To analyze minutely a life as corrupted as that of M. de Lafayette was healthy, one would have to face a distaste which I am incapable of overcoming. Men of sores resemble prostitutes' carcasses: they have been so much eaten away by the ulcers that they are of no use to the dissecting-room. The French Revolution is one vast political destruction, set in the midst of the old world; let us fear lest a much more fatal destruction be established, let us fear a moral destruction through the evil side of that Revolution. What would become of the human race if a strenuous attempt were made to rehabilitate manners justly stigmatized, to offer odious examples to our enthusiasm, to show us the progress of the age, the establishment of liberty, the profundity of genius in abject natures and atrocious actions? Not daring to extol the evil under its own name, they sophisticate it: beware of taking that brute for a spirit of darkness; it is an angel of light! All ugliness is beautiful, every shame honourable, every enormity sublime; every vice has its admiration awaiting it. We have gone back to that material society of paganism in which every form of depravity had its altars. Back, those cowardly, lying, criminal praises, which pervert the public conscience, which debauch youth, which discourage good people, which are an outrage against virtue and the spitting of the Roman soldier in the face of Christ! PARIS, 1839. When I was in Prague, in 1833, Charles X. said to me: "So that old Talleyrand is still alive?" And Charles X. left this life two years before M. de Talleyrand; the Monarch's private and Christian death forms a contrast with the public death of the apostate bishop, dragged against his will to the feet of the divine incorruptibility. On the 3rd of October 1836, I wrote the following letter to Madame la Duchesse de Berry, and I added a postscript to it on the 15th of November of the same year: "MADAME,