"It is not that I have the pretension to be a tearful preacher of sentimental politics, an eternal repeater of white plumes and commonplaces à la Henry IV. Casting my eyes over the space that separates the tower of the Temple from the palace in Edinburgh, I should doubtless find as many calamities heaped up as there are centuries accumulated on a noble race. A woman of sorrow, above all, has been loaded with the heaviest burden, as being the strongest; there is not a heart but breaks at the thought of her: her sufferings have risen so high that they have become one of the grandeurs of the Revolution. But, when all is said and done, no one is obliged to be king: Providence sends particular afflictions to whom it pleases, always brief ones, because life is short; and those afflictions are not counted in the general destinies of the peoples. . . . . . . . . . . . . "Even if the proposition which for ever banishes the deposed Family from French territory be a corollary of the deposition of that Family, that corollary carries no conviction for me.... I should in vain seek my place in the several categories of persons who have become attached to the actual order of things. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . "There are men who, after taking the oath to the Republic One and Indivisible, to the Directory of five persons, to the Consulate of three, to the Empire of one alone, to the First Restoration, to the Additional Act to the Constitutions of the Empire, to the Second Restoration, have something left to swear to Louis-Philippe: I am not so rich. "There are men who flung their word on the Place de Grève, in July, like those Roman goat-herds who play at odd or even among ruins. Those men... treat as a fool and simpleton whosoever does not reduce politics to a question of private interests: I am a fool and a simpleton. "There are timorous people who would have much preferred not to swear, but who saw themselves being butchered, together with their grand-parents, their grandchildren, and all the landlords, if they had not trembled out their oaths: this is a physical effect which I have not yet experienced; I shall wait for the infirmity and, if it comes to me, I shall consider. "There! are great lords of the Empire linked to their pensions by sacred and indissoluble bonds, whatever be the hand they fall from: a pension is in their eyes a sacrament; it stamps a character, like orders or marriage; no pensioned head can ever cease to be so: pensions being charged to the Treasury, they remain charged to the same Treasury. As for me, I have the habit of divorce from Fortune: I am too old for her and abandon her, lest she should leave me.