At this moment when we learnt the end of the dangerous quarrel, the Cabinet, after thus witnessing a happy conclusion to the two great pieces of foreign business that still kept the peace of the world in suspense, the Piedmont War and the Hungarian War--at that moment, the Cabinet fell. APPENDIX I have recently discovered these four notes in the charter-room at Tocqueville, where my grandfather had carefully deposited, by the side of our most precious family archives, all the manuscripts of his brother that came into his possession. They seemed to me to throw some light upon the Revolution of February and the question of the revision of the Constitution in 1851, and to merit publication together with the Recollections. Comte de Tocqueville. I GUSTAVE DE BEAUMONT'S VERSION OF THE 24TH OF FEBRUARY. I have to-day (24 October 1850) had a conversation with Beaumont which is worth noting. This is what he told me: "On the 24th of February, at seven o'clock in the morning, Jules Lasteyrie and another [I have forgotten the name which Beaumont mentioned] came to fetch me to take me to M. Thiers, where Barrot, Duvergier, and several others were expected." I asked him if he knew what had passed during the night between Thiers and the King. He replied: "I was told by Thiers, and especially by Duvergier, who had at once taken a note of Thiers' narrative, that Thiers had been summoned at about one o'clock; that he had found the King in an undecided frame of mind; that he had at once told him that he could only come in with Barrot and Duvergier; that the King, after raising many objections, had appeared to yield; that he had put off Thiers till the morning; that nevertheless, as he showed him to the door, he had told him that as yet no one was bound one way or the other." Evidently the King reserved the right of attempting to form another combination before the morning. "I must here," continued Beaumont, "tell you a curious anecdote. Do you know how Bugeaud was occupied during that decisive night, at the Tuileries itself, where he had just received the command-in-chief? Listen: Bugeaud's hope and ambition was to become Minister of War when Thiers should come into power. Things were so turning out, as he clearly saw, as to make this appointment impossible; but what preoccupied him was to assure his preponderance at the War Office even if he was not at the head of it. Consequently, on the night of the 24th of February, or rather in the early morning, Bugeaud with his own hand wrote to Thiers from the Tuileries a letter of four pages, of which the substance was: