We passed to the language of conversation.

'There are three words,' said Tocqueville, 'which you have lost, and which I wonder how you do without,—Monsieur, Madame, and Mademoiselle. You are forced always to substitute the name. They are so mixed in all our forms that half of what we say would appear abrupt or blunt without them.

'Then the tutoyer is a nuance that you want. When husband and wife are talking together they pass insensibly, twenty times perhaps in an hour, from the vous to the tu. When matters of business or of serious discussion are introduced, indeed whenever the affections are not concerned, it is vous. With the least soupcon of tenderness the tu returns.'

'Yet,' I said, 'you never use the tu before a third person.'

'Never,' he answered, 'in good company. Among the bourgeoisie always. It is odd that an aristocratic form, so easily learned, should not have been adopted by all who pretend to be gentry. I remember being present when an Englishman and his wife, much accustomed to good French society, but unacquainted with this nuance, were laboriously tutoyering each other. I relieved them much by assuring them that it was not merely unnecessary, but objectionable.'

May 2.—Tocqueville dined with us.

A lady at the table d'hote was full of a sermon which she had heard at the Madeleine. The preacher said, sinking his voice to an audible whisper, 'I will tell you a secret, but it must go no farther. There is more religion among the Protestants than with us, they are better acquainted with the Bible, and make more use of their reading: we have much to learn from them.'

I asked Tocqueville, when we were in our own room, as to the feelings of the religious world in France with respect to heretics.

'The religious laity,' he answered, 'have probably little opinion on the subject. They suppose the heretic to be less favourably situated than themselves, but do not waste much thought upon him. The ignorant priests of course consign him to perdition. The better instructed think, like Protestants, that error is dangerous only so far as it influences practice.

'Dr. Bretonneau, at Tours, was one of the best men that I have known, but an unbeliever. The archbishop tried in his last illness to reconcile him to the Church: Bretonneau died as he had lived. But the archbishop, when lamenting to me his death, expressed his own conviction that so excellent a soul could not perish.

'You recollect the duchesse in St.-Simon, who, on the death of a sinner of illustrious race, said, "On me dira ce qu'on voudra, on ne me persuadera pas que Dieu n'y regarde deux fois avant de damner un homme de sa qualite." The archbishop's feeling was the same, only changing qualite into virtue.

'There is something amusing,' he continued, 'when, separated as we are from it by such a chasm, we look back on the prejudices of the Ancien Regime. An old lady once said to me, "I have been reading with great satisfaction the genealogies which prove that Jesus Christ descended from David. Ca montre que notre Seigneur etait Gentilhomme."'

'We are somewhat ashamed,' I said, 'in general of Jewish blood, yet the Levis boast of their descent from the Hebrew Levi.'

'They are proud of it,' said Tocqueville, 'because they make themselves out to be cousins of the Blessed Virgin. They have a picture in which a Duc de Levi stands bareheaded before the Virgin. "Couvrez-vous donc, mon cousin," she says. "C'est pour ma commodite," he answers.'

The conversation passed to literature.

'I am glad,' said Tocqueville, 'to find that, imperfect as my knowledge of English is, I can feel the difference in styles.'

'I feel strongly,' I said, 'the difference in French styles in prose, but little in poetry.'

'The fact is,' said Tocqueville, 'that the only French poetry, except that of Racine, that is worth reading is the light poetry. I do not think that I could now read Lamartine, though thirty years ago he delighted me.'

'The French taste,' I said, 'in English poetry differs from ours. You read Ossian and the "Night Thoughts."'

'As for Ossian,' he answered, 'he does not seem to have been ever popular in England. But the frequent reference to the "Night Thoughts," in the books and letters of the last century, shows that the poem was then in everybody's memory. Foreigners are in fact provincials. They take up fashions of literature as country people do fashions of dress, when the capital has left them off. When I was young you probably had ceased to be familiar with Richardson. We knew him by heart. We used to weep over the Lady Clementina, whom I dare say Miss Senior never heard of.

'During the first Empire, we of the old regime abandoned Paris, as we do now, and for the same reasons. We used to live in our chateaux, where I remember as a boy hearing Sir Charles Grandison and Fielding read aloud. A new novel was then an event. Madame Cottin was much more celebrated than George Sand is now. For all her books were read, and by everybody. Notwithstanding the great merits of George Sand's style, her plots and her characters are so exaggerated and so unnatural, and her morality is so perverted, that we have ceased to read her.'

We talked of Montalembert, and I mentioned his sortie the other day against the clergy.

'I can guess pretty well,' said Tocqueville, 'what he said to you, for it probably was a resume of his article in the "Correspondant." Like most men accustomed to public speaking, he repeats himself. He is as honest perhaps as a man who is very passionne can be; but his oscillations are from one extreme to another. Immediately after the coup d'etat, when he believed Louis Napoleon to be Ultramontane, he was as servile as his great enemy the "Univers" is now. "Ce sont les nuances qui se querellent, non les couleurs;" and between him and the "Univers" there is only a nuance. The Bishop of Agen has oscillated like him, but began at the other end. The other day the Bishop made a most servile address to the Emperor. He had formerly been a furious anti-Bonapartist. "How is it possible," said Montalembert, "that a man can rush so completely from one opinion to another? On the 4th of December in 1851 this same Bishop denounced the coup d'etat with such violence that the President sent me to the Nuncio to request his interference. Now he is on his knees before him. Such changes can scarcely be honest." Montalembert does not see that the only difference between them is that they have trod in opposite directions the very same path.'

Thursday, May 5.—Tocqueville and I dined with M. and Madame de Bourke, and met there General Dumas and Ary Scheffer.

We talked of Delaroche's pictures, and Scheffer agreed with me in preferring the smaller ones. He thought that Delaroche improved up to the time of his death, and preferred his Moses, and Drowned Martyr, painted in 1853 and 1855, to the other large ones, and his Girondins, finished in 1856, to the earlier small ones.

We passed on to the increased and increasing population of Paris.

'The population of Paris,' I said, 'is only half that of London, while that of the British Islands is not three-fourths that of France. If you were to double the population of Paris, therefore, it would still be proportionally less than that of London.'

'That is true,' said Tocqueville, 'but yet there are many circumstances connected with the Parisian population each of which renders it more dangerous than the London one. In the first place, there is the absence of any right to relief. The English workman knows that neither he nor his family can starve. The Frenchman becomes anxious as soon as his employment is irregular, and desperate when it fails. The English workmen are unacquainted with arms, and have no leaders with military experience. The bulk of the Frenchmen have served, many of them are veterans in civil war, and they have commanders skilled in street-fighting. The English workmen have been gradually attracted to London by a real and permanent demand for their labour. They have wives and children. At least 100,000 men have been added to the working population of Paris since the coup d'etat. They are young men in the vigour of their strength and passions, unrestrained by wives or families. They have been drawn hither suddenly and artificially by the demolition and reconstruction of half the town, by the enormous local expenditure of the Government, and by the fifty millions spent in keeping the price of bread in Paris unnaturally low. The 40,000 men collected in Paris by the construction of the fortifications are supposed to have mainly contributed to the revolution of 1848. What is to be expected from this addition of 100,000? Then the repressive force is differently constituted and differently animated. In England you have an army which has chosen arms as a profession, which never thinks of any other employment, and indeed is fit for no other, and never expects any provision except its pay and its pension. The French soldier, ever since 1789, is a citizen. He serves his six years because the law and the colonel force him to do so, but he counts the days until he can return to his province, his cottage, and his field. He sympathises with the passions of the people. In the terrible days of June, the army withstood the cries, the blessings, the imprecations and the seductions of the mob, only because they had the National Guards by their side. Their presence was a guarantee that the cause was just. The National Guards never fought before as they did in those days. Yet at the Chateau d'Eau, the miraculous heroism and the miraculous good luck of Lamoriciere were necessary to keep them together. If he had not exposed himself as no man ever did, and escaped as no man ever did, they would have been broken.'

'I was there,' said Scheffer, 'when his fourth horse was killed under him. As the horse was sinking he drew his feet out of the stirrups and came to the ground without falling; but his cigar dropped from his mouth. He picked it up, and went on with the order which he was giving to an aide-de-camp.

'I saw that,' said Tocqueville. 'He had placed himself immediately behind a cannon in front of the Chateau d'Eau which fired down the Boulevard du Temple. A murderous fire from the windows in a corner of the Rue du Temple killed all the artillerymen. The instant that Lamoriciere placed himself behind it, I thought that I saw what would happen. I implored him to get behind some shelter, or at least not to pose as a mark. "Recollect," I said, "that if you go on in this way you must be killed before the day is over-and where shall we all be?"'

'"I see the danger of what I am doing," he answered, "and I dislike it as much as you can do; but it is necessary. The National Guards are shaking; if they break, the Line follows. I must set an example that everyone can see and can understand. This is not a time for taking precautions. If I were to shelter myself, they would run."'

'How does Lamoriciere,' I asked, 'bear exile and inactivity in Brussels?'

'Very ill,' said Scheffer. 'He feels that he has compromised the happiness of his wife, whom he married not long before the coup d'etat.'

'Changarnier at Malins, who lives alone and has only himself to care for, supports it much better.'

Tocqueville and I walked home together.

'Scheffer,' he said, 'did not tell all that happened at the Chateau d'Eau. Men seldom do when they fight over their battles.'

