Part 14

'Four years ago, at the beginning of the Russian war, we resolved to build a steam fleet of 150 steam ships of different sizes for fighting, and 74 steam ships for the transfer service, and to carry fuel and stores. Though we set about this in the beginning, as we thought, of a long war, we have not allowed the peace to interrupt it. We are devoting to it sixty-five millions a year (2,600,000_l_.) of which from fifteen to seventeen millions are employed every year in building new ships, and from forty to forty-two in adding steam power to the old ones. We hope to finish this great work in fourteen years.'

'What,' I asked, 'is the amount of your present fleet of steamers?'

'We have thirty-three screws,' he answered, 'fifty-seven paddles, and sixty-two sailing vessels in commission, and seventy-three, mostly steamers, _en réserve_, as you would say, in ordinary.'

'Manned by how many men?' I asked.

'By twenty-five thousand sailors,' he answered, 'and eleven thousand marines. But our _inscription maritime_ would give us in a few months or less one hundred thousand more. Since the times of Louis XVI. the French Navy has never been so formidable, positively or relatively.'

'How,' I asked, 'has your "Napoleon" succeeded?'

'Admirably,' he answered. 'I have not seen the "Wellington," but she is a much finer ship than the Agamemnon. Her speed is wonderful. A month ago she left Toulon at seven in the morning, and reached Ajaccio by four in the evening. But the great improvement is in our men. Napoleon knew nothing and cared nothing about sailors. He took no care about their training, and often wasted them in land operations, for which landsmen would have done as well.

'In 1814 he left Toulon absolutely unguarded, and sent all the sailors to join Augereau. You might have walked into it.

'In 1810 or 1811 I was on board a French corvette which fought an action with an English vessel, the "Lively." We passed three times under her stern, and raked her each time. We ought to have cleared her decks. Not a shot touched her. The other day at Cherbourg I saw a broadside fired at a floating mark three cables off, the usual distance at which ships engage. Ten balls hit it, and we could see that all the others passed near enough to shake it by their wind.

'A ship of eighty guns has now forty _canonniers_ and forty _maîtres de pièces_. All practical artillerymen, and even the able seamen, can point a gun. Nelson's manoeuvre of breaking the line could not be used against a French fleet, such as a French fleet is now. The leading ships would be destroyed one after another, by the concentrated fire. Formerly our officers dreaded a maritime war. They knew that defeat awaited them, possibly death. Now they are confident, and eager to try their hands.'

In the evening L. took me into a corner, and we had a long conversation.

He had been reading my 'Athens Journal.'

'What struck me,' he said, 'in every page of it, was the resemblance of King Otho to Louis Napoleon.'

'I see the resemblance,' I answered, 'but it is the resemblance of a dwarf to a giant.'

'No,' he replied. 'Of a man five feet seven inches high to one five feet eleven inches. There are not more than four inches between them. There is the same cunning, the same coldness, the same vindictiveness, the same silence, the same perseverance, the same unscrupulousness, the same selfishness, the same anxiety to appear to do everything that is done, and above all, the same determination to destroy, or to seduce by corruption or by violence, every man and every institution favourable to liberty, independence, or self-government. In one respect Otho had the more difficult task. He found himself, in 1843, subject to a Constitution carefully framed under the advice of England for the express purpose of controlling him. He did not attempt to get rid of it by a _coup d'état_, or even to alter it, but cunningly and skilfully perverted it into an instrument of despotism. Louis Napoleon destroyed the Constitution which he found, and made a new one, copied from that which had been gradually elaborated by his uncle, which as a restraint is intentionally powerless and fraudulent.

'A man,' he continued, 'may acquire influence either by possessing in a higher degree the qualities which belong to his country and to his time, or by possessing those in which they are deficient.

'Wellington is an example of this first sort. His excellences were those of an Englishman carried almost to perfection.

