He wants to dazzle. His policy, domestic and foreign, is a policy
of vanity and ostentation--motives which mislead everyone both in private
and in public life.
'His great moral merits are kindness and sympathy. He is a faithful
attached friend, and wishes to serve all who come near him.
'His greatest moral fault is his ignorance of the difference between
right and wrong; perhaps his natural insensibility to it, his want of the
organs by which that difference is perceived--a defect which he inherits
from his uncle.'
'The uncle,' I said, 'had at least one moral sense--he could understand
the difference between pecuniary honesty and dishonesty, a difference
which this man seems not to see, or not to value.'
'I agree with you,' said L. 'He cannot value it, or he would not look
complacently on the peculation which surrounds him. Every six months some
magnificent hotel rises in the Champs Elysees, built by a man who had
nothing, and has been a minister for a year or two.'
On my return I found Tocqueville with the ladies. I gave him an outline
of what L. had said.
'No one,' he said, 'knows Louis Napoleon better than L.'
'My opportunities of judging him have been much fewer, but as far as they
have gone, they lead to the same conclusions.
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