He had formerly been a furious anti-Bonapartist. "How is it
possible," said Montalembert, "that a man can rush so completely from one
opinion to another? On the 4th of December in 1851 this same Bishop
denounced the _coup d'etat_ with such violence that the President sent me
to the Nuncio to request his interference. Now he is on his knees before
him. Such changes can scarcely be honest." Montalembert does not see that
the only difference between them is that they have trod in opposite
directions the very same path.'
_Thursday, May_ 5.--Tocqueville and I dined with M. and Madame de Bourke,
and met there General Dumas and Ary Scheffer.
We talked of Delaroche's pictures, and Scheffer agreed with me in
preferring the smaller ones. He thought that Delaroche improved up to the
time of his death, and preferred his Moses, and Drowned Martyr, painted
in 1853 and 1855, to the other large ones, and his Girondins, finished in
1856, to the earlier small ones.
We passed on to the increased and increasing population of Paris.
'The population of Paris,' I said, 'is only half that of London, while
that of the British Islands is not three-fourths that of France.
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