About the 13th of January,çoisRené I opened the series of my dispatches with the Minister of Foreign Affairs. My mind easily accommodates itself to this kind of work: why not? Did not Dante[119], Ariosto[120] and Milton[121] succeed as well in politics as in poetry? No doubt I am not Dante, nor Ariosto, nor Milton; nevertheless, Europe and France have seen by the _Congrès de Vérone_ what I could do.
My predecessor in Berlin treated me, in 1816, as he treated M. de Lameth[122] in his little verses at the commencement of the Revolution. When one is so amiable, he should not leave minute-books behind him, nor have the orderliness of a clerk when he has not the capacity of a diplomatist. It happens, in the times in which we live, that a gust of wind sends into your place the man against whom you rose up; and, as the ambassador's duty is first to make himself acquainted with the archives of the embassy, behold him coming upon the notes in which he is dealt with in masterly fashion. What would you have? Those profound minds, which worked for the success of the good cause, could not think of everything.
EXTRACTS FROM THE MINUTE-BOOK OF M. DE BONNAY
"All Europe has taken cognizance and approved of the words which the King addressed to the newly-formed bureau of the Chamber of Peers. I have been asked if it was possible that men devoted to the King, that persons attached to his person and holding places in his Household or in those of our Princes had indeed been able to give their votes to put M. de Chateaubriand into the secretaryship. My reply was that, as the balloting was secret, no one could know how individual votes went.
"'Ah,' exclaimed a leading man, 'if the King could be assured of it, I hope that the access to the Tuileries would be forthwith closed to those faithless servants.'
"I thought it my duty to make no answer, and I made no answer."
"It will be the same, monsieur le duc, with the measures of the 5th and of the 20th of September: both meet with nothing but approval in Europe. But what is astonishing is to see that very pure and very worthy Royalists continue to be smitten with M. de Chateaubriand, notwithstanding the publication of a book which lays down the principle that the King of France, by virtue of the Charter, is no longer more than a moral entity, essentially null, and without a will of his own. If any other than he had put forward a similar maxim, the same men, not without apparent reason, would have qualified him as a Jacobin."