'The insurgents by burrowing through walls had got into a house in the rear of our position. They manned the windows, and suddenly fired down on us from a point whence no danger had been feared. This caused a panic among the National Guards, a force of course peculiarly subject to panics. They turned and ran back 250 yards along the Boulevard St. Martin, carrying with them the Line and Lamoriciere himself. He endeavoured to stop them by outcries, and by gesticulations, and indeed by force. He gave to one man who was trying to run by him a blow with his fist, so well meant and well directed that it broke his collar bone.'

'At length he stopped them, re-formed them, and said: "Now you shall march, I at your head, and the drummer beating the charge, as if you were on parade, up to that house." They did so. After a few discharges, which miraculously missed Lamoriciere, the men in the house deserted it.'

'What were you doing at the Chateau d'Eau?' I asked.

'We were marching,' he said, 'with infantry and artillery on the Boulevard du Temple, across which there was a succession of barricades, which it was necessary to take one by one.

'As we advanced in the middle, our sappers and miners got into the houses on each side, broke through the party walls, and killed the men at the windows.'

'Those three days,' he continued, 'impress strongly on my mind the dangers of our present state.'

'It is of no use to take up pavements and straighten streets, and pierce Paris by long military roads, and loop-hole the barracks, if the Executive cannot depend on the army. Ditches and bastions are of no use if the garrison will not man them.'

'The new law of recruitment, however, may produce a great change. Instead of 80,000 conscripts, 120,000 are to be taken each year. This is about all that are fit for service. They are required to serve for only two years. If the change ended there our army would be still more a militia than it is now. It would be the Prussian Landwehr. But those entitled to their discharge are to be enticed by higher pay, promotions, bounties, and retiring pensions—in short, by all means of seduction, to re-enter for long periods, for ten, or fifteen, or perhaps twenty years. It is hoped that thus a permanent regular army may be formed, with an esprit de corps of its own, unsympathising with the people, and ready to keep it down; and such will, I believe, be the result. But it will take nine or ten years to produce such an army—and the dangers that I fear are immediate.'

'What are the motives,' I asked, 'for the changes as to the conscription, the increase of numbers, and the diminution of the time of service?'

'They are parts,' he answered, 'of the system. The French peasant, and indeed the ouvrier, dislikes the service. The proportion of conscripts who will re-enlist is small. Therefore the whole number must be large. The country must be bribed to submit to this by the shortness of the term. The conscript army will be sacrificed to what is to be the regular army. It will be young and ill-trained.'

'But your new regular army,' I said, 'will be more formidable to the enemy than your present force.'

'I am not sure of that,' he answered. 'The merit of the French army was the impetuosity of its attack, the "furia Francese," as the Italians called it. Young troops have more of this quality than veterans. The Maison du Roi, whose charge at Steenkirk Macaulay has so well described, consisted of boys of eighteen.'

'I am re-editing,' I said, 'my old articles. Among them is one written in 1841 on the National Character of France, England, and America,[1] as displayed towards foreign nations. I have not much to change in what I have said of England or of America. As they have increased in strength they have both become still more arrogant, unjust, and shameless.

'England has perhaps become a little more prudent America a little less so. But France seems to me to be altered. I described her as a soldier with all the faults of that unsocial character. As ambitious, rapacious, eager for nothing but military glory and territorial aggrandisement. She seems now to have become moderate and pacific, and to be devoted rather to the arts of peace than to those of war.'

'France is changed,' answered Tocqueville, 'and when compared with the France of Louis XIV., or of Napoleon, was already changed when you wrote, though the war-cry raised for political purposes in 1840 deceived you. At the same time, I will not deny that military glory would, more than any other merit, even now strengthen a Government, and that military humiliation would inevitably destroy one. Nor must you overrate the unpopularity of the last war. Only a few even of the higher classes understood its motives. "Que diable veut cette guerre?" said my country neighbour to me; "si c'etait contre les Anglais—mais avec les Anglais, et pour le Grand Turc, qu'est-ce que cela peut signifier?" But when they saw that it cost only men, that they were not invaded or overtaxed, and that prices rose, they got reconciled to it.

'It was only the speculators of Paris that were tired of it. And if, instead of the Crimea, we had fought near our own frontiers, or for some visible purpose, all our military passions, bad and good, would have broken out.'

[Footnote 1: This article is republished in the Historical and Philosophical Essays. Longmans: 1865.—ED.]

Wednesday, May 13.—Tocqueville came in after breakfast, and I walked with him in the shade of the green walls or arcades of the Tuileries chestnuts.

We talked of the Montijos, which led our conversation to Merimee and V.

'Both of them,' said Tocqueville, 'were the friends of Countess Montijo, the mother.

'V. was among the last persons who knew Eugenie as Countess Theba. He escorted her to the Tuileries the very evening of her marriage. There he took his leave of her. "You are now," he said, "placed so high that I can only admire you from below." And I do not believe that they have met since.

'Merimee took a less sentimental view of the change. He acknowledged his Empress in his former plaything, subsided from a sort of stepfather into a courtier, and so rose to honour and wealth, while V. is satisfied to remain an ex-professor and un homme de lettres.'

* * * * *

We met Henri Martin, and I asked Tocqueville what he thought of his History.

'It has the merit of selling,' he said, 'which cannot be said of any other History of France. Martin is laborious and conscientious, and does not tell a story ill; but he is a partisan and is always biassed by his own likings and dislikings. He belongs to the class of theorists, unfortunately not a small one, whose political beau ideal is the absence of all control over the will of the people-who are opposed therefore to an hereditary monarchy-to a permanent President—to a permanent magistracy-to an established Church—in short, to all privileged classes, bodies, or institutions. Equality, not liberty or security, is their object. They are centralisers and absolutists. A despotic Assembly elected by universal suffrage, sitting at most for a year, governing, like the Convention, through its committees, or a single despot, appointed for a week, and not re-eligible, is the sort of ruler that they would prefer. The last five years have perhaps disgusted Martin with his Asiatic democracy, but his earlier volumes are coloured throughout by his prejudices against all systems implying a division of power, and independent authorities controlling and balancing one another.'

We talked of the Secret Police.

'It has lately,' said Tocqueville, 'been unusually troublesome, or rather it has been troublesome to a class of persons whom it seldom ventures to molest. A friend of mine, M. Sauvaire Barthelemy, one of Louis Philippe's peers, was standing at the door of his hotel reading a letter. A gentleman in plain clothes addressed him, announced himself as an _agent de police_, and asked him if the letter which he was reading was political. "No," said Barthelemy, "you may see it. It is a _billet de mariage." "I am directed," said the agent, "to request you to get into this carriage." They got in and drove to Mazas. There Barthelemy was shown into a neat room with iron bars to the windows, and ordered to wait. After some time Louis Pietri, the Prefet de Police, arrived.

'"I am grieved," he said, "at giving you so much trouble, but I have been commanded to see you in this place, and to inform you that the Emperor cannot bear that a man in your high position should systematically misrepresent him.

'"L'Empereur fait tout ce qu'il peut pour le bonheur de la France, et il n'entend pas supporter une opposition aussi constante et aussi violente. Effectivement il ne veut pas d'opposition. Voulez-vous le tenir pour dit, Monsieur, et recevoir de nouveau mes excuses du derangement que j'ai du vous causer? Pour le present vous etes libre."'

[Mr. Senior left Paris on the next day.

M. de Tocqueville paid his promised visit to England in June, and was received with a perfect ovation.—ED.]



CORRESPONDENCE.

London, July 10, 1857.

I was too ill, my dear friend, to go to you yesterday. Dr. Ferguson tells me that I have been doing too much, and prescribes perfect rest.

I have already read half your journal of 1857. It is very curious; but I am glad that you have disguised me.

It is terrible to be in London, and to see so little of you; but the force of circumstances is greater than the force of wishes.

Ever yours,

A. DE TOCQUEVILLE.

Tocqueville, August 6, 1857.

You may already have had news of me through some of our common friends, my dear Senior, but I wish, besides, to give you some myself, and to thank you again for the kind welcome I received from you and in your house during my stay in London.

I regret only that I was unable to be more with you, and that, in spite of myself, I was drawn into a whirlpool which carried me away and prevented me from following my inclinations.

I have returned, however, full of gratitude for the marks of consideration and affection showered upon me in England. I shall never forget them.

I found my wife already installed here, and in good health; and I have resumed my busy and peaceful life with a delight which does honour to my wisdom. For I had been so spoiled in England that I might have been afraid of finding my retreat too much out of the way and too quiet. But nothing of the sort has happened. The excitement of the past month appears to have added charms to the present.

Nevertheless, I have not yet set to work again, but I am full of good resolutions, which I hope to execute as soon as I have completely returned to my usual habits. These first days have been devoted to putting everything into its regular order.

In France we are almost as much interested as you in England in the affairs of India. Everyone, even in the country, asks me for news of what is going on there.

There is a natural disposition to exaggerate the evil and to believe that your dominion is overturned. For my part, I am waiting with the utmost and most painful anxiety for the development of the drama, for no good can possibly result from it; and there is not one civilised nation in the world that ought to rejoice in seeing India escape from the hands of Europeans in order to fall back into a state of anarchy and barbarism worse than before its conquest.

I am quite sure that you will conquer. But it is a serious business.

A military insurrection is the worst of all insurrections, at least in the beginning. You have to deal with barbarians, but they possess the arms of civilised people given to them by yourselves.

My wife, who has preserved her English heart, is particularly affected by the spectacle which Bengal at present affords.

If you have any more particular news than is to be found in the newspapers, you will give us great pleasure by communicating them.

Remember me to Mrs. and Miss Senior, and to your daughter-in-law.

My wife sends many kind regards to them, as well as to you.

