A POPULAR HISTORY OF FRANCE
FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES
By M. Guizot
![[ENLARGE]](#3394880634367390791_frontis6.jpg.id-740161604978276162.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
CONTENTS
[ CHAPTER XLIX.] LOUIS XIV. AND HIS COURT.
[ CHAPTER L.] LOUIS XIV. AND DEATH. 1711-1715.
[ CHAPTER LI.] LOUIS XV., THE REGENCY, AND CARDINAL DUBOIS. 1715-1723.
[ CHAPTER LII.] LOUIS XV., THE MINISTRY OF CARDINAL FLEURY., 1723-1748.
[ CHAPTER LIII.] LOUIS XV., FRANCE IN THE COLONIES. 1745-1763.
[ CHAPTER LIV.] LOUIS XV., THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR.
[ CHAPTER LV.] LOUIS XV., THE PHILOSOPHERS.
[ CHAPTER LVI.] LOUIS XVI., MINISTRY OF M. TURGOT. 1774-1776.
[ CHAPTER LVII.] LOUIS XVI., FRANCE ABROAD.—UNITED STATES’ WAR
[ CHAPTER LVIII.] LOUIS XVI., FRANCE AT HOME.—MINISTRY OF M. NECKER.
[ CHAPTER LIX.] LOUIS XVI., M. DE CALONNE AND THE ASSEMBLY OF NOTABLES.
[ CHAPTER LX.] LOUIS XVI., CONVOCATION OF THE STATES-GENERAL. 1787-1789.ILLUSTRATIONS
[ The Grand Monarch in his State Robes——9 ]
[ Madame de Maintenon and the Duchess of Burgundy.——27 ]
[ Death of Madame de Maintenon.——34 ]
[ The King Leaving the Death-bed of Monseigneur——36 ]
[ The Death-bed of Louis XIV.——50 ]
[ The Duke and Duchess of Maine——71 ]
[ Peter the Great and Little Louis XV.——82 ]
[ Belzunce Amid the Plague-Stricken——96 ]
[ The Boy King and his People——104 ]
[ “Moriamur Pro Rege Nostro.”——142 ]
[ Louis XV. and his Councillors——148 ]
[ Louis XV. and the Ambassador of Holland——151 ]
[ Arrest of Charles Edward——166 ]
[ Dupleix Meeting the Soudhabar of The Deccan——174 ]
[ Death of the Nabob Of The Carnatic——174 ]
[ Death of General Braddock——203 ]
[ Attack on Fort St. Philip——218 ]
[ Assassination of Louis XV. by Damiens——221 ]
[ Death of Chevalier D’Assas——233 ]
[ “France, Thy Parliament Will Cut off Thy Head Too!”—249 ]
[ Defeat of the Corsicans at Golo——256 ]
[ The Rescue of “La Henriade.”——283 ]
[ Diderot and Catherine II.——321 ]
[ Rousseau and Madame D’Epinay——338 ]
[ Destruction of the Tea——378 ]
[ The Reading of “Paul and Virginia.”——427 ]
[ “There Are My Sledges, Sirs.”——458 ]
[ Cardinal Rohan’s Discomfiture——470 ]
A POPULAR HISTORY OF FRANCE
FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES.
CHAPTER XLIX.
LOUIS XIV. AND HIS COURT.
Louis XIV. reigned everywhere, over his people, over his age, often over Europe; but nowhere did he reign so completely as over his court. Never were the wishes, the defects, and the vices of a man so completely a law to other men as at the court of Louis XIV. during the whole period of his long life. When near to him, in the palace of Versailles, men lived, and hoped, and trembled; everywhere else in France, even at Paris, men vegetated. The existence of the great lords was concentrated in the court, about the person of the king. Scarcely could the most important duties bring them to absent themselves for any time. They returned quickly, with alacrity, with ardor; only poverty or a certain rustic pride kept gentlemen in their provinces. “The court does not make one happy,” says La Bruyere, “it prevents one from being so anywhere else.”
At the outset of his reign, and when, on the death of Cardinal Mazarin, he took the reins of power in hand, Louis XIV. had resolved to establish about him, in his dominions and at his court, “that humble obedience on the part of subjects to those who are set over them,” which he regarded as “one of the most fundamental maxims of Christianity.” “As the principal hope for the reforms I contemplated establishing in my kingdom lay in my own will,” says he in his Memoires, “the first step towards their foundation was to render my will quite absolute by a line of conduct which should induce submission and respect, rendering justice scrupulously to any to whom I owed it, but, as for favors, granting them freely and without constraint to any I pleased and when I pleased, provided that the sequel of my acts showed that, for all my giving no reason to anybody, I was none the less guided by reason.”
The principle of absolute power, firmly fixed in the young king’s mind, began to pervade his court from the time that he disgraced Fouquet and ceased to dissemble his affection for Mdlle. de La Valliere. She was young, charming, and modest. Of all the king’s favorites she alone loved him sincerely. “What a pity he is a king!” she would say. Louis XIV. made her a duchess; but all she cared about was to see him and please him. When Madame de Montespan began to supplant her in the king’s favor, the grief of Madame de La Valliere was so great that she thought she should die of it. Then she turned to God, in penitence and despair. Twice she sought refuge in a convent at Chaillot. “I should have left the court sooner,” she sent word to the king on leaving, “after having lost the honor of your good graces, if I could have prevailed upon myself never to see you again; that weakness was so strong in me that hardly now am I capable of making a sacrifice of it to God; after having given you all my youth, the rest of my life is not too much for the care of my salvation.” The king still clung to her. “He sent M. Colbert to beg her earnestly to come to Versailles, and that he might speak with her. M. Colbert escorted her thither; the king conversed for an hour with her, and wept bitterly. Madame de Montespan was there to meet her with open arms and tears in her eyes.” “It is all incomprehensible,” adds Madame de Sevigne; “some say that she will remain at Versailles, and at court, others that she will return to Chaillot; we shall see.” Madame de La Valliere remained three years at court, “half penitent,” she said humbly, detained there by the king’s express wish, in consequence of the tempers and jealousies of Madame de Montespan, who felt herself judged and condemned by her rival’s repentance. Attempts were made to turn Madame de La Valliere from her inclination for the Carmelites: “Madame,” said Madame Scarron to her one day, “here are you one blaze of gold: have you really considered that at the Carmelites’ before long, you will have to wear serge?” She, however, persisted. She was already practising in secret the austerities of the convent. “God has laid in this heart the foundation of great things,” said Bossuet, who supported her in her conflict: “the world puts great hinderances in her way and God great mercies; I have hopes that God will prevail; the uprightness of her heart will carry everything.”
“When I am in trouble at the Carmelites’,” said Madame de La Valliere, as at last she quitted the court, “I will think of what those people have made me suffer.” “The world itself makes us sick of the world,” said Bossuet in the sermon he preached on the day of her taking the dress; “its attractions have enough of illusion, its favors enough of inconstancy, its rebuffs enough of bitterness, there is enough of injustice and perfidy in the dealings of men, enough of unevenness and capriciousness in their intractable and contradictory humors—there is enough of it all, without doubt, to disgust us.” “She was dead to me the day she entered the Carmelites,” said the king, thirty-five years later, when the modest and fervent nun expired at last, in 1710, at her convent, without having ever relaxed the severities of her penance. He had married the daughter she had given him to the Prince of Conti. “Everybody has been to pay compliments to this saintly Carmelite,” says Madame de Sevigne, without appearing to perceive the singularity of the alliance between words and ideas; “I was there too with Mademoiselle. The Prince of Conti detained her in the parlor. What an angel appeared to me at last! She had to my eyes all the charms we had seen heretofore. I did not find her either puffy or sallow; she is less thin, though, and more happy-looking. She has those same eyes of hers, and the same expression; austerity; bad living, and little sleep have not made them hollow or dull; that singular dress takes away nothing of the easy grace and easy bearing. As for modesty, she is no grander than when she presented to the world a princess of Conti, but that is enough for a Carmelite. In real truth, this dress and this retirement are a great dignity for her.” The king never saw her again, but it was at her side that Madame de Montespan, in her turn forced to quit the court, went to seek advice and pious consolation. “This soul will be a miracle of grace,” Bossuet had said.
It was no longer the time of “this tiny violet that hides itself in the grass,” as Madame de Sevigne used to remark. Madame de Montespan was haughty, passionate, “with hair dressed in a thousand ringlets, a majestic beauty to show off to the ambassadors: “she openly paraded the favor she was in, accepting and angling for the graces the king was pleased to do her and hers, having the superintendence of the household of the queen whom she insulted without disguise, to the extent of wounding the king himself. “Pray consider that she is your mistress,” he said one day to his favorite. The scandal was great; Bossuet attempted the task of stopping it. It was the time of the Jubilee: neither the king nor Madame de Montespan had lost all religious feeling; the wrath of God and the refusal of the sacraments had terrors for them still. Madame de Montespan left the court after some stormy scenes; the king set out for Flanders. “Pluck this sin from your heart, Sir,” Bossuet wrote to him; “and not only this sin, but the cause of it; go even to the root. In your triumphant march amongst the people whom you constrain to recognize your might, would you consider yourself secure of a rebel fortress if your enemy still had influence there? We hear of nothing but the magnificence of your troops, of what they are capable under your leadership! And as for me, Sir, I think in my secret heart of a war far more important, of a far more difficult victory which God holds out before you. What would it avail you to be dreaded and victorious without, when you are vanquished and captive within?” “Pray God for me,” wrote the bishop at the same time to Marshal Bellefonds, “pray Him to deliver me from the greatest burden man can have to bear, or to quench all that is man in me, that I may act for Him only. Thank God, I have never yet thought, during the whole course of this business, of my belonging to the world; but that is not all; what is wanted is to be a St. Ambrose, a true man of God, a man of that other life, a man in whom everything should speak, with whom all his words should be oracles of the Holy Spirit, all his conduct celestial; pray, pray, I do beseech you.”
At the bottom of his soul, and in the innermost sanctuary of his conscience, Bossuet felt his weakness; he saw the apostolic severance from the world, the apostolic zeal and fervor required for the holy crusade he had undertaken. “Your Majesty has given your promise to God and the world,” he wrote to Louis XIV. in, ignorance of the secret correspondence still kept up between the king and Madame de Montespan. “I have been to see her,” added the prelate. “I find her pretty calm; she occupies herself a great deal in good works. I spoke to her as well as to you the words in which God commands us to give Him our whole heart; they caused her to shed many tears; may it please God to fix these truths in the bottom of both your hearts, and accomplish His work, in order that so many tears, so much violence, so many strains that you have put upon yourselves, may not be fruitless.”
The king was on the road back to Versailles; Madame de Montespan was to return thither also, her duties required her to do so, it was said; Bossuet heard of it; he did not for a single instant delude himself as to the emptiness of the king’s promises and of his own hopes. He determined, however, to visit the king at Luzarches. Louis XIV. gave him no time to speak.
“Do not say a word to me, sir,” said he, not without blushing, “do not say a word; I have given my orders, they will have to be executed.” Bossuet held his tongue. “He had tried every thrust; had acted like a pontiff of the earliest times, with a freedom worthy of the earliest ages and the earliest bishops of the Church,” says St. Simon. He saw the inutility of his efforts; henceforth, prudence and courtly behavior put a seal upon his lips. It was the time of the great king’s omnipotence and highest splendor, the time when nobody withstood his wishes. The great Mademoiselle had just attempted to show her independence: tired of not being married, with a curse on the greatness which kept her a-strand, she had made up her mind to a love-match. “Guess it in four, guess it in ten, guess it in a hundred,” wrote Madame de Sevigne to Madame de Coulanges: “you are not near it; well, then, you must be told. M. de Lauzun is to marry on Sunday at the Louvre, with the king’s permission, mademoiselle . . . mademoiselle de . .. mademoiselle, guess the name . . . he is to marry Mademoiselle, my word! upon my word! my sacred word! Mademoiselle, the great Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle daughter of the late Monsieur, Mademoiselle grand-daughter of Henry IV., Mademoiselle d’Eu, Mademoiselle de Dombes, Mademoiselle de Montpensier, Mademoiselle d’ Orleans, Mademoiselle, cousin-german to the king, Mademoiselle destined to the throne, Mademoiselle, the only match in France who would have been worthy of Monsieur!” The astonishment was somewhat premature; Mademoiselle did not espouse Lauzun just then, the king broke off the marriage. “I will make you so great,” he said to Lauzun, “that you shall have no cause to regret what I am taking from you; meanwhile, I make you duke, and peer, and marshal of France.” “Sir,” broke in Lauzun, insolently, “you have made so many dukes that it is no longer an honor to be one, and as for the baton of marshal of France, your Majesty can give it me when I have earned it by my services.” He was before long sent to Pignerol, where he passed ten years. There he met Fouquet, and that mysterious personage called the Iron Mask, whose name has not yet been discovered to a certainty by means of all the most ingenious conjectures. It was only by settling all her property on the Duke of Maine after herself that Mademoiselle purchased Lauzun’s release. The king had given his posts to the Prince of Marcillac, son of La Rochefoucauld. He at the same time overwhelmed Marshal Bellefonds with kindnesses.
“He sent for him into his study,” says Madame de Sevigne, “and said to him, ‘Marshal, I want to know why you are anxious to leave me. Is it a devout feeling? Is it a desire for retirement? Is it the pressure of your debts? If the last, I shall be glad to set it right, and enter into the details of your affairs.’ The marshal was sensibly touched by this kindness: ‘Sir,’ said he, ‘it is my debts; I am over head and ears. I cannot see the consequences borne by some of my friends who have assisted me, and whom I cannot pay.’ ‘Well,’ said the king, ‘they must have security for what is owing to them. I will give you a hundred thousand francs on your house at Versailles, and a patent of retainder (brevet de retenue—whereby the emoluments of a post were not lost to the holder’s estate by his death) for four hundred thousand francs, which will serve as a policy of assurance if you should die; that being so, you will stay in my service.’ In truth, one must have a very hard heart not to obey a master who enters with so much kindness into the interests of one of his domestics; accordingly, the marshal made no objection, and here he is in his place again, and loaded with benefits.”
The king entered benevolently into the affairs of a marshal of France; he paid his debts, and the marshal was his domestic; all the court had come to that; the duties which brought servants in proximity to the king’s person were eagerly sought after by the greatest lords. Bontemps, his chief valet, and Fagon, his physician, as well as his surgeon Marachal, very excellent men, too, were all-powerful amongst the courtiers. Louis XIV. had possessed the art of making his slightest favors prized; to hold the candlestick at bedtime (au petit coucher), to make one in the trips to Marly, to play in the king’s own game, such was the ambition of the most distinguished; the possessors of grand historic castles, of fine houses at Paris, crowded together in attics at Versailles, too happy to obtain a lodging in the palace. The whole mind of the greatest personages, his favorites at the head, was set upon devising means of pleasing the king; Madame de Montespan had pictures painted in miniature of all the towns he had taken in Holland; they were made into a book which was worth four thousand pistoles, and of which Racine and Boileau wrote the text; people of tact, like M. de Langlee, paid court to the master through those whom he loved. “M. de Langlee has given Madame de Montespan a dress of the most divine material ever imagined; the fairies did this work in secret, no living soul had any notion of it; and it seemed good to present it as mysteriously as it had been fashioned. Madame de Montespan’s dressmaker brought her the dress she had ordered of him; he had made the body a ridiculous fit; there was shrieking and scolding as you may suppose. The dressmaker said, all in a tremble, ‘As time presses, madame, see if this other dress that I have here might not suit you for lack of anything else.’ ‘Ah! what material! Does it come from heaven? There is none such on earth.’ The body is tried on; it is a picture. The king comes in. The dressmaker says, ‘Madame, it is made for you.’ Everybody sees that it is a piece of gallantry; but on whose part? ‘It is Langlee,’ says the king; ‘it is Langlee.’ ‘Of course,’ says Madame de Montespan, ‘none but he could have devised such a device; it is Langlee, it is Langlee.’ Everybody repeats, ‘it is Langlee;’ the echoes are agreed and say, ‘it is Langlee;’ and as for me, my child, I tell you, to be in the fashion, ‘it is Langlee.’”
All the style of living at court was in accordance with the magnificence of the king and his courtiers; Colbert was beside himself at the sums the queen lavished on play. Madame de Montespan lost and won back four millions, in one night at bassette; Mdlle. de Fontanges gave away twenty thousand crowns’ worth of New Year’s gifts; the king had just accomplished the dauphin’s marriage. “He made immense presents on this occasion; there is certainly no need to despair,” said Madame de Sevigne, “though one does not happen to be his valet; it may happen that, whilst paying one’s court, one will find one’s self underneath what he showers around. One thing is certain, and that is, that away from him all services go for nothing; it used to be the contrary.” All the court were of the same opinion as Madame de Sevigne.
A new power was beginning to appear on the horizon, with such modesty and backwardness that none could as yet discern it, least of all could the king. Madame de Montespan had looked out for some one to take care of and educate her children. She had thought of Madame Scarron; she considered her clever; she was so herself, “in that unique style which was peculiar to the Mortemarts,” said the Duke of St. Simon; she was fond of conversation; Madame Scarron had a reputation of being rather a blue-stocking; this the king did not like; Madame de Montespan had her way; Madame Scarron took charge of the children secretly and in an isolated house. She was attentive, careful, sensible. The king was struck with her devotion to the children intrusted to her. “She can love,” he said; “it would be a pleasure to be loved by her.” The confidence of Madame de Montespan went on increasing. “The person of quality (Madame de Montespan) has no partnership with the person who has a cold (Madame Scarron), for she regards her as the confidential person; the lady who is at the head of all (the queen) does the same; she is, therefore, the soul of this court,” writes Madame de Sevigne in 1680. There were, however, frequent storms; Madame de Montespan was jealous and haughty, and she grew uneasy at the nascent liking she observed in the king for the correct and shrewd judgment, the equable and firm temper, of his children’s governess. The favor of which she was the object did not come from Madame de Montespan. The king had made the Parliament legitimatize the Duke of Maine, Mdlle. de Nantes, and the Count of Vexin; they were now formally installed at Versailles. Louis XIV. often chatted with Madame Scarron. She had bought the estate of Maintenon out of the king’s bounty. He made her take the title. The recollection of Scarron was displeasing to him. “It is supposed that I am indebted for this present to Madame de Montespan,” she wrote to Madame de St. Geran; “I owe it to my little prince. The king was amusing himself with him one day, and, being pleased with the manner with which he answered his questions, told him that he was a very sensible little fellow. ‘I can’t help being,’ said the child, ‘I have by me a lady who is sense itself.’ ‘Go and tell her,’ replied the king, ‘that you will give her this evening a hundred thousand francs for your sugar-plums.’ The mother gets me into trouble with the king, the son makes my peace with him; I am never for two days together in the same situation, and I do not get accustomed to this sort of life, I who thought I could make myself used to anything.” She often spoke of leaving the court. “As I tell you everything honestly,” she wrote in 1675 to her confessor, Abbe Gobelin, “I will not tell you that it is to serve God that I should like to leave the place where I am; I believe that I might work out my salvation here and elsewhere, but I see nothing to forbid us from thinking of our repose, and withdrawing from a position that vexes us every moment. I explained myself badly if you understood me to mean that I am thinking of being a nun; I am too old for a change of condition, and, according to the property I shall have, I shall look out for securing one full of tranquillity. In the world, all reaction is towards God; in a convent, all reaction is towards the world; there is one great reason; that of age comes next.” She did not, however, leave the court except to take to the waters the little Duke of Maine, who had become a cripple after a series of violent convulsions. “Never was anything more agreeable than the surprise which Madame de Maintenon gave the king,” writes Madame de Sevigne to her daughter. “He had not expected the Duke of Maine till the next day, when he saw him come walking into his room, and only holding by the hand of his governess; he was transported with joy. M. do Louvois on her arrival went to call upon Madame de Maintenon; she supped at Madame de Richelieu’s, some kissing her hand, others her gown, and she making fun of them all, if she is not much changed; but they say that she is.” The king’s pleasure in conversing with the governess became more marked every day; Madame de Montespan frequently burst out into bitter complaints. “She reproaches me with her kindnesses, with her presents, with those of the king, and has told me that she fed me, and that I am strangling her; you know what the fact is; it is a strange thing that we cannot live together and that we cannot separate. I love her, and I cannot persuade myself that she hates me.” They found themselves alone together in one of the court carriages. “Let us not be duped by such a thing as this,” said Madame de Montespan, rudely; “let us talk as if we had no entanglements between us to arrange; it being understood, of course,” added she, “that we resume our entanglements when we get back.” “Madame de Maintenon accepted the proposal,” says Madame de Caylus, who tells the story, “and they kept their word to the letter.” Madame de Maintenon had taken a turn for preaching virtue. “The king passed two hours in my closet,” she wrote to Madame de St. Geran; “he is the most amiable man in his kingdom. I spoke to him of Father Bourdaloue. He listened to me attentively. Perhaps he is not so far from thinking of his salvation as the court suppose. He has good sentiments and frequent reactions towards God.” “The star of Quanto (Madame de Montespan) is paling,” writes Madame de Sevigne to her daughter; “there are tears, natural pets, affected gayeties, poutings—in fact, my dear, all is coming to an end. People look, observe, imagine, believe that there are to be seen as it were rays of light upon faces which, a month ago, were thought to be unworthy of comparison with others. If Quanto had hidden her face with her cap at Easter in the year she returned to Paris, she would not be in the agitated state in which she now is. The spirit, indeed, was willing, but great is human weakness; one likes to make the most of a remnant of beauty. This is an economy which ruins rather than enriches.” “Madame de Montespan asks advice of me,” said Madame de Maintenon; “I speak to her of God, and she thinks I have some understanding with the king; I was present yesterday at a very animated conversation between them. I wondered at the king’s patience, and at the rage of that vain creature. It all ended with these terrible words: ‘I have told you already, madame; I will not be interfered with.’”
Henceforth Madame de Montespan “interfered with” the king. He gave the new dauphiness Madame de Maintenon as her mistress of the robes. “I am told,” writes Madame de Sevigne, “that the king’s conversations do nothing but increase and improve, that they last from six to ten o’clock, that the daughter-in-law goes occasionally to pay them a shortish visit, that they are found each in a big chair, and that, when the visit is over, the talk is resumed. The lady is no longer accosted without awe and respect, and the ministers pay her the court which the rest do. No friend was ever so careful and attentive as the king is to her; she makes him acquainted with a perfectly new line of country—I mean the intercourse of friendship and conversation, without chicanery and without constraint; he appears to be charmed with it.”
Discreet and adroit as she was, and artificial without being false, Madame de Maintenon gloried in bringing back the king and the court to the ways of goodness. “There is nothing so able as irreproachable conduct,” she used to say. The king often went to see the queen; the latter heaped attentions upon Madame de Maintenon. “The king never treated me more affectionately than he has since she had his ear,” the poor princess would say. The dauphiness had just had a son. The joy at court was excessive. “The king let anybody who pleased embrace him,” says the Abbe de Croisy; “he gave everybody his hand to kiss. Spinola, in the warmth of his zeal, bit his finger; the king began to exclaim. ‘Sir,’ interrupted the other, ‘I ask your Majesty’s pardon; but, if I hadn’t bitten you, you would not have noticed me.’ The lower orders seemed beside themselves, they made bonfires of everything. The porters and the Swiss burned the poles of the chairs, and even the floorings and wainscots intended for the great gallery. Bontemps, in wrath, ran and told the king, who burst out laughing and said, ‘Let them be; we will have other floorings.’”
The least clear-sighted were beginning to discern the modest beams of a rising sun. Madame de Montespan, who had a taste for intellectual things, had not long since recommended Racine and Boileau to the king to write a history of his reign. They had been appointed historiographers. “When they had done some interesting piece,” says Louis Racine in his Memoires, “they used to go and read it to the king at Madame de Montespan’s. Madame de Maintenon was generally present at the reading. She, according to Boileau’s account, liked my father better than him, and Madame de Montespan, on the contrary, liked Boileau better than my father, but they always paid their court jointly, without any jealousy between them. When Madame de Montespan would let fall some rather tart expressions, my father and Boileau, though by no means sharp-sighted, observed that the king, without answering her, looked with a smile at Madame de Maintenon, who was seated opposite to him on a stool, and who finally disappeared all at once from these meetings. They met her in the gallery, and asked her why she did not come any more to hear their readings. She answered very coldly, ‘I am no longer admitted to those mysteries.’ As they found a great deal of cleverness in her, they were mortified and astonished at this. Their astonishment was very much greater, then, when the king, being obliged to keep his bed, sent for them with orders to bring what they had newly written of history, and they saw as they went in Madame de Maintenon sitting in an arm-chair near the king’s pillow, chatting familiarly with his Majesty. They were just going to begin their reading, when Madame do Montespan, who had not been expected, came in, and after a few compliments to the king, paid such long ones to Madame de Maintenon, that the king, to stop them, told her to sit down. ‘As it would not be fair,’ he added, ‘to read without you a work which you yourself ordered.’ From this day, the two historians paid their court to Madame de Maintenon as far as they knew how to do so.”
The queen had died on the 30th of July, 1683, piously and gently, as she had lived. “This is the first sorrow she ever caused me,” said the king, thus rendering homage in his superb and unconscious egotism, to the patient virtue of the wife he had put to such cruel trials. Madame de Maintenon was agitated but resolute. “Madame de Montespan has plunged into the deepest devoutness,” she wrote, two months after the queen’s death; “it is quite time she edified us; as for me, I no longer think of retiring.” Her strong common sense and her far-sighted ambition, far more than her virtue, had secured her against rocks ahead; henceforth she saw the goal, she was close upon it, she moved towards it with an even step. The king still looked in upon Madame de Montespan of an evening on his way to the gaming-table; he only staid an instant, to pass on to Madame de Maintenon’s; the latter had modestly refused to become lady in attendance upon the dauphiness. She, however, accompanied the king on all his expeditions, “sending him away always afflicted, but, never disheartened.” Madame de Montespan, piqued to see that the king no longer thought of anybody but Madame de Maintenon, “said to him one day at Marly,” writes Dangeau, “that she has a favor to ask of him, which was to let her have the duty of entertaining the second-carriage people and of amusing the antechamber.” It required more than seven years of wrath and humiliation to make her resolve upon quitting the court, in 1691.
The date has never been ascertained exactly of the king’s private marriage with Madame de Maintenon. It took place, probably, eighteen months or two years after the queen’s death; the king was forty-seven, Madame de Maintenon fifty.
“She had great remains of beauty, bright and sprightly eyes, an imcomparable grace,” says St. Simon, who detested her; “an air of ease, and yet of restraint and respect; a great deal of cleverness, with a speech that was sweet, correct, in good terms, and naturally eloquent and brief.”
Madame do La Valliere had held sway over the young and passionate heart of the prince, Madame de Montespan over the court, Madame de Maintenon alone established her empire over the man and the king. “Whilst giving up our heart, we must remain absolute master of our mind,” Louis XIV. had written, “separate our affections from our resolves as a sovereign, that she who enchants us may never have liberty to speak to us of our business or of the people who serve us, and that they be two things absolutely distinct.” The king had scrupulously applied this maxim; Mdlle. de La Valliere had never given a thought to business; Madame de Montespan had sought only to shine, disputing the influence of Colbert when he would have put a limit upon her ruinous fancies, leaning for support at the last upon Louvois, in order to counterbalance the growing power of Madame de Maintenon; the latter alone had any part in affairs, a smaller part than has frequently been made out, but important, nevertheless, and sometimes decisive. Ministers went occasionally to do their work in her presence with the king, who would turn to her when the questions were embarrassing, and ask, “What does your Solidity think?” The opinions she gave were generally moderate and discreet. “I did not manage to please in my conversation about the buildings,” she wrote to Cardinal Noailles, “and what grieves me is to have caused vexation to no purpose. Another block of chambers is being built here at a cost of a hundred thousand francs; Marly will soon be a second Versailles. The people, what will become of them?” And later on: “Would you think proper, monsignor, to make out a list of good bishops? You could send it me, so that, on the occasions which are constantly occurring, I might support their interests, and they might have the business referred to them in which they ought to have a hand, and for which they are the proper persons. I am always spoken to when the question is of them; and if I were better informed, I should be bolder.” “It is said that you meddle too little with business,” Fenelon wrote to her in 1694; “your mind is better calculated for it than you suppose. You ought to direct your whole endeavors to giving the king views tending to peace, and especially to the relief of the people, to moderation, to equity, to mistrust of harsh and violent measures, to horror for acts of arbitrary authority, and finally to love of the Church, and to assiduity in seeking good pastors for it.” Neither Fenelon nor Madame de Maintenon had seen in the revocation of the edict of Nantes “an act of arbitrary authority, or a harsh and violent measure.” She was not inclined towards persecution, but she feared lest her moderation should be imputed to a remnant of prejudice in favor of her former religion, “and this it is,” she would say, “which makes me approve of things quite opposed to my sentiments.” An egotistical and cowardly prudence, which caused people to attribute to Madame de Maintenon, in the severities against the Huguenots, a share which she had not voluntarily or entirely assumed.
Whatever the apparent reserve and modesty with which it was cloaked, the real power of Madame de Maintenon over the king’s mind peeped out more and more into broad daylight. She promoted it dexterously by her extreme anxiety to please him, as well as by her natural and sincere attachment to the children whom she had brought up, and who had a place near the heart of Louis XIV. Already the young Duke of Maine had been sent to the army at the dauphin’s side; the king was about to have him married [August 29, 1692] to Mdlle. de Charolais; carefully seeking for his natural children alliances amongst the princes of his blood, he had recently given Mdlle. de Nantes, daughter of Madame de Montespan, to the duke, grandson of the great Conde. “For a long time past,” says St. Simon, “Madame de Maintenon, even more than the king, had been thinking of marrying Mdlle. de Blois, Madame de Montespan’s second daughter, to the Duke of Chartres; he was the king’s own and only nephew, and the first moves towards this marriage were the more difficult in that Monsieur was immensely attached to all that appertained to his greatness, and Madame was of a nation which abhorred misalliances, and of a character which gave no promise of ever making this marriage agreeable to her.” The king considered himself sure of his brother; he had set his favorites to work, and employed underhand intrigues. “He sent for the young Duke of Chartres, paid him attention, told him he wanted to have him settled in life, that the war which was kindled on all sides put out of his reach the princesses who might have suited him, that there were no princesses of the blood of his own age, that he could not better testify his affection towards him than by offering him his daughter whose two sisters had married princes of the blood; but that, however eager he might be for this marriage, he did not want to put any constraint upon him, and would leave him full liberty in the matter. This language, addressed with the awful majesty so natural to the king to a prince who was timid, and had not a word to say for himself, put him at his wits’ end.” He fell back upon the wishes of his father and mother. “That is very proper in you,” replied the king; “but, as you consent, your father and mother will make no objection;” and, turning to Monsieur, who was present, “Is it not so, brother?” he asked. Monsieur had promised; a messenger was sent for Madame, who cast two furious glances at her husband and her son, saying that, as they were quite willing, she had nothing to say, made a curt obeisance, and went her way home. Thither the court thronged next day; the marriage was announced. “Madame was walking in the gallery with her favorite, Mdlle. de Chateau-Thiers, taking long steps, handkerchief in hand, weeping unrestrainedly, speaking somewhat loud, gesticulating and making a good picture of Ceres after the rape of her daughter Proserpine, seeking her in a frenzy, and demanding her back from Jupiter. Everybody saluted, and stood aside out of respect. Monsieur had taken refuge in lansquenet; never was anything so shamefaced as his look or so disconcerted as his whole appearance, and this first condition lasted more than a month with him. The Duke of Chartres came into the gallery, going up to his mother, as he did every day, to kiss her hand. At that moment, Madame gave him a box of the ear so loud that it was heard some paces off, and given as it was before the whole court, covered the poor prince with confusion, and overwhelmed the countless spectators with prodigious astonishment.” That did not prevent or hamper the marriage, which took place with great pomp at Versailles on the 18th of February, 1692. The king was, and continued to the last, the absolute and dread master of all his family, to its remotest branches.
