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A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times
Louis XV., The Regency, And Cardinal Dubois. 1715-1723.
by Guizot, M.
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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."
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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.
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