"Because such is çoisRenéFrance's good pleasure."
My dispatches would warn the Cabinets of Europe that nothing shall stir on the globe without our intervention; that, if the world's shreds are to be distributed, the lion's share shall fall to us. We should cease humbly to ask our neighbours for leave to exist; the heart of France would beat freely, no hand would dare to lay itself upon that heart to count its throbbings; and, since we are seeking new suns, I should dart towards their splendour and no longer await the natural rise of dawn.
God grant that these industrial interests, in which we are to find a prosperity of a new kind, may deceive nobody, that they may prove as fruitful, as civilizing as the moral interests whence the old society issued! Time will teach us whether they be not the barren dreams of those sterile intellects which lack the faculty of rising above the material world.
Although my part finishes with the Legitimacy, all my wishes are for France, whatever be the powers which her improvident whim may lead her to obey. As for myself, I ask for nothing more; I would wish only not too long to outlive the ruins which lie crumbling at my feet. But one's years are like the Alps: scarce has one surmounted the first, before others rise before one. Alas, those last and higher mountains are uninhabited, arid and topped with snow!
[Footnote 263: This book was written in Paris, in August and September 1830, and revised in December 1840.--T.]
[Footnote 264: Michel Chevalier (1806-1879), who later achieved distinction as the promoter of the Treaty of Commerce between France and England.--T.]
[Footnote 265: Ulysse Trélat (_b._ 1795), a well-known mad-doctor and politician. He was Minister of Public Works for six weeks in 1848.--T.]
[Footnote 266: Jean Baptiste Teste (1780-1852), a famous lawyer, went to Belgium after the Second Restoration and became attorney-general to King William I. of the Netherlands. He returned to France at the outbreak of the Revolution and filled several ministerial offices during the reign of Louis-Philippe.--T.]
[Footnote 267: Augustin Guinard has already been mentioned as being among the first to enter the Tuileries on the 29th of July (_supra_, p. 109).--T.]