well in England—­particularly Lord Buckingham; he said that was very wrong, for it showed a want of gratitude.  I told him I supposed the Bourbons were afraid to be thought to depend upon the English.  “No,” he said, “the English in general are very well received.”  He asked sneeringly if the Army was much attached to the Bourbons.

    Talking of the Congress, he said, “There will be no war; the Powers
    will disagree, but they will not go to war”—­he said the Austrians,
    he heard, were already much disliked in Italy and even at Florence.

    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 bienseances, 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 systeme 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.

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