"But this is too much about myself: let us speak of something more important. I fear lest I should not come to an understanding with you on serious objects, and that would distress me greatly! I want the Charter, the whole Charter, the public liberties to their full extent. Do you want them? "I want religion, like yourself; like you, I hate the Congregation and those societies of hypocrites who transform my servants into spies and who seek nothing at the altar but power. But I think that the clergy, rid of those parasites, may very well enter into a constitutional system and even become the stay of our new institutions. Do you not wish too much to separate it from the political order? Here I am giving you a proof of my extreme impartiality. The clergy, which, I venture to say, owes me so much, does not love me at all, has never defended me nor rendered me any service. But what matter? It is a question of being just and of seeing what is good for religion and the monarchy. "I did not, old friend, doubt your courage; you will, I am convinced, do all that will appear to you to be useful, and your talent answers for your triumph. I shall expect to hear from you again, and I embrace my faithful companion in exile with all my heart. "CHATEAUBRIAND." I resumed my controversies. Every day I had skirmishes and van-guard actions with the soldiers of the ministerial hangers-on; they did not always fight with clean weapons. In the two first centuries of Rome, they punished the horse-soldiers who rode badly to the charge, whether because they were too stout or not brave enough, by condemning them to undergo a bleeding: I made the chastisement my affair. "The universe is changing around us," I said: "new peoples are appearing upon the world's scene, ancient peoples are rising again in the midst of ruins; astonishing discoveries proclaim an approaching revolution in the arts of peace and war: religion, politics, manners, all is assuming a different character. Do we take notice of that movement? Are we marching with society? Are we following the course of the time? Are we preparing to keep our place in a transmuted or growing civilization? No: the men who rule us are as foreign to the state of things in Europe as though they belonged to the people lately discovered in the interior of Africa. What do they know then? The stock-exchange: and even that they know badly. Are we condemned to bear the burden of obscurity to punish us for having undergone the yoke of glory[288]?" The transaction relating to San Domingo furnished me with the occasion to develop some points of our public right, of which no one was thinking.