as possible with lines or parts of lines of their own.--On the
periodical press, on the newspaper which has acquired a body of readers
and which exercises an influence and groups its subscribers according to
an opinion, if not political, at least philosophic and literary,
there is a compression which goes even as far as utter ruin. From the
beginning of the Consulate,[6257] sixty out of seventy-three political
journals are suppressed; in 1811, the thirteen that still existed are
reduced to four and the editors-in-chief are appointed by the minister
of police. The property of these journals, on the other hand, is
confiscated, while the Emperor, who had taken it, concedes it, one
third to his police and the other two thirds to people of the court
or litterateurs who are his functionaries or his creatures. Under this
always aggravated system the newspapers, from year to year, become so
barren that the police, to interest and amuse the public, contrive a pen
warfare in their columns between one amateur of French music and one of
Italian music.

Books, almost as rigorously kept within bounds, are mutilated or
prevented from appearing.[6258] Chateaubriand is forbidden to reprint
his "Essay on Revolutions," published in London under the Directory. In
"L'Itineraire de Paris a Jerusalem" he is compelled to cut out "a good
deal of declamation on courts, courtiers and