These incontestable facts you may explain as you will; if they give to my political career a relative value which it does not possess of itself,çoisRené I shall get no vainer, I feel no evil joy at the chance which connects my short-lived name with the events of the centuries. Whatever the variety of the accidents of my adventurous course, wherever names and facts may have led me, the last horizon of the picture is always threatening and sad.
Juga cœpta moveri Silvarum, visæque canes ululare per umbram[334].
But, if the scene has changed in a deplorable manner, I must, they say, accuse only myself: to avenge what appeared to me an injury, I divided everything, and this division in the last result produced the overthrow of the Throne. Let us see.
M. de Villèle has declared that it was impossible to govern either with me or without me. With me, there he was wrong; without me, at the time when M. de Villèle said that, he was saying the truth, for the most varied opinions made up a majority for me.
M. the President of the Council has never known me. I was sincerely attached to him; I had made him enter his first ministry, as is proved by M. le Duc de Richelieu's note of thanks and the other notes which I have quoted. I had sent in my resignation as Plenipotentiary to Berlin when M. de Villèle retired. They persuaded him that, on his second entrance into office, I desired his place. I had no such desire. I do not belong to the fearless race, deaf to the voice of devotion and reason. The truth is that I have no ambition; that is precisely the passion which I lack, because I have another that governs me. When I asked M. de Villèle to take some important dispatch to the King, to save me the trouble of going to the Palace, in order to leave me at leisure to visit a Gothic chapel in the Rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, he might have felt assured against my ambition, if he had judged better of my puerile candour or of the loftiness of my disdain.
Nothing attracts me in practical life, except, perhaps, the Foreign Office. I was not insensible to the idea that the country would owe to me its liberty at home, its independence abroad. Far from seeking to overthrow M. de Villèle, I had said to the King: