"How are your friends the Bertins? They have no reason to complain of me, as you know: they are very severe upon a banished man who has done them no harm, at least as far as I know. But, my dear fellow, I bear no one ill-will; let everybody behave as he thinks right."
This sweetness of temperament, this Christian meekness on the part of an expelled and slandered King brought tears to my eyes. I tried to say a few words about Louis-Philippe:
"Ah!" said the King. "M. le Duc d'Orléans... he judged.. . What do you expect?... Men are like that."
Not a bitter word, not a reproach, not a complaint could escape from the mouth of the thrice-banished old man. And yet French hands had cut off his brother's head and pierced his son's heart; to such an extent have those hands been mindful and implacable towards him!
I praised the King with all my heart and in a voice broken with emotion. I asked him if it was not part of his intention to put a stop to all that secret correspondence, to dismiss all those commissaries who, for forty years, have been deceiving the Legitimacy. The King assured me that he was resolved to put an end to that impotent mischief; he had already, he said, named a few serious persons, including myself, to compose a sort of council, in France, competent to keep him informed of the truth. M. de Blacas would explain all that. I begged Charles X. to assemble his servants and hear me; he referred me to M. de Blacas.
I called the King's attention to the time of the majority of Henry V.; I spoke to him of a declaration as a necessary thing to be made. The King, who, inwardly, would have nothing to say to this declaration, invited me to draft the model for him. I replied, respectfully, but firmly, that I would never formulate a declaration at the foot of which my name should not appear below the King's. My reason was that I did not wish to have put to my account the eventual changes introduced into any deed by Prince Metternich and M. de Blacas.
I pointed out to the King that he was too far from Paris, that one would have time to make two or three revolutions before he was informed of it in Prague. The King replied that the Emperor had left him free to choose his place of residence in all the Austrian States, the Kingdom of Lombardy excepted.
The King's poverty.
"But," added His Majesty, "the towns in Austria that one can live in are all at more or less the same distance from France; in Prague, I am lodged for nothing, and my position obliges me to make that calculation."
A noble calculation for a Prince who had, for five years, enjoyed a civil list of twenty millions, without counting the royal residences; for a Prince who had left to France the Colony of Algiers and the ancient patrimony of the Bourbons, valued at twenty-five to thirty millions per annum!