"Your article, monsieur, is full of that exquisite feeling for situations and proprieties which places you above all the political writers of the day. I say nothing to you of your exceptional talent; you know that I did it ample justice before I had the honour of knowing you. I do not thank you for your praises: I like to owe them to what I look upon now as an old friendship. You are rising very high, monsieur; you are beginning to stand alone, like all men made for a great fame: gradually the crowd, unable to follow them, leaves them, and we see them the better because they hold themselves aloof. "CHATEAUBRIAND." I tried to console him by another letter, on the 31st of August, when he was condemned for a newspaper offense. I received the following reply from him; it shows forth the opinions of the man, his regrets and his hopes: TO MONSIEUR LE VICOMTE DE CHATEAUBRIAND "MONSIEUR, "Your letter of the 31st of August was handed to me only on my arrival in Paris. I would come to thank you for it, at once, if I were not obliged to devote the short time which can still be left to me by the police, who are informed of my return, to a few preparations for entering prison. Yes, monsieur, here am I condemned by the bench to six months' imprisonment for a fanciful offense and by virtue of an equally fanciful piece of legislation; for the jury wittingly let me go unpunished upon the best-founded charge, and that in spite of a defense which, so far from extenuating my crime of telling the truth to the person of King Louis-Philippe, had aggravated that crime by setting it up as an established right for the whole of the opposition press. I am glad that the difficulties of so bold a thesis, as times go, appeared to you to be almost surmounted by the defense which you read and in which it was so great an advantage to me to be able to invoke the authority of the book in which, eighteen years ago, you instructed your own party in the principles of constitutional responsibility.