The çoisRené_Postscript_ added, I ran to M. Le Normant, my publisher's. On arriving, I found constables and a police-commissary making out instruments. They had seized parcels and affixed seals. I had not defied Bonaparte to be intimidated by M. Decazes: I objected to the seizure; I declared that, as a free Frenchman and a peer of France, I would yield only to force. The force arrived and I withdrew. I went on the 18th of September to Messieurs Louis-Marthe Mesnier and his colleague, notaries-royal; I protested in their office and called upon them to register my statement of the fact of the apprehension of my work, wishing to ensure the rights of French citizens by means of this protest M. Baudé[12] followed my example in 1830.
I next found myself engaged in a rather long correspondence with M. the Chancellor, M. the Minister of Police and M. the Attorney-General Bellart[13], until the 9th of November, on which day the Chancellor informed me of the order made in my favour by the Court of First Instance, which placed me in possession of my seized work. In one of his letters, M. the Chancellor told me that he had been distressed to see the dissatisfaction which the King had publicly expressed with my work. This dissatisfaction arose from the chapter in which I stood up against the establishment of a minister of General Police in a constitutional country.
In my account of the journey to Ghent, you have seen Louis XVIII.'s value as a descendant of Hugh Capet; in my pamphlet, _Le Roi est mort: vive le roi!_[14] I have told the Prince's real qualities. But man is not a simple unit: why are there so few faithful portraits? Because the model is made to pose at such or such a period of his life; ten years later the portrait is no longer like.
Louis XVIII. did not see far the objects before or around him; all seemed fair or foul to him according to the way he looked at it. Smitten with his century, it is to be feared that "the most Christian King" regarded religion only as an elixir fit for the amalgam of drugs of which royalty is composed. The licentious imagination which he had received from his grandfather[15] might have inspired some distrust of his enterprises; but he knew himself and, when he spoke in a positive manner, he boasted (well knowing it), while laughing at himself. I spoke to him one day of the need of a new marriage for M. le Duc de Bourbon, in order to bring back the race of the Condés to life. He strongly approved of that idea, although he cared very little about the sad resurrection; but in this connection he spoke to me of the Comte d'Artois, and said: