Besides, since M. de Villèle parted from me, politics had become deranged: the ultraism against which the wisdom of the President of the Council still struggled had gone beyond him. The annoyance which he experienced at the hands of opinion at home and of the movement of opinion abroad rendered him irritable: hence the fettering of the press, the suppression of the National Guard of Paris, and so forth. Was I to allow the Monarchy to perish, in order to acquire the reputation of an hypocritical moderation on the look-out? I believed myself most sincerely to be fulfilling a duty in fighting at the head of the Opposition, paying too much attention to the peril which I beheld on one side, not enough struck with the contrary danger. When M. de Villèle was overthrown, I was consulted on the nomination of a new ministry. If they had, as I suggested, taken M. Casimir Périer, General Sébastiani and M. Royer-Collard, things might have held out. I would not accept the department of the Navy and I made them give it to my friend M. Hyde de Neuville; I also twice refused the Ministry of Public Instruction; never would I have entered the Council unless I were the master. I went to Rome to seek my other self among the ruins, for there are in my person two distinct beings, having no communication one with the other. I will, however, make a loyal admission: my excessive resentment does not justify me according to the rule and the time-honoured word of virtue; but my whole life serves as my excuse. An officer in the Navarre Regiment, I had returned from the forests of America to join the fleeing Legitimacy, to fight in its ranks against my own judgment, all without conviction, from sheer soldierly duty. I remained eight years on foreign soil, overwhelmed with every wretchedness. This generous tribute paid, I returned to France in 1800. Bonaparte sought me out and placed me; on the death of the Duc d'Enghien, I devoted myself once more to the memory of the Bourbons. My words on the tomb of Mesdames at Trieste revived the wrath of the dispenser of empires; he threatened to have me cut down on the steps of the Tuileries. The pamphlet _De Bonaparte et des Bourbons_ was worth to Louis XVIII., on his own confession, as much as a hundred thousand men. With the aid of the popularity which I then enjoyed, anti-Constitutional France understood the institutions of the Legitimate Royalty. During the Hundred Days, the Monarchy saw me by its side in its second exile. Lastly, through the Spanish War, I had contributed to the suppression of the conspiracies, to the union of opinions under one and the same cockade, and to the restoring of its range to our cannon. The rest of my plans are well known: to extend our frontiers, to give new crowns in the New World to the family of St. Louis. [Sidenote: My difference with him.]