'I have known several cases in which this attempt has been made. With such timid slaves as the Roman nobility it always succeeds.'

[Footnote 1: The Jewish child who was taken away from his parents and converted.—ED.]

Thursday, August 15.—This is the fete of St. Louis—the great fete of Tocqueville. Madame de Tocqueville and Madame de Beaumont spent much of the morning in church.

Beaumont and his son walked to the coast to bathe. Minnie, Ampere, and I strolled among the deep shady lanes of the plateau above the castle. Throughout Normandy the fields are small and are divided by mounds planted with trees. The farmhouses, and even the cottages, are built of primitive rock, granite, or old red sandstone. At a distance, peeping out of the trees that surround them, they look pretty, but they, have more than the usual French untidiness. The outhouses are roofless, the farmyards are full of pools and dung heaps, which often extend into the road; and the byroads themselves are quagmires when they do not consist of pointed stones. I was struck by the paucity of the children and the absence of new houses. The population of Normandy is diminishing.

We conversed on the subject of Italy.

'If we are in Rome next winter,' I asked, 'shall we find the French there?'

'I think not,' said Ampere; 'I think that you will find only the Piedmontese.

'Every day that Louis Napoleon holds Rome is a day of danger to him, a danger slight perhaps now, but serious if the occupation be prolonged. The Anti-papal party, and it includes almost all that are liberal and all that are energetic, are willing to give him time, but not an indefinite time. They are quiet only because they trust him. He is a magician who has sold himself to the Devil. The Devil is patient, but he will not be cheated. The Carbonari will support Louis Napoleon as long as he is doing their work, and will allow him to do it in his own way and to take his own time, as long as they believe he is doing it. But woe to him if they believe that he is deceiving them. I suspect that they are becoming impatient, and I suspect too, that he is becoming impatient. This quarrel between Merode and Goyon is significative. I do not believe that Goyon used the words imputed to him. We shall probably keep Civita Vecchia, but we shall give up Rome to the Piedmontese.'

'And will the Pope,' I asked, 'remain?'

'Not this Pope,' said Ampere, 'but his successor. Nor do I see the great evil of the absence of the Pope from Rome. Popes have often been absent before, sometimes for long periods.'

'Most of my French friends,' I said, 'are opposed to Italian Unity as mischievous to France.'

'I do not believe,' he answered, 'in the submission of Naples to this Piedmontese dynasty, but I shall be delighted to see all Italy north of the Neapolitan territory united.

'I do not think that we have anything to fear from the kingdom of Italy. It is as likely to be our friend as to be our enemy. But the Neapolitans, even if left to themselves, would not willingly give up their independence, and Celui-ci is trying to prevent their doing so.'

'What do they wish,' I asked, 'and what does he wish?'

'I believe,' he answered, 'that their wishes are only negative.

'They do not wish to recall the Bourbons, and they are resolved not to keep the Piedmontese. His wish I believe to be to put his cousin there. Prince Napoleon himself refused Tuscany. It is too small, but he would like Naples, and Louis Napoleon would be glad to get rid of him. What would England say?'

'If we believed,' I said, 'in the duration of a Bonaparte dynasty in France, we should, of course, object to the creation of one in Naples. But if, as we think it probable, the Bonapartists have to quit France, I do not see few we should be injured by their occupying the throne of Naples.

'I should object to them if I were a Neapolitan. All their instincts are despotic, democratic, and revolutionary. But even they are better than the late king was. What chance have the Murats?'

'None,' said Ampere. 'They have spoiled their game, if they had a game, by their precipitation. The Emperor has disavowed them, the Neapolitans do not care for them. The Prince de Leuchtenberg, grandson of Eugene Beauharnais, has been talked of. He is well connected, related to many of the reigning families of the Continent, and is said to be intelligent and well educated.'

'If Naples,' I said, 'is to be detached from the kingdom of Italy, Sicily ought to be detached from Naples. There is quite as much mutual antipathy.'

'Would you like to take it?' he asked.

'Heaven forbid!' I answered. 'It would be another Corfu on a larger scale. The better we governed them, the more they would hate us. The only chance for them is to have a king of their own.'

August 15.—In the evening Ampere read to us a comedy called 'Beatrix,' by a writer of some reputation, and a member of the Institut.

It was very bad, full of exaggerated sentiments, forced situations, and the cant of philanthropic despotism.

An actress visits the court of a German grand duke. He is absent. His mother, the duchess, receives her as an equal. The second son falls in love with her at first sight and wishes to marry her. She is inclined to consent, when another duchy falls in, the elder duke resigns to his brother, he becomes king, presses their marriage, his mother does not oppose, and thereupon Beatrix makes a speech, orders her horses, and drives off to act somewhere else.

Ampere reads admirably, but no excellence of reading could make such absurdities endurable. It was written for Ristori, who acted Beatrix in French with success.

Friday, August 16.—We talked at breakfast of 1793.

'It is difficult,' said Madame de Beaumont, 'to believe that the French of that day were our ancestors.'

'They resembled you,' I said, 'only in two things: in military courage, and in political cowardice.'

'They had,' she replied, 'perhaps more passive courage than we have.[1] My great-great-grandmother, my great-grandmother, and my great-aunt, were guillotined on the same day. My great-great-grandmother was ninety years old. When interrogated, she begged them to speak loud, as she was deaf. 'Ecrivez,' said Fouquier Tinville, 'que la citoyenne Noailles a conspire sourdement contre la Republique.' They were dragged to the Place de la Republique in the same tombereau, and sat waiting their turn on the same bench.

'My great-aunt was young and beautiful. The executioner, while fastening her to the plank, had a rose in his mouth. The Abbe de Noailles, who was below the scaffold, disguised, to give them, at the risk of his life, a sign of benediction, was asked how they looked.

'"Comme si,' he said, 'elles allaient a la messe."'

'The habit,' said Ampere, 'of seeing people die produces indifference even to one's own death. You see that among soldiers. You see it in epidemics. But this indifference, or, to use a more proper word, this resignation, helped to prolong the Reign of Terror. If the victims had resisted, if, like Madame du Barry, they had struggled with the executioner, it would have excited horror.'

'The cries of even a pig,' said Madame de Beaumont, 'make it disagreeable to kill it.'

'Sanson,' I said, 'long survived the Revolution; he made a fortune and lived in retirement at Versailles. A lady was run away with between Versailles and Paris. An elderly man, at considerable risk, stopped her horse. She was very grateful, but could not get from him his name. At last she traced him, and found that it was Sanson.'

'Sanson,' said Beaumont, 'may have been an honest man. Whenever a place of bourreau is vacant, there are thirty or forty candidates, and they always produce certificates of their extraordinary kindness and humanity. It seems to be the post most coveted by men eminent for their benevolence.'

'How many have you?' I asked.

'Eighty-six,' he answered. 'One for each department.'

'And how many executions?'

'About one hundred a year in all France.'

'And what is the salary?'

'Perhaps a couple of thousand francs a year.'

'Really,' said Ampere, 'it is one of the best parts of the patronage of the Minister of the Interior. M. le Bourreau gets more than a thousand francs for each operation.'

'We pay by the piece,' I said, 'and find one operator enough for all England.'

'A friend of mine,' said Beaumont, had a remarkably good Swiss servant. His education was far above his station, and we could not find what had been his birth or his canton.

'Suddenly he became agitated and melancholy, and at last told my friend that he must leave him, and why. His father was the hereditary bourreau of a Swiss canton. To the office was attached an estate, to be forfeited if the office were refused. He had resolved to take neither, and, to avoid being solicited, had left his country and changed his name. But his family had traced him, had informed him of his father's death, and had implored him to accept the succession. He was the only son, and his mother and sisters would be ruined, if he allowed it to pass to the next in order of inheritance, a distant cousin. He had not been able to persist in his refusal.'

