leon was born on the 20th of April, twelve days before he was expected. On this pretext, Louis, in 1815, tried to get a divorce, but of course failed. He was jealous of Hortense, bribed ail her servants to watch her, and often said of Louis Napoleon: Ce n'est pas mon enfant;' but he was half mad, and, I believe, said so only to tease his wife. At one time he took possession of Louis Napoleon, and became exceedingly fond of him, which would scarcely have been the case if he had really doubted his legitimacy.

"Louis Napoleon, indeed, was an attractive child. He was gentle and intelligent, but more like a girl than a boy. He is a year older than I am. He was shy, and has continued to be so. He hates new faces: in old times he could not bear to part with a servant, and I know that he has kept ministers whom he disliked and disapproved only because he did not like the embarras of sending them away. His great pleasures are riding, walking, and, above all, fine scenery. I remember walking with him and Prince Napoleon one fine evening on Lansdowne Hill, near Bath. The view was enchanting. He sat down to admire it. Look,' said he, at Napoleon, he does not care a farthing for all this. I could sit here for hours.'

"He employed me, some days ago, to make inquiries for him in Germany in connection with his book. Moquard wrote me a letter of thanks. Louis Napoleon wrote in his own hand these words, Ceci me rappelle les bontés qu'avait Mdme. R. pour le prisonnier de Ham. Les extrêmes se touchent, car les Tuileries c'est encore une prison.'

"While the Duc de Reichstadt, and his own brother lived, he used to rejoice that there were two lives between him and power. What he would have liked better than empire would have been to be a rich country gentleman, with nothing to do but to enjoy himself."

"You tell me," I said, "that as a child, he was gentle (doux). Is he so now ?" "In appearance," she answered, "for he has great self-command; but au fond he is irritable. He is also very pertinacious, at least in his opinions. Hence he hates discussion, it annoys him and never convinces him. He cannot bear to see people 'triste' or discontented.

me the evening before his escape. He tells me that he has sent to me all his remaining manuscripts on artillery, and all the proof sheets of the printed portion, and begs me to keep them. I was then in Paris.

"The instant I read it, I said to my husband, He is going to make his escape, he is making me his literary executrix.' "My husband laughed at me. Next morning at breakfast, the papers came in. I read aloud,

"Yesterday Louis Napoleon Buonaparte made his escape from Ham.'

"Bah!' said my husband, 'you are going back to the nonsense which you talked yesterday."

"I repeated, Yesterday Louis Napoleon Buonaparte made his escape from Ham.'

"Don't talk stuff,' said my husband. "Read it yourself,' I answered. "The next day I got this letter from him in London.

"I need not,' he writes, "tell you the details of my escape, as you have them in the papers. My measures were so well taken that in eight hours I was in Belgium, and twelve hours after in London. It seems a dream. Take care of my manuscripts and proofs. The first volume is finished, and may be printed from the proofs.'

"Here is another worth hearing. It was written from London in 1847, in consequence of a common friend having accused him of personal ambition.

"In all my adventures,' he says, 'I have been governed by one principle. I believe that from time to time men are created whom I will call providential, in whose hands the destinies of their countries are placed. I believe myself to be one of these men. If I am mistaken I may perish uselessly. If I am right Providence will enable me to fulfil my mission. But, right or wrong, I will persevere, whatever be the difficulties or the dangers. Living or dying, I will serve France.'"

Here M. T. C. came in: she closed the book, but the conversation on Louis Napoleon continued.

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*

*

two, and then descended without having uttered a word. Some time after he made a second attempt, and actually spoke, but very badly. I gave a reception to the whole assembly. He negociated with me about his coming to it. He did not wish to be announced, as his name would draw all eyes upon him. It was agreed that he should come early, and that I should meet him in the passage, and lead him in without his name being mentioned-but he never came."

"It has been thought," said Mdme. R., "that he was playing a part; that he was pretending to be stupid, as a candidate for the Papacy pretends to be dying. "I was with him," she continued, "when the Bill of the 31st of May, 1850, for the restriction of the suffrage was in discussion. I hear,' I said, but I do not believe it, that you support this Bill.'

"I do,' he answered.

6

“‘What,' I said, 'you the child of universal suffrage, do you support a limited suffrage?'

"You understand nothing about it,' he replied, Je perds l'assemblée.'

"But, I said, you will perish with the Assembly.'

