Paris to mind his affairs at Court, told me these particulars by the
Count's express orders, and I still remember this passage in one of his
letters to Campion: "The men you know are very urgent with me to treat
with the enemy, and accuse me of weakness because I fear the examples of
Charles de Bourbon and Robert d'Artois." He was ordered to show me this
letter and desire my opinion thereupon. I took my pen, and, at a little
distance from the answer he had already begun, I wrote these words:

"And I do accuse them of folly." The reasons upon which my opinion was
grounded were these: The Count was courageous in the highest degree of
what is commonly called valour, and had a more than ordinary share in
that boldness of mind which we call resolution. The first is common and
to be frequently met with among the vulgar, but the second is rarer than
can be imagined, and yet abundantly more necessary for great enterprises;
and is there a greater in the world than heading a party? The command of
an army is without comparison of less intricacy, for there are wheels
within wheels necessary for governing the State, but then they are not
near so brittle and delicate. In a word, I am of opinion there are
greater qualities necessary to make a good head of a party than to make
an emperor who is to govern the whole world, and that resolution ought to
run parallel with judgment,--I say, with heroic judgment, which is able
to distinguish the extraordinary from what we call the impossible.

The Count had not one grain of this discerning faculty, which is but
seldom to be met with in the sublimest genius. His character was mean to
a degree, and consequently susceptible of unreasonable jealousies and
distrusts, which of all characters is the most opposite to that of a good
partisan, who is indispensably obliged in many cases to suppress, and in
all to conceal, the best-grounded suspicions.