haracters were
altogether dissimilar. I have seen a good many men whose names have
become household words among the refined, the educated, and the
art-loving all the world over; I have seen them at the commencement, in
the middle, and at the zenith of their career: I have seen none more
indifferent to the material benefits of their art than Eugene Lami and
Paul Delaroche, not even Eugene Delacroix and Decamps. Balzac was the
very reverse. To make a fortune was the sole ambition of his life.

To return for a moment to Louis-Philippe's sons. I have said that the
Duc de Nemours was essentially the grand seigneur of the family; truth
compels me to add, however, that there was a certain want of pliability
about him which his social inferiors could not have relished. It was
Henri IV. minus the bonhomie, also perhaps minus that indiscriminate
galanterie which endeared Ravaillac's victim to all classes, even when
he was no longer young. In the days of which I am treating just now, the
Duc de Nemours was very young. As for his courage, it was simply above
suspicion; albeit that it was called in question after the revolution of
'48, to his father's intense sorrow. No after-dinner encomium was ever
as absolutely true as that of Sir Robert Peel on the sons and daughters
of the last King of France, when he described them as respectively brave
and chaste. Nevertheless, had the Duc de Nemours and his brothers been a
thousand times as brave as they were, party spirit, than which there is
nothing more contemptible in France, would have found the opportunity of
denying that bravery.

If these notes are ever published, Englishmen will smile at what I am
about to write now, unless their disgust takes another form of
expression. The exploits of the Duc d'Aumale in Algeria are quoted by
independent military authorities as so many separate deeds of signal
heroism. They belong to history, and not a single historian has
endeavoured to impair their value. Will it be believed that the
Opposition journals of those days spoke of them with ill-disguised
contempt as mere skirmishes with a lot of semi-savages? And, during the
Second Republic, many of these papers returned to the charge because the
Duc d'Aumale, being the constitutionally-minded son of a
constitutionally-minded king, resigned the command of his army instead
of bringing it to France to coerce a nation into retaining a ruler whom,
ostensibly at least, she had voluntarily accepted, and w