"Not in the least,' he answered. 'When the Assembly goes over the precipice, je coupe la corde.'

"In fact," said T. C., "the relations between him and the Assembly were such, that one or the other must have perished." "It seems to me," I said, "that if Cavaignac had been President the Republic might have been saved."

"So I thought at the time," answered T. C., " and so I think now. Much depended on Thiers. In 1849 I was Minister of Finance. Blanqui-not the conspirator, but the political economist-came to ask me to call on Thiers, and see whether we could come to an arrangement under which Thiers would support Cavaignac. I said that Thiers was, in many respects, a much greater man than I, but still, as he was a mere private person, and I was a minister, he ought to call on me. Thiers is proud and punctilious; he would not visit me, but it was agreed that he should come to me on the ministerial bench, and that we should go out and discuss the matter in the corridors. We had a long conversation, but it ended in nothing."

"What caused the failure?" I asked.

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Catiline," said Mdme. R., " was always one of his favorites. He maintained that Cicero and Sallust were unjust to him. At one time he almost thought him a patriot incompris, until he found that he had pillaged Africa as governor, and escaped condemnation only by being defended by Cicero."

"He says, with truth," said Maury, "that if Catiline had been, as Cicero makes him out, a mere robber who wished to burn and pillage Rome, he would have raised the slaves. The Emperor treats him as the leader of a political party, an extreme one, a mischievous one, but not a band of robbers and assassins."

"Is the Emperor," I asked, "still absorbed in his literary work?"

"As much as ever," answered Maury. "To-day when I entered he was dictating a portion of it. He thinks much more about it than about Italy. He does not like the theatre, excepting sometimes farces that amuse him; he cares little for society. His delight is to get to his study, put on his dressing-gown and slippers, and work at his history."

"What sort of a scholar is he ?" I asked.

"In Latin," answered Maury, "far above the average of educated Frenchmen, perhaps on a par with educated Englishmen: he reads without difficulty."

We continued to talk about Louis Napoleon after Maury had left us. Mdme. R. showed me a vase of jade, taken from the palace in Pekin. When sent to her the day before yesterday it came without the cover. This morning Thelern, the Emperor's servant, who managed his escape from Ham, brought her the cover. "The Emperor," he said, "spent all yesterday in looking for it."

"He is a strange being," said Mdme.

R.: "one who did not know him would think that he had enough to do without wasting a day in looking for the cover of a vase; but it is like him. His mind wants keeping. A trifle close to his eyes hides from him the largest object at a distance; I have no doubt what Thelern said was true, and that he did spend three or four hours yesterday hunting for the cover of that vase. He wished to send it to me, and for the time that wish absorbed him."

"What are your relations with him now?" I asked.

"We do not meet," she answered, "but we correspond. I am his intermédiaire with many of the German literati. I get for him information for his book, as I did when he was at Ham for his work on Artillery. We lived together," she continued, "from our births till I was about fourteen, and he about fifteen. During the first seven years of this time he was surrounded by all the splendor of a court. During the last eight years he was in Germany, looked down on by the Germans, who would scarcely admit the Buonapartes to be gentry, and would call him Monsieur Buonaparte, and seeing no one but his mother and her suite.

"Afterwards he lived in Italy and in Switzerland, among Italians and Swiss, but never with French people.

"His long exclusion from the society of the higher classes of his own countrymen, and, in a great measure, from the higher classes of the foreigners among whom he resided, did him harm in many ways. It is wonderful that it did not spoil his manners; he was saved, perhaps, by having always before him so admirable a model as his mother. But it made him somewhat of a parvenu, what you would call a tufthunter. He looked up to people of high rank with a mixture of admiration, envy, and dislike; the more difficult he found it to get into their society, the more he disliked them, and the more he courted them."

April 11, 1861.-Mdme. R., Mrs. Grote, Mdme. Mohl, Circourt, Target, Duvergier, and Lavergne breakfasted with us.

Circourt told us that he had acquired a new neighbor, the Emperor, who has purchased Malmaison, and a considerable tract all round it, and is busy planting and gardening.

"He comes to Malmaison," said Circourt, "once or twice a week; pointing out, indeed, writing on little tickets with his own hand, the place for every shrub. He is a most considerate purchaser; pays liberally, and is anxious that no one shall suffer inconvenience by removal. A strange contrast to the indifference with which he turns tens of thousands into the streets to make a boulevard or a square." "I have often said of him," said Mdme. R,, "qu'il a la sensibilité dans l'œil. He is deeply affected by any distress that he actually sees; he is indifferent to any that is not brought before him in detail. One day I found him at Ham in great grief. The man who waited on him had died the day before, leaving a wife and family in distress. 'I gave them,' he said to me,' 300 francs, but that will do little.'

