George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

November 8.—Being at Guizot's this morning, he told me some curious particulars about the King. He says, the King commence beaucoup de fautes, et en finit fort peu; that he feels his talent and power of action, and sometimes decides without consulting his ministers; that when he himself was Minister for the first time, the King twice so decided in affairs that were of his department, but that, having himself immediately caused it to be understood that he had no responsibility in those cases, the King, never did it afterward; that the King sometimes asked him to leave his brouillons of memoires, etc., with him, to be looked over, but that he always refused, because he did not choose the King should consult others about his unfinished and unexplained projects, or make a separate work and decision of his own upon them, etc., etc. . . . . The King, too, Guizot says, is very anxious and sensitive on the subject of the punishment of death, examines each case of capital conviction himself, and makes a written abstract of the reasons for and against a pardon, in parallel columns, and decides with care and conscientiously without the intervention of his ministers.

In the afternoon I saw Confalonieri. He was in bed, broken down in health, and much broken in the brightness and strength of his intellectual powers, but full of kindly affection and gratitude. I went over the whole of his strange case with him; his case, I mean, so far as the French government is concerned, and told him, what he did not before know, how completely it was the King's personal affair. I did not stay long with him, for it was not well that he should talk much. He has been in Paris, this time, three days. To-morrow he is to have an operation performed, and when he is sufficiently recovered will go to the South of France. It is a great pain to see him so different from what he was when I knew him at Milan in 1817, and at Paris in 1818-19. The Austrian government seems to have succeeded. It has crushed him, broken his spirit, broken his heart; and his nature was so noble and lofty that it seems as if tyranny were encouraged and strengthened, by his present condition, to proceed as far as it has power. It seems as if it had now found new and better means to work withal titan it had ever discovered before. . . . .

November 12.—The case of Confalonieri is so remarkable, and, from accidental circumstances, I have become so fully and exactly possessed of details that are almost unknown even in Paris, and some of which Confalonieri himself learnt only from me, that I have thought I would write it out in full. It is strongly illustrative of the way in which things are managed, not only in France, but by