'The husband of an acquaintance of mine,' said Madame de Beaumont, 'used to disappear for two or three hours every day. He would not tell her for what purpose. At last she found out that he was employed in the chambre noire, the department of the police by which letters passing through the post are opened. The duties were well paid, and she could not persuade him to give them up. They were on uneasy terms, when an accident threw a list of all the names of the employes in the chambre noire, into the hands of an opposition editor, who published them in his newspaper.

'She then separated from him.'

'If the Post-office,' I said, 'were not a Government monopoly, if everyone had a right to send his letters in the way that he liked best, there would be some excuse. But the State compels you, under severe penalties, to use its couriers, undertaking, not tacitly but expressly, to respect the secrecy of your correspondence, and then systematically violates it.'

'I should have said,' answered Ampere, 'not expressly but tacitly.'

'No,' I replied; 'expressly. Guizot, when Minister for Foreign Affairs, proclaimed from the tribune, that in France the secrecy of correspondence was, under all circumstances, inviolable. This has never been officially contradicted.

'The English Post-office enters into no such engagements. Any letters may be legally opened, under an order from a Secretary of State.'

'Are prisoners in England,' asked Beaumont, 'allowed to correspond with their friends?'

'I believe,' I answered, 'that their letters pass through the Governor's hands, and that he opens them, or not, at his discretion.'

'Among the tortures,' said Ampere, 'which Continental despots delight to inflict on their state prisoners the privation of correspondence is one.'

'In ordinary life,' I said, 'the educated endure inaction worse than the ignorant. A coachman sits for hours on his box without feeling ennui. If his master had to sit quiet all that time, inside the carriage, he would tear his hair from impatience.

'But the educated seem to tolerate the inactivity of imprisonment better than their inferiors. We find that our ordinary malefactors cannot endure solitary imprisonment for more than a year—seldom indeed so long. The Italian prisoners whom I have known, Zucchi, Borsieri, Poerio, Gonfalonieri, and Pellico, endured imprisonment lasting from ten to seventeen years without much injury to mind or body.'

'The spirit of Pellico,' said Madame de Beaumont, 'was broken. When released, he gave himself up to devotion and works of charity. Perhaps the humility, resignation, and submission of his book made it still more mischievous to the Austrian Government. The reader's indignation against those who could so trample on so unresisting a victim becomes fierce.'

'If the Austrians,' I said, 'had been wise, they would have shot instead of imprisoning them. Their deaths would have been forgotten—their imprisonment has contributed much to the general odium which is destroying the Austrian Empire.'

'It would have been wiser,' said Beaumont, 'but it would have been more merciful, and therefore it was not done. But you talk of all these men as solitarily imprisoned. Some of them had companions.'

'Yes,' I said, 'but they complained that one permanent companion was worse than solitude. Gonfalonieri said, that one could not be in the same room, with the same man, a year without hating him.

'One of the Neapolitan prisoners was chained for some time to a brigand. Afterwards the brigand was replaced by a gentleman. He complained bitterly of the change.

'The brigand,' said Minnie, 'was his slave, the gentleman had a will of his own.'

'How did M. de La Fayette,'[2] I asked Madame de Beaumont, 'bear his five years' imprisonment at Olmutz?'

'His health,' said Madame de Beaumont, 'was good, but the miseries of his country and the sufferings of his wife made him very unhappy. When my grandmother came to him, it was two days before she had strength to tell him that all his and her family had perished. I was once at Olmutz, and saw the one room which they had inhabited. It was damp and dark. She asked to be allowed to leave it for a time for better medical treatment and change of air. It was granted only on the condition that she should never return. She refused. The rheumatic attacks which the state of the prison had produced, continued and increased: she was hopelessly ill when they were released—and died soon afterwards. The sense of wrong aggravated their sufferings, for their imprisonment was a gross and wanton violation of all law, international and municipal. My grandfather was not an Austrian subject; he had committed no offence against Austria. She seized him simply because he was a liberal, because his principles had made him the enemy of tyranny in America and in France; and because his birth and talents and reputation gave him influence. It was one of the brutal stupid acts of individual cruelty which characterise the Austrian despotism, and have done more to ruin it than a wider oppression—such a one, for instance, as ours, more mischievous, but more intelligent,—would have done.'

'Freedom,' said Ampere, 'was offered to him on the mere condition of his not serving in the French army. At that time the Jacobins would have guillotined him, the Royalists would have forced duel after duel on him till they had killed him. It seemed impossible that he should ever be able to draw his sword for France. In fact he never was able. America offered him an asylum, honours, land, everything that could console an exile. But he refused to give up the chance, remote as it was, of being useful to his country, and remained a prisoner till he was delivered by Napoleon.'

'He firmly believed,' said Madame de Beaumont, 'that if the Royal Family would have taken refuge with his army in 1791 he could have saved them, and probably the Monarchy. His army was then in his hands, a few months after the Jacobins had corrupted it.'

'Two men,' said Ampere, 'Mirabeau and La Fayette, could have saved the Monarchy, and were anxious to do so. But neither the King nor the Queen would trust them.

'Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette are among the historical personages who have most influenced the destinies of the world. His dulness, torpidity and indecision, and her frivolity, narrow-minded prejudices and suspiciousness, are among the causes of our present calamities. They are among the causes of a state of things which has inflicted on us, and threatens to inflict on all Europe, the worst of all Governments—democratic despotism. A Government in which two wills only prevail—that of the ignorant, envious, ambitious, aggressive multitude, and that of the despot who, whatever be his natural disposition, is soon turned, by the intoxication of flattery and of universal power, into a capricious, fantastic, selfish participator in the worst passions of the worst portion of his subjects.'

'Such a Government,' I said, 'may be called an anti-aristocracy. It excludes from power all those who are fit to exercise it.'

'The consequence,' said Beaumont, 'is, that the qualities which fit men for power not being demanded, are not supplied. Our young men have no political knowledge or public spirit. Those who have a taste for the sciences cultivated in the military schools enter the army. The rest learn nothing.'

'What do they do?' I asked.

'How they pass their time,' said Madame de Beaumont, 'is a puzzle to me. They do not read, they do not go into society—I believe that they smoke and play at dominos, and ride and bet at steeple-chases.

'Those who are on home service in the army are not much better. The time not spent in the routine of their profession is sluggishly and viciously wasted. Algeria has been a God-send to us. There our young men have real duties to perform, and real dangers to provide against and to encounter. My son, who left St. Cyr only eighteen months ago, is stationed at Thebessa, 300 miles in the interior. He belongs to a bureau arabe, consisting of a captain, a lieutenant, and himself, and about forty spahis. He has to act as a judge, as an engineer, to settle the frontier between the province of Constantine and Tunis—in short, to be one of a small ruling aristocracy. This is the school which has furnished, and is furnishing, our best generals and administrators.'

We talked of the interior of French families.

'The ties of relationship,' I said, 'seem to be stronger with you than they are with us. Cousinship with you is a strong bond, with us it is a weak one.'

'The habit of living together,' said Beaumont, 'has perhaps much to do with the strength of our feelings of consanguinity. Our life is patriarchal. Grandfather, father, and grandson are often under the same roof. At the Grange[3] thirty of the family were sometimes assembled at dinner. With you, the sons go off, form separate establishments, see little of their parents, still less of their cousins, and become comparatively indifferent to them.'

'I remember,' I said, 'the case of an heir apparent of seventy; his father was ninety-five. One day the young man was very grumpy. They tried to find out what was the matter with him; at last he broke out, "Everybody's father dies except mine."'

'An acquaintance of mine,' said Beaumont, 'not a son, but a son-in-law, complained equally of the pertinacious longevity of his father-in-law. "Je n'ai pas cru," he said, "en me mariant, que j'epousais la fille du Pere Eternel." Your primogeniture,' he continued, 'must be a great source of unfilial feelings. The eldest son of one of your great families is in the position of the heir apparent to a throne. His father's death is to give him suddenly rank, power, and wealth; and we know that royal heirs apparent are seldom affectionate sons. With us the fortunes are much smaller, they are equally divided, and the rank that descends to the son is nothing.'