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"How much have you left?' I asked. 'Sixty,' he answered. 'I can manage with that for a fortnight, until my next remittances come. The government must lodge and feed me.' While we were talking, the man's daughter, a girl of about fourteen, came in to thank him. She was weeping, and he began to sob too. Suddenly he went to his escritoire, took out the sixty francs that he had left, and gave them to her. It is lucky,' I said, that I have 100 francs more than my journey will cost me.' So I gave them to him, or I should have left him utterly penniless."

"How come he to be so poor ?" I asked. "I was told that when he was taken at Boulogne he had 160,000 francs, which were deposited with the maire, and returned to him after his trial ?"

"He had much more than that." answered Mdme. R. "His coat was lined with bank notes. It disappeared, with its contents; but, as you say, the 160,000 francs were returned to him. He sold, too, almost all the little property which he had; but nearly all went in buying up the pensions to which the old servants of his mother were entitled.

"He said to them, 'I am condemned to imprisonment for life. With my active habits, imprisonment will kill me in a few years, and my will may not be respected. You had better take the value of your pension while I am allowed to pay it to you.'

"Almost all that remained he spent in allowances to those who had accompanied

him in his expedition and were in different prisons. Persigny had a great deal. The result was that during the latter part of his imprisonment he was very poor, and had the utmost difficulty in getting together the money necessary for his escape.'

Monday, April 7, 1862.—I called on Mdme. R.

We talked of Louis Napoleon.

"A single day," said she," changed his character. Until the death of his elder brother he was mild, unambitious, impressionable, affectionate, delighting in country pursuits, in nature, in art, and in literature. He frequently said to me, not when he was a child, but at the age of nineteen and twenty, What a blessing that I have two before me in succession the Duc de Reichstadt and my brother, so that I can be happy in my own way, instead of being, as the head of our house must be, the slave of a mission.'

"From the day of his brother's death, he was a different man. I can compare his feelings as to his mission only to those which urged Our first apostles and martyrs."

"What," I asked, " is the sense in which he understands his mission ?"

"It is a devotion," she answered, "first to the Napoleonic dynasty, and then to France. It is not personal ambition. He has always said, and I believe sincerely, that if there were any better hands to which he could transmit that duty he would do so with delight.

"His duty to his dynasty is to perpetuate it. His duty to France is to give her influence abroad and prosperity at home." "And also," I asked, "extension of territory ?"

"Not now," she answered, "I will not say what may have been his wishes before the birth of his son, but what I have called devotion to his dynasty, is rather worship of his son. One of his besetting fears is the revival of an European coalition, not so much against France as against the Buonapartes, and the renewal of the proscription of the family."

"I have been told," I said, "that he leans towards constitutionalism as more favorable to hereditary succession than despotism."

"I believe," she answered, "that to be true, and that it is the explanation of his recent liberalism. He hates, without

doubt, opposition; he hates restraint; but if he thinks that submitting to opposition will promote his great object, the perpetuation of his dynasty, he will do so.

"He would sacrifice to that object, Europe, France, his dearest friends, and even himself.

"One of his qualities-and it is a valuable one, is his willingness to adjourn, to change, or even to give up his means, however dear they may be to him, if any safer or better occur to him."*

"Another is the readiness with which he confesses his mistakes. His last confession," I said, "was perhaps too full and too frank."

"So I think," said Mdme. R., "but by making it he enjoyed another pleasure, that of astonishing. He delights in l'imprévu, in making Europe and France, and, above all, his own ministers stare. When it is necessary to act, he does not consult his friends, still less his ministers, and perhaps he is right, for they would give him only bad advice; he does not conscientiously think the matter over, weigh the opposing reasons, strike the balance and

act.

He takes his cigar, gives loose to his ideas, lets them follow one another without exercising over them his will, till at last something pleases his imagination, he seizes it, and thinks himself inspired. Sometimes the inspiration is good, as it was when he released Abd el Kader, sometimes it is very bad, as it was when he chose the same time for opening the discussion of the address, and revealing the state of our finances."