Adieu, dear Senior. Believe in my sincere affection.

A. DE TOCQUEVILLE.

P.S.—I fancy that the first effect of the Indian affair will be to draw still closer the alliance between England and France.

Tocqueville, November 15, 1857.

I am somewhat angry with you, my dear Senior, for not having yet given us your news.[1] It is treating our friendship unfairly, I have not written to you because I doubted your following exactly your intended route, but I will write to you at Athens, as I think that you must now be there. If you have followed your itinerary your travels must have been most interesting to you, and they will be equally curious to us. I conclude that you only passed quickly through the Principalities in following the course of the Danube. I, however, had depended on you for furnishing me with clear ideas of a country which is at present so interesting to Europe, and which I think is destined to play an important part in the future. And what say you of our friends the Turks? Was it worth while to spend so much money and to shed so much blood in order to retain in Europe savages who are ill disguised as civilised men? I am impatient to talk to you, and almost equally so to read you.

I shall have little to tell you. I have not stirred from home since I left England, and am leading the life of a gentleman-farmer; a life which pleases me more and more every day, and would really make me happy, if my wife were not suffering from an obstinate neuralgic affection in the face. I fear that she may have to go to some mineral waters, which she would be sorry to do; for, as you know, she hates travelling, and does no justice to the reputation for wandering possessed by the English race.

I can tell you nothing on politics which you will not find in the newspapers. The great question at present for all civilised Governments seems to be the financial. The crisis from which America and England are suffering will probably extend everywhere. As for India, you are out, not perhaps of your difficulties, but of your greatest dangers. This affair, and that of the Crimea, show how little sympathy there is for England abroad. There was everything to interest us in your success—similarity of race, of religion, and of civilisation. Your loss of India could have served no cause but that of barbarism. Yet I venture to affirm that the whole Continent, though it detested the cruelties of your enemies, did not wish you to triumph.

Much of this is, without doubt, to be attributed to the evil passions which make men always desire the fall of the prosperous and the strong. But much belongs to a less dishonourable cause—to the conviction of all nations that England considers them only with reference to her own greatness; that she has less sympathy than any other modern nation; that she never notices what passes among foreigners, what they think, feel, suffer, or do, but with relation to the use which England can make of their actions, their sufferings, their feelings, or their thoughts; and that when she seems most to care for them she really cares only for herself. All this is exaggerated, but not without truth.

Kindest regards from us both to you and to Mrs. Senior.

A. DE TOCQUEVILLE.

[Footnote 1: Mr. Senior was at this time in the East.—ED.]



Tocqueville, February 10, 1858.

I was delighted, my dear Senior, to receive a letter from you dated Marseilles. You are right in remaining till the spring in the South. We trust to meet you in Paris in March.

I say no more, for I cannot write to you on what would most interest you—French politics. Much is to be said on them; but you will understand my silence if you study our new Law of Public Safety, and remember who is the new Home Minister.[1] For the first time in French history has such a post been filled by a general—and what a general!

I defer, therefore, until we meet, the expression of feelings and opinions which cannot be safely transmitted through the post, and only repeat how eager I am for our meeting.

Kind regards to Mrs. Senior.

A. DE TOCQUEVILLE.

[Footnote 1: General Espinasse.]

Tocqueville, February 21, 1858.

I received your letters with great pleasure, my dear Senior, and I think with still greater satisfaction that I shall soon be able to see you.

I shall probably arrive in Paris, with my wife, at about the same time as you will, that is to say, about the 19th of next month. I should have gone earlier if I were not occupied in planting and sowing, for I am doing a little farming to my great amusement.

I am delighted that you intend again to take up your quarters at the Hotel Bedford, as I intend also to stay there if I can find apartments.

I hope that we shall be good neighbours and see each other as frequently as such old friends ought to do. A bientot!

A. DE TOCQUEVILLE.

[Mr. Senior ran over to England for a few weeks instead of remaining in Paris. The meeting between the two friends did not, therefore, take place till April.—ED.]



CONVERSATIONS.

Paris, Saturday, April 17, 1858.—We had a discussion at the Institut to-day as to a bust to fill a niche in the anteroom. Rossi was proposed. His political merits were admitted, but he was placed low as to his literary claims as an economist and a jurist. Dupin suggested Talleyrand, which was received with a universal groan, and failed for want of a seconder. Ultimately the choice fell on Dumont.

'Nothing that is published of Talleyrand's,' said Tocqueville to me as we walked home, 'has very great merit, nor indeed is much of it his own. He hated writing, let his reports and other state papers be drawn up by others, and merely retouched them. But in the archives of the Affaires etrangeres there is a large quarto volume containing his correspondence with Louis XVIII during the Congress of Vienna. Nothing can be more charming. The great European questions which were then in debate, the diplomatic and social gossip of Vienna, the contemporary literature—in short, all that one clever homme du monde could find to interest and amuse another, are treated with wit, brilliancy, and gaiety, supported by profound good sense. When that volume is published his bust will be placed here by acclamation.'

Monday, April 19.—I dined with Lanjuinais, and met Tocqueville, Rivet, Dufaure, Corcelle, Freslon, and one or two others.

They attacked me about the change of sentiment in England with respect to Louis Napoleon.

'While he was useful to you,' they said, 'you steadily refused to admit that he was a tyrant, or even an usurper. You chose to disbelieve in the 3,000 men, women, and children massacred on the Boulevards of Paris—in the 20,000 poisoned by jungle fever in Cayenne—in the 25,000 who have died of malaria, exposure, and bad food, working in gangs on the roads and in the marshes of the Metidja and Lambressa.'

'We did not choose', I answered, 'to disbelieve any thing. We were simply ignorant. I knew all these facts, because I have passed a part of every year since 1847 in Paris; because I walked along the Boulevards on the 20th of December 1851, and saw the walls of every house, from the Bastille to the Madeleine, covered with the marks of musket-balls; because I heard in every society of the thousands who had been massacred, and of the tens of thousands who had been deportes; but the untravelled English, and even the travelled English, except the few who live in France among the French, knew nothing of all this. Your press tells nothing. The nine millions of votes given to Louis Napoleon seemed to prove his popularity, and therefore the improbability of the tyranny of which he was accused by his enemies. I knew that those nine millions of votes were extorted, or stolen by violence or fraud. But the English people did not know it. They accepted his election as the will of the nation, and though they might wonder at your choice, did not presume to blame it.'

'The time,' they answered, 'at which light broke in upon you is suspicious. Up to the 14th of January 1858 the oppression under which thirty-four millions of people within twenty-four miles of your coast, with whom you are in constant intercourse, was unknown to you. Their ruler insults you, and you instantly discover that he is an usurper and a tyrant. This looks as if the insult, and the insult alone, opened your eyes.'

'What opened our eyes,' I answered, 'was not the insult but the loi de surete publique. It was the first public act which showed to England the nature of your Government.

'When we found, erected in every department, a revolutionary tribunal, empowered to banish and transport without trial; when we found a rude soldier made Home Minister, and the country divided into five districts to be each governed by a marshal, we saw at once that France was under a violent military despotism. Until that law was passed the surface was smooth. There was nothing in the appearance of France to show to a stranger that she was not governed by a Monarch, practically, indeed, absolute, but governing as many absolute Monarchs have done, mildly and usefully.

'Of course we might have found out the truth sooner if we had inquired. And perhaps we ought to have inquired. We busy ourselves about our own affairs, and neglect too much those of other countries. In that sense you have a right to say that we chose to be ignorant, since our conduct was such as necessarily to make us ignorant. But it was not because Louis Napoleon was our ally that we chose to be ignorant, but because we habitually turn our eyes from the domestic affairs of the Continent, as things in which we have seldom a right to interfere, and in which, when we do interfere, we do more harm than good.'

We talked of the manner in which the loi de surete publique has been carried out. And I mentioned 600 as the number of those who had suffered under it, as acknowledged to me by Blanchard in the beginning of March.

'It is much greater now,' said Lanjuinais. 'Berryer on his return from Italy, a week ago, slept in Marseilles. He was informed that more than 900 persons had passed through Marseilles, deportes under the new law to Algeria. They were of all classes: artisans and labourers mixed with men of the higher and middle classes. To these must be added those transported to Cayenne, who were sent by way of Havre. As for the number expulses and internes there are no data.'

'In the Department of Var, a man was found guilty in 1848 of joining in one of the revolutionary movements of that time. His complete innocence was soon proved; he was released, and has lived quietly on his little estate ever since. He was arrested under the new law and ordered to be deporte to Algeria. His friends, in fact all his neighbours, remonstrated, and sent to Paris the proof that the original conviction was a mistake. "Qu'il aille tout de meme," was Espinasse's answer.

'In Calvados the Prefet, finding no one whom he could conscientiously arrest, took hold of one of the most respectable men in the department. "If," he said, "I had arrested a man against whom there was plausible ground for suspicion, he might have been transported. This man must be released."'

'Has he been released?' I asked.

'I have not heard,' was the answer. 'In all probability he has been.'

'In my department,' said Tocqueville, 'the sous-prefet, ordered by the Prefet to arrest somebody in the arrondissement, was in the same perplexity as the Prefet of Calvados. "I can find no fit person," he said to me. I believe that he reported the difficulty to the Prefet, and that the vacancy was supplied from some other arrondissement.

'What makes this frightful,' he added, 'is that we now know that deportation is merely a slow death. Scarcely any of the victims of 1851 and 1852 are living.'

'I foretold that,' I said, 'at the time, as you will find if you look at my article on Lamartine, published in the "Edinburgh Review."'[1]

[Footnote 1: See Journals in France and Italy.—ED.]

April 20.—We talked of the political influence in France of the hommes de lettres.

'It began,' said Tocqueville, 'with the Restoration. Until that time we had sometimes, though very rarely, statesmen who became writers, but never writers who became statesmen,'

'You had hommes de lettres,' I said, 'in the early Revolutionary Assemblies—Mirabeau for instance.'

'Mirabeau,' he answered, 'is your best example, for Mirabeau, until he became a statesman, lived by his pen. Still I should scarcely call a man of his high birth and great expectations un homme de lettres. That appellation seems to belong to a man who owes his position in early life to literature. Such a man is Thiers, or Guizot, as opposed to such men as Gladstone, Lord John Russell, or Montalembert.'

Wednesday, April 21.—I dined with D. and met, among several others, Admiral Matthieu the Imperial Hydrographer, and a general whose name I did not catch. I talked to the general about the army.

'We are increasing it,' he said, 'but not very materially. We are rather giving ourselves the means of a future rapid increase, than making an immediate augmentation. We are raising the number of men from 354,000 to 392,400, in round numbers to 400,000; but the principal increase is in the cadres, the officers attached to each battalion. We have increased them by more than one third. So that if a war should break out we can instantly—that is to say in three months, increase our army to 600,000 or even 700,000 men. Soldiers are never wanting in France, the difficulty always is to find officers.'

'I hear,' I said, 'that you are making great improvements in your artillery.'

'We are,' he answered. 'We are applying to it the principle of the Minie musket, and we are improving the material. We hope to make our guns as capable of resisting rapid and continued firing as well and as long as the English and the Swedish guns, which are the best in Europe, can do. And we find that we can throw a ball on the Minie principle with equal precision twice as far. This will double the force of all our batteries.'

'Are you,' he asked me, 'among those who have taken shares in the Russian railways?'

'No,' I said. 'They are the last that I wish to encourage.'

'Englishmen or Frenchmen,' he answered, 'who help Russia to make railways, put me in mind of the Dutch who sold powder to their besiegers.

'The thinness of her population—that is, the vast space over which it is scattered—alone prevents Russia from being the mistress of Europe. If her 64,000,000 were as concentrated as our 34,000,000 are, she would be irresistible. She loses always far more men in marching than in fighting.'

'The events of the war,' I said, 'lead me to believe that the goodness of the Russian soldier is exaggerated. They were always beaten, often by inferior numbers.'

'In the first place,' he answered, 'those who were beaten at Sebastopol were not the best Russian soldiers. They were short small men, generally drawn from the neighbouring provinces. The Russian Imperial Guards and the Russian Army in Poland are far superior to any that we encountered in the Crimea. In the second place, they were ill commanded. The improvements of weapons, of science and of discipline, have raised the privates of all the great military nations to about the same level. Success now depends on numbers and on generalship. With railways Russia will be able to bring quickly a preponderating force to any point on her frontier. Her officers are already good, and for money she can import the best generals; indeed, I do not see why she should not breed them. Russia is civilised enough to produce men of the highest military qualities.'

I asked Admiral Matthieu about the naval preparations of France.

'The "Moniteur,"' I said, 'denies that you are making any.'

'The "Moniteur,"' he answered, 'does not tell the truth. We are augmenting largely, both the number and the efficacy of our fleet.

'Four years ago, at the beginning of the Russian war, we resolved to build a steam fleet of 150 steam ships of different sizes for fighting, and 74 steam ships for the transfer service, and to carry fuel and stores. Though we set about this in the beginning, as we thought, of a long war, we have not allowed the peace to interrupt it. We are devoting to it sixty-five millions a year (2,600,000l.) of which from fifteen to seventeen millions are employed every year in building new ships, and from forty to forty-two in adding steam power to the old ones. We hope to finish this great work in fourteen years.'

'What,' I asked, 'is the amount of your present fleet of steamers?'

'We have thirty-three screws,' he answered, 'fifty-seven paddles, and sixty-two sailing vessels in commission, and seventy-three, mostly steamers, en reserve, as you would say, in ordinary.'

'Manned by how many men?' I asked.

'By twenty-five thousand sailors,' he answered, 'and eleven thousand marines. But our inscription maritime would give us in a few months or less one hundred thousand more. Since the times of Louis XVI. the French Navy has never been so formidable, positively or relatively.'

'How,' I asked, 'has your "Napoleon" succeeded?'

'Admirably,' he answered. 'I have not seen the "Wellington," but she is a much finer ship than the Agamemnon. Her speed is wonderful. A month ago she left Toulon at seven in the morning, and reached Ajaccio by four in the evening. But the great improvement is in our men. Napoleon knew nothing and cared nothing about sailors. He took no care about their training, and often wasted them in land operations, for which landsmen would have done as well.

'In 1814 he left Toulon absolutely unguarded, and sent all the sailors to join Augereau. You might have walked into it.

'In 1810 or 1811 I was on board a French corvette which fought an action with an English vessel, the "Lively." We passed three times under her stern, and raked her each time. We ought to have cleared her decks. Not a shot touched her. The other day at Cherbourg I saw a broadside fired at a floating mark three cables off, the usual distance at which ships engage. Ten balls hit it, and we could see that all the others passed near enough to shake it by their wind.

'A ship of eighty guns has now forty canonniers and forty maitres de pieces. All practical artillerymen, and even the able seamen, can point a gun. Nelson's manoeuvre of breaking the line could not be used against a French fleet, such as a French fleet is now. The leading ships would be destroyed one after another, by the concentrated fire. Formerly our officers dreaded a maritime war. They knew that defeat awaited them, possibly death. Now they are confident, and eager to try their hands.'

In the evening L. took me into a corner, and we had a long conversation.

He had been reading my 'Athens Journal.'

'What struck me,' he said, 'in every page of it, was the resemblance of King Otho to Louis Napoleon.'

'I see the resemblance,' I answered, 'but it is the resemblance of a dwarf to a giant.'

'No,' he replied. 'Of a man five feet seven inches high to one five feet eleven inches. There are not more than four inches between them. There is the same cunning, the same coldness, the same vindictiveness, the same silence, the same perseverance, the same unscrupulousness, the same selfishness, the same anxiety to appear to do everything that is done, and above all, the same determination to destroy, or to seduce by corruption or by violence, every man and every institution favourable to liberty, independence, or self-government. In one respect Otho had the more difficult task. He found himself, in 1843, subject to a Constitution carefully framed under the advice of England for the express purpose of controlling him. He did not attempt to get rid of it by a coup d'etat, or even to alter it, but cunningly and skilfully perverted it into an instrument of despotism. Louis Napoleon destroyed the Constitution which he found, and made a new one, copied from that which had been gradually elaborated by his uncle, which as a restraint is intentionally powerless and fraudulent.

'A man,' he continued, 'may acquire influence either by possessing in a higher degree the qualities which belong to his country and to his time, or by possessing those in which they are deficient.

'Wellington is an example of this first sort. His excellences were those of an Englishman carried almost to perfection.

'Louis Napoleon belongs to the second. If his merits had been impetuous courage, rapidity of ideas, quickness of decision, frankness, versatility and resource, he would have been surrounded by his equals or his superiors. He predominated over those with whom he came in contact because he differed from them. Because he was calm, slow, reserved, silent, and persevering. Because he is a Dutchman, not a Frenchman.'

'He seems,' I said, 'to have lost his calmness.'

'Yes,' answered L. 'But under what a shock! And observe that though the greatest risk was encountered by him, the terror was greatest among his entourage. I do not believe that if he had been left to himself he would have lost his prudence or his self-possession. He did not for the first day. Passions are contagious. Everyone who approached him was agitated by terror and anger. His intrepidity and self-reliance, great as they are, were disturbed by the hubbub all round him. His great defects are three. First, his habit of self-contemplation. He belongs to the men whom the Germans call subjective, whose eye is always turned inwardly; who think only of themselves, of their own character, and of their own fortunes. Secondly, his jealousy of able men. He wishes to be what you called him, a giant, and as Nature has not made him positively tall, he tries to be comparatively so, by surrounding himself with dwarfs. His third defect is the disproportion of his wishes to his means. His desires are enormous. No power, no wealth, no expenditure would satisfy them. Even if he had his uncle's genius and his uncle's indefatigability, he would sink, as his uncle did, under the exorbitance of his attempts. As he is not a man of genius, or even a man of remarkable ability, as he is ignorant, uninventive and idle, you will see him flounder and fall from one failure to another.

'During the three years that Drouyn de L'Huys was his minister he was intent on home affairs—on his marriage, on the Louvre, on the artillery, on his bonnes fortunes, and on the new delights of unbounded expenditure. He left foreign affairs altogether to his minister. When Drouyn de L'Huys left him, the road before him was plain—he had only to carry on the war. But when the war was over, the road ended; neither he nor Walewski nor any of his entourage know anything of the country in which they are travelling. You see them wandering at hazard. Sometimes trying to find their way to Russia, sometimes to England. Making a treaty with Austria, then attempting to injure her, and failing; attempting to injure Turkey, and failing; bullying Naples, and failing; threatening Switzerland, threatening Belgium, and at last demanding from England an Alien Bill, which they ought to know to be incompatible with the laws and hateful to the feelings of the people.

'He is not satisfied with seeing the country prosperous and respected abroad. He wants to dazzle. His policy, domestic and foreign, is a policy of vanity and ostentation—motives which mislead everyone both in private and in public life.

