While expressing myself upon our worthlessness,çoisRené I taxed my conscience home: I asked myself whether I did not purposely incorporate myself with the nullity of these times, in order to acquire the right to condemn the others, persuaded though I were _in petto_ that my name would be read in the midst of all these obliterations. No, I am convinced that we shall all fade out: first, because we have not in us the wherewithal to live; secondly, because the age in which we are commencing or ending our days has itself not the wherewithal to make us live. Generations mutilated, exhausted, disdainful, faithless, consecrated to the annihilation which they love, are unable to bestow immortality; they have no power to create a renown; if you were to nail your ear to their mouth, you would hear nothing: no sound issues from the heart of the dead.
One thing strikes me, however: the little world to which I am now coming was superior to the world which succeeded it in 1830; we were giants in comparison with the society of maggots that has engendered itself.
The Restoration offers at least one point in which we can find importance: after the dignity of one man, that man having passed, there was born again the dignity of mankind. If despotism has been replaced by liberty, if we understand anything of independence, if we have lost the habit of grovelling, if the rights of human nature are no longer disregarded, we owe these things to the Restoration. Wherefore also I threw myself into the fray in order, as far as I could, to revive the species when the individual had come to an end.
Come, let us pursue our task! Let us descend, with a groan, to myself and my colleagues. You have seen me amid my dreams; you are about to see me in my realities: if the interest decreases, if I fall, reader, be just, make allowance for my subject!
After the second return of the King and the final disappearance of Bonaparte, the Ministry being in the hands of M. le Duc d'Otrante and M. le Prince de Talleyrand, I was appointed president of the electoral college of the Department of the Loiret. The elections of 1815 gave the King the _Chambre introuvable._[2] I was carrying all the votes at Orleans, when I received the Order which called me to the House of Peers[3]. My active career had hardly commenced, when it suddenly changed its course: what would it have been if I had been sent to the Elective Chamber? It is fairly probable that that career would, in the event of my success, have ended in the Ministry of the Interior, instead of taking me to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. My habits and manners were more in touch with the peerage, and, although the latter became hostile to me from the first moment, by reason of my Liberal opinions, it is nevertheless certain that my doctrines concerning the liberty of the press and against the vassalage to foreigners gave the Noble Chamber the popularity which it enjoyed so long as it suffered my opinions.