"I have, monsieur le comte, discovered dangerous and contemptible intrigues carried on between Paris and Rome through the channel of Monsignor Lambruschini, the Nuncio[58]. It was no less a question than to cause to be read, in open conclave, a copy of some pretended secret instructions, divided into several clauses and given (so it was impudently asserted) to M. le Cardinal de Latil. The majority of the Conclave has pronounced strongly against these machinations; it wished the Nuncio to be instructed to break off all relations with those men of discord who, while troubling France, would end by making the Catholic Religion hateful to all. I am, monsieur le comte, making a collection of these authentic revelations, and I will send it to you after the election of the pope: that will be worth more than all the dispatches in the world. The King will learn to know who are his friends and who his enemies, and the Government will be able to rely on facts suited to guide its conduct "Your Dispatch No. 14 informs me of the encroachments which His Holiness' Nuncio endeavoured to renew in France in connection with the death of Leo XII. The same thing had happened before, when I was Foreign Minister, at the time of the death of Pius VII.: fortunately, we always have means of defending ourselves against those public attacks; it is much more difficult to escape the plots laid in the dark. "The conclavists who accompany our cardinals appeared to me to be reasonable men: the Abbé Coudrin[59] alone, whom you mentioned to me, is one of those cramped and narrow minds into which nothing can enter, one of those men who have mistaken their profession. As you are well aware, he is a monk, head of an order, and he even has bulls of institution: this is but little in agreement with our civil laws and our political institutions. "It may happen that the pope will be elected at the end of this week. But, if the French cardinals fail to make their presence felt at once, it will become impossible to assign a limit to the duration of the Conclave. New combinations would perhaps bring about an unexpected nomination: to have done with it, they might agree on some insignificant cardinal, such as Dandini[60].