om want of foresight and mental routine, rather than from
the passion of pride or power.

On the day after the presentation of the address, the 19th of March, the
session was prorogued to the 1st of September. Two months later, on the
16th of May, the Chamber of Deputies was dissolved; the two most
moderate members of the Cabinet, the Chancellor and the Minister of
Finance, M. Courvoisier and M. de Chabrol, left the Council; they had
refused their concurrence to the extreme measures already debated there,
in case the elections should falsify the expectations of power. The most
compromised and audacious member of the Villele Cabinet,
M. de Peyronnet, became Minister of the Interior. By the dissolution,
the King appealed to the country, and at the same moment he took fresh
steps to separate himself from his people.

Having returned to the private life from which he never again emerged,
M. Courvoisier wrote to me on the 29th of September 1831, from his
retirement at Baume-les-Dames: "Before resigning the Seals, I happened
to be in conversation with M. Pozzo di Borgo on the state of the
country, and the perils with which the throne had surrounded itself.
What means, said he to me, are there of opening the King's eyes, and of
drawing him from a system which may once again overturn Europe and
France?--I see but one, replied I, and that is a letter from the hand of
the Emperor of Russia.--He shall write it, said he; he shall write it
from Warsaw, whither he is about to repair.--We then conversed together
on the substance of the letter. M. Pozzo di Borgo often said to me that
the Emperor Nicholas saw no security for the Bourbons, but in the
fulfilment of the Charter."

I much doubt whether the Emperor Nicholas ever wrote himself to the
King, Charles X.; but what his ambassador at Paris had said to the
Chancellor of France, he himself repeated to the Duke de Mortemart, the
King's ambassador at St. Petersburg:--"If they deviate from the Charter,
they will lead direct to a catastrophe; if the King attempts a
_coup-d'etat_, the responsibility will fall on himself alone." The
councils of monarchs were not more wanting to Charles X., than the
addresses of nations, to detach him from his fatal design.

As soon as the electoral glove was thrown down, my friends wrote to me
from Nismes that my presence was necessary to unite them all, and to
hold out in the College of the department any prospect of success. It
was also desired that