'What regulates,' I asked, 'the descent of titles?'

'It is ill regulated,' said Beaumont 'Titles are now of such little value that scarcely anyone troubles himself to lay down rules about them.

'In general, however, it is said, that all the sons of dukes and of marquises are counts. The sons of counts in some families all take the title of Count. There are, perhaps, thirty Beaumonts. Some call themselves marquises, some counts, some barons. I am, I believe, the only one of the family who has assumed no title. Alexis de Tocqueville took none, but his elder brother, during his father's life, called himself vicomte and his younger brother baron. Probably Alexis ought then to have called himself chevalier, and, on his father's death, baron. But, I repeat, the matter is too unimportant to be subject to any settled rules. Ancient descent is, with us, of great value, of far more than it is with you, but titles are worth nothing.'

[Footnote 1: This incident is described in a little book published last year, the Memoirs of Madame de Montaign.—ED.]

[Footnote 2: M. de La Fayette was Madame de Beaumont's grandfather.—ED.]

[Footnote 3: The chateau of M. de La Fayette.—ED.]

Saturday, August 17.—We drove to the coast and ascended the lighthouse of Gatteville, 85 metres, or about 280 feet high. It stands in the middle of a coast fringed with frightful reefs, just enough under water to create no breakers, and a flat plain a couple of miles wide behind, so that the coast is not seen till you come close to it. In spite of many lighthouses and buoys, wrecks are frequent. A mysterious one occurred last February: the lighthouse watchman showed us the spot—a reef just below the lighthouse about two hundred yards from the shore.

It was at noon—there was a heavy sea, but not a gale. He saw a large ship steer full on the reef. She struck, fell over on one side till her yards were in the water, righted herself, fell over on the other, parted in the middle, and broke up. It did not take five minutes, but during those five minutes there was the appearance of a violent struggle on board, and several shots were fired. From the papers which were washed ashore it appeared that she was from New York, bound for Havre, with a large cargo and eighty-seven passengers, principally returning emigrants. No passenger escaped, and only two of the crew: one was an Italian speaking no French, from whom they could get nothing; the other was an Englishman from Cardiff, speaking French, but almost obstinately uncommunicative. He said that he was below when the ship struck, that the captain had locked the passengers in the cabin, and that he knew nothing of the causes which had led the ship to go out of her course to run on this rock.

The captain may have been drunk or mad. Or there may have been a mutiny on board, and those who got possession of the ship may have driven her on the coast, supposing that they could beach her, and ignorant of the interposed reefs, which, as I have said, are not betrayed by breakers.

Our informant accounted for the loss of all, except two persons, by the heavy sea, the sharp reefs, and the blows received by those who tried to swim from the floating cargo. The two who escaped were much bruised.

A man and woman were found tied to one another and tied to a spar. They seemed to have been killed by blows received from the rocks or from the floating wreck.

In the evening Ampere read to us the 'Bourgeois Gentilhomme.' His reading is equal to any acting. It kept us all, for the first two acts, which are the most comic, in one constant roar of laughter.

'The modern nouveau riche, said Beaumont, 'has little resemblance to M. Jourdain. He talks of his horses and his carriages, builds a great hotel, and buys pictures. I have a neighbour of this kind; he drives four-in-hand over the bad roads of La Sarthe, visits with one carriage one day, and another the next. His jockey stands behind his cabriolet in top-boots, and his coachman wears a grand fur coat in summer. His own clothes are always new, sometimes in the most accurate type of a groom, sometimes in that of a dandy. His talk is of steeple-chases.'

'And does he get on?' I asked.

'Not in the least,' answered Beaumont. 'In England a nouveau riche can get into Parliament, or help somebody else to get in, and political power levels all distinctions. Here, wealth gives no power: nothing, indeed, but office gives power. The only great men in the provinces are the prefet, the sous-prefet, and the maire. The only great man in Paris is a minister or a general. Wealth, therefore, unless accompanied by the social talents, which those who have made their fortunes have seldom had the leisure or the opportunity to acquire, leads to nothing. The women, too, of the parvenus always drag them down. They seem to acquire the tournure of society less easily than the men. Bastide, when Minister, did pretty well, but his wife used to sign her invitations "Femme Bastide."

'Society,' he continued, 'under the Republic was animated. We had great interests to discuss, and strong feelings to express, but perhaps the excitement was too great. People seemed to be almost ashamed to amuse or to be amused when the welfare of France, her glory or her degradation, her freedom or her slavery, were, as the event has proved, at stake.'

'I suppose,' I said to Ampere, 'that nothing has ever been better than the salon of Madame Recamier?'

'We must distinguish,' said Ampere. 'As great painters have many manners, so Madame Recamier had many salons. When I first knew her, in 1820, her habitual dinner-party consisted of her father, her husband, Ballanche, and myself. Both her father, M. Bernard, and her husband were agreeable men. Ballanche was charming.'

'You believe,' I said, 'that Bernard was her father?' 'Certainly I do,' he replied. 'The suspicion that Recamier might be was founded chiefly on the strangeness of their conjugal relations. To this, I oppose her apparent love for M. Bernard, and I explain Recamier's conduct by his tastes. They were coarse, though he was a man of good manners. He never spent his evenings at home. He went where he could find more license.

'Perhaps the most agreeable period was at that time of Chateaubriand's reign when he had ceased to exact a tete-a-tete, and Ballanche and I were admitted at four o'clock. The most illustrious of the partie carree was Chateaubriand, the most amusing Ballanche. My merit was that I was the youngest. Later in the evening Madame Mohl, Miss Clarke as she then was, was a great resource. She is a charming mixture of French vivacity and English originality, but I think that the French element predominates. Chateaubriand, always subject to ennui, delighted in her. He has adopted in his books some of the words which she coined. Her French is as original as the character of her mind, very good, but more of the last than of the present century.'

'Was Chateaubriand himself,' I said, 'agreeable?'

'Delightful,' said Ampere; 'tres-entrain, tres-facile a vivre, beaucoup d'imagination et de connaissances.'

'Facile a vivre?' I said. 'I thought that his vanity had been difficile et exigeante?'

'As a public man,' said Ampere, 'yes; and to a certain degree in general society. But in intimate society, when he was no longer "posing," he was charming. The charm, however, was rather intellectual than moral.

'I remember his reading to us a part of his memoirs, in which he describes his early attachment to an English girl, his separation from her, and their meeting many years after when she asked his protection for her son. Miss Clarke was absorbed by the story. She wanted to know what became of the young man, what Chateaubriand had been able to do for him. Chateaubriand could answer only in generals: that he had done all that he could, that he had spoken to the Minister, and that he had no doubt that the young man got what he wanted. But it was evident that even if he had really attempted to do anything for the son of his old love, he had totally forgotten the result. I do not think that he was pleased at Miss Clarke's attention and sympathy being diverted from himself. Later still in Madame Recamier's life, when she had become blind, and Chateaubriand deaf, and Ballanche very infirm, the evenings were sad. I had to try to amuse persons who had become almost unamusable.'

'How did Madame de Chateaubriand,' I asked, 'take the devotion of her husband to Madame Recamier?'

'Philosophically,' answered Ampere. 'He would not have spent with her the hours that he passed at the Abbaye au bois. She was glad, probably, to know that they were not more dangerously employed.'

'Could I read Chateaubriand?' I asked.

'I doubt it,' said Ampere. 'His taste is not English.'

'I have read,' I said, 'and liked, his narrative of the manner in which he forced on the Spanish war of 1822. I thought it well written.'