'Louis Napoleon belongs to the second. If his merits had been impetuous courage, rapidity of ideas, quickness of decision, frankness, versatility and resource, he would have been surrounded by his equals or his superiors. He predominated over those with whom he came in contact because he differed from them. Because he was calm, slow, reserved, silent, and persevering. Because he is a Dutchman, not a Frenchman.'

'He seems,' I said, 'to have lost his calmness.'

'Yes,' answered L. 'But under what a shock! And observe that though the greatest risk was encountered by _him_, the terror was greatest among his _entourage_. I do not believe that if he had been left to himself he would have lost his prudence or his self-possession. He did not for the first day. Passions are contagious. Everyone who approached him was agitated by terror and anger. His intrepidity and self-reliance, great as they are, were disturbed by the hubbub all round him. His great defects are three. First, his habit of self-contemplation. He belongs to the men whom the Germans call subjective, whose eye is always turned inwardly; who think only of themselves, of their own character, and of their own fortunes. Secondly, his jealousy of able men. He wishes to be what you called him, a giant, and as Nature has not made him positively tall, he tries to be comparatively so, by surrounding himself with dwarfs. His third defect is the disproportion of his wishes to his means. His desires are enormous. No power, no wealth, no expenditure would satisfy them. Even if he had his uncle's genius and his uncle's indefatigability, he would sink, as his uncle did, under the exorbitance of his attempts. As he is not a man of genius, or even a man of remarkable ability, as he is ignorant, uninventive and idle, you will see him flounder and fall from one failure to another.

'During the three years that Drouyn de L'Huys was his minister he was intent on home affairs--on his marriage, on the Louvre, on the artillery, on his _bonnes fortunes_, and on the new delights of unbounded expenditure. He left foreign affairs altogether to his minister. When Drouyn de L'Huys left him, the road before him was plain--he had only to carry on the war. But when the war was over, the road ended; neither he nor Walewski nor any of his _entourage_ know anything of the country in which they are travelling. You see them wandering at hazard. Sometimes trying to find their way to Russia, sometimes to England. Making a treaty with Austria, then attempting to injure her, and failing; attempting to injure Turkey, and failing; bullying Naples, and failing; threatening Switzerland, threatening Belgium, and at last demanding from England an Alien Bill, which they ought to know to be incompatible with the laws and hateful to the feelings of the people.

'He is not satisfied with seeing the country prosperous and respected abroad. He wants to dazzle. His policy, domestic and foreign, is a policy of vanity and ostentation--motives which mislead everyone both in private and in public life.

'His great moral merits are kindness and sympathy. He is a faithful attached friend, and wishes to serve all who come near him.

'His greatest moral fault is his ignorance of the difference between right and wrong; perhaps his natural insensibility to it, his want of the organs by which that difference is perceived--a defect which he inherits from his uncle.'

'The uncle,' I said, 'had at least one moral sense--he could understand the difference between pecuniary honesty and dishonesty, a difference which this man seems not to see, or not to value.'

'I agree with you,' said L. 'He cannot value it, or he would not look complacently on the peculation which surrounds him. Every six months some magnificent hotel rises in the Champs Élysées, built by a man who had nothing, and has been a minister for a year or two.'

On my return I found Tocqueville with the ladies. I gave him an outline of what L. had said.

'No one,' he said, 'knows Louis Napoleon better than L.'

'My opportunities of judging him have been much fewer, but as far as they have gone, they lead to the same conclusions. L. perhaps has not dwelt enough on his indolence. Probably as he grows older, and the effects of his early habits tell on him, it increases. I am told that it is difficult to make him attend to business, that he prolongs audiences apparently to kill time.

'One of the few of my acquaintances who go near him, was detained by him for an hour to answer questions about the members of the _Corps législatif_. Louis Napoleon inquired about their families, their fortunes, their previous histories. Nothing about their personal qualities. These are things that do not interest him. He supposes that men differ only in externals. "That the _fond_ is the same in everyone."'

_April 26_.--Tocqueville spent the evening with us.

We talked of Novels.

