"There, Madame, you see the precarious state of the sham Legitimacy at home; abroad its position is no more assured. If Louis-Philippe's Government had felt that the Revolution of July cancelled the earlier transactions, that a new national constitution entailed a new political right and changed social interests; if it had shown judgment and courage at the outset of its career, it could, without firing a single cartridge, have endowed France with the frontier which has been taken from her, so keen was the assent of the peoples, so great the stupefaction of the kings. The sham Legitimacy would have paid ready money for its crown with an increase of territory and would have entrenched itself behind that bulwark. Instead of profiting by its republican element to go fast, it has been afraid of its own principles; it has dragged itself on its belly; it has abandoned the nations which have risen for it and through it; it has turned them from the clients that they were into adversaries; it has extinguished warlike enthusiasm; it has changed into a pusillanimous wish for peace an enlightened desire to restore the balance of power between ourselves and the neighbouring States, or at least to claim from those States, enlarged out of all proportion, the shreds tom from our old country. Thanks to his faint-heartedness and lack of genius, Louis-Philippe has recognised treaties which are not connatural with the Revolution, treaties with which it cannot live and which the foreigners themselves have violated. "The _juste-milieu_ has left the foreign Cabinets time to recover themselves and to form their armies. And, as the existence of a democratic monarchy is incompatible with the existence of the continental monarchies, a state of hostilities might issue from this incompatibility in spite of protocols, financial embarrassments, mutual fears, prolonged armistices, gracious dispatches and demonstrations of friendship. If our _bourgeois_ Royalty has resigned itself to accept insult?, if men dream of peace, still the state of things may become such as to necessitate war. "But whether war shatter the sham Legitimacy or not, I know, Madame, that you will never fix your hopes in the foreigner; you would rather that Henry V. should never reign than see him triumph under the patronage of an European coalition: you place your hopes in yourself and in your son. In whatever manner we might argue about the Ordinances, they could never affect Henry V.; innocent of all, he has the election of the ages and his native misfortunes in his favour. If unhappiness touches us in the solitude of a tomb, it moves us still more when it keeps watch beside a cradle: for then it is no longer the memory of a thing that is past, of a being who is miserable but who has ceased to suffer; it is a painful reality; it saddens an age which ought to know only joy; it threatens a whole life which has done nothing to deserve its rigours.