"I have received with the deepest gratitude the mark of confidence and esteem with which you have consented to honour me; it lays upon my loyalty the duty of doubling my zeal, while not refraining from placing before the eyes of Your Royal Highness what appears to me to be the truth. "I will speak first of the so-called conspiracies, the rumour of which will perhaps have reached Your Royal Highness. It is asserted that these have been concocted or provoked by the police. Leaving the fact on one side, and without insisting upon the intrinsically reprehensible nature of conspiracies, be they true or false, I will content myself with observing that our national character is at once too light and too frank to succeed in such tasks. And so, during the last forty years, this sort of guilty enterprise has invariably failed. Nothing is more common than to hear a Frenchman publicly boast of being in a plot: he tells the whole details of it, without forgetting the day, place and hour, to some spy whom he takes for a brother; he says aloud, or rather exclaims to the passers-by: "'We have forty thousand men all told, we have sixty thousand cartridges, in such a street, number so-and-so, the corner-house.' "And then our Cataline goes off to dance and laugh. "Secret societies have a long range only because they proceed by revolutions and not by conspiracies; they aim at changing doctrines, ideas and manners, before changing men and things; their progress is slow, but their results certain. Publicity of thought will destroy the influence of secret societies; it is public opinion which will now effect in France that which occult congregations accomplish among unemancipated nations. "The departments in the West and South, which they seem to wish to drive to extremities by means of arbitrary measures and violence, retain the spirit of loyalty for which our old manners were distinguished; but that half of France will never conspire, in the narrow sense of the word: it forms a sort of camp standing at ease under arms. Admirable as a reserve force of the Legitimacy, it would be insufficient as an advance-guard and would never assume the offensive successfully. Civilization has made too much progress to allow of the outburst of one of those intestine wars, leading to great results, which were the outlet and the scourge of centuries at once more Christian and less enlightened than our own. "What exists in France is not a monarchy; it is a republic: one, truly, of the worst quality. This republic is plastroned with a royalty which receives the blows and prevents them from striking on the Government itself.