n to virtue;
it is from the vivacity of earthly desires that we become
superstitious, and it is on the contrary by the sacrifice of these
same desires, that we are religious.

M. de Romanzow, the minister of foreign affairs in Russia, loaded me
with the most amiable attentions, and it was with regret that I
considered him as so implicated in the system of the emperor
Napoleon, that he must necessarily retire, like the English
ministers, when that system was abandoned. Doubtless, in an absolute
monarchy, the will of the master explains every thing; but the
dignity of a prime minister perhaps requires that words of an
opposite tendency should not proceed from the same mouth. The
sovereign represents the state, and the state may change its system
of politics whenever circumstances require it; but the minister is
only a man, and a man, on questions of this nature, ought to have
but one opinion in the course of his life. It is impossible to have
better manners than Count Romanzow, or to receive strangers more
nobly. I was at his house when the English envoy, Lord Tyrconnel,
and Admiral Bentinck were announced, both of them men of remarkably
fine appearance: they were the first English who had re-appeared on
that continent, from which the tyranny of one man had banished them.
After ten years of such fearful struggle, after ten years during
which victories and disasters had always found the English true to
the compass of their politics' conscience, they returned at last
into the country which first emancipated itself from the universal
monarchy. Their accent, their simplicity, their fierte, all awakened
in the soul that sentiment of truth in all things, which Napoleon
has discovered the art of obscuring in the eyes of those who have
only read his journals, and listened to his agents. I do not even
know if Napoleon's adversaries on the continent, constantly
surrounded with a false opinion which never ceases to deafen them,
can venture to trust themselves without apprehension to their own
feelings. If I can judge of them by myself, I know that frequently,
after having heard all the advices of prudence or meanness with
which one is overwhelmed in the Bonapartist atmosphere, I scarcely
knew what to think of my own opinion; my blood forbid me to renounce
it, but my reason was not always sufficient to preserve me from so
many sophisms. It was therefore with the most lively emotion that I
heard once more the voice of that England,