Switzerland, threatening Belgium, and at last demanding from England an
Alien Bill, which they ought to know to be incompatible with the laws and
hateful to the feelings of the people.

'He is not satisfied with seeing the country prosperous and respected
abroad. He wants to dazzle. His policy, domestic and foreign, is a policy
of vanity and ostentation--motives which mislead everyone both in private
and in public life.

'His great moral merits are kindness and sympathy. He is a faithful
attached friend, and wishes to serve all who come near him.

'His greatest moral fault is his ignorance of the difference between
right and wrong; perhaps his natural insensibility to it, his want of the
organs by which that difference is perceived--a defect which he inherits
from his uncle.'

'The uncle,' I said, 'had at least one moral sense--he could understand
the difference between pecuniary honesty and dishonesty, a difference
which this man seems not to see, or not to value.'

'I agree with you,' said L. 'He cannot value it, or he would not look
complacently on the peculation which surrounds him. Every six months some
magnificent hotel rises in the Champs Elysees, built by a man who had
nothing, and has been a minister for a year or two.'

On my return I found Tocqueville with the ladies. I gave him an outline
of what L. had said.

'No one,' he said, 'knows Louis Napoleon better than L.'

'My opportunities of judging him have been much fewer, but as far as they
have gone, they lead to the same conclusions. L. perhaps has not dwelt
enough on his indolence. Probably as he grows older, and the effects of
his early habits tell on him, it increases. I am told that it is
difficult to make him attend to business, that he prolongs audiences
apparently to kill time.

'One of the few of my acquaintances who go near him, was detained by him
for an hour to answer questions about the members of the _Corps
legislatif_. Louis Napoleon inquired about their families, their
fortunes, their previous histories. Nothing about their personal
qualities. These are things that do not interest him. He supposes that
men differ only in externals. "That the _fond_ is the same in everyone."'

_April 26_.--Tocqueville spent the evening with us.

We talked of Novels.

'I read none,' he said, 'that end ill. Why should one voluntarily subject
oneself to painful emotions? To emotions created by an imaginary cause
and therefore impelling you to no