He lost through this obedience a great deal that is charming and sweet in daily intercourse. For him and for Madame de Maintenon the great and inexhaustible attraction of the Duchess of Burgundy was her gayety and unconstrained ease, tempered by the most delicate respect, which this young princess, on coming as quite a child to France from the court of Savoy, had tact enough to introduce, and always maintain, amidst the most intimate familiarity. “In public, demure, respectful with the king, and on terms of timid propriety with Madame de Maintenon, whom she never called anything but aunt, thus prettily blending rank and affection. In private, chattering, frisking, fluttering around them, at one time perched on the arm of one or the other’s chair, at another playfully sitting on their knee, she would throw herself upon their necks, embrace them, kiss them, fondle them, pull them to pieces, chuck them under the chin, tease them, rummage their tables, their papers, their letters, reading them sometimes against their will, according as she saw that they were in the humor to laugh at it, and occasionally speaking thereon. Admitted to everything, even at the reception of couriers bringing the most important news, going into the king at any hour, even at the time the council was sitting, useful and also fatal to ministers themselves, but always inclined to help, to excuse, to benefit, unless she were violently set against anybody. The king could not do without her; when, rarely, she was absent from his supper in public, it was plainly shown by a cloud of more than usual gravity and taciturnity over the king’s whole person; and so, when it happened that some ball in winter or some party in summer made her break into the night, she arranged matters so well that she was there to kiss the king the moment he was awake, and to amuse him with an account of the affair.” [Memoires de St. Simon, t. x. p. 186.]
The dauphiness had died in 1690; the Duchess of Burgundy was, therefore, almost from childhood queen of the court, and before long the idol of the courtiers; it was around her that pleasures sprang up; it was for her that the king gave the entertainments to which he had habituated Versailles, not that for her sake or to take care of her health he would ever consent to modify his habits or make the least change in his plans. “Thank God, it is over!” he exclaimed one day, after an accident to the princess; “I shall no longer be thwarted in my trips, and in all I desire to do, by the representations of physicians. I shall come and go as I fancy; and I shall be left in peace.” Even in his court, and amongst his most devoted servants, this monstrous egotism astounded and scandalized everybody. “A silence in which you might have heard an ant move succeeded this sally,” says St. Simon, who relates the scene; “we looked down; we hardly dared draw breath. Everybody stood aghast. To the very builders-men and gardeners everybody was motionless. This silence lasted more than a quarter of an hour. The king broke it, as he leaned against a balustrade of the great basin, to speak about a carp. Nobody made any answer. He afterwards addressed his remarks about these carp to some builder’s-men who did not keep up the conversation in the regular way; it was but a question of carp with them. Everything was at a low ebb, and the king went away some little time after. As soon as we dared look at one another out of his sight, our eyes meeting told all.” There was no venturing beyond looks. Fenelon had said, with severe charity, “God will have compassion upon a prince beset from his youth up by flatterers.”
Flattery ran a risk of becoming hypocrisy. On returning to a regular life, the king was for imposing the same upon his whole court; the instinct of order and regularity, smothered for a while in the heyday of passion, had resumed all its sway over the naturally proper and steady mind of Louis XIV. His dignity and his authority were equally involved in the cause of propriety and regularity at his court; he imposed this yoke as well as all the others; there appeared to be entire obedience; only some princes or princesses escaped it sometimes, getting about them a few free-thinkers or boon-companions; good, honest folks showed ingenuous joy; the virtuous and far-sighted were secretly uneasy at the falsehood, and deplored the pressure put on so many consciences and so many lives. The king was sincere in his repentance for the past, many persons in his court were as sincere as he; others, who were not, affected, in order to please him, the externals of austerity; absolute power oppressed all spirits, extorting from them that hypocritical complaisance which is liable to engender; corruption was already brooding beneath appearances of piety; the reign of Louis XV. was to see its deplorable fruits displayed with a haste and a scandal which are to be explained only by the oppression exercised in the last years of King Louis XIV.
Madame de Maintenon was like the genius of this reaction towards regularity, propriety, order; all the responsibility for it had been thrown upon her; the good she did has disappeared beneath the evil she allowed or encouraged; the regard lavished upon her by the king has caused illusions as to the discreet care she was continually taking to please him. She was faithful to her friends, so long as they were in favor with the king; if they had the misfortune to displease him, she, at the very least, gave up seeing them; without courage or hardihood to withstand the caprices and wishes of Louis XIV., she had gained and preserved her empire by dint of dexterity and far-sighted suppleness beneath the externals of dignity.
She never forgot her origin. “I am not a grandee,” she would say; “I am a mushroom.” Her life, entirely devoted to the king, had become a veritable slavery; she said as much to Mdlle. d’Aumale at St. Cyr. “I have to take for my prayers and for mass the time when everybody else is still sleeping. For, when once they begin coming into my room, at half past seven, I haven’t another moment to myself. They come filing in, and nobody goes out without being relieved by somebody higher. At last comes the king; then, of course, they all have to go out; he remains with me up to mass. I am, still in my night-cap. The king comes back after mass; then the Duchess of Burgundy with her ladies. They remain whilst I dine. I have to keep up the conversation, which flags every moment, and to manage so as to harmonize minds and reconcile hearts which are as far as possible asunder. The circle is all round me, and I cannot ask for anything to drink; I sometimes say to them (aside), ‘It is a great honor, but really I should prefer a footman.’ At last they all go away to dinner. I should be free during that time, if Monseigneur did not generally choose it for coming to see me, for he often dines earlier in order to go hunting. He is very difficult to entertain, having very little to say, and finding himself a bore, and running away from himself continually; so I have to talk for two. Immediately after the king has dined, he comes into my room with all the royal family, princes and princesses; then I must be prepared for the gayest of conversation, and wear a smiling face amidst so much distressing news. When this company disperses, some lady has always something particular to say to me; the Duchess of Burgundy also wants to have a chat. The king returns from hunting. He comes to me. The door is shut, and nobody else is admitted. Then I have to share his secret troubles, which are no small number. Arrives a minister; and the king sets himself to work. If I am not wanted at this consultation, which seldom happens, I withdraw to some farther distance and write or pray. I sup, whilst the king is still at work. I am restless, whether he is alone or not. The king says to me, ‘You are tired, Madame; go to bed.’ My women come. But I feel that they interfere with the king, who would chat with me, and does not like to chat before them; or, perhaps, there are some ministers still there, whom he is afraid they may overhear. Wherefore I make haste to undress, so much so that I often feel quite ill from it. At last I am in bed. The king comes up and remains by my pillow until he goes to supper. But a quarter of an hour before supper, the dauphin and the Duke and Duchess of Burgundy come in to me again. At ten, everybody goes out. At last I am alone, but very often the fatigues of the day prevent me from sleeping.”
She was at that time seventy. She was often ailing; but the Duchess of Burgundy was still very young, and the burden of the most private matters of court diplomacy fell entirely upon Madame de Maintenon. “The Princess des Ursins is about to return to Spain,” she said; “if I do not take her in hand, if I do not repair by my attentions the coldness of the Duchess of Burgundy, the indifference of the king and the curtness of the other princes, she will go away displeased with our court, and it is expedient that she should praise it, and speak well of it in Spain.”
It was, in fact, through Madame de Maintenon and her correspondence with the Princess des Ursins, that the private business between the two courts of France and Spain was often carried on. At Madrid, far more than at Versailles, the influence of women was all-powerful. The queen ruled her husband, who was honest and courageous, but without wit or daring; and the Princess des Ursins ruled the queen, as intelligent and as amiable as her sister the Duchess of Burgundy, but more ambitious and more haughty. Louis XIV. had several times conceived some misgiving of the camarera major’s influence over his grandson; she had been disgraced, and then recalled; she had finally established her sway by her fidelity, ability, dexterity, and indomitable courage. She served France habitually, Spain and her own influence in Spain always; she had been charming, with an air of nobility, grace, elegance, and majesty all together, and accustomed to the highest society and the most delicate intrigues, during her sojourn at Rome and Madrid; she was full of foresight and calculation, but impassioned, ambitious, implacable, pushing to extremes her amity as well as her hatred, faithful to her master and mistress in their most cruel trials, and then hampering and retarding peace for the sake of securing for herself a principality in the Low Countries. Without having risen from the ranks, like Madame de Maintenon, she had reached a less high and less safe elevation; she had been more absolutely and more daringly supreme during the time of her power, and at last she fell with the rudest shock, without any support from Madame de Maintenon. The pretensions of Madame des Ursins during the negotiations had offended France; “this was the stone of stumbling between the two supreme directresses,” says St. Simon; after this attempt at sovereignty, there was no longer the same accord between Madame de Maintenon and Madame des Ursins, but this latter had reached in Spain a point at which she more easily supposed that she could dispense with it. The Queen of Spain had died at the age of twenty-six, in 1714; did the princess for a moment conceive the hope of marrying Philip V. in spite of the disproportion in rank and age? Nobody knows; she had already been reigning as sovereign mistress for some months, when she received from the king this stunning command: “Look me out a wife.” She obeyed; she looked out. Alberoni, an Italian priest, brought into Spain by the Duke of Vendome, drew her attention to the Princess of Parma, Elizabeth Farnese. The principality was small, the princess young; Alberoni laid stress upon her sweetness and modesty. “Nothing will be more easy,” he said, “than for you to fashion her to Spanish gravity, by keeping her retired; in the capacity of her camarera major, intrusted with her education, you will easily be able to acquire complete sway over her mind.” The Princess des Ursins believed him, and settled the marriage. “Cardonne has surrendered at last, Madame,” she wrote on the 20th of September, 1714, to Madame de Maintenon; “there is nothing left in Catalonia that is not reduced. The new queen, at her coming into this kingdom, is very fortunate to find no more war there. She whom we have lost would have been beside herself with delight at enjoying peace after having experienced such cruel sufferings of all kinds. The longer I live, the more I see that we are never so near a reverse of Fortune as when she is favorable, or so near receiving favors as when she is maltreating us. For that reason, Madame, if one were wise, one would take her inconstancy graciously.”
The time had come for Madame des Ursins to make definitive trial of Fortune’s inconstancy. She had gone to meet the new queen, in full dress and with her ornaments; Elizabeth received her coldly; they were left alone; the queen reproached the princess with negligence in her costume Madame des Ursins, strangely surprised, would have apologized, “but, all at once there was the queen at offensive words, and screaming, summoning, demanding officers, guards, and imperiously ordering Madame des Ursins out of her presence. She would have spoken; but the queen, with redoubled rage and threats, began to scream out for the removal of this mad woman from her presence and her apartments; she had her put out by the shoulders, and on the instant into a carriage with one of her women, to be taken at once to St. Jean-de-Luz. It was seven o’clock at night, the day but one before Christmas, the ground all covered with ice and snow; Madame des Ursins had no time to change gown or head-dress, to take any measures against the cold, to get any money, or any anything else at all.” Thus she was conducted almost without a mouthful of food to the frontier of France. She hoped for aid from the king of Spain; but none came; it got known that the queen had been abetted in everything and beforehand by Philip V. On arriving at St. Jean-de-Luz, she wrote to the king and to Madame de Maintenon: “Can you possibly conceive, Madame, the situation in which I find myself? Treated in the face of all Europe, with more contempt by the Queen of Spain than if I were the lowest of wretches? They want to persuade me that the king acted in concert with a princess who had me treated with such cruelty. I shall await his orders at St. Jean-de-Luz, where I am in a small house close by the sea. I see it often stormy and sometimes calm; a picture of courts. I shall have no difficulty in agreeing with you that it is of no use looking for stability but in God. Certainly it cannot be found in the human heart, for who was ever more sure than I was of the heart of the King of Spain?”
The king did not reply at all, and Madame de Maintenon but coldly, begging the princess, however, to go to Versailles. There she passed but a short time, and received notice to leave the kingdom. With great difficulty she obtained an asylum at Rome, where she lived seven years longer, preserving all her health, strength, mind, and easy grace until she died, in 1722, at more than eighty-four years of age, in obscurity and sadness, notwithstanding her opulence, but avenged of her Spanish foes, Cardinals della Giudice and Alberoni, whom she met again at Rome, disgraced and fugitive like herself. “I do not know where I may die,” she wrote to Madame de Maintenon, at that time in retirement at St. Cyr. Both had survived their power; the Princess des Ursins had not long since wanted to secure for herself a dominion; Madame de Maintenon, more far-sighted and more modest, had aspired to no more than repose in the convent which she had founded and endowed. Discreet in her retirement as well as in her life, she had not left to chance the selection of a place where she might die.
CHAPTER L.
LOUIS XIV. AND DEATH. 1711-1715.
“One has no more luck at our age,” Louis XIV. had said to his old friend Marshal Villars, returning from his most disastrous campaign. It was a bitter reflection upon himself which had put these words into the king’s mouth. After the most brilliant, the most continually and invariably triumphant of reigns, he began to see Fortune slipping away from him, and the grievous consequences of his errors successively overwhelming the state. “God is punishing me; I have richly deserved it,” he said to Marshal Villars, who was on the point of setting out for the battle of Denain. The aged king, dispirited and beaten, could not set down to men his misfortunes and his reverses; the hand of God Himself was raised against his house. Death was knocking double knocks all round him. The grand-dauphin had for some days past been ill of small-pox. The king had gone to be with him at Meudon, forbidding the court to come near the castle. The small court of Monseigneur were huddled together in the lofts. The king was amused with delusive hopes; his chief physician, Fagon, would answer for the invalid. The king continued to hold his councils as usual, and the deputation of market-women (dames de la Halle), come from Paris to have news of Monseigneur, went away, declaring that they would go and sing a Te Deum, as he was nearly well. “It is not time yet, my good women,” said Monseigneur, who had given them a reception. That very evening he was dead, without there having been time to send for his confessor in ordinary. “The parish priest of Meudon, who used to look in every evening before he went home, had found all the doors open, the valets distracted, Fagon heaping remedy upon remedy without waiting for them to take effect. He entered the room, and hurrying to Monseigneur’s bedside, took his hand and spoke to him of God. The poor prince was fully conscious, but almost speechless. He repeated distinctly a few words, others inarticulately, smote his breast, pressed the priest’s hand, appeared to have the most excellent sentiments, and received absolution with an air of contrition and wistfulness.” [Memoires de St. Simon, ix.] Meanwhile word had been sent to the king, who arrived quite distracted. The Princess of Conti, his daughter, who was deeply attached to Monseigneur, repulsed him gently: “You must think only of yourself now, Sir,” she said. The king let himself sink down upon a sofa, asking news of all that came out of the room, without any one’s daring to give him an answer. Madame de Maintenon, who had hurried to the king, and was agitated without being affected, tried to get him away; she did not succeed, however, until Monseigneur had breathed his last. He passed along to his carriage between two rows of officers and valets, all kneeling, and conjuring him to have pity upon them who had lost all and were like to starve.
The excitement and confusion at Versailles were tremendous. From the moment that small-pox was declared, the princes had not been admitted to Meudon. The Duchess of Burgundy alone had occasionally seen the king. All were living in confident expectation of a speedy convalescence; the news of the death came upon them like a thunderclap. All the courtiers thronged together at once, the women half dressed, the men anxious and concerned, some to conceal their extreme sorrow, others their joy, according as they were mixed up in the different cabals of the court. “It was all, however, nothing but a transparent veil,” says St. Simon, “which did not prevent good eyes from observing and discerning all the features. The two princes and the two princesses, seated beside them, taking care of them, were most exposed to view. The Duke of Burgundy wept, from feeling and in good faith, with an air of gentleness, tears of nature, of piety, and of patience. The Duke of Berry, in quite as good faith, shed abundance, but tears, so to speak, of blood, so great appeared to be their bitterness; he gave forth not sobs, but shrieks, howls. The Duchess of Berry (daughter of the Duke of Orleans) was beside herself. The bitterest despair was depicted on her face. She saw her sister-in-law, who was so hateful to her, all at once raised to that title, that rank of dauphiness, which were about to place so great a distance between them. Her frenzy of grief was not from affection, but from interest; she would wrench herself from it to sustain her husband, to embrace him, to console him, then she would become absorbed in herself again with a torrent of tears, which helped her to stifle her shrieks. The Duke of Orleans wept in his own corner, actually sobbing, a thing which, had I not seen it, I should never have believed,” adds St. Simon, who detested Monseigneur, and had as great a dread of his reigning as the Duke of Orleans had. “Madame, re-dressed in full dress, in the middle of the night, arrived regularly howling, not quite knowing why either one or the other; inundating them all with her tears as she embraced them, and making the castle resound with a renewal of shrieks, when the king’s carriages were announced, on his return to Marly.” The Duchess of Burgundy was awaiting him on the road. She stepped down and went to the carriage window. “What are you about, Madame?” exclaimed Madame de Maintenon; “do not come near us, we are infectious.” The king did not embrace her, and she went back to the palace, but only to be at Marly next morning before the king was awake.
The king’s tears were as short as they had been abundant. He lost a son who was fifty years old, the most submissive and most respectful creature in the world, ever in awe of him and obedient to him, gentle and good-natured, a proper man amid all his indolence and stupidity, brave and even brilliant at head of an army. In 1688, in front of Philipsburg, the soldiers had given him the name of “Louis the Bold.” He was full of spirits and always ready, “revelling in the trenches,” says Vauban. The Duke of Montausier, his boyhood’s strict governor, had written to him, “Monseigneur, I do not make you my compliments on the capture of Philipsburg; you had a fine army, shells, cannon, and Vauban. I do not make them to you either on your bravery; it is an hereditary virtue in your house; but I congratulate you on being open-handed, humane, generous, and appreciative of the services of those who do well; that is what I make you my compliments upon.” “Did not I tell you so?” proudly exclaimed the Chevalier de Grignan, formerly attached (as menin) to the person of Monseigneur, on hearing his master’s exploits lauded; “for my part, I am not surprised.” Racine had exaggerated the virtues of Monseigneur in the charming verses of the prologue of Esther:
|
“Thou givest him a son, an ever ready aid, Apt or to woo or fight, obey or be obeyed; A son who, like his sire, drags victory in his train, Yet boasts but one desire, that father’s heart to gain; A son, who to his will submits with loving air, Who brings upon his foes perpetual despair. As the swift spirit flies, stern Equity’s envoy, So, when the king says, ‘Go,’ down rusheth he in joy, With vengeful thunderbolt red ruin doth complete, Then tranquilly returns to lay it at his feet.” |
In 1690 and in 1691 he had gained distinction as well as in 1688. “The dauphin has begun as others would think it an honor to leave off,” the Prince of Orange had said, “and, for my part, I should consider that I had worthily capped anything great I may have done in war if, under similar circumstances, I had made so fine a march.” Whether it were owing to indolence or court cabal, Monseigneur had no more commands; he had no taste for politics, and always sat in silence at the council, to which the king had formally admitted him at thirty years of age, “instructing him,” says the Marquis of Sourches, “with so much vigor and affection, that Monseigneur could not help falling at his feet to testify his respect and gratitude.” Twice, at grave conjunctures, the grand-dauphin allowed his voice to be heard; in 1685, to offer a timid opposition to the Edict of Nantes, and, in 1700, to urge very vigorously the acceptance of the King of Spain’s will. “I should be enchanted,” he cried, as if with a prophetic instinct of his own destiny, “to be able to say all my life, ‘The king my father, and the king my SON.’” Heavy in body as well as mind, living on terms of familiarity with a petty court, probably married to Mdlle. Choin, who had been for a long time installed in his establishment at Meudon, Monseigneur, often embarrassed and made uncomfortable by the austere virtue of the Duke of Burgundy, and finding more attraction in the Duke of Berry’s frank geniality, had surrendered himself, without intending it, to the plots which were woven about him. “His eldest son behaved to him rather as a courtier than as a son, gliding over the coldness shown him with a respect and a gentleness which, together, would have won over any father less a victim to intrigue. The Duchess of Burgundy, in spite of her address and her winning grace, shared her husband’s disfavor.” The Duchess of Berry had counted upon this to establish her sway in a reign which the king’s great age seemed to render imminent; already, it was said, the chief amusement at Monseigneur’s was to examine engravings of the coronation ceremony, when death carried him off suddenly on the 14th of April, 1711, to the consternation of the lower orders, who loved him because of his reputation for geniality. The severity of the new dauphin caused some little dread.
“Here is a prince who will succeed me before long,” said the king on presenting his grandson to the assembly of the clergy; “by his virtue and piety he will render the church still more flourishing, and the kingdom more happy.” That was the hope of all good men. Fenelon, in his exile in Cambrai, and the Dukes of Beauvilliers and Chevreuse, at court, began to feel themselves all at once transported to the heights with the prince whom they had educated, and who had constantly remained faithful to them. The delicate foresight and prudent sagacity of Fenelon had a long while ago sought to prepare his pupil for the part which he was about to play. It was piety alone that had been able to triumph over the dangerous tendencies of a violent and impassioned temperament. Fenelon, who had felt this, saw also the danger of devoutness carried too far. “Religion does not consist in a scrupulous observance of petty formalities,” he wrote to the Duke of Burgundy; “it consists, for everybody, in the virtues proper to one’s condition. A great prince ought not to serve God in the same way as a hermit or a simple individual.”
“The prince thinks too much and acts too little,” he said to the Duke of Chevreuse; “his most solid occupations are confined to vague applications of his mind and barren resolutions; he must see society, study it, mix in it, without becoming a slave to it, learn to express himself forcibly, and acquire a gentle authority. If he do not feel the need of possessing firmness and nerve, he will not make any real progress; it is time for him to be a man. The life of the region in which he lives is a life of effeminacy, indolence, timidity, and amusement. He will never be so true a servant to the king and to Monseigneur as when he makes them see that they have in him a man matured, full of application, firm, impressed with their true interests, and fitted to aid them by the wisdom of his counsels and the vigor of his conduct. Let him be more and more little in the hands of God, but let him become great in the eyes of men; it is his duty to make virtue, combined with authority, loved, feared, and respected.”
Court-perfidy dogged the Duke of Burgundy to the very head of the army over which the king had set him; Fenelon, always correctly informed, had often warned him of it. The duke wrote to him, in 1708, on the occasion of his dissensions with Vendome: “It is true that I have experienced a trial within the last fortnight, and I am far from having taken it as I ought, allowing myself to give way to an oppression of the heart caused by the blackenings, the contradictions, and the pains of irresolution, and the fear of doing something untoward in a matter of extreme importance to the State. As for what you say to me about my indecision, it is true that I myself reproach myself for it, and I pray God every day to give me, together with wisdom and prudence, strength and courage to carry out what I believe to be my duty.” He had no more commands, in spite of his entreaties to obtain, in 1709, permission to march against the enemy. “If money is short, I will go without any train,” he said; “I will live like a simple officer; I will eat, if need be, the bread of a common soldier, and none will complain of lacking superfluities when I have scarcely necessaries.” It was at the very time when the Archbishop of Cambrai was urgent for peace to be made at any price. “The people no longer live like human beings,” he said, in a memorial sent to the Duke of Beauvilliers; “there is no counting any longer on their patience, they are reduced to such outrageous trials. As they have nothing more to hope, they have nothing more to fear. The king has no right to risk France in order to save Spain; he received his kingdom from God, not that he should expose it to invasion by the enemy, as if it were a thing with which he can do anything he pleases, but that he should rule it as a father, and transmit it as a precious heirloom to his posterity.” He demanded at the same time the convocation of the assembly of notables.
It was this kingdom, harassed on all sides by its enemies, bleeding, exhausted, but stronger, nevertheless, and more bravely faithful than was made out by Fenelon, that the new dauphin found himself suddenly called upon to govern by the death of Monseigneur, and by the unexpected confidence testified in him before long by the king. “The prince should try more than ever to appear open, winning, accessible, and sociable,” wrote Fenelon; “he must undeceive the public about the scruples imputed to him; keep his strictness to himself, and not set the court apprehending a severe reform of which society is not capable, and which would have to be introduced imperceptibly, even if it were possible. He cannot be too careful to please the king, avoid giving him the slightest umbrage, make him feel a dependence founded on confidence and affection, relieve him in his work, and speak to him with a gentle and respectful force which will grow by little and little. He should say no more than can be borne; it requires to have the heart prepared for the utterance of painful truths which are not wont to be heard. For the rest, no puerilities or pettinesses in the practice of devotion; government is learned better from studying men than from studying books.”
The young dauphin was wise enough to profit by these sage and able counsels. “Seconded to his heart’s content by his adroit young wife, herself in complete possession of the king’s private ear and of the heart of Madame de Maintenon, he redoubled his attentions to the latter, who, in her transport at finding a dauphin on whom she might rely securely instead of one who did not like her, put herself in his hands, and, by that very act, put the king in his hands. The first fortnight made perceptible to all at Marly this extraordinary change in the king, who was so reserved towards his legitimate children, so very much the king with them. Breathing more freely after so great a step had been made, the dauphin showed a bold front to society, which he dreaded during the lifetime of Monseigneur, because, great as he was, he was often the victim of its best received jests. The king having come round to him; the insolent cabal having been dispersed by the death of a father, almost an enemy, whose place he took; society in a state of respect, attention, alacrity; the most prominent personages with an air of slavishness; the gay and frivolous, no insignificant portion of a large court, at his feet through his wife,—it was observed that this timid, shy, self-concentrated prince, this precise (piece of) virtue, this (bit of) misplaced learning, this gawky man, a stranger in his own house, constrained in everything,—it was observed, I say, that he was showing himself by degrees, unfolding himself little by little, presenting himself to society in moderation, and that he was unembarrassed, majestic, gay, and agreeable in it. A style of conversation, easy but instructive, and happily and aptly directed, charmed the sensible courtier and made the rest wonder. There was all at once an opening of eyes, and ears, and hearts. There was a taste of the consolation, which was so necessary and so longed for, of seeing one’s future master so well fitted to be from his capacity and from the use that he showed he could make of it.”
The king had ordered ministers to go and do their work at the prince’s. The latter conversed modestly and discreetly with the men he thought capable of enlightening him; the Duke of St. Simon had this honor, which he owed to the friendship of the Duke of Beauvilliers, and of which he showed himself sensible in his Memoires. Fenelon was still at Cambrai, “which all at once turned out to be the only road from all the different parts of Flanders. The archbishop had such and so eager a court there, that for all his delight he was pained by it, from apprehension of the noise it would make, and the bad effect he feared it might have on the king’s mind.” He, however, kept writing to the dauphin, sending him plans of government prepared long before; some wise, bold, liberal, worthy of a mind that was broad and without prejudices; others chimerical and impossible of application. The prince examined them with care. “He had comprehended what it is to leave God for God’s sake, and had set about applying himself almost entirely to things which might make him acquainted with government, having a sort of foretaste already of reigning, and being more and more the hope of the nation, which was at last beginning to appreciate him.”
God had in former times given France a St. Louis. He did not deem her worthy of possessing such an ornament a second time. The comfort and hope which were just appearing in the midst of so many troubles vanished suddenly like lightning; the dauphiness fell ill on the 5th of February; she had a burning fever, and suffered from violent pains in the head; it was believed to be scarlet-fever (rougeole), with whispers, at the same time, of ugly symptoms; the malady went on increasing; the dauphin was attacked in his turn; sacraments were mentioned; the princess, taken by surprise, hesitated without daring to speak. Her Jesuit confessor, Father La Rue, himself proposed to go and fetch another priest. A Recollet (Raptionist) was brought; when he arrived she was dying. A few hours later she expired, at the age of twenty-six, on the 12th of February, 1712. “With her there was a total eclipse of joys, pleasures, amusements even, and every sort of grace; darkness covered the whole face of the court; she was the soul of it all, she filled it all, she pervaded all the interior of it.” The king loved her as much as he was capable of loving; she amused him and charmed him in the sombre moments of his life; he, like the dauphin, had always been ignorant of the giddiness of which she had been guilty; Madame de Maintenon, who knew of them, and who held them as a rod over her, was only concerned to keep them secret; all the court, with the exception of a few perfidious intriguers, made common cause to serve her and please her. “Regularly ugly, pendent cheeks, forehead too prominent, a nose that said nothing; of eyes the most speaking and most beautiful in the world; a carriage of the head gallant, majestic, graceful, and a look the same; smile the most expressive, waist long, rounded, slight, supple; the gait of a goddess on the clouds; her youthful, vivacious, energetic gayety, carried all before it, and her nymph-like agility wafted her everywhere, like a whirlwind that fills many places at once, and gives to them movement and life. If the court existed after her it was but to languish away.” [Memoires de St. Simon, xi.] There was only one blow more fatal for death to deal; and there was not long to wait for it.
“I have prayed, and I will pray,” writes Fenelon. “God knows whether the prince is for one instant forgotten. I fancy I see him in the state in which St. Augustin depicts himself: ‘My heart is obscured by grief. All that I see reflects for me but the image of death. All that was sweet to me, when I could share it with her whom I loved, becomes a torment to me since I lost her. My eyes seek for her everywhere and find her nowhere. When she was alive, wherever I might be without her, everything said to me, You are going to see her. Nothing says so now. I find no solace but in my tears. I cannot bear the weight of my wounded and bleeding heart, and yet I know not where to rest it. I am wretched; for so it is when the heart is set on the love of things that pass away.’” “The days of this affliction were soon shortened,” says St. Simon; “from the first moment I saw him, I was scared at his fixed, haggard look, with a something of ferocity, at the change in his countenance and the livid marks I noticed upon it. He was waiting at Marly for the king to awake; they came to tell him he could go in; he turned without speaking a word, without replying to his gentlemen (menins) who pressed him to go; I went up to him, taking the liberty of giving him a gentle push; he gave me a look, that pierced right to the heart, and went away. I never looked on him again. Please God in His mercy I may look on him forever there where his goodness, no doubt, has placed him!”
