This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
58
FRENCH AFFAIRS.

now require no republic, since we have seen the best. And it also said as cruelly, in reference to the debates on the civil list, that "la meilleure république coute quinze millions."[1]

The Republican party will never forgive Lafayette his blunder in supporting a king. They reproach him with this, that he knew Louis Philippe[2] long enough not to be aware beforehand what was to be expected of him. Lafayette is now ill—malade de chagrin—heart-sick. Ah! the greatest heart of two worlds must feel bitterly the royal trickery. It was all in vain that he in the very beginning continually insisted on the Programme de l'Hôtel de Ville, on the republican institutions with which the monarchy should be surrounded, and on similar promises. But he was out-cried by the doctrinaire gossips and chatterers, who proved from the English history of 1688 that people in Paris in July 1830 had fought simply to maintain La Charte, and that all their sacrifices and battles had no other object save to replace the elder line of the Bourbons by the younger, just as all was finished in England by putting the House of Orange in place of the Stuarts. Thiers,


  1. This passage is wanting in the French version.—Translator.
  2. French version "Par la connaissance personelle des hommes."—Translator.