I believe that he reported the difficulty to the Prefet, and that
the vacancy was supplied from some other arrondissement.
'What makes this frightful,' he added, 'is that we now know that
deportation is merely a slow death. Scarcely any of the victims of 1851
and 1852 are living.'
'I foretold that,' I said, 'at the time, as you will find if you look at
my article on Lamartine, published in the "Edinburgh Review."'[1]
[Footnote 1: See _Journals in France and Italy_.--ED.]
_April_ 20.--We talked of the political influence in France of the
_hommes de lettres_.
'It began,' said Tocqueville, 'with the Restoration. Until that time we
had sometimes, though very rarely, statesmen who became writers, but
never writers who became statesmen,'
'You had _hommes de lettres_,' I said, 'in the early Revolutionary
Assemblies--Mirabeau for instance.'
'Mirabeau,' he answered, 'is your best example, for Mirabeau, until he
became a statesman, lived by his pen. Still I should scarcely call a man
of his high birth and great expectations _un homme de lettres_. That
appellation seems to belong to a man who owes his position in early life
to literature.
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