My dear Sir,--Many thanks for your kind letter of the 6th. I am still an invalid, _conjuguant_ in all its tenses the verb _grippe_, with its near relation bronchitis. However, I am recovering by-and-by, and the weather--not fine, still very mild--helps me towards recovering my liberty of locomotion. I am the more sorry for my _reclusion_ that I had begun some plantations in my garden. Fancy what it is to plant trees by half-dozens and to buy land by wheelbarrows! We are in a state of partial fermentation and general disgust. The President _videt meliora probatque, deteriora sequitur_; he is absolutely sunken in the opinions, but tolerated, because he lets every party at freedom to plot and to hope. Waddington does not fare better, but Jules Simon has presently no chance of replacing him. The sympathy which Ferry has proclaimed for the Reformed Church [Footnote: See _Times_, November 8th.]--very natural in itself--may be mischievous for them; our nation has never any sympathy for minorities. The leaders of the Clerical party have lowered their teaching and their practices to the level of the most obtuse intellects and the most childish enthusiasms; they make conquests by myriads; and as, in our present state of society, numbers are accounted for everything, the Government and ruling party have already encountered, and shall encounter more and more, a formidable opposition, which, if it does not drag the country into civil war, cannot fail to accelerate and precipitate the fate of the Republican Government. As the Duc d'Aumale seems resolved never to put himself forward, the conjectures hover between Galliffet [Footnote: General de Galliffet was more especially known for the stern justice he had meted out to the Communards of 1871.] and several others, all men of action, although none of them has the prestige which made, in 1799, the task of Bonaparte so wonderfully easy. The 'Great Unknown' will be revealed to us by some sudden stroke; our people is perfectly disposed to acknowledge a master, and prays only that 'nous ayons un bon tyran,' since we must have one.