'His great moral merits are kindness and sympathy. He is a faithful attached friend, and wishes to serve all who come near him.

'His greatest moral fault is his ignorance of the difference between right and wrong; perhaps his natural insensibility to it, his want of the organs by which that difference is perceived—a defect which he inherits from his uncle.'

'The uncle,' I said, 'had at least one moral sense—he could understand the difference between pecuniary honesty and dishonesty, a difference which this man seems not to see, or not to value.'

'I agree with you,' said L. 'He cannot value it, or he would not look complacently on the peculation which surrounds him. Every six months some magnificent hotel rises in the Champs Elysees, built by a man who had nothing, and has been a minister for a year or two.'

On my return I found Tocqueville with the ladies. I gave him an outline of what L. had said.

'No one,' he said, 'knows Louis Napoleon better than L.'

'My opportunities of judging him have been much fewer, but as far as they have gone, they lead to the same conclusions. L. perhaps has not dwelt enough on his indolence. Probably as he grows older, and the effects of his early habits tell on him, it increases. I am told that it is difficult to make him attend to business, that he prolongs audiences apparently to kill time.

'One of the few of my acquaintances who go near him, was detained by him for an hour to answer questions about the members of the Corps legislatif. Louis Napoleon inquired about their families, their fortunes, their previous histories. Nothing about their personal qualities. These are things that do not interest him. He supposes that men differ only in externals. "That the fond is the same in everyone."'

April 26.—Tocqueville spent the evening with us.

We talked of Novels.

'I read none,' he said, 'that end ill. Why should one voluntarily subject oneself to painful emotions? To emotions created by an imaginary cause and therefore impelling you to no action. I like vivid emotions, but I seek them in real life, in society, in travelling, in business, but above all in political business. There is no happiness comparable to political success, when your own excitement is justified by the magnitude of the questions at issue, and is doubled and redoubled by the sympathy of your supporters. Having enjoyed that, I am ashamed of being excited by the visionary sorrows of heroes and heroines.

'I had a friend,' he continued, 'a Benedictine, who is now ninety-seven. He was, therefore, about thirteen when Louis XVI. began to reign. He is a man of talents and knowledge, has always lived in the world, has attended to all that he has seen and heard, and is still unimpaired in mind, and so strong in body that when I leave him he goes down to embrace me, after the fashion of the eighteenth century, at the bottom of his staircase.'

'And what effect,' I asked, 'has the contemplation of seventy years of revolution produced in him? Does he look back, like Talleyrand, to the ancien regime as a golden age?'

'He admits,' said Tocqueville, 'the material superiority of our own age, but he believes that, intellectually and morally, we are far inferior to our grandfathers. And I agree with him. Those seventy years of revolution have destroyed our courage, our hopefulness, our self-reliance, our public spirit, and, as respects by far the majority of the higher classes, our passions, except the vulgarest and most selfish ones—vanity and covetousness. Even ambition seems extinct. The men who seek power, seek it not for itself, not as the means of doing good to their country, but as a means of getting money and flatterers.

'It is remarkable,' he continued, 'that women whose influence is generally greatest under despotisms, have none now. They have lost it, partly in consequence of the gross vulgarity of our dominant passions, and partly from their own nullity. They are like London houses, all built and furnished on exactly the same model, and that a most uninteresting one. Whether a girl is bred up at home or in a convent, she has the same masters, gets a smattering of the same accomplishments, reads the same dull books, and contributes to society the same little contingent of superficial information.

'When a young lady comes out I know beforehand how her mother and her aunts will describe her. "Elle a les gouts simples. Elle est pieuse. Elle aime la campagne. Elle aime la lecture. Elle n'aime pas le bal. Elle n'aime pas le monde, elle y ira seulement pour plaire a sa mere." I try sometimes to escape from these generalities, but there is nothing behind them.'

'And how long,' I asked, 'does this simple, pious, retiring character last?'

'Till the orange flowers of her wedding chaplet are withered,' he answered. 'In three months she goes to the messe d'une heure.'

'What is the "messe d'une heure?"' I asked.

'A priest,' he answered, 'must celebrate Mass fasting; and in strictness ought to do so before noon. But to accommodate fashionable ladies who cannot rise by noon, priests are found who will starve all the morning, and say Mass in the afternoon. It is an irregular proceeding, though winked at by the ecclesiastical authorities. Still to attend it is rather discreditable; it is a middle term between the highly meritorious practice of going to early Mass, and the scandalous one of never going at all.'

'What was the education,' I asked, 'of women under the ancien regime?'

'The convent,' he answered.

'It must have been better,' I said, 'than the present education, since the women of that time were superior to ours.'

'It was so far better,' he answered, 'that it did no harm. A girl at that time was taught nothing. She came from the convent a sheet of white paper. Now her mind is a paper scribbled over with trash. The women of that time were thrown into a world far superior to ours, and with the sagacity, curiosity, and flexibility of French women, caught knowledge and tact and expression from the men.

'I knew well,' he continued, 'Madame Recamier. Few traces of her former beauty then remained, but we were all her lovers and her slaves. The talent, labour, and skill which she wasted in her salon, would have gained and governed an empire. She was virtuous, if it be virtuous to persuade every one of a dozen men that you wish to favour him, though some circumstance always occurs to prevent your doing so. Every friend thought himself preferred. She governed us by little distinctions, by letting one man come five minutes before the others, or stay five minutes after. Just as Louis XIV. raised one courtier to the seventh heaven by giving him the bougeoir, and another by leaning on his arm, or taking his shirt from him.

'She said little, but knew what each man's fort was, and placed from time to time a mot which led him to it. If anything were peculiarly well said, her face brightened. You saw that her attention was always active and always intelligent.

'And yet I doubt whether she really enjoyed conversation. Tenir salon was to her a game, which she played well, and almost always successfully, but she must sometimes have been exhausted by the effort. Her salon was perhaps pleasanter to us than it was to herself.

'One of the last,' he continued, 'of that class of potentates was the Duchesse de Dino. Her early married life was active and brilliant, but not intellectually. It was not till about forty, when she had exhausted other excitements, that she took to bel esprit. But she performed her part as if she had been bred to it.'

This was our last conversation. I left Paris the next day, and we never met again.



CORRESPONDENCE.

Tocqueville, June 30, 1858.

I must complain, a little of your silence, my dear Senior. I hear that before you left Paris you suffered a great deal from your throat. Is it true, or have you recovered?

I have not either much to boast of on the score of health since we parted. The illness which I had in Paris became still worse, and when I got a little better in that way I had a violent bronchial attack. I even began to spit blood, which had not happened to me for many years, and I am still almost reduced to silence. Still I am beginning to mend, and I hope, please God, to be able to speak to my friends when they visit me.

You are aware that I wished to induce my wife to accompany me to the South; but the length of the journey, the difficulties of transport, the heat, and indeed the state of my health, were reasons which she brought forward with so much force that we have remained here, and shall not leave till the end of September. We still hope that you and Miss Senior will join us the first week in that month. We shall be very happy to have you both with us. This is no compliment ... I hope soon to be able to enjoy more frequent communication with my English friends. A steamboat is about to run from Cherbourg to the coast of England. We shall then be able to visit each other as neighbours (voisiner).

Between ourselves, I do not think that the events in England during the last six months are of a nature to raise the reputation of Parliamentary Government in the rest of the world. A bientot!

A. DE TOCQUEVILLE.

Kensington, July 5, 1858.

My dear Tocqueville,—If I had written to you three days ago, I should have talked of the pleasure which my daughter and I expected from our visit to Tocqueville. But our plans are changed. Edward Ellice is going to pay a last visit to America, and has begged me to accompany him. He is a great proprietor in both America and Canada—knows everybody in both countries, and is besides a most able and interesting companion. So I have accepted the proposal, and start on the 30th of this month for Boston. We shall return in the beginning of November.

I am very sorry to lose the visit to Normandy, but I trust that it is only deferred.

We are grieved to hear that neither you nor Madame de Tocqueville are as well as your friends could wish you to be.

My grippe, after lasting for three months, has gradually subsided, and I look to the voyage to America as a cure for all remains of it.

I have most punctually carried your remembrances to all the persons honoured by being inscribed on your card.

Though I have often seen Gladstone, it has always been among many other persons, and he has been so full of talk, that I have never been able to allude to your subject. I mentioned it to Mrs. Gladstone on Saturday last: she said that there was not a person in all France whom her husband so much admired and venerated as you—therefore, if there was any appearance of neglect, it could have arisen only from hurry or mistake. I shall see him again on Thursday, when we are going all together to a rehearsal of Ristori's, and I will talk to him: we shall there be quiet.

Things here are in a very odd state. The Government is supported by the Tories because it calls itself Tory, and by the Whigs and Radicals because it obeys them. On such terms it may last for an indefinite time.

Kindest regards from us all to you both.

Ever yours,

N.W. SENIOR.

9 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, August 2, 1858.

My dear Tocqueville,—I ought, as you know, to be on the Atlantic by this time; but I was attacked, ten days ago, with lumbar neuralgia, which they are trying, literally, to rub away. If I am quite well on the 13th, I shall go on the 14th to America.

I was attacked at Sir John Boileau's, where I spent some days with the Guizots, Mrs. Austin, and Stanley and Lord John Russell.

Guizot is in excellent spirits, and, what is rare in an ex-premier, dwells more on the present and the future than on the past. Mrs. Austin is placid and discursive.

