bition.

All this has been strenuously denied; my friends and I have often been
represented as deep plotters, greedy for office, eager and shrewd in
pushing our fortunes through every opening, and more intent on our own
ascendency than on the fate or wishes of the country,--a vulgar and
senseless estimate, both of human nature and of our contemporary
history. If ambition had been our ruling principle, we might have
escaped many efforts and defeats. In times when the most brilliant
fortunes, political or otherwise, were easily within reach of those who
thought of nothing else, we only desired to achieve ours on certain
moral conditions, and with the object of not caring for ourselves.
Ambition we had, but in the service of a public cause; and one which,
either in success or adversity, has severely tried the constancy of its
defenders.

The most clear-sighted of the cabinet ministers in 1817, M. Decazes and
M. Pasquier, whose minds were more free and less suspicious than those
of the Duke de Richelieu and M. Laine, were not deceived on this point:
they felt the necessity of our alliance, and cultivated it with anxiety.
But when it becomes a question of how to govern in difficult times,
allies are not enough; intimate associates are necessary, devoted
adherents in labour and peril. In this character, the doctrinarians, and
particularly M. Royer-Collard, their leader in the Chambers, were
mistrusted. They were looked upon as at once imperious and undecided,
and more exacting than effective. Nevertheless, in November, 1819, after
the election of M. Gregoire and in the midst of their projected reforms
in the electoral law, M. Decazes, at the strong instigation of
M. de Serre, proposed to M. Royer-Collard to join the Cabinet with one
or two of his friends. M. Royer-Collard hesitated at first, then acceded
for a moment, and finally declined. "You know not what you would do,"
said he to M. Decazes; "my method of dealing with affairs would differ
entirely from yours: you elude questions, you shift and change them, you
gain time, you settle things by halves; I, on the contrary, should
attack them in front, bring them into open view, and dissect them before
all the world. I should compromise instead of assisting you."
M. Royer-Collard was in the right, and defined himself admirably,
perhaps more correctly than he imagined. He was more calculated to
advise and contest than to exercise power. He was rather a great
spectator and cri