"I still had great reason to be çoisRenédiffident of the activity of our embassy. How did I act? I sent a man, on whom I could depend, with a strong and swift horse to a farm four miles from Berlin, from the master of which I had some days before received two pairs of pigeons, an experiment on the flight of which had been made; so that, unless the bridges of the isle of Potsdam were raised, I acted with certainty....
"After considering, I did not find we were rich enough to throw a hundred guineas away; I therefore renounced all my fine projects, which had cost me some thought, some trouble, and some louis; and I let fly my pigeons to my man with the word 'Return.' Have I done well or ill? Of this I am ignorant; but I had no express orders, and sometimes works of supererogation gain but little applause."
The ambassadors were charged, during their residence abroad, to draw up a memorandum on the condition of the peoples and the governments to which they were accredited. This series of memoranda might be useful to the historian. To-day the same injunctions are issued, but scarcely one diplomatic agent complies with it. I had too little time in my embassies to finish off long studies; nevertheless, I made drafts for them; my patience for work was not entirely unfruitful. I find this commencement of a sketch of my investigations on Germany:
"After the fall of Napoleon, the introduction of the representative governments into the Germanic Confederation reawakened in Germany those first ideas of innovation which the Revolution had originally called forth there. They fomented for some time with great violence: the youth of the country had been called to its defense by a promise of liberty; this promise had been greedily received by scholars who found in their masters the inclination which science has shown, in this century, to second liberal theories. Under the sky of Germany, this love of liberty becomes a sort of sombre and mysterious fanaticism, which is propagated by means of secret societies. Sand came to strike terror into Europe. That man, for the rest, who revealed the existence of a powerful sect, was no more than a vulgar enthusiast; he deceived himself and took a common mind for a transcendental mind: his crime went to waste itself upon a writer whose genius could not aspire to empire and had not enough of the conqueror and the king to merit a dagger-thrust.