All this delights me; for I feel towards him, and towards all his family, a true friendship.

To return to China.

It seems to me that the relations between that country and Europe are changed, and dangerously changed.

Till now, Europe has had to deal only with a Chinese government—­the most wretched of governments.  Now you will find opposed to you a people; and a people, however miserable and corrupt, is invincible on its own territory, if it be supported and impelled by common and violent passions.

Yet I should be sorry to die before I have seen China open to the eyes as well as to the arms of Europe.

Do you believe in a dissolution?  If so, when?

A thousand regards to Mrs. Grote, to the great historian, to the Reeves, and generally to all who are kind enough to remember my existence.

I delight in the prospect of meeting you in Paris; yet I fear that you will find it dull.  All that I hear from the great town shows me that never, at least during the last two hundred years, has intellectual life been less active.

If there be talent in the official circles, it is not the talent of conversation, and among those who formerly possessed that talent, there is so much torpidity, such want of interest on public affairs, such ignorance as to what is passing, and so little wish to hear about it, that no one, I am told, knows what to talk about or to take interest in.  Your conversation, however, is so agreeable and stimulating that it is capable of reanimating the dead.  Come and try to work this miracle.

A thousand remembrances.

A. DE TOCQUEVILLE.

CONVERSATIONS.

Paris, Hotel Bedford, April 9, 1857.—­We reached this place last night.

The Tocquevilles are in our hotel.  I went to them in the evening.

Tocqueville asked me how long I intended to remain.

‘Four weeks,’ I answered.

‘I do not think,’ he replied, ’that you will be able to do so.  Paris has become so dull that no one will voluntarily spend a month here.  The change which five years have produced is marvellous.

’We have lost our interest not only in public affairs, but in all serious matters.’

‘You will return then to the social habits of Louis Quinze,’ I said.  ’You were as despotically governed then as you are now; and yet the salons of Madame Geoffrin were amusing.’

‘We may do so in time,’ he answered, ’but that time is to come.  At present we talk of nothing but the Bourse.  The conversation of our salons resembles more that of the time of Law, than that of the time of Marmontel.’

I spent the evening at Lamartine’s.  There were few people there, and the conversation was certainly dull enough to justify Tocqueville’s fears.

April 10.—­Tocqueville drank tea with us.