It was a desperate but a short struggle. Disease and grief were victorious over the most sublime courage. “It was the spectacle of a man beside himself, who was forcing himself to keep the surface smooth, and who succumbed in the attempt.” The dauphin took to his bed on the 14th of February; he believed himself to be poisoned, and said, from the first, that he should never recover. His piety alone, through the most prodigious efforts, still kept up; he spoke no more, save to God, continually lifting up his soul to him in fervent aspirations. “What tender, but tranquil views! What lively motions towards thanksgiving for being preserved from the sceptre and the account that must be rendered thereof! What submission, and how complete! What ardent love of God! What a magnificent idea of infinite mercy! What pious and humble awe! What invincible patience! What sweetness! What constant kindness towards all that approached him! What pure charity which urged him forward to God! France at length succumbed beneath this last chastisement; God gave her a glimpse of a prince whom she did not deserve. Earth was not worthy of him; he was already ripe for a blessed eternity!”
“For some time past I have feared that a fatality hung over the dauphin,” Fenelon had written at the first news of his illness; “I have at the bottom of my heart a lurking apprehension that God is not yet appeased towards France. For a long while He has been striking, as the prophet says, and His anger is not yet worn out. God has taken from us all our hope for the Church and for the State.”
Fenelon and his friends had expected too much and hoped for too much; they relied upon the dauphin to accomplish a work above human strength; he might have checked the evil, retarded for a while the march of events, but France carried simultaneously in her womb germs of decay and hopes of progress, both as yet concealed and confused, but too potent and too intimately connected with the very sources of her history and her existence for the hand of the most virtuous and most capable of princes to have the power of plucking them out or keeping them down.
There was universal and sincere mourning in France and in Europe. The death of the little Duke of Brittany, which took place a few days after that of his parents, completed the consternation into which the court was thrown. The most sinister rumors circulated darkly; a base intrigue caused the Duke of Orleans to be accused; people called to mind his taste for chemistry and even magic, his flagrant impiety, his scandalous debauchery; beside himself with grief and anger, he demanded of the king to be sent to the Bastille; the king refused curtly, coldly, not unmoved in his secret heart by the perfidious insinuations which made their way even to him, but too just and too sensible to entertain a hateful lie, which, nevertheless, lay heavy on the Duke of Orleans to the end of his days.
Darkly, but to more effect, the same rumors were renewed before long. The Duke of Berry died at the age of twenty-seven on the 4th of May, 1714, of a disease which presented the same features as the scarlet fever (rougeole vourpree) to which his brother and sister-in-law had succumbed. The king was old and sad; the state of his kingdom preyed upon his mind; he was surrounded by influences hostile to his nephew, whom he himself called “a vaunter of crimes.” A child who was not five years old remained sole heir to the throne. Madame de Maintenon, as sad as the king, “naturally mistrustful, addicted to jealousies, susceptibilities, suspicions, aversions, spites, and woman’s wiles” [Lettres de Fenelon au duc de Chevreuse], being, moreover, sincerely attached to the king’s natural children, was constantly active on their behalf. On the 19th of July, 1714, the king announced to the premier president and the attorney-general of the Parliament of Paris that it was his pleasure to grant to the Duke of Maine and to the Count of Toulouse, for themselves and their descendants, the rank of princes of the blood, in its full extent, and that he desired that the deeds should be enregistered in the Parliament. Soon after, still under the same influence, he made a will which was kept a profound secret, and which he sent to be deposited in the strong-room (greffe) of the Parliament, committing the guardianship of the future king to the Duke of Maine, and placing him, as well his brother, on the council of regency, with close restrictions as to the Duke of Orleans, who would he naturally called to the government of the kingdom during the minority. The will was darkly talked about; the effect of the elevation of bastards to the rank of princes of the blood had been terrible. “There was no longer any son of France; the Spanish branch had renounced; the Duke of Orleans had been carefully placed in such a position as not to dare say a word or show the least dissatisfaction; his only son was a child; neither the Duke (of Berry), his brothers, nor the Prince of Conti, were of an age or of standing, in the king’s eyes, to make the least trouble in the world about it.” The bombshell dropped all at once when nobody could have expected it, and everybody fell on his stomach as is done when a shell drops; everybody was gloomy and almost wild; the king himself appeared as if exhausted by so great an effort of will and power. He had only just signed his will, when he met, at Madame de Maintenon’s, the Ex-Queen of England. “I have made my will, Madame,” said he. “I have purchased repose; I know the impotence and uselessness of it; we can do all we please as long as we are here; after we are gone, we can do less than private persons; we have only to look at what became of my father’s, and immediately after his death too, and of those of so many other kings. I am quite aware of that; but, in spite of all that, it was desired; and so, Madame, you see it has been done; come of it what may, at any rate I shall not be worried about it any more.” It was the old man yielding to the entreaties and intrigues of his domestic circle; the judgment of the king remained steady and true, without illusions and without prejudices.
Death was coming, however, after a reign which had been so long and had occupied so much room in the world that it caused mistakes as to the very age of the king. He was seventy-seven; he continued to work with his ministers; the order so long and so firmly established was, not disturbed by illness any more than it had been by the reverses and sorrows of late; meanwhile the appetite was diminishing, the thinness went on increasing, a sore on the leg appeared, the king suffered a great deal. On the 24th of August he dined in bed, surrounded as usual by his courtiers; he had a difficulty in swallowing; for the first time, publicity was burdensome to him; he could not get on, and said to those who were there that he begged them to withdraw. Meanwhile the drums and hautboys still went on playing beneath his window, and the twenty-four violins at his dinner. In the evening, he was so ill that he asked for the sacraments. There had been wrung from him a codicil which made the will still worse. He, nevertheless, received the Duke of Orleans, to whom he commended the young king. On the 26th he called to his bedside all those of the court who had the entry. “Gentlemen,” he said to them, “I ask your pardon for the bad example I have set you. I have to thank you much for the way in which you have served me, and for the attachment and fidelity you have always shown me. I am very sorry not to have done for you what I should have liked to do. The bad times are the cause of that. I request of you, on my great-grandson’s behalf, the same attention and fidelity that you have shown me. It is a child who will possibly have many crosses to bear. Follow the instructions my nephew gives you; he is about to govern the kingdom, and I hope that he will do it well; I hope also that you will all contribute to preserve unity. I feel that I am becoming unmanned, and that I am unmanning you also; I ask your pardon. Farewell, gentlemen; I feel sure that you will think of me sometimes.”
The princesses had entered the king’s closet; they were weeping and making a noise. “You must not cry so,” said the king, who asked for them to bid them farewell. He sent for the little dauphin. His governess, the Duchess of Ventadour, brought him on to the bed. “My child,” said the king to him, “you are going to be a great king. Render to God that which you owe to Him; recognize the obligations you have towards Him; cause Him to be honored by your subjects. Try to preserve peace with your neighbors. I have been too fond of war; do not imitate me in that, any more than in the too great expenses I have incurred. Take counsel in all matters, and seek to discern which is the best in order to follow it. Try to relieve your people, which I have been so unfortunate as not to have been able to do.” He kissed the child, and said, “Darling, I give you my blessing with all my heart.” He was taken away; the king asked for him once more and kissed him again, lifting hands and eyes to Heaven in blessings upon him. Everybody wept. The king caught sight in a glass of two grooms of the chamber who were sobbing. “What are you crying for?” he said to them; “did you think that I was immortal?” He was left alone with Madame de Maintenon. “I have always heard say that it was difficult to make up one’s mind to die,” said he; “I do not find it so hard.” “Ah, Sir,” she replied, “it may be very much so, when there are earthly attachments, hatred in the heart, or restitutions to make!” “Ah!” replied the king, “as for restitutions to make, I owe nobody any individually; as for those that I owe the kingdom, I have hope in the mercy of God.”
The Duke of Orleans came back again; the king had sent for him. “When I am dead,” he said, “you will have the young king taken to Vincennes; the air there is good; he will remain there until all the ceremonies are over at Versailles, and the castle well cleaned afterwards; you will then bring him back again.” He at the same time gave orders for going and furnishing Vincennes, and directed a casket to be opened in which the plan of the castle was kept, because, as the court had not been there for fifty years, Cavoye, grand chamberlain of his household, had never prepared apartments there. “When I was king . . . ,” he said several times.
A quack had brought a remedy which would cure gangrene, he said. The sore on the leg was hopeless, but they gave the king a dose of the elixir in a glass of Alicante. “To life and to death,” said he as he took the glass; “just as it shall please God.” The remedy appeared to act; the king recovered a little strength. The throng of courtiers, which, the day before, had been crowding to suffocation in the rooms of the Duke of Orleans, withdrew at once. Louis XIV. did not delude himself about this apparent rally. “Prayers are offered in all the churches for your Majesty’s life,” said the parish priest of Versailles. “That is not the question,” said the king “it is my salvation that much needs praying for.”
Madame de Maintenon had hitherto remained in the back rooms, though constantly in the king’s chamber when he was alone. He said to her once, “What consoles me for leaving you, is that it will not be long before we meet again.” She made no reply. “What will become of you?” he added; “you have nothing.” “Do not think of me,” said she; “I am nobody; think only of God.” He said farewell to her; she still remained a little while in his room, and went out when he was no longer conscious. She had given away here and there the few movables that belonged to her, and now took the road to St. Cyr. On the steps she met Marshal Villeroy. “Good by, marshal,” she said curtly, and covered up her face in her coifs. He! it was who sent her news of the king to the last moment. The Duke of Orleans, on becoming regent, went to see her, and took her the patent (brevet) for a pension of sixty thousand livres, “which her disinterestedness had made necessary for her,” said the preamble. It was paid her up to the last day of her life. History makes no further mention of her name; she never left St. Cyr. Thither the czar Peter the Great, when he visited Paris and France, went to see her; she was confined to her bed; he sat a little while beside her. “What is your malady?” he asked her through his interpreter. “A great age,” answered Madame de Maintenon, smiling. He looked at her a moment longer in silence; then, closing the curtains, he went out abruptly. The memory he would have called up had vanished. The woman on whom the great king had, for thirty years, heaped confidence and affection, was old, forgotten, dying; she expired at St. Cyr on the 15th of April, 1719, at the age of eighty-three.
She had left the king to die alone. He was in the agonies; the prayers in extremity were being repeated around him; the ceremonial recalled him to consciousness. He joined his voice with the voices of those present, repeating the prayers with them. Already the court was hurrying to the Duke of Orleans; some of the more confident had repaired to the Duke of Maine’s; the king’s servants were left almost alone around his bed; the tones of the dying man were distinctly heard above the great number of priests. He several times repeated, Nunc et in hora mortis. Then he said, quite loud, “O, my God, come Thou to help me, haste Thee to succor me.” Those were his last words. He expired on Sunday, the 1st of September, 1715, at eight A. M. Next day, he would have been seventy-seven years of age, and he had reigned seventy-two of them.
In spite of his faults and his numerous and culpable errors, Louis XIV. had lived and died like a king. The slow and grievous agony of olden France was about to begin.
CHAPTER LI.
LOUIS XV., THE REGENCY, AND CARDINAL DUBOIS.
1715-1723.
At the very moment when the master’s hand is missed from his work, the narrative makes a sudden bound out of the simple times of history. Under Henry IV., under Richelieu, under Louis XIV., events found quite naturally their guiding hand and their centre; men as well as circumstances formed a group around the head of the nation, whether king or minister, to thence unfold themselves quite clearly before the eyes of posterity. Starting from the reign of Louis XV. the nation has no longer a head, history no longer a centre; at the same time with a master of the higher order, great servants also fail the French monarchy; it all at once collapses, betraying thus the exhaustion of Louis XIV.‘s latter years; decadence is no longer veiled by the remnants of the splendor which was still reflected from the great king and his great reign; the glory of olden France descends slowly to its grave. At the same time, and in a future as yet obscured, intellectual progress begins to dawn; new ideas of justice, of humanity, of generous equity towards the masses germinate sparsely in certain minds; it is no longer Christianity alone that inspires them, though the honor is reflected upon it in a general way and as regards the principles with which it has silently permeated modern society, but they who contribute to spread them, refuse with indignation to acknowledge the source whence they have drawn them. Intellectual movement no longer appertains exclusively to the higher classes, to the ecclesiastics, or to the members of the Parliaments; vaguely as yet, and retarded by apathy in the government as well as by disorder in affairs, it propagates and extends itself imperceptibly pending that signal and terrible explosion of good and evil which is to characterize the close of the eighteenth century. Decadence and progress are going on confusedly in the minds as well as in the material condition of the nation. They must be distinguished and traced without any pretence of separating them.
There we have the reign of Louis XV. in its entirety.
The regency of the Duke of Orleans and the ministry of Cardinal Dubois showed certain traits of the general tendencies and to a certain extent felt their influence; they formed, however, a distinct epoch, abounding in original efforts and bold attempts, which remained without result, but which testified to the lively reaction in men’s minds against the courses and fundamental principles of the reign which had just ended.
Louis XIV. had made no mistake about the respect which his last wishes were destined to meet with after his death. In spite of the most extreme precautions, the secret of the will had transpired, giving occasion for some days past to secret intrigues. Scarcely had the king breathed his last, when the Duke of Orleans was urged to get the regency conferred upon him by the dukes and peers, simply making to Parliament an announcement of what had been done. The Duke of Orleans was a better judge of the moral authority belonging to that important body; and it was to the Palace of Justice that he repaired on the morning of September 2, 1715. The crowd there was immense; the young king alone was not there, in spite of his great-grandfather’s express instructions. The day was a decisive one; the legitimatized princes were present, “the Duke of Maine bursting with joy,” says St. Simon; “a smiling, satisfied air overrippled that of audacity, of confidence, which nevertheless peeped through, and the politeness which seemed to struggle against it. He bowed right and left, piercing every one with his looks. Towards the peers, the earnestness, it is not too much to say the respectfulness, the slowness, the profoundness of his bow was eloquent. His head remained lowered even on recovering himself.” The Duke of Orleans had just begun to speak; his voice was not steady; he repeated the terms of which the king had made use, he said, for the purpose of confiding the dauphin to his care. “To you I commend him; serve him faithfully as you have served me, and labor to preserve to him his kingdom. I have made such dispositions as I thought wisest; but one cannot foresee everything; if there is anything that does not seem good, it will of course be altered.”
The favor of the assembly was plainly with him, and the prince’s accents became more firm. “I shall never,” said he, “have any other purpose but to relieve the people, to reestablish good order in the finances, to maintain peace at home and abroad, and to restore unity and tranquillity to the church; therein I shall be aided by the wise representations of this august assembly, and I hereby ask for them in anticipation.” The Parliament was completely won; the right of representation (or remonstrance) was promised them; the will of Louis XIV. was as good as annulled; it was opened, it was read, and so were the two codicils. All the authority was intrusted to a council of regency of which the Duke of Orleans was to be the head, but without preponderating voice and without power to supersede any of the members, all designated in advance by Louis XIV. The person and the education of the young king, as well as the command of the household troops, were intrusted to the Duke of Maine.
“It was listened to in dead silence, and with a sort of indignation, which expressed itself in all countenances,” says St. Simon. “The king, no doubt, did not comprehend the force of what he had been made to do,” said the Duke of Orleans; “he assured me in the last days of his life that I should find in his dispositions nothing that I was not sure to be pleased with, and he himself referred the ministers to me on business, with all the orders to be given.” He asked, therefore, to have his regency declared such as it ought to be, “full and independent, with free formation of the council of regency.” The Duke of Maine wished to say a word. “You shall speak in your turn, Sir,” said the Duke of Orleans in a dry tone. The court immediately decided in his favor by acclamation, and even without proceeding in the regular way to vote. There remained the codicils, which annulled in fact the Regent’s authority. A discussion began between the Duke of Orleans and the Duke of Maine; it was causing Philip of Orleans to lose the advantage he had just won; his friends succeeded in making him perceive this, and he put off the session until after dinner. When they returned to the Palace of Justice the codicils were puffed away like the will by the breath of popular favor. The Duke of Maine, despoiled of the command of the king’s household, declared that, under such conditions, it was impossible for him to be answerable for the king’s person, and that he “demanded to be relieved of that duty.” “Most willingly, Sir,” replied the Regent; “your services are no longer required;” and he forthwith explained to the Parliament his intention of governing affairs according to the plan which had been found among the papers of the Duke of Burgundy. “Those gentry know little or nothing of the French, and of the way to govern them,” had been the remark of Louis XIV. on reading the schemes of Fenelon, the Duke of Beauvilliers, and St. Simon. The Parliament applauded the formation of the six councils of foreign affairs, of finance, of war, of the marine, of home or the interior, of conscience or ecclesiastical affairs; the Regent was intrusted with the free disposal of graces. “I want to be free for good,” said he, adroitly repeating a phrase from Telemaque, “I consent to have my hands tied for evil.”
The victory was complete. Not a shred remained of Louis XIV.‘s will. The Duke of Maine, confounded and humiliated, retired to his Castle of Sceaux, there to endure the reproaches of his wife. The king’s affection and Madame de Maintenon’s clever tactics had not sufficed to found his power; the remaining vestiges of his greatness were themselves about to vanish before long in their turn.
On the 12th of September, the little king held a bed of justice; his governess, Madame de Ventadour, sat alone at the feet of the poor orphan, abandoned on the pinnacle of power. All the decisions of September 2 were ratified in the child’s name. Louis XIV. had just descended to the tomb without pomp and without regret. The joy of the people broke out indecently as the funeral train passed by; the nation had forgotten the glory of the great king; it remembered only the evils which had for so long oppressed it during his reign.
The new councils had already been constituted, when it was discovered that commerce had been forgotten; and to it was assigned a seventh body. “Three sorts of men, the choice of whom was dictated by propriety, weakness, and necessity, filled the lists: in the first place, great lords, veterans in intrigue but novices in affairs, and less useful from their influence than embarrassing from their pride and their pettinesses; next, the Regent’s friends, the cream of the rows, possessed with the spirit of opposition and corruption, ignorant and clever, bold and lazy, and far better calculated to harass than to conduct a government; lastly, below them, were pitch-forked in, pell-mell, councillors of State, masters of requests, members of Parliament, well-informed and industrious gentlemen, fated henceforth to crawl about at the bottom of the committees, and, without the spur of glory or emulation, to repair the blunders which must be expected from the incapacity of the first and the recklessness of the second class amongst their colleagues.” [Lemontey, Histoire de la Regence, t. i. p. 67.] “It is necessary,” the young king was made to say in the preamble to the ordinance which established the councils, “that affairs should be regulated rather by unanimous consent than by way of authority.”
How singular are the monstrosities of experience! At the head of the council of finance, a place was found for the Duke of Noailles, active in mind and restless in character, without any fixed principles, an adroit and a shameless courtier, strict in all religious observances under Louis XIV., and a notorious debauchee under the Regency, but intelligent, insolent, ambitious, hungering and thirsting to do good if he could, but evil if need were, and in order to arrive at his ends. His uncle, Cardinal Noailles, who had been but lately threatened by the court of Rome with the loss of his hat, and who had seen himself forbidden to approach the dying king, was now president of the council of conscience. Marshal d’Huxelles, one of the negotiators who had managed the treaty of Utrecht, was at the head of foreign affairs. The Regent had reserved to himself one single department, the Academy of Sciences. “I quite intend,” said he, gayly, “to ask the king, on his majority, to let me still be Secretary of State of the Academy.”
The Regent’s predilection, consolidating the work of Colbert, contributed to the development of scientific researches, for which the neatness and clearness of French thought rendered it thenceforth so singularly well adapted.
The gates of the prison were meanwhile being thrown open to many a poor creature; the Jansenists left the Bastille; others, who had been for a long time past in confinement, were still ignorant of the grounds for their captivity, which was by this time forgotten by everybody. A wretched Italian, who had been arrested the very day of his arrival in Paris, thirty-five years before, begged to remain in prison; he had no longer any family, or relatives, or resources. For a while the Protestants thought they saw their advantage in the clemency with which the new reign appeared to be inaugurated, and began to meet again in their assemblies; the Regent had some idea of doing them justice, re-establishing the Edict of Nantes, and re-opening to the exiles the doors of their country, but his councillors dissuaded him; the more virtuous, like St. Simon, from Catholic piety, the more depraved from policy and indifference. However, the lot of the Protestants remained under the Regency less hard than it had been under Louis XIV., and than it became under the Duke of Bourbon.
The chancellor, Voysin, had just died. To this post the Regent summoned the attorney-general, D’Aguesseau, beloved and esteemed of all, learned, eloquent, virtuous, but too exclusively a man of Parliament for the functions which had been confided to him. “He would have made a sublime premier president,” said St. Simon, who did not like him. The magistrate was attending mass at St. Andre-des-Arts; he was not ignorant of the chancellor’s death, when a valet came in great haste to inform him that the Regent wanted him at the Palais-Royal. D’Aguesseau piously heard out the remainder of the mass before obeying the prince’s orders. The casket containing the seals was already upon the table. The Duke of Orleans took the attorney-general by the arm and, going out with him into the gallery thronged with courtiers, said, “Gentlemen, here is your new and most worthy chancellor!” and he took him away with him to the Tuileries, to pay his respects to the little king.
On returning home, still all in a whirl, D’Aguesseau went up to the room of his brother, “M. de Valjouan, a sort of Epicurean (voluptueux) philosopher, with plenty of wit and learning, but altogether one of the oddest creatures.” He found him in his dressing-gown, smoking in front of the fire. “Brother,” said he, as he entered, “I have come to tell you that I am chancellor.” “Chancellor!” said the other, turning round; “and what have you done with the other one?” “He died suddenly to-night.” “O, very well, brother, I am very glad; I would rather it were you than I;” and he resumed his pipe. Madame D’Aguesseau was better pleased. Her husband has eulogized her handsomely. “A wife like mine,” he said, “is a good man’s highest reward.”
The new system of government, as yet untried, and confided to men for the most part little accustomed to affairs, had to put up with the most formidable difficulties, and to struggle against the most painful position. The treasury was empty, and the country exhausted; the army was not paid, and the most honorable men, such as the Duke of St. Simon, saw no other remedy for the evils of the state but a total bankruptcy, and the convocation of the States-general. Both expedients were equally repugnant to the Duke of Orleans. The Duke of Noailles had entered upon a course of severe economy; the king’s household was diminished, twenty-five thousand men were struck off the strength of the army, exemption from talliage for six years was promised to all such discharged soldiers as should restore a deserted house, and should put into cultivation the fields lying waste. At the same time something was being taken off the crushing weight of the taxes, and the state was assuming the charge of recovering them directly, without any regard for the real or supposed advances of the receivers-general; their accounts were submitted to the revision of the brothers Paris, sons of an innkeeper in the Dauphinese Alps, who had made fortunes by military contracts, and were all four reputed to be very able in matters of finance. They were likewise commissioned to revise the bills circulating in the name of the state, in other words, to suppress a great number without reimbursement to the holder, a sort of bankruptcy in disguise, which did not help to raise the public credit. At the same time also a chamber of justice, instituted for that purpose, was prosecuting the tax-farmers (traitants), as Louis XIV. had done at the commencement of his reign, during the suit against Fouquet. All were obliged to account for their acquisitions and the state of their fortunes; the notaries were compelled to bring their books before the court. Several tax-farmers (traitants) killed themselves to escape the violence and severity of the procedure. The Parliament, anything but favorable to the speculators, but still less disposed to suffer its judicial privileges to be encroached upon, found fault with the degrees of the Chamber. The Regent’s friends were eager to profit by the reaction which was manifesting itself in the public mind; partly from compassion, partly from shameful cupidity, all the courtiers set themselves to work to obtain grace for the prosecuted financiers. The finest ladies sold their protection with brazen faces; the Regent, who had sworn to show no favor to anybody, yielded to the solicitations of his friends, to the great disgust of M. Rouille-Ducoudray, member of the council of finance, who directed the operations of the Chamber of Justice with the same stern frankness which had made him not long before say to a body of tax-farmers (traitants) who wanted to put at his disposal a certain number of shares in their enterprise, “And suppose I were to go shares with you, how could I have you hanged, in case you were rogues?” Nobody was really hanged, although torture and the penalty of death had been set down in the list of punishments to which the guilty were liable; out of four thousand five hundred amenable cases, nearly three thousand had been exempted from the tax. “The corruption is so wide-spread,” says the preamble to the edict of March, 1727, which suppressed the Chamber of Justice, “that nearly all conditions have been infected by it in such sort that the most righteous severities could not be employed to punish so great a number of culprits without causing a dangerous interruption to commerce, and a kind of general shock in the system of the state.” The resources derived from the punishment of the tax-farmers (traitants), as well as from the revision of the state’s debts, thus remaining very much below expectation, the deficit went on continually increasing. In order to re-establish the finances, the Duke of Noailles demanded fifteen years’ impracticable economy, as chimerical as the increment of the revenues on which he calculated; and the Duke of Orleans finally suffered himself to be led away by the brilliant prospect which was flashed before his eyes by the Scotsman, Law, who had now for more than two years been settled in France.
Law, born at Edinburgh, in 1611, son of a goldsmith, had for a long time been scouring Europe, seeking in a clever and systematic course of gambling a source of fortune for himself, and the first foundation of the great enterprises he was revolving in his singularly inventive and daring mind. Passionately devoted to the financial theories he had conceived, Law had expounded them to all the princes of Europe in succession. “He says that of all the persons to whom he has spoken about his system, he has found but two who apprehended it, to wit, the King of Sicily and my son,” wrote Madame, the Regent’s mother. Victor Amadeo, however, had rejected Law’s proposals. “I am not powerful enough to ruin myself,” he had said. Law had not been more successful with Louis XIV. The Regent had not the same repugnance for novelties of foreign origin; so soon as he was in power, he authorized the Scot to found a circulating and discount bank (banque de circulation et d’escompte), which at once had very great success, and did real service. Encouraged by this first step, Law reiterated to the Regent that the credit of bankers and merchants decupled their capital; if the state became the universal banker, and centralized all the values in circulation, the public fortune would naturally be decupled. A radically false system, fated to plunge the state, and consequently the whole nation, into the risks of speculation and trading, without the guarantee of that activity, zeal, and prompt resolution which able men of business can import into their private enterprises. The system was not as yet applied; the discreet routine of the French financiers was scared at such risky chances, the pride of the great lords sitting in the council was shocked at the idea of seeing the state turning banker, perhaps even trader. St. Simon maintained that what was well enough for a free state, could not take place under an absolute government. Law went on, however; to his bank he had just added a great company. The king ceded to him Louisiana, which was said to be rich in gold and silver mines, superior to those of Mexico and Peru. People vaunted the fertility of the soil, the facility offered for trade by the extensive and rapid stream of the Mississippi; it was by the name of that river that the new company was called at first, though it soon took the title of Compagnie d’ Occident, when it had obtained the privilege of trading in Senegal and in Guinea; it became the Compagnie des Indes, on forming a fusion with the old enterprises which worked the trade of the East. For the generality, and in the current phraseology, it remained the Mississippi; and that is the name it has left in history. New Orleans was beginning to arise at the mouth of that river. Law had bought Belle-Isle-en-Mer and was constructing the port of Lorient.
The Regent’s councillors were scared and disquieted; the chancellor proclaimed himself loudly against the deception or illusion which made of Louisiana a land of promise; he called to mind that Crozat had been ruined in searching for mines of the precious metals there. “The worst of him was his virtue,” said Duclos. The Regent made a last effort to convert him, as well as the Duke of Noailles, to the projects of Law. It was at a small house in the faubourg St. Antoine, called La Roquette, belonging to the last named, that the four interlocutors discussed the new system thoroughly. “With the use of very sensible language Law had the gift of explaining himself so clearly and intelligibly that he left nothing to desire as concerned making himself comprehended. The Duke of Orleans liked him and relished him. He regarded him and all he did as work of his own creation. He liked, moreover, extraordinary and out-of-the-way methods, and he embraced them the more readily in that he saw the resources which had become so necessary for the state and all the ordinary operations of finance vanishing away. This liking of the Regent’s wounded Noailles, as being adopted at his expense. He wanted to be sole master in the matter of finance, and all the eloquence of Law could not succeed in convincing him.” The chancellor stood firm; the Parliament, which ever remained identified in his mind with his country, was in the same way opposed to Law. The latter declared that the obstacles which arrested him at every step through the ill will of the Council and of the magistrates, were ruining all the fruits of his system. The representations addressed by the Parliament to the king, on the 20th of January, touching a re-coinage of all moneys, which had been suggested by Law, dealt the last blow at the chancellor’s already tottering favor. On the morning of the 23d M. de La Villiere went to him on behalf of the Regent and demanded the return of the seals. D’Aguesseau was a little affected and surprised. “Monseigneur,” he wrote to the Duke of Orleans, “you gave me the seals without any merit on my part, you take them away without any demerit.” He had received orders to withdraw to his estate at Fresnes; the Regent found his mere presence irksome. D’Aguesseau set out at once. “He had taken his elevation like a sage,” says St. Simon, “and it was as a sage too that he fell.” “The important point,” wrote the disgraced magistrate to his son, “is to be well with one’s self.”
The Duke of Noailles had resigned his presidency of the council of finance; but, ever adroit, even in disgrace, he had managed to secure himself a place in the council of regency. The seals were intrusted to M. d’Argenson, for some years past chief of police at Paris. “With a forbidding face, which reminded one of the three judges of Hades, he made fun out of everything with excellence of wit, and he had established such order amongst that innumerable multitude of Paris, that there was no single inhabitant of whose conduct and habits he was not cognizant from day to day, with exquisite discernment in bringing a heavy or light hand to bear on every matter that presented itself, ever leaning towards the gentler side, with the art of making the most innocent tremble before him.” [St. Simon, t. xv. p. 387.] Courageous, bold, audacious in facing riots, and thereby master of the people, he was at the same time endowed with prodigious activity. “He was seen commencing his audiences at three in the morning, dictating to four secretaries at once on various subjects, and making his rounds at night whilst working in his carriage at a desk lighted with wax candles. For the rest, without any dread of Parliament, which had often attacked him, he was in his nature royal and fiscal; he cut knots, he was a foe to lengthiness, to useless forms or such as might be skipped, to neutral or wavering conditions.” [Lemontey, Histoire de la Regence, t. i. p. 77.] The Regent considered that he had secured to himself an effective instrument of his views; acceptance of the system had been the condition sine qua non of M. d’Argenson’s elevation.
