That word "Rome" had a magic effect upon me; I felt the temptation to which the anchorites were exposed in the desert. Charles X., in accepting for the Navy the friend whom I had suggested, was making the first advances; I could no longer refuse what he expected of me: I therefore consented once more to go away. This time, at least, the place of exile attracted me: Pontificum veneranda sedes, sacrum solium. I felt myself seized with the desire to settle for good, with the longing to disappear (even with some calculated idea of fame) in the city of funerals, at the very moment of my triumph. I should no longer have raised my voice, unless like Pliny's prophetic bird, to say Ave every morning to the Capitol and the dawn. It may be that it was useful to my country to get rid of me: by the weight which I feel to myself, I can guess the burden which I must be to others. Minds of some power which prey upon themselves and turn upon themselves are tiring. Dante places tortured souls, in the Inferno, on a bed of fire. M. le Duc de Laval, whom I was going to replace in Rome, was appointed to the Embassy in Vienna.

*

Before changing my subject, I beg leave to retrace my steps and relieve myself of a burden. I did not enter without suffering into the details of my long difference with M. de Villèle. I have been accused of contributing to the fall of the Legitimist Monarchy; it is right that I should examine that reproach.

The events which happened under the ministry of which I formed part have an importance which binds it to the common fortune of France: there is no Frenchman but his lot has been affected by the good which I may have done, the ill which I have undergone. Through whimsical and inexplicable affinities, through secret relations which sometimes entwine lofty and vulgar destinies, the Bourbons prospered so long as they deigned to listen to me, although I am far from believing, with the poet, that "my eloquence gave alms to the Royalty[333]." So soon as it was thought right to break the reed that grew at the foot of the throne, the crown leant over, soon to fall: often, by plucking a blade of grass, one causes a great ruin to crumble into dust.

These incontestable facts you may explain as you will; if they give to my political career a relative value which it does not possess of itself, I shall get no vainer, I feel no evil joy at the chance which connects my short-lived name with the events of the centuries. Whatever the variety of the accidents of my adventurous course, wherever names and facts may have led me, the last horizon of the picture is always threatening and sad.

Juga cœpta moveri
Silvarum, visæque canes ululare per umbram[334].

But, if the scene has changed in a deplorable manner, I must, they say, accuse only myself: to avenge what appeared to me an injury, I divided everything, and this division in the last result produced the overthrow of the Throne. Let us see.

The Comte de Villèle.

M. de Villèle has declared that it was impossible to govern either with me or without me. With me, there he was wrong; without me, at the time when M. de Villèle said that, he was saying the truth, for the most varied opinions made up a majority for me.

M. the President of the Council has never known me. I was sincerely attached to him; I had made him enter his first ministry, as is proved by M. le Duc de Richelieu's note of thanks and the other notes which I have quoted. I had sent in my resignation as Plenipotentiary to Berlin when M. de Villèle retired. They persuaded him that, on his second entrance into office, I desired his place. I had no such desire. I do not belong to the fearless race, deaf to the voice of devotion and reason. The truth is that I have no ambition; that is precisely the passion which I lack, because I have another that governs me. When I asked M. de Villèle to take some important dispatch to the King, to save me the trouble of going to the Palace, in order to leave me at leisure to visit a Gothic chapel in the Rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, he might have felt assured against my ambition, if he had judged better of my puerile candour or of the loftiness of my disdain.