Secondly, his jealousy of able men.  He wishes to be what you called him, a giant, and as Nature has not made him positively tall, he tries to be comparatively so, by surrounding himself with dwarfs.  His third defect is the disproportion of his wishes to his means.  His desires are enormous.  No power, no wealth, no expenditure would satisfy them.  Even if he had his uncle’s genius and his uncle’s indefatigability, he would sink, as his uncle did, under the exorbitance of his attempts.  As he is not a man of genius, or even a man of remarkable ability, as he is ignorant, uninventive and idle, you will see him flounder and fall from one failure to another.

’During the three years that Drouyn de L’Huys was his minister he was intent on home affairs—­on his marriage, on the Louvre, on the artillery, on his bonnes fortunes, and on the new delights of unbounded expenditure.  He left foreign affairs altogether to his minister.  When Drouyn de L’Huys left him, the road before him was plain—­he had only to carry on the war.  But when the war was over, the road ended; neither he nor Walewski nor any of his entourage know anything of the country in which they are travelling.  You see them wandering at hazard.  Sometimes trying to find their way to Russia, sometimes to England.  Making a treaty with Austria, then attempting to injure her, and failing; attempting to injure Turkey, and failing; bullying Naples, and failing; threatening Switzerland, threatening Belgium, and at last demanding from England an Alien Bill, which they ought to know to be incompatible with the laws and hateful to the feelings of the people.

’He is not satisfied with seeing the country prosperous and respected abroad.  He wants to dazzle.  His policy, domestic and foreign, is a policy of vanity and ostentation—­motives which mislead everyone both in private and in public life.

’His great moral merits are kindness and sympathy.  He is a faithful attached friend, and wishes to serve all who come near him.

’His greatest moral fault is his ignorance of the difference between right and wrong; perhaps his natural insensibility to it, his want of the organs by which that difference is perceived—­a defect which he inherits from his uncle.’

‘The uncle,’ I said, ’had at least one moral sense—­he could understand the difference between pecuniary honesty and dishonesty, a difference which this man seems not to see, or not to value.’

‘I agree with you,’ said L.  ’He cannot value it, or he would not look complacently on the peculation which surrounds him.  Every six months some magnificent hotel rises in the Champs Elysees, built by a man who had nothing, and has been a minister for a year or two.’

On my return I found Tocqueville with the ladies.  I gave him an outline of what L. had said.

‘No one,’ he said, ‘knows Louis Napoleon better than L.’

’My opportunities of judging him have been much fewer, but as far as they have gone, they lead to the same conclusions.  L. perhaps has not dwelt enough on his indolence.  Probably as he grows older, and the effects of his early habits tell on him, it increases.  I am told that it is difficult to make him attend to business, that he prolongs audiences apparently to kill time.