The former is sure to include a certain number of distinguished and remarkable men, who, even under the chill and restraint of a royal entertainment, venture now and then on some few words that supply the void where conversation should be. At Neuilly it is strictly a family party, where, whatever ease may be felt by the illustrious hosts, the guests have none of it. Juvenal quaintly asks, If that can be a battle where you strike and I am beaten? so one is tempted to inquire, If that can be called society where a royal personage talks rapidly for hours, and the listener must not even look dissent? The King of the French is unquestionably a great man, but not greater in any thing than in the complete mystification in which he has succeeded in enveloping his real character, mingling up together elements so strange, so incongruous, and seemingly inconsistent, that the actual direction or object of any political move he has ever made, will always bear a double appreciation. The haughty monarch is the citizen king; the wily and secret politician, the most free-spoken and candid of men: the most cautious in an intrigue, the very rashest in action. How is it possible to divine the meaning, or guess the wishes, of one whose nature seems so Protean? His foreign policy is, however, the master-stroke of his genius,--the cunning game by which he has conciliated the party of popular institutions and beguiled the friends of absolutism, delighting Tom Buncombe and winning praise from Nicholas. Like all clever men who are vain of their cleverness, he has always been fond of employing agents of inferior capacity, but of unquestionable devotion to his interests. What small intelligences--to use a phrase more French than English--were the greater number of the French ministers and secretaries I have met accredited to foreign courts! I remember Talleyrand’s observation, on the remark being made, was, “His Majesty always keeps the trumps in his own hand.” Though, to be sure, he himself was an evidence to the contrary--a “trump” led boldly out, the first card played! So well did that subtle politician comprehend the future turn events must take, that on hearing, at two o’clock in the morning, that his Royal Highness the Duc d’Orléans had consented to assume the crown, he exclaimed, “And I am now ambassador at St. James’s!” It must have been what the Londoners call “good fun” to have lived in the days of the Empire, when all manner of rapid elevations occurred on every hand. The _commis_ of yesterday, the special envoy to-day; a week ago a corporal, and now gazetted an officer, with the cross of the Legion--on the _grande route_, to become a general. A General, why not a Marshal of France--ay, or a King?