A public musical assembly took place two or three times in the week. In the evening, on returning from their work, little work-women, their baskets on their arms, journeymen artisans, carrying the tools of their trades, crowded promiscuously into a hall; on entering, they were given a written sheet of music and they joined in the general chorus with astonishing precision. It was something surprising to hear those two or three hundred blended voices. When the piece was finished, each resumed his homeward road. We are very far from this feeling for harmony, a powerful means of civilization; it has introduced into the cottage of the German peasants an education which our rustics lack: wherever there is a piano, there is no more grossness. About the 13th of January, I opened the series of my dispatches with the Minister of Foreign Affairs. My mind easily accommodates itself to this kind of work: why not? Did not Dante[119], Ariosto[120] and Milton[121] succeed as well in politics as in poetry? No doubt I am not Dante, nor Ariosto, nor Milton; nevertheless, Europe and France have seen by the _Congrès de Vérone_ what I could do. My predecessor in Berlin treated me, in 1816, as he treated M. de Lameth[122] in his little verses at the commencement of the Revolution. When one is so amiable, he should not leave minute-books behind him, nor have the orderliness of a clerk when he has not the capacity of a diplomatist. It happens, in the times in which we live, that a gust of wind sends into your place the man against whom you rose up; and, as the ambassador's duty is first to make himself acquainted with the archives of the embassy, behold him coming upon the notes in which he is dealt with in masterly fashion. What would you have? Those profound minds, which worked for the success of the good cause, could not think of everything. [Sidenote: Minute-book revelations.] EXTRACTS FROM THE MINUTE-BOOK OF M. DE BONNAY No. 64. "22 _November_ 1816. "All Europe has taken cognizance and approved of the words which the King addressed to the newly-formed bureau of the Chamber of Peers. I have been asked if it was possible that men devoted to the King, that persons attached to his person and holding places in his Household or in those of our Princes had indeed been able to give their votes to put M. de Chateaubriand into the secretaryship. My reply was that, as the balloting was secret, no one could know how individual votes went. "'Ah,' exclaimed a leading man, 'if the King could be assured of it, I hope that the access to the Tuileries would be forthwith closed to those faithless servants.' "I thought it my duty to make no answer, and I made no answer." "15 _October_ 1815. . . . . . . . . . .