became
known in the departments. Other bills, although laid before the
Chambers, produced no result; three, amongst the rest, may be named: on
the responsibility of Ministers, on the organization of the Chamber of
Peers into a court of justice, and on the alteration of the financial
year to avoid the provisional vote of the duty. Others again, especially
applicable to the reform of departmental and parochial administrations,
and to public instruction, were left in a state of inquiry and
preliminary discussion. Far from eluding or allowing important questions
to linger, the Government laboriously investigated them, and forestalled
the wishes of the public, determined to submit them to the Chambers as
soon as they had collected facts and arranged their own plans.

I still preserve a deep remembrance of the State Council in which these
various bills were first discussed. This Council had not then any
defined official existence or prescribed action in the constitution of
the country; politics nevertheless were more prominently argued there,
and with greater freedom and effect, than at any other time; every
shade, I ought rather to say every variation, of the royalist party,
from the extreme right to the edge of the left, were there represented;
the politicians most in repute, the leaders of the majority in the two
Assemblies, were brought into contact with the heads of administration,
the old senators of the Empire, and with younger men not yet admissible
to the Chambers, but introduced by the Charter into public life.
MM. Royer-Collard, de Serre, and Camille Jordan sat there by the side of
MM. Simeon, Portalis, Mole, Berenger, Cuvier, and Allent; and
MM. de Barante, Mounier, and myself deliberated in common with
MM. de Ballainvilliers, Laporte-Lalanne, and de Blaire, unswerving
representatives of the old system. When important bills were examined by
the Council, the Ministers never failed to attend. The Duke de Richelieu
often presided at the general sittings. The discussion was perfectly
free, without oratorical display or pretension, but serious, profound,
varied, detailed, earnest, erudite, and at the same time practical. I
have heard Count Berenger, a man of disputatious and independent temper,
and a quasi-republican under the Empire, maintain there, with ingenious
and imposing subtlety, universal suffrage, and distinctions of
qualification for voting, against direct election and the concentrated
right of suffrage. MM.