We talked of Louis Napoleon.

"A single day," said she, " changed his character. Until the death of his elder brother he was mild, unambitious, impressionable, affectionate, delighting in country pursuits, in nature, in art, and in literature. He frequently said to me, not when he was a child, but at the age of nineteen and twenty, What a blessing that I have two before me in succession: the Duc de Reichstadt and my brother, so that I can be happy in my own way, instead of being, as the head of our house must be, the slave of a mission.'

"From the day of his brother's death, he was a different man. I can compare his feelings as to his mission only to those which urged our first apostles and martyrs."

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What," I asked, " is the sense in which he understands his mission ?"

"It is a devotion," she answered, "first to the Napoleonic dynasty, and then to France. It is not personal ambition. He has always said, and I believe sincerely, that if there were any better hands to which he could transmit that duty he would do so with delight.

"His duty to his dynasty is to perpetuate it. His duty to France is to give her .influence abroad and prosperity at home." "And also," I asked, "extension of territory ?"

"Not now," she answered, "I will not say what may have been his wiches before the birth of his son, but what I have called devotion to his dynasty, is rather worship of his son. One of his besetting fears is the revival of an European coalition, not so much against France as against the Buonapartes, and the renewal of the proscription of the family."

"I have been told," I said, "that he leans towards constitutionalism as more favorable to hereditary succession than despotism."

"I believe," she answered, "that to be true, and that it is the explanation of his recent liberalism. He hates, without

matter with his eyes. Nothing,' he said. A day or two after I saw him again. They had still an odd appearance. At last I found that he had been accustoming himself to keep his eyelids closed, and to throw into his eyes a vacant dreamy expression.

"I cannot better describe the change that came over him after his brother's death than by saying that he tore his heart out of his bosom, and surrendered himself to his head.

"Once I found him reading Hernani. 'How wonderfully fine it is,' he said. 'I know,' I said, 'what you admire in it. It is the picture of a man driven on by irresistible destiny. You are thinking of the Hernani qui n'est pas un homme comme les autres.'

"Ah,' he answered, 'que vous m'avez bien deviné.'

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Pray show me," I said, "the passage to which you referred."

"He took down the Théâtre de Victor • Hugo and read to me the following verses from the fourth scene of the third act of Hernani

Tu me crois, peut-être, Un homme comme sont tous les autres, un être Intelligent qui court droit au but quil rêva; Détrompe-toi. Je suis une force qui va. Où vais-je? Je ne sais, mais je me sens poussé D'un souffle impétueux, d'un destin insensé, J'avance et j'avance; si jamais je m'arrête, Si parfois, haletant, j'ose tourner la tête Une voix me dit-marche.

"Now," she continued, "when, as he thinks, his mission is fulfilled, his former nature is returning. He is becoming mild and affectionate. Many parts of his disposition are feminine. He adores his child with the affection rather of a mother than of a father. He puts me in mind of the pictures in which the Virgin is looking on the infant Jesus, with an expression, half love and half worship. The boy is intelligent and serious, no common child.

"On the whole the best of the Buonapartes is the Emperor, and as I said before, power is improving him, notwithstanding his detestable entourage. He is a bad judge of men, he is shy, he hates new faces, he hates to refuse anything to any body, and he keeps about him men unable, and, if they were able, unwilling to give him advice, whose only object is to plunder him and the public purse."

"Do you agree," I said, "in the general opinion that he is sinking in public estimation ?'

"I do," she answered, "and I suspect that he feels it himself, and, as I said before, that he is trying to recover himself by promoting public prosperity, and by an approach to constitutional government."

"I expect," I said, "when I am here next year to find that you have renewed your old relations to him."

"I do not know," she answered. “When people once intimate have been separated for ten years, there is shyness on both sides.

"In the mean time he is constantly writing to me. On the jour de l'an, though he had been receiving people and addresses all day, he found time to send me a note to say that he could not let the day pass without expressing his good wishes.

"He knows too, how much I detest his Idées Napoléoniennes. If we talk it must be on the neutral ground of his Life of Cæsar. There we shall sympathise, for it is very good.

"From time to time he is absolutely engrossed by it. And he has all the help that money and power can procure."

Sunday, April 5, 1863.-Mdme. R. breakfasted with us.

'Every time," I said, "that I return to Paris, I expect to find you reconciled to the Emperor."

"At last," she answered, " you are right. On the 5th of last month he wrote to me to say that for twelve years I had refused to see him, and that perhaps I should persist, but that he could not bear the thought that he might die before I had embraced his child. That the next day the boy would be seven years old. Mdme. Walewska would call on me at one o'clock on that day, and that he could not avoid indulging a hope that I would allow her to take me to the Tuileries. I could not refuse. The next day she came and took me thither. As we entered his cabinet the door was closed, and I found myself in the presence of the Emperor and the Empress. He was the nearest and took me by the hand. He stood still for an instant, then ran forward, took me by the arm, threw himself on my neck and kissed me. I kissed him, and we all of us, including the Empress and Mdme. Walewska, began to weep. Méchante femme,' exclaimed the Emperor, voilà douze ans que tu me tiens rigueur!'

