these two minds, and their conspiracy was for some
time the entire policy of Europe.

Madame de Staeel, M. de Narbonne, and the constitutional party were for
war; but theirs was to be a partial and not a desperate war which,
shaking nationality to its foundations, would carry away the throne and
throw France into a Republic. They contrived by their influence to renew
all the personal staff of the diplomacy, exclusively devoted to the
emigrants or the king. They filled foreign courts with their adherents,
M. de Marbois was sent to the Diet of Ratisbon, M. Barthelemy to
Switzerland, M. de Talleyrand to London, M. de Segur to Berlin. The
mission of M. de Talleyrand was to endeavour to fraternise the
aristocratic principle of the English constitution with the democratic
principle of the French constitution, which they believed they could
effect and control by an Upper Chamber. They hoped to interest the
statesmen of Great Britain in a Revolution, imitated from their own,
which, after having convulsed the people, was now becoming moulded in
the hands of an intelligent aristocracy. This mission would be easy, if
the Revolution were in regular train for some months in Paris. French
ideas were popular in London. The opposition was revolutionary. Fox and
Burke, then friends, were most earnest in their desire for the liberty
of the Continent[9]. We must render this justice to England, that the
moral and popular principle concealed in the foundation of its
constitution, has never stultified itself by combating the efforts of
other nations to acquire a free government. It has everywhere accorded
the liberty similar to its own.

XXI.

The mission of M. de Segur at Berlin was more delicate. Its object was
to detach the king of Prussia from his alliance with the emperor
Leopold, whose coronation was not yet known, and to persuade the cabinet
of Berlin into an alliance with revolutionary France. This alliance held
out to Prussia with its security on the Rhine the ascendency of the
new-sprung ideas in Germany: it was a Machiavelian idea, which would
smile at the agitating spirit of the great Frederic, who had made of
Prussia the corrosive influence (_la puissance corrosive_) of the
empire.

These two words--seduce and corrupt--were all M. de Segur's
instructions. The king of Prussia had favourites and mistresses.
Mirabeau had written in 1786, "There can be at Berlin no secrets for the
ambassador of France, unless money and skill