letter, but that it was not signed and that he had looked upon it as a
mystification. He showed it me. Now that letter was evidently an
answer, in which the writer again declared that he would listen to
nothing more concerning the Emperor, but that, his person excepted, it
would be easy to agree to all the rest. I expected that the Emperor
would conclude his narrative by expressing his anger against Fouche, but
our conversation turned on some other subject, and he talked no more of
him.

"Two days afterwards I went to Fouche to solicit the return to Paris of
an officer of musqueteers who had been banished far from his family. I
found him at breakfast, and sat down next to him. Facing him sat a
stranger. 'Do you see this man?' he said to me; pointing with his spoon
to the stranger; 'he is an aristocrat, a Bourbonist, a Chouan; it is the
Abbe -----, one of the editors of the Journal des Debats--a sworn enemy
to Napoleon, a fanatic partisan of the Bourbons; he is one of our men.
I looked, at him. At every fresh epithet of the Minister the Abbe bowed
his head down to his plate with a smile of cheerfulness and
self-complacency, and with a sort of leer. I never saw a more ignoble
countenance. Fouche explained to me, on leaving the breakfast table,
in what manner all these valets of literature were men of his, and while
I acknowledged to myself that the system might be necessary, I scarcely
knew who were really more despicable--the wretches who thus sold
themselves to the highest bidder, or the minister who boasted of having
bought them, as if their acquisition were a glorious conquest. Judging
that the Emperor had spoken to me of the scene I have described above,
Fouche said to me, 'The Emperor's temper is soured by the resistance he
finds, and he thinks it is my fault. He does not know that I have no
power but by public opinion. To morrow I might hang before my door
twenty persons obnoxious to public opinion, though I should not be able
to imprison for four-and-twenty hours any individual favoured by it.
As I am never in a hurry to speak I remained silent, but reflecting on
what the Emperor had said concerning Fouche I found the comparison of
their two speeches remarkable. The master could have his minister hanged
with public applause, and the minister could hang--whom? Perhaps the
master himself, and with the same approbation. What a singular
situation!--and I believe they were both in the right; so far public
opinion, equ