, where we execute so
many, we do not prevent crimes.

_N._ It is because you have not a _gendarmerie_.

He inquired very particularly about the forms of the Viceregal
Court in Ireland, the _Dames d'honneur_, pages, etc.; in some
things he was strangely ignorant, as, for instance, asking if my
father was a peer of Parliament.

He asked many questions three times over.

He spoke of the Regent's conduct to the Princess as very impolitic,
as it shocked the _bienseances_, by which his father had
become so popular.

He said our war with America was a _guerre de vengeance_, for
that the frontier could not possibly be of any importance.

He said, "You English ought to be very well satisfied with the end
of the war."

_F. R._ Yes, but we were nearly ruined in the course of it.

_N._ Ha! le systeme continental, ha--and then he laughed very
much.

He asked who was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland at present, but made no
remark on my answer.

I asked him if he understood English; he said that at Paris he had
had plenty of interpreters, but that he now began to read it a
little.

Many English went to Elba about this time; the substance of their
conversations is still in my recollection--April 2, 1815. He said
that he considered the great superiority of England to France lay
in her aristocracy, that the people were not better, but that the
Parliament was composed of all the men of property and all the men
of family in the country; this enabled the Government to resist the
shock which the failure of the Duke of York's expedition was liable
to cause--in France it would have destroyed the Government. (This
is an opinion rather tinged by the Revolution, but it is true that
our House of Commons looks to final results.) They were strong, he
said, by "les souvenirs attachants a l'histoire"; that on the
contrary he could make eighty senates in France as good as the
present; that he had intended to create a nobility by marrying his
generals, whom he accounted as quite insignificant, notwithstanding
the titles he had given them, to the offspring of the old nobility
of France. He had reserved a fund from the contribution which he
levied when he made treaties with Austria, Prussia, etc., in order
to found these new families. "Did you get anything from Russia?"

_N._ No, I n