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

Count Confalonieri, belonging to one of the first and richest families in Lombardy, was, by his position in society, by his talents, by the nobleness of his character, and by his personal relations throughout Europe, not only one of the most prominent persons in Italy, but altogether the first and most important of the victims of Austria in 1821. When in the United States he wrote to his old friend, the Duke de Broglie, then Minister for Foreign Affairs to Louis Philippe, to inquire whether his presence in France would be unwelcome to the government. The Duke––who told me this fact–said he replied that he ought not to have permitted himself to ask such a question; that France was, as it were, his natural asylum; and that the sooner he should be here the more happiness he would give his friends. On receiving this assurance he gave notice in New York, to the Austrian Consul, of his intention to come to France, that he might not even seem to do anything covertly, and embarked for England.

He there gave a new and somewhat formal notice to the French Charge d'affaires,—the Ambassador being absent,—and desired him, if he had any doubt about his reception in France,—where the Duke de Broglie had been displaced by Count Mole,—to write for instructions; to which the Charge replied, that there could be no doubt in the case, and that he should hold it to be a pleasure as well as a duty to viser his passport. Under these circumstances he crossed the Channel, and arrived in Paris about September 20, where he established himself in a private hospital to undergo a surgical operation, intending to pass the winter in the South of France, as his constitution is much shattered by his confinement and sufferings for sixteen years in the Spielberg.

When he had been a few days in this Maison de Sante he was suddenly sent for to the police, and there, very rudely, as he told me, ordered to leave France, and to go back to England by the very road by which he had come from it, quitting Paris within twenty-four hours. Confalonieri replied that, to a gentleman, any command on such a subject was quite unnecessary; that to make him anxious to leave the country it would have been sufficient to have intimated to him that his presence in it was unwelcome; and that he should not fail at once to obey the injunctions of the government. But the next day the Prefect of Police came to him in the Maison de Sante, four miles from his office, in person, with mitigated instructions, and followed up this sort of visitation for three successive days, with offers of kindness, and intimations