Lord John seems to me well pleased with the present state of affairs—which he thinks, I believe with reason, will bring him back to power. He thinks that Malmesbury and Disraeli are doing well, and praises much the subordinates of the Government. Considering that no one believes Lord Derby to be wise, or Disraeli to be either wise or honest, it is marvellous that they get on as well as they do. The man who has risen most is Lord Stanley, and, as he has the inestimable advantage of youth, I believe him to be predestined to influence our fortunes long.

The world, I think, is gradually coming over to an opinion, which, when I maintained it thirty years ago, was treated as a ridiculous paradox—that India is and always has been a great misfortune to us; and, that if it were possible to get quit of it, we should be richer and stronger.

But it is clear that we are to keep it, at least for my life.

Kindest regards from us all to you and Madame de Tocqueville.

Ever yours,

N.W. SENIOR.

Tocqueville, August 21, 1858.

My dear Senior,—I hear indirectly that you are extremely ill. Your letter told me only that you were suffering from neuralgia which you hoped to be rid of in a few days, but Mrs. Grote informs me that the malady continues and has even assumed a more serious character.

If you could write or dictate a few lines to me, you would please me much.

I am inconsolable for the failure of your American journey. I expected the most curious results from it I hoped that your journal would enable me once more to understand the present state of a country which has so changed since I saw it that I feel that I now know nothing of it. What a blessing, however, that you had not started! What would have become of you if the painful attack from which you are suffering had seized you 2,000 miles away from home, and in the midst of that agitated society where no one has time to be ill or to think of those who are ill? It must be owned that Fortune has favoured you by sending you this illness just at the moment of your departure instead of ten days later.

I have been much interested by your visit to Sir John Boileau. You saw there M. Guizot in one of his best lights. The energy with which he stands up under the pressure of age and of ill-fortune, and is not only resigned in his new situation, but as vigorous, as animated, and as cheerful as ever, shows a character admirably tempered and a pride which nothing will bend.

I do not so well understand the cheerfulness of Lord John Russell. For the spectacle now exhibited by England, in which a party finds no difficulty in maintaining itself in power by carrying into practice ideas which it has always opposed, and by relying for support on its natural enemies, is not of a nature to raise the reputation of your institutions, or of your public men. I should have a great deal more to say to you on this and other subjects if I were not afraid of tiring you. I leave off, therefore, by assuring you that we are longing to hear of your recovery. Remembrances, &c.

A. DE TOCQUEVILLE.



Cannes, December 12, 1858.

I wish, my dear friend, to reassure you myself on the false reports which have been spread regarding my health. Far from finding myself worse than when we arrived, I am already much better.

I am just now an invalid who takes his daily walks of two hours in the mountains after eating an excellent breakfast. I am not, however, well. If I were I should not long remain a citizen of Cannes.

I have almost renounced the use of speech, and consequently the society of human beings; which is all the more sad as my wife, my sole companion, is herself very unwell, not dangerously, but enough to make me anxious. When I say my sole companion, I am wrong, for my eldest brother has had the kindness to shut himself up with us for a month.

Adieu, dear Senior. A thousand kind remembrances from us to all your party.

A. DE TOCQUEVILLE.



Cannes, March 15, 1859.

You say, my dear Senior, in the letter which I have just received, that I like to hear from my friends, not to write to them. It is true that I delight in the letters of my friends, especially of my English friends; but it is a calumny to say that I do not like to answer them. It is true that I am in your debt: one great cause is, that a man who lives at Cannes knows nothing of what is passing. My solitary confinement, which is bad enough in every way, makes me a bad correspondent, by depressing my spirits and rendering every exertion painful.

Mrs. Grote, in a very kind and interesting letter, which I received from her yesterday, says, that Lord Brougham, on his late arrival in London, gave a lamentable description of my health. If he confined himself to January, he was right. It is impossible to exaggerate my sufferings during that month. But, since that time, all has changed, as if from day to night, or rather from night to day. To talk now of what I was in January is like making a speech about the Spanish marriages.

I am grieved to find that you have suffered so much this year from bronchitis. I fear that your larynx can scarcely endure an English winter. But it is very hard to be obliged to expatriate oneself every year. I fear, however, that such must be my fate for some winters to come, and the pain with which I anticipate it makes me sympathise more acutely with you.

We know not, as yet, whether we are to have peace or war. Whichever it be, a mortal blow has struck the popularity of Louis Napoleon. What maintained him was the belief that he was the protector of our material interests: interests to which we now sacrifice all others. The events of the last month show, with the utmost vividness, that these very interests may be endangered by the arbitrary and irrational will of a despot. The feelings, therefore, which were his real support are now bitterly hostile to him.

I feel, in short, that a considerable change in our Government is approaching.

Even our poor Corps legislatif, a week ago, refused to take into consideration the Budget, until it was informed whether it were to be a war budget or a peace budget. Great was the fury of those who represented the Government. They exclaimed that the Chamber misapprehended its jurisdiction, and that it had nothing to do with political questions. The Chamber, however, or rather its committee on the Budget, held its ground, and extorted from the Government some explanations.

Adieu, my dear Senior. Say everything that is kind to the Grotes, the Reeves, the Lewises—in short, to all our common friends, and believe in the sincerity of my friendship.

A. DE TOCQUEVILLE.

[This was M. de Tocqueville's last letter to Mr. Senior. He died on the 16th of April.—ED.]



Hotel Westminster, Rue de la Paix, April 25, 1859.

My dear Madame de Tocqueville,—I was in the country, and it was only last Friday, as I was passing through London on my way to Paris, that I heard of the irreparable loss that we, indeed that France and Europe, have suffered.

It cannot alleviate your distress to be told how universal and deep is the sympathy with it—quite as much in England as in France.

It has thrown a gloom over society, not only over that portion which had the happiness and the honour of intimacy with M.A. de Tocqueville, but even of his acquaintances, and of those too whose acquaintance was only with his works.

I have, as you know, been for about a year, the depositary of a large packet confided to me by M. de Tocqueville last spring. About six months ago he begged me to return it to him, in Paris, when I had a safe opportunity. No such opportunity offered itself, so that the packet remains in my library awaiting your orders.

Since I began this letter I have been informed by M. de Corcelle that you are likely to be soon in Paris. I shall not venture to send it by the post, lest it should cross you on the road.

I shall anxiously inquire as to your arrival, in the hope that you will allow one who most sincerely loved and admired your husband, morally and intellectually, to see you as soon as you feel yourself equal to it.

Believe me, my dear Madame de Tocqueville, with the truest sympathy, yours most truly,

NASSAU W. SENIOR.

[Mr. Senior continued an active correspondence with Madame de Tocqueville, and we saw her whenever we were in Paris. Our long-promised visit to Tocqueville took place in 1861.—ED.]



JOURNAL.

Tocqueville, Sunday, August 11, 1861.—We left Paris on Saturday evening, got to Valognes by the Cherbourg railway by six the next morning, and were furnished there with a good carriage and horses, which took us, and our servants and luggage, in three hours to Tocqueville.

Valognes has been immortalised by Le Sage in Turcaret. It is a town of about 6,000 inhabitants, built of granite, and therefore little altered from what it was 200 years ago. Over many of the doors are the armorial bearings of the provincial nobility who made it a small winter capital: the practice is not wholly extinct. I asked who was the inhabitant of an imposing old house. 'M. de Neridoze,' answered our landlady, 'd'une tres-haute noblesse.' I went over one in which Madame de Tocqueville thinks of passing the winter. It is of two stories. The ground floor given up to kitchen, laundry, and damp-looking servants' rooms; the first floor in this form:—



Bedroom. Door Stairs Bedroom.

Bedroom. Drawing-room. Dining-room. Hall. Bedroom.

The longer side looks into the street, the shorter, which is to be Madame de Tocqueville's bedroom, into a small garden.

August 11.—At Tocqueville we find M. and Madame de Beaumont, their second son—a charming boy of ten years old, and Ampere.

It is eleven years since I was here. Nothing has been done to the interior of the house. This is about the plan of ground floor.



Offices Tower staircase Offices.

Drawing-room. Billiard-room. Dining-room. Hall. Tower

The first floor corresponds to the ground floor, except that on the western sides a passage runs, into which the library, which is over the drawing-room, and the bedrooms open. The second consists of garrets. My room is on the first floor of the eastern tower, with deep windows looking south and east. The room dedicated by Tocqueville to Ampere is above me. Creepers in great luxuriance cover the walls up to the first floor windows. The little park consists of from thirty to forty acres, well wooded and traversed by an avenue in this form, leading from the road to the front of the house.

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To the west the ground rises to a wild common commanding the sea, the lighthouses of Gatteville, Barfleur, La Hogue, and a green plain covered with woods and hedgerow trees, and studded with church towers and spires of the picturesque forms of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. It has no grand features, except the sea and the rocky coast of the Cherbourg peninsula, but it is full of variety and beauty. I can understand Tocqueville's delight in the house and in the country. The weather is perfect; the thermometer in my bedroom, the walls of which are about six feet thick, is 71 deg., in the sun it is 80 deg.; but there is a strong breeze.

August 12th.—Madame de Beaumont, my daughter, and Ampere drove, and Beaumont and I walked, to the coast about three miles and a half off. Our road ran through the gay wooded plain which I have described.

We talked of Italian affairs.

'Up to the annexation of Tuscany,' said Beaumont, 'I fully approve of all that has been done. Parma, Modena, and Tuscany were eager to join Piedmont. During the anxious interval of six months, while the decision of Louis Napoleon was doubtful, the conduct of the Tuscans was above all praise. Perhaps the general wish of the people of Romagna justified the Piedmontese in seizing it. Though there the difficult question as to the expediency of stripping the Pope of his temporal power rises.

