“The King sincerely wished for the Charter, whatever may be said, but he wished for the monarchy; he, therefore, decided to change ministers who had made promises that seemed to him fatal, and to replace them by others whose principles suited him better.  He was not happy in this choice, it must be agreed.  He took as Minister of Foreign Affairs and President of the Council the Prince de Polignac.  For a long time public opinion had foreseen this choice, and dreaded it.  At the commencement of the Restoration M. de Polignac for more than a year had refused to recognize the Charter and to swear fidelity to it, which made him regarded as the pronounced enemy of our institutions.  Was this antipathy real?  I do not think so.  He had for a long time lived in England, as ambassador, and was thoroughly imbued with principles at once very constitutional and very aristocratic, after the English fashion.  His devotion was great, as well as his personal merit, but his resources as a statesman were not so much so; he took his desire to do well for the capacity to do well, and he mistook.”

When he assumed the direction of affairs the Prince de Polignac was wholly surprised at the systematic and obstinate opposition that he encountered.  As M. Guizot said, “he was sincerely astonished that he was not willingly accepted as a minister devoted to the constitutional regime.  But the public, without troubling itself to know if he were sincere or not, persisted in seeing in him the champion of the old regime and the standard-bearer of the counter-Revolution.”

Although he had passed a part of his life in England, first as emigre, then as ambassador, and had married as his first wife an English lady, Miss Campbell, and as his second another, the daughter of Lord Radcliffe, the Prince de Polignac was French at heart.

No Minister of Foreign Affairs in France had in higher degree the sentiment of the national dignity.  Yet this is the way the Debats expressed itself, the 16th of August, 1829, about a man who, the next year, at the time of the glorious Algiers Expedition, was to hold toward England language so proud and firm:—­

“The manifesto of M. de Polignac comes to us from England.  That is very simple.  We have a minister who scarcely knows how to speak anything but English.  It takes time to relearn one’s native tongue when one has forgotten it for many years.  It appears even that one never regains the accent in all its freedom and purity.  In fact, the English have not given us M. de Polignac; they have sold him to us.  That people understand commerce so well.”

Despite all the violent criticisms, all the implacable hatreds by which he was incessantly assailed, the Prince de Polignac was a noble character, and no one should forget the justness of soul with which, from the commencement to the end of his career, he supported misfortune and captivity.  The Viscount Sosthenes de La Rochefoucauld, afterwards the Duke of Doudeauville, says, in his Memoirs:—­