He, however, like his predecessors, attempted before long to hamper the march of the audacious foreigner; but the die had been cast, and the Duke of Orleans outstripped Law himself in the application of his theories. A company, formed secretly, and protected by the new keeper of the seals, had bought up the general farmings (fermes generales), that is to say, all the indirect taxes, for the sum of forty-eight million fifty-two thousand livres; the Compagnie des Indes re-purchased them for fifty-two millions; the general receipts were likewise conceded to it, and Law’s bank was proclaimed a Royal Bank; the company’s shares already amounted to the supposed value of all the coin circulating in the kingdom, estimated at seven or eight millions. Law thought he might risk everything in the intoxication which had seized all France, capital and province. He created some fifteen hundred millions of new shares, promising his shareholders a dividend of twelve per cent. From all parts silver and gold flowed into his hands; everywhere the paper of the Bank was substituted for coin. The delirium had mastered all minds. The street called Quincampoix, for a long time past devoted to the operations of bankers, had become the usual meeting-place of the greatest lords as well as of discreet burgesses. It had been found necessary to close the two ends of the street with gates, open from six A. M. to nine P. M.; every house harbored business agents by the hundred; the smallest room was let for its weight in gold. The workmen who made the paper for the bank-notes could not keep up with the consumption. The most modest fortunes suddenly became colossal, lacqueys of yesterday were millionaires to-morrow; extravagance followed the progress of this outburst of riches, and the price of provisions followed the progress of extravagance. Enthusiasm was at its height in favor of the able author of so many benefits. Law became a convert to Catholicism, and was made comptroller-general; all the court was at his feet. “My son was looking for a duchess to escort my granddaughter to Genoa,” writes Madame, the Regent’s mother. “‘Send and choose one at Madame Law’s,’ said I; ‘you will find them all sitting in her drawing-room.’” Law’s triumph was complete; the hour of his fall was about to strike.
At the pinnacle of his power and success the new comptroller-general fell into no illusion as to the danger of the position. “He had been forced to raise seven stories on foundations which he had laid for only three,” said a contemporary, as clear-sighted as impartial. Some large shareholders were already beginning to quietly realize their profits. The warrants of the Compagnie des Indes had been assimilated to the bank-notes; and the enormous quantity of paper tended to lower its value. First, there was a prohibition against making payments in silver above ten francs, and in gold above three hundred. Soon afterwards money was dislegalized as a tender, and orders were issued to take every kind to the Bank on pain of confiscation, half to go to the informer. Informing became a horrible trade; a son denounced his father. The Regent openly violated law, and had this miscreant punished. The prince one day saw President Lambert de Vernon coming to visit him. “I am come,” said the latter, “to denounce to your Royal Highness a man who has five hundred thousand livres in gold.” The Duke of Orleans drew back a step. “Ah, Mr. President,” he cried, “what low vocation have you taken to?” “Monseigneur,” rejoined the president, “I am obeying the law; but your Royal Highness may be quite easy; it is myself whom I have come to denounce, in hopes of retaining at least a part of this sum, which I prefer to all the bank-notes.” “My money is at the king’s service,” was the proud remark of Nicolai, premier president of the Exchequer-Chamber, “but it belongs to nobody.” The great mass of the nation was of the same opinion as the two presidents; forty-five millions only found their way to the Bank; gold and silver were concealed everywhere. The crisis was becoming imminent; Law boldly announced that the value of the notes was reduced by a half. The public outcry was so violent that the Regent was obliged to withdraw the edict, as to which the council had not been consulted. “Since Law became comptroller-general, his head has been turned,” said the prince. That same evening Law was arrested by the major of the Swiss; it was believed to be all over with him, but the admirable order in which were his books, kept by double entry after the Italian manner, as yet unknown in France, and the ingenious expedients he indicated for restoring credit, gave his partisans a moment’s fresh confidence. He ceased to be comptroller-general, but he remained director of the Bank. The death-blow, however, had been dealt his system, for a panic terror had succeeded to the insensate enthusiasm of the early days. The Prince of Conti had set the example of getting back the value of his notes; four wagons had been driven up to his house laden with money. It was suffocation at the doors of the Bank, changing small notes, the only ones now payable in specie. Three men were crushed to death on one day in the crowd. It was found necessary to close the entrances to Quincampoix Street, in order to put a stop to the feverish tumult arising from desperate speculation. The multitude moved to the Place Vendome; shops and booths were thrown up; there was a share-fair; this ditty was everywhere sung in the streets:—
|
“On Monday I bought share on share; On Tuesday I was a millionaire; On Wednesday took a grand abode; On Thursday in my carriage rode; On Friday drove to the Opera-ball; On Saturday came to the paupers’ hall.” |
To restore confidence, Law conceived the idea of giving the seals back to D’Aguesseau; and the Regent authorized him to set out for Fresnes. In allusion to this step, so honorable for the magistrate who was the object of it, Law afterwards wrote from Venice to the Regent, “In my labors I desired to be useful to a great people, as the chancellor can bear me witness. . . . At his return I offered him my shares, which were then worth more than a hundred millions, to be distributed by him amongst those who had need of them.” The chancellor came back, though his influence could neither stop the evil, nor even assuage the growing disagreement between the Duke of Orleans and the Parliament. None could restore the public sense of security, none could prevent the edifice from crumbling to pieces. With ruin came crimes. Count Horn, belonging to the family of the celebrated Count Horn, who was beheaded under Philip II., in company with Count Lamoral d’Egmont, murdered at an inn a poor jobber whom he had inveigled thither on purpose to steal his pocket-book. In spite of all his powerful family’s entreaties, Count Horn died on the wheel, together with one of his accomplices. It was represented to the Regent that the count’s house had the honor of being connected with his. “Very, well, gentlemen,” said he, “then I will share the shame with you,” and he remained inflexible.
The public wrath and indignation fastened henceforth upon Law, the author and director of a system which had given rise to so many hopes, and had been the cause of so many woes. His carriage was knocked to pieces in the streets. President de Mesmes entered the Grand Chamber, singing with quite a solemn air,—
|
“Sirs, sirs, great news! What is it? It’s—They’ve smashed Law’s carriage all to bits.” |
The whole body jumped up, more regardful of their hatred than of their dignity; and “Is Law torn in pieces?” was the cry. Law had taken refuge at the Palais Royal. One day he appeared at the theatre in the Regent’s box; low murmurs recalled to the Regent’s mind the necessity for prudence; in the end he got Law away secretly in a carriage lent him by the Duke of Bourbon.
Law had brought with him to France a considerable fortune; he had scarcely enough to live upon when he retired to Venice, where he died some years later (1729), convinced to the last of the utility of his system, at the same time that he acknowledged the errors he had committed in its application. “I do not pretend that I did not make mistakes,” he wrote from his retreat; “I know I did, and that if I had to begin again I should do differently. I should go more slowly but more surely, and I should not expose the state and my own person to the dangers which may attend the derangement of a general system.” “There was neither avarice nor rascality in what he did,” says St. Simon; “he was a gentle, kind, respectful man, whom excess of credit and of fortune had not spoilt, and whose bearing, equipage, table, and furniture could not offend anybody. He bore with singular patience and evenness the obstructions that were raised against his operations, until at the last, finding himself short of means, and nevertheless seeking for them and wishing to present a front, he became crusty, gave way to temper, and his replies were frequently ill-considered. He was a man of system, calculation, comparison, well informed and profound in that sort of thing, who was the dupe of his Mississippi, and in good faith believed in forming great and wealthy establishments in America. He reasoned Englishwise, and did not know how opposed to those kinds of establishments are the levity of our nation and the inconveniences of a despotic government, which has a finger in everything, and under which what one minister does is always destroyed or changed by his successor.” The disasters caused by Law’s system have recoiled upon his memory. Forgotten are his honesty, his charity, his interest in useful works; remembered is nothing but the imprudence of his chimerical hopes and the fatal result of his enterprises, as deplorable in their effects upon the moral condition of France, as upon her wealth and her credit.
The Regent’s rash infatuation for a system, as novel as it was seductive, had borne its fruits. The judgment which his mother had pronounced upon Philip of Orleans was justified to the last. “The fairies,” said Madame, “were all invited to the birth of my son; and each endowed him with some happy quality. But one wicked fairy, who had been forgotten, came likewise, leaning upon her stick, and not being able to annul her sisters’ gifts, declared that the prince should never know how to make use of them.”
Throughout the successive periods of intoxication and despair caused by the necessary and logical development of Law’s system, the Duke of Orleans had dealt other blows and directed other affairs of importance. Easy-going, indolent, often absorbed by his pleasures, the Regent found no great difficulty in putting up with the exaltation of the legitimatized princes; it had been for him sufficient to wrest authority from the Duke of Maine, he let him enjoy the privileges of a prince of the blood. “I kept silence during the king’s lifetime,” he would say; “I will not be mean enough to break it now he is dead.” But the Duke of Bourbon, heir of the House of Conde, fierce in temper, violent in his hate, greedy of honors as well as of money, had just arrived at man’s estate, and was wroth at sight of the bastards’ greatness. He drew after him the Count of Charolais his brother, and the Prince of Conti his cousin; on the 22d of April, 1716, all three presented to the king a request for the revocation of Louis XIV.‘s edict declaring his legitimatized sons princes of the blood, and capable of succeeding to the throne. The Duchess of Maine, generally speaking very indifferent about her husband, whom she treated haughtily, like a true daughter of the House of Conde, flew into a violent passion, this time, at her cousins’ unexpected attack; she was for putting her own hand to the work of drawing up the memorial of her husband and of her brother-in-law, the Count of Toulouse. “The greater part of the nights was employed at it,” says Madame de Stael, at that time Mdlle. do Launay, a person of much wit, half lady’s maid, half reader to the duchess. “The huge volumes, heaped up on her bed like mountains overwhelming her, caused her,” she used to say, “to look, making due allowances, like Enceladus, buried under Mount AEtna. I was present at the work, and I also used to turn over the leaves of old chronicles and of ancient and modern jurisconsults, until excess of fatigue disposed the princess to take some repose.”
All this toil ended in the following declaration on the part of the legitimatized princes: “The affair, being one of state, cannot be decided but by a king, who is a major, or indeed by the States-general.” At the same time, and still at the instigation of the Duchess of Maine, thirty-nine noblemen signed a petition, modestly addressed to “Our Lords of the Parliament,” demanding, in their turn, that the affair should be referred to the states-general, who alone were competent, when it was a question of the succession to the throne.
The Regent saw the necessity of firmness. “It is a maxim,” he declared, “that the king is always a major as regards justice; that which was done without the states-general has no need of their intervention to be undone.” The decree of the council of regency, based on the same principles, suppressed the right of succession to the crown, and cut short all pretensions on the part of the legitimatized princes’ issue to the rank of princes of the blood; the rights thereto were maintained in the case of the Duke of Maine and the Count of Toulouse, for their lives, by the bounty of the Regent, “which did not prevent the Duchess of Maine from uttering loud shrieks, like a maniac,” says St. Simon, “or the Duchess of Orleans from weeping night and day, and refusing for two months to see anybody.” Of the thirty-nine members of the nobility who had signed the petition to Parliament, six were detained in prison for a month, after which the Duke of Orleans pardoned them. “You know me, well enough to be aware that I am only nasty when I consider myself positively obliged to be,” he said to them. The patrons, whose cause these noblemen had lightly embraced, were not yet at the end of their humiliations.
The Duke of Bourbon was not satisfied with their exclusion from the succession to the throne; he claimed the king’s education, which belonged of right, he said, to the first prince of the blood, being a major. In his hatred, then, towards the legitimatized, he accepted with alacrity the Duke of St. Simon’s proposal to simply reduce them to their rank by seniority in the peerage, with the proviso of afterwards restoring the privileges of a prince of the blood in favor of the Count of Toulouse alone, as a reward for his services in the navy. The blow thus dealt gratified all the passions of the House of Conde and the wrath of Law, as well as that of the keeper of the seals, D’Argenson, against the Parliament, which for three months past had refused to enregister all edicts. On the 24th of August, 1718, at six in the morning, the Parliament received orders to repair to the Tuileries, where the king was to hold a bed of justice., The Duke of Maine, who was returning from a party, was notified, as colonel of the Swiss, to have his regiment under arms; at eight o’clock the council of regency was already assembled; the Duke of Maine and the Count of Toulouse arrived in peer’s robes. The Regent had flattered himself that they would not come to the bed of justice, and had not summoned them. He at once advanced towards the Count of Toulouse, and said out loud that he was surprised to see him in his robes, and that he had not thought proper to notify him of the bed of justice, because he knew that, since the last edict, he did not like going to the Parliament. The Count of Toulouse replied that that was quite true, but that, when it was a question of the welfare of the State, he put every other consideration aside. The Regent was disconcerted; he hesitated a moment, then, speaking low and very earnestly to the Count of Toulouse, he returned to St. Simon. “I have just told him all,” said he, “I couldn’t help it; he is the best fellow in the world, and the one who touches my heart the most. He was coming to me on behalf of his brother, who had a shrewd notion that there was something in the wind, and that he did not stand quite well with me; he had begged him to ask me whether I wished him to remain, or whether he would not do well to go away. I confess to you that I thought I did well to tell him that his brother would do just as well to go away, since he asked me the question; that, as for himself, he might safely remain, because he was to continue just as he is, without alteration; but that something might take place rather disagreeable to M. du Maine. Whereupon, he asked me how he could remain, when there was to be an attack upon his brother, seeing that they were but one, both in point of honor and as brothers. I do believe, there they are just going out,” added the Regent, casting a glance towards the door, as the members of the council were beginning to take their places: “they will be prudent; the Count of Toulouse promised me so.” “But, if they were to do anything foolish, or were to leave Paris?” “They shall be arrested, I give you my word,” replied the Duke of Orleans, in a firmer tone than usual. They had just read the decree reducing the legitimatized to their degree in the peerage, and M. le Duc had claimed the superintendence of the king’s education, when it was announced that the Parliament, in their scarlet robes, were arriving in the court of the palace. Marshal de Villeroi alone dared to protest. “Here, then,” said he with a sigh, “are all the late king’s dispositions upset; I cannot see it without sorrow. M. du Maine is very unfortunate.” “Sir,” rejoined the Regent, with animation, “M. du Maine is my brother-in-law, but I prefer an open to a hidden enemy.”
With the same air the Duke of Orleans passed to the bed of justice, “with a gentle but resolute majesty, which was quite new to him; eyes observant, but bearing grave and easy; M. le Duc staid, circumspect, surrounded by a sort of radiance that adorned his whole person, and under perceptible restraint; the keeper of the seals, in his chair, motionless, gazing askance with that witful fire which flashed from his eyes and which seemed to pierce all bosoms, in presence of that Parliament which had so often given him orders standing at its bar as chief of police, in presence of that premier president, so superior to him, so haughty, so proud of his Duke of Maine, so mightily in hopes of the seals.” After his speech, and the reading of the king’s decree, the premier president was for attempting a remonstrance; D’Argenson mounted the step, approached the young king, and then, without taking any opinion, said, in a very loud voice, “The king desires to be obeyed, and obeyed at once.” There was nothing further for it but to enregister the edict; all the decrees of the Parliament were quashed.
Some old servants of Louis XIV., friends and confidants of the Duke of Maine, alone appeared moved. The young king was laughing, and the crowd of spectators were amusing themselves with the scene, without any sensible interest in the court intrigues. The Duchess of Maine made her husband pay for his humble behavior at the council; “she was,” says St. Simon, “at one time motionless with grief, at another boiling with rage, and her poor husband wept daily like a calf at the biting reproaches and strange insults which he had incessantly to pocket in her fits of anger against him.”
In the excess of her indignation and wrath, the Duchess of Maine determined not to confine herself to reproaches. She had passed her life in elegant entertainments, in sprightly and frivolous intellectual amusements; ever bent on diverting herself, she made up her mind to taste the pleasure of vengeance, and set on foot a conspiracy, as frivolous as her diversions. The object, however, was nothing less than to overthrow the Duke of Orleans, and to confer the regency on the King of Spain, Philip V., with a council and a lieutenant, who was to be the Duke of Maine. “When one has once acquired, no matter how, the rank of prince of the blood and the capability of succeeding to the throne,” said the duchess, “one must turn the state upside down, and set fire to the four corners of the kingdom, rather than let them be wrested from one.” The schemes for attaining this great result were various and confused. Philip V. had never admitted that his renunciation of the crown of France was seriously binding upon him; he had seen, by the precedent of the war of devolution, how a powerful sovereign may make sport of such acts; his Italian minister, Alberoni, an able and crafty man, who had set the crown of Spain upon the head of Elizabeth Farnese, and had continued to rule her, cautiously egged on his master into hostilities against France. They counted upon the Parliaments, taking example from that of Paris, on the whole of Brittany, in revolt at the prolongation of the tithe-tax, on all the old court, accustomed to the yoke of the bastards and of Madame de Maintenon, on Languedoc, of which the Duke of Maine was the governor; they talked of carrying off the Duke of Orleans, and taking him to the castle of Toledo; Alberoni promised the assistance of a Spanish army. The Duchess of Maine had fired the train, without the knowledge, she said, and probably against the will, too, of her husband, more indolent than she in his perfidy. Some scatter-brains of great houses were mixed up in the affair; MM. de Richelieu, de Laval, and de Pompadour; there was secret coming and going between the castle of Sceaux and the house of the Spanish ambassador, the Prince of Cellamare; M. de Malezieux, the secretary and friend of the duchess, drew up a form of appeal from the French nobility to Philip V., but nobody had signed it, or thought of doing so. They got pamphlets written by Abbe Brigault, whom the duchess had sent to Spain; the mystery was profound, and all the conspirators were convinced of the importance of their manoeuvres; every day, however, the Regent was informed of them by his most influential negotiator with foreign countries, Abbe Dubois, his late tutor, and the most depraved of all those who were about him. Able and vigilant as he was, he was not ignorant of any single detail of the plot, and was only giving the conspirators time to compromise themselves. At last, just as a young abbe, Porto Carrero, was starting for Spain, carrying important papers, he was arrested at Poitiers, and his papers were seized. Next day, December 7, 1718, the Prince of Cellamare’s house was visited, and the streets were lined with troops. Word was brought in all haste to the Duchess of Maine. She had company, and dared not stir. M. de Chatillon came in; joking commenced. “He was a cold creature, who never thought of talking,” says Madame de Stael in her memoirs. “All at once he said, ‘Really there is some very amusing news: they have arrested and put in the Bastille, for this affair of the Spanish ambassador, a certain Abbe Bri . . . . Bri’ he could not remember the name, and those who knew it had no inclination to help him. At last he finished, and added, ‘The most amusing part is, that he has told all, and so, you see, there are some folks in a great fix.’ Thereupon he burst out laughing for the first time in his life. The Duchess of Maine, who had not the least inclination thereto, said, ‘Yes, that is very amusing.’ ‘O! it is enough to make you die of laughing,’ he resumed; ‘fancy those folks who thought their affair was quite a secret; here’s one who tells more than he is asked, and names everybody by name!’” The agony was prolonged for some days; jokes were beginning to be made about it at the Duchess of Maine’s; she kept friends with her to pass the night in her room, waiting for her arrest to come. Madame de Stael was reading Machiavelli’s conspiracies. “Make haste and take away that piece of evidence against us,” said Madame du Maine, laughingly, “it would be one of the strongest.”
The arrest came, however; it was six A.M., and everybody was asleep, when the king’s men entered the Duke of Maine’s house. The Regent had for a long time delayed to act, as if he wanted to leave everybody time to get away; but the conspirators were too scatter-brained to take the trouble. The duchess was removed to Dijon, within the government, and into the very house of the Duke of Bourbon, her nephew, which was a very bitter pill for her. The Duke of Maine, who protested his innocence and his ignorance, was detained in the Castle of Dourlans in Picardy. Cellamare received his passports and quitted France. The less illustrious conspirators were all put in the Bastille; the majority did not remain there long, and purchased their liberty by confessions, which the Duchess of Maine ended by confirming. “Do not leave Paris until you are driven thereto by force,” Alberoni had written to the Prince of Cellamare, “and do not start before you have fired all the mines.” Cellamare started, and the mines did not burst after his withdrawal; conspiracy and conspirators were covered with ridicule; the natural clemency of the Regent had been useful; the part of the Duke and Duchess of Maine was played out.
The only serious result of Cellamare’s conspiracy was to render imminent a rupture with Spain. From the first days of the regency the old enmity of Philip V. towards the Duke of Orleans and the secret pretensions of both of them to the crown of France, in case of little Louis XV.‘s death, rendered the relations between the two courts thorny and strained at bottom, though still perfectly smooth in appearance. It was from England that Abbe Dubois urged the Regent to seek support. Dubois, born in the very lowest position, and endowed with a soul worthy of his origin, was “a little, lean man, wire-drawn, with a light colored wig, the look of a weasel, a clever expression,” says St. Simon, who detested him; “all vices struggled within him for the mastery; they kept up a constant hubbub and strife together. Avarice, debauchery, ambition, were his gods; perfidy, flattery, slavishness, his instruments; and complete unbelief his comfort. He excelled in low intrigues; the boldest lie was second nature to him, with an air of simplicity, straightforwardness, sincerity, and often bashfulness.” In spite of all these vices, and the depraving influence he had exercised over the Duke of Orleans from his earliest youth, Dubois was able, often far-sighted, and sometimes bold; he had a correct and tolerably practical mind. Madame, who was afraid of him, had said to her son on the day of his elevation to power, “I desire only the welfare of the state and your own glory; I have but one request to make for your honor’s sake, and I demand your word for it, that is, never to employ that scoundrel of an Abbe Dubois, the greatest rascal in the world, and one who would sacrifice the state and you to the slightest interest.” The Regent promised; yet a few months later and Dubois was Church-councillor of State, and his growing influence with the prince placed him, at first secretly, and before long openly, at the head of foreign affairs.
James Stuart, King James II.‘s son, whom his friends called James III. and his enemies Chevalier St. George, had just unsuccessfully attempted a descent upon Scotland. The Jacobites had risen; they were crying aloud for their prince, who remained concealed in Lorraine, when at last he resolved to set out and traverse France secretly. Agents, posted by the English ambassador, Lord Stair, were within an ace of arresting him, perhaps of murdering him. Saved by the intelligence and devotion of the post-mistress of Nonancourt, he embarked on the 26th of December at Dunkerque, too late to bring even moral support to the men who were fighting and dying for him. Six weeks after landing at Peterhead, in Scotland, he started back again without having struck a blow, without having set eyes upon the enemy, leaving to King George I. the easy task of avenging himself by sending to death upon the scaffold the noblest victims. The Duke of Orleans had given him a little money, had known of and had encouraged his passage through France, but had accorded him no effectual aid; the wrath of both parties, nevertheless, fell on him.
Inspired by Dubois, weary of the weakness and dastardly incapacity of the Pretender, the Regent consented to make overtures to the King of England. The Spanish nation was favorable to France, but the king was hostile to the Regent; the English loved neither France nor the Regent, but their king had an interest in severing France from the Pretender forever. Dubois availed himself ably of his former relations with Lord Stanhope, heretofore commander of the English troops in Spain, for commencing a secret negotiation which soon extended to Holland, still closely knit to England. “The character of our Regent,” wrote Dubois on the 10th of March, 1716, “leaves no ground for fearing lest he should pique himself upon perpetuating the prejudices and the procedure of our late court, and, as you yourself remark, he has too much wit not to see his true interest.” Dubois was the bearer to the Hague of the Regent’s proposals; King George was to cross over thither; the clever negotiator veiled his trip under the pretext of purchasing rare books; he was going, he said, to recover from the hands of the Jews Le Poussin’s famous pictures of the Seven Sacraments, not long ago carried off from Paris. The order of succession to the crowns of France and England, conformably to the peace of Utrecht, was guaranteed in the scheme of treaty; that was the only important advantage to the Regent, who considered himself to be thus nailing the renunciation of Philip V.; in other respects all the concessions came from the side of France; her territory was forbidden ground to the Jacobites, and the Pretender, who had taken refuge at Avignon on papal soil, was to be called upon to cross the Alps. The English required the abandonment of the works upon the canal of Mardyck, intended to replace the harbor of Dunkerque the Hollanders claimed commercial advantages. Dubois yielded on all the points, defending to the last with fruitless tenacity the title of King of France, which the English still disputed. The negotiations came to an end at length on the 6th of January, 1717, and Dubois wrote in triumph to the Regent, “I signed at midnight; so there are you quit of servitude (your own master), and here am I quit of fear.” The treaty of the triple alliance brought the negotiator before long a more solid advantage; he was appointed secretary of state for foreign affairs; it was on this occasion that he wrote to Mr. Craggs, King George’s minister, a letter worthy of his character, and which contributed a great deal towards gaining credit for the notion that he had sold himself to England. “If I were to follow only the impulse of my gratitude and were not restrained by respect, I should take the liberty of writing to H. B. Majesty to thank him for the place with which my lord the Regent has gratified me, inasmuch as I owe it to nothing but to the desire he felt not to employ in affairs common to France and England anybody who might not be agreeable to the King of Great Britain.”
At the moment when the signature was being put to the treaty of the triple alliance, the sovereign of most distinction in Europe, owing to the eccentric renown belonging to his personal merit, the czar Peter the Great, had just made flattering advances to France. He had some time before wished to take a trip to Paris, but Louis XIV. was old, melancholy, and vanquished, and had declined the czar’s visit. The Regent could not do the same thing, when, being at the Hague in 1717, Peter I. repeated the expression of his desire. Marshal Cosse was sent to meet him, and the honors due to the king himself were everywhere paid to him on the road. A singular mixture of military and barbaric roughness with the natural grandeur of a conqueror and creator of an empire, the czar mightily excited the curiosity of the Parisians. “Sometimes, feeling bored by the confluence of spectators,” says Duclos, “but never disconcerted, he would dismiss them with a word, a gesture, or would go away without ceremony, to stroll whither his fancy impelled him. He was a mighty tall man, very well made, rather lean, face rather round in shape, a high forehead, fine eyebrows, complexion reddish and brown, fine black eyes, large, lively, piercing; well-opened; a glance majestic and gracious when he cared for it, otherwise stern and fierce, with a tic that did not recur often, but that affected his eyes and his whole countenance, and struck terror. It lasted an instant, with a glance wild and terrible, and immediately passed away. His whole air indicated his intellect, his reflection, his grandeur, and did not lack a certain grace. In all his visits he combined a majesty the loftiest, the proudest, the most delicate, the most sustained, at the same time the least embarrassing when he had once established it, with a politeness which savored of it, always and in all cases; masterlike everywhere, but with degrees according to persons. He had a sort of familiarity which came of frankness, but he was not exempt from a strong impress of that barbarism of his country which rendered all his ways prompt and sudden, and his wishes uncertain, without bearing to be contradicted in any.” Eating and drinking freely, getting drunk sometimes, rushing about the streets in hired coach, or cab, or the carriage of people who came to see him, of which he took possession unceremoniously, he testified towards the Regent a familiar good grace mingled with a certain superiority; at the play, to which they went together, the czar asked for beer; the Regent rose, took the goblet which was brought and handed it to Peter, who drank, and, without moving, put the glass back on the tray which the Regent held all the while, with a slight inclination of the head, which, however, surprised the public. At his first interview with the little king, he took up the child in his arms, and kissed him over and over again, “with an air of tenderness and politeness which was full of nature, and nevertheless intermixed with a something of grandeur, equality of rank, and, slightly, superiority of age; for all that was distinctly perceptible.” We know how he went to see Madame de Maintenon. One of his first visits was to the church of the Sorbonne; when he caught sight of Richelieu’s monument, he ran up to it, embraced the statue, and, “Ah! great man,” said he, “if thou wert still alive, I would give thee one half of my kingdom to teach me to govern the other.”
The czar was for seeing everything, studying everything; everything interested him, save the court and its frivolities; he did not go to visit the princesses of the blood, and confined himself to saluting them coldly, whilst passing along a terrace; but he was present at a sitting of the Parliament and of the academies, he examined the organization of all the public establishments, he visited the shops of the celebrated workmen, he handled the coining-die whilst there was being struck in his honor a medal bearing a Fame with these words: Vires acquiret eundo (‘Twill gather strength as it goes.) He received a visit from the doctors of the Sorbonne, who brought him a memorial touching the reunion of the Greek and Latin Churches. “I am a mere soldier,” said he, “but I will gladly have an examination made of the memorial you present to me.” Amidst all his chatting, studying, and information-hunting, Peter the Great did not forget the political object of his trip. He wanted to detach France from Sweden, her heretofore faithful ally, still receiving a subsidy which the czar would fain have appropriated to himself. Together with his own alliance, he promised that of Poland and of Prussia. “France has nothing to fear from the emperor,” he said; as for King George, whom he detested, “if any rupture should take place between him and the Regent, Russia would suffice to fill towards France the place of England as well as of Sweden.”
Thanks to the ability of Dubois, the Regent felt himself infeoffed to England; he gave a cool reception to the overtures of the czar, who proposed a treaty of alliance and commerce. Prussia had already concluded secretly with France; Poland was distracted by intestine struggles; matters were confined to the establishment of amicable relations; France thenceforth maintained an ambassador in Russia, and the czar accepted the Regent’s mediation between Sweden and himself. “France will be ruined by luxury and daintiness,” said Peter the Great, at his departure, more impressed with the danger run by the nation from a court which was elegant even to effeminacy than by the irregularity of the morals, to which elsewhere he was personally accustomed.
Dubois, however, went on negotiating, although he had displayed no sort of alacrity towards the czar; he was struggling everywhere throughout Europe against the influence of a broader, bolder, more powerful mind than his own, less adroit perhaps in intrigue, but equally destitute of scruples as to the employment of means. Alberoni had restored the finances, and reformed the administration of Spain; he was preparing an army and a fleet, meditating, he said, to bring peace to the world, and beginning that great enterprise by manoeuvres which tended to nothing less than setting fire to the four corners of Europe, in the name of an enfeebled and heavy-going king, and of a queen ambitious, adroit, and unpopular, “both of whom he had put under lock and key, keeping the key in his pocket,” says St. Simon. He dreamed of reviving the ascendency of Spain in Italy, of overthrowing the Protestant king of England, whilst restoring the Stuarts to the throne, and of raising himself to the highest dignities in Church and State. He had already obtained from Pope Clement XI. the cardinal’s hat, disguising under pretext of war against the Turks the preparations he was making against Italy; he had formed an alliance between Charles XII. and the czar, intending to sustain, by their united forces, the attempts of the Jacobites in England. His first enterprise, at sea, made him master of Sardinia within a few days; the Spanish troops landed in Sicily. The emperor and Victor Amadeo were in commotion; the pope, overwhelmed with reproaches by those princes, wept, after his fashion, saying that he had damned himself by raising Alberoni to the Roman purple; Dubois profited by the disquietude excited in Europe by the bellicose attitude of the Spanish minister to finally draw the emperor into the alliance between France and England. He was to renounce his pretensions to Spain and the Indies, and give up Sardinia to Savoy, which was to surrender Sicily to him. The succession to the duchies of Parma and Tuscany was to be secured to the children of the Queen of Spain. “Every difficulty would be removed if there were an appearance of more equality,” wrote the Regent to Dubois on the 24th of January, 1718. “I am quite aware that my personal interest does not suffer from this inequality, and that it is a species of touchstone for discovering my friends as well at home as abroad. But I am Regent of France, and I ought to so behave myself that none may be able to reproach me with having thought of nothing but myself. I also owe some consideration to the Spaniards, whom I should completely disgust by making with the emperor an unequal arrangement, about which their glory and the honor of their monarchy would render them very sensitive. I should thereby drive them to union with Alberoni, whereas, if a war were necessary to carry our point, we ought to be able to say what Count Grammont said to the king: ‘At the time when we served your Majesty against Cardinal Mazarin. Then the Spaniards themselves would help us.’” In the result, France and England left Holland and Savoy free to accede to the treaty; but, if Spain refused to do so voluntarily within a specified time, the allies engaged to force her thereto by arms.
The Hollanders hesitated; the Spanish ambassador at the Hague had a medal struck representing the quadruple alliance as a coach on the point of falling, because it rested on only three wheels. Certain advantages secured to their commerce at last decided the States-general. Victor Amadeo regretfully acceded to the treaty which robbed him of Sicily; he was promised one of the Regent’s daughters for his son.
Alberoni refused persistently to accede to the great coalition brought about by Dubois. Lord Stanhope proposed to go over to Spain in order to bring him round. “If my lord comes as a lawgiver,” said the cardinal, “he may spare himself the journey. If he comes as a mediator I will receive him; but in any case I warn him that, at the first attack upon our vessels by an English squadron, Spain has not an inch of ground on which I would answer for his person.” Lord Stanhope, nevertheless, set out for Spain, and had the good fortune to leave it in time, though without any diplomatic success. Admiral Byng, at the head of the English fleet, had destroyed the Spanish squadron before Messina; the troops which occupied Palermo found themselves blockaded without hope of relief, and the nascent navy of Spain was strangled at the birth. Alberoni, in his fury, had the persons and goods seized of English residents settled in Spain, drove out the consuls, and orders were given at Madrid that no tongue should wag about the affairs of Sicily. The hope of a sudden surprise in England, on behalf of the Jacobites, had been destroyed by the death of the King of Sweden, Charles XII., killed on the 12th of December, 1718, at Freiderishalt, in Norway; the flotilla equipped by Alberoni for Chevalier St. George, had been dispersed and beaten by the elements; the Pretender henceforth was considered to cost Spain too dear; he had just been sent away from her territory at the moment when the conspiracy of Cellamare failed in France; in spite of the feverish activity of his mind, and the frequently chimerical extent of his machinations, Alberoni remained isolated in Europe, without ally and without support.
The treaty of the quadruple alliance had at last come to be definitively signed; Marshal d’Huxelles, head of the council of foreign affairs, an enemy to Dubois, and displeased at not having been invited to take part in the negotiations, at first refused his signature. [Memoires de St. Simon, t. xix. p. 365.] “At the first word the Regent spoke to him, he received nothing but bows, and the marshal went home to sulk; caresses, excuses, reasons, it was all of no use; Huxelles declared to the Marquis of Effiat, who had been despatched to him, that he would have his hand cut off rather than sign. The Duke of Orleans grew impatient, and took a resolution very foreign to his usual weakness; he sent D’Antin to Marshal d’Huxelles, bidding him to make choice of this: either to sign or lose his place, of which the Regent would immediately dispose in favor of somebody who would not be so intractable (farouclae) as he. O, mighty power of orvietan (a counterpoison)! This man so independent, this great citizen, this courageous minister, had no sooner heard the threat, and felt that it would be carried into effect, than he bowed his head beneath his huge hat, which he always had on, and signed right off, without a word. He even read the treaty to the council of regency in a low and trembling voice, and when the Regent asked his opinion, ‘the opinion of the treaty,’ he answered, between his teeth, with a bow.” Some days later appeared, almost at the same time—the 17th of December, 1718, and the 9th of January, 1719—the manifestoes of England and France, proclaiming the resolution of making war upon Spain, whilst Philip V., by a declaration of December 25th, 1718, pronounced all renunciations illusory, and proclaimed his right to the throne of France in case of the death of Louis XV. At the same time he made an appeal to an assembly of the States-general against the tyranny of the Regent, “who was making alliances,” he said, “with the enemies of the two crowns.”
For once, in a way, Alberoni indulged the feelings of the king his master, and, in spite of the good will felt by a part of the grandees towards France, Spain was, on the whole, with him; he no longer felt himself to be threatened, as he had been a few months before, when the king’s illness had made him tremble for his greatness, and perhaps for his life. He kept the monarch shut up in his room, refusing entrance to even the superior officers of the palace. [Memoires de St. Simon, t. xv.] “The Marquis of Villena, major-domo major, having presented himself there one afternoon, one of the valets inside half opened the door, and told him, with much embarrassment, that he was forbidden to let him in. ‘You are insolent, sir,’ replied the marquis; ‘that cannot be.’ He pushed; the door against the valet and went in. The marquis, though covered with glory, being very weak on his legs, thus advances with short steps, leaning on his little stick. The queen and the cardinal see him, and look at one another. The king was too ill to take notice of anything, and his curtains were drawn. The cardinal, seeing the marquis approach, went up to him, and represented to him that the king wished to be alone, and begged him to go away. ‘That is not true,’ said the marquis. ‘I kept my eye upon you, and the king never said a word to you.’ The cardinal, insisting, took him by the arm to make him go out; what with the heat of the moment, and what with the push, the marquis, being feeble, fell into an arm-chair which happened to be by. Wroth at his fall, he raises his stick and brings it down with all his might, hammer and tongs, about the cardinal’s ears, calling him a little rascal, a little hound, who deserved nothing short of the stirrup-leathers. When he did at last go out, the queen had looked on from her seat at this adventure all through, without moving or saying a word, and so had the few who were in the room, without daring to stir. The curious thing is, that the cardinal, mad as he was, but taken completely by surprise at the blows, did not defend himself, and thought of nothing but getting clear. The same evening the marquis was exiled to his estates, without ever wanting to return from them, until the fall of Alberoni.” Alberoni has sometimes been compared to the great cardinals who had governed France. To say nothing of the terror with which Richelieu inspired the grandees, who detested him, the Prince of Coude would not have dared to touch Cardinal Mazarin with the tip of his cane, even when the latter “kissed his boots” in the courtyard of the castle at Havre.
Alberoni had persuaded his master that the French were merely awaiting the signal to rise in his favor; the most odious calumnies were everywhere circulating against the Regent; he did not generally show that he was at all disturbed or offended by them; however, when the poem of the Philippics by La Grange appeared, he desired to see it; the Duke of St. Simon took it to him. “‘Read it to me,’ said the Regent. ‘That I will never do, Monseigneur,’ said I. He then took it and read it quite low, standing up in the window of his little winter-closet, where we were. All at once I saw him change countenance, and turn towards me, tears in his eyes, and very near fainting. ‘All,’ said he to me, ‘this is too bad, this horrid thing is too much for me.’ He had lit upon the passage where the scoundrel had represented the Duke of Orleans purposing to poison the king, and all ready to commit his crime. I have never seen man so transfixed, so deeply moved, so overwhelmed by a calumny so enormous and so continuous. I had all the pains in the world to bring him round a little.” King Louis XV., who had no love and scarcely any remembrance, preserved all his life some affection for the Regent, and sincere gratitude for the care which the latter had lavished upon him. The Duke of Orleans had never desired the crown for himself, and the attentions full of tender respect which he had shown the little king had made upon the child an impression which was never effaced.
The preparations for war with Spain meanwhile continued; the Prince of Conti was nominally at the head of the army, Marshal Berwick was intrusted with the command. He accepted it, in spite of his old connections with Spain, the benefits which Philip V. had heaped upon him, and the presence of his eldest son, the Duke of Liria, in the Spanish ranks. There were others who attached more importance to gratitude. Berwick thought very highly of lieutenant-general Count D’Asfeldt, and desired to have him in his army; the Duke of Orleans spoke to him about it. “Monseigneur,” answered D’Asfeldt, “I am a Frenchman, I owe you everything, I have nothing to expect save from you, but,” taking the Fleece in his hand and showing it, “what would you have me do with this, which I hold, with the king’s permission, from the King of Spain, if I were to serve against Spain, this being the greatest honor that I could have received?” He phrased his repugnance so well, and softened it down by so many expressions of attachment to the Duke of Orleans, that he was excused from serving against Spain, and he contented himself with superintending at Bordeaux the service of the commissariat. The French army, however, crossed the frontier in the month of March, 1719. “The Regent may send a French army whenever he pleases,” wrote Alberoni, on the 21st November, 1718; “proclaim publicly that there will not be a shot fired, and that the king our master will have provisions ready to receive them.” He had brought the king, the queen, and the prince of the Asturias into the camp; Philip V. fully expected the desertion of the French army in a mass. Not a soul budged; some refugees made an attempt to tamper with certain officers of their acquaintance; their messenger was hanged in the middle of Marshal Berwick’s camp. Fontarabia, St. Sebastian, and the Castle of Urgel fell before long into the power of the French; another division burned, at the port of Los Pasages, six vessels which chanced to be on the stocks; an English squadron destroyed those at Centera and in the port of Vigo. Everywhere the depots were committed to the flames: this cruel and destructive war against an enemy whose best troops were fighting far away, and who was unable to offer more than a feeble resistance, gratified the passions and the interests of England rather than of France. “It was, of course, necessary,” said Berwick, “that the English government should be able to convince the next Parliament that nothing had been spared to diminish the navy of Spain.” During this time the English fleet and the emperor’s troops were keeping up an attack in Sicily upon the Spanish troops, who made a heroic defence, but were without resources or re-enforcements, and were diminishing, consequently, every day. The Marquis of Leyden no longer held anything but Palermo and the region round AEtna.
Alberoni had attempted to create a diversion by hurling into the midst of France the brand of civil war. Brittany, for a long time past discontented with its governor, the Marquis of Montesquiou, and lately worked upon by the agents of the Duchess of Maine, was ripe for revolt; a few noblemen took up arms, and called upon the peasants to enter the forest with them, that is, to take the field. Philip V. had promised the assistance of a fleet, and had supplied some money. But the peasants did not rise, the Spanish ships were slow to arrive, the enterprise attempted against the Marquis of Montesquiou failed, the conspirators were surrounded in the forest of Noe, near Rennes; a great number were made prisoners and taken away to Nantes, where a special chamber inquired into the case against them. Three noblemen and one priest perished on the scaffold.
Insurrection, as well as desertion and political opposition, had been a failure; Philip V. was beaten at home as well as in Sicily. The Regent succeeded in introducing to the presence of the King of Spain an unknown agent, who managed to persuade the monarch that the cardinal was shirking his responsibility before Europe, asserting that the king and queen had desired the war, and that he had confined himself to gratifying their passions. The Duke of Orleans said, at the same time, quite openly, that he made war not against Philip V. or against Spain, but against Alberoni only. Lord Stanhope declared, in the name of England, that no peace was possible, unless its preliminary were the dismissal of the pernicious minister. The fall of Alberoni was almost as speedy as that which he had but lately contrived for his enemy the Princess des Ursins. On the 4th of December, 1719, he received orders to quit Madrid within eight days and Spain under three weeks. He did not see the king or queen again, and retired first to Genoa, going by France, and then finally to Rome. He took with him an immense fortune. It was discovered, after his departure, that he had placed amongst the number of his treasures, the authentic will of Charles II., securing the throne of Spain to Philip V. He was pursued, his luggage ransacked, and the precious document recovered. Alberoni had restored order in the internal administration of Spain; he had cleared away many abuses; Italian as he was, he had resuscitated Spanish ambition. “I requickened a corpse,” he used to say. His views were extensive and daring, but often chimerical; he had reduced to a nullity the sovereign whom he governed for so long, keeping him shut up far away from the world, in a solitude which he was himself almost the only one to interrupt. “The queen has the devil in her,” he used to say; “if she finds a man of the sword who has some mental resources and is a pretty good general, she will make a racket in France and in Europe.” The queen did not find a general; and on the 17th of February, 1720, peace was signed at the Hague between Spain and the powers in coalition against her, to the common satisfaction of France and Spain, whom so many ties already united. The haughty Elizabeth Farnese looked no longer to anybody but the Duke of Orleans for the elevation of her children.
So great success in negotiation, however servile had been his bearing, had little by little increased the influence of Dubois over his master. The Regent knew and despised him, but he submitted to his sway and yielded to his desires, sometimes to his fancies. Dubois had for a long while comprehended that the higher dignities of the church could alone bring him to the grandeur of which he was ambitious; yet everything about him seemed to keep them out of his reach, his scandalous life, his perpetual intrigues, the baseness, not of his origin, but of his character and conduct; nevertheless, the see of Cambrai having become vacant by the death of Cardinal de la Tremoille, Dubois conceived the hope of obtaining it. “Impudent as he was,” says St. Simon, “great as was the sway he had acquired over his master, he found himself very much embarrassed, and masked his effrontery by ruse; he told the Duke of Orleans that he had dreamed a funny dream, that he was Archbishop of Cambrai. The Regent, who saw what he was driving at, answered him in a tone of contempt, ‘Thou, Archbishop of Cambrai! thou hast no thought of such a thing?’ And the other persisting, he bade him think of all the scandal of his life. Dubois had gone too far to stop on so fine a road, and quoted to him precedents, of which there were, unfortunately, only too many. The Duke of Orleans, less moved by such bad reasons than put to it how to resist the suit of a man whom he was no longer wont to dare gainsay in anything, sought to get out of the affair. ‘Why! who would consecrate thee?’ ‘Ah! if that’s all,’ replied Dubois, cheerfully, ‘the thing is done. I know well who will consecrate me; but is that all, once more?’ ‘Well! who?’ asked the Regent. ‘Your premier almoner; there he is, outside; he will ask nothing better.’ And he embraces the legs of the Duke of Orleans,—who remains stuck and caught without having the power to refuse,—goes out, draws aside the Bishop of Nantes, tells him that he himself has got Cambrai, begs him to consecrate him,—who promises immediately,—comes in again, capers, returns thanks, sings praises, expresses wonder, seals the matter more and more surely by reckoning it done, and persuading the Regent that it is so, who never dared say no. That is how Dubois made himself Archbishop of Cambrai.”
He was helped, it is said, by a strange patron. Destouches, charge d’affaires in London, who was kept well informed by Dubois, went to see George I., requesting him to write to the Regent, recommending to him the negotiator of the treaties. The king burst out laughing. “How can you ask a Protestant prince,” said he, “to mix himself up with the making of an archbishop in France? The Regent will laugh at the idea, as I do, and will do nothing of the sort.” “Pardon me, sir,” rejoined Destouches, “he will laugh, but he will do it, first out of regard for your Majesty, and then because he will think it a good joke. I beseech your Majesty to be pleased to sign the letter I have here already written.” King George signed, and the adroit Dubois became Archbishop of Cambrai. He even succeeded in being consecrated, not only by the Bishop of Nantes, but also by Cardinal Rohan and by Massillon, one of the glories of the French episcopate, a timid man and a poor one, in despite of his pious eloquence. The Regent, as well as the whole court, was present at the ceremony, to the great scandal of the people attached to religion. Dubois received all the orders on the same day; and, when he was joked about it, he brazen-facedly called to mind the precedent of St. Ambrose. Dubois henceforth cast his eyes upon the cardinal’s hat, and his negotiations at Rome were as brisk as those of Alberoni had but lately been with the same purpose.
Amidst so much defiance of decency and public morality, in the presence of such profound abuse of sacred things, God did not, nevertheless, remain without testimony, and his omnipotent justice had spoken. On the 21st of July, 1719, the Duchess of Berry, eldest daughter of the Regent, had died at the Palais-Royal, at barely twenty-four years of age; her health, her beauty, and her wit were not proof against the irregular life she had led. Ere long a more terrible cry arose from one of the chief cities of the kingdom. “The plague,” they said, “is at Marseilles, brought, none knows how, on board a ship from the East.” The terrible malady had by this time been brooding for a month in the most populous quarters without anybody’s daring to give it its real name. “The public welfare demands,” said Chancellor d’Aguesseau, “that the people should be persuaded that the plague is not contagious, and that the ministry should behave as if it were persuaded of the contrary.” Meanwhile emigration was commencing at Marseilles; the rich folks had all taken flight; the majority of the public functionaries, unfaithful to their duty, had imitated them, when, on the 31st of July, 1720, the Parliament of Aix, scared at the contagion, drew round Marseilles a sanitary line, proclaiming the penalty of death against all who should dare to pass it; the mayor (viguier) and the four sheriffs were left alone, and without resources to confront a populace bewildered by fear, suffering, and, ere long, famine. Then shone forth that grandeur of the human soul, which displays itself in the hour of terror, as if to testify of the divine image still existing amidst the wreck of us. Whilst the Parliament was flying from threatened Aix, and hurrying affrighted from town to town, accompanied or pursued in its route by the commandant of the province, all that while the Bishop of Marseilles, Monseigneur de Belzunce, the sheriffs Estelle and Moustier, and a simple officer of health, Chevalier Roze, sufficed in the depopulated town for all duties and all acts of devotion.
The plague showed a preference for attacking robust men, young people, and women in the flower of their age; it disdained the old and the sick; there was none to care for the dying, none to bury the dead. The doctors of Marseilles had fled, or dared not approach the dying without precautions, which redoubled the terror. “The doctors ought to be abolished,” wrote Dubois to the Archbishop of Aix, “or ordered to show more ability and less cowardice, for it is a great calamity.”
Some young doctors, arriving from Montpellier, raised the courage of their desponding brethren, and the sick no longer perished without help. Rallying round the bishop, the priests, assisted by the members of all the religious orders, flew from bedside to bedside, and from grave to grave, without being able to suffice for the duties of their ministry. “Look at Belzunce,” writes M. Lemontey; “all he possessed, he has given; all who served him are dead; alone, in poverty, afoot, in the morning he penetrates into the most horrible dens of misery, and in the evening, he is found again in the midst of places bespattered with the dying; he quenches their thirst, he comforts them as a friend, he exhorts them as an apostle, and on this field of death he gleans abandoned souls. The example of this prelate, who seems to be invulnerable, animates with courageous emulation—not the clergy of lazy and emasculated dignitaries, for they fled at the first approach of danger, but—the parish-priests, the vicars and the religious orders; not one deserts his colors, not one puts any bound to his fatigues save with his life. Thus perished twenty-six Recollects and eighteen Jesuits out of twenty-six. The Capucins summoned their brethren from the other provinces, and the latter rushed to martyrdom with the alacrity of the ancient Christians; out of fifty-five the epidemic slew forty-three. The conduct of the priests of the Oratory was, if possible, more magnanimous. The functions of the sacred ministry were forbidden them by the bishop, a fanatical partisan of the bull Unigenitus; they refused to profit by their disqualification, and they devoted themselves to the service of the sick with heroic humility; nearly all succumbed, and there were still tears in the city for the Superior, a man of eminent piety.”
During more than five months the heroic defenders of Marseilles struggled against the scourge. The bishop drew the populace on to follow in his steps, in processions or in the churches, invoking the mercy of God in aid of a city which terror and peril seemed to have the effect of plunging into the most awful corruption. Estelle, Moustier, and Chevalier Roze, heading the efforts attempted in all directions to protect the living and render the last offices to the dead, themselves put their hands to the work, aided by galley-men who had been summoned from the hulks. Courage was enough to establish equality between all ranks and all degrees of virtue. Monseigneur de Belzunce sat upon the seat of the tumbrel laden with corpses, driven by a convict stained with every crime.
Marseilles had lost a third of its inhabitants. Aix, Toulon, Arles, the Cevennes, the Gevaudan were attacked by the contagion; fearful was the want in the decimated towns long deprived of every resource. The Regent had forwarded corn and money; the pope sent out three ships laden with provisions; one of the vessels was wrecked, the two others were seized by Barbary pirates, who released them as soon as they knew their destination. The cargo was deposited on a desert island in sight of Toulon. Thither it was that boats, putting off from Marseilles, went to fetch the alms of the pope, more charitable than many priests, accompanying his gifts with all the spiritual consolations and indulgences of his holy office. The time had not come for Marseilles and the towns of Provence to understand the terrible teaching of God. Scarcely had they escaped from the dreadful scourge which had laid them waste, when they plunged into excesses of pleasure and debauchery, as if to fly from the memories that haunted them. Scarcely was a thought given to those martyrs to devotion who had fallen during the epidemic; those who survived received no recompense; the Regent, alone, offered Monseigneur de Belzunce the bishopric of Laon, the premier ecclesiastical peerage in the kingdom; the saintly bishop preferred to remain in the midst of the flock for which he had battled against despair and death. It was only in 1802 that the city of Marseilles at last raised a monument to its bishop and its heroic magistrates.
Dubois, meanwhile, was nearing the goal of all his efforts. In order to obtain the cardinal’s hat, he had embraced the cause of the Court of Rome, and was pushing forward the registration by Parliament of the Bull Unigenitus. The long opposition of the Duke of Noailles at last yielded to the desire of restoring peace in the church. In his wake the majority of the bishops and communities who had made appeal to the contemplated council, renounced, in their turn, the protests so often renewed within the last few years. The Parliament was divided, but exiled to Pontoise, as a punishment for its opposition to the system of Law; it found itself threatened with removal to Blois. Chancellor d’Aguesseau had vainly sought to interpose his authority; a magistrate of the Grand Chamber, Perelle by name, was protesting eloquently against any derogation from the principles of liberty of the Gallican Church and of the Parliaments. “Where did you find such maxims laid down?” asked the chancellor, angrily. “In the pleadings of the late Chancellor d’Aguesseau,” answered the councillor, icily. D’Aguesseau gave in his resignation to the Regent; the Parliament did not leave for Blois; after sitting some weeks at Pontoise, it enregistered the formal declaration of the Bull, and at last returned to Paris on the, 20th of December, 1720.
Dubois had reconciled France with the court of Rome; the latter owed him recompense for so much labor. Clement XI. had promised, but he could not make up his mind to bring down so low the dignity of the Sacred College; he died without having conferred the hat upon Dubois. During the conclave intrigues recommenced, conducted this time by Cardinal Rohan. The Jesuit Lafitteau, who had become Bishop of Sisteron, and had for a long while been the secret agent of Dubois at Rome, kept him acquainted with all the steps taken to wrest a promise from Cardinal Conti, who was destined, it was believed, to unite the majority of the suffrages. “Do not be surprised,” he adds, “to hear me say that I go by night to the conclave, for I have found out the secret of getting the key of it, and I constantly pass through five or six guard-posts, without their being able to guess who I am.”
Cardinal Conti was old and feeble; all means were brought to bear upon him. Dubois had for a long time past engaged the services of Chevalier St. George; when the new pope was proclaimed, under the name of Innocent XIII., he had signed a conditional promise in favor of Dubois. The Regent, who had but lately pressed his favorite’s desires upon Clement XI., was not afraid to write to the new pontiff—
“MOST HOLY FATHER,
“Your Holiness is informed of the favor which the late pope had granted me on behalf of the Archbishop of Cambrai, of which his death alone prevented the fulfilment. I hope that Your Holiness will let it be seen, on your accession to the throne of St. Peter, that services rendered to the Church lose nothing by the death of the sovereign pontiffs, and that you will not think it unworthy of your earliest care to give me this public mark of the attention paid by the Holy See to the zeal which I profess for its interests. This kindness on the part of Your Holiness will crown the wishes I formed for your exaltation, will fill up the measure of the joy which it has caused me, will maintain our kindly relations to the advantage of the peace of the Church and the authority of the Holy See, and will fortify the zeal of the Archbishop of Cambrai in the execution of my orders to the glory of the Pontificate and of Your Holiness.”
On the 16th of July, 1721, Dubois was at last elected Cardinal; it was stated that his elevation had cost eight millions of livres. The frivolous curiosity of the court was concerned with the countenance the new Eminence would make in his visits of ceremony, especially in that to Madame, his declared foe at all times. “He had nearly two months to prepare for it,” says St. Simon, “and it must be admitted that he had made good use of them. He got himself up for his part, and appeared before Madame with deep respect and embarrassment. He prostrated himself, as she advanced to greet him, sat down in the middle of the circle, covered his head for a moment with his red hat, which he removed immediately, and made his compliments; he began with his own surprise at finding himself in such a position in presence of Madame, spoke of the baseness of his birth and his first employments; employed them with much cleverness and in very choice terms to extol so much the more the kindness, courage, and power of the Duke of Orleans, who from so low had raised him to where he found himself; gave Madame some delicate incense; in fine, dissolved in the most profound respect and gratitude, doing it so well that Madame herself could not help, when he was gone, praising his discourse and his countenance, at the same time adding that she was mad to see him where he was.”
The bearing of the newly-elected was less modest at the council of regency; he got himself accompanied thither by Cardinal Rohan; their rank gave the two ecclesiastics precedence. The Duke of Noailles, d’Aguesseau, and some other great lords refused to sit with Dubois. “This day, sir, will be famous in history,” said the Duke of Noailles to the new cardinal; “it will not fail to be remarked therein that your entrance into the council caused it to be deserted by the grandees of the kingdom.” Noailles was exiled, as well as d’Aguesseau.
The great lords had made a decided failure in government. Since 1718, the different councils had been abolished; defended by Abbe St. Pierre, under the grotesque title of Polysynodie, they had earned for the candid preacher of universal peace his exclusion from the French Academy, which was insisted upon by the remnants of the old court, whom he had mortally offended by styling Louis XIV.‘s governmental system a viziership. The Regent had heaped favors upon the presidents and members of the councils, but he had placed Dubois at the head of foreign affairs and Le Blanc over the war department. “I do not inquire into the theory of councils,” said the able Dubois to the Regent by the mouth of his confidant Chavigny; “it was, as you know, the object of worship to the shallow pates of the old court. Humiliated by their nonentity at the end of the last reign, they begot this system upon the reveries of M. de Cambrai. But I think of you, I think of your interests. The king will reach, his majority, the grandees of the kingdom approach the monarque by virtue of their birth; if to this privilege they unite that of being then at the head of affairs, there is reason to fear that they may surpass you in complaisance, in flattery, may represent you as a useless phantom, and establish themselves upon the ruin of you. Suppress, then, these councils, if you mean to continue indispensable, and haste to supersede the great lords, who would become your rivals, by means of simple secretaries of state, who, without standing or family, will perforce remain your creatures.”
The Duke of Antin, son of Madame de Montespan, one of the most adroit courtiers of the old as well as of the new court, “honorless and passionless” (sans honneur et sans humeur), according to the Regent’s own saying, took a severer view than Dubois of the arrangement to which he had contributed. “The councils are dissolved,” he wrote in his memoirs; “the nobility will never recover from it—to my great regret, I must confess. The kings who hereafter reign will see that Louis XIV., one of the greatest kings in the world, never would employ people of rank in any of his business; that the Regent, a most enlightened prince, had begun by putting them at the head of all affairs, and was obliged to remove them at the end of three years. What can they and must they conclude therefrom? That people of this condition are not fitted for business, and that they are good for nothing but to get killed in war. I hope I am wrong, but there is every appearance that the masters will think like that, and there will not be wanting folks who will confirm them in that opinion.” A harsh criticism on the French nobility, too long absorbed by war or the court, living apart from the nation and from affairs, and thereby become incapable of governing, put down once for all by the iron hand of Richelieu, without ever having been able to resume at the head of the country the rank and position which befitted them.
The special councils were dissolved, the council of regency diminished; Dubois became premier minister in name—he had long been so in fact.
He had just concluded an important matter, one which the Regent had much at heart—the marriage of the king with the Infanta of Spain, and that of Mdlle. de Montpensier, daughter of the Duke of Orleans, with the Prince of the Asturias. The Duke of St. Simon was intrusted with the official demand. Philip V. was rejoiced to see his daughter’s elevation to that throne which he still regarded as the first in the world; he purchased it by the concession made to the Regent.
The age of the Infanta was a serious obstacle; she was but three years old, the king was twelve. When the Duke of Orleans went in state to announce to Louis XV. the negotiation which tarried for nothing further but his consent, the young prince, taken by surprise, was tongue-tied, seemed to have his heart quite full, and his eyes grew moist. His preceptor, Fleury, Bishop of Frejus, who had just refused the Archbishopric of Rheims, seeing that he must make up his mind to please the Regent or estrange him, supported what had just been said. “Marshal Villeroy, decided by the bishop’s example, said to the king, ‘Come, my dear master; the thing must be done with a good grace.’ The Regent, very much embarrassed, the duke, mighty taciturn, and Dubois, with an air of composure, waited for the king to break a silence which lasted a quarter of an hour, whilst the bishop never ceased whispering to the king. As the silence continued, and the assembly of all the council, at which the king was about to appear, could not but augment his timidity, the bishop turned to the Regent, and said to him, ‘His Majesty will go to the council, but he wants a little time to prepare himself for it.’ Thereupon the Regent replied, that he was created to await the convenience of the king, saluted him with an air of respect and affection, went out and made signs to the rest to follow him. A quarter of an hour later the king entered the council, with his eyes still red, and replied, with a very short and rather low yes, to the Regent’s question, whether he thought proper that the news of his marriage should be imparted to the council.” “It was the assurance of peace with Spain, and the confirmation of the recent treaties; the Regent’s enemies saw in it the climax of the policy, by the choice of an infant, which retarded the king’s marriage.” [Memoires secrets de Dubois, t. ii. p. 163.]