'Perhaps, too, the facility with which Sicily submitted was a justification. But I cannot pardon the seizure of Naples. It is clear to me that if the Neapolitans had been left to themselves they would have driven out the Garibaldians. Garibaldi himself felt this: nothing but a conviction of its necessity would have induced him to call for the assistance of the Piedmontese. I do not believe that in defiance of all international law-indeed in defiance of all international morality—Cavour would have given that assistance if the public opinion of Piedmont had allowed him to refuse it. And what is the consequence? A civil war which is laying waste the country. The Piedmontese call their adversaries brigands. There are without doubt among them men whose motive is plunder, but the great majority are in arms in defence of the independence of their country. They are no more brigands now than they were when they resisted King Joseph. The Piedmontese are as much foreigners to them as the French were: as much hated and as lawfully resisted. They may be conquered, they probably will be conquered. An ignorant corrupt population, inhabiting a small country, unsupported by its higher classes—its fleet, its fortresses, and all the machinery of its government, in the hands of its enemies—cannot permanently resist; but the war will be atrocious, and the more cruel on the part of Piedmont because it is unjust.'

'You admit,' I said, 'that the higher classes side with Piedmont?'

'I admit that,' he answered; 'but you must recollect how few they are in number, and how small is the influence which they exercise. In general, I detest universal suffrage, I detest democracy and everything belonging to it, but if it were possible to obtain honestly and truly the opinion of the people, I would ask it and obey it. I believe that it would be better to allow the Neapolitans, ignorant and debased as they are, to choose their own sovereign and their own form of government, than to let them be forced by years of violence to become the unwilling subjects of Piedmont.'

'Do you believe,' I said, 'that it is possible to obtain through universal suffrage the honest and true opinion of a people?'

'Not,' he answered, 'if the Government interferes. I believe that in Savoy not one person in fifty was in favour of annexation to France. But this is an extreme case.

'The Bourbons are deservedly hated and despised by the Neapolitans, the Piedmontese are not despised, but are hated still more intensely. There is no native royal stock. The people are obviously unfit for a Republic. It would be as well, I think, to let them select a King as to impose one on them. The King whom Piedmont, without a shadow of right, is imposing on them is the one whom they most detest.'

'If I go to Rome,' I asked, 'in the winter, whom shall I find there?'

'I think,' he answered, 'that it will be the Piedmontese. The present state of things is full of personal danger to Louis Napoleon. As his policy is purely selfish, he will, at any sacrifice, put an end to it. That sacrifice may be the unity of Catholicism. The Pope, no longer a sovereign, will be under the influence of the Government in whose territory he resides, and the other Catholic Powers may follow the example of Greece and of Russia, and create each an independent Spiritual Government. It would be a new excitement for Celui-ci to make himself Head of the Church.'

'Assassinations,' I said, 'even when successful have seldom produced important and permanent effects, but Orsini's failure has influenced and is influencing the destinies of Europe.'

'If I were an Italian liberal,' said Beaumont, 'I would erect a statue to him. The policy and almost the disposition of Louis Napoleon have been changed by the attentat. He has become as timid as he once was intrepid. He began by courting the Pope and the clergy. He despised the French assassins, who were few in number and unconnected, and who had proved their unskilfulness on Louis Philippe; but Orsini showed him that he had to elect between the Pope and the Austrians on one side, and the Carbonari on the other. He has chosen the alliance of the Carbonari. He has made himself their tool, and will continue to do so.

'They are the only enemies whom he fears, at least for the present.

'France is absolutely passive. The uneducated masses from whom he holds his power are utterly indifferent to liberty, and he has too much sense to irritate them by wanton oppression. They do not know that he is degrading the French character, they do not even feel that he is wasting the capital of France, they do not know that he is adding twenty millions every year to the national debt. They think of his loans merely as investments, and the more profligately extravagant are the terms and the amount, the better they like them.'

'Ten years ago,' I said, 'the cry that I heard was, "Ca ne durera pas."'

'That was my opinion,' he answered; 'indeed, it was the opinion of everybody. I thought the Duc de Broglie desponding when he gave it three years. We none of us believed that the love of liberty was dead in France.'

'It is not,' I said, 'dead, for among the higher classes it still lives, and among the lower it never existed.'

'Perhaps,' he answered, 'our great mistakes were that we miscalculated the courage of the educated classes, and the degree in which universal suffrage would throw power into the hands of the uneducated. Not a human being in my commune reads a newspaper or indeed reads anything: yet it contains 300 electors. In the towns there is some knowledge and some political feeling, but for political purposes they are carefully swamped by being joined to uneducated agricultural districts.

'Still I think I might enter the Corps legislatif for our capital Le Mans. Perhaps at a general election twenty liberals might come in. But what good could they do? The opposition in the last session strengthened Louis Napoleon. It gave him the prestige of liberality and success.'

'You think him, then,' I said, 'safe for the rest of his life?'

'Nothing,' he answered, 'is safe in France, and the thing most unsafe is a Government. Our caprices are as violent as they are sudden. They resemble those of a half-tamed beast of prey, which licks its keeper's hand to-day, and may tear him to-morrow. But if his life be not so long as to enable the fruits of his follies to show themselves in their natural consequences—unsuccessful war, or defeated diplomacy, or bankruptcy, or heavily increased taxation—he may die in the Tuileries.

'But I infer from his conduct that he thinks an insurrection against his tyranny possible, and that he is preparing to meet it by a popular war— that is to say, by a war with England.

'I found my opinion not so much on the enormous maritime preparations, as on the long-continued systematic attempts to raise against England our old national enmity. All the provincial papers are in the hands of the Government. The constantly recurring topic of every one of them is, the perfidy and the malignity of England. She is described as opposing all our diplomacy, as resisting all our aggrandisement, as snarling and growling at our acquisition of Savoy, as threatening us if we accept Sardinia, as trying to drive the Pope from Rome because we protect him, as trying to separate the Danubian provinces because we wish to unite them, as preventing the Suez Canal because we proposed it—in short, on every occasion and in every part of the world as putting herself in our way. To these complaints, which are not without foundation, are added others of which our ignorant people do not see the absurdity. They are told that the enormous conscription, and the great naval expenditure, are rendered necessary by the aggressive armaments of England. That you are preparing to lay waste all our coasts, to burn our arsenals, to subsidise against us a new Coalition, and perhaps lead its armies again to Paris.

'The Emperor's moderation, his love of England, and his love of peace, are said to be the only obstacles to, a violent rupture. But they are prepared for these obstacles at length giving way. "The Emperor," they are told, "is getting tired of his insolent, and hostile, and quarrelsome allies. He is getting tired of a peace which is more expensive than a war. Some day the cup will flow over. 'Il en finira avec eux,' will dictate a peace in London, will free the oppressed Irish nationality, will make England pay the expense of the war, and then having conquered the only enemy that France can fear, will let her enjoy, for the first time, real peace, a reduced conscription, and low taxation."

'Such is the language of all the provincial papers and of all the provincial authorities, and it has its effect. There never was a time when a war with England would be so popular. He does not wish for one, he knows that it would be extremely dangerous, but he is accustomed to play for great stakes, and if submitting to any loss of his popularity, or to any limitation of his power is the alternative, he will run the risk. He keeps it, as his last card, in reserve, to be played only in extremity, but to be ready when that extremity has arrived.'

Tuesday, August 13.—We drove to La Prenelle, a church at the point of a high table-land running from Tocqueville towards the bay of La Hogue, and commanding nearly all the Cherbourg peninsula. On three sides of us was the sea, separated from us by a wooded, well-inhabited plain, whose churches rose among the trees, and containing the towns and lofty lighthouses of Gatteville, Barfleur, Vast, and La Hogue. We sat on the point from whence James II. saw the battle of La Hogue, and admired the courage of his English rebels.

Ampere has spent much of his life in Rome, and is engaged on a work in which its history is to be illustrated by its monuments.

We talked of the Roman people.

'Nothing,' said Ampere, 'can be more degraded than the higher classes. With the exception of Antonelli, who is charming, full of knowledge, intelligence, and grace, and of the Duke of Sermoneta, who is almost equally distinguished, there is scarcely a noble of my acquaintance who has any merits, moral or intellectual.

'They are surrounded by the finest ancient and modern art, and care nothing for it. The eminent men of every country visit Rome—the Romans avoid them for they have nothing to talk to them about.

'Politics are of course unsafe, literature they have none. They never read. A cardinal told me something which I doubted, and I asked him where he had found it. "In certi libri," he answered.

'Another, who has a fine old library, begged me to use it. "You will do the room good," he said. "No one has been there for years." Even scandal and gossip must be avoided under an Ecclesiastical Government.

'They never ride, they never shoot, they never visit their estates, they give no parties; if it were not for the theatre and for their lawsuits they would sink into vegetable life.'

'Sermoneta,' I said, 'told me that many of his lawsuits were hereditary, and would probably descend to his son.'

'If Sermoneta,' said Ampere, 'with his positive intelligence and his comparative vigour, cannot get through them, what is to be expected from others? They have, however, one merit, one point of contact with the rest of the world—their hatred of their Government. They seem to perceive, not clearly, for they perceive nothing clearly, but they dimly see, that the want of liberty is a still greater misfortune to the higher classes than to the lower.

'But the people are a fine race. Well led they will make excellent soldiers. They have the cruelty of their ancestors, perhaps I ought to say of their predecessors, but they have also their courage.'

