‘If I were an Italian liberal,’ said Beaumont, ’I would erect a statue to him.  The policy and almost the disposition of Louis Napoleon have been changed by the attentat.  He has become as timid as he once was intrepid.  He began by courting the Pope and the clergy.  He despised the French assassins, who were few in number and unconnected, and who had proved their unskilfulness on Louis Philippe; but Orsini showed him that he had to elect between the Pope and the Austrians on one side, and the Carbonari on the other.  He has chosen the alliance of the Carbonari.  He has made himself their tool, and will continue to do so.

’They are the only enemies whom he fears, at least for the present.

’France is absolutely passive.  The uneducated masses from whom he holds his power are utterly indifferent to liberty, and he has too much sense to irritate them by wanton oppression.  They do not know that he is degrading the French character, they do not even feel that he is wasting the capital of France, they do not know that he is adding twenty millions every year to the national debt.  They think of his loans merely as investments, and the more profligately extravagant are the terms and the amount, the better they like them.’

‘Ten years ago,’ I said, ‘the cry that I heard was, “Ca ne durera pas."’

‘That was my opinion,’ he answered; ’indeed, it was the opinion of everybody.  I thought the Duc de Broglie desponding when he gave it three years.  We none of us believed that the love of liberty was dead in France.’

‘It is not,’ I said, ’dead, for among the higher classes it still lives, and among the lower it never existed.’

‘Perhaps,’ he answered, ’our great mistakes were that we miscalculated the courage of the educated classes, and the degree in which universal suffrage would throw power into the hands of the uneducated.  Not a human being in my commune reads a newspaper or indeed reads anything:  yet it contains 300 electors.  In the towns there is some knowledge and some political feeling, but for political purposes they are carefully swamped by being joined to uneducated agricultural districts.

’Still I think I might enter the Corps legislatif for our capital Le Mans.  Perhaps at a general election twenty liberals might come in.  But what good could they do?  The opposition in the last session strengthened Louis Napoleon.  It gave him the prestige of liberality and success.’

‘You think him, then,’ I said, ‘safe for the rest of his life?’

‘Nothing,’ he answered, ’is safe in France, and the thing most unsafe is a Government.  Our caprices are as violent as they are sudden.  They resemble those of a half-tamed beast of prey, which licks its keeper’s hand to-day, and may tear him to-morrow.  But if his life be not so long as to enable the fruits of his follies to show themselves in their natural consequences—­unsuccessful war, or defeated diplomacy, or bankruptcy, or heavily increased taxation—­he may die in the Tuileries.