The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
Alexis de Tocqueville
EDITED BY THE COMTE DE TOCQUEVILLE AND NOW FIRST TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH BY ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS WITH A PORTRAIT IN HELIOGRAVURE NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN CO. 1896

C'est tousiours plaisir de veoir les choses escriptes par ceulx qui ont essayé comme il les faut conduire. Montaigne.
After the fall of his short-lived ministry, which had been filled with so many cares and such violent agitation, thinking himself removed for a time (it was to be for ever) from the conduct of public affairs, he went first to Normandy and then to Sorrento, on the Bay of Naples, in search of the peace and repose of which he stood in need. The intellect, however, but rarely shows itself the docile slave of the will, and his, to which idleness was a cause of real suffering, immediately set about to seek an object worthy of its attention. This was soon found in the great drama of the French Revolution, which attracted him irresistibly, and which was destined to form the subject-matter of his most perfect work.
It was at this time, while Alexis de Tocqueville was also preoccupied by the daily increasing gravity of the political situation at home, that he wrote the Recollections now first published. These consisted of mere notes jotted down at intervals on odds and ends of paper; and it was not until the close of his life that, yielding to the persuasions of his intimates, he gave a reluctant consent to their publication. He took a certain pleasure in thus retracing and, as it were, re-enacting the events in which he had taken part, the character of which seemed the more transient, and the more important to establish definitely, inasmuch as other events came crowding on, precipitating the crisis and altering the aspect of affairs. Thus those travellers who, steering their adventurous course through a series of dangerous reefs, alight upon a wild and rugged island, where they disembark and live for some days, and when about to depart for ever from its shores, throw back upon it a long and melancholy gaze before it sinks from their eyes in the immensity of the waves. Already the Assembly had lost its independence; the reign of constitutional liberty, under which France had lived for thirty-three years, was giving way; and, in the words of the famous phrase, The Empire was a fact.