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TO M. DE RÉMUSAT. - Alexis de Tocqueville, Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, vol. 2 [1861]

Edition used:

Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville. Translated from the French by the translator of Napoleon’s Correspondence with King Joseph. With large Additions. In Two Volumes (London: Macamillan, 1861). 2 vols.

Part of: Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, 2 vols.

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TO M. DE RÉMUSAT.

Tocqueville, August 6, 1856.

My dear friend,

I received only yesterday the number of the Revue des Deux Mondes of the first of this month. Your article,* which I eagerly expected, has exceeded my hopes, and I cannot thank you too much for it. I shall always remember that I have been so well praised, and praised by you. Really I cannot tell you how grateful I am, nor how much what I have just read increases my old and sincere affection. Not only have you said the most agreeable things of me, but you have said them in a way which will make everybody read them. I should have read your article with delight, even if it had not related to me. It contains all the grace, and the sagacity, and the breadth of your mind, so that those who differ from you as to the merits of the author, will read to the very end, and with great enjoyment, all that you say of him, or about him. Next to me, the man most pleased with the article must be M. Buloz.† You have been as useful to him as to me. I will say no more about it, except to repeat, that I shall never forget the service which you have rendered to me, nor the pleasure which you have given me. The substance and the form pleased me equally.

Buloz, in the letter in which he announced to me your article, pressed me to write for the Review. Certainly this is not the time at which I ought to refuse; and yet I do not know how to comply. I never wrote an article in a Review,‡ and I am frightened at the difficulty of having to compress into so small a frame a picture which shall be worth looking at. You, who do it so well, must suggest to me a subject. When we were political colleagues, every one said, “Let us talk on this to Rémusat. He has ideas about everything.” I follow this counsel, and beg you, if it does not give you too much trouble, to tell me how to satisfy Buloz. I am full of zeal, but my mind is barren. If your intelligence and experience do not help me, at least as to the subject, I do not know how I shall manage.

[*]This article is reproduced, almost without change, in an excellent work published by M. de Rémusat, in the winter of 1859, entitled, “La Politique Liberale.”

[†]The Editor of the Review.

[‡]M. de Tocqueville had forgotten the admirable article contributed by him twenty years before to the Westminster Review, and republished in Vol. I.—Tr.