’One of the few of my acquaintances who go near him, was detained by him for an hour to answer questions about the members of the Corps legislatif.  Louis Napoleon inquired about their families, their fortunes, their previous histories.  Nothing about their personal qualities.  These are things that do not interest him.  He supposes that men differ only in externals.  “That the fond is the same in everyone."’

April 26.—­Tocqueville spent the evening with us.

We talked of Novels.

‘I read none,’ he said, ’that end ill.  Why should one voluntarily subject oneself to painful emotions?  To emotions created by an imaginary cause and therefore impelling you to no action.  I like vivid emotions, but I seek them in real life, in society, in travelling, in business, but above all in political business.  There is no happiness comparable to political success, when your own excitement is justified by the magnitude of the questions at issue, and is doubled and redoubled by the sympathy of your supporters.  Having enjoyed that, I am ashamed of being excited by the visionary sorrows of heroes and heroines.

‘I had a friend,’ he continued, ’a Benedictine, who is now ninety-seven.  He was, therefore, about thirteen when Louis XVI. began to reign.  He is a man of talents and knowledge, has always lived in the world, has attended to all that he has seen and heard, and is still unimpaired in mind, and so strong in body that when I leave him he goes down to embrace me, after the fashion of the eighteenth century, at the bottom of his staircase.’

‘And what effect,’ I asked, ’has the contemplation of seventy years of revolution produced in him?  Does he look back, like Talleyrand, to the ancien regime as a golden age?’

‘He admits,’ said Tocqueville, ’the material superiority of our own age, but he believes that, intellectually and morally, we are far inferior to our grandfathers.  And I agree with him.  Those seventy years of revolution have destroyed our courage, our hopefulness, our self-reliance, our public spirit, and, as respects by far the majority of the higher classes, our passions, except the vulgarest and most selfish ones—­vanity and covetousness.  Even ambition seems extinct.  The men who seek power, seek it not for itself, not as the means of doing good to their country, but as a means of getting money and flatterers.

‘It is remarkable,’ he continued, ’that women whose influence is generally greatest under despotisms, have none now.  They have lost it, partly in consequence of the gross vulgarity of our dominant passions, and partly from their own nullity.  They are like London houses, all built and furnished on exactly the same model, and that a most uninteresting one.  Whether a girl is bred up at home or in a convent, she has the same masters, gets a smattering of the same accomplishments, reads the same dull books, and contributes to society the same little contingent of superficial information.