the conduct of affairs. He looked to constitutional analogies, and
thought it incompatible with Ministerial responsibility. The King
appealed to the example of William III., and said to Lord
Granville, 'King William presided in person at his council board,
after your revolution?' It was Broglie's scruple (for it hardly
ever amounted to resistance) on this head that made the King
dislike him so much. It is certainly true that the present state
of things is an anomaly, but France is in its infancy as to
constitutional practice, and the doctrine of Ministerial
responsibility, with all its indispensable consequences, is not
understood. Nothing can exemplify this more than the recent case
of a man which was agitated in the Chambers, and passed off so
easily. He was one of the French refugees in Switzerland, and
Montalivet, Minister of the Interior, the man most in the King's
confidence, engaged him in his service to act as a spy on the
other refugees, but without letting Thiers (President of the
Council and Minister for Foreign Affairs) know that he had done
so. Accordingly Thiers demanded, through the French Ambassador,
the Duc de Montebello, that this man (with the rest) should be
expelled from Switzerland, he being at the time the agent of
Thiers' own colleague. In the course of the subsequent discussions
this fact came out, when Thiers declared he had been ignorant of
his employment, and Montalivet merely said that he had acted as he
deemed best for the interest of the country, and this excuse was
taken and nothing more said. Thiers took it more quietly than he
would otherwise have done, because he had committed himself in his
correspondence with Montebello, and it would not have suited him
to have his letters published. At that time the Duke of Orleans
was gone to Vienna, and Thiers was in all the fervour of his hopes
of obtaining one of the Archduchesses for the Prince, and he was
therefore the humble servant of Austria, and endeavouring to court
her favour in all ways, especially by truckling to her views in
the affair of the refugees.

I asked Madame de Lieven what was the reason that the great Powers
would not let the Duke of Orleans find a wife, and why especially
the Emperor Nicholas (who, it was to be presumed, desired the
continuance of peace and order in France, and therefore of this
dynasty) took every opportunity of showing his contempt and
aversion for the King, being the only Sovereign who had never
co