of income, an appointment entirely suited to your taste, a high and magnificent office, the empire of the fine arts at Rome, the felicity, in fine, of having at length received the recompense for your long and laborious struggles. Honour is to be won, esteem preserved, at no other price."--Vol. ix. 141, 142. On arriving at Paris after he had resigned his appointment as ambassador at Rome, Chateaubriand found that many of the kind and officious friends who had so strongly urged _him_ to resign, had themselves quietly accepted appointments under the Polignac Administration! He withdrew, however, in pursuance of his resolution, into private life; and in order to avoid the expenses of Paris, which exceeded what his reduced income could bear, he retired to Dieppe in June 1830. When there he received the stunning intelligence of the Ordinances of July. His part was immediately taken. He returned with the utmost expedition to Paris, resolved to share the fate of his country whatever it might be, and to exert himself to the utmost to mitigate the calamities which he foresaw awaited it. His first step on arriving in the capital was to write a letter to the King, making a tender of his services to negotiate with the popular leaders who had got the command in the capital. The only answer he received was a verbal one, that M. de Montemart had been appointed to the head of the Ministry, and a reference to him. But M. de Montemart could not be found; and even if he had been, affairs had gone too far to admit of any remedy by individual efforts, how powerful soever. The nation would have a Revolution with its consequences, and it was doomed to have a Revolution with its consequences. But although Louis Philippe was successful, Chateaubriand foresaw that his throne was established on a rotten foundation: that the _juste milieu_, resting neither on the attachment of a loyal, nor the passions of a conquering people, could not be of lasting endurance; and that, in default of all principles of honour whereon to rest a Government, those of interest alone remained. He has left the following memorable prophecy of the fate awaiting a monarchy cradled in treason and fostered by selfishness:-- "Louis Philippe, his Government, the whole of that impossible and contradictory combination, _will perish in a time more or less retarded by fortuitous events_, by complications of interests interior and exterior, by the apathy or corruption of individuals, by the levity of disposition, the indifference and want of nerve in characters. But be its duration long or short, the present dynasty will not exist long enough for the House of Orleans to strike its roots in the soil of France."--Vol. ix. 333.[6] [6] M. de Chateaubriand died in 1847, before the Revolution of 1848.