“He is,” she said, “a strange being.  His mind wants keeping.  A trifle close to his eyes hides from him large objects at a distance....  The great progress in political knowledge made by the higher classes in France from 1815 to 1848 is lost on him.  When we met in 1836, after three years’ separation, I was struck by his backwardness in political knowledge.  Up to 1848 he never had lived in France except as a child or a captive.  His opinions and feelings were those of the French masses from 1799 to 1812.  Though these opinions had been modified in the minds of the higher classes, they were, in 1848, those of the multitude, who despise parliamentary government, despise the pope, despise the priests, delight in profuse expenditure, delight in war, hold the Rhine to be our national frontier, and that it is our duty to seize all that lies on the French side.  The people and he were of one mind.  I have no doubt that the little he may have heard, and the less that he attended to, from the persons he saw between 1848 and 1852 about liberty, self-government, economy, the supremacy of the Assembly, respect for foreign nations, and fidelity to treaties, appeared to him the silliest talk imaginable.  So it would have appeared to all in the lower classes of France; so it would have appeared to the army, which is drawn from those classes, and exaggerates their political views.”

“The prince president is romantic, impulsive, and bizarre,” said one of his officials to the same English gentleman, “indolent, vain, good-natured, selfish, fearing and disliking his superiors;... he loves to excite the astonishment of the populace.  As a child he liked best bad children,—­as a man, bad men.”

But one good quality he had pre-eminently,—­no man was ever more grateful for kindness, or more indulgent to his friends.

Such was the man, untried, uneducated in French politics, covered with ridicule, and even of doubtful courage, whom the voices of five and a half millions of French voters called to the presidential chair.  It was to the country Louis Napoleon had appealed, to the rural population of France as against the dangerous classes in the great cities.  Paris had for sixty years been making revolutions for the country; now it was the turn of the provincials, who said they were tired of receiving a new Government by mail whenever it pleased the Parisians to make one.  Paris contained one hundred and forty thousand Socialists, besides Anarchists and Red Republicans.  With these the rural population had no sympathy.  Louis Napoleon was not chosen by their votes, nor by those of their sympathizers in other great cities.  His success was in the rural districts alone.

His election was a great disappointment to the Assembly, and from the first moment the prince president and that body were antagonistic to each other.  The president claimed to hold his powers from the people, and to be in no way under the control of the Assembly; the Assembly was forever talking of deposing him, of imprisoning him at Vincennes, and so on.