96 POLITICAL LIFE-III 



poleon Jerome, otherwise known as "Plon-Plon," whom 

 I saw during my student life at Paris, and the eldest son 

 of the latter, the present Bonaparte pretender to the Na- 

 poleonic crown of France, whom I saw during my stay 

 as minister at St. Petersburg, very strikingly resembled 

 the first Napoleon, though all were of much larger size. 

 But the Louis Napoleons, that is, the emperor and his 

 brother the Due de Morny, had no single Napoleonic 

 point in their features or bearing. 



I think that the most startling inspiration during my 

 life was one morning when, on walking through the Gar- 

 den of the Tuileries, I saw, within twenty feet of me, at 

 a window, in the old palace, which afterward disappeared 

 under the Commune, the emperor and his minister of 

 finance, Achille Fould, seated together, evidently in earn- 

 est discussion. There was not at that time any human 

 being whom I so hated and abhorred as Napoleon III. 

 He had broken his oath and trodden the French republic 

 under his feet, he was aiding to keep down the aspirations 

 of Italy, and he was doing his best to bring on an inter- 

 vention of Europe, in behalf of the Confederate States, to 

 dissolve our Union. He was then the arbiter of Europe. 

 The world had not then discovered him to be what Bis- 

 V/ marck had already found him "a great unrecognized in- 

 capacity," and, as I looked up and distinctly saw him so 

 near me, there flashed through my mind an understanding 

 of some of the great crimes of political history, such as I 

 have never had before or since. 1 



In France there was very little to be done for our cause. 

 The great mass of Frenchmen were either indifferent or 

 opposed to us. The only exception of importance was La- 

 boulaye, professor at the College de France, and his lec- 

 ture-room was a center of good influences in favor of 

 the American cause ; in the midst of that frivolous Napo- 

 leonic France he seemed by far "the noblest Roman of 

 them all." 



1 Since writing this I find in the Autobiography of W. J. Stillman that a 

 similar feeling once beset him on seeing this imperial malefactor. 



