"I am, monsieur le comte, awaiting the King's orders. I presume that you dispatched a courier to me after M. de Montebello's arrival in Paris. It is urgent that I should receive either the announcement of an extraordinary embassy, or my new credentials together with the instructions of the Government. "Are my five French cardinals coming? Politically speaking, their presence here is very little necessary. I have written to Monseigneur le Cardinal de Latil[49] to offer him my services in case he should decide to come, "I have the honour to be, etc. "_P.S._ I enclose a copy of a letter which M. le Comte de Funchal has written to me. I have not replied to this ambassador in writing; I only went to talk to him." TO MADAME RÉCAMIER "ROME, _Monday_ 23 _February_ 1829. "Yesterday the Pope's obsequies were finished. The pyramid of 'paper' and the four candelabra were fine enough, because they were of immense proportions and reached up to the cornice of the church. The last _Dies iræ_ was admirable. It is composed by an unknown man, who belongs to the pope's chapel, and who seems to me to possess a very different sort of genius from Rossini's. To-day we pass from sorrow to joy; we sing the _Veni Creator_ for the opening of the Conclave; then we shall go every evening to see if the ballot-papers are burnt, if the smoke issues from a certain chimney: on the day on which there is no smoke, the pope will have been appointed, and I shall go to see you again; that is the whole business as it affects me. The King of England's speech is very insolent to France! What a deplorable expedition that Morean Expedition is! Are they beginning to see it? General Guilleminot wrote me a letter on the subject which made me laugh; he can only have written as he did because he presumed me to be a minister." [Sidenote: Letters to Madame Récamier.] "25 _February._ "Death is here; Torlonia went yesterday evening after two days' illness; I have seen him lying all painted on his death-bed, his sword at his side. He lent money on pledges, but on such pledges! On antiquities, on pictures huddled promiscuously in an old, dusty palace. That was different from the shop in which the Miser put away 'a Bologna lute, fitted with all its strings, or nearly... the skin of a lizard three feet long... and a four-foot bedstead with slips in Hungarian point[50].'