A franker chronicler gives us further details. Under the title, _Madame Cornu et Napoléon III_, M. Eugène d'Eichthal published, in 1897, a number of fragments translated from a posthumous work, _Conservation_, by the English economist, Nassau Senior, who had been brought into contact with a large number of distinguished men of different countries. In 1854, he first met in a salon the wife of the French painter Sébastien Cornu, who was a goddaughter of Queen Hortense and had been a friend from childhood of Louis-Napoleon. She had been able to render him many services when he was a prisoner at Ham, and they had maintained a confidential correspondence even after the _Coup d'État_, which almost interrupted their friendship, Madame Cornu being a good republican. In the course of her acquaintance with the English gentleman, she gave him much information concerning the then ruler of the French nation, which he carefully set down, and which M. d'Eichthal translated for the benefit of his countrymen. On one occasion she said: "The mental faculties of Louis-Napoleon present many great superiorities and great deficiencies. He has neither originality nor invention. He neither knows how to reason nor to discuss. He has very few fixed or general principles, but he is a very keen observer, noting quickly the weaknesses and the stupidities of those around him. In the company of some persons with whom he feels at ease, his wit and his gaiety are delicious. "There is an equal want of accord in his moral qualities. He is extremely mild and amiable; his friendships are durable, but his passions are not so. He has, in a high degree, decision, obstinacy, dissimulation, patience, and confidence in himself. He is not arrested by any scruples. That which we call a sense of good and evil, he calls prejudices...." Installed in the Élysée as Prince-President in 1849, he began to prepare the way for the _Coup d'État_ and the zealous republicans saw with alarm the species of informal court which he was already gathering around him. To attract the members of the higher society, he instituted a series of weekly receptions; all the ground-floor of the palace, including three salons and a gallery, was thrown open, and there was added a light edifice connecting the main façade with the wall of the garden, facing on the Avenue de Marigny. A decree of the 4th of January, 1850, elevated the ex-king Jérôme, then governor of the Invalides, to the rank of marshal of France, by a mere exercise of the presidential authority. His term of office and that of the Assemblée both expired in 1852, with an interval of three months between them, but the violent measures of the 2d of December, 1851, made him president for a term of three years, and the constitution which he had proposed was ratified by the nation by a tremendous majority.