'I read none,' he said, 'that end ill. Why should one voluntarily subject oneself to painful emotions? To emotions created by an imaginary cause and therefore impelling you to no action. I like vivid emotions, but I seek them in real life, in society, in travelling, in business, but above all in political business. There is no happiness comparable to political success, when your own excitement is justified by the magnitude of the questions at issue, and is doubled and redoubled by the sympathy of your supporters. Having enjoyed that, I am ashamed of being excited by the visionary sorrows of heroes and heroines.

'I had a friend,' he continued, 'a Benedictine, who is now ninety-seven. He was, therefore, about thirteen when Louis XVI. began to reign. He is a man of talents and knowledge, has always lived in the world, has attended to all that he has seen and heard, and is still unimpaired in mind, and so strong in body that when I leave him he goes down to embrace me, after the fashion of the eighteenth century, at the bottom of his staircase.'

'And what effect,' I asked, 'has the contemplation of seventy years of revolution produced in him? Does he look back, like Talleyrand, to the _ancien régime_ as a golden age?'

'He admits,' said Tocqueville, 'the material superiority of our own age, but he believes that, intellectually and morally, we are far inferior to our grandfathers. And I agree with him. Those seventy years of revolution have destroyed our courage, our hopefulness, our self-reliance, our public spirit, and, as respects by far the majority of the higher classes, our passions, except the vulgarest and most selfish ones--vanity and covetousness. Even ambition seems extinct. The men who seek power, seek it not for itself, not as the means of doing good to their country, but as a means of getting money and flatterers.

'It is remarkable,' he continued, 'that women whose influence is generally greatest under despotisms, have none now. They have lost it, partly in consequence of the gross vulgarity of our dominant passions, and partly from their own nullity. They are like London houses, all built and furnished on exactly the same model, and that a most uninteresting one. Whether a girl is bred up at home or in a convent, she has the same masters, gets a smattering of the same accomplishments, reads the same dull books, and contributes to society the same little contingent of superficial information.

'When a young lady comes out I know beforehand how her mother and her aunts will describe her. "Elle a les goûts simples. Elle est pieuse. Elle aime la campagne. Elle aime la lecture. Elle n'aime pas le bal. Elle n'aime pas le monde, elle y ira seulement pour plaire à sa mère." I try sometimes to escape from these generalities, but there is nothing behind them.'

'And how long,' I asked, 'does this simple, pious, retiring character last?'

'Till the orange flowers of her wedding chaplet are withered,' he answered. 'In three months she goes to the _messe d'une heure_.'

'What is the "messe d'une heure?"' I asked.

'A priest,' he answered, 'must celebrate Mass fasting; and in strictness ought to do so before noon. But to accommodate fashionable ladies who cannot rise by noon, priests are found who will starve all the morning, and say Mass in the afternoon. It is an irregular proceeding, though winked at by the ecclesiastical authorities. Still to attend it is rather discreditable; it is a middle term between the highly meritorious practice of going to early Mass, and the scandalous one of never going at all.'

'What was the education,' I asked, 'of women under the _ancien régime_?'

'The convent,' he answered.

'It must have been better,' I said, 'than the present education, since the women of that time were superior to ours.'

'It was so far better,' he answered, 'that it did no harm. A girl at that time was taught nothing. She came from the convent a sheet of white paper. _Now_ her mind is a paper scribbled over with trash. The women of that time were thrown into a world far superior to ours, and with the sagacity, curiosity, and flexibility of French women, caught knowledge and tact and expression from the men.

'I knew well,' he continued, 'Madame Récamier. Few traces of her former beauty then remained, but we were all her lovers and her slaves. The talent, labour, and skill which she wasted in her _salon_, would have gained and governed an empire. She was virtuous, if it be virtuous to persuade every one of a dozen men that you wish to favour him, though some circumstance always occurs to prevent your doing so. Every friend thought himself preferred. She governed us by little distinctions, by letting one man come five minutes before the others, or stay five minutes after. Just as Louis XIV. raised one courtier to the seventh heaven by giving him the _bougeoir_, and another by leaning on his arm, or taking his shirt from him.