"C.,” I said, " treats his phlegm as his greatest quality, qu'il ne s'étonne de rien." "Did C.," she answered, "ever describe to you his fits of passion ?"

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No," I said.

"Probably," she answered, "he never perceived them. His powers of self-command are really marvellous. I have known him after a conversation in which he betrayed no anger break his own furniture in his rage. The first sign of rage in him is a swelling of his nostrils, like those of an excited horse. Then his eyes become bright and his lips quiver. His long moustache is intended to conceal his mouth, and he has disciplined his eyes. When I first saw him in 1848 I asked him what was the

*M. de Tocqueville said of him, “Il sait reculer."-M. C. M. S.

matter with his eyes. Nothing,' he said. A day or two after I saw him again. They had still an odd appearance. At last I found that he had been accustoming himself to keep his eyelids closed, and to throw into his eyes a vacant dreamy expression.

"I cannot better describe the change that came over him after his brother's death than by saying that he tore his heart out of his bosom, and surrendered himself to his head.

"Once I found him reading Hernani. 'How wonderfully fine it is,' he said. 'I know,' I said, 'what you admire in it. It is the picture of a man driven on by irresistible destiny. You are thinking of the Hernani qui n'est pas un homme comme les autres.'

"Ah,' he answered, 'que vous m'avez bien deviné.'"

"Pray show me," I said, "the passage to which you referred."

"He took down the Théâtre de Victor Hugo and read to me the following verses from the fourth scene of the third act of Hernani

Tu me crois, peut-être, Un homme comme sont tous les autres, un être Intelligent qui court droit au but quil rêva; Détrompe-toi. Je suis une force qui va.

Où vais-je? Je ne sais, mais je me sens poussé
D'un souffle impétueux, d'un destin insensé,
J'avance et j'avance; si jamais je m'arrête,
Si parfois, haletant, j'ose tourner la tête
Une voix me dit-marche.

"Now," she continued, "when, as he thinks, his mission is fulfilled, his former nature is returning. He is becoming mild and affectionate. Many parts of his disposition are feminine. He adores his child with the affection rather of a mother than of a father. He puts me in mind of the pictures in which the Virgin is looking on the infant Jesus, with an expression, half love and half worship. The boy is intelligent and serious, no common child.

"On the whole the best of the Buonapartes is the Emperor, and as I said before, power is improving him, notwithstanding his detestable entourage. He is a bad judge of men, he is shy, he hates new faces, he hates to refuse anything to any body, and he keeps about him men unable, and, if they were able, unwilling to give him advice, whose only object is to plunder him and the public purse."

"Do you agree," I said, "in the general opinion that he is sinking in public estimation ?'

"I do," she answered, "and I suspect that he feels it himself, and, as I said before, that he is trying to recover himself by promoting public prosperity, and by an approach to constitutional government."

"I expect," I said, "when I am here next year to find that you have renewed your old relations to him."

"I do not know," she answered. "When people once intimate have been separated for ten years, there is shyness on both sides.

"In the mean time he is constantly writing to me. On the jour de l'an, though he had been receiving people and addresses all day, he found time to send me a note to say that he could not let the day pass without expressing his good wishes.

"He knows too, how much I detest his Idées Napoléoniennes. If we talk it must be on the neutral ground of his Life of Cæsar. There we shall sympathise, for it is very good.

"From time to time he is absolutely engrossed by it. And he has all the help that money and power can procure."

Sunday, April 5, 1863.-Mdme. R. breakfasted with us.

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'Every time," I said, "that I return to Paris, I expect to find you reconciled to the Emperor."

"At last," she answered, "you are right. On the 5th of last month he wrote to me to say that for twelve years I had refused to see him, and that perhaps I should persist, but that he could not bear the thought that he might die before I had embraced his child. That the next day the boy would be seven years old. Mdme. Walewska would call on me at one o'clock on that day, and that he could not avoid indulging a hope that I would allow her to take me to the Tuileries. I could not refuse. The next day she came and took me thither. As we entered his cabinet the door was closed, and I found myself in the presence of the Emperor and the Empress. He was the nearest and took me by the hand. He stood still for an instant, then ran forward, took me by the arm, threw himself on my neck and kissed me. I kissed him, and we all of us, including the Empress and Mdme. Walewska, began to weep. Méchante femme,' exclaimed the Emperor, voilà douze ans que tu me tiens rigueur!'

"Then there was silence which the Emperor broke by saying, 'Je crois que nous