Lord Stuart, therefore, beheld our "troubles of July" with all that good nature which rejoices over our misfortunes. But the members of the Diplomatic Body hostile to the popular cause had more or less urged Charles X. in the direction of the Ordinances; and yet, when they appeared, the ambassadors did nothing to save the Sovereign. If M. Pozzo di Borgo[304] showed some anxiety concerning a coup d'État, this was on behalf of neither the King nor the people.

Two things are certain:

First, the Revolution attacked the treaties of the Quadruple Alliance: the France of the Bourbons formed part of that alliance; the Bourbons could not, therefore, be violently dispossessed without endangering the new political right of Europe.

Secondly, in a monarchy, the foreign legations are not accredited to the government, but to the monarch. The strict duty of those legations, therefore, was to gather round Charles X. and to attend on him so long as he remained on French soil.

Is it not singular that the only ambassador to whom this idea occurred should have been the representative of Bernadotte, of a King who did not belong to the old families of sovereigns? M. de Lœwenhielm was on the point of bringing the Baron de Werther[305] over to his opinion, when M. Pozzo di Borgo opposed a measure which his credentials prescribed and honour demanded.

Had the Diplomatic Body gone to Saint-Cloud, Charles X.'s position would have been different: the partisans of the Legitimacy in the Elective Chamber would have gained a strength which they lacked at first; the fear of a war would have alarmed the working class; the idea of preserving peace by keeping Henry V.[306] would have drawn a considerable mass of the population over to the royal infant's party.

M. Pozzo di Borgo stood aloof so as not to compromise his securities on the Bourse or at his bankers', and especially not to expose his place. He played at five per cent, on the corpse of the Capetian Legitimacy, a corpse which will communicate death to the other living kings. He will not fail, some time hence, to try, according to custom, to pass off this irreparable fault, due to personal interest, as a profound combination.

Ambassadors left too long at the same Court adopt the manners of the country in which they reside. Charmed to live in the midst of honours, no longer seeing things as they are, they are afraid of passing in their dispatches a truth which might bring about a change in their position. It is, in fact, a different thing to be Esterhazy[307], Werther, Pozzo in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, or to be Their Excellencies the Ambassadors to the Court of France. It has been said that M. Pozzo bore a grudge against Louis XVIII. and Charles X. in the matter of the Blue Ribbon and the peerage. They were wrong not to satisfy him; he had rendered services to the Bourbons, for hatred of his fellow-countryman[308], Bonaparte. But if, at Ghent, he decided the question of the throne, by provoking the sudden departure of Louis XVIII. for Paris, he can now boast that, by preventing the Diplomatic Body from doing its duty in the Days of July, he has helped to throw from the head of Charles X. the crown which he assisted in placing on the brow of his brother.

The diplomatic body.

I have long been of opinion that diplomatic bodies, born in centuries subject to a different law of nations, are no longer in keeping with the new society: public governments, easy communications bring about that nowadays Cabinets are in a position to treat direct or simply through the intermediary of their consular agents, whose number should be increased and their condition improved: for, at this hour, Europe is an industrial continent. Titled spies, with exorbitant pretensions, who meddle with everything to give themselves an importance which they cannot retain, serve only to disturb the Cabinets to which they are accredited and to feed their masters with illusions. Charles X., on his side, was wrong not to invite the Diplomatic Body to join his Court; but what he saw seemed to him a dream: he went from one surprise to the other. It was thus that he did not send for M. le Duc d'Orléans; for, thinking himself in danger only from the side of the Republic, the risk of an usurpation never entered his thoughts.