'She said little, but knew what each man's _fort_ was, and placed from time to time a _mot_ which led him to it. If anything were peculiarly well said, her face brightened. You saw that her attention was always active and always intelligent.

'And yet I doubt whether she really enjoyed conversation. _Tenir salon_ was to her a game, which she played well, and almost always successfully, but she must sometimes have been exhausted by the effort. Her _salon_ was perhaps pleasanter to us than it was to herself.

'One of the last,' he continued, 'of that class of potentates was the Duchesse de Dino. Her early married life was active and brilliant, but not intellectually. It was not till about forty, when she had exhausted other excitements, that she took to _bel esprit._ But she performed her part as if she had been bred to it.'

This was our last conversation. I left Paris the next day, and we never met again.

CORRESPONDENCE.

Tocqueville, June 30, 1858.

I must complain, a little of your silence, my dear Senior. I hear that before you left Paris you suffered a great deal from your throat. Is it true, or have you recovered?

I have not either much to boast of on the score of health since we parted. The illness which I had in Paris became still worse, and when I got a little better in that way I had a violent bronchial attack. I even began to spit blood, which had not happened to me for many years, and I am still almost reduced to silence. Still I am beginning to mend, and I hope, please God, to be able to _speak_ to my friends when they visit me.

You are aware that I wished to induce my wife to accompany me to the South; but the length of the journey, the difficulties of transport, the heat, and indeed the state of my health, were reasons which she brought forward with so much force that we have remained here, and shall not leave till the end of September. We still hope that you and Miss Senior will join us the first week in that month. We shall be very happy to have you both with us. This is no compliment ... I hope soon to be able to enjoy more frequent communication with my English friends. A steamboat is about to run from Cherbourg to the coast of England. We shall then be able to visit each other as neighbours (_voisiner_).

Between ourselves, I do not think that the events in England during the last six months are of a nature to raise the reputation of Parliamentary Government in the rest of the world. _A bientôt!_

A. DE TOCQUEVILLE.

Kensington, July 5, 1858.

My dear Tocqueville,--If I had written to you three days ago, I should have talked of the pleasure which my daughter and I expected from our visit to Tocqueville. But our plans are changed. Edward Ellice is going to pay a last visit to America, and has begged me to accompany him. He is a great proprietor in both America and Canada--knows everybody in both countries, and is besides a most able and interesting companion. So I have accepted the proposal, and start on the 30th of this month for Boston. We shall return in the beginning of November.

I am _very_ sorry to lose the visit to Normandy, but I trust that it is only deferred.

We are grieved to hear that neither you nor Madame de Tocqueville are as well as your friends could wish you to be.

My _grippe_, after lasting for three months, has gradually subsided, and I look to the voyage to America as a cure for all remains of it.

I have most punctually carried your remembrances to all the persons honoured by being inscribed on your card.

Though I have often seen Gladstone, it has always been among many other persons, and he has been so full of talk, that I have never been able to allude to your subject. I mentioned it to Mrs. Gladstone on Saturday last: she said that there was not a person in all France whom her husband so much admired and venerated as you--therefore, if there was any appearance of neglect, it could have arisen only from hurry or mistake. I shall see him again on Thursday, when we are going all together to a rehearsal of Ristori's, and I will talk to him: we shall there be quiet.

Things here are in a very odd state. The Government is supported by the Tories because it calls itself Tory, and by the Whigs and Radicals because it obeys them. On such terms it may last for an indefinite time.

Kindest regards from us all to you both.

Ever yours,

N.W. SENIOR.

9 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, August 2, 1858.

My dear Tocqueville,--I ought, as you know, to be on the Atlantic by this time; but I was attacked, ten days ago, with lumbar neuralgia, which they are trying, literally, to rub away. If I am quite well on the 13th, I shall go on the 14th to America.

