_March 10th._--I called on Thiers yesterday, and had a long talk with him; he declared he was happier unemployed and quite free than he had ever been; he had been all for the war, and was now as much for peace--like every other Frenchman he considered it a necessity; anxious as ever for the English alliance, and ridiculed the idea that we had not accomplished everything that our honour and glory required; bitter against this Government, and maintained that the Emperor might very safely relax the severity of it without giving up anything; indignant with the peculation and corruption that prevailed, and the abominable acts of injustice committed, one of which he mentioned towards his own family. Very pleasant as usual.
The news of the day was the dangerous illness of King Jerome, whose life hangs on a thread. This morning I went to St. Germains to see a stag hunt in the forest--a curious sight, with the old-fashioned _meute_; the officers, and those privileged to wear the uniform, in embroidered coats, jackboots, and cocked hats; _piqueurs_ on horseback and foot with vast horns wound round their bodies; the costume and the sport exactly as in the time of Louis XIV., rather tiresome after a time. The old chateau is a melancholy _délabré_ building, sad as the finishing career of its last Royal inhabitant. These recollections come thick upon one--Anne of Austria and the Fronde, Louis XIV. and Mademoiselle de la Vallière--for here their lives began. When the Queen was here she insisted on being taken up to see Mademoiselle de la Vallière's apartment, to mark which some slight ornaments remain. Here too James II. held his dismal Court and came to his unhappy and bigoted end. After it ceased to be a palace, it became successively a prison, a school, and a barrack, and now the Emperor has a fancy to restore it. I went at night to a great concert at Walewski's, where I fell in with Clarendon, and found he was quite prepared to make peace even on such terms as he can get, in which I encouraged him, and to my surprise he said he did not think it would be a bad peace, though it was not so good as we might have got if the generals had done all they might, or if we had had another campaign. He asked me how I thought people would look on it in England, and I told him from all I heard I thought _now_ the wish was for peace, and that the peace would be well enough taken. This he now thinks himself, and he said peace would certainly be concluded before the end of the month.