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When he returned to Coppet, in 1815, he was received with the same affection by Madame de Staël, but at Geneva it was otherwise. His friends looked upon him as a deserter, because in his eyes the end did not justify the means, because he had a horror of foreign intervention, because the union between the Jacobins and the Royalists, which he had long refused to believe, inspired him with profound disgust, because his heart bled at this war of hatred; and seeing our fields stripped, our town swept down, he cried, “I could console myself for the sufferings of the rich, of those who have brought this scourge upon us; but the state of ruin, but the misery, but the despair of the unhappy peasants rend my heart.”

The death of his friends Labedoyére and Ney, the persecutions of the south, the violence of the royalist Chamber, “a counterpart to the Convention,” all contributed to make his thoughts gloomy, and “finding more melancholy than pleasure in his recollections,” he took refuge in his work. “I have always endeavoured to forget myself,” said he, “and thanks to my studies, I can live in other ages than my own.”

In July, 1817, as he was going to Paris to print the four last volumes of his history, he was detained at Coppet. There had just been brought the lifeless body of her who had made that abode so agreeable, of her who had so long been his friend, his second sister. “There is something confusing,” wrote Sismondi to his mother, “in a misfortuue which has taken place at a distance; at first one sees nothing changed around one, and it is only slowly and by degrees that one learns to know one's own grief. It is over, then, for me; this abode where I have lived so much, where I always felt myself so much and so happily at home! It is over—that animating society, that magic lanthorn of the world, which I there saw righted up for the first time, and where I have learned so much! My life is grievously changed; there was no one, perhaps, to whom I owed more than to her. How I suffered on the day of her funeral! A discourse by the minister of Coppet at the bier, in presence of Madame de Broglie and Miss Randall kneeling before the coffin, had begun to soften my heart, to make me feel the full extent of my loss, and I could not restrain my tears.”

When, on publishing the conclusion of his great and admirable work, Sismondi cast a glance backwards on the twenty-two years devoted to his history, he might have felicitated himself with just pride, on finding at the last page of his sixteenth volume, the same moral tendency, the same political principles, which had inspired him at the begning. “During this long period; tormented by the eager strife between nations thirsting for liberty, and princes obstinate in refusing it, Europe had seen over and over again her institutions destroyed, and different political doctrines by turns proscribed and proclaimed;” but the historian of the old times remained the same, becoming more enlightened without being changed, enlarging his ideas without abandoning them. His style acquired, however, as he proceeded, more firmness, more dignity, less endeavour after effect; and yet with what fervent candour he replies to his critics.

“It was never voluntarily, never knowingly, that I have employed unusual terms and expressions. But to fulfil the task which I had imposed on myself, to attain the truth which I had engaged to present to the public, I have been obliged to live in some sort out of my maternal tongue. I have been obliged habitually to write and think in Italian or in Latin, and occasionally in German, Spanish, Greek, English, Portuguese, Provencal. I have been obliged to pass from one of these languages to another, without reflecting on the form in which thought was clothed, almost without perceiving the substitution of one dialect for another. Then a form of speech which I had met with a thousand times, I thought French, because I had been accustomed to it, in another idiom.”