Accusations of greater gravity had been recently renewed against the Duke of Orleans. The king had been ill; for just a moment the danger had appeared serious; the emotion in France was general, the cabal opposed to the Regent went beyond mere anxiety. “The consternation everywhere was great,” says St. Simon; “I had the privileges of entry, and so I went into the king’s chamber. I found it very empty; the Duke of Orleans seated at the chimney-corner, very forlorn and very sad. I went up to him for a moment, then I approached the king’s bed. At that moment, Boulduc, one of his apothecaries, was giving him something to take. The Duchess of la Ferte was at Boulduc’s elbow, and, having turned round to see who was coming, she saw me, and all at once said to me, betwixt loud and soft, ‘He is poisoned, he is poisoned.’ ‘Hold your tongue, do,’ said I; ‘that is awful!’ She went on again, so much and so loud, that I was afraid the king would hear her. Boulduc and I looked at one another, and I immediately withdrew from the bed and from that madwoman, with whom I was on no sort of terms. The illness was not a long one, and the convalescence was speedy, which restored tranquillity and joy, and caused an outburst of Te Deums and rejoicings. On St. Louis’ day, at the concert held every year on that evening at the Tuileries, the crowd was so dense that a pin would not have fallen to the ground in the garden. The windows of the Tuileries were decorated and crammed full, and all the roofs of the Carrousel filled with all that could hold on there, as well as the square. Marshal Villeroy revelled in this concourse, which bored the king, who kept hiding himself every moment in the corners; the marshal pulled him out by the arm and led him up to the windows. Everybody shouted ‘Hurrah! for the king!’ and the marshal, detaining the king, who would still have gone and hidden himself, said, ‘Pray look, my dear master, at all this company, all this people; it is all yours, it all belongs to you; you are their master; pray give them a look or two just to satisfy them!’ A fine lesson for a governor, and one which he did not tire of impressing upon him, so fearful was he lest he should forget it; accordingly he retained it very perfectly.”
The Duke of Beauvilliers and Fenelon taught the Duke of Burgundy differently; the Duke of Montausier and Bossuet himself, in spite of the majestic errors of his political conceptions, had not forgotten in the education of the grand-dauphin the lesson of kings’ duties towards their peoples.
Already, over the very infancy of Louis XV. was passing the breath of decay; little by little that people, as yet so attached to their young sovereign, was about to lose all respect and submission towards its masters; a trait long characteristic of the French nation.
The king’s majority was approaching, the Regent’s power seemed on the point of slipping from him; Marshal Villeroy, aged, witless, and tactless, irritated at the elevation of Dubois, always suspicious of the Regent’s intentions towards the young king, burst out violently against the minister, and displayed towards the Regent an offensive distrust. “One morning,” says Duclos, “when the latter came to give an account to the king of the nomination to certain benefices, he begged his Majesty to be pleased to walk into his closet, where he had a word to say to him in private. The governor objected, saying that he knew the duties of his place, that the king could have no secrets from his governor, protested that he would not lose sight of him for an instant, and that he was bound to answer for his person. The Regent, then taking a tone of superiority, said to the marshal, ‘You forget yourself, sir; you do not see the force of your expressions; it is only the king’s presence that restrains me from treating you as you deserve.’ Having so said, he made a profound bow to the king and went out. The disconcerted marshal followed the Regent to the door, and would have entered upon a justification; all his talk all day long was a mixture of the Roman’s haughtiness and the courtier’s meanness.” [Memoires de St. Simon.]
“Next day, at noon, Marshal Villeroy repaired to the Duke of Orleans’ to excuse himself, fancying he might attempt an explanation as equal with equal. He crosses with his grand airs, in the midst of the whole court, the rooms which preceded the prince’s closet; the crowd opens and makes way for him respectfully. He asks, in a loud tone, where the Duke of Orleans is; the answer is that he is busy. ‘I must see him, nevertheless,’ says he; ‘announce me!’ The moment he advances towards the door, the Marquis of La Fare, captain of the Regent’s guards, shows himself between the door and the marshal, arrests him, and demands his sword. Le Blanc hands him the order from the king, and at the same instant Count d’Artagnan, commandant of the musketeers, blocks him on the opposite side to La Fare. The marshal shouts, remonstrates; he is pitched into a chair, shut up in it, and passed out by one of the windows which opens door-wise on to the garden; at the bottom of the steps of the orangery behold a carriage with six horses, surrounded by twenty musketeers. The marshal, furious, storms, threatens; he is carried into the vehicle, the carriage starts, and in less than three hours the marshal is at Villeroi, eight or nine leagues from Versailles.” The king wept a moment or two without saying a word; he was consoled by the return of the Bishop of Frejus, with whom it was supposed to be all over, but who was simply at Baville, at President Lamoignon’s; his pupil was as much attached to him as he was capable of being; Fleury remained alone with him, and Marshal Villeroy was escorted to Lyons, of which he was governor. He received warning not to leave it, and was not even present at the king’s coronation, which took place at Rheims, on the 25th of October, 1722. Amidst the royal pomp and festivities, a significant formality was for the first time neglected; that was, admitting into the nave of the church the people, burgesses and artisans, who were wont to join their voices to those of the clergy and nobility when, before the anointment of the king, demand was made in a loud voice for the consent of the assembly, representing the nation. Even in external ceremonies, the kingship was becoming every day more and more severed from national sentiment and national movement.
The king’s majority, declared on the 19th of February, 1723, had made no change in the course of the government; the young prince had left Paris, and resumed possession of that Palace of Versailles, still full of mementoes of the great king. The Regent, more and more absorbed by his pleasures, passed a great deal of time at Paris; Dubois had the government to himself.
His reign was not long at this unparalleled pinnacle of his greatness; he had been summoned to preside at the assembly of the clergy, and had just been elected to the French Academy, where he was received by Fontenelle, when a sore, from which he had long suffered, reached all at once a serious crisis; an operation was indispensable, but he set himself obstinately against it; the Duke of Orleans obliged him to submit to it, and it was his death-blow; the wretched cardinal expired, without having had time to receive the sacraments.
The elevation and power of Dubois had the fatal effect of lowering France in her own eyes; she had felt that she was governed by a man whom she despised, and had a right to despise; this was a deep-seated and lasting evil; authority never recovered from the blow thus struck at its moral influence. Dubois, however, was more able and more farsighted in his foreign policy than the majority of his predecessors and his contemporaries were; without definitively losing the alliance of Spain, re-attached to the interests of France by the double treaty of marriage, he had managed to form a firm connection with England, and to rally round France the European coalition but lately in arms against her. He maintained and made peace ingloriously; he obtained it sometimes by meannesses in bearing and modes of acting; he enriched himself by his intrigues, abroad as well as at home; his policy none the less was steadfastly French, even in his relations with the court of Rome, and in spite of his eager desire for the cardinal’s hat. He died sadly, shamefully, without a friend and without regret, even on the part of the Regent, whom he had governed and kept in hand by active and adroit assiduity, by a hardihood and an effrontery to the influence of which that prince submitted, all the while despising it. Dubois had raised up again, to place himself upon it, that throne of premier minister on which none had found a seat since Richelieu and Mazarin; the Duke of Orleans succeeded him without fuss, without parade, without even appearing to have any idea of the humiliation inflicted upon him by that valet, lying in his coffin, whom he had raised to power, and whose place he was about to fill for a few days.
On the 2d of December, 1723, three months and a half after the death of Dubois, the Duke of Orleans succumbed in his turn. Struck down by a sudden attack of apoplexy, whilst he was chatting with his favorite for the time, the Duchess of Falarie, he expired without having recovered consciousness. Lethargized by the excesses of the table and debauchery of all kinds, more and more incapable of application and work, the prince did not preserve sufficient energy to give up the sort of life which had ruined him. For a long while the physicians had been threatening him with sudden death. “It is all I can desire,” said he. Naturally brave, intelligent, amiable, endowed with a charm of manner which recalled Henry IV., kind and merciful like him, of a mind that was inquiring, fertile, capable of applying itself to details of affairs, Philip of Orleans was dragged down by depravity of morals to the same in soul and mind; his judgment, naturally straightforward and correct, could still discern between good and evil, but he was incapable of energetically willing the one and firmly resisting the other; he had governed equitably, without violence and without harshness, he had attempted new and daring courses, and he had managed to abandon them without any excesses or severities; like Dubois, he had inspired France with a contempt which unfortunately did not protect her from contagion. When Madame died, an inscription had been put on the tomb of that honest, rude, and haughty German: “Here lies Lazybones” (Ci-git l’oisivete). All the vices thus imputed to the Regent did not perish with him, when he succumbed at forty-nine years of age under their fatal effects. “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones;” the Regency was the signal for an irregularity of morals which went on increasing, like a filthy river, up to the end of the reign of Louis XV.; the fatal seed had been germinating for a long time past under the forced and frequently hypocritical decency of the old court; it burst out under the easy-going regency of an indolent and indulgent prince, himself wholly given to the licentiousness which he excused and authorized by his own example. From the court the evil soon spread to the nation; religious faith still struggled within the soul, but it had for a long while been tossed about between contrary and violent opinions; it found itself disturbed, attacked, by the new and daring ideas which were beginning to dawn in politics as well as in philosophy. The break-up was already becoming manifest, though nobody could account for it, though no fixed plan was conceived in men’s minds. People devoured the memoirs of Cardinal Retz and Madame de Motteville, which had just appeared; people formed from them their judgments upon the great persons and great events which they had seen and depicted. The University of Paris, under the direction of Rollin, was developing the intelligence and lively powers of burgessdom; and Montesquieu, as yet full young, was shooting his missiles in the Lettres persanes at the men and the things of his country with an almost cynical freedom, which was, as it were, the alarum and prelude of all the liberties which he scarcely dared to claim, but of which he already let a glimpse be seen. Evil and good were growing up in confusion, like the tares and the wheat. For more than eighty years past France has been gathering the harvest of ages; she has not yet separated the good grain from the rubbish which too often conceals it.
CHAPTER LII.
LOUIS XV., THE MINISTRY OF CARDINAL FLEURY.,
1723-1748.
The riotous and frivolous splendor of the Regency had suffered eclipse; before their time, in all their vigor, through disgrace or by death, Law, Dubois, and the Regent, had suddenly disappeared from the stage of the world. To these men, a striking group for different reasons, notwithstanding their faults and their vices, was about to succeed a discreet but dull and limp government, the reign of an old man, and, moreover, a priest. The Bishop of Frejus, who had but lately been the modest preceptor of the king, and was quietly ambitious and greedy of power, but without regard to his personal interests, was about to become Cardinal Fleury, and to govern France for twenty years; in 1723 he was seventy years old.
Whether from adroitness or prudence, Fleury did not all at once aspire to all-powerfulness. Assured in his heart of his sway over the as yet dormant will of his pupil, he suffered the establishment of the Duke of Bourbon’s ministry, who was in a greater hurry to grasp the power he had so long coveted. When the king received his cousin, head of the house of Conde, who had but lately taken the place of the Duke of Maine near his person, he sought in his preceptor’s eyes the guidance he needed, and contented himself with sanctioning by an inclination of the head the elevation of the duke, presented by Fleury. The new Duke of Orleans, as yet quite a youth, hovering between debauchery and devotion, obtained no portion of his father’s heritage; he had taken away from him even the right of doing business with the king, a right secured to him by his office of colonel-general.
The Bishop of Frejus had nursed his power more skilfully; he kept the list of benefices, and he alone, it was said, knew how to unloosen the king’s tongue; but he had not calculated upon the pernicious and all-powerful influence of the Marchioness of Prie, favorite “by appointment” (attitree) to the duke. Clever, adroit, depraved, she aspired to govern, and chose for her minister Paris-Duverney, one of the four Dauphinese brothers who had been engaged under the regency in the business of the visa, and the enemies as well as rivals of the Scotsman Law. Whilst the king hunted, and Fleury exercised quietly the measure of power which as yet contented his desires, the duke, blinded by his passion for Madame de Prie, slavishly submissive to her slightest wishes, lavished, according to his favorite’s orders, honors and graces in which she managed to traffic, enriching herself brazen-facedly. Under Louis XIV. Madame de Maintenon alone, exalted to the rank of wife, had taken part in state affairs; amidst the irregularity of his life the Regent had never accorded women any political influence, and the confusion of the orgie had never surprised from his lips a single important secret; Madame de Prie was the first to become possessed of a power destined to frequently fall, after her, into hands as depraved as they were feeble.
The strictness of the views and of the character of Paris-Duverney strove, nevertheless, in the home department, against the insensate lavishness of the duke, and the venal irregularities of his favorite; imbued with the maxims of order and regularity formerly impressed by Colbert upon the clerks of the treasury, and not yet completely effaced by a long interregnum, he labored zealously to cut down expenses and useless posts, to resuscitate and regulate commerce; his ardor, systematic and wise as it was, hurried him sometimes into strange violence and improvidence; in order to restore to their proper figure values and goods which still felt the prodigious rise brought about by the System, Paris-Duverney depreciated the coinage and put, a tariff on merchandise as well as wages. The commotion amongst the people was great; the workmen rioted, the tradesmen refused to accept the legal figure for their goods; several men were killed in the streets, and some shops put the shutters up. The misery, which the administration had meant to relieve, went on increasing; begging was prohibited; refuges and workshops were annexed to the poorhouses; attempts were made to collect there all the old, infirm, and vagabond. The rigor of procedure, as well as the insufficiency of resources, caused the failure of the philanthropic project. Lightly conceived, imprudently carried out, the new law filled the refuges with an immense crowd, taken up in all quarters, in the villages, and on the high roads; the area of the relieving-houses became insufficient. “Bedded on straw, and fed on bread and water as they ought to be,” wrote the comptroller-general Dodun, “they will take up less room and be less expense.” Everywhere the poor wretches sought to fly; they were branded on the arm, like criminals. All this rigor was ineffectual; the useful object of Paris-Duverney’s decrees was not attained.
Other outrages, not to be justified by any public advantage, were being at the same time committed against other poor creatures, for a long while accustomed to severities of all kinds. Without freedom, without right of worship, without assemblies, the Protestants had, nevertheless, enjoyed a sort of truce from their woes during the easy-going regency of the Duke of Orleans. Amongst the number of his vices Dubois did not include hypocrisy; he had not persecuted the remnants of French Protestantism, enfeebled, dumb, but still living and breathing. The religious enthusiasm of the Camisards had become little by little extinguished; their prophets and inspired ones, who were but lately the only ministers of the religion in the midst of a people forcibly deprived of its pastors, had given place to new servants of God, regularly consecrated to His work and ready to brave for His sake all punishments. The Church under the Cross, as the Protestants of France then called themselves, was reviving slowly, secretly, in the desert, but it was reviving. The scattered members of the flocks, habituated for so many years past to carefully conceal their faith in order to preserve it intact in their hearts, were beginning to draw near to one another once more; discipline and rule were once more entering within that church, which had been battered by so many storms, and the total destruction of which had been loudly proclaimed. In its origin, this immense work, as yet silently and modestly progressing, had been owing to one single man, Antony Court, born, in 1696, of a poor family, at Villeneuve-de-Berg in the Vivarais. He was still almost a child when he had perceived the awakening in his soul of an ardent desire to rebuild the walls of holy Sion; without classical education, nurtured only upon his reading of the Bible, guided by strong common sense and intrepid courage, combined with a piety as sincere as it was enlightened, he had summoned to him the preachers of the Uvennes, heirs of the enthusiastic Camisards. From the depths of caverns, rocks, and woods had come forth these rude ministers, fanatics or visionaries as they may have been, eagerly devoted to their work and imbued with their pious illusions; Court had persuaded, touched, convinced them; some of the faithful had gathered around him, and, since the 11th of August, 1715, at the first of those synods in the desert, unknown to the great king whose life was ebbing away at Versailles, the Protestant church of France had been reconstituting itself upon bases as sound as they were strong; the functions of the ancients were everywhere re-established; women were forbidden to hold forth at assemblies; the Holy Scriptures were proclaimed as the only law of faith; pastoral ordination was required of preachers and ministers of the religion; Corteis, a friend of Court’s, went to Switzerland to receive from the pastors of Zurich the imposition of hands, which he transmitted afterwards to his brethren. Everywhere the new Evangelical ministry was being recruited. “I seek them in all places,” said Court, “at the plough, or behind the counter, everywhere where I find the call for martyrdom.” Of the six devoted men who signed the statutes of the first synod, four were destined to a martyr’s death. The restorer of French Protestantism had made no mistake about the call then required for the holy ministry. The synods of the desert became every year more numerous; deputies from the North, from the West, from the Centre, began to join those of the South. Persecution continued, but it was local, more often prompted by the fanatical zeal of the superintendents than by the sovereign impulse of government; the pastors died without having to sorrow for the church, up-risen from its ruins, when a vague echo of this revival came striking upon the ears of the Duke and Madame de Prie, amidst the galas of Chantilly. Their silence and their exhaustion had for some time protected the Protestants; fanaticism and indifference made common cause once more to crush them at their reawakening.
The storm had now been brewing for some years; the Bishop of Nantes, Lavergne de Tressan, grand almoner to the Regent, had attempted some time before to wrest from him a rigorous decree against the Protestants; the Duke of Orleans, as well as Dubois, had rejected his overtures. Scarcely had the duke (of Bourbon) come into power, when the prelate presented his project anew; indifferent and debauched, a holder of seventy-six benefices, M. de Tressan dreamed of the cardinal’s hat, and aspired to obtain it from the Court of Rome at the cost of a persecution. The government was at that time drifting about, without compass or steersman, from the hands of Madame de Prie to those of Paris-Duverney. Little cared they for the fate of the Reformers. “This castaway of the regency,” says M. Lemontey, “was adopted without memorial, without examination, as an act of homage to the late king, and a simple executive formula. The ministers of Louis XVI. afterwards found the minute of the declaration of 1724, without any preliminary report, and simply bearing on the margin the date of the old edicts.” For aiming the thunderbolts against the Protestants, Tressan addressed himself to their most terrible executioner. Lamoignon de Baville was still alive; old and almost at death’s door as he was, he devoted the last days of his life to drawing up for the superintendents some private instructions; an able and a cruel monument of his past experience and his persistent animosity. He died with the pen still in his hand.
The new edict turned into an act of homage to Louis XIV. the rigors of Louis XV. “Of all the grand designs of our most honored lord and great-grandfather, there is none that we have more at heart to execute than that which he conceived, of entirely extinguishing heresy in his kingdom. Arrived at majority, our first care has been to have before us the edicts whereof execution has been delayed, especially in the provinces afflicted with the contagion. We have observed that the chief abuses which demand a speedy remedy relate to illicit assemblies, the education of children, the obligation of public functionaries to profess the Catholic religion, the penalties against the relapsed, and the celebration of marriage, regarding which here are our intentions: Shall be condemned: preachers to the penalty of death, their accomplices to the galleys for life, and women to be shaved and imprisoned for life. Confiscation of property: parents who shall not have baptism administered to their children within twenty-four hours, and see that they attend regularly the catechism and the schools, to fines and such sums as they may amount to together; even to greater penalties. Midwives, physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, domestics, relatives, who shall not notify the parish priests of births or illnesses, to fines. Persons who shall exhort the sick, to the galleys or imprisonment for life, according to sex; confiscation of property. The sick who shall refuse the sacraments, if they recover, to banishment for life; if they die, to be dragged on a hurdle. Desert-marriages are illegal; the children born of them are incompetent to inherit. Minors whose parents are expatriated may marry without their authority; but parents whose children are on foreign soil shall not consent to their marriage, on pain of the galleys for the men and banishment for the women. Finally, of all fines and confiscations, half shall be employed in providing subsistence for the new converts.”
Just as the last edicts of Louis XIV., the edict of 1724 rested upon an absolute contradiction: the legislators no longer admitted the existence of any reformers in the kingdom; and yet all the battery of the most formidable punishments was directed against that Protestant church which was said to be defunct. The same contradiction was seen in the conduct of the ecclesiastics: Protestants could not be admitted to any position, or even accomplish the ordinary duties of civil life, without externally conforming to Catholicism; and, to so conform, there was required of them not only an explicit abjuration, but even an anathema against their deceased parents. “It is necessary,” said Chancellor d’Aguesseau, “either that the church should relax her vigor by some modification, or, if she does not think she ought to do so, that she should cease requesting the king to employ his authority in reducing his subjects to the impossible, by commanding them to fulfil a religious duty which the church does not permit them to perform.”
At this point is revealed a progress in ideas of humanity and justice: the edict of 1724 equalled in rigor the most severe proclamations of Louis XIV.; it placed the peace, and often the life, of Reformers at the mercy not only of an enemy’s denunciation, but of a priest’s simple deposition; it destroyed all the bonds of family, and substituted for the natural duties a barbarous and depraving law; but general sentiment and public opinion were no longer in accord with the royal proclamations. The clergy had not solicited the edict, the work of an ambitious man backed up by certain fanatics; they were at first embarrassed by it. When the old hatreds revived, and the dangerous intoxications of power had affected the souls of bishops and priests, the magistracy, who had formerly been more severe towards the Reformers than even the superintendents of the provinces had been, pronounced on many points in favor of the persecuted; the judges were timid; the legislation, becoming more and more oppressive, tied their hands; but the bias of their minds was modified; it tended to extenuate, and not to aggravate, the effects of the edict. The law was barbarous everywhere, the persecution became so only at certain spots, owing to the zeal of the superintendents or bishops; as usual, the south of France was the first to undergo all the rigors of it. Emigration had ceased there for a long time past; whilst the Norman or Dauphinese Reformers, on the revival of persecution, still sought refuge on foreign soil, whilst Sweden, wasted by the wars of Charles XII., invited the French Protestants into her midst, the peasants of the Uvennes or of the Vivarais, passionately attached to the soil they cultivated, bowed their heads, with a groan, to the storm, took refuge in their rocks and their caverns, leaving the cottages deserted and the harvests to be lost, returning to their houses and their fields as soon as the soldiery were gone, ever faithful to the proscribed assemblies in the desert, and praying God for the king, to whose enemies they refused to give ear. Alberoni, and after him England, had sought to detach the persecuted Protestants from their allegiance; the court was troubled at this; they had not forgotten the Huguenot regiments at the battle of the Boyne. From the depths of their hiding-places the pastors answered for the fidelity of their flocks; the voice of the illustrious and learned Basnage, for a long while a refugee in Holland, encouraged his brethren in their heroic submission. As fast as the ministers died on the gallows, new servants of God came forward to replace them, brought up in the seminary which Antony Court had founded at Lausanne, and managed to keep up by means of alms from Protestant Europe. It was there that the most illustrious of the pastors of the desert, Paul Rabaut, already married and father of one child, went to seek the instruction necessary for the apostolic vocation which he was to exercise for so many years in the midst of so many and such formidable perils. “On determining to exercise the ministry in this kingdom,” he wrote, in 1746, to the superintendent of Languedoc, Lenain d’Asfeldt, “I was not ignorant of what I exposed myself to; so I regarded myself as a victim doomed to death. I thought I was doing the greatest good of which I was capable in devoting myself to the condition of a pastor. Protestants, being deprived of the free exercise of their own religion, not seeing their way to taking part in the exercises of the Roman religion, not being able to get the books they would require for their instruction, consider, my lord, what—might be their condition if they were absolutely deprived of pastors. They would be ignorant of their most essential duties, and would fall either into fanaticism, the fruitful source of extravagances and irregularities, or into indifference and contempt for all religion.” The firm moderation, the courageous and simple devotion, breathed by this letter, were the distinctive traits of the career of Paul Rabaut, as well as of Antony Court; throughout a persecution which lasted nearly forty years, with alternations of severity and clemency, the chiefs of French Protestantism managed to control the often recurring desperation of their flocks. On the occasion of a temporary rising on the borders of the Gardon, Paul Rabaut wrote to the governor of Languedoc, “When I desired to know whence this evil proceeded, it was reported to me that divers persons, finding themselves liable to lose their goods and their liberty, or to have to do acts contrary to their conscience, in respect of their marriages or the baptism of their children, and knowing no way of getting out of the kingdom and setting their conscience free, abandoned themselves to despair, and attacked certain priests, because they regarded them as the primal and principal cause of the vexations done to them. Once more, I blame those people; but I thought it my duty to explain to you the cause of their despair. If it be thought that my ministry is necessary to calm the ruffled spirits, I shall comply with pleasure. Above all, if I might assure the Protestants of that district that they shall not be vexed in their conscience, I would pledge myself to bind over the greater number to stop those who would make a disturbance, supposing that there should be any.” At a word from Paul Rabaut calmness returned to the most ruffled spirits; sometimes his audience was composed of ten or twelve thousand of the faithful; his voice was so resonant and so distinct, that in the open air it would reach the most remote. He prayed with a fervor and an unction which penetrated all hearts, and disposed them to hear, with fruits following, the word of God. Simple, grave, penetrating rather than eloquent, his preaching, like his life, bears the impress of his character. As moderate as fervent, as judicious as heroic in spirit, Paul Rabaut preached in the desert, at the peril of his life, sermons which he had composed in a cavern. “During more than thirty years,” says one of his biographers, “he had no dwelling-place but grottoes, hovels, and cabins, whither men went to draw him like a ferocious beast. He lived a long while in a hiding-place, which one of his faithful guides had contrived for him under a heap of stones and blackberry bushes. It was discovered by a shepherd; and such was the wretchedness of his condition, that, when forced to abandon it, he regretted that asylum, more fitted for wild beasts than for men.”
The hulks were still full of the audience of Paul Rabaut, and Protestant women were still languishing in the unwholesome dungeon of the Tower of Constance, when the execution of the unhappy Calas, accused of having killed his son, and the generous indignation of Voltaire cast a momentary gleam of light within the sombre region of prisons and gibbets. For the first time, public opinion, at white heat, was brought to bear upon the decision of the persecutors. Calas was dead, but the decree of the Parliament of Toulouse which had sentenced him, was quashed by act of the council: his memory was cleared, and the day of toleration for French Protestants began to glimmer, pending the full dawn of justice and liberty.
We have gone over in succession, and without break, the last cruel sufferings of the French Protestants; we now turn away our eyes with a feeling of relief mingled with respect and pride; we leave the free air of the desert to return to the rakes and effeminates of Louis XV.‘s court. Great was the contrast between the government which persecuted without knowing why, and the victims who suffered for a faith incessantly revived in their souls by suffering. For two centuries the French Reformation had not experienced for a single day the formidable dangers of indifference and lukewarmness.
The young king was growing up, still a stranger to affairs, solely occupied with the pleasures of the chase, handsome, elegant, with noble and regular features, a cold and listless expression. In the month of February, 1725, he fell ill; for two days there was great danger. The duke thought himself to be threatened with the elevation of the house of Orleans to the throne. “I’ll not be caught so again,” he muttered between his teeth, when he came one night to inquire how the king was, “if he recovers, I’ll have him married.” The king did recover, but the Infanta was only seven years old. Philip V., who had for a short time abdicated, retiring with the queen to a remote castle in the heart of the forests, had just remounted the throne after the death of his eldest son, Louis I. Small-pox had carried off the young monarch, who had reigned but eight months. Elizabeth Farnese, aided by the pope’s nuncio and some monks who were devoted to her, had triumphed over her husband’s religious scruples and the superstitious counsels of his confessor; she was once more reigning over Spain, when she heard that the little Infanta-queen, whose betrothal to the King of France had but lately caused so much joy, was about to be sent away from the court of her royal spouse. “The Infanta must be started off, and by coach too, to get it over sooner,” exclaimed Count Morville, who had been ordered by Madame de Prie to draw up a list of the marriageable princesses in Europe. Their number amounted to ninety-nine; twenty-five Catholics, three Anglicans, thirteen Calvinists, fifty-five Lutherans, and three Greeks. The Infanta had already started for Madrid; the Regent’s two daughters, the young widow of Louis I. and Mdlle. de Beaujolais, promised to Don Carlos, were on their way back to France; the advisers of Louis XV. were still looking out for a wife for him. Spain had been mortally offended, without the duke’s having yet seen his way to forming a new alliance in place of that which he had just broken off. Some attempts at arrangement with George I. had failed; an English princess could not abjure Protestantism. Such scruples did not stop Catherine I., widow of Peter the Great, who had taken the power into her own hands to the detriment of the czar’s grandson; she offered the duke her second daughter, the grand-duchess Elizabeth, for King Louis XV., with a promise of abjuration on the part of the princess, and of a treaty which should secure the support of all the Muscovite forces in the interest of France. At the same time the same negotiators proposed to the Duke of Bourbon himself the hand of Mary Leckzinska, daughter of Stanislaus, the dispossessed King of Poland, guaranteeing to him, on the death of King Augustus, the crown of that kingdom.
The proposals of Russia were rejected. “The Princess of Muscovy,” M. de Morville had lately said, “is the daughter of a low-born mother, and has been brought up amidst a still barbarous people.” Every great alliance appeared impossible; the duke and Madame de Prie were looking out for a queen who would belong to them, and would secure them the king’s heart. Their choice fell upon Mary Leckzinska, a good, gentle, simple creature, without wit or beauty, twenty-two years old, and living upon the alms of France with her parents, exiles and refugees at an old commandery of the Templars at Weissenburg. Before this King Stanislaus had conceived the idea of marrying his daughter to Count d’Estrees; the marriage had failed through the Regent’s refusal to make the young lord a duke and peer. The distress of Stanislaus, his constant begging letters to the court of France, were warrant for the modest submissiveness of the princess. “Madame de Prie has engaged a queen, as I might engage a valet to-morrow,” writes Marquis d’Argenson; “it is a pity.”
When the first overtures from the duke arrived at Weissenburg, King Stanislaus entered the room where his wife and daughter were at work, and, “Fall we on our knees, and thank God!” he said. “My dear father,” exclaimed the princess, “can you be recalled to the throne of Poland?” “God has done us a more astounding grace,” replied Stanislaus: “you are Queen of France!”
“Never shall I forget the horror of the calamities we were enduring in France, when Queen Mary Leckzinska arrived,” says M. d’Argenson. “A continuance of rain had caused famine, and it was much aggravated by the bad government under the duke. That government, whatever may be said of it, was even more hurtful through bad judgment than from interested views, which had not so much to do with it as was said. There were very costly measures taken to import foreign corn; but that only augmented the alarm, and, consequently, the dearness.
“Fancy the unparalleled misery of the country-places! It was just the time when everybody was thinking of harvests and ingatherings of all sorts of things, which it had not been possible to get in for the continual rains; the poor farmer was watching for a dry moment to get them in; meanwhile all the district was beaten with many a scourge. The peasants had been sent off to prepare the roads by which the queen was to pass, and they were only the worse for it, insomuch that Her Majesty was often within a thought of drowning; they pulled her from her carriage by the strong arm, as best they might. In several stopping-places she and her suite were swimming in water which spread everywhere, and that in spite of the unparalleled pains that had been taken by a tyrannical ministry.”
