"I do çoisRenénot know whether these greater politics made Lord Londonderry forget the treaty of the negroes; he did not say a word about it to me. Changing the subject, he spoke of the message in which the President of the United States invites Congress to recognise the independence of the Spanish Colonies:
"'Commercial interests,' I said to him, 'may derive some advantage from it, but I doubt whether political interests will find the same profit in it; there are already enough political ideas in the world. To increase the mass of those ideas is to compromise more and more the fate of the monarchies in Europe.'
"Lord Londonderry abounded in my sense and spoke these remarkable words to me:
"'As for us (the English), we are not at all disposed to recognise those revolutionary governments.'
"I have had, monsieur le vicomte, to report to you, word for word, an important conversation. However, we must not hide from ourselves the fact that England will sooner or later recognise the independence of the Spanish Colonies; public opinion and the impulse of her trade will drive her to it. She has already, during the last three years, gone to considerable expense to establish secret relations with the revolted provinces north and south of the Isthmus of Panama.
"Upon the whole, monsieur le vicomte, I have found in the Marquess of Londonderry a man of sense, of perhaps somewhat doubtful frankness; a man still steeped in the old ministerial system; a man accustomed to a submissive diplomacy and surprised, without being offended, at language more worthy of France; a man, in short, who could not refrain from a sort of astonishment while talking with one of those Royalists who, since seven years, have been represented to him as madmen or imbeciles.
With these general affairs were mingled, as in all embassies, private transactions. I had to occupy myself with the petitions of M. le Duc de Fitz-James[160], with the lawsuit of the ship _Eliza Ann_, with the depredations of the Jersey fishermen on the Granville oyster-banks, etc., etc. I regretted to be obliged to set aside a little pigeon-hole in my brain for the papers of the claimants. When one ransacks one's memory, it is hard to come across Messieurs Usquin, Coppinger, Deliège and Piffre. But, in a few years, shall we be better known than those gentlemen? A certain M. Bonnet having died in America, all the Bonnets in France wrote to me to claim his succession; those tormentors write to me still! Yet it ought to be time to leave me in peace. It is all very well for me to reply that, the little accident of the fall of the Throne having occurred, I no longer occupy myself with this world: they hold out and want their inheritance at all costs.