Ah! _Monseigneur_, que votre vie, D'honneurs aujourd'hui si remplie, Diffère de ces heureux temps[434]. Still an obscurity of another kind envelopes me in London. My political position casts into shade my literary fame: not a fool in the three kingdoms but prefers the ambassador of Louis XVIII. to the author of the _Génie du Christianisme_. I shall see how the matter turns after my death, or when I shall have ceased to fill M. le Duc Decazes'[435] place at the Court of George IV.[436], a succession as incongruous as the rest of my life. Now that I have arrived in London as French Ambassador, one of my chief pleasures is to leave my carriage at the corner of some square, and on foot to traverse the back-streets which I frequented in former days, the cheap popular suburbs, where misfortune takes refuge under the protection of a kindred suffering, the nameless shelters which I haunted with my companions in distress, not knowing whether I should have bread to eat on the morrow, I whose table today is covered with three or four courses. At all those narrow and necessitous doors which were once open to me, I see none but strange faces. I no longer meet my fellow-countrymen roaming, recognizable by their gestures, their gait, the shape and age of their clothes. I no longer perceive those martyred priests, wearing the clerical collar, the big three-cornered hat, the long, black, threadbare frock, whom the English used to salute as they passed. Wide streets, lined with palaces, have been cut, bridges built, walks planted with trees: Regent's Park, near Portland Place, occupies the space of the old meadows filled with herds of cows. A cemetery which formed the prospect from the dormer-window of one of my attics has disappeared within the circumference of a factory. When I call upon Lord Liverpool[437], I find it difficult to pick out the spot where stood the scaffold of Charles I.; new buildings, closing in upon the statue of Charles II.[438], have come forward, with forgetfulness, to cover up memorable events. [Sidenote: And as an emigrant.]