"Therefore, Madame, if I told you that the Legitimacy had a chance of returning through the aristocracy of the nobles and clergy, with their privileges; through the Court, with its distinctions; through the Royalty, with its attractions, I should be deceiving you. The Legitimacy, in France, is no longer a sentiment; it is a principle in so far as it guarantees property and interests, rights and liberties; but if it remained proved that the Legitimacy would not defend or was powerless to protect that property and those interests, those rights and those liberties, it would cease to be even a principle. When any one puts forward that the Legitimacy will necessarily come about, that it cannot be dispensed with, that it is enough to wait, for France to come crying mercy to it on her knees, he is putting forward an illusion. The Restoration may never return, or may last for but a moment, if the Legitimacy seeks its strength where it does not exist. [Sidenote: My letter to the Dauphiness.] "Yes, Madame, I say it sorrowfully, Henry V. might remain a foreign and banished Prince: a young and new ruin of an edifice already fallen, but, in short, a ruin. We old servants of the Legitimacy will soon have spent the small stock of years that is left to us; we shall shortly be resting in our graves, asleep with our old ideas, like the ancient knights with their ancient suits of armour into which rust and time have eaten, suits of armour which no longer shape themselves to the figure nor adapt themselves to the usages of the living. "All that was militating, in 1789, for the preservation of the old order of things, religion, laws, manners, customs, property, classes, privileges, corporations, no longer exists. A general ferment has become manifest; Europe is hardly safer than ourselves; no form of society is entirely destroyed, none entirely established; all is worn or new, or decrepit or not yet rooted; all has the weakness of old age or childhood. The kingdoms that have sprung from the territorial limitations drawn by the last treaties are of yesterday; love of country has lost its force, because the country is an uncertain and fleeting thing to populations sold by auction, dealt in like second-hand furniture, now allotted to hostile populations, now handed over to unknown masters. Thus dug up, furrowed, tilled, the soil is prepared to receive the democratic seed which the Days of July have ripened.