"My departure is fixed for the 16th. Letters from Vienna arriving this morning announce that M. de Laval has refused the Foreign Office; is it true? If he keeps to this refusal, what will happen? God knows. I hope that all will be decided before my arrival in Paris. It seems to me that we have become paralyzed and that we have nothing free except our tongues. "You think I shall come to an arrangement with M. de Laval; I doubt it. I am inclined to come to an arrangement with nobody. I was going to arrive in the most peaceful mood, and those people think fit to pick a quarrel with me. So long as I had a chance of office, they could not praise and flatter me enough in their dispatches; the day on which the place was taken, or thought to be taken, they drily inform me of M. de Laval's nomination in the rudest and at the same time the most stupid dispatch. But, before becoming so flat and insolent between one post and another, they ought to have reflected a little whom they were addressing, and M. Portalis will have learnt as much from a word which I have sent him lately in reply. It is possible that he merely signed without reading, just as Carnot signed hundreds of death-warrants on trust." The friend of the great L'Hôpital[83], the Chancelier Olivier[84], in his sixteenth-century language, which set politeness at defiance, compares the French to monkeys which clamber to the tree-tops and never cease climbing until they reach the top-most branch, where they show what they ought to hide. All that has happened in France from 1789 to our own time proves the correctness of the simile: every man, as he ascends through life, becomes like the Chancellor's ape; he ends by shamelessly exposing his infirmities to the passers-by. See, at the end of my dispatches I am seized with a desire to boast: the great men who swarm at this present time prove that a man is a dupe if he does not himself proclaim his immortality. Have you read, in the archives of the Foreign Office, the diplomatic correspondence relating to the most important events at the period of that correspondence? "No."