in
England, as ambassador, and was thoroughly imbued with principles at
once very constitutional and very aristocratic, after the English
fashion. His devotion was great, as well as his personal merit, but his
resources as a statesman were not so much so; he took his desire to do
well for the capacity to do well, and he mistook."

When he assumed the direction of affairs the Prince de Polignac was
wholly surprised at the systematic and obstinate opposition that he
encountered. As M. Guizot said, "he was sincerely astonished that he
was not willingly accepted as a minister devoted to the constitutional
regime. But the public, without troubling itself to know if he were
sincere or not, persisted in seeing in him the champion of the old
regime and the standard-bearer of the counter-Revolution."

Although he had passed a part of his life in England, first as emigre,
then as ambassador, and had married as his first wife an English lady,
Miss Campbell, and as his second another, the daughter of Lord
Radcliffe, the Prince de Polignac was French at heart.

No Minister of Foreign Affairs in France had in higher degree the
sentiment of the national dignity. Yet this is the way the Debats
expressed itself, the 16th of August, 1829, about a man who, the next
year, at the time of the glorious Algiers Expedition, was to hold
toward England language so proud and firm:--

"The manifesto of M. de Polignac comes to us from England. That is very
simple. We have a minister who scarcely knows how to speak anything but
English. It takes time to relearn one's native tongue when one has
forgotten it for many years. It appears even that one never regains the
accent in all its freedom and purity. In fact, the English have not
given us M. de Polignac; they have sold him to us. That people
understand commerce so well."

Despite all the violent criticisms, all the implacable hatreds by which
he was incessantly assailed, the Prince de Polignac was a noble
character, and no one should forget the justness of soul with which,
from the commencement to the end of his career, he supported misfortune
and captivity. The Viscount Sosthenes de La Rochefoucauld, afterwards
the Duke of Doudeauville, says, in his Memoirs:--

"The purest honor, the loftiest disinterestedness, the sincerest
devotion, are not everything, there is needed a capacity for affairs, a
knowledge of men, which experience alone procures and which even the
strongest will cannot give.