"We offer our services to our King and country; the whole School of Law asks to go to the front. We will abandon neither our King nor our Constitution. Faithful to French honour, we ask you for arms. The feeling of love which we bear to Louis XVIII. is answerable to you for the constancy of our devotion. We want no more irons, we want liberty. We have it, and they come to snatch it from us. We will defend it to the death. Long live the King! Long live the Constitution!" In this energetic, natural and sincere language, one feels the generosity of youth and the love of liberty. They who come to tell us to-day that the Restoration was received by France with dislike and sorrow are ambitious men who are playing a game, or new-comers who have never known Bonaparte's oppression, or old imperialized revolutionary liars who, after applauding the return of the Bourbons with the rest, now, according to their habit, insult the fallen and return to their instincts of murder, police and servitude. * The King's Speech had filled me with hope. Conferences were held at the house of the President of the Chamber of Deputies, M. Lainé. I there met M. de La Fayette: I had never seen him except at a distance, at another period, under the Constituent Assembly. The proposals were various and for the most part weak, as happens in peril: some wished the King to leave Paris and fall back upon the Havre; others spoke of moving him to the Vendée; one stammered out unfinished sentences; another said that we must wait and see what was coming: what was coming was very visible, for all that. I expressed a very different opinion: oddly enough, M. de La Fayette supported it, and warmly[249]. M. Lainé and Marshal Marmont were also of my opinion. I said: [Illustration: La Fayette.] [Sidenote: My advice to the government.]