On the 17th of May, I went to Covent Garden, in the Duke of York's[188] box. The King appeared. This sovereign, once detested, was greeted with acclamations such as he would not, in other days, have received from the monks, the inhabitants of that former convent. On the 26th, the Duke of York came to dinner at the Embassy: George IV. was greatly tempted to do me the same honour, but he feared the diplomatic jealousies of my colleagues.
Death of the Duc de Richelieu.
The Vicomte de Montmorency refused to enter into negociations on the Spanish Colonies with the Cabinet of St. James. On the 19th of May, I heard of the almost sudden death of M. le Duc de Richelieu[189]. That honest man had patiently borne his first retirement from office; but, when business came to be taken from him for too long a time, he failed because he had not a double life to replace that which he had lost. The great name of Richelieu has been handed down to our time only by women.
The revolutions continued in America. I wrote to M. de Montmorency:
No. 26.
"London, 28 May 1822.
"Peru has just adopted a monarchical Constitution. European policy should employ every care to obtain a similar result in the case of the colonies which declare themselves independent. The United States are singularly afraid of the establishment of an empire in Mexico. If ever the whole of the New World is Republican, the monarchies of the Old World will perish."
There was much spoken of the distress of the Irish peasants, and society danced in order to console them. A great full-dress ball at the Opera occupied sensitive souls. The King, meeting me in a corridor, asked me what I was doing there and, taking me by the arm, he led me to his box.
The English pit, in my days of exile, was noisy and coarse; sailors drank ale in the pit, ate oranges, apostrophized the boxes. I found myself one evening next to a sailor who had entered the theatre drunk; he asked me where he was; I told him:
"At Covent Garden."
"Pretty garden, indeed!" he exclaimed, seized, like Homer's gods, with inextinguishable laughter.
Invited lately to an evening-party at Lord Lansdowne's[190], I was presented by His Majesty to a severe-looking lady, seventy-three years old: she was dressed in crape, wore a black veil like a diadem on her white hair, and resembled a queen who had abdicated her throne. She greeted me in a solemn voice with three mangled sentences from the Génie du Christianisme; then she said to me, with no less solemnity: