“Two days afterwards I went to Fouche to solicit the return to Paris of an officer of musqueteers who had been banished far from his family.  I found him at breakfast, and sat down next to him.  Facing him sat a stranger.  ‘Do you see this man?’ he said to me; pointing with his spoon to the stranger; ’he is an aristocrat, a Bourbonist, a Chouan; it is the Abbe -----, one of the editors of the Journal des Debats--a sworn enemy to Napoleon, a fanatic partisan of the Bourbons; he is one of our men.  I looked, at him.  At every fresh epithet of the Minister the Abbe bowed his head down to his plate with a smile of cheerfulness and self-complacency, and with a sort of leer.  I never saw a more ignoble countenance.  Fouche explained to me, on leaving the breakfast table, in what manner all these valets of literature were men of his, and while I acknowledged to myself that the system might be necessary, I scarcely knew who were really more despicable—­the wretches who thus sold themselves to the highest bidder, or the minister who boasted of having bought them, as if their acquisition were a glorious conquest.  Judging that the Emperor had spoken to me of the scene I have described above, Fouche said to me, ’The Emperor’s temper is soured by the resistance he finds, and he thinks it is my fault.  He does not know that I have no power but by public opinion.  To morrow I might hang before my door twenty persons obnoxious to public opinion, though I should not be able to imprison for four-and-twenty hours any individual favoured by it.  As I am never in a hurry to speak I remained silent, but reflecting on what the Emperor had said concerning Fouche I found the comparison of their two speeches remarkable.  The master could have his minister hanged with public applause, and the minister could hang—­whom?  Perhaps the master himself, and with the same approbation.  What a singular situation!—­and I believe they were both in the right; so far public opinion, equitable in regard to Fouche, had swerved concerning the Emperor.”

The wrath of Napoleon was confined to the Lower House, the Peers, from the nature of their composition, being complacent and passive enough.  The vast majority of them were in fact mere shadows gathered round the solid persons of Joseph, Lucien, Louis, and Jerome Bonaparte, and Sieyes, Carnot, and the military men of the Revolution.  As a political body Napoleon despised them himself, and yet he wanted the nation to respect them.  But respect was impossible, and the volatile Parisians made the Peers a constant object of their witticisms.  The punsters of Paris made the following somewhat ingenious play upon words.  Lallemand, Labedogure, Drouot, and Ney they called Las Quatre Pairs fides (perfides), which in pronunciation may equally mean the four faithful peers or the four perfidious men.  The infamous Vandamme and another were called Pair-siffles, the biased peers, or the biased pair, or (persiffles) men made objects of derision.  It was thus the lower orders behaved while the, existence of France was at stake.