_January 25th._--The Clerical party has tried to refute the article of the 18th, and the Chief wishes to have a reply prepared. For this purpose Bucher brings me a sketch of the Prince’s ideas on the matter. The article written on this information, which was again to be sent to the _Kölnische Zeitung_, ran as follows: “My letter on the relations of the Tuileries and Rome before the outbreak of the war would seem to have hit the Ultramontanes in a tender place. They reply to-day through their Bonn organ in a tone of great irritation, and somewhat in the temper (here I used the Chief’s own words) of a man at the dentist’s when the forceps closes on his bad tooth. Their anger leads them so far astray that they sometimes lose both memory and judgment. In the article in question we read, _inter alia_: ‘Ollivier was a declared Gallican, therefore an opponent of the Pope and the Jesuits. His colleagues were almost all liberal Catholics.... Accordingly, one of the first steps taken by Count Daru was to send to Rome a menacing Note with regard to the Council, such as no other Government had ventured to despatch. He did everything in his power to promote a decision in accordance with the views of the minority, threatening even that, in the event of the Papal infallibility being proclaimed, France would be compelled to withdraw the protection which she had hitherto accorded to the Pope.’ The first thing to be said in reply to this is that Ollivier was _not_ a declared Gallican, and indeed nothing whatever except a vain place-hunter who could not resist the influences brought to bear upon him by Eugénie. Furthermore, when the war broke out Daru was no longer one of Ollivier’s colleagues, and his Note to the Curia had been dropped by his successor, a striking proof in support of our contention. The Ultramontane tendencies of the Empress had in the meantime won the upper hand, and no one will be misled by the Bonn newspaper’s attempt to represent the withdrawal of the French troops from the States of the Church as the execution of Daru’s threat. That measure was a military necessity to which Eugénie was forced much against her will. The manner in which the Empress is treated in the ultramontane _pseudo-démenti_ is both interesting and instructive. For the writer Eugénie is now ‘pious’ only within quotation marks, and she is said to have taken her nieces to anti-Christian and decidedly immoral and irreligious lectures, &c. The good lady has really not deserved such treatment, and it would have been much more becoming for the Ultramontanes to place on her head the martyr’s crown, which she has richly earned in their service through her bitter hatred of Prussia. When, on the contrary, they now insult and disavow her, they display not only ingratitude, but stupidity, a circumstance only to be explained by the confusion of ideas to which men are so frequently liable when unpleasant truths are sprung upon them. For after such