I have always faced boldly the most cruel phases of my life. No hope was left to me of ever gaining Madame de Fersen's love. I therefore gathered religiously in my heart and memory the slightest traces of this ineffable love, as one gathers the sacred and precious remnants of a departed being, to come daily and contemplate them with dreamy sadness, and ask of them the melancholy charm of memory. Not wishing, however, to be prostrated, and hoping to find some distraction in work, I went assiduously to M. de Sérigny's study. He was truly an excellent man. He showed himself full of kindness to me. Having doubtless assured himself of my scrupulous discretion, he soon gave me a flattering mark of his confidence in me, by entrusting me to make a clear and concise summing up of his diplomatic correspondence. This brief was to be handed daily to the king. This work, it is true, appeared of much greater importance than it really was, since there was at that time no great political question pending in Europe. Almost all these despatches, written mostly in very faint ink, and very poor French, contained only vague and trifling particulars about foreign courts, particulars which had frequently even been discounted in the public print. I convinced myself of that which I had always surmised, that in modern times, and with a representative government like ours, diplomacy which may be called current is almost nothing; the vital questions of nations are fought on fields of battle, in the Chambers, or in congresses. Most of the time (I speak only of representative governments) diplomatic positions are mere sinecures which ministers use as a means of action or corruption, by disposing of them by political expediency. I was all the more struck by the futility of the correspondence under my eyes, because my father had formerly made me almost go through a whole course of political law, and I had studied with him the most famous negotiators of the latter half of the seventeenth century. My great-great-grandfather having filled certain missions conjointly with Messieurs d'Avaux, de Lyonne, and Courtin, we had at Serval a duplicate of his despatches and theirs, and I must confess that the reading of these documents had made me very fastidious. M. Sérigny himself was a man of second-rate ability; but he had enough tact, shrewdness, and perspicacity to enable him to respond to the modest requirements of his position. When he fought the Opposition in the Chambers, he could extinguish, drown, the most heated discussion with the clear flow of his abundant words, cold and monotonous as a waterfall. From the constitutional point of view M. de Sérigny could just as well have been Minister of Marine, of Justice, or of Finances as Minister of Foreign Affairs, but from the real, special point of view of these ministries, he was incapable of filling any.