"There has been a first ball at Torlonia's[673]. I met all the English on earth there; I thought myself still Ambassador in London. The Englishwomen appear to me to be _figurantes_ who are engaged to dance in the winter in Paris, Milan, Rome, Naples, and who return to London in the spring, when their engagements have expired. The hoppings on the ruins of the Capitol, the uniform manners which 'great' society puts on everywhere are very strange things: if even I had the resource of escape into the deserts of Rome! "What is really deplorable here, what clashes with the nature of the place is that multitude of insipid Englishwomen and frivolous dandies who, holding each other linked by the arm, as the bats do by the wing, parade their eccentricity, their boredom and their insolence at your receptions, and make themselves at home in your house as at an inn. This vagrant and swaggering Great Britain makes for your seats at public solemnities, and boxes with you to turn you out of them: all day long it hastily swallows pictures and ruins and, in the evening, it comes to swallow cakes and ices at your parties, feeling that it confers a great honour upon you in doing so. I do not know how an ambassador can endure those unmannerly guests, nor why he does not show them his door." [Sidenote: My Memorandum on the East.] I have spoken in the _Congrès de Vérone_ of the existence of my Memorandum on Eastern Affairs. When I sent it, in 1828, to M. le Comte de La Ferronnays, then Minister for Foreign Affairs, the world was not what it is: in France, the Legitimacy existed; in Russia, Poland had not perished; Spain was still Bourbon; England had not yet the honour of protecting us. Many things, therefore, have become old in this Memorandum: to-day, my foreign policy would, in many respects, be different; twelve years have altered diplomatic relations, but the basis of the truths has remained the same. I have inserted this Memorandum in its entirety in order once more to revenge the Restoration for the absurd reproaches which continue to be obstinately addressed to it, in spite of the evidence of facts. The Restoration, so soon as it had chosen its ministers from among its friends, never ceased to occupy itself with the independence and honour of France: it protested against the Treaties of Vienna; it demanded protective frontiers, not for the vain-glory of pushing itself to the banks of the Rhine, but to ensure its safety; it laughed when they talked to it of the equilibrium of Europe, an equilibrium so unjustly broken where it was concerned: that was why it first wished to cover itself on the south, because it had pleased the others to disarm it on the north. At Navarino, it recovered a navy and the liberty of Greece; the Eastern Question did not take it unawares. I have kept three opinions on the East from the time at which I wrote that Memorandum: