Thiers' letter expressed considerable alarm. After describing the failure of Walewski and the other French agents, and enlarging upon the efforts they had made, and were still making, to restrain the Pasha, and prevent his making any offensive movement, he said that this was the Pasha's ultimatum. He offered, if France would join him and make common cause with him, to place his fleets and armies at her disposal, and to be governed in all things by her advice and wishes, a thing utterly impossible for France to listen to. Upon the impossibility of this alliance being represented to him, the prudence of keeping quiet strenuously urged upon him, and the utmost endeavours made to convince him that a defensive policy was the only wise and safe course for him, he had engaged not to move forward, or take any offensive course unless compelled to do so, by violence offered to him; his army was concentrated at the foot of the Taurus, and there (but in a menacing attitude) he would consent to its remaining; but if any European troops were to advance against him, or be transported to Syria, any attempt made to foment another insurrection in Syria, or any attack made upon his fleet, or any violence offered to his commerce, then he would cross the Taurus, and, taking all consequences, commence offensive operations. In that case, said Guizot, Constantinople might be occupied by the Russians, and the British fleet enter the Sea of Marmora; and if that happened, he could not answer for the result in France, and he owned that he (and Thiers expressed the same in his letter) was in the greatest alarm at all these dangers and complications. He had seen Palmerston this morning, and read Thiers' letter to him. I asked him if it had made any impression on Palmerston. He said, 'Not the slightest;' that he had said, 'Oh! Mehemet Ali cedera; il ne faut pas s'attendre qu'il cede a la premiere sommation; mais donnez-lui quinze jours, et il finira par ceder.' Guizot said that the failure of so many of his predictions and expectations had not in the slightest degree diminished Palmerston's confidence, and that there was in fact no use whatever in speaking to him on the subject. Guizot is evidently in great alarm, and well he may be, for there can be no doubt that his Government are in a position of the greatest embarrassment, far from inclined to war, the King especially abhorring the very thoughts of it, and at the same time so far committed that if the four allies act with any vigour and drive Mehemet Ali to desperation, France must either kindle the flames of war, or, after all her loud and threatening tone, succumb in a manner not only intolerably galling to the national pride, but which really would be very discreditable in itself.