“These are respectful and tender warnings of which too little account was taken, and which might have saved the King and France.  I put them down here with the gloomy predictions contained in them, which have been only too completely realized.  They are not prophecies after the event.  We saw in advance the misfortunes of the King, the fall of the monarchy, the ruin of legitimacy.  Each page, then each line, and soon every word of this part of my Memoirs will be a cry of alarm:  ‘God save the King!’ Alas!  He has not saved him.  One is always wrong if one cannot get a hearing and make one’s self believed.  It is then, with no pride in my previsions, but with bitter regret, that I could not get them accepted, that I recall this long monologue addressed to Charles X.”

From the beginning of the reign, as he foresaw that one day the Chamber would sign the Address of the 221, and that M. Laffitte would be the banker of the revolution of July, the Viscount wrote to the sovereign in December, 1824:—­

“The King has two things to combat for the glory and strength of his rule, the encroachments of the Chamber of Deputies, and the power of money in Europe.  Four bankers could to-day decide war, if such was their pleasure.  Sovereigns cannot seek too earnestly to free themselves from the sceptre which is rising above their own.  The triumph of moneyed men will blight the character and the morals of France.”

M. de La Rochefoucauld added (report of January 31, 1825) this prediction, which shows to what length his frankness went in his loyal explanations with his King:—­

“We are between two rocks, equally dangerous:  revolution with the Duke of Orleans, and ultraism with the good Polignac.  The by-word now is:  ‘These princes will end like the Stuarts.’  Madame de—­, who is agitating against the laws now under discussion, has said:  ‘Yes, it’s the second throne of the Stuarts.’  The Left compare the Archbishop of Rheims to Father Peters, the restless and ambitious confessor of King James.  It is not easy for me to write thus to the King, and I have assumed a hard task in promising myself to conceal nothing from him.  Sometimes my heart is oppressed and my hand stops; but I question my conscience, which seems troubled, and the indispensable necessity of telling all to the King, that he may judge in his wisdom, decides me to go on.”

How many sagacious warnings given by the brave courtier, or, better, by the faithful friend, during the year 1825, the year of the coronation:  “The good Madame de M—­ of the Sacred Heart was saying the other day:  ’We had a King with no limbs, and with a head; now we have limbs and no head.’  It is unheard of, the trouble taken in certain circles to make out that the King has no will.  The future must give to all a complete refutation; the future must teach them that the King knows how to distinguish those that betray from those that serve him.” (Report of March 1, 1825).  “Does the King wish to run the chances of a complete overturning by throwing himself into the hands of the ultras?  That would be to fall again under the blows of the Revolution, which counts on these to push the monarchy into the abyss always held open at its side.”