"For you, Madame, your adversities provide a powerful authority. Bathed in your husband's blood, you have carried in your womb the son whom politics named "the child of Europe" and religion "the child of miracle." What influence do you not exercise over public opinion when you are seen to be keeping unaided, for the exiled orphan, the heavy crown which Charles X. shook from his whitened head and from whose weight two other brows escaped, sufficiently laden with sorrow to permit them to reject this new burden! Your image presents itself to our memory with those feminine graces which seem to occupy their natural place, when seated on the throne. The people entertain no prejudice against you; they pity your sorrows, they admire your courage; they remember your days of mourning; they are grateful to you for mingling later in their pleasures, for sharing their tastes and their festivals; they find a charm in the vivacity of this foreign Frenchwoman, who has come from a land endeared to our glory by the days of Fornovo[371], of Marignano[372], of Areola[373] and of Marengo[374]. The Muses regret their protectress, born under that fair sky of Italy which inspired her with the love of the arts and which turned a daughter of Henry IV. into a daughter of Francis I. "France, since the Revolution, has often changed leaders, and has not yet seen a woman at the helm of the State. God wills, perhaps, that the reins of this unmanageable people, which slipped from the devouring hands of the Convention, broke in the victorious hands of Bonaparte, and were taken up in vain by Louis XVIII. and Charles X., should be fastened again by a young Princess, who would know how to make them at once less fragile and less light." [Sidenote: On the legitimacy.] Lastly reminding Madame that she had been good enough to think of me as a member of the secret government, I concluded my letter as follows: "In Lisbon there stands a magnificent monument on which one reads this epitaph: HERE LIES BASCO FUGUERA AGAINST HIS WILL. My mausoleum shall be a modest one, and I shall not rest there unwillingly. "You know, Madame, the order of ideas in which I perceive the possibility of a restoration: the other combinations would be beyond the range of my mind; I should confess my insufficiency. It would be overtly, by proclaiming myself the man of your consent, of your confidence, that I should find some strength; but I should feel no aptitude to act as a nocturnal minister plenipotentiary, a _chargé d'affaires_ to the darkness. If Your Royal Highness were patently to appoint me your ambassador to the people of 'New France' I should inscribe in large letters over my door: LEGATION OF OLD FRANCE. Things would happen as God pleased; but I would have nothing to do with secret devotions; I know how to be guilty of loyalty only in _flagrante delicto._