514 fcETSY PATTERSON. and consequent prices of American stocks. There is nothing here worth attention or interest save the money market. Society, conversation, friendship, belong to older countries, and are not yet cultivated in any part of the United States which I have visited. You ought to thank your stars for your European birth ; you may believe me when I assure you that it is only distance from republics which lends enchantment to the view of them. I hope that about the middle of next July I shall begin to put the Atlantic between the advantages and honors of democracy and myself. France, je Vespere dans son inter et, is in a state of transition, and will not let her brilliant society be put under an extinguisher nominee la Republique. " The emperor hurled me back on what I most hated on earth — my Baltimore obscurity ; even that shock could not divest me of the admiration I felt for his genius and glory. I have ever been an imperial Bonapartiste quand oneme, and I do feel enchanted at the homage paid by six millions of voices to his memory, in voting an imperial president ; le prestige du nom has, therefore, elected the prince, who has my best wishes, my most ardent hopes for an empire. I never could endure universal suffrage until it elected the nephew of an emperor for the chief of a republic ; and I shall be charmed with universal suffrage once more if it insists upon their president of France becoming a monarch. I am disinterested personally. It is not my desire ever to return to France. " My dear Lady Morgan, do you know that, having been cheated out of the fortune which I ought to have inherited from my late rich and unjust parent, I have only ten thousand dollars, or two thousand pounds English, which conveniently I can disburse annually. You talk of my ' princely income,' which convinces me that . you are ignorant of the paucity of my means. I have all my life
