'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 Élysées, 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 législatif. 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.