'It is, perhaps,' said Ampere, 'the best thing which he has written, as the intervention to restore Ferdinand, which he effected in spite of almost everybody, was perhaps the most important passage in his political life.

'There is something revolting in an interference to crush the liberties of a foreign nation. But the expedition tended to maintain the Bourbons on the French throne, and, according to Chateaubriand's ideas, it was more important to support the principle of legitimacy than that of liberty. He expected, too, sillily enough, that Ferdinand would give a Constitution. It is certain, that, bad as the effects of that expedition were, Chateaubriand was always proud of it.'

'What has Ballanche written?' I asked.

'A dozen volumes,' he answered. 'Poetry, metaphysics, on all sorts of subjects, with pages of remarkable vigour and finesse, containing some of the best writing in the language, but too unequal and too desultory to be worth going through.'

'How wonderfully extensive,' I said, 'is French literature! Here is a voluminous author, some of whose writings, you say, are among the best in the French language, yet his name, at least as an author, is scarcely known. He shines only by reflected light, and will live only because he attached himself to a remarkable man and to a remarkable woman.'

'French literature,' said Ampere, 'is extensive, but yet inferior to yours. If I were forced to select a single literature and to read nothing else, I would take the English. In one of the most important departments, the only one which cannot be re-produced by translation—poetry—you beat us hollow. We are great only in the drama, and even there you are perhaps our superiors. We have no short poems comparable to the "Allegro" or to the "Penseroso," or to the "Country Churchyard."'

'Tocqueville,' I said, 'told me that he did not think that he could now read Lamartine.'

'Tocqueville,' said Ampere, 'could taste, like every man of genius, the very finest poetry, but he was not a lover of poetry. He could not read a hundred bad lines and think himself repaid by finding mixed with them ten good ones.'

'Ingres,' said Beaumont, 'perhaps our greatest living painter, is one of the clever cultivated men who do not read. Somebody put the "Misanthrope" into his hands, "It is wonderfully clever," he said, when he returned it; "how odd it is that it should be so totally unknown."'

'Let us read it to-night,' I said.

'By all means,' said Madame de Tocqueville; 'though we know it by heart it will be new when read by M. Ampere.' Accordingly Ampere read it to us after dinner.

'The tradition of the stage,' he said, 'is that Celimene was Moliere's wife.'

'She is made too young,' said Minnie. 'A girl of twenty has not her wit, or her knowledge of the world.'

'The change of a word,' said Ampere, 'in two or three places would alter that. The feeblest characters are as usual the good ones. Philinte and Eliante.

'Alceste is a grand mixture, perhaps the only one on the French stage, of the comic and the tragic; for in many of the scenes he rises far above comedy. His love is real impetuous passion. Talma delighted in playing him.'

'The desert,' I said, 'into which he retires, was, I suppose, a distant country-house. Just such a place as Tocqueville.'

'As Tocqueville,' said Beaumont, 'fifty years ago, without roads, ten days' journey from Paris, and depending for society on Valognes.'

'As Tocqueville,' said Madame de Tocqueville, 'when my mother-in-law first married. She spent in it a month and could never be induced to see it again.'

'Whom,' I asked, 'did Celimene marry?'

'Of course,' said Ampere, 'Alceste. Probably five years afterwards. By that time he must have got tired of his desert and she of her coquetry.'

'We know,' I said, 'that Moliere was always in love with his wife, notwithstanding her legerete. What makes me think the tradition that Celimene was Mademoiselle[1] Moliere true, is that Moliere was certainly in love with Celimene. She is made as engaging as possible, and her worst faults do not rise above foibles. Her satire is good-natured. Arsinoe is her foil, introduced to show what real evil-speaking is.'

'All the women,' said Ampere, 'are in love with Alceste, and they care about no one else. Celimene's satire of the others is scarcely good-natured. It is clear, at least, that they did not think so.'

'If Celimene,' said Minnie, 'became Madame Alceste, he probably made her life a burthen with his jealousy.'

'Of course he was jealous,' said Madame de Beaumont, 'for he was violently in love. There can scarcely be violent love without jealousy.'

'At least,' said Madame de Tocqueville, 'till people are married.

'If a lover is cool enough to be without jealousy, he ought to pretend it.'

[Footnote 1: Under the ancien regime even the married actresses were called Mademoiselle.—ED.]

Sunday, August 18.—After breakfast when the ladies were gone to church, I talked over with Ampere and Beaumont Tocqueville's political career.

'Why,' I asked, 'did he refuse the support of M. Mole in 1835? Why would he never take office under Louis Philippe? Why did he associate himself with the Gauche whom he despised, and oppose the Droit with whom he sympathised? Is the answer given by M. Guizot to a friend of mine who asked a nearly similar question, "Parce qu'il voulait etre ou je suis," the true one?'

'The answers to your first question,' said Beaumont, 'are two. In 1835 Tocqueville was young and inexperienced. Like most young politicians, he thought that he ought to be an independent member, and to vote, on every occasion, according to his conscience, untrammelled by party connections. He afterwards found his mistake.

'And, secondly, if he had chosen to submit to a leader, it would not have been Mole.

'Mole represented a principle to which Guizot was then vehemently opposed, though he was afterwards its incarnation—the subservience of the Ministry and of the Parliament to the King. In that house of 450 members, there were 220 placemen; 200 were the slaves of the King. They received from him their orders; from time to time, in obedience to those orders, they even opposed his Ministers.

'This, however, seldom occurred, for the King contrived always to have a devoted majority in his Cabinet.

'It was this that drove the Duc de Broglie from the Government and prevented his ever resuming office.

'"I could not bear," he said to me, "to hear Sebastiani repeat, in every council and on every occasion, 'Ce que le Roi vient de dire est parfaitement juste.'" The only Ministers that ventured to have an opinion of their own were those of the 12th of May 1839, of which Dufaure, Villemain, and Passy were members, and that of the 1st of March 1840, of which Thiers was the leader; and Tocqueville supported them both.

'When Guizot, who had maintained the principle of Ministerial and Parliamentary, in opposition to that of Monarchical Governments, with unequalled eloquence, vigour, and I may add violence, suddenly turned round and became the most servile member of the King's servile majority, Tocqueville fell back into opposition.

'In general it is difficult to act with an opposition systematically and, at the same time, honestly. For the measures proposed by a Government are, for the most part, good. But, during the latter part of Louis Philippe's reign, it was easy, for the Government proposed merely to do nothing—either abroad or at home. I do not complain of the essence of M. Guizot's foreign policy, though there was a want of dignity in its forms.

'There was nothing useful to be done, and, under such circumstances, all action would have been mischievous.

'But at home every thing was to be done. Our code required to be amended, our commerce and our industry, and our agriculture required to be freed, our municipal and commercial institutions were to be created, our taxation was to be revised, and, above all, our parliamentary system—under which, out of 36,000,000 of French, only 200,000 had votes, under which the Deputies bought a majority of the 200,000 electors, and the King bought a majority of the 450 deputies—required absolute reconstruction.

'Louis Philippe would allow nothing to be done. If he could have prevented it we should not have had a railroad. He would not allow the most important of all, that to Marseilles, to be finished. He would not allow our monstrous centralisation, or our monstrous protective system, to be touched. The owners of forests were permitted to deprive us of cheap fuel, the owners of forges of cheap iron, the owners of factories of cheap clothing.

'In some of this stupid inaction Guizot supported him conscientiously, for, like Thiers, he is ignorant of the first principles of political economy, but he knows too much the philosophy of Government not to have felt, on every other point, that the King was wrong.

'If he supposed that Tocqueville wished to be in his place, on the conditions on which he held office, he was utterly mistaken.

'Tocqueville was ambitious; he wished for power. So did I. We would gladly have been real Ministers, but nothing would have tempted us to be the slaves of the pensee immuable, or to sit in a Cabinet in which we were constantly out-voted, or to defend, as Guizot had to do in the Chamber, conduct which we had disapproved in the Council.