I was attacked at Sir John Boileau's, where I spent some days with the Guizots, Mrs. Austin, and Stanley and Lord John Russell.

Guizot is in excellent spirits, and, what is rare in an ex-premier, dwells more on the present and the future than on the past. Mrs. Austin is placid and discursive.

Lord John seems to me well pleased with the present state of affairs--which he thinks, I believe with reason, will bring him back to power. He thinks that Malmesbury and Disraeli are doing well, and praises much the subordinates of the Government. Considering that no one believes Lord Derby to be wise, or Disraeli to be either wise or honest, it is marvellous that they get on as well as they do. The man who has risen most is Lord Stanley, and, as he has the inestimable advantage of youth, I believe him to be predestined to influence our fortunes long.

The world, I think, is gradually coming over to an opinion, which, when I maintained it thirty years ago, was treated as a ridiculous paradox--that India is and always has been a great misfortune to us; and, that if it were possible to get quit of it, we should be richer and stronger.

But it is clear that we are to keep it, at least for my life.

Kindest regards from us all to you and Madame de Tocqueville.

Ever yours,

N.W. SENIOR.

Tocqueville, August 21, 1858.

My dear Senior,--I hear indirectly that you are extremely ill. Your letter told me only that you were suffering from neuralgia which you hoped to be rid of in a few days, but Mrs. Grote informs me that the malady continues and has even assumed a more serious character.

If you could write or dictate a few lines to me, you would please me much.

I am inconsolable for the failure of your American journey. I expected the most curious results from it I hoped that your journal would enable me once more to understand the present state of a country which has so changed since I saw it that I feel that I now know nothing of it. What a blessing, however, that you had not started! What would have become of you if the painful attack from which you are suffering had seized you 2,000 miles away from home, and in the midst of that agitated society where no one has time to be ill or to think of those who are ill? It must be owned that Fortune has favoured you by sending you this illness just at the moment of your departure instead of ten days later.

I have been much interested by your visit to Sir John Boileau. You saw there M. Guizot in one of his best lights. The energy with which he stands up under the pressure of age and of ill-fortune, and is not only resigned in his new situation, but as vigorous, as animated, and as cheerful as ever, shows a character admirably tempered and a pride which nothing will bend.

I do not so well understand the cheerfulness of Lord John Russell. For the spectacle now exhibited by England, in which a party finds no difficulty in maintaining itself in power by carrying into practice ideas which it has always opposed, and by relying for support on its natural enemies, is not of a nature to raise the reputation of your institutions, or of your public men. I should have a great deal more to say to you on this and other subjects if I were not afraid of tiring you. I leave off, therefore, by assuring you that we are longing to hear of your recovery. Remembrances, &c.

A. DE TOCQUEVILLE.

Cannes, December 12, 1858.

I wish, my dear friend, to reassure you myself on the false reports which have been spread regarding my health. Far from finding myself worse than when we arrived, I am already much better.

I am just now an invalid who takes his daily walks of two hours in the mountains after eating an excellent breakfast. I am not, however, well. If I were I should not long remain a citizen of Cannes.

I have almost renounced the use of speech, and consequently the society of human beings; which is all the more sad as my wife, my sole companion, is herself very unwell, not dangerously, but enough to make me anxious. When I say my sole companion, I am wrong, for my eldest brother has had the kindness to shut himself up with us for a month.

Adieu, dear Senior. A thousand kind remembrances from us to all your party.

A. DE TOCQUEVILLE.

Cannes, March 15, 1859.

You say, my dear Senior, in the letter which I have just received, that I like to hear from my friends, not to write to them. It is true that I delight in the letters of my friends, especially of my English friends; but it is a calumny to say that I do not like to answer them. It is true that I am in your debt: one great cause is, that a man who lives at Cannes knows nothing of what is passing. My solitary confinement, which is bad enough in every way, makes me a bad correspondent, by depressing my spirits and rendering every exertion painful.