CHAPTER III. 



ROME SUEZ PANAMA. 



AT the age of twenty I was sent upon a mission, 

 in the year 1825, under the orders of my 

 uncle, J. B. de Lesseps, the sole survivor of the 

 Lapeyrouse expedition, who was then Charge 

 d j Affaires at Lisbon. Since then I have held dif- 

 ferent posts in the administration of Foreign Affairs 

 at Tunis, in Algeria, in Egypt, in Holland, and in 

 Spain. At the outbreak of the Revolution of 1848, 

 M. de Lamartine summoned me from Barcelona to 

 Paris, and sent me to Madrid as Minister Plenipoten- 

 tiary. I had been eight years in Spain, during 

 which time I had been upon terms of intimacy with 

 the principal generals and public men, and though I 

 had never mixed myself up in the political dissen- 

 sions, I had established friendly relations with all the 

 different party leaders. Lamartine said to me, " We 

 are at the beginning of a revolution here ; we cannot 

 tell if foreigners will be friendly to us. It is 

 important for us that things should be quiet in 

 Spain. You know the Court, the representatives of 

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