'You ask why Tocqueville joined the Gauche whom he despised, against the Droit with whom he sympathised?

'He voted with the Gauche only where he thought their votes right. Where he thought them wrong, as, for instance, in all that respected Algeria, he left them. They would have abandoned the country, and, when that could not be obtained, they tried to prevent the creation of the port.

'Very early, however, in his parliamentary life, he had found that an independent member—a member who supporting no party is supported by no party—-is useless. He allowed himself therefore to be considered a member of the Gauche; but I never could persuade him to be tolerably civil to them. Once, after I had been abusing him for his coldness to them, he shook hands with Romorantin, then looked towards me for my applause, but I doubt whether he ever shook hands with him again. In fact almost his only point of contact with them was their disapprobation of the inactivity of Louis Philippe. Many of them were Bonapartists like Abbatucci and Romorantin. Some were Socialists, some were Republicans; the majority of them wished to overthrow the Monarchy, and the minority looked forward with indifference to its fall.

'They hated him as much as he did them, much more indeed, for his mind was not formed for hatred. They excluded him from almost all committees.'

'Would it not have been wise in him,' I asked, 'to retire from the Chamber during the King's life, or at least until it contained a party with whom he could cordially act?'

'Perhaps,' said Beaumont, 'that would have been the wisest course for him—and indeed for me. I entered the Chamber reluctantly. All my family were convinced that a political man not in the Chamber was nothing. So I let myself be persuaded. Tocqueville required no persuasion, he was anxious to get in, and when in it was difficult to persuade oneself to go out. We always hoped for a change. The King might die, or he might be forced—as he had been forced before—to submit to a liberal Ministry which might have been a temporary cure, or even to a Parliamentary reform which might have been a complete cure. Duchatel, who is a better politician than Guizot, was superseding him in the confidence of the King and of the Chamber.

'In fact, the liberal Ministry and Parliamentary reform did come at last, though not until it was too late to save the Monarchy.

'If Tocqueville had retired in disgust from the Chamber of Deputies, he might not have been a member of the Constituent, or of the Legislative Assembly. This would have been a misfortune—though the shortness of the duration of the first, and the hostility of the President during the second, and also the state of his health, prevented his influencing the destinies of the Republic as much as his friends expected him to do, and indeed as he expected himself.'

'I have often,' I said, 'wondered how you and Tocqueville, and the other eminent men who composed the committee for preparing the Constitution, could have made one incapable of duration, and also incapable of change.'

'What,' he asked, 'are the principal faults which you find in the Constitution?'

'First,' I said, 'that you gave to your President absolute authority over the army, the whole patronage of the most centralised and the most place-hunting country in the world, so that there was not one of your population of 36,000,000 whose interests he could not seriously affect; and, having thus armed him with irresistible power, you gave him the strongest possible motives to employ it against the Constitution by turning him out at the end of his four years, incapable of re-election, unpensioned and unprovided for, so that he must have gone from the Elysee Bourbon to a debtor's prison.

'Next, that, intending your President to be the subordinate Minister of the Assembly, you gave him the same origin, and enabled him to say, "I represent the people as much as you do, indeed much more. They all voted for me, only a fraction of them voted for any one of you." Then that origin was the very worst that could possibly be selected, the votes of the uneducated multitude; you must have foreseen that they would give you a demagogue or a charlatan. The absence of a second Chamber, and the absence of a power of dissolution, are minor faults, but still serious ones. When the President and the Assembly differed, they were shut up together to fight it out without an umpire.'

'That we gave the President too much power,' said Beaumont, 'the event has proved. But I do not see how, in the existing state of feeling in France, we could have given him less. The French have no self-reliance. They depend for everything on their administrators. The first revolution and the first empire destroyed all their local authorities and also their aristocracy. Local authorities may be gradually re-created, and an aristocracy may gradually arise, but till these things have been done the Executive must be strong.

'If he had been re-eligible, our first President would virtually have been President for life. Having decided that his office should be temporary, we were forced to forbid his immediate re-election.

'With respect to his being left unprovided for, no man who had filled the office decently would have been refused an ample provision on quitting it. As for this man, no provision that we could have made for him, if we had given him three or four millions a year, would have induced him to give up what he considered a throne which was his by descent. He swore to the Constitution with an idee fixe to destroy it. He attempted to do so on the 29th of January 1849, not two months after his election.

'I agree with you that the fault of the Constitution was that it allowed the President to be chosen by universal suffrage; and that the fault of the people was that they elected a pretender to the throne, whose ambition, rashness, and faithlessness had been proved.

'No new Constitution can work if the Executive conspires against it. But deliberating and acting in the midst of emeutes, with a Chamber and a population divided into half a dozen hostile factions, the two Royalist parties hating one another, the Bonapartists bent on destroying all freedom, and the Socialists all individual property, what could we do? My wish and Tocqueville's was to give the election to the Chamber. We found that out of 650 members we could not hope that our proposition would be supported by more than 200. You think that we ought to have proposed two Chambers. The great use of two Chambers is to strengthen the Executive by enabling it to play one against the other; but we felt that our Executive was dangerously strong, and we believed, I think truly, that a single Chamber would resist him better than two could do. The provision which required more than a bare majority for the revision of the Constitution was one of those which we borrowed from America. It had worked well there. In the general instability we wished to have one anchor, one mooring ring fixed. We did not choose that the whole framework of our Government should be capable of being suddenly destroyed by a majority of one, in a moment of excitement and perhaps by a parliamentary surprise.

'With respect to your complaint that, there being no power of dissolution, there was no means of taking the opinion of the people, the answer is, that to give the President power of dissolution would have been to invite him to a coup d'etat. With no Chamber to watch him, he would have been omnipotent.

'I agree with you that the Constitution was a detestable one. But even now, looking back to the times, and to the conditions under which we made it, I do not think that it was in our power to make a good one.'

'Tocqueville,' I said, 'told me that Cormenin was your Solon, that he brought a bit of constitution to you every morning, and that it was usually adopted.'[1]

'Tocqueville's memory,' answered Beaumont, 'deceived him. Cormenin was our president. It is true that he brought a bit of constitution every morning. But it scarcely ever was adopted or capable of being adopted. It was in general bad in itself, or certain to be rejected by the Assembly. He wished to make the President a puppet. But he exercised over us a mischievous influence. He tried to revenge himself for our refusal of all his proposals by rendering our deliberations fruitless. And as the power of a president over a deliberative body is great, he often succeeded.

'Many of our members were unaccustomed to public business and lost their tempers or their courage when opposed. The Abbe Lamennais proposed a double election of the president. But of thirty members, only four, among whom were Tocqueville and I, supported him. He left the committee and never returned to it. Tocqueville and I were anxious to introduce double election everywhere. It is the best palliative of universal suffrage.'

'The double election,' I said, 'of the American President is nugatory. Every elector is chosen under a pledge to nominate a specified candidate.'

'That is true,' said Beaumont, 'as to the President, but not as to the other functionaries thus elected. The senators chosen by double election are far superior to the representatives chosen by direct voting.

'We proposed, too, to begin by establishing municipal institutions. We were utterly defeated. The love of centralisation is almost inherent in French politicians. They see the evil of local government—its stupidity, its corruption, its jobbing. They see the convenience of centralisation—the ease with which a centralised administration works. Feelings which are really democratic have reached those who fancy themselves aristocrats. We had scarcely a supporter.

'We should perhaps have a few now, when experience has shown that centralisation is still more useful to an usurper than it is to a regular Government.'

[Footnote 1: See Vol. I. p. 212.—ED.]

August 18.—We drove in the afternoon to the coast, and sat in the shade of the little ricks of sea-weed, gazing on an open sea as blue as the Mediterranean.

We talked of America.

'I can understand,' said Madame de Tocqueville, 'the indignation of the North against you. It is, of course, excessive, but they had a right to expect you to be on their side in an anti-slavery war.'

'They had no right,' I said, 'to expect from our Government anything but absolute neutrality.'

'But you need not,' she replied, 'have been so eager to put the South on the footing of belligerents.'

'On what other footing,' I asked, 'could we put them? On what other footing does the North put them? Have they ventured, or will they venture, to hang a single seceder?'

'At least,' she said, 'you might have expressed more sympathy with the North?'

'I think,' I answered, 'that we have expressed as much sympathy as it was possible to feel. We deplore the combat, we hold the South responsible for it, we think their capricious separation one of the most foolish and one of the most wicked acts that have ever been committed; we hope that the North will beat them, and we should bitterly regret their forcing themselves back into the Union on terms making slavery worse, if possible, than it is now. We wish the contest to end as quickly as possible: but we do not think that it can end by the North subjugating the Southerns and forcing them to be its subjects.

'The best termination to which we look forward as possible, is that the North should beat the South, and then dictate its own terms of separation.

'If they wish to go farther than this, if they wish us to love or to admire our Northern cousins in their political capacity, they wish for what is impossible.

'We cannot forget that the Abolitionists have been always a small and discredited party; that the Cuba slave trade is mainly carried on from New York; that they have neglected the obligations formally entered into by them with us to co-operate in the suppression of the slave trade; that they have pertinaciously refused to allow us even to inquire into the right of slavers to use the American flag; that it is the capital of the North which feeds the slavery of the South; that the first act of the North, as soon as the secession of the South from Congress allowed it to do what it liked, was to enact a selfish protective tariff; that their treatment of us, from the time that they have felt strong enough to insult us, has been one unvaried series of threats, bullying, and injury; that they have refused to submit their claims on us to arbitration, driven out our ambassadors, seized by force on disputed territory, and threatened war on every pretence.'

'It is true,' said Beaumont, 'that during the last twenty years American diplomacy has not been such as to inspire affection or respect But you must recollect that during all that time America has been governed by the South.'

'It is true,' I said, 'that the presidents have generally been Southerns, but I am not aware that the North has ever disavowed their treatment of us. This is certain, that throughout the Union, insolence to England has been an American statesman's road to popularity.'

Monday., August 19.—We walked in the afternoon over the commons overlooking the sea, and among the shady lanes of this well-wooded country.

We came on a group of about twelve or thirteen reapers taking their evening meal of enormous loaves of brown bread, basins of butter, and kegs of cider.

M. Roussell, the farmer in whose service they were, was sitting among them. He was an old friend and constituent of Tocqueville, and for thirty years was Maire of Tocqueville. He has recently resigned. He rose and walked with us to his house.

'I was required,' he said, 'to support the prefect's candidate for the Conseil general. No such proposition was ever made to me before. I could not submit to it. The prefect has been unusually busy of late. The schoolmaster has been required to send in a list of the peasants whose children, on the plea of poverty, receive gratuitous education. The children of those who do not vote with the prefect are to have it no longer.'

I asked what were the wages of labour.

'Three francs and half a day,' he said, 'during the harvest, with food—which includes cider. In ordinary times one franc a day with food, or a franc and a half without food.'

'It seems then,' I said, 'that you can feed a man for half a franc a day?'

'He can feed himself,' said M. Roussell, 'for that, but I cannot, or for double that money.'

The day labourer is generally hired only for one day. A new bargain is made every day.

The house was not uncomfortable, but very untidy. There are no ricks, everything is stored in large barns, where it is safe from weather, but terribly exposed to vermin.

A bright-complexioned servant-girl was in the kitchen preparing an enormous bowl of soup, of which bread, potatoes, and onions were the chief solid ingredients.

'Roussell,' said Beaumont, 'is superior to his class. In general they are bad politicians. It is seldom difficult to get their votes for the nominee of the prefect. They dislike to vote for anyone whom they know, especially if he be a gentleman, or be supported by the gentry. Such a candidate excites their democratic envy and suspicion. But the prefect is an abstraction. They have never seen him, they have seldom heard of his name or of that of his candidate, and therefore they vote for him.

'Lately, however, in some of my communes, the peasants have adapted a new practice, that of electing peasants. I suspect that the Government is not displeased.

'The presence of such members will throw discredit on the Conseils generaux, and, if they get there, on the Corps legislatif, much to the pleasure of our democratic master, and they will be easily bribed or frightened. Besides which the fifteen francs a day will be a fortune to them, and they will be terrified by the threat of a dissolution. I do not think that even yet we have seen the worst of universal suffrage.'

'What influence,' I asked, 'have the priests?'

'In some parts of France,' said Beaumont, 'where the people are religious, as is the case here, much. Not much in the north-east, where there is little religion; and in the towns, where there is generally no religion, their patronage of a candidate would ruin him. I believe that nothing has so much contributed to Louis Napoleon's popularity with the ouvriers as his quarrel with the Pope. You may infer the feelings of the lower classes in Paris from his cousin's conduct.'

'I study Prince Napoleon,' said Ampere, 'with interest, for I believe that he will be the successor.'

'If Louis Napoleon,' I said, 'were to be shot tomorrow, would not the little prince be proclaimed?'

'Probably,' said Ampere, 'but with Jerome for regent, and I doubt whether the regency would end by the little Napoleon IV. assuming the sceptre.

'Louis Napoleon himself does not expect it. He often says that, in France, it is more than two hundred years since a sovereign has been succeeded by his son.

'On the whole,' continued Ampere, 'I had rather have Jerome than Louis Napoleon. He has more talent and less prudence. He would bring on the crisis sooner.

'On the 31st of October, 1849,' said Madame de Tocqueville, 'I was in Louis Napoleon's company, and he mentioned some matter on which he wished to know my husband's opinion. I could not give it. "It does not much signify," he answered, "for as I see M. de Tocqueville every day, I will talk to him about it myself." At that very time, the ordonnance dismissing M. de Tocqueville had been signed, and Louis Napoleon knew that he would probably never see him again.'

'I do not,' said Ampere, 'give up the chance of a republic. I do not wish for one. It must be a very bad constitutional monarchy which I should not prefer to the best republic. My democratic illusions are gone. France and America have dispelled them: but it must be a very bad republic which I should not prefer to the best despotism. A republic is like a fever, violent and frightful, but not necessarily productive of organic mischief. A despotism is a consumption: it degrades and weakens, and perverts all the vital functions.

'What is there now in France worth living for? I find people proud of our Italian campaign. Why should the French be proud that their master's soldiers have been successful in a war as to which they were not consulted; which, in fact, they disapproved, which was not made for their benefit, which was the most glaring proof of their servility and degradation? We knew before that our troops were better than the Austrians. What have we gained by the additional example of their superiority?

'I fear,' I said, 'that a republic, at least such a republic as you are likely to have, would begin by some gross economical enormities—by the droit au travail, by the impot progressif sur la fortune presumtee, by a paper currency made a legal tender without limitation of its amount.'

'The last republic,' said Ampere, 'did some of these things, but very timidly and moderately. It gave to its paper a forced currency, but was so cautious in its issue, that it was not depreciated. It created the ateliers nationaux, but it soon dissolved them, though at the expense of a civil war. Its worst fault was more political than economical: it was the 45 centimes, that is to say, the sudden increase by 45 per cent, of the direct taxes. It never recovered that blow. Of all its acts it is the one which is best recollected. The Provisional Government is known in the provinces as "ces gredins des quarante-cinq centimes." The business of a revolutionary government is to be popular. It ought to reduce taxation, meet its expenditure by loans, abolish octrois and prohibitions, and defer taxation until it has lasted long enough to be submitted to as a fait accompli.'

