ions, by depicting characters, by choosing
the principal incidents of social life, by composing types out of a
combination of homogeneous characteristics, I might perhaps succeed in
writing the history which so many historians have neglected: that of
Manners. By patience and perseverance I might produce for France in the
nineteenth century the book which we must all regret that Rome, Athens,
Tyre, Memphis, Persia, and India have not bequeathed to us; that history
of their social life which, prompted by the Abbe Barthelemy, Monteil
patiently and steadily tried to write for the Middle Ages, but in an
unattractive form.

This work, so far, was nothing. By adhering to the strict lines of a
reproduction a writer might be a more or less faithful, and more or less
successful, painter of types of humanity, a narrator of the dramas of
private life, an archaeologist of social furniture, a cataloguer of
professions, a registrar of good and evil; but to deserve the praise of
which every artist must be ambitious, must I not also investigate the
reasons or the cause of these social effects, detect the hidden sense
of this vast assembly of figures, passions, and incidents? And finally,
having sought--I will not say having found--this reason, this motive
power, must I not reflect on first principles, and discover in what
particulars societies approach or deviate from the eternal law of truth
and beauty? In spite of the wide scope of the preliminaries, which might
of themselves constitute a book, the work, to be complete, would need a
conclusion. Thus depicted, society ought to bear in itself the reason of
its working.

The law of the writer, in virtue of which he is a writer, and which I do
not hesitate to say makes him the equal, or perhaps the superior, of the
statesman, is his judgment, whatever it may be, on human affairs,
and his absolute devotion to certain principles. Machiavelli, Hobbes,
Bossuet, Leibnitz, Kant, Montesquieu, _are_ the science which statesmen
apply. "A writer ought to have settled opinions on morals and politics;
he should regard himself as a tutor of men; for men need no masters to
teach them to doubt," says Bonald. I took these noble words as my guide
long ago; they are the written law of the monarchical writer. And
those who would confute me by my own words will find that they have
misinterpreted some ironical phrase, or that they have turned against me
a speech given to one of my actors--a trick peculiar to