f its aim be merely the preservation of his own
power.

'Such being his purpose, he has committed no great faults. Wonderful,
almost incredible, as his elevation is, it has not intoxicated him.'

'It has not intoxicated him,' I answered, 'because he was prepared for
it--he always expected it.'

'He could scarcely,' replied Tocqueville, 'have really and soberly
expected it until 1848.

'Boulogne and Strasbourg were the struggles of a desperate man, who
staked merely a life of poverty, obscurity, and exile. Even if either of
them had succeeded, the success could not have been permanent. A
surprise, if it had thrown him upon the throne, could not have kept him
there. Even after 1848, though the Bourbons were discredited, we should
not have tolerated a Bonaparte if we had not lost all our self-possession
in our terror of the Rouges. That terror created him, that terror
supports him; and habit, and the dread of the bloodshed and distress, and
the unknown chances of a revolution, will, I think, maintain him during
his life.

'The same feelings will give the succession to his heir. Whether the heir
will keep it, is a different question.'

_Sunday, April_ 12.--Tocqueville drank tea with us. I asked him if he had
seen the Due de Nemours' letter.

'I have not seen it,' he answered. 'In fact, I have not wished to see it.
I disapprove of the Fusionists, and the anti-Fusionists, and the
Legitimists, and the Orleanists-in short, of all the parties who are
forming plans of action in events which may not happen, or may not
happen in my time, or may be accompanied by circumstances rendering those
plans absurd, or mischievous, or impracticable,'

'But though you have not read the letter,' I said, 'you know generally
what are its contents.'

'Of course I do,' he replied. 'And I cannot blame the Comte de Chambord
for doing what I do myself--for refusing to bind himself in
contingencies, and to disgust his friends in the hope of conciliating his
enemies.'

'Do you believe,' I asked, 'that the mere promise of a Constitution would
offend the Legitimists?'

'I do not think,' he answered, 'that they would object to a Constitution
giving them what they would consider their fair share of power and
influence.

'Under Louis Philippe they had neither, but it was in a great measure
their own fault.

'They have neither under this Government, for its principle is to rest on
the army and on the people, and to ignore the existence of th