uld again wrote to the King:--

"Shall I thank the King for the nomination of M. de Montmorency? Six
months ago, it would have been useful. To-day, it is merely good. But
alas, how far is that interesting Prince from the crown! and what
shocks and revolutions he must traverse first. If ever--God watch over
France; the Orleans are making frightful progress."

The signs of the coming storm accumulated in the most alarming manner.
Read this other report of the Viscount de La Rochefoucauld (August 8,
1826):--

"Indifference to religion, hatred of the priests, were the symptoms of
the Revolution. God grant that the same things do not bring the same
results. The unfortunate priests no longer dare to go through the
streets; they are everywhere insulted. Three days since, a well-dressed
man, passing by the sentinel of the Luxembourg said to him, pointing to
a priest: 'Never mind; in a year you'll see no more of all these
wretches.' The poor Cure of Clichy was in real danger, surrounded by
two or three hundred madmen, who cried; 'Down with the black-hats!'
Every day there is a scene of the same sort."

The popularity of Charles X., so great at the beginning of his reign,
was dwindling every day at Paris. M. de La Rochefoucauld did not fear
to declare it to him.

"By what inconceivable fatality is it," he wrote, February 6, 1827,
"that the king amid all the care he takes to ensure the happiness of
his people, is losing from day to day in their love and affection? At
the play--and it is there, to use an expression of Napoleon, that the
pulse of public opinion is to be felt--the most seditious and hostile
allusions are eagerly caught up. Saturday last, verses, of which the
sense was that kings who have lost the love of their people encounter
only silence and coldness, were greeted with triple applause and
furiously encored."

The report of May 12,1827, was like an alarm bell:

"Circumstances are so grave that the calmest minds betray fear
regarding them; there are now but one opinion and one feeling,--doubt
and fear. It is said openly, as eight years since: This branch cannot
keep the crown; it is impossible; who will succeed it? How many things,
great Heavens, done in eight years; how many things forgotten!"

Exposed to an outpouring of enmities and of incessant intrigues, taken
between two fires,--the extreme Right and the Left,--M. de Villele no
longer had the strength to govern. His ministry was about to come to an
en