"Excuse me, Monsieur de Chateaubriand," he said; "I left an important deputation to come to talk with you, and I must go back to it. Madame la Duchesse d'Orléans will have told you how happy I should be to do what you might wish; but, believe me, it is I alone who am holding back a threatening crowd. If the Royalist Party is not massacred, it owes its life to my efforts." "Monseigneur," I replied to this statement, so unexpected and so far removed from the subject of our conversation, "I have seen massacres: men who have gone through the Revolution are seasoned. Old soldiers do not allow themselves to be frightened by objects that terrify conscripts." H.R.H. withdrew, and I went to join my friends: "Well?" they exclaimed. "Well, he wants to be King." "And Madame la Duchesse d'Orléans?" "She wants to be Queen." "What did they say to you?" "One spoke to me of pastorals, the other of the dangers threatening France and of 'poor Caroline's' frivolity; both were good enough to convey to me that I might be of use to them, and neither of them looked me in the face." Madame la Duchesse d'Orléans wished to see me once more. M. le Duc d'Orléans did not come to take part in this conversation. Madame la Duchesse d'Orléans explained herself more clearly on the favours with which Monseigneur le Duc d'Orléans proposed to honour me. She was good enough to remind me of what she called my power over public opinion, of the sacrifices which I had made, of the aversion which Charles X. and his family had always shown me, in spite of my services. She told me that, if I wished to go back to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, H.R.H. would be most pleased to reinstate me in that office; but that perhaps I would prefer to return to Rome, and that she (Madame la Duchesse d'Orléans) would see me take this last course with an extreme pleasure, in the interests of our holy religion.