A traveller from the south of France says that he saw everywhere the portrait of Henry V. Besides the mysterious hold which legitimacy keeps upon the vulgar and the polite alike, there are associations with it which operate on all classes of men. Tradesmen and manufacturers are for legitimacy, because they love peace, and want to make money. The _roturiers_ sooner or later learn the misery of mobs, and the love of change makes them willing to welcome home the king, especially as they mistake their own hearts, and flatter themselves that their sudden loyalty is proof of remaining virtue. Then the profligate and abandoned, they want a monarchy, in hopes of another riot in the palace. It may be doubted whether the _blouses_ can be permanently contented without a king to curse. The national anthem cannot be sung with any spirit, unless there be a monarch who can be imagined to hear all its imprecations against tyrants: in fact, the king must come back, if only to make sense of the Marseilles Hymn. Que veut cette horde d'esclaves, De traîtres, de rois conjurés? Pour qui ces ignobles entraves, Ces fers, dès long-tems préparés? What imaginable sense is there in singing these red-hot verses at a feast of fraternity, and in honour of the full possession of absolute liberty? Then, where is the sport of clubs, and the excitement of conspiracies, if there's no king to execrate within locked doors? Is Paris to have no more of those nice little _émeutes_? What's to be done with the genius that delights in infernal machines? Who's to be fired at in a glass coach? Everybody knows that Cavaignacs and Lamartines are small game for such sport. Your true assassin must have, at least, a duke of the blood. These are considerations which must have their weight in deciding upon probabilities; though, for one, I am not sure but France is doomed, by retributive justice, to be thus the Tantalus of nations, steeped to the neck in liberty, but forbidden to drink, with kings hanging over them to provoke the eye, and yet escaping the hand. In 1796 de Maistre published his _Considérations sur la France_. They deserve to be reproduced for the present age. Nothing can surpass the cool contempt of the philosophical _réactionnaire_, or the confidence with which, from his knowledge of the past, he pronounces oracles for the future. Do you ask how Henry V. is to recover his rights? In ten thousand imaginable ways. See what Cavaignac might have done last July, had the time been ripe for another Monk! There's but one way to keep legitimacy out; it comes in as water enters a leaky ship, oozing through seams, and gushing through cracks, where nobody dreamed of such a thing. As long as even a tolerable pretender survives, a popular government must be kept in perpetual alarm. But you shall hear the Count, my Basil! Let me give you a free translation.