All this was pure reason; but the Lieutenant-general of the Kingdom was aspiring to the crown, and the fearful and ambitious were in a hurry to give it to him. The plebeians of to-day wanted a revolution and did not know how to make it; the Jacobins, whom they have taken for their models, would have flung the men of the Palais-Royal and the praters of the two Chambers into the water. M. de La Fayette was reduced to impotent wishes: pleased at having caused the revival of the National Guard, he allowed himself to be tossed like an old swaddling-band by Philip, whose wet-nurse he imagined himself to be; he grew torpid with this felicity. The old general was no more than liberty fallen asleep, as the Republic of 1793 was no more than a death's-head. The truth is that a truncated Chamber, with no special mandate, had no right whatever to dispose of the crown: it was a Convention expressly called together, formed of the House of Lords and a newly-elected House of Commons, that disposed of the throne of James II. It is also certain that that rump of the Chamber of Deputies, those 221, imbued under Charles X. with the traditions of the hereditary monarchy, brought no disposition fitted to the elective monarchy; they stopped it at its commencement, and forced it to go back to principles of quasi-legitimism. They who forged the sword of the new royalty introduced into the blade a straw which sooner or later will cause it to spring. [Sidenote: The seventh of August.] The 7th of August is a memorable day for me; it is the day on which I had the happiness of ending my political career as I had begun it: a happiness rare enough to-day to give reason for rejoicing in it. The declaration of the Chamber of Deputies concerning the vacancy of the throne had been brought to the Chamber of Peers. I went to take my seat, which, was in the highest row of arm-chairs, facing the President. The Peers seemed to me at once busy and depressed. If some bore on their foreheads the pride of their approaching disloyalty, others bore the shame of a remorse to which they lacked the courage to listen. I said to myself, as I watched this sad assembly: