of public worship, with violent theological fury. De Maistre,
whose intense attachment to his own creed was well known, fell under
suspicion of having connived at these conversions, and the Emperor
himself went so far as to question him. 'I told him,' De Maistre says,
'that I had never changed the faith of any of his subjects, but that if
any of them had by chance made me a sharer of their confidence, neither
honour nor conscience would have allowed me to tell them that they were
wrong.' This kind of dialogue between a sovereign and an ambassador
implied a situation plainly unfavourable to effective diplomacy. The
envoy obtained his recall, and after twenty-five years' absence returned
to his native country (1817). On his way home, it may be noticed, De
Maistre passed a few days in Paris, and thus, for the first and last
time, one of the most eminent of modern French writers found himself on
French soil.

The king accorded De Maistre an honourable reception, conferred upon him
a high office and a small sum of money, and lent his ear to other
counsellors. The philosopher, though insisting on declaring his
political opinions, then, as ever, unwaveringly anti-revolutionary,
threw himself mainly upon that literary composition which had been his
solace in yet more evil days than these. It was at this time that he
gave to the world the supreme fruit of nearly half a century of study,
meditation, and contact with the world, in _Du Pape_, _Les Soirees de
Saint Petersbourg_, and _L'Eglise Gallicane_. Their author did not live
long to enjoy the vast discussion which they occasioned, nor the
reputation that they have since conferred upon his name. He died in
February 1821 after such a life as we have seen.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] The facts of De Maistre's life I have drawn from a very meagre
biography by his son, Count Rodolphe de Maistre, supplemented by two
volumes of _Lettres et Opuscules_ (Fourth edition. Paris: Vaton. 1865),
and a volume of his _Diplomatic Correspondence_, edited by M. Albert
Blanc.

II.

It is not at all surprising that they upon whom the revolutionary deluge
came should have looked with indiscriminating horror and affright on all
the influences which in their view had united first to gather up, and
then to release the destructive flood. The eighteenth century to men
like De Maistre seemed an infamous parenthesis, mysteriously interposed
between the glorious age of Bossuet and Fenelon, and that yet br