'
'Could a man like Lord Althorp,' I asked, 'whom it was painful to hear,
hold his place as leader of a French Assembly?'
'Impossible,' said Tocqueville, 'unless he were a soldier. We tolerate
from a man who has almost necessarily been deprived of a careful
education much clumsiness and awkwardness of elocution. Soult did not
speak much better than the Duke of Wellington, but he was listened to. He
had, like the Duke, an air of command which imposed.'
'Was there,' I said, 'any personal quarrel between Soult and Thiers?'
'Certainly there was,' said Z., 'a little one. I will not say that Soult
was in Spain a successful commander, or an agreeable colleague, or an
obedient subordinate, but whenever things went wrong there, Soult was the
man whom the Emperor sent thither to put them to rights. Great as Thiers
may be as a military critic, I venture to put him below Napoleon.'
'I have been reading,' I said, 'Falloux's reception speech, and was
disappointed by it.'
'In his speech and Brifault's,' said Circourt, 'you may compare the
present declamatory style and that of thirty years ago. Brifault has, or
attempts to have, the _legerete_ and the prettiness of the Restoration.
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