good push forward.  This indifferentist of the deepest dye, who knows so admirably how to preserve moderation in the clearness, intelligence, and illustration of his style, this Goethe of politics, is certainly at present the most powerful defender of the system of Perier, and, in fact, with his pamphlet against Chateaubriand he well-nigh annihilated that Don Quixote of Legitimacy, who sat so pathetically on his winged Rosinante, whose sword was more shining than sharp, and who shot only with costly pearls instead of good, piercing, leaden bullets.

In their irritation at the lamentable turn which events have taken, many of the enthusiasts for freedom go so far as to slander Lafayette.  How far a man can go astray in this direction is shown by the book of Belmontet, which is also an attack on the well-known pamphlet by Chateaubriand, and in which the Republic is advocated with commendable freedom.  I would here cite the bitter passages against Lafayette contained in this work, were they not on one side too spiteful, and on the other connected with a defense of the Republic which is not suitable to this journal.  I therefore refer the reader to the work itself, and especially to a chapter in it entitled “The Republic.”  One may there see how evil fortune may make even the noblest men unjust.

I will not here find fault with the brilliant delusion of the possibility of a republic in France.  A royalist by inborn inclination, I have now, in France, become one from conviction.  For I am convinced that the French could never tolerate any republic, neither according to the constitution of Athens or of Sparta, nor, least of all, to that of the United States.  The Athenians were the student-youths of mankind; their constitution was a species of academic freedom, and it would be mere folly to seek to introduce it in this our matured age, to revive it in our senile Europe.  And how could we put up with that of Sparta, that great and tiresome manufactory of patriotism, that soldiers’ barrack of republican virtue, that sublimely bad kitchen of equality, in which black broth was so vilely cooked that Attic wits declared it made men despise life and defy death in battle?  How could such a constitution flourish in the very foyer of gourmands, in the fatherland of Very, of Vefour, and of Careme?  This latter would certainly have thrown himself, like Vatel, on his sword, as a Brutus of cookery and as the last gastronome.  Indeed, had Robespierre only introduced Spartan cookery, the guillotine would have been quite superfluous, for then the last aristocrats would have died of terror, or emigrated as soon as possible.  Poor Robespierre! you would introduce stern republicanism to Paris—­to a city in which one hundred and fifty thousand milliners and dressmakers, and as many barbers and perfumers, exercise their smiling, curling, and sweet-smelling industries!