"Ah sir, I entreat you, in the name of your rare talent, cease to reward crime and to punish misfortune by the sentences improvised by your muse; do not condemn the first to Heaven, the second to Hell. If, while remaining attached to the cause of liberty and enlightenment, you were to afford an asylum to religion, humanity, innocence, you would see another sort of Nemesis appear before you in your waking hours, one worthy of all the earth's homage. And, while waiting to pour over virtue, better than I know how, 'the whole ocean of your fresh ideas,' continue, in the spirit of vengeance which you have adopted, to drag our turpitude to the _gemoniæ_; overthrow the false monuments of a revolution which has not built the temple fit for its cult; turn up their ruins with the plough-share of your satire; sow salt in that field to make it barren, so that no new vileness can shoot there. I recommend above all, sir, to your attention, that Government which has fallen so low that it trembles before the pride of the obedience, the victory of the defeats, and the glory of the humiliations of the country. "CHATEAUBRIAND." PARIS, RUE D'ENFER, _end of March_ 1832. Those travels and those contests came to an end for me in the year 1831; at the beginning of the year 1832, a new annoyance. The Paris Revolution had left on the streets of Paris a host of Swiss, of Body-guards, of men of all conditions kept by the Court, who were now starving and whom certain monarchical dunderheads, young and foolish under their grey hairs, thought of enlisting for a surprise. In this formidable plot there was no lack of serious, pale, lean, diaphanous, bent persons, with noble faces, eyes still bright, white heads; that past suggested honour resuscitated, coming to try, with its shadowy hands, to restore the Family which it had been unable to maintain with its living hands. Often men on crutches pretend to prop crumbling monarchies; but, at this period of society, the restoration of a mediæval monument has become impossible, because the genius which quickened that architecture is dead: what we take for Gothic is merely antiquated. On the other hand, the heroes of July, whom the _juste-milieu_ had swindled out of the Republic, desired nothing more than to come to an understanding with the Carlists to revenge themselves on a common enemy, remaining free to cut each other's throats after the victory. M. Thiers having extolled the system of 1793 as the work of liberty, victory and genius, young imaginations became kindled at the flame of a conflagration of which they saw only the distant reverberation; they have got no further than the poetry of the Terror: a mad and hideous parody which sets back the hour of liberty. This is to disregard at once time, history and humanity; it is to oblige the world to recoil under the whip of the convict-keeper in order to escape those fanatics of the scaffold.