'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 Minié 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 Minié principle with equal precision twice as far. This will double the force of all our batteries.'