Tuesday, May 20.—­The Tocquevilles and Rivet drank tea with us.

I mentioned to Tocqueville the subject of my conversations with Cousin and H.

‘I agree with Cousin,’ he said.  ’The attempt to turn our national activity into speculation and commerce has often been made, but has never had any permanent success.  The men who make these sudden fortunes are not happy, for they are always suspected of friponnerie, and the Government to which they belong is suspected of friponnerie.  Still less happy are those who have attempted to make them, and have failed.  And those who have not been able even to make the attempt are envious and sulky.  So that the whole world becomes suspicious and dissatisfied.

’And even if it were universal, mere material prosperity is not enough for us.  Our Government must give us something more:  must gratify our ambition, or, at least, our vanity.’

‘The Government,’ said Rivet, ’has been making a desperate plunge in order to escape from the accusation of friponnerie.  It has denounced in the “Moniteur” the faiseurs; it has dismissed a poor aide-de-camp of Jerome’s for doing what everybody has been doing ever since the coup d’etat.  When Ponsard’s comedy, which was known to be a furious satire on the agioteurs, was first played, Louis Napoleon took the whole orchestra and pit stalls, and filled them with people instructed to applaud every allusion to the faiseurs.  And he himself stood in his box, his body almost out of it, clapping most energetically every attack on them.’

‘At the same time,’ I said, ’has he not forced the Orleans Company and the Lyons Company to buy the Grand Central at much more than its worth?  And was not that done in order to enable certain faiseurs to realise their gains?’

‘He has forced the Orleans Company,’ said Rivet, ’to buy up, or rather to amalgamate the Grand Central; but I will not say at more than its value.  The amount to be paid is to depend on the comparative earnings of the different lines, for two years before and two years after the purchase.’

‘But,’ I said, ’is it not true, first, that the Orleans Company was unwilling to make the purchase? and, secondly, that thereupon the Grand Central shares rose much in the market?’

‘Both these facts,’ answered Rivet, ‘are true.’

‘Do you believe,’ I said to Tocqueville, ’H.’s history of the Tripartite Treaty?’

‘I do,’ he answered.  ’I do not think that at the time when it was made we liked it.  It suited you, who wish to preserve the statu quo in Europe, which keeps us your inferiors, or, at least, not your superiors. You have nothing to gain by a change.  We have.  The statu quo does not suit us.  The Tripartite Treaty is a sort of chain—­not a heavy one, or a strong one—­but one which we should not have put on if we could have avoided it.’