’They hated him as much as he did them, much more indeed, for his mind was not formed for hatred.  They excluded him from almost all committees.’

‘Would it not have been wise in him,’ I asked, ’to retire from the Chamber during the King’s life, or at least until it contained a party with whom he could cordially act?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Beaumont, ’that would have been the wisest course for him—­and indeed for me.  I entered the Chamber reluctantly.  All my family were convinced that a political man not in the Chamber was nothing.  So I let myself be persuaded.  Tocqueville required no persuasion, he was anxious to get in, and when in it was difficult to persuade oneself to go out.  We always hoped for a change.  The King might die, or he might be forced—­as he had been forced before—­to submit to a liberal Ministry which might have been a temporary cure, or even to a Parliamentary reform which might have been a complete cure.  Duchatel, who is a better politician than Guizot, was superseding him in the confidence of the King and of the Chamber.

’In fact, the liberal Ministry and Parliamentary reform did come at last, though not until it was too late to save the Monarchy.

’If Tocqueville had retired in disgust from the Chamber of Deputies, he might not have been a member of the Constituent, or of the Legislative Assembly.  This would have been a misfortune—­though the shortness of the duration of the first, and the hostility of the President during the second, and also the state of his health, prevented his influencing the destinies of the Republic as much as his friends expected him to do, and indeed as he expected himself.’

‘I have often,’ I said, ’wondered how you and Tocqueville, and the other eminent men who composed the committee for preparing the Constitution, could have made one incapable of duration, and also incapable of change.’

‘What,’ he asked, ’are the principal faults which you find in the Constitution?’

‘First,’ I said, ’that you gave to your President absolute authority over the army, the whole patronage of the most centralised and the most place-hunting country in the world, so that there was not one of your population of 36,000,000 whose interests he could not seriously affect; and, having thus armed him with irresistible power, you gave him the strongest possible motives to employ it against the Constitution by turning him out at the end of his four years, incapable of re-election, unpensioned and unprovided for, so that he must have gone from the Elysee Bourbon to a debtor’s prison.

’Next, that, intending your President to be the subordinate Minister of the Assembly, you gave him the same origin, and enabled him to say, “I represent the people as much as you do, indeed much more.  They all voted for me, only a fraction of them voted for any one of you.”  Then that origin was the very worst that could possibly be selected, the votes of the uneducated multitude; you must have foreseen that they would give you a demagogue or a charlatan.  The absence of a second Chamber, and the absence of a power of dissolution, are minor faults, but still serious ones.  When the President and the Assembly differed, they were shut up together to fight it out without an umpire.’