The Vicomte de Montmorency refused to enter into negociations on the Spanish Colonies with the Cabinet of St. James. On the 19th of May, I heard of the almost sudden death of M. le Duc de Richelieu[189]. That honest man had patiently borne his first retirement from office; but, when business came to be taken from him for too long a time, he failed because he had not a double life to replace that which he had lost. The great name of Richelieu has been handed down to our time only by women. The revolutions continued in America. I wrote to M. de Montmorency: No. 26. "LONDON, 28 _May_ 1822. "Peru has just adopted a monarchical Constitution. European policy should employ every care to obtain a similar result in the case of the colonies which declare themselves independent. The United States are singularly afraid of the establishment of an empire in Mexico. If ever the whole of the New World is Republican, the monarchies of the Old World will perish." There was much spoken of the distress of the Irish peasants, and society danced in order to console them. A great full-dress ball at the Opera occupied sensitive souls. The King, meeting me in a corridor, asked me what I was doing there and, taking me by the arm, he led me to his box. The English pit, in my days of exile, was noisy and coarse; sailors drank ale in the pit, ate oranges, apostrophized the boxes. I found myself one evening next to a sailor who had entered the theatre drunk; he asked me where he was; I told him: "At Covent Garden." "Pretty garden, indeed!" he exclaimed, seized, like Homer's gods, with inextinguishable laughter. Invited lately to an evening-party at Lord Lansdowne's[190], I was presented by His Majesty to a severe-looking lady, seventy-three years old: she was dressed in crape, wore a black veil like a diadem on her white hair, and resembled a queen who had abdicated her throne. She greeted me in a solemn voice with three mangled sentences from the _Génie du Christianisme_; then she said to me, with no less solemnity: "I am Mrs Siddons[191]." If she had said to me, "I am Lady Macbeth," I should have believed her. I had seen her formerly on the stage in all the strength of her talent. One has but to live to find again those wrecks of one century cast by the billows of time upon the shore of another century. My French visitors in London were M. le Duc[192] and Madame la Duchesse de Guiche[193], of whom I will talk to you at Prague; M. le Marquis de Custine, whom I had seen as a child at Fervacques; and Madame la Vicomtesse de Noailles[194], as agreeable, witty and gracious as though she were still wandering, at fourteen years of age, in the beautiful gardens of Méréville.