nment. Louis Napoleon must maintain his position by acts: they
will find out that Belgium should belong to France, or Alsace, or
Antwerp, or something or other that England will not be able to allow,
and then how are we prepared for the consequences?...

The more I think of Palmerston's letters, the less I can understand
them; every sentence is in direct contradiction to his acts and words.
He ridicules the idea of the Constitution; turns to scorn the idea of
anything being due to the Members of the Assembly; laughs and jokes at
the Club being fired into, though the English people in it were
within an ace of being murdered by the soldiers; says that Normanby
is pathetic over a broken looking-glass,[34] forgetting that the same
bullet grazed the hand of an Englishman, "_a Roman citizen!_" who was
between the window and the glass--in short, as I said before, he is
quite incomprehensible, except, as I cannot help thinking, he read the
private letter Normanby wrote to the Duke of Bedford upon the Kossuth
business, wishing to take his advice a little upon a grave question,
but which did not actually interfere with his position here. This
would account for his extreme irritation....

All at present is quiet in Paris. There are Socialist risings in many
parts of the country, but all these will do the President good, and
strengthen his hands, for even the people who have been treated
with indignity will pardon him if their chateaux are saved from an
infuriated and brutal peasantry. The President told Normanby last
night that the accounts of the cruelties and attacks in parts of
the country were very serious, but he hoped they would soon be put
down....

M. NORMANBY.[35]

[Footnote 33: Submitted to the Queen by Colonel Phipps.]

[Footnote 34: The tone of Lord Palmerston's private letters
to Lord Normanby at this time is best illustrated by the
following extract:--

"Your despatches since the event of Tuesday have been all
hostile to Louis Napoleon, with very little information as to
events. One of them consisted of a dissertation about
Kossuth, which would have made a good article in the _Times_
a fortnight ago: and another dwells chiefly on a looking-glass
broken in a Club-house; and you are pathetic about a piece
of broken plaster brought down from a ceiling by musket-shots
during the street fights. Now we know that the Diplomatic
Agents of Austria and Russia called o