Note 54 — Chapter XIV

The determination to have Murat deposed and Naples restored to Ferdinand is one of the cardinal points. This was insisted on by Louis XVIII as a family accommodation. It was not less advisable for France generally. Murat was too near Elba, as the sequel showed. Yet an able French critic of Talleyrand, M. Ollivier (Revue des Deux Mondes, September 15th 1894), has so far strained, perverted and ignored the evidence as to say Talleyrand first corresponded with Murat, and got 1,250,000 francs from him, and then turned against him and obtained several millions from Ferdinand. The blind hostility of Sainte Beuve is not yet extinct at Paris. Ollivier’s whole case is founded on Sainte Beuve’s “remarkable study” (a happy phrase!), Pasquier’s “judicious” memoirs and the wild charges of Savary, Chateaubriand and Napoleon.