The Duc de Broglie seems to have been the most high-minded and independent of all the Ministers who have been in place, and the only one who kicked against the personal supremacy of the King in the conduct of affairs. He looked to constitutional analogies, and thought it incompatible with Ministerial responsibility. The King appealed to the example of William III., and said to Lord Granville, 'King William presided in person at his council board, after your revolution?' It was Broglie's scruple (for it hardly ever amounted to resistance) on this head that made the King dislike him so much. It is certainly true that the present state of things is an anomaly, but France is in its infancy as to constitutional practice, and the doctrine of Ministerial responsibility, with all its indispensable consequences, is not understood. Nothing can exemplify this more than the recent case of a man which was agitated in the Chambers, and passed off so easily. He was one of the French refugees in Switzerland, and Montalivet, Minister of the Interior, the man most in the King's confidence, engaged him in his service to act as a spy on the other refugees, but without letting Thiers (President of the Council and Minister for Foreign Affairs) know that he had done so. Accordingly Thiers demanded, through the French Ambassador, the Duc de Montebello, that this man (with the rest) should be expelled from Switzerland, he being at the time the agent of Thiers' own colleague. In the course of the subsequent discussions this fact came out, when Thiers declared he had been ignorant of his employment, and Montalivet merely said that he had acted as he deemed best for the interest of the country, and this excuse was taken and nothing more said. Thiers took it more quietly than he would otherwise have done, because he had committed himself in his correspondence with Montebello, and it would not have suited him to have his letters published. At that time the Duke of Orleans was gone to Vienna, and Thiers was in all the fervour of his hopes of obtaining one of the Archduchesses for the Prince, and he was therefore the humble servant of Austria, and endeavouring to court her favour in all ways, especially by truckling to her views in the affair of the refugees.