Louis XVIII returned to power and soon Lafayette was opposing him. So it went on for years. He said of himself that he was a man of institutions, not of dynasties; and that he valued first principles so much that he was very willing to compromise on matters of secondary importance. He cared nothing for apparent consistency and did whatever his erratic republican conscience dictated, without a thought of how it might look to others. He was a born optimist, but a poor judge of men; and in spite of repeated disappointments believed the promises of each new ruler who came along. Liberal representative government was of supreme importance in his eyes. If France was not yet ready for a president, she could have it under a king. Each administration [Pg 283]that promised a step in this direction received his support, each lapse from it his censure. That appears to be the key to the many shifting changes of his later life. His popularity among the people waxed and waned. Usually it kept him his seat in the Chamber of Deputies. From 1818 to 1824 he represented the Sarthe; from 1825 to the close of his life the district of Meaux. It was in the interval between that he made his visit to America. He returned to find Charles X king. As that monarch lost popularity his own influence gained. Charles's ministers thought their sovereign showed ill-placed confidence and esteem when he freely acknowledged that this liberal leader had rendered services to his family that no true man could forget. "I know him well," Charles said. "We were born in the same year. We learned to mount a horse together at the riding academy at Versailles. He was a member of my division in the Assembly of Notables. The fact is neither of us has changed--he no more than I." That was just the point. Neither had changed. Charles X was a Bourbon to the bone, and Lafayette had come back from America with renewed health, replenished means, and all the revolutionary impetuosity of youth. He had not one atom of that willingness to put up with "things as they are" which grows upon many reformers as their hair turns gray. John Quincy Adams divined this and advised Lafayette to have nothing more to do with revolutions. "He is sixty-eight years old, but there is fire beneath the cinders," the President of the United States confided to his diary in August, 1825.