'I fear,' said Madame de Tocqueville, 'that our working classes are in a much worse frame of mind than they were in 1848. Socialist opinions—the doctrine that the profits of capitalists are so much taken fraudulently or oppressively from the wages of labourers, and that it is unjust that one man should have more of the means of happiness than another—are extending every day. The workpeople believe that the rich are their enemies and that the Emperor is their friend, and that he will join them in an attempt to get their fair share, that is, an equal share, of the property of the country—and I am not sure that they are mistaken.'

'Nor am I,' said Beaumont 'Celui-ci fully sympathises with their feelings, and I do not think that he has intelligence enough to see the absurdity of their theories.'

'You do not deny him,' I said, 'intelligence?'

'Not,' said Beaumont, 'for some purposes, and to some extent, practical intelligence. His ends are bad, but he is often skilful in inventing and pertinacious in employing means for effecting those bad ends. But I deny him theoretic intelligence. I do not think that he has comprehension or patience to work out, or even to follow, a long train of reasoning; such a train as that by which economical errors and fallacies are detected.'

'Are there strikes,' I asked, 'among your workmen?'

'They are beginning,' said Beaumont. 'We have had one near us, and the authorities were afraid to interfere.'

'I suppose,' I said, that they are illegal?'

'They are illegal,' he answered, 'and I think that they ought to be so. They are always oppressive and tyrannical. The workman who does not join in a strike is made miserable. They are generally mischievous to the combined workmen themselves, and always to those of other trades. Your toleration of them appears to me one of the worst symptoms of your political state of health. It shows among your public men an ignorance or a cowardice, or a desire of ill-earned popularity, which is generally a precursor of a democratic revolution.'

'It is certain,' said Ampere, 'that the masters are becoming afraid of their workmen. Pereire brings his from their residences to the Barriere Malesherbes in carriages. You are not actually insulted in the streets of Paris, but you are treated with rude neglect. A fiacre likes to splash you, a paveur to scatter you with mud. Louis Napoleon began with Chauvinism. He excited all the bad international passions of the multitude. He has now taken up Sansculotteism. Repulsed with scorn and disgust by the rich and the educated, he has thrown himself on the poor and ignorant The passions with which he likes to work are envy, malignity, and rapacity.

'I do not believe that he feels them. He is what is called a good-natured man. That is to say, he likes to please everyone that he sees. But his selfishness is indescribable.

'No public interest stands in the way of his slightest caprice. He often puts me in mind of Nero. With the same indifference to the welfare of others with which Nero amused himself by burning down Rome, he is amusing himself by pulling down Paris.'

N.W. SENIOR.

* * * * * *

[We left Tocqueville on the following day with great regret The same party was never to meet again—the only survivors are Madame de Beaumont and myself and the Beaumonts' son, then a very intelligent boy of ten years old.

One day my father and I visited the little green churchyard on a cliff near the sea where Tocqueville is buried. The tomb is a plain grey stone slab—on it a cross is cut in bas-relief, with these words only:—

ICI REPOSE

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE.

NE 24 FEVRIER 1805. MORT 16 AVRIL 1859.

My father laid a wreath of immortelles on the tomb.—ED.]

APPENDIX.

MONTALEMBERT'S speech was afterwards published in the Moniteur but with considerable alterations. In Mr. Senior's journal in 1854 (which has not been published), he says, under the date of April 26, I called on Montalembert and took him my report of his speech. He has promised to add to it any notes that it may require. "The printed report," he said, "is intentionally falsified. Before it was struck off I asked to see the proofs. I was told that, as such an application was new, the President of the Bureau would meet and decide on its admissibility. They decided that it could not be granted."'

[The following is Mr. Senior's report, with M. de Montalembert's own corrections and additions in French.—ED.]

At length Montalembert rose. He stood near the extreme right, with his side towards the tribune, and his face towards the centre gallery, in which I sat. His voice and delivery are so good, and the house was so silent, that I did not lose a word. I believe that the following report is a tolerably accurate abridgment of his speech.

'Gentlemen, I must begin by expressing to you my deep gratitude for the attention which you have paid to this unhappy business. I am grieved at having occasioned the waste of so much public time. I am still more grieved at having been the occasion of division among my colleagues.'

[Note by Montalember.—'J'aurais voulu faire plus qu'exprimer le regret: j'aurais voulu me preter a tous les arrangements qui m'ont ete suggeres par des voix amies pour mettre un terme a cette discussion. Je n'aurais recule devant aucun sacrifice qui eut ete compatible avec l'honneur. Mais vous comprenez tous que sous le coup d'une poursuite, d'un danger, je ne puis rien desavouer, rien retracter, rien retirer de ce que j'ai ecrit, de ce que j'ai pense. Si j'agissais autrement il vous resterait un collegue absous, mais deshonore et dont vous ne sauriez que faire.']

'More than all I am grieved when I think of the time at which this has occurred. A time when we are engaged in an honourable and serious war—a war in which, with the great and faithful ally whom I have always desired, and the sympathy of all Europe, we are defending civilisation against an enemy, barbarous indeed, but so formidable as to require our undivided energy and our undivided attention.

But you must recollect when that letter was written. It was in last September, in profound peace, when our whole thoughts were employed, and were properly employed, on our internal affairs.

'Aujourd'hui il en est autrement; l'etat de guerre impose a tous les citoyens des devoirs speciaux: il doit aussi imposer un certain frein a l'esprit de critique. Aucun Francais, quel que soit sa foi politique, ne peut vouloir discrediter le pouvoir des dissidents, des mecontents, mais il n'y a plus d'emigres, ni a l'interieur, ni a l'exterieur.'

[Note by N.W. Senior.—This seems to be an allusion to a passage in Thiers's celebrated speech of the 17th of February, 1851. 'I1 ne faut emigrer, ni au dehors, ni au dedans.']

['J'aurais su contenir les sentiments les plus passiones de mon ame, plutot que de paraitre affaiblir en quoi que ce soit la main qui porte l'epee et le drapeau de la France. Ce n'est pas toutefois que j'admette que toute liberte de parole ou de presse soit incompatible avec l'etat de guerre. L'Angleterre a conserve toutes ses libertes en faisant la guerre aux plus redoutables ennemis: aujourd'hui encore l'opposition, d'accord avec le gouvernement sur la question exterieure, maintient les resistances et les critiques a l'interieur. Et certes personne ne dira que l'Angleterre, pour avoir conserve la liberte de discussion la plus entiere, n'ait pas deploye pour le moins autant de prevoyance et d'energie que nous dans la conduite de la guerre ou nous entrons. Il n'y a que les nations ou la vie publique circule dans toutes les veines du corps social, qui sachent resister aux epreuves et aux chances d'une guerre prolongee. La liberte de la contradiction centuple le prix d'une libre adhesion; et a force de mettre une sourdine a toutes les emotions du pays, il faut prendre garde qu'on ne se trouve un jour dans l'impossibilite de faire vibrer les cordes les plus essentielles quand le moment des dangers et des sacrifices sera arrive.']

'I deeply regret the publication of that letter. But with that publication I repeat that I am utterly unconnected. I never sanctioned it, I never wished for it, I never even thought it possible. There are passages in the letter itself which I might modify if I were to re-write it, but it would rather be by adding to them than by taking from them. Two accusations have been directed against its substance. One that it is hostile to the Emperor; the other that it is hostile to this assembly. No one who knows my character, and knows my history, will believe that I can have intended to injure the Emperor. Our relations have been such as to make it impossible.

['J'ai eu l'occasion de defendre le chef actuel de l'Etat dans des circonstances infiniment difficiles, et ou rien n'etait plus douteux que le succes. Je ne pretends pas l'avoir constitue par cela mon debiteur, car en le defendant, je ne voulais servir, comme toujours, que la justice, l'interet du pays, la liberte moderee qui se personnifiaient en lui a mes yeux, mais enfin, aux yeux du public il est mon oblige, et je ne suis pas le sien. Si j'avais eu la pensee d'offenser publiquement l'Empereur, et si j'y avais cede, nous serions quittes. Or, je tiens beaucoup a ce que nous ne le soyons pas. Il n'y aurait pour moi ni honneur ni avantage a ce changement de position. Tous les hommes de bon gout, tous les coeurs delicats, me comprendront.']

