Lady John Russell: A Memoir with Selections from Her Diaries and Correspondence. Various

Чтение книги онлайн.

       F. R. It is very odd, the Austrian government is hated wherever it has been established. N. It is because they do everything with the baton--the Italians all hate to be given over to them. F. R. But the Italians will never do anything for themselves--they are not united. N. True. Besides this he talked about the robbers between Rome and Florence, and when I said they had increased, he said, "Oh! to be sure; I always had them taken by the gendarmerie." F. R. It is very odd that in England, where we execute so many, we do not prevent crimes. N. It is because you have not a gendarmerie. He inquired very particularly about the forms of the Viceregal Court in Ireland, the Dames d'honneur, pages, etc.; in some things he was strangely ignorant, as, for instance, asking if my father was a peer of Parliament. He asked many questions three times over. He spoke of the Regent's conduct to the Princess as very impolitic, as it shocked the bienséances, by which his father had become so popular. He said our war with America was a guerre de vengeance, for that the frontier could not possibly be of any importance. He said, "You English ought to be very well satisfied with the end of the war." F. R. Yes, but we were nearly ruined in the course of it. N. Ha! le système continental, ha--and then he laughed very much. He asked who was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland at present, but made no remark on my answer. I asked him if he understood English; he said that at Paris he had had plenty of interpreters, but that he now began to read it a little.

      Page 55.

      Many English went to Elba about this time; the substance of their conversations is still in my recollection--April 2, 1815. He said that he considered the great superiority of England to France lay in her aristocracy, that the people were not better, but that the Parliament was composed of all the men of property and all the men of family in the country; this enabled the Government to resist the shock which the failure of the Duke of York's expedition was liable to cause--in France it would have destroyed the Government. (This is an opinion rather tinged by the Revolution, but it is true that our House of Commons looks to final results.) They were strong, he said, by "les souvenirs attachants à l'histoire"; that on the contrary he could make eighty senates in France as good as the present; that he had intended to create a nobility by marrying his generals, whom he accounted as quite insignificant, notwithstanding the titles he had given them, to the offspring of the old nobility of France. He had reserved a fund from the contribution which he levied when he made treaties with Austria, Prussia, etc., in order to found these new families. "Did you get anything from Russia?"