'They showed,' said Beaumont, 'courage in the defence of Rome, but courage behind walls is the commonest of all courages. No training could make the Spaniards stand against us in the open field, but they were heroes in Saragossa. The caprices of courage and cowardice are innumerable. The French have no moral courage, they cannot stand ridicule, they cannot encounter disapprobation, they bow before oppression; a French soldier condemned by a court-martial cries for mercy like a child. The same man in battle appears indifferent to death. The Spaniard runs away without shame, but submits to death when it is inevitable without terror. None of the prisoners taken on either side in the Spanish civil war asked for pardon.'

'Indifference to life,' I said, 'and indifference to danger have little in common. General Fenelon told me that in Algeria he had more than once to preside at an execution. No Arab showed any fear. Once there were two men, one of whom was to be flogged, the other to be shot. A mistake was made and they were going to shoot the wrong man. It was found out in time, but neither of the men seemed to care about it; yet they would probably have run away in battle. The Chinese are not brave, but you can hire a man to be beheaded in your place.'

'So,' said Ampere, 'you could always hire a substitute in our most murderous wars, when in the course of a year a regiment was killed twice over. It was hiring a man, not indeed to be beheaded, but to be shot for you.'

'The destructiveness,' said Beaumont, 'of a war is only gradually known. It is found out soonest in the villages when the deaths of the conscripts are heard of, or are suspected from their never returning; but in the towns, from which the substitutes chiefly come, it may be long undiscovered. Nothing is known but what is officially published, and the Government lies with an audacity which seems always to succeed. If it stated the loss of men in a battle at one half of the real number, people would fancy that it ought to be doubled, and so come near to the truth; but it avows only one-tenth or only one-twentieth, and then the amount of falsehood is underestimated.'

'Marshal Randon,' I said, 'told me that the whole loss in the Italian campaign was under 7,000 men.'

'That is a good instance,' said Beaumont. 'It certainly was 50,000, perhaps 70,000. But I am guilty of a delit in saying so, and you will be guilty of a delit if you repeat what I have said. I remember the case of a man in a barber's shop in Tours, to whom the barber said that the harvest was bad. He repeated the information, and was punished by fine and imprisonment for having spread des nouvelles alarmantes. Truth is no excuse; in fact it is an aggravation, for the truer the news the more alarming.'

'In time of peace,' I asked, 'what proportion of the conscripts return after their six years of service?'

'About three-quarters,' answered Beaumont.

'Then,' I said, 'as you take 100,000 conscripts every year even in peace, you lose 25,000 of your best young men every year?'

'Certainly,' said Beaumont.

'And are the 75,000 who return improved or deteriorated?' I asked.

'Improved,' said Ampere; 'they are degourdis, they are educated, they submit to authority, they know how to shift for themselves.'

'Deteriorated,' said Beaumont. 'A garrison life destroys the habits of steady industry, it impairs skill. The returned conscript is more vicious and less honest than the peasant who has not left his village.'

'And what was the loss,' I asked, 'in the late war?'

'At least twice as great,' said Beaumont, 'as it is in peace. Half of those who were taken perished. The country would not have borne the prolongation of the Crimean War.'

'These wars,' I said, 'were short and successful. A war with England can scarcely be short, and yet you think that he plans one?'

'I think,' said Beaumont, 'that he plans one, but only in the event of his encountering any serious difficulty at home. You must not infer from the magnitude of his naval expenditure that he expects one.

'You look at the expense of those preparations, and suppose that so great a sacrifice would not be made in order to meet an improbable emergency. But expense is no sacrifice to him. He likes it. He has the morbid taste for it which some tyrants have had for blood, which his uncle had for war. Then he is incapable of counting. When he lived at Arenenburg he used to give every old soldier who visited him an order on Viellard his treasurer for money. In general the chest was empty. Viellard used to remonstrate but without effect. The day perhaps after his orders had been dishonoured he gave new ones.'

'Is it true,' I asked, 'that the civil list is a couple of years' income in debt?'

I know nothing about it,' said Beaumont; 'in fact, nobody knows anything about anything, but it is highly probable. Everybody who asks for anything gets it, everybody is allowed to waste, everybody is allowed to rob, every folly of the Empress is complied with. Fould raised objections, and was dismissed.

'She is said to have a room full of revolutionary relics: there is the bust of Marie Antoinette, the nose broken at one of the sacks of the Tuileries. There is a picture of Simon beating Louis XVII. Her poor child has been frightened by it, and she is always dwelling on the dangers of her position.'

'So,' I said, 'did Queen Adelaide—William IV.'s Queen. From the passing of the Reform Bill she fully expected to die on the scaffold.'

'There is more reason,' he answered, 'for the Empress's fears.'

'Not,' I said, 'if she fears the scaffold. Judicial murder, at least in that form, is out of fashion. Cayenne and Lambressa are your guillotines, and the Empress is safe from them.'

'But there are other modes of violent death,' he answered; 'from one of which she escaped almost by miracle.'

'How did she behave,' I asked, 'at the attentat?'

'Little is known,' he answered, 'except that the Emperor said to her, as he led her upstairs to her box: "Allons, il faut faire notre metier."'

'Then she is disturbed by religious fears. The little prince has been taught to say to his father every morning: "Papa, ne faites pas de mal a mon parrain." The Pope was his godfather.'

'If the Emperor dies, the real power will pass into the hands of Prince Napoleon. And very dangerous hands they will be. He has more talent than the Emperor, and longer views. Louis Napoleon is a revolutionist from selfishness. Prince Napoleon is selfish enough, but he has also passion. He detests everything that is venerable, everything that is established or legal.

'There is little value now for property or for law, though the Government professes to respect them. What, will it be when the Government professes to hate them?'

Wednesday, August 14.—We talked at breakfast of Rome.

'Is there,' said Beaumont to Ampere, 'still an Inquisition at Rome?'

'There is,' said Ampere, 'but it is torpid. It punishes bad priests, but does little else.'

'If a Roman,' I asked, 'were an avowed infidel, would it take notice of him?'

'Probably not,' said Ampere, 'but his cure might—not for his infidelity, but for his avowing it. The cure who has always the powers of a commissaire de police, might put him in prison if he went into a cafe and publicly denied the Immaculate Conception, or if he neglected going to church or to confession: but the Inquisition no longer cares about opinions.'

'Is there much infidelity,' I asked, 'in Rome?'

'Much,' said Ampere, 'among the laity. The clergy do not actively disbelieve. They go through their functions without ever seriously inquiring whether what they have to teach be true or false. No persons were more annoyed by the Mortara[1] business than the clergy, with the exception of Antonelli. He hates and fears the man who set it on foot, the Archbishop of Bologna, and therefore was glad to see him expose himself, and lose all hope of the Secretaryship, but he took care to prevent the recurrence of such a scandal. He revived an old law prohibiting Jews from keeping Christian nurses. But he could scarcely order restitution. According to the Church it would have been giving the child to the Devil, and, what is worse, robbing God of him. The Pope's piety is selfish. His great object is his own salvation. He would not endanger that, to confer any benefit upon, or to avert any evil from Rome; or indeed from the whole world. This makes him difficult to negotiate with. If anything is proposed to him which his confessor affirms to be dangerous to his soul, he listens to no arguments. As for Mortara himself, he is a poor creature. A friend of mine went to see him in his convent. All that he could get from him was:

'"Sono venuti i Carabinieri."

'"And what did they do to you?"

'"M' hanno portato qui."

'"What more?"

'"M' hanno dato pasticci; erano molto buoni."

'What is most teasing,' continued Ampere, 'in the Roman Government is not so much its active oppression as its torpidity. It hates to act. An Englishman had with great difficulty obtained permission to light Rome with gas. He went to the Government in December, and told them that everything was ready, and that the gas would be lighted on the 1st of January.

'"Could you not," they answered, "put it off till April?"

'"But it is in winter," he replied; "that it is wanted. Every thing is ready. Why should we wait?"

'"It is a new thing," they replied; "people will be frightened. It may have consequences. At least put it off till March."

'"But they will be as much frightened in March," he replied.

'"If it must be done," they said, "as a kindness to His Holiness and to us put it off till February."

'There is, however, one sort of oppression which even we should find it difficult to tolerate.

'A Monsignore has a young friend without money, but an excellent Catholic and an excellent politician, a fervid believer in the Immaculate Conception and in the excellence of the Papal Government. He wishes to reward such admirable opinions: but the Pope has little to give. Monsignore looks out for some young heiress, sends for her father, describes his pious and loyal protege, and proposes marriage. Her father objects—says that his daughter cannot afford to marry a poor man, or that she does not wish to marry at all—or that he or she has some other preference.

'Monsignore insists. He assures the father that what he is proposing is most favourable to the salvation of his daughter, that he suggests it principally for the benefit of her soul, and that the father's objections are inspired by the Evil One. The father breaks off the conversation and goes home. He finds that his daughter has disappeared. He returns furious to Monsignore, is received with the utmost politeness and is informed that his daughter is perfectly safe under the protection of a cardinal who himself did her the honour of fetching her in his gilded coach. "You have only," the Monsignore says, "to be reasonable, and she shall be returned to you."

'The father flies to the cardinal.

'The same politeness and the same answer.

'"Do not oppose," he is told, "the will of the Pope, who, in this matter, seeks only your daughter's happiness here and hereafter. She is now with me. If you will give up your sinful obstinacy she shall be restored to you to-day. If not, it will be our duty to place her in a convent, where she will be taken the utmost care of, but she will not leave it except to marry the person whom His Holiness thinks most fitted to promote the welfare of her soul."