The juge de paix fell back into his usual silence after thus expressing himself; but the topics he suggested must have occupied the minds of those present.  Emboldened by Clousier’s words, and moved by the look which Gerard exchanged with Grossetete, Monsieur Bonnet ventured to go further.

“The good King Charles X.,” he said, “has just failed in the most far-sighted and salutary enterprise a monarch ever planned for the welfare of the people confided to him; and the Church ought to feel proud of the part she took in his councils.  But the upper classes deserted him in heart and mind, just as they had already deserted him on the great question of the law of primogeniture,—­the lasting honor of the only bold statesman the Restoration has produced, namely, the Comte de Peyronnet.  To reconstitute the nation through the family; to take from the press its venomous action and confine it to its real usefulness; to recall the elective Chamber to its true functions; and to restore to religion its power over the people,—­such were the four cardinal points of the internal policy of the house of Bourbon.  Well, twenty years from now all France will have recognized the necessity of that grand and sound policy.  Charles X. was in greater peril in the situation he chose to leave than in that in which his paternal power has been defeated.  The future of our noble country—­where all things will henceforth be brought periodically into question, where our rulers will discuss incessantly instead of acting, where the press, become a sovereign power, will be the instrument of base ambitions —­this future will only prove the wisdom of the king who has just carried away with him the true principles of government; and history will bear in mind the courage with which he resisted his best friends after having probed the wound and seen the necessity of curative measures, which were not sustained by those for whose sake he put himself into the breach.”

“Ah! monsieur,” cried Gerard, “you are frank; you go straight to your thought without disguise, and I won’t contradict you.  Napoleon in his Russian campaign was forty years in advance of the spirit of his age; he was never understood.  The Russia and England of 1830 explains the campaign of 1812.  Charles X. has been misunderstood in the same way.  It is quite possible that in twenty-five years from now his ordinances may become the laws of the land.”

“France, too eloquent not to gabble, too full of vanity to bow down before real talent, is, in spite of the sublime good sense of its language and the mass of its people, the very last nation in which two deliberative chambers should have been attempted,” said the juge de paix.  “Or, at any rate, the weaknesses of our national character should have been guarded against by the admirable restrictions which Napoleon’s experience laid upon them.  Our present system may succeed in a country whose action is circumscribed by the nature of its soil,