"The thing is done now; I have respected your scruples and La Ferronnays'; I have struck out a great deal to please you. But neither of you has placed himself sufficiently, in thought, outside his century and public affairs. To judge of an effect of tone, we should place ourselves at a distance. It is by saying all that one distinguishes one's self from the herd of buttoned-up and over-scrupulous statesmen. I have conceived diplomacy on a new plan; I speak out. You are wrong to dread my revelations; they could only do you credit. I tell you: you will do later, La Ferronnays or you, when you think the danger lessened, and for the same reasons, what you are preventing me from doing now. As far as I am concerned, I give you my authorization beforehand[494]." Since Chateaubriand was induced to leave out of his Memoirs the Spanish War, which was "the great political event of his life," it is fitting that I should here remind the reader, if only in a few words, that this war was an act of high and great politics and not, as the enemies of the Restoration have repeated to satiety, an act of "servitude and subjection to the Northern Cabinets." When M. de Montmorency, then Minister for Foreign Affairs, went to the Congress of Verona, he was the bearer of positive instructions containing these very words: "France being the sole Power which is to act with her troops, she will be the sole judge of that necessity. The plenipotentiaries must not consent that the Congress should lay down the conduct of France with regard to Spain." [Sidenote: Appendix to Book XI.] Led away by the generosity and elevation of his sentiments, which sometimes assumed a tinge of mysticism, to embrace a policy in which the private initiative of each nation should disappear before the decisions taken in common by a sort of directorate of the Great Powers charged to secure the universal prevalence of the interests of justice and humanity, the loyal and chivalrous Mathieu de Montmorency had been induced to demand that Russia, Austria, Prussia and France should address a final notice to Spain, after which the ambassadors were to be recalled. M. de Villèle declared himself against this collective action, in the council of ministers held at the Tuileries on the 25th of January 1822. He claimed the right of France to intervene alone. Louis XVIII. sided with his opinion, and declared that "France occupied a special position towards Spain; that for her to recall her ambassador was either too much or too little;" then he added: "Louis XIV. destroyed the Pyrenees, I will not allow them to be set up again; he placed my House on the Throne of Spain, I shall not allow it to fall from it; my Ambassador must not leave Madrid before the day when a hundred thousand Frenchmen are pushing forward to take his place."