When M. de Martignac had made a speech:
"Well," asked Charles X., "have you heard the Pasta[142]?"
M. Hyde de Neuville's liberal opinions displeased him; he found more complaisance in M. Portalis, the Federate, who bore cupidity stamped on his face: it is to M. Portalis that France owes her misfortunes. When I saw him at Passy, I perceived what I had in part guessed: the Keeper of the Seals, while pretending to hold the Foreign Office ad interim, was dying to keep it, although, in any event, he had provided himself with the post of President of the Court of Appeal. The King, when the question arose of the appointment of a Foreign Secretary, had said:
"I do not say that Chateaubriand shall not be my minister; but not for the present."
The Prince de Laval had refused; M. de La Ferronnays was no longer able to apply himself to regular work. In the hope that, weary of resistance, the portfolio would remain in his hands, M. Portalis made no effort to persuade the King.
Full of my coming delights in Rome, I abandoned myself to them without too deeply sounding the future; it suited me well enough that M. Portalis should keep the ad interim under the shelter of which my position remained what it was. Not for a moment did I imagine that M. de Polignac might be invested with power: his limited, unpliable and perfervid mind, his fatal and unpopular name, his stubbornness, his religious opinions, exalted to the pitch of fanaticism, appeared to me so many causes for his eternal exclusion. He had, it is true, suffered for the King; but he had been amply rewarded for it by the friendship of his master and by the proud London Embassy, which I had given him under my ministry, in spite of M. de Villèle's opposition.
Of all the ministers in office whom I found in Paris, with the exception of the excellent M. Hyde de Neuville, not one pleased me: I felt them to possess a relentless capacity which left me uneasy as to the duration of their empire. M. de Martignac, who was endowed with an agreeable talent for speaking, had the sweet and worn-out voice of a man to whom women have given something of their seduction and their weakness! Pythagoras remembered having been a charming courtesan, named Alcea. The former secretary of embassy to the Abbé Sieyès[143] had also a restrained self-conceit, a calm and somewhat jealous mind. I had sent him, in 1823, to Spain, in a high and independent position[144], but he would have liked to be an ambassador. He was offended at not receiving an employment which he thought due to his merit.
My likes or dislikes mattered little. The Chamber committed a mistake in overturning a ministry which it ought to have preserved at all costs. That moderate ministry served as a hand-rail to abysses; it was easy to overthrow it, for it had nothing to support it, and the King was hostile to it: a reason the more for not quarrelling with those men, for giving them a majority by the aid of which they could have remained in office and made room one day, without accident, for a strong government. In France, people are unable to wait for anything; they loathe all that has the appearance of power until they possess it themselves. For the rest, M. de Martignac has nobly given the lie to his weaknesses by courageously expending the rest of his life in the defense of M. de Polignac.
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