"The English newspapers, copying from the French newspapers, this morning give news from Madrid up to and including the 8th. I never expected better from the King of Spain, and I was not surprised. If that unhappy Prince is doomed to perish, the manner of the catastrophe is not a matter of indifference to the rest of the world: the dagger would lay low only the Monarch, the scaffold might kill the Monarchy. Already the judgments on Charles I. and Louis XVI. are a great deal too much: Heaven preserve us from a third judgment which would appear to establish, through the authority of crimes, a sort of right of peoples and a body of jurisprudence against the kings! We can now expect anything: a declaration of war on the part of the Spanish Government is one of the chances which the French Government must have foreseen. In any case, we shall soon be obliged to put an end to the sanitary cordon, for, once the month of September is past and the plague not reappearing at Barcelona, it would be a real mockery still to speak of a _sanitary cordon_; we should therefore quite frankly confess to an _army_ and give the reason which obliges us to maintain that army. Would not that be equivalent to a declaration of war against the Cortes? On the other hand, shall we break up the sanitary cordon? That act of weakness would compromise the safety of France, disgrace the ministry and revive the hopes of the revolutionary faction in our midst. "I have the honour to be, etc., etc., etc." Since the Congress of Vienna and of Aix-la-Chapelle, the princes of Europe had their heads turned with congresses: it was there that one amused one's self and divided a few peoples. Scarcely was the Congress, commenced at Laibach and continued at Troppau, ended, when they thought of convoking another in Vienna, at Ferrara, or at Verona; Spanish affairs offered the occasion to hasten the moment. Each Court had already marked out its ambassador. In London, I saw every one preparing to leave for Verona: as my head was full of Spanish affairs and as I was dreaming of a plan for the honour of France, I thought I could be of some use to the new congress by making myself known in a respect which was not thought of. I had written to M. de Montmorency on the 24th of May; but I met with no favour. The minister's long reply is evasive, embarrassed, entangled; a marked aversion to me is ill-disguised under expressions of friendliness; it ends with this paragraph: