"In a word, there are only two parties--the party of Marius and the
party of Sulla. I am for Sulla against Marius. This, roughly speaking,
is our position. To go more into details: the Revolution is still
active; it is embedded in the law and written on the soil; it fills
people's minds. The danger is all the greater because the greater
number of the King's counselors, seeing it destitute of armed forces
and of money, believe it completely vanquished. The King is an able
man, and not easily blinded; but from day to day he is won over by his
brother's partisans, who want to hurry things on. He has not two years
to live, and thinks more of a peaceful deathbed than of anything else.

"Shall I tell you, my child, which is the most destructive of all the
consequences entailed by the Revolution? You would never guess. In
Louis XVI. the Revolution has decapitated every head of a family. The
family has ceased to exist; we have only individuals. In their desire
to become a nation, Frenchmen have abandoned the idea of empire; in
proclaiming the equal rights of all children to their father's
inheritance, they have killed the family spirit and created the State
treasury. But all this has paved the way for weakened authority, for
the blind force of the masses, for the decay of art and the supremacy
of individual interests, and has left the road open to the foreign
invader.

"We stand between two policies--either to found the State on the basis
of the family, or to rest it on individual interest--in other words,
between democracy and aristocracy, between free discussion and
obedience, between Catholicism and religious indifference. I am among
the few who are resolved to oppose what is called the people, and that
in the people's true interest. It is not now a question of feudal