[Footnote 1: Barthélemy de St-Hilaire is now Thiers' private secretary and right hand.--ED.]
_Tuesday, April_ 14.--Z., Sumner, Lord Granville, Tocqueville, M. Circourt, St.-Hilaire, and Corcelle breakfasted with us.
The conversation took the same turn as yesterday.
'May I venture,' said Lord Granville to Z., 'to ask whom of your opponents you feared the most?'
'Beyond all comparison,' answered Z., 'Thiers.'
'Certainly,' said Z. 'But he had not the wit, or the _entraînement_ of Thiers. His sentences were like his action. He had only one gesture, raising and sinking his right arm, and every time that right arm fell, it accompanied a sentence adding a link to a chain of argument, massive and well tempered, without a particle of dross, which coiled round his adversary like a boa constrictor.'
'And yet,' said M., 'he was always languid and embarrassed at starting; it took him ten minutes to get _en train_.'
'That defect,' said Lord Granville, 'belonged to many of our good speakers--to Charles Fox--to Lord Holland. Indeed Fox required the excitement of serious business to become fluent. He never made a tolerable after-dinner speech.'
'Among the peculiarities of D.,' said M., 'are his perfect tact and discretion in the tribune, and his awkwardness in ordinary life. In public and in private he is two different men.'
'It is impossible,' said Tocqueville, 'to deny that D. was great in a deliberative body, but his real scene of action is the bar. He was only _among_ the best speakers in the Constituent Assembly. He is _the_ greatest advocate at the bar.'
'Although,' said M----, 'at the bar, where he represents only his client, one of the elements of his parliamentary success, his high moral character, does not assist him. Do you remember how, on the debate of the Roman expedition, he annihilated by one sentence Jules Favre who had ventured to assail him? "Les injures," he said, "sont comme les corps pesants, dont la force dépend de la hauteur d'où ils tombent."'
'One man,' said Z., 'who enjoys a great European reputation, I could never think of as a serious adversary, that is Lamartine.
'He appeared to me to treat the sad realities of political life as materials out of which he could compose strange and picturesque scenes, or draw food for his imagination and his vanity. He seemed always to be saying to himself: "How will the future dramatist or poet, or painter, represent this event, and what will be my part in the picture, or in the poem, or on the stage?"