Madame de Staël tweets a Letter to the Globe and Mail

Bonaparte was very much aware that the Parisians made jokes about his new nobles, but he also knew that their opinions would be expressed only in the form of mockery and not in violence.  They did not venture beyond the ambiguity of puns; and just as in the Orient one is reduced to allegory, in France people sink even lower, limiting themselves to the rattling of syllables.

Source: Madame de Staël, Ten Years of Exile, tr. Doris Beik (Toronto: Doubleday, 1972), p. 90.