'It is equally impossible that I should have wished to offend this assembly. It contains men by whose sides I have fought the great battles of property and law. I love many of its members. I respect almost all. If I have offended any, it was done unconsciously. Again, it is said that the tone of my letter is violent. Expressions may be called violent by some which would be only called passionnes by others. Now I admit that I am passionne. It is in my nature. I owe to that quality much of my merit, whatever that merit may be. Were I not passionne, I should not have been, during all my life, la sentinelle perdue de la liberte. I should not have thrown myself into every breach: sometimes braving the attacks of anarchy, sometimes heading the assault on tyranny, and sometimes fighting against the worst of all despotisms, the despotism that is based on democracy.'

['Allons plus au fond, et vous reconnaitrez que les opinions enoncees dans la lettre ne sont autres que celles toujours professees par moi. Elles peuvent toutes se ramener a une seule, a mon eloignement pour le pouvoir absolu. Je ne l'aime pas: je ne l'ai jamais aime. Si j'ai tant combattu l'anarchie avant et apres 1848, si j'ai suscite contre moi dans le parti demagogique ces haines virulentes qui durent encore et qui ne perdent jamais une occasion d'eclater contre moi, c'est parce que j'ai compris de bonne heure les affinites naturelles du despotisme et de la democratie; c'est parce que j'ai prevu et predit que la democratie nous conduirait au pouvoir absolu. Oui, je crois, comme je l'ai dit, que le despotisme abaisse les caracteres, les intelligences, les consciences. Oui, je deplore le systeme qui rend un seul homme tout-puissant et seul responsable des destinees d'une nation de 36 millions d'hommes; et trouve que cela ressemble trop au gouvernement russe, contre lequel nous allons en guerre, et trop peu au gouvernement anglais, dont nous prisons si haut l'alliance.']

'I am told again, and the accusation is sanctioned by the requisitoire of the Procureur-General, that my letter is inconsistent with the fidelity which I have sworn to the Emperor and to the constitution. When a man swears fidelity to a sovereign and to a constitution, his oath engages him only as to matters within his own power. He swears not to conspire against them. He swears not to attempt to subvert them. He cannot swear to approve the acts of the sovereign, or the working of the constitution, for he cannot foresee what either of them will be. I have kept, and I shall keep, my oath to the Emperor and my oath to the constitution. I have not attempted, and I shall not attempt, to overthrow either of them. But my approbation of either of them does not depend on me. I accepted the coup d'etat, comme vous l'avez tous fait, comme notre seule chance de salut dans les circonstances d'alors. I expected a Government honnete et modere. I have been disappointed.'

Here a violent exclamation ran through the assembly. Baroche rose and cried out, 'You hear him, gentlemen. He says that he expected honesty and moderation from the Government, and that he has been disappointed. I appeal to you, Mr. President, to decide whether we are to sit and listen to such infamies.'

[Voix diverses:—'Expliquez vos paroles.' 'Retirez vos paroles.' M. de Montalembert.—'Je les maintiens et je les explique.']

'I expected un gouvernement honnete et modere. I have been disappointed. Its honnete may be judged by the confiscation of the Orleans property.'

Here was another hubbub, and another protest of Baroche's.

'What is going on before you,' continued Montalembert, 'is a sample of its moderation. It is now attempting in my person to introduce into our criminal law a new delit, "communication." Until now it was supposed that nothing was criminal until it was published. It was believed that a man might write his opinions and his reflections, and might exchange them with his friends; that nothing was libellous that was confidential. Now this Government holds a man responsible for every thought that an indiscreet or an incautious friend, or a concealed enemy, or a tool of power reveals. If it succeeds in this attempt, it will not rest satisfied with this victory over the remnant of our freedom. It is not in the nature of things that it should. A Government that will not tolerate censure must forbid discussion. You are now asked to put down writing. When that has been done, conversation will be attacked. Paris will resemble Rome under the successors of Augustus. Already this prosecution has produced a malaise which I never felt or observed before. What will be the feelings of the nation when all that is around it is concealed, when every avenue by which light could penetrate is stopped; when we are exposed to all the undefined terrors and exaggerated dangers that accompany utter darkness? The misfortune of France, a national defect which makes the happiness enjoyed by England unattainable by us, is, that she is always oscillating between extremes; that she is constantly swinging from universal conquest to la paix a tout prix, from the desire of nothing but glory to the desire of nothing but wealth, from the wildest democracy to the most abject servility. Every new Government starts with a new principle. Every Government in a few years perishes by carrying that principle to an extreme. The First Republic was destroyed by the intemperance with which it trampled on every sort of tradition and authority, the First Empire by its abuse of victory and war, the Restoration by its exaggerated belief in divine right and legitimacy, the Royalty of July by its exaggerated reliance on purchased voters and Parliamentary majorities, the Second Republic by the conduct of its own Republicans. The danger to the Second Empire—its only internal danger, but I fear a fatal one—is its abuse of authority. With every phase of our sixty years' long revolution, we have a new superstition, a new culte. We are now required to become the worshippers of authority. I lament that with the new religion we have not new priests. Our public men would not be discredited by instantaneous apostasy from one political faith to another. I am grieved, gentlemen, if I offend you; though many of you are older in years than I am, not one probably is so old in public life. I may be addressing you for the last time, and I feel that my last words ought to contain all the warnings that I think will be useful to you. This assembly will soon end, as all its predecessors have ended. Its acts, its legislation, may perish with it, but its reputation, its fame, for good or for evil, will survive. Within a few minutes you will do an act by which that reputation will be seriously affected; by which it may be raised, by which it may be deeply, perhaps irrevocably, sunk. Your vote to-night will show whether you possess freedom, and whether you deserve it. As for myself, I care but little. A few months, or even years, of imprisonment are among the risks which every public man who does his duty in revolutionary times must encounter, and which the first men of the country have incurred, soit en sortant des affaires, soit avant d'y entrer. But whatever may be the effect of your vote on my person, whatever it may be on your reputation, I trust that it is not in your power to inflict permanent injury on my country. Among you are some who lived through the Empire. They must remember that the soldiers of our glorious army cherished as fondly the recollection of its defeats as of its victories. They must see that the lessons which those defeats taught, and the feelings which they inspired, are now among the sources of our military strength. Your Emperor himself, in one of his earlier addresses, talked hopefully of the period when France would be capable of more liberty than he now thinks good for her, "Un jour," he exclaimed, "mon oeuvre sera couronnee par la liberte." I join in that hope. I look sanguinely towards the time when she will be worthy of the English constitution, and she will obtain it. Vous tenez le corps de la France, mais vous ne tenez pas son ame. Cette ame, aujourd'hui effrayee, engourdie, endormie, cette ame c'est la liberte. Elle se reveillera un jour et vous echappera. La certitude de ce reveil suffit pour consoler et fortifier ses vieux et fideles soldats a traverser la nuit de l'epreuve. Cette liberte honnete et moderee, sage et sainte, j'y ai toujours cru, et j'y crois encore. Je l'ai toujours servie, toujours aimee, toujours invoquee, tantot pour la religion, tantot pour le pays; hier contre le socialisme, aujourd'hui contre un commencement de despotisme; et, quelle que soit votre decision, je me feliciterai toujours d'avoir eu cette occasion solennelle de la confesser encore une fois devant vous, et, s'il le faut, de souffrir un peu pour elle.'

These concluding words were drowned in universal murmurs.

N.W. SENIOR.

THE END