It was under such sad auspices that Mary Leckzinska arrived at Versailles. Fleury had made no objection to the marriage. Louis XV. accepted it, just as he had allowed the breaking-off of his union with the Infanta and that of France with Spain. For a while the duke had hopes of reaping all the fruit of the unequal marriage he had just concluded for the King of France. The queen was devoted to him; he enlisted her in an intrigue against Fleury. The king was engaged with his old preceptor; the queen sent for him; he did not return. Fleury waited a long while. The duke and Paris-Duverney had been found with the queen; they had papers before them; the king had set to work with them. When he went back, at length, to his closet, Louis XV. found the bishop no longer there; search was made for him; he was no longer in the palace.
The king was sorry and put out; the Duke of Mortemart, who was his gentleman of the bed-chamber, handed him a letter from Fleury. The latter had retired to Issy, to the countryhouse of the Sulpicians; he bade the king farewell, assuring him that he had for a long while been resolved, according to the usage of his youth, to put some space between the world and death. Louis began to shed tears; Mortemart proposed to go and fetch Fleury, and got the order given him to do so. The duke had to write the letter of recall. Next morning the bishop was at Versailles, gentle and modest as ever, and exhibiting neither resentment nor surprise. Six months later, however, the king set out from Versailles to go and visit the Count and Countess of Toulouse at Rambouillet. The duke was in attendance at his departure. “Do not make us wait supper, cousin,” said the young monarch, graciously. Scarcely had his equipages disappeared, when a letter was brought: the duke was ordered to quit the court and retire provisionally to Chantilly. Madame de Prie was exiled to her estates in Normandy, where she soon died of spite and anger. The head of the House of Conde came forth no more from the political obscurity which befitted his talents. At length Fleury remained sole master.
He took possession of it without fuss or any external manifestation; caring only for real authority, he advised Louis XV. not to create any premier minister, and to govern by himself, like his great-grandfather. The king took this advice, as every other, and left Fleury to govern. This was just what the bishop intended; a sleepy calm succeeded the commotions which had been caused by the inconsistent and spasmodic government of the duke; galas and silly expenses gave place to a wise economy, the real and important blessing of Fleury’s administration. Commerce and industry recovered confidence; business was developed; the increase of the revenues justified a diminution of taxation; war, which was imminent at the moment of the duke’s fall, seemed to be escaped; the Bishop of Frejus became Cardinal Fleury; the court of Rome paid on the nail for the service rendered it by the new minister in freeing the clergy from the tax of the fiftieth (impot du cinquantieme). “Consecrated to God, and kept aloof from the commerce of men,” had been Fleury’s expression, “the dues of the church are irrevocable, and cannot be subject to any tax, whether of ratification or any other.” The clergy responded to this pleasant exposition of principles by a gratuitous gift of five millions. Strife ceased in every quarter; France found herself at rest, without lustre as well as without prospect.
It was not, henceforth, at Versailles that the destinies of Europe were discussed and decided. The dismissal of the Infanta had struck a deadly blow at the frail edifice of the quadruple alliance, fruit of the intrigues and diplomatic ability of Cardinal Dubois. Philip V. and Elizabeth Farnese, deeply wounded by the affront put upon them, had hasted to give the Infanta to the Prince of Brazil, heir to the throne of Portugal, at the same time that the Prince of the Asturias espoused a daughter of John V. Under cover of this alliance, agreeable as it was to England, the faithful patron of Portugal, the King of Spain was negotiating elsewhere, with the Emperor Charles VI., the most ancient and hitherto the most implacable of his enemies. This prince had no son, and wished to secure the succession to his eldest daughter, the Arch-duchess Maria Theresa. The Pragmatic-Sanction which declared this wish awaited the assent of Europe; that of Spain was of great value; she offered, besides, to open her ports to the Ostend Company, lately established by the emperor to compete against the Dutch trade.
The house of Austria divided the house of Bourbon, by opposing to one another the two branches of France and Spain; the treaty of Vienna was concluded on the 1st of May, 1725. The two sovereigns renounced all pretensions to each other’s dominions respectively, and proclaimed, on both sides, full amnesty for the respective partisans. The emperor recognized the hereditary rights of Don Carlos to the duchies of Tuscany, Parma, and Piacenza; he, at the same time, promised his good offices with England to obtain restitution of Gibraltar and Mahon. In spite of the negotiations already commenced with the Duke of Lorraine, hopes were even held out to the two sons of Elizabeth Farnese, Don Carlos and Don Philip, of obtaining the hands of the arch-duchesses, daughters of the emperor.
When the official treaty was published and the secret articles began to transpire, Europe was in commotion at the new situation in which it was placed. George I. repaired to his German dominions, in order to have a closer view of the emperor’s movements. There the Count of Broglie soon joined him, in the name of France. The King of Prussia, Frederick William I., the King of England’s son-in-law, was summoned to Hanover. Passionate and fantastic, tyrannical, addicted to the coarsest excesses, the King of Prussia had, nevertheless, managed to form an excellent army of sixty thousand men, at the same time amassing a military treasure amounting to twenty-eight millions; he joined, not without hesitation, the treaty of Hanover, concluded on the 3d of September, 1725, between France and England. The Hollanders, in spite of their desire to ruin the Ostend Company, had not yet signed the convention; Frederick William was disturbed at their coming in. “Say, I declare against the emperor,” said he in a letter which he communicated on the 5th of December to the ambassadors of France and England: “he will not fail to get the Muscovites and Poles to act against me. I ask whether their majesties will then keep my rear open? England, completely surrounded by sea, and France, happening to be covered by strong places, consider themselves pretty safe, whilst the greater part of my dominions are exposed to anything it shall seem good to attempt. By this last treaty, then, I engage in war for the benefit of Mr. Hollander and Co., that they may be able to sell their tea, coffee, cheese, and crockery dearer; those gentlemen will not do the least thing for me, and I am to do everything for them. Gentlemen, tell me, is it fair? If you deprive the emperor of his ships and ruin his Ostend trade, will he be a less emperor than he is at this moment? The pink of all (le pot aux roses) is to deprive the emperor of provinces, but which? And to whose share will they fall? Where are the troops? Where is the needful, wherewith to make war? Since it seems good to commence the dance, it must of course be commenced. After war comes peace. Shall I be forgotten? Shall I be the last of all? Shall I have to sign perforce?” The coarse common sense of the Vandal soon prevailed over family alliances; Frederick William broke with France and England in order to rally to the emperor’s side. Russia, but lately so attentive to France, was making advances to Spain. “The czar’s envoy is the most taciturn Muscovite that ever came from Siberia,” wrote Marshal Tesse. “Goodman Don Miguel Guerra is the minister with whom he treats, and the effect of eight or ten apoplexies is, that he has to hold his head with his hands, else his mouth would infallibly twist round over his shoulder. During their audience they seat themselves opposite one another in arm-chairs, and, after a quarter of an hour’s silence, the Muscovite opens his mouth and says, ‘Sir, I have orders from the emperor, my master, to assure the Catholic King that he loves him very much.’ ‘And I,’ replies Guerra, ‘do assure you that the king my master loves your master the emperor very much.’ After this laconic conversation they stare at one another for a quarter of an hour without saying anything, and the audience is over.”
The tradition handed down by Peter the Great forbade any alliance with England; M. de Campredon, French ambassador at Petersburg, was seeking to destroy this prejudice. One of the empress’s ministers, Jokosinski, rushed abruptly from the conference; he was half drunk, and he ran to the church where the remains of the czar were lying. “O my dear master!” he cried before all the people, “rise from the tomb, and see how thy memory is trampled under foot!” Antipathy towards England, nevertheless, kept Catherine I. aloof from the Hanoverian league; she made alliance with the emperor. France was not long before she made overtures to Spain. Philip V. always found it painful to endure family dissensions; he became reconciled with his nephew, and accepted the intervention of Cardinal Fleury in his disagreements with England. The alliance, signed at Seville on the 29th of November, 1729, secured to Spain, in return for certain commercial advantages, the co-operation of England in Italy. The Duke of Parma had just died; the Infante Don Carlos, supported by an English fleet, took possession of his dominions. Elizabeth Farnese had at last set foot in Italy. She no longer encountered there the able and ambitious monarch whose diplomacy had for so long governed the affairs of the peninsula; Victor Amadeo had just abdicated. Scarcely a year had passed from the date of that resolution, when, suddenly, from fear, it was said, of seeing his father resume power, the young king, Charles Emmanuel, had him arrested in his castle of Pontarlier. “It will be a fine subject for a tragedy, this that is just now happening to Victor, King of Sardinia,” writes M. d’Argenson. “What a catastrophe without a death! A great king, who plagued Europe with his virtues and his vices, with his courage, his artifices, and his perfidies, who had formed round him a court of slaves, who had rendered his dominion formidable by his industry and his labors; indefatigable in his designs, unresting in every branch of government, cherishing none but great projects, credited in every matter with greater designs than he had yet been known to execute, —this king abdicates unexpectedly, and, almost immediately, here he finds himself arrested by his son, whose benefactor he had been so recently and so extraordinarily! This son is a young prince without merit, without courage, and without capacity, gentle and under control. His ministers persuaded him to be ungrateful: he accomplishes the height of crime, without having crime in his nature; and here is his father shut up like a bear in a prison, guarded at sight like a maniac, and separated from the wife whom he had chosen for consolation in his retirement!” Public indignation, however, soon forced the hand of Charles Emmanuel’s minister. Victor Amadeo was released; his wife, detained in shameful captivity, was restored to him; he died soon afterwards in that same castle of Pontarlier, whence he had been carried off without a voice being raised in his favor by the princes who were bound to him by the closest ties of blood.
The efforts made in common by Fleury and Robert Walpole, prime minister of the King of England, had for a long while been successful in maintaining the general peace; the unforeseen death of Augustus of Saxony, King of Poland, suddenly came to trouble it. It was, thenceforth, the unhappy fate of Poland to be a constant source of commotion and discord in Europe. The Elector of Saxony, son of Augustus H., was supported by Austria and Russia; the national party in Poland invited Stanislaus Leckzinski; he was elected at the Diet by sixty thousand men of family, and set out to take possession of the throne, reckoning upon the promises of his son-in-law, and on the military spirit which was reviving in France. The young men burned to win their spurs; the old generals of Louis XIV. were tired of idleness.
The ardor of Cardinal Fleury did not respond to that of the friends of King Stanislaus. Russia and Austria made an imposing display of force in favor of the Elector of Saxony; France sent, tardily, a body of fifteen hundred men; this ridiculous re-enforcement had not yet arrived when Stanislaus, obliged to withdraw from Warsaw, had already shut himself up in Dantzic. The Austrian general had invested the place.
News of the bombardment of Dantzic greeted the little French corps as they approached the fort of Wechselmunde. Their commander saw his impotence; instead of landing his troops, he made sail for Copenhagen. The French ambassador at that court, Count Plelo, was indignant to see his countrymen’s retreat, and, hastily collecting a hundred volunteers, he summoned to him the chiefs of the expeditionary corps.
“How could you resolve upon not fighting, at any price?” he asked. “It is easy to say,” rejoined one of the officers roughly, “when you’re safe in your closet.” “I shall not be there long!” exclaims the count, and presses them to return with him to Dantzic. The officer in command of the detachment, M. de la Peyrouse Lamotte, yields to his entreaties. They set out both of them, persuaded at the same time of the uselessness of their enterprise and of the necessity they were under, for the honor of France, to attempt it. Before embarking, Count Plelo wrote to M. de Chauvelin, the then keeper of the seals, “I am sure not to return; I commend to you my wife and children.” Scarcely had the gallant little band touched land beneath the fort of Wechselmunde, when they marched up to the Russian lines, opening a way through the pikes and muskets in hopes of joining the besieged, who at the same time effected a sally. Already the enemy began to recoil at sight of such audacity, when M. de Plelo fell mortally wounded; the enemy’s battalions had hemmed in the French.
La Peyrouse succeeded, however, in effecting his retreat, and brought away his little band into the camp they had established under shelter of the fort. For a month the French kept up a rivalry in courage with the defenders of Dantzic; when at last they capitulated, on the 23d of June, General Munich had conceived such esteem for their courage that be granted them leave to embark with arms and baggage. A few days later King Stanislaus escaped alone from Dantzic, which was at length obliged to surrender on the 7th of July, and sought refuge in the dominions of the King of Prussia. Some Polish lords went and joined him at Konigsberg. Partisan war continued still, but the arms and influence of Austria and Russia had carried the day; the national party was beaten in Poland. The pope released the Polish gentry from the oath they had made never to intrust the crown to a foreigner. Augustus III., recognized by the mass of the nation, became the docile tool of Russia, whilst in Germany and in Italy the Austrians found themselves attacked simultaneously by France, Spain, and Sardinia.
Marshal Berwick had taken the fort of Kehl in the month of December, 1733; he had forced the lines of the Austrians at Erlingen at the commencement of the campaign of 1734, and he had just opened trenches against Philipsburg, when he pushed forward imprudently in a reconnaissance between the fires of the besiegers and besieged; a ball wounded him mortally, and he expired immediately, like Marshal Turenne; he was sixty-three. The Duke of Noailles, who at once received the marshal’s baton, succeeded him in the command of the army by agreement with Marshal d’Asfeldt. Philipsburg was taken after forty-eight days’ open trenches, without Prince Eugene, all the while within hail, making any attempt to relieve the town. He had not approved of the war. “Of three emperors that I have served,” he would say, “the first, Leopold, was my father; the Emperor Joseph was my brother; this one is my master.” Eugene was old and worn out; he preserved his ability, but his ardor was gone. Marshal Noailles and D’Asfeldt did not agree; France did not reap her advantages. The campaign of 1735 hung fire in Germany.
It was not more splendid in Italy, where the outset of the war had been brilliant. Presumptuous as ever, in spite of his eighty-two years, Villars had started for Italy, saying to Cardinal Fleury, “The king may dispose of Italy, I am going to conquer it for him.” And, indeed, within three months, nearly the whole of Milaness was reduced. Cremona and Pizzighitone had surrendered; but already King Charles Emmanuel was relaxing his efforts with the prudent selfishness customary with his house. The Sardinian contingents did not arrive; the Austrians had seized a passage over the Po; Villars, however, was preparing to force it, when a large body of the enemy came down upon him. The King of Sardinia was urged to retire. “That is not the way to get out of this,” cried the marshal, and, sword in hand, he charged at the head of the body-guard; Charles Emmanuel followed his example; the Austrians were driven in. “Sir,” said Villars to the king, who was complimenting him, “these are the last sparks of my life; thus, at departing, I take my leave of it.”
Death, in fact, had already seized his prey; the aged marshal had not time to return to France to yield up his last breath there; he was expiring at Turin, when he heard of Marshal Berwick’s death before Philipsburg. “That fellow always was lucky,” said he. On the 17th of June, 1734, Villars died, in his turn, by a strange coincidence in the very room in which he had been born when his father was French ambassador at the court of the Duke of Savoy.
Some days later Marshals Broglie and Coigny defeated the Austrians before Parma; the general-in-chief, M. de Mercy, had been killed on the 19th of September; the Prince of Wurtemberg, in his turn, succumbed at the battle of Guastalla, and yet these successes on the part of the French produced no serious result. The Spaniards had become masters of the kingdom of Naples and of nearly all Sicily; the Austrians had fallen back on the Tyrol, keeping a garrison at Mantua only. The Duke of Noailles, then at the head of the army, was preparing for the siege of the place, in order to achieve that deliverance of Italy which was as early as then the dream of France, but the King of Sardinia and the Queen of Spain were already disputing for Mantua; the Sardinian troops withdrew, and it was in the midst of his forced inactivity that the Duke of Noailles heard of the armistice signed in Germany. Cardinal Fleury, weary of the war which he had entered upon with regret, disquieted too at the new complications which he foresaw in Europe, had already commenced negotiations; the preliminaries were signed at Vienna in the month of October, 1735.
The conditions of the treaty astonished Europe. Cardinal Fleury had renounced the ambitious idea suggested to him by Chauvelin; he no longer aspired to impose upon the emperor the complete emancipation of Italy, but he made such disposition as he pleased of the states there, and reconstituted the territories according to his fancy. The kingdom of Naples and the Two Sicilies were secured to Don Carlos, who renounced Tuscany and the duchies of Parma and Piacenza. These three principalities were to form the appanage of Duke Francis of Lorraine, betrothed to the Archduchess Maria Theresa. There it was that France was to find her share of the spoil; in exchange for the dominions formed for him in Italy, Duke Francis ceded the duchies of Lorraine and Bar to King Stanislaus; the latter formally renounced the throne of Poland, at the same time preserving the title of king, and resuming possession of his property; after him, Lorraine and the Barrois were to be united to the crown of France, as dower and heritage of that queen who had been but lately raised to the throne by a base intrigue, and who thus secured to her new country a province so often taken and retaken, an object of so many treaties and negotiations, and thenceforth so tenderly cherished by France.
The negotiations had been protracted. England, stranger as she had been to the war, had taken part in the diplomatic proposals. The Queen of Spain had wanted to keep the states in the north of Italy, as well as those in the south. “Shall I not have a new heir given me by and by?” said the Duke of Tuscany, John Gaston de Medici, last and unworthy scion of that illustrious family, who was dying without posterity. “Which is the third child that France and the empire mean to father upon me?” The King of Sardinia gained only Novara and Tortona, whilst the emperor recovered Milaness. France renounced all her conquests in Germany; she guaranteed the Pragmatic-Sanction. Russia evacuated Poland: peace seemed to be firmly established in Europe. Cardinal Fleury hasted to consolidate it, by removing from power the ambitious and daring politician whose influence he dreaded. “Chauvelin had juggled the war from Fleury,” said the Prince of Prussia, afterwards the great Frederick; “Fleury in turn juggles peace and the ministry from him.”
“It must be admitted,” wrote M. d’Argenson, “that the situation of Cardinal Fleury and the keeper of the seals towards one another is a singular one just now. The cardinal, disinterested, sympathetic, with upright views, doing nothing save from excess of importunity, and measuring his compliance by the number, and not the weight, of the said importunities,—the minister, I say, considers himself bound to fill his place as long as he is in this world. It is only as his own creature that he has given so much advancement to the keeper of the seals, considering him wholly his, good, amiable, and of solid merit, without the aid of any intrigue; and so his adjunction to the premier minister has made the keeper of the seals a butt for all the ministers. He has taken upon himself all refusals, and left to the cardinal the honor of all benefits and graces; he has, transported himself in imagination to the time when he would be sole governor, and he would have had affairs set, in advance, upon the footing on which he calculated upon placing them. It must be admitted, as regards that, that he has ideas too lofty and grand for the state; he would like to set Europe by the ears, as the great ministers did; he is accused of resembling M. de Louvois, to whom he is related. Now the cardinal is of a character the very opposite to that of this adjunct of his. M. Chauvelin has embarked him upon many great enterprises, upon that of the late war, amongst others; but scarcely is his Eminence embarked, by means of some passion that is worked upon, when the chill returns, and the desire of getting out of the business becomes another passion with him. Altogether, I see no great harm in the keeper of the seals being no longer minister, for I do not like any but a homely (bourgeoise) policy, whereby one lives on good terms with one’s neighbors, and whereby one is merely their arbiter, for the sake of working a good long while and continuously at the task of perfecting the home affairs of the kingdom, and rendering Frenchmen happy.”
M. d’Argenson made no mistake; the era of a great foreign policy had passed away for France. A king, who was frivolous and indifferent to his business as well as to his glory; a minister aged, economizing, and timid; an ambitious few, with views more bold than discreet,—such were henceforth the instruments at the disposal of France; the resources were insufficient for the internal government; the peace of Vienna and the annexation of Lorraine were the last important successes of external policy. Chauvelin had the honor of connecting his name therewith before disappearing forever in his retreat at Grosbois, to expend his life in vain regrets for lost power, and in vain attempts to recover it.
Peace reigned in Europe, and Cardinal Fleury governed France without rival and without opposition. He had but lately, like Richelieu, to whom, however, he did not care to be compared, triumphed over parliamentary revolt. Jealous of their ancient, traditional rights, the Parliament claimed to share with the government the care of watching over the conduct of the clergy. It was on that ground that they had rejected the introduction of the Legend of, Gregory VII., recently canonized at Rome, and had sought to mix themselves up in the religious disputes excited just then by the pretended miracles wrought at the tomb of Deacon Paris, a pious and modest Jansenist, who had lately died in the odor of sanctity in the parish of St. Medard. The cardinal had ordered the cemetery to be closed, in order to cut short the strange spectacles presented by the convulsionists; and, to break down the opposition of Parliament, the king had ordered, at a bed of justice, the registration of all the papal bulls succeeding the Unigenitus. In vain had D’Aguesseau, reappointed to the chancellorship, exhorted the Parliament to yield: he had fallen in public esteem. Abbe Pernelle, ecclesiastical councillor, as distinguished for his talent as for his courage, proposed a solemn declaration, analogous, at bottom, to the maxims of the Gallican church, which had been drawn up by Bossuet, in the assembly of the clergy of France. The decision of the Parliament was quashed by the council. An order from the king, forbidding discussion, was brought to the court by Count Maurepas; its contents were divined, and Parliament refused to open it. The king iterated his injunctions. “If his Majesty were at the Louvre,” cried Abbe Pernelle, “it would be the court’s duty to go and let him know how his orders are executed.” “Marly is not so very far!” shouted a young appeal-court councillor (aux enquetes) eagerly. “To Marly! To Marly!” at once repeated the whole chamber. The old councillors themselves murmured between their teeth, “To Marly!” Fourteen carriages conveyed to Marly fifty magistrates, headed by the presidents. The king refused to receive them; in vain the premier president insisted upon it, to Cardinal Fleury; the monarch and his Parliament remained equally obstinate. “What a sad position!” exclaimed Abbe Pernelle, “not to be able to fulfil one’s duties without falling into the crime of disobedience! We speak, and we are forbidden a word; we deliberate, and we are threatened. What remains for us, then, in this deplorable position, but to represent to the king the impossibility of existing under form of Parliament, without having permission to speak; the impossibility, by consequence, of continuing our functions?” Abbe Pernelle was carried off in the night, and confined in the abbey of Corbigny, in Nivernais, of which he was titular head. Other councillors were arrested; a hundred and fifty magistrates immediately gave in their resignation. Rising in the middle of the assembly, they went out two and two, dressed in their long scarlet robes, and threaded the crowd in silence. There was a shout as they went, “There go true Romans, and fathers of their country!” “All those who saw this procession,” says the advocate Barbier, “declare that it was something august and overpowering.” The government did not accept the resignations; the struggle continued. A hundred and thirty-nine members received letters under the king’s seal (lettres de cachet), exiling them to the four quarters of France. The Grand Chamber had been spared; the old councillors, alone remaining, enregistered purely and simply the declarations of the keeper of the seals. Once more the Parliament was subdued; it had testified its complete political impotence. The iron hand of Richelieu, the perfect address of Mazarin, were no longer necessary to silence it; the prudent moderation, the reserved frigidity, of Cardinal Fleury had sufficed for the purpose. “The minister, victorious over the Parliament, had become the arbiter of Europe,” said Frederick II., in his History of my Time. The standard of intelligences and of wills had everywhere sunk down to the level of the government of France. Unhappily, the day was coming when the thrones of Europe were about to be occupied by stronger and more expanded minds, whilst France was passing slowly from the hands of a more than octogenarian minister into those of a voluptuous monarch, governed by his courtiers and his favorites. Frederick II., Maria Theresa, Lord Chatham, Catherine II., were about to appear upon the scene; the French had none to oppose them but Cardinal Fleury with one foot in the grave, and, after him, King Louis XV. and Madame de Pompadour.
It was amidst this state of things that the death of the Emperor Charles VI., on the 20th of October, 1740, occurred, to throw Europe into a new ferment of discord and war. Maria Theresa, the emperor’s eldest daughter, was twenty-three years old, beautiful, virtuous, and of a lofty and resolute character; her rights to the paternal heritage had been guaranteed by all Europe. Europe, however, soon rose, almost in its entirety, to oppose them. The Elector of Bavaria claimed the domains of the house of Austria, by virtue of a will of Ferdinand I., father of Charles V. The King of Poland urged the rights of his wife, daughter of the Emperor Joseph I. Spain put forth her claims to Hungary and Bohemia, appanage of the elder branch of the house of Austria. Sardinia desired her share in Italy. Prussia had a new sovereign, who spoke but little, but was the first to act.
Kept for a long while by his father in cruel captivity, always carefully held aloof from affairs, and, to pass the time, obliged to engage in literature and science, Frederick II. had ascended the throne in August, 1740, with the reputation of a mind cultivated, liberal, and accessible to noble ideas. Voltaire, with whom he had become connected, had trumpeted his praises everywhere. The first act of the new king revealed qualities of which Voltaire had no conception. On the 23d of December, after leaving a masked ball, he started post-haste for the frontier of Silesia, where he had collected thirty thousand men. Without preliminary notice, without declaration of war, he at once entered the Austrian territory, which was scantily defended by three thousand men and a few garrisons. Before the end of January, 1741, the Prussians were masters of Silesia. “I am going, I fancy, to play your game,” Frederick had said, as he set off, to the French ambassador: “if the aces come to me we will share.”
Meanwhile France, as well as the majority of the other nations, had recognized the young Queen of Hungary. She had been proclaimed at Vienna on the 7th of November, 1740; all her father’s states had sworn alliance and homage to her. She had consented to take to the Hungarians the old oath of King Andreas II., which had been constantly refused by the house of Hapsburg: “If I, or any of my successors, at any time whatsoever, would infringe your privileges, be it permitted you, by virtue of this promise, you and your descendants, to defend yourselves, without being liable to be treated as rebels.”
When Frederick II., encamped in the midst of the conquered provinces, made a proposal to Maria Theresa to cede him Lower Silesia, to which his ancestors had always raised pretensions, assuring her, in return, of his amity and support, the young queen, deeply offended, replied haughtily that she defended her subjects, she did not sell them. At the same time an Austrian army was advancing against the King of Prussia; it was commanded by Count Neipperg. The encounter took place at Molwitz, on the banks of the Neiss. For one instant Frederick, carried along by his routed cavalry, thought the battle was lost, and his first step towards glory an unlucky business. The infantry, formed by the aged Prince of Anhalt, and commanded by Marshal Schwerin, late comrade of Charles XII., restored the fortune of battle; the Austrians had retired in disorder. Europe gave the King of Prussia credit for this first success, due especially to the excellent organization of his father’s troops. “Each battalion,” says Frederick, “was a walking battery, whose quickness in loading tripled their fire, which gave the Prussians the advantage of three to one.”
Meanwhile, in addition to the heritage of the house of Austria, thus attacked and encroached upon, there was the question of the Empire. Two claimants appeared: Duke Francis of Lorraine, Maria Theresa’s husband, whom she had appointed regent of her dominions, and the Elector of Bavaria, grandson of Louis XIV.‘s faithful ally, the only Catholic amongst the lay electors of the empire, who was only waiting for the signal from France to act, in his turn, against the Queen of Hungary.
Cardinal Fleury s intentions remained as yet vague and secret. Naturally and stubbornly pacific as he was, he felt himself bound by the confirmation of the Pragmatic-Sanction, lately renewed, at the time of the treaty of Vienna. The king affected indifference. “Whom are you for making emperor, Souvre?” he asked one of his courtiers. “Faith, sir,” answered the marquis, “I trouble myself very little about it; but if your Majesty pleased, you might tell us more about it than anybody.” “No,” said the king; “I shall have nothing to do with it; I shall look on from Mont-Pagnotte” (a post of observation out of cannon-shot). “Ah, sir,” replied Souvre, “your Majesty will be very cold there, and very ill lodged.” “How so?” said the king. “Sir,” replied Souvre, “because your ancestors never had any house built there.” “A very pretty answer,” adds the advocate Barbier; “and as regards the question, nothing can be made of it, because the king is mighty close.”
A powerful intrigue was urging the king to war. Cardinal Fleury, prudent, economizing, timid as he was, had taken a liking for a man of adventurous, and sometimes chimerical spirit. “Count Belle-Isle, grandson of Fouquet,” says M. d’Argenson, “had more wit than judgment, and more fire than force; but he aimed very high.” He dreamed of revising the map of Europe, and of forming a zone of small states, destined to protect France against the designs of Austria. Louis XV. pretended to nothing, demanded nothing for the price of his assistance; but France had been united from time immemorial to Bavaria: she was bound to raise the elector to the imperial throne. If it happened afterwards, in the dismemberment of the Austrian dominions, that the Low Countries fell to the share of France, it was the natural sequel of past conquests of Flanders, Lorraine, and the Three Bishoprics. Count Belle-Isle did not disturb with his dreams the calm of the aged cardinal; he was modest in his military aspirations. The French navy was ruined, the king had hardly twenty vessels to send to sea; that mattered little, as England and Holland took no part in the contest; Austria was not a maritime power; Spain joined with France to support the elector. A body of forty thousand men was put under the orders of that prince, who received the title of lieutenant-general of the armies of the King of France. Louis XV. acted only in the capacity of Bavaria’s ally and auxiliary. Meanwhile Marshal Belle-Isle, the King’s ambassador and plenipotentiary in Germany, had just signed a treaty with Frederick II., guaranteeing to that monarch Lower Silesia. At the same time, a second French army, under the orders of Marshal Maillebois, entered Germany; Saxony and Poland came into the coalition. The King of England, George II., faithful to the Pragmatic-Sanction, hurrying over to Hanover to raise troops there, found himself threatened by Maillebois, and signed a treaty of neutrality. The elector had been proclaimed, at Lintz, Archduke of Austria nowhere did the Franco-Bavarian army encounter any obstacle. The King of Prussia was occupying Moravia; Upper and Lower Austria had been conquered without a blow, and by this time the forces of the enemy were threatening Vienna. The success of the invasion was like a dream; but the elector had not the wit to profit by the good fortune which was offered him. On the point of entering the capital abandoned by Maria Theresa, he fell back, and marched towards Bohemia; the gates of Prague did not open like those of Passau or of Lintz; it had to be besieged. The Grand-duke of Tuscany was advancing to the relief of the town; it was determined to deliver the assault.
