y. Notwithstanding the great merits of George Sand's style, her
plots and her characters are so exaggerated and so unnatural, and her
morality is so perverted, that we have ceased to read her.'

We talked of Montalembert, and I mentioned his _sortie_ the other day
against the clergy.

'I can guess pretty well,' said Tocqueville, 'what he said to you, for it
probably was a _resume_ of his article in the "Correspondant." Like most
men accustomed to public speaking, he repeats himself. He is as honest
perhaps as a man who is very _passionne_ can be; but his oscillations are
from one extreme to another. Immediately after the _coup d'etat,_ when he
believed Louis Napoleon to be Ultramontane, he was as servile as his
great enemy the "Univers" is now. "Ce sont les nuances qui se querellent,
non les couleurs;" and between him and the "Univers" there is only a
_nuance_. The Bishop of Agen has oscillated like him, but began at the
other end. The other day the Bishop made a most servile address to the
Emperor. He had formerly been a furious anti-Bonapartist. "How is it
possible," said Montalembert, "that a man can rush so completely from one
opinion to another? On the 4th of December in 1851 this same Bishop
denounced the _coup d'etat_ with such violence that the President sent me
to the Nuncio to request his interference. Now he is on his knees before
him. Such changes can scarcely be honest." Montalembert does not see that
the only difference between them is that they have trod in opposite
directions the very same path.'

_Thursday, May_ 5.--Tocqueville and I dined with M. and Madame de Bourke,
and met there General Dumas and Ary Scheffer.

We talked of Delaroche's pictures, and Scheffer agreed with me in
preferring the smaller ones. He thought that Delaroche improved up to the
time of his death, and preferred his Moses, and Drowned Martyr, painted
in 1853 and 1855, to the other large ones, and his Girondins, finished in
1856, to the earlier small ones.

We passed on to the increased and increasing population of Paris.

'The population of Paris,' I said, 'is only half that of London, while
that of the British Islands is not three-fourths that of France. If you
were to double the population of Paris, therefore, it would still be
proportionally less than that of London.'

'That is true,' said Tocqueville, 'but yet there are many circumstances
connected with the Parisian population each of which renders it more
dangerous t