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several days, and you will see some of my drawbacks.
Paris is very gay and beautiful, and abounding in interesting people.
Of those I have seen, Tocqueville and Guizot have impressed me most.
They are very superior men; I am disposed to believe them the first men in France. . . . the intelligence and education constituting the brains of France are all against the emperor, who has the ateliers and his own immediate adherents.
All admit that this baby, who was born with such parade, and who is now escorted by cavalry when he takes an airing, can never succeed to power; but I have not yet seen a human being who undertakes to say what will take place in the event of the death of the emperor.
my own impression is that the emperor's superiority is found in his fixed will.
His purpose is clear, and he is almost the only Man in this condition. . . . I tremble for Kansas, which seems to me a doomed Territory.
How disgusting seems the conduct of those miserable men who thus trifle with the welfare of this region!
My blood boils at this outrage, and I long to denounce it again from my place.
To
C. F. Adams, June 2, from
Paris:—
I have often thought of what the good Dr. Bigelow said when he postponed my complete recovery till next December; and I have had gloomy hours thinking that perhaps it would not come then.
But my feelings latterly, and particularly for the last few days, give me hope.
After a busy month in
Paris he made a tour of three weeks in the provinces, which included
Tours and the old chateaux of the Touraine; mettray, where he saw again
Demetz, the founder of the penitentiary colony; Angers,
Nantes,
Bordeaux, and the
Pyrenees.
His sojourn in
Paris after his return was very brief, and he was in
London June 16.
He was recruited by his journey to the west and south of
France; and while daily reminded of his disability by the sensitiveness in his spine, his inability to walk far, and weariness after exertion, he wrote, July 3, that he felt better than at any time since he was disabled.
Some of his English friends had died,—among them
Mr.Montagu and
Mrs. Basil Montagu,
John Kenyon, the first and second Lord Wharncliffe, and
Sir Charles Vaughan; and Earl Fitzwilliam was on his death bed. But the greater number still survived.
1 They remembered him well as he came in his youth, and had followed his career.
When they knew him first he was a youth of promise,—intelligent, aspiring, attractive in every way, but without any prestige of name or deeds; he came now with a fame equal to that of any whom he met, and with a record of devotion and suffering.
Time had wrought changes also with
