was a mistake. "Qu'il aille tout de meme," was Espinasse's answer.

'In Calvados the Prefet, finding no one whom he could conscientiously
arrest, took hold of one of the most respectable men in the department.
"If," he said, "I had arrested a man against whom there was plausible
ground for suspicion, he might have been transported. This man _must_ be
released."'

'Has he been released?' I asked.

'I have not heard,' was the answer. 'In all probability he has been.'

'In my department,' said Tocqueville, 'the _sous-prefet_, ordered by the
Prefet to arrest somebody in the arrondissement, was in the same
perplexity as the Prefet of Calvados. "I can find no fit person," he said
to me. I believe that he reported the difficulty to the Prefet, and that
the vacancy was supplied from some other arrondissement.

'What makes this frightful,' he added, 'is that we now know that
deportation is merely a slow death. Scarcely any of the victims of 1851
and 1852 are living.'

'I foretold that,' I said, 'at the time, as you will find if you look at
my article on Lamartine, published in the "Edinburgh Review."'[1]

[Footnote 1: See _Journals in France and Italy_.--ED.]

_April_ 20.--We talked of the political influence in France of the
_hommes de lettres_.

'It began,' said Tocqueville, 'with the Restoration. Until that time we
had sometimes, though very rarely, statesmen who became writers, but
never writers who became statesmen,'

'You had _hommes de lettres_,' I said, 'in the early Revolutionary
Assemblies--Mirabeau for instance.'

'Mirabeau,' he answered, 'is your best example, for Mirabeau, until he
became a statesman, lived by his pen. Still I should scarcely call a man
of his high birth and great expectations _un homme de lettres_. That
appellation seems to belong to a man who owes his position in early life
to literature. Such a man is Thiers, or Guizot, as opposed to such men as
Gladstone, Lord John Russell, or Montalembert.'

_Wednesday, April_ 21.--I dined with D. and met, among several others,
Admiral Matthieu the Imperial Hydrographer, and a general whose name I
did not catch. I talked to the general about the army.

'We are increasing it,' he said, 'but not very materially. We are rather
giving ourselves the means of a future rapid increase, than making an
immediate augmentation. We are raising the number of men from 354,000 to
392,400, in round numbers to 400,000; but the principal increase is in
the _