‘It is much greater now,’ said Lanjuinais.  ’Berryer on his return from Italy, a week ago, slept in Marseilles.  He was informed that more than 900 persons had passed through Marseilles, deportes under the new law to Algeria.  They were of all classes:  artisans and labourers mixed with men of the higher and middle classes.  To these must be added those transported to Cayenne, who were sent by way of Havre.  As for the number expulses and internes there are no data.’

’In the Department of Var, a man was found guilty in 1848 of joining in one of the revolutionary movements of that time.  His complete innocence was soon proved; he was released, and has lived quietly on his little estate ever since.  He was arrested under the new law and ordered to be deporte to Algeria.  His friends, in fact all his neighbours, remonstrated, and sent to Paris the proof that the original conviction was a mistake.  “Qu’il aille tout de meme,” was Espinasse’s answer.

’In Calvados the Prefet, finding no one whom he could conscientiously arrest, took hold of one of the most respectable men in the department.  “If,” he said, “I had arrested a man against whom there was plausible ground for suspicion, he might have been transported.  This man must be released."’

‘Has he been released?’ I asked.

‘I have not heard,’ was the answer.  ‘In all probability he has been.’

‘In my department,’ said Tocqueville, ’the sous-prefet, ordered by the Prefet to arrest somebody in the arrondissement, was in the same perplexity as the Prefet of Calvados.  “I can find no fit person,” he said to me.  I believe that he reported the difficulty to the Prefet, and that the vacancy was supplied from some other arrondissement.

‘What makes this frightful,’ he added, ’is that we now know that deportation is merely a slow death.  Scarcely any of the victims of 1851 and 1852 are living.’

‘I foretold that,’ I said, ’at the time, as you will find if you look at my article on Lamartine, published in the “Edinburgh Review."’[1]

[Footnote 1:  See Journals in France and Italy.—­ED.]

April 20.—­We talked of the political influence in France of the hommes de lettres.

‘It began,’ said Tocqueville, ’with the Restoration.  Until that time we had sometimes, though very rarely, statesmen who became writers, but never writers who became statesmen,’

‘You had hommes de lettres,’ I said, ’in the early Revolutionary Assemblies—­Mirabeau for instance.’

‘Mirabeau,’ he answered, ’is your best example, for Mirabeau, until he became a statesman, lived by his pen.  Still I should scarcely call a man of his high birth and great expectations un homme de lettres.  That appellation seems to belong to a man who owes his position in early life to literature.  Such a man is Thiers, or Guizot, as opposed to such men as Gladstone, Lord John Russell, or Montalembert.’