_February 9th._--Yesterday Clarendon told me a curious thing about the Emperor Napoleon and his marriage, which came in a roundabout way, but which no doubt is true. Madame de Montijo's most intimate friend is the Marchioness of Santa Cruz, and to her she wrote an account of what had passed about her daughter's marriage and the Emperor's proposal to her. When he offered her marriage, she expressed her sense of the greatness of the position to which he proposed to raise her. He replied, 'It is only fair that I should set before you the whole truth, and let you know that if the position is very high, it is also perhaps very dangerous and insecure.' He then represented to her in detail all the dangers with which he was environed, his unpopularity with the higher classes, the _malveillance_ of the Great Powers, the possibility of his being any day assassinated at her side, his popularity indeed with the masses, but the fleeting character of their favour, but above all the existence of a good deal of disaffection and hostility in the army, the most serious thing of all. If this latter danger, he said, were to become more formidable, he knew very well how to avert it by a war; and though his earnest desire was to maintain peace, if no other means of self-preservation should remain, he should not shrink from that, which would at once rally the whole army to one common feeling. All this he told her with entire frankness, and without concealing the perils of his position, or his sense of them, and it is one of the most creditable traits I have ever heard of him. It was, of course, calculated to engage and attach any woman of high spirit and generosity, and it seems to have had that effect upon her. It is, however, curious in many ways; it reveals a sense of danger that is not apparently suspected, and his consciousness of it; and it shows how, in spite of a sincere wish to maintain peace, he may be driven to make war as a means of self-preservation, and therefore how entirely necessary it is that we should be on our guard, and not relax our defensive preparations. I was sure from the conversations I had with M. de Flahault at Beaudesert, that he feels the Emperor's situation to be one of insecurity and hazard. He said that it remained to be seen whether it was possible that a Government could be maintained permanently in France on the principle of the total suppression of civil and political liberty, which had the support of the masses, but which was abhorred and opposed by all the elevated and educated classes. The limbs of the body politic are with the Emperor, and the head against him.