"Then there was silence which the Emperor broke by saying, 'Je crois que nous

ferions mieux de nous asseoir.' He stood with his back to the fire, the Empress and I sitting on each side, and Mdme. Walewska behind the Empress. Then again there was a silence, and the child was sent for. "I took him in my arms and kissed him. He looked astonished. The Emperor took him between his knees, and told him to repeat one of his fables. I have forgotten,' the boy said, 'the ends of them all.' Then tell us the beginning of one of them.' 'I have forgotten the beginning.' Then let us have the middle. Mais, papa, où commence le milieu ?'

"It was clear that he would not show off, so he was allowed to go to his pony.

"Cette dame,' he said to his mother in the evening, doit avoir été très-grande amie de papa, ou elle ne m'aurait pas embrassé.'

"The child had broken the ice, though still there was some restraint; but it wore off, and we talked as familiarly as ever. As I went he said, 'J'espère que tu ne me quittes pas pour douze ans.'

"Since that time I see him or the Empress two or three times a week. I find him in the evenings alone in his cabinet, at work on his Cæsar; but he is glad to break it off, and to talk to me for hours on old times. He is quite unembarrassed, for his conscience does not reproach him-indeed, no Buonaparte ever has to complain of his conscience.

"I sometimes forget all that has passed since we saw one another for the last time before December 1851, when he was still an innocent man. But from time to time the destruction of our liberties, the massacres of 1851, the deportations of 1852, and the cruelties which revenged the Attentat rise to my mind, and I shrink from the embrace of a man stained with the blood of many of my friends."

"Do you see the Empress and the child ?" I asked.

for an opportunity, which, when it comes, he does not always seize : he often keeps deferring and deferring execution until execution has become impossible or useless. But he forgets nothing that he has learned, he renounces nothing that he has planned. "On the 29th of January 1849, six weeks after he became President, he intended a coup d'état. He read his plan to Changarnier, and the instant Changarnier began to oppose it, he folded up the paper and was silent.

"But he never abandoned it, and two years and a half afterwards he executed it." "What," I asked, " are Louis Napoleon's habits now?"

'Worse than they used to be," she answered. "He rides little, walks little, and is getting fat. He hates more and more the details of business, and yet is more and more afraid of trusting them to his ministers. But his Cæsar absorbs and consoles him. He said to the bureau of the Academy, when they came to announce the election of Feuillet, 'Je travaille à me rendre digne de vous.' He thought at one time of offering himself for the vacancy made by Pasquier. He intended to be present at his own reception, and to read, in the frightful academic green coat, the éloge of his predecessor, and to characterise the nine different governments which Pasquier had served.

"But, with his habit of procrastination, he has delayed his candidature till the first two volumes of his Cæsar have been published. The first volume is ready, and he intended to publish it immediately; but the booksellers tell him that they will sell better in couples. And as even emperors must submit to booksellers, he waits till the second is finished."

April 15, 1863.-Madame R., the Corcelles, and Lady Ashburton breakfasted with us. We had an agreeable conversation, but I do not recollect much of it.

The Corcelles and Madame R. seemed delighted to meet again. They had not seen one another for years. I remarked to Madame R. that I had not seen at Lady Mowley's great party in celebration of the Prince of Wales's marriage more than three French persons that I had ever seen before.

royal caste. If his aristocracy is not of the purest blood, it is at least rich."

"Have you seen Michel Chevalier's building in the Avenue de l'Impératrice? It is to cost a million. Evans, the Emperor's dentist, has become a millionaire. He had early information that the Avenue de l'Impératrice was to be created, and bought land at low prices which is now worth 250,ooo francs an acre. Persigny is building a palace at Chamarand."

"Not out of his savings," I said, "for his salary as minister is not above 120,000 francs, and as senator 35,000, and he must spend the whole."

"Nor does he," said Madame R., "do as most of the others do, steal or take pots de vin. The Emperor gives him whatever he wants."

April 20, 1863.-We breakfasted with Mdme. R., and met there Renan and Maury, librarian of the Institute, the Emperor's principal assistant in his Life of Cæsar. I asked Mdme. R. when she had last seen the Emperor.

"Yesterday," she said. "It is arranged that I go to him every Sunday at five, and stay till a quarter to seven, when he has to dress for dinner, but often, as was the case yesterday, he keeps me much longer, and then he has to run for it, that he may not exhaust the patience of the Empress and of the chef. He delights to talk to a person not bound by etiquette, who can question him and contradict him and talk over all his youth. I never conceal my Republican opinions, and he treats them as the harmless follies of a woman.

"Yesterday he was in very high spirits. I suspect that he has just made up his mind on some subject that has been teasing him. He dislikes coming to a decision, but perhaps for that very reason, when he does so, he feels relieved and happy. He may have decided what to do about Poland, or what to write about some questionable anecdote about Cæsar or when the elections shall be.

"I think that it may have been about Poland. I told him that in some classes of society, I found an opinion that the forcible intervention of France in favor of Poland was impracticable. His answer was, 'Ei, Ei.'"

"Seriously," I asked, "or contemptuously?"

"Laughingly," she answered, "and

contemptuously. His 'Ei, Ei,' may have meant nothing, but I think that it may have meant something. There certainly has been a great pressure on him to take up the cause of the Polish insurgents. There are the wildest ideas as to the political importance of Poland. The war party talks of a Poland twice as large as Prussia, and one third more populous, which is to be the ally of France, and her citadel, interposed between Russia, Austria, and Prussia, a check on them all. It affirms that it would be an easy thing to march on Poland by land, and that the sight of the first French uniform would raise up a Polish population of twenty millions.

"It associates Poland with the proudest times of the Empire. The Emeutiers recollect that the Poles have always fought by their sides—have often been their leaders, and sometimes their exciters. The army is, as it always is, and perhaps ought to be, furious for war. The Catholic party hopes to make a religious war. It cares not what damage it may do to the country if it can do good to the Pope and harm to the Greek Church and to its schismatic head. Though the peasantry of the provinces are pacific, the low town population-and it is the population of towns, or rather of Paris, that governs France-is always warlike. It does not suffer, or does not know that it suffers, the miseries of a war, and it delights in the excitement. If the insurrection be put down in a couple of months, or within three months, it will be a fait accompli, and be forgotten. But if it lasts, if it be carried on with heroic vigor on the part of the Poles and with barbarity on the part of the Russians, a force will be put on him which I doubt his being able to withstand. Again, if the New Chamber should be intolerable—and no one knows how it may act he may dissolve it, appeal to the people in defence of Poland, and flatter them by promises of which war must be the result. It will be a very dangerous expedient, but he is accustomed to rush into dangerous enterprises, and to succeed in them.

"There is one subject, however, on which he has not decided, and that is the time of his candidature for the Academy. Pasquier's vacancy is to be filled up on Thursday next. His mind is still set on pronouncing Pasquier's éloge. I wish,'

he said to me, 'that I could get some one to propose me as a candidate.' "That is not the practice,' I said. 'The candidate presents himself.'

"I am shy,' he answered. If my Cæsar, or even the first volume of it, had appeared, I should feel that I had some claims; but I am not vain enough to think that what I have published as yet, entitles me to the honor of being a member of the first literary society in the world. I want somebody to say so for me. You may think that I ought to delay my candidature till the Cæsar has appeared. But I know now whom I should succeed, and whose éloge I should have to pronounce. If I delay I may have to make a speech in praise of Feuillet or of Victor Hugo.'

"You," I said to Maury, "have read his Cæsar as far as it has gone. Will it give him a claim to the Academy ?"

"I think," said Maury, "that it will. It is a work of great and sagacious research, and contains passages admirably written. It is a wonderful improvement on the Idées Napoléoniennes."

lect is that of Dr. Johnson, whose best work, the Lives of the Poets, was written after he was seventy."

"That may be the case," answered Maury, "in England, where you enjoy a language much purer from arbitrary restraints and idioms than ours is, and where you prefer the substance to the form. La forme is our idol. It resembles cookery. The best meat ill cooked is uneatable. Inferior meat well cooked may be delicious.

"We have been at work refining our style, introducing into it des malices et des délicatesses, until to write perfect French is the acquisition of only a long life. Our best writers, Voltaire, for instance, have gone on improving till they died. We spend much of what you would call useless labor on it, we omit ideas worth preserving because we cannot express them with perfect elegance; we are somewhat in the state of a man speaking a foreign language, qui ne dit pas ce qu'il veut, mais ce qu'il peut; but we have created a literature which will live, for it is the style, not the matter, which preserves the book. Good matter ill expressed is taken possession of by a master of style, and reproduced in a readable form, and then the first writer is forgotten."

On the 21st of December, 1872, H.M.S. Challenger, an eighteen gun corvette, of 2000 tons burden, sailed from Portsmouth harbor for a three, or perhaps four, years' cruise. No man-of-war ever left that famous port before with so singular an equipment. Two of the eighteen sixty-eight pounders of the Challenger's armament remained to enable her to speak with effect to sea-rovers, haply devoid of any respect for science, in the remote seas for which she is bound; but the main-deck was, for the most part, stripped of its warlike gear, and fitted up with physical, chemical, and biological laboratories; photography had its dark cabin; while apparatus for dredging, trawling, and sounding; for photo

meters and for thermometers, filled the space formerly occupied by guns and guntackle, pistols and cutlasses.

The crew of the Challenger match her fittings. Captain Nares, his officers and men, are ready to look after the interests of hydrography, work the ship, and, if need be, fight her as seamen should; while there is a staff of scientific civilians, under the general direction of Dr. Wyville Thomson, F.R.S., (Professor of Natural History in Edinburgh University by rights, but at present detached for duty in partibus) whose business it is to turn all the wonderfully packed stores of appliances to account, and to accumulate, before the ship returns to England, such additions to na