Count Maurice of Saxony, natural son of the late King of Poland, the most able and ere long the most illustrious of the generals in the service of France, had opposed the retrograde movement towards Bohemia. In front of Prague, he sent for Chevert, lieutenant-colonel of the regiment of Beauce, of humble origin, but destined to rise by his courage and merit to the highest rank in the army; the two officers made a reconnaissance; the moment and the point of attack were chosen. At the approach of night on the 25th of November, 1741, Chevert called up a grenadier. “Thou seest yonder sentry?” said he to the soldier. “Yes, colonel.” “He will shout to thee, ‘Who goes there?’” “Yes, colonel.” “He will fire upon thee and miss thee.” “Yes, colonel.” “Thou’lt kill him, and I shall be at thy heels.” The grenadier salutes, and mounts up to the assault; the body of the sentry had scarcely begun to roll over the rampart when Colonel Chevert followed the soldier; the eldest son of Marshal Broglie was behind him.
Fifty men had escaladed the wall before the alarm spread through the town; a gate was soon burst to permit the entrance of Count Maurice with a body of cavalry. Next day the elector was crowned as King of Bohemia; on the 13th of January, 1742, he was proclaimed emperor, under the name of Charles VII.
A few weeks had sufficed to crown the success; less time sufficed to undo it. On flying from Vienna, Maria Theresa had sought refuge in Hungary; the assembly of the Estates held a meeting at Presburg; there she appeared, dressed in mourning, holding in her arms her son, scarce six months old. Already she had known how to attach the magnates to her by the confidence she had shown them; she held out to them her child; “I am abandoned of my friends,” said she in Latin, a language still in use in Hungary amongst the upper classes; “I am pursued by my enemies, attacked by my relatives; I have no hope but in your fidelity and courage; we—my son and I—look to you for our safety.”
The palatines scarcely gave the queen time to finish; already the sabres were out of the sheaths and flashing above their heads. Count Bathyany was the first to shout, “Moriamur pro rege nostro Maria Theresa!” The same shout was repeated everywhere; Maria Theresa, restraining her tears, thanked her defenders with gesture and voice; she was expecting a second child before long. “I know not,” she wrote to her mother-in-law, the Duchess of Lorraine, “if I shall have a town left to be confined in.”
Hungary rose, like one man, to protect her sovereign against the excess of her misfortunes; the same spirit spread before long through the Austrian provinces; bodies of irregulars, savage and cruel, formed at all points, attacking and massacring the French detachments they encountered,—and giving to the war a character of ferocity which displayed itself with special excess against Bavaria. Count Segur, besieged in Lintz, was obliged to capitulate on the 26th of January, and the day after the Elector of Bavaria had received the imperial crown at Frankfurt, February 12, 1742—the Austrians, under the orders of General Khevenhuller, obtained possession of Munich, which was given up to pillage. Jokes then began to fly about in Paris at the expense of the emperor who had just been made after an interregnum of more than a year. “The thing in the world which it is perceived that one can most easily do without,” said Voltaire, “is an emperor.” “As Paris is always crammed with a number of Austrians in heart who are charmed at the sad events,” writes the advocate Barbier, “they have put in the Bastille some indiscreet individuals who said in open cafe that the emperor was John Lackland, and that a room would have to be fitted up for him at Vincennes. In point of fact, he remains at Frankfurt, and it would be very hard for him to go elsewhere in safety.”
Meanwhile England had renounced her neutrality; the general feeling of the nation prevailed over the prudent and farsighted ability of Robert Walpole; he succumbed, after his long ministry, full of honors and riches; the government had passed into warlike hands. The women of society, headed by the Duchess of Marlborough, raised a subscription of one hundred thousand pounds, which they offered unsuccessfully to the haughty Maria Theresa. Parliament voted more effectual aid, and English diplomacy adroitly detached the King of Sardinia from the allies whom success appeared to be abandoning. The King of Prussia had just gained at Czezlaw an important victory; next day, he was negotiating with the Queen of Hungary. On the 11th of June the treaty which abandoned Silesia to Frederick II. was secretly concluded; when the signatures were exchanged at Berlin in the following month, the withdrawal of Prussia was everywhere known in Europe. “This is the method introduced and accepted amongst the allies: to separate and do a better stroke of business by being the first to make terms,” writes M. d’Argenson on 30th June; “it used not to be so. The English were the first to separate from the great alliance in 1711, and they derive great advantages from it; we followed this terrible example in 1735, and got Lorraine by it; lastly, here is the King of Prussia, but under much more odious circumstances, since he leaves us in a terrible scrape, our armies, in the middle of Germany, beaten and famine-stricken; the emperor, despoiled of his hereditary dominions and his estates likewise in danger. All is at the mercy of the maritime powers, who have pushed things to the extremity we see; and we, France, who were alone capable of resisting such a torrent at this date— here be we exhausted, and not in a condition to check these rogueries and this power, even by uniting ourselves the most closely with Spain. Let be, let us meddle no more; it is the greatest service we can render at this date to our allies of Germany.”
Cardinal Fleury had not waited for confirmation of the King of Prussia’s defection to seek likewise to negotiate; Marshal Belle-Isle had been intrusted with this business, and, at the same time with a letter addressed by the cardinal—to Field-Marshal Konigseck. The minister was old, timid, displeased, disquieted at the war which he had been surprised into; he made his excuses to the Austrian negotiator and delivered his plenipotentiary into his hands at the very outset. “Many people know,” said he, “how opposed I was to the resolutions we adopted, and that I was in some sort compelled to agree to them. Your Excellency is too well informed of all that passes not to divine who it was who set everything in motion for deciding the king to enter into a league which was so contrary to my inclinations and to my principles.”
For sole answer, Maria Theresa had the cardinal’s letter published. At Utrecht, after the unparalleled disasters which were overwhelming the kingdom, and in spite of the concessions they had been ordered to offer, the tone of Louis XIV.‘s plenipotentiaries was more dignified and prouder than that of the enfeebled old man who had so long governed France by dint of moderation, discretion, and patient inertness. The allies of France were disquieted and her foes emboldened. Marshal Belle-Isle, shut up in Prague, and Marshal Broglie, encamped near the town, remaining isolated in a hostile country, hemmed in on all sides by a savage foe, maintaining order with difficulty within the fortress itself.
“Marshal Broglie is encamped under the guns of Prague,” says Barbier’s journal: “his camp is spoken of as a masterpiece. As there is reason to be shy of the inhabitants, who are for the Queen of Hungary, a battery has been trained upon Prague, the garrison camps upon the ramparts, and Marshal Belle-Isle patrols every night.”
Marshal Maillebois was at Dusseldorf, commissioned to observe the Hollanders and protect Westphalia; he received orders to join Marshals Broglie and Belle-Isle. “It is the army of redemption for the captives,” was the saying at Paris. At the same time that the marshal was setting out for Prague, Cardinal Fleury sent him the following instructions: “Engage in no battle of which the issue may be doubtful.” All the defiles of Bohemia were carefully guarded; Maillebois first retired on Egra, then he carried his arms into Bavaria, where Marshal Broglie came to relieve him of his command. Marshal Belle-Isle remained with the sole charge of the defence of Prague; he was frequently harassed by the Austrians; his troops were exhausted with cold and privation. During the night between the 16th and 17th of December, 1742, the marshal sallied from the town. “I stole a march of twenty-four hours good on Prince Lobkowitz, who was only five leagues from me,” wrote Belle-Isle, on accomplishing his retreat; “I pierced his quarters, and I traversed ten leagues of plain, having to plod along with eleven thousand foot and three thousand two hundred and fifty worn-out horses, M. de Lobkowitz having eight thousand good horses and twelve thousand infantry. I made such despatch that I arrived at the defiles before he could come up with me. I concealed from him the road I had resolved to take, for he had ordered the occupation of all the defiles and the destruction of all the bridges there are on the two main roads leading from Prague to Egra. I took one which pierces between the two others, where I found no obstacles but those of nature, and, at last, I arrived on the tenth day, without a check, though continually harassed by hussars in front, rear, and flank.” The hospitals at Egra were choke full of sick soldiers; twelve nights passed on the snow without blankets or cloaks had cost the lives of many men; a great number never recovered more than a lingering existence. Amongst them there was, in the king’s regiment of infantry, a young officer, M. de Vauvenargues, who expired at thirty-two years of age, soon after his return to his country, leaving amongst those who had known him a feeling that a great loss had been suffered by France and human intellect.
Chevert still occupied Prague, with six thousand sick or wounded; the Prince of Lorraine had invested the place and summoned it to surrender at discretion. “Tell your general;” replied Chevert to the Austrian sent to parley, “that, if he will not grant me the honors of war, I will fire the four corners of Prague, and bury myself under its ruins.” He obtained what he asked for, and went to rejoin Marshal Belle-Isle at Egra. People compared the retreat from Prague to the Retreat of the Ten Thousand; but the truth came out for all the fictions of flattery and national pride. A hundred thousand Frenchmen had entered Germany at the outset of the war; at the commencement of the year 1743, thirty-five thousand soldiers, mustered in Bavaria, were nearly all that remained to withstand the increasing efforts of the Austrians.
Marshal Belle-Isle was coldly received at Paris. “He is much inconvenienced by a sciatica,” writes the advocate Barbier, “and cannot walk but with the assistance of two men. He comes back with grand decorations: prince of the empire, knight of the Golden Fleece, blue riband, marshal of France, and duke. He is held accountable, however, for all the misfortunes that have happened to us; it was spread about at Paris that he was disgraced and even exiled to his estate at Vernon, near Gisors. It is true, nevertheless, that he has several times done business with the king, whether in M. Amelot’s presence, on foreign affairs, or M. d’Aguesseau’s, on military; but this restless and ambitious spirit is feared by the ministers.”
Almost at the very moment when the Austrians were occupying Prague and Bohemia, Cardinal Fleury was expiring, at Versailles, at the age of ninety. Madame Marshal Noailles, mother of the present marshal, who is at least eighty-seven, but is all alive, runs about Paris and writes all day, sent to inquire after him. He sent answer to her, “that she was cleverer than he—she managed to live; as for him, he was ceasing to exist. In fact, it is the case of a candle going out, and being a long while about it. Many people are awaiting this result, and all the court will be starting at his very ghost, a week after he has been buried.” [Journal de Barbier, t. ii. p. 348.]
Cardinal Fleury had lived too long: the trials of the last years of his life had been beyond the bodily and mental strength of an old man elevated for the first time to power at an age when it is generally seen slipping from the hands of the most energetic. Naturally gentle, moderate, discreet, though stubborn and persevering in his views, he had not an idea of conceiving and practising a great policy. France was indebted to him for a long period of mediocre and dull prosperity, which was preferable to the evils that had for so long oppressed her, but as for which she was to cherish no remembrance and no gratitude, when new misfortunes came bursting upon her.
Both court and nation hurled the same reproach at Cardinal Fleury; he alone prevented the king from governing, and turned his attention from affairs, partly from jealousy, and partly from the old habit acquired as a preceptor, who can never see a man in one who has been his pupil. When the old man died at last, as M. d’Argenson cruelly puts it, France turned her eyes towards Louis XV. “The cardinal is dead: hurrah! for the king!” was the cry amongst the people. The monarch himself felt as if he were emancipated. “Gentlemen, here am I—premier minister!” said he to his most intimate courtiers. “When MM. de Maurepas and Amelot went to announce to him this death, it is said that he was at first overcome, and that when he had recovered himself, he told them that hitherto he had availed himself of Cardinal Fleury’s counsels; but he relied upon it that they would so act, that they would not need to place any one between them and him. If this answer is faithfully reported,” adds the advocate Barbier, “it is sufficiently in the high style to let it be understood that there will be no more any premier minister, or at any rate any body exercising the functions thereof.”
For some time previously, in view of the great age and rapid enfeeblement of Cardinal Fleury, Marshal Noailles, ever able and far-sighted, had been pressing Louis XV. to take into his own hands the direction of his affairs. Having the command on the frontier of the Low Countries, he had adopted the practice of writing directly to the king. “Until it may please your Majesty to let me know your intentions and your will,” said the marshal at the outset of his correspondence, “confining myself solely to what relates to the frontier on which you have given me the command, I shall speak with frankness and freedom about the object confided to my care, and shall hold my peace as regards the rest. If you, Sir, desire the silence to be broken, it is for you to order it.” For the first time Louis XV. seemed to awake from the midst of that life of intellectual lethargy and physical activity which he allowed to glide along, without a thought, between the pleasures of the chase and the amusements invented by his favorite; a remembrance of Louis XIV. came across his mind, naturally acute and judicious as it was. “The late king, my great-grandfather,” he writes to Marshal Noailles on the 26th of November, 1743, “whom I desire to imitate as much as I can, recommended me, on his death-bed, to take counsel in all things, and to seek out the best, so as always to follow it. I shall be charmed, then, if you will give me some; thus do I open your mouth, as the pope does the cardinals, and I permit you to say to me what your zeal and your affection for me and my kingdom prompt you.” The first fruit of this correspondence was the entrance of Marshal Noailles into the Council.
“One day as he was, in the capacity of simple courtier, escorting the king, who was on his way to the Council, his Majesty said to him, ‘Marshal, come in; we are going to hold a council,’ and pointed to a place at his left, Cardinal Tencin being on his right. ‘This new minister does not please our secretaries of state. He is a troublesome inspector set over them, who meddles in everything, though master of nothing.’” The renewal of active hostilities was about to deliver the ministers from Marshal Noailles.
The prudent hesitation and backwardness of Holland had at last yielded to the pressure of England. The States-general had sent twenty thousand men to join the army which George II. had just sent into Germany. It was only on the 15th of March, 1744, that Louis XV. formally declared war against the King of England and Maria Theresa, no longer as an auxiliary of the ‘emperor, but in his own name and on behalf of France. Charles VII., a fugitive, driven from his hereditary dominions, which had been evacuated by Marshal Broglie, had transported to Frankfurt his ill fortune and his empty titles. France alone supported in Germany a quarrel the weight of which she had imprudently taken upon herself.
The effort was too much for the resources; the king’s counsellors felt that it was; the battle of Dettingen, skilfully commenced on the 27th of June, 1743, by Marshal Noailles, and lost by the imprudence of his nephew, the Duke of Gramont, had completely shaken the confidence of the armies; the emperor had treated with the Austrians for an armistice; establishing the neutrality of his troops, as belonging to the empire. Noailles wrote to the king on the 8th of July, “It is necessary to uphold this phantom, in order to restrain Germany, which would league against us, and furnish the English with all the troops therein, the moment the emperor was abandoned.” It was necessary, at the same time, to look out elsewhere for more effectual support. The King of Prussia had been resting for the last two years, a curious and an interested spectator of the contests which were bathing Europe in blood, and which answered his purpose by enfeebling his rivals. He frankly and coolly flaunted his selfishness. “In a previous war with France,” he says in his memoirs, “I abandoned the French at Prague, because I gained Silesia by that step. If I had escorted them to Vienna, they would never have given me so much.” In turn the successes of the Queen of Hungary were beginning to disquiet him; on the 5th of June, 1744, he signed a new treaty with France; for the first time Louis XV. was about to quit Versailles and place himself at the head of an army. “If my country is to be devoured,” said the king, with a levity far different from the solemn tone of Louis XIV., “it will be very hard on me to see it swallowed without personally doing my best to prevent it.”
He had, however, hesitated a long while before he started. There was a shortness of money. For all his having been head of the council of finance, Noailles had not been able to rid himself of ideas of arbitrary power. “When the late king, your great-grandfather, considered any outlay necessary,” he wrote to Louis XV., “the funds had to be found, because it was his will. The case in question is one in which your Majesty ought to speak as master, and lay down the law to your ministers. Your comptroller-general ought, for the future, to be obliged to furnish the needful funds without daring to ask the reasons for which they are demanded of him, and still less to decide upon them. It was thus that the late king behaved towards M. Colbert and all who succeeded him in that office; he would never have done anything great in the whole course of his reign, if he had behaved otherwise.” It was the king’s common sense which replied to this counsel, “We are still paying all those debts that the late king incurred for extraordinary occasions, fifty millions a year and more, which we must begin by paying off first of all.” Later on, he adds, gayly, “As for me, I can do without any equipage, and, if needful, the shoulder of mutton of the lieutenants of infantry will do perfectly well for me.” “There is nothing talked off here but the doings of the king, who is in extraordinary spirits,” writes the advocate Barbier; “he has visited the places near Valenciennes, the magazines, the hospitals; he has tasted the broth of the sick, and the soldiers’ bread. The ambassador of Holland came, before his departure, to propose a truce in order to put us off yet longer. The king, when he was presented, merely said, ‘I know what you are going to say to me, and what it is all about. I will give you my answer in Flanders.’ This answer is a proud one, and fit for a king of France.”
The hopes of the nation were aroused. “Have we, then, a king?” said M. d’Argenson. Credit was given to the Duchess of Chateauroux, Louis XV.‘s new favorite, for having excited this warlike ardor in the king. Ypres and Menin had already surrendered after a few days’ open trenches; siege had just been laid to Furnes. Marshal Noailles had proposed to move up the king’s household troops in order to make an impression upon the enemy. “If they must needs be marched up,” replied Louis XV., “I do not wish to separate from my household: verbum sap.”
The news which arrived from the army of Italy was equally encouraging; the Prince of Conde, seconded by Chevert, had forced the passage of the Alps. “There will come some occasion when we shall do as well as the French have done,” wrote Count Campo-Santo, who, under Don Philip, commanded the Spanish detachment; “it is impossible to do better.”
Madame de Chateauroux had just arrived at Lille; there were already complaints in the army of the frequent absence of the king on his visits to her, when alarming news came to cause forgetfulness of court intrigues and dissatisfaction; the Austrians had effected the passage of the Rhine by surprise near Philipsburg; Elsass was invaded. Marshal Coigny, who was under orders to defend it, had been enticed in the direction of Worms, by false moves on the part of Prince Charles of Lorraine, and had found great difficulty in recrossing the frontier. “Here we are on the eve of a great crisis,” writes Louis XV. on the 7th of July. It was at once decided that the king must move on Elsass to defend his threatened provinces. The King of Prussia promised to enter Bohemia immediately with twenty thousand men, as the diversion was sure to be useful to France. Louis XV. had already arrived at Metz, and Marshal Noailles pushed forward in order to unite all the corps. On the 8th of August the king awoke in pain, prostrated by a violent headache; a few days later, all France was in consternation; the king was said to have been given over.
“The king’s danger was noised abroad throughout Paris in the middle of the night,” writes Voltaire [Siecle de Louis XV., p. 103]: “everybody gets up, runs about, in confusion, not knowing whither to go. The churches open at dead of night; nobody takes any more note of time, bed-time, or day-time, or meal-time. Paris was beside itself; all the houses of officials were besieged by a continual crowd; knots collected, at all the cross-roads. The people cried, ‘If he should die, it will be for having marched to our aid.’ People accosted one another, questioned one another in the churches, without being the least acquainted. There were many churches where the priest who pronounced the prayer for the king’s health interrupted the intoning with his tears, and the people responded with nothing but sobs and cries. The courier, who, on the 19th, brought to Paris the news of his convalescence, was embraced and almost stifled by the people; they kissed his horse, they escorted him in triumph. All the streets resounded with a shout of joy. ‘The king is well!’ When the monarch was told of the unparalleled transports of joy which had succeeded those of despair, he was affected to tears, and, raising himself up in a thrill of emotion which gave him strength, ‘Ah!’ he exclaimed, ‘how sweet it is to be so loved! What have I done to deserve it?’”
What had he done, indeed! And what was he destined to do? France had just experienced the last gush of that monarchical passion and fidelity which had so long distinguished her, and which were at last used up and worn out through the faults of the princes as well as through the blindness and errors of the nation itself.
Confronted with death, the king had once more felt the religious terrors which were constantly intermingled with the irregularity of his life; he had sent for the queen, and had dismissed the Duchess of Chateauroux. On recovering his health, he found himself threatened by new perils, aggravated by his illness and by the troubled state into which it had thrown the public mind. After having ravaged and wasted Elsass, without Marshals Coigny and Noailles having been able to prevent it, Prince Charles had, without being harassed, struck again into the road towards Bohemia, which was being threatened by the King of Prussia. “This prince,” wrote Marshal Belle-Isle on the 13th of September, “has written a very strong letter to the king, complaining of the quiet way in which Prince Charles was allowed to cross the Rhine; he attributes it all to his Majesty’s illness, and complains bitterly of Marshal Noailles.” And, on the 25th, to Count Clermont, “Here we are, decided at last; the king is to start on Tuesday the 27th for Lundville, and on the 5th of October will be at Strasbourg. Nobody knows as yet any further than that, and it is a question whether he will go to Fribourg or not. The ministers are off back to Paris. Marshal Noailles, who has sent for his equipage hither, asked whether he should attend his Majesty, who replied, ‘As you please,’ rather curtly. Your Highness cannot have a doubt about his doing so, after such a gracious permission.”
Louis XV. went to the siege of Fribourg, which was a long and a difficult one. He returned to Paris on the 13th of November, to the great joy of the people. A few days later, Marshal Belle-Isle, whilst passing through Hanover in the character of negotiator, was arrested by order of George II., and carried to England a prisoner of war, in defiance of the law of nations and the protests of France. The moment was not propitious for obtaining the release of a marshal of France and an able general. The Emperor Charles VII., who but lately returned to his hereditary dominions, and recovered possession of his capital, after fifteen months of Austrian occupation, died suddenly on the 20th of January, 1745, at forty-seven years of age. The face of affairs changed all at once; the honor of France was no longer concerned in the struggle; the Grand-duke of Tuscany had no longer any competitor for the empire; the eldest son of Charles VII. was only seventeen; the Queen of Hungary was disposed for peace. “The English ministry, which laid down the law for all, because it laid down the money, and which had in its pay, all at one time, the Queen of Hungary, the King of Poland, and the King of Sardinia, considered that there was everything to lose by a treaty with France, and everything to gain by arms. War continued, because it had commenced.” [Voltaire, Siecle de Louis XV.]
The King of France henceforth maintained it almost alone by himself. The young Elector of Bavaria had already found himself driven out of Munich, and forced by his exhausted subjects to demand peace of Maria Theresa. The election to the empire was imminent; Maximilian-Joseph promised his votes to the Grand-duke of Tuscany; at that price he was re-established in his hereditary dominions. The King of Poland had rejected the advances of France, who offered him the title of emperor, beneath which Charles VII. had succumbed. Marshal Saxe bore all the brunt of the war. A foreigner and a Protestant, for a long while under suspicion with Louis XV., and blackened in character by the French generals, Maurice of Saxony had won authority as well as glory by the splendor of his bravery and of his military genius. Combining with quite a French vivacity the far-sightedness and the perseverance of the races of the north, he had been toiling for more than a year to bring about amongst his army a spirit of discipline, a powerful organization, a contempt for fatigue as well as for danger. “At Dettingen the success of the allies was due to their surprising order, for they were not seasoned to war,” he used to say. Order did not as yet reign in the army of Marshal Saxe. In 1745, the situation was grave; the marshal was attacked with dropsy; his life appeared to be in danger. He nevertheless commanded his preparations to be made for the campaign, and, when Voltaire, who was one of his friends, was astounded at it, “It is no question of living, but of setting out,” was his reply.
The king was preparing to set out, like Marshal Saxe; he had just married the dauphin to the eldest daughter of the King of Spain; the young prince accompanied his father to the front before Tournai, which the French army was besieging. On the 8th of May Louis XV. visited the outskirts; an attack from the enemy was expected, the field of battle was known beforehand. The village of Fontenoy had already been occupied by Marshal Noailles, who had asked to serve as aide-de-camp to Marshal Saxe, to whom he was attached by sincere friendship, and whom he had very much contributed to advance in the king’s good graces.
“Never did Louis XV. show more gayety than on the eve of the fight,” says Voltaire. “The conversation was of battles at which kings had been present in person. The king said that since the battle of Poitiers no king of France had fought with his son beside him, that since St. Louis none had gained any signal victory over the English, and that he hoped to be the first. He was the first up on the day of action; he himself at four o’clock awoke Count d’Argenson, minister of war, who on the instant sent to ask Marshal Saxe for his final orders. The marshal was found in a carriage of osier-work, which served him for a bed, and in which he had himself drawn about when his exhausted powers no longer allowed him to sit his horse.” The king and the dauphin had already taken up their positions of battle; the two villages of Fontenoy and Antoin, and the wood of Barri, were occupied by French troops. Two armies of fifty thousand men each were about to engage in the lists as at Dettingen. Austria had sent but eight thousand soldiers, under the orders of the old and famous General Konigseck; the English and the Hollanders were about to bear all the burden and heat of the day.
It was not five in the morning, and already there was a thunder of cannon. The Hollanders attacked the village of Antoin, the English that of Fontenoy. The two posts were covered by a redoubt which belched forth flames; the Hollanders refused to deliver the assault. An attack made by the English on the wood of Barri had been repulsed. “Forward, my lord, right to your front,” said old Konigseck to the Duke of Cumberland, George II.‘s son, who commanded the English; “the ravine in front of Fontenoy must be carried.” The English advanced; they formed a deep and serried column, preceded and supported by artillery. The French batteries mowed them down right and left, whole ranks fell dead; they were at once filled up; the cannon which they dragged along by hand, pointed towards Fontenoy and the redoubts, replied to the French artillery. An attempt of some officers of the French guards to carry off the cannon of the English was unsuccessful. The two corps found themselves at last face to face.
The English officers took off their hats; Count Chabannes and the Duke of Biron, who had moved forward, returned their salute. “Gentlemen of the French guard, fire!” exclaimed Lord Charles Hay. “Fire yourselves, gentlemen of England,” immediately replied Count d’Auteroche; “we never fire first.” [All fiction, it is said.] The volley of the English laid low the foremost ranks of the French guards. This regiment had been effeminated by a long residence in Paris and at Versailles; its colonel, the Duke of Gramont, had been killed in the morning, at the commencement of the action; it gave way, and the English cleared the ravine which defended Fontenoy. They advanced as if on parade; the majors [?sergeant-majors], small cane in hand, rested it lightly on the soldiers’ muskets to direct their fire. Several regiments successively opposed to the English column found themselves repulsed and forced to beat a retreat; the English still advanced.
Marshal Saxe, carried about everywhere in his osier-litter, saw the danger with a calm eye; he sent the Marquis of Meuse to the king. “I beg your Majesty,” he told him to say, “to go back with the dauphin over the bridge of Calonne; I will do what I can to restore the battle.” “Ah! I know well enough that he will do what is necessary,” answered the king, “but I stay where I am.” Marshal Saxe mounted his horse.
In its turn, the cavalry had been repulsed by the English; their fire swept away rank after rank of the regiment of Vaisseaux, which would not be denied. “How is it that such troops are not victorious?” cried Marshal Saxe, who was moving about at a foot’s pace in the middle of the fire, without his cuirass, which his weakness did not admit of his wearing. He advanced towards Fontenoy; the batteries had just fallen short of ball. The English column had ceased marching; arrested by the successive efforts of the French regiments, it remained motionless, and seemed to receive no more orders, but it preserved a proud front, and appeared to be masters of the field of battle. Marshal Saxe was preparing for the retreat of the army; he had relinquished his proposal for that of the king, from the time that the English had come up and pressed him closely. “It was my advice, before the danger was so great,” he said; “now there is no falling back.”
A disorderly council was being held around Louis XV. With the fine judgment and sense which he often displayed when he took the trouble to have an opinion on his affairs, the king had been wise enough to encourage his troops by his presence without in any way interfering with the orders of Marshal Saxe. The Duke of Richelieu vented an opinion more worthy of the name he bore than had been his wont in his life of courtiership and debauchery. “Throw forward the artillery against the column,” he said, “and let the king’s household, with all the disposable regiments, attack them at the same time; they must be fallen upon like so many foragers.”
The retreat of the Hollanders admitted of the movement; the small field-pieces, as yet dragged by hand, were pointed against the English column. Marshal Saxe, with difficulty keeping his seat upon his horse, galloped hastily up to the Irish brigade, commanding all the troops he met on the way to make no more false attacks, and to act in concert. All the forces of the French army burst simultaneously upon the English. The Irish regiments in the service of France, nearly all composed of Jacobite emigrants, fought with fury. Twice the brave enemy rallied, but the officers fell on all sides, the ranks were everywhere broken; at last they retired, without disorder, without enfeeblement, preserving, even in defeat, the honor of a vigorous resistance. The battle was gained at the moment when the most clear-sighted had considered it lost. Marshal Saxe had still strength left to make his way to the king. “I have lived long enough, sir,” he said, “now that I have seen your Majesty victorious. You now know on what the fortune of battles depends.”
The victory of Fontenoy, like that of Denain, restored the courage and changed the situation of France. When the King of Prussia heard of his ally’s success, he exclaimed with a grin, “This is about as useful to us as a battle gained on the banks of the Scamander.” His selfish absorption in his personal and direct interests obscured the judgment of Frederick the Great. He, however, did justice to Marshal Saxe: “There was a discussion the other day as to what battle had reflected most honor on the general commanding,” he wrote, a long while after the battle of Fontenoy; “some suggested that of Almanza, others that of Turin; but I suggested—and everybody finally agreed that it was undoubtedly that in which the general had been at death’s door when it was delivered.”
The fortress of Tournai surrendered on the 22d of May; the citadel capitulated on the 19th of June. Ghent, Bruges, Oudenarde, Dendermonde, Ostend, Nienport, yielded, one after another, to the French armies. In the month of February, 1746, Marshal Saxe terminated the campaign by taking Brussels. By the 1st of the previous September Louis XV. had returned in triumph to Paris.
Henceforth he remained alone confronting Germany, which was neutral, or had rallied round the restored empire. On the 13th of September, the Grand-duke of Tuscany had been proclaimed emperor at Frankfurt, under the name of Francis I. The indomitable resolution of the queen his wife had triumphed. In spite of the checks she suffered in the Low Countries, Maria Theresa still withstood, at all points, the pacific advances of the belligerents.
On the 4th of June, the King of Prussia had gained a great victory at Freilberg. “I have honored the bill of exchange your Majesty drew on me at Fontenoy,” he wrote to Louis XV. A series of successful fights had opened the road to Saxony. Frederick headed thither rapidly; on the 18th of December he occupied Dresden.
This time, the King of Poland, Elector of Saxony, forced the hand of the new empress: “The Austrians and the Saxons have just sent ministers hither to negotiate for peace,” said a letter to France from the King of Prussia; “so I have no course open but to sign. Would that I might be fortunate enough to serve as the instrument of general pacification. After discharging my duty towards the state I govern, and towards my family, no object will be nearer to my heart than that of being able to render myself of service to your Majesty’s interests.” Frederick the Great returned to Berlin covered with glory, and definitively master of Silesia. “Learn once for all,” he said at a later period, in his instructions to his successor, “that where a kingdom is concerned, you take when you can, and that you are never wrong when you are not obliged to hand over.” An insolent and a cynical maxim of brute force, which conquerors have put in practice at all times, without daring to set it up as a principle.