ron Louis, declared that they
would not co-operate in any attack on the existing law of elections.
M. Decazes determined to do without them, as he had dispensed with the
Duke de Richelieu, and to form a new Cabinet, of which he became the
president, and in which M. Pasquier, General Latour-Maubourg, and M. Roy
replaced the three retiring ministers. On the 29th of November the King
opened the session. Two months passed over, and the new electoral system
had not yet been presented to the Chamber. Three days after the
assassination of the Duke de Berry, M. Decazes introduced it suddenly,
with two bills to suspend personal liberty, and re-establish the
censorship of the daily press. Four days later he fell, and the
Duke de Richelieu, standing alone before the King and the danger,
consented to resume power. M. Decazes would have acted more wisely had
he submitted to his first defeat, and induced the King after the
election of M. Gregoire, to take back the Duke de Richelieu as minister.
He would not then have been compelled to lower with his own hand the
flag he had raised, and to endure the burden of a great miscarriage.

The fall of the Cabinet of 1819, brought on a new crisis, and a fresh
progress of the evil which disorganized the great Government party
formed during the session of 1815, and by the decree of the 5th of
September, 1816. To the successive divisions of the centre, were now
added the differences between the doctrinarians themselves. M. de Serre,
who had joined the Cabinet with M. Decazes to defend the law of
elections, now determined, although sick and absent, to remain there
with the Duke de Richelieu to overthrow it, without any of the
compensations, real or apparent, which his grand schemes of
constitutional reform were intended to supply. I tried in vain to
dissuade him from his resolution.[15] In the Chamber of Deputies,
M. Royer-Collard and M. Camille Jordan vehemently attacked the new
electoral plan; the Duke de Broglie and M. de Barante proposed serious
amendments to it in the Chamber of Peers. All the political ties which
had been cemented during five years appeared to be dissolved; every one
followed his own private opinion, or returned to his old bias. In the
parliamentary field, all was uncertainty and confused opposition; a
phantom appeared at each extremity, revolution and counter-revolution,
exchanging mutual menaces, and equally impatient to come to issue.

Those who wish to give themselves a