tice. While there, M. de Marbois had treated me with confidence
inspired by sympathy. Finding it disagreeable to remain under
M. Dambray, to whom my Protestant extraction and opinions were equally
unsuited, I re-assumed the place of Master of Requests in the State
Council.

The Chambers had scarcely adjourned, when the conspiracy of Grenoble,
planned by Didier, and that called the plot of the patriots, at Paris,
in 1816, came, one upon the other, to put the moderation of the Cabinet
to the proof. The details forwarded by the magistrates of the department
of the Isere were full of exaggeration and declamatory excitement. The
mode of repression ordered by the Government was precipitately rigorous.
Grenoble had been the cradle of the Hundred Days. It was thought
expedient to strike Bonapartism heavily, in the very place where it had
first exploded. A natural opportunity presented itself here of dealing
firmly with the abettors of treason, while in another quarter strong
resistance was opposed to the advocates of reaction. Moderation
sometimes becomes impatient of its name, and yields to the temptation of
forgetting it for the moment.

The Government nevertheless continued to be moderate, and the public
were not deceived as to the course adopted. Although M. Decazes, from
the nature of his department, was the minister on whom measures of
inquiry and suppression devolved, he was at the same time looked upon,
and truly, as the protector of the oppressed, and of all who were
suspected without cause. By natural disposition and magisterial habit,
he loved justice in his heart. A stranger to all party antipathies,
penetrating, fearless, indefatigably active, and as prompt in
benevolence as in duty, he exercised the power which the special laws
conferred on him with measure and discretion; enforcing them as much
against the spirit of reaction and persecution as against detected
conspiracy, and continually occupied himself in preventing or repairing
the abuses in which the inferior authorities indulged. Thus he advanced
equally in the good opinion of the country and the favour of the King.
People and parties have an infallible instinct by which they recognize,
under the most complicated circumstances, those who attack and those who
defend them, their friends and their enemies. The ultra-royalists soon
began to look upon M. Decazes as their chief adversary, and the
moderates to regard him as their most valuable ally.

At the same