The Memoirs Of Louis Xv And Xvi Entire By Madame Du Hausset

[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the file for those who may wish to sample the author’s ideas before making an entire meal of them. D.W.]
BOOK 1. MEMOIRS OF LOUIS XV. AND XVI. Being Secret Memoirs of Madame du Hausset, Lady’s Maid to Madame de Pompadour, and of an unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe ADVERTISEMENT. [FROM THE LONDON MAGAZINE, NO. III. NEW SERIES P. 439.] We were obliged by circumstances, at one time, to read all the published memoirs relative to the reign of Louis XV., and had the opportunity of reading many others which may not see the light for a long time yet to come, as their publication at present would materially militate against the interest of the descendants of the writers; and we have no hesitation in saying that the Memoirs of Madame du Hausset are the only perfectly sincere ones amongst all those we know. Sometimes, Madame du Hausset mistakes, through ignorance, but never does she wilfully mislead, like Madame Campan, nor keep back a secret, like Madame Roland, and MM. Bezenval and Ferreires; nor is she ever betrayed by her vanity to invent, like the Due de Lauzun, MM. Talleyrand, Bertrand de Moleville, Marmontel, Madame d’Epinay, etc. When Madame du Hausset is found in contradiction with other memoirs of the same period, we should never hesitate to give her account the preference. Whoever is desirous of accurately knowing the reign of Louis XV. should run over the very wretched history of Lacretelle, merely for the, dates, and afterwards read the two hundred pages of the naive du Hausset, who, in every half page, overturns half a dozen misstatements of this hollow rhetorician. Madame du Hausset was often separated from the little and obscure chamber in the Palace of Versailles, where resided the supreme power, only by a slight door or curtain, which permitted her to hear all that was said there. She had for a ‘cher ami’ the greatest practical philosopher of that period, Dr. Quesnay, the founder of political economy. He was physician to Madame de Pompadour, and one of the sincerest and most single-hearted of men probably in Paris at the time. He explained to Madame du Hausset many things that, but for his assistance, she would have witnessed without understanding. INTRODUCTION. A friend of M. de Marigny (the brother of Madame de Pompadour) called on him one day and found him burning papers. Taking up a large packet which he was going to throw into the fire “This,” said he, “is the journal of a waiting-woman of my sister’s. She was a very estimable person, but it is all gossip; to the fire with it!” He stopped, and added, “Don’t you think I am a little like the curate and the barber burning Don Quixote’s romances?”–“I beg for mercy on this,” said his friend. “I am fond of anecdotes, and I shall be sure to find some here which will interest me.” “Take it, then,” said M. de Marigny, and gave it him. The handwriting and the spelling of this journal are very bad. It abounds in tautology and repetitions. Facts are sometimes inverted in the order of time; but to remedy all these defects it would have been necessary to recast the whole, which would have completely changed the character of the work. The spelling and punctuation were, however, corrected in the original, and some explanatory notes added. Madame de Pompadour had two waiting-women of good family. The one, Madame du Hausset, who did not change her name; and another, who assumed a name, and did not publicly announce her quality. This journal is evidently the production of the former. The amours of Louis XV. were, for a long time, covered with the veil of mystery. The public talked of the Parc-aux-Cerfs, but were acquainted with none of its details. Louis XIV., who, in the early part of his reign, had endeavoured to conceal his attachments, towards the close of it gave them a publicity which in one way increased the scandal; but his mistresses were all women of quality, entitled by their birth to be received at Court. Nothing can better describe the spirit of the time and the character of the Monarch than these words of Madame de Montespan: “He does not love me,” said she, “but he thinks he owes it to his subjects and to his own greatness to have the most beautiful woman in his kingdom as his mistress.” BOOK 1. SECRET MEMOIRS OF LOUIS XV., AND MEMOIRS OF MADAME DU HAUSSET. An early friend of mine, who married well at Paris, and who has the reputation of being a very clever woman, has often asked me to write down what daily passed under my notice; to please her, I made little notes, of three or four lines each, to recall to my memory the most singular or interesting facts; as, for instance–attempt to assassinate the King; he orders Madame de Pompadour to leave the Court; M. de Machaudt’s ingratitude, etc.–I always promised my friend that I would, some time or other, reduce all these materials into the form of a regular narrative. She mentioned the “Recollections of Madame de Caylus,” which were, however, not then printed; and pressed me so much to produce a similar work, that I have taken advantage of a few leisure moments to write this, which I intend to give her, in order that she may arrange it and correct the style. I was for a long time about the person of Madame de Pompadour, and my birth procured for me respectful treatment from herself, and from some distinguished persons who conceived a regard for me. I soon became the intimate friend of Doctor Quesnay, who frequently came to pass two or three hours with me. His house was frequented by people of all parties, but the number was small, and restricted to those who were on terms of greatest intimacy with him. All subjects were handled with the utmost freedom, and it is infinitely to his honour and theirs that nothing was ever repeated. The Countess D—– also visited me. She was a frank and lively woman, and much liked by Madame de Pompadour. The Baschi family paid me great attention. M. de Marigny had received some little services from me, in the course of the frequent quarrels between him and his sister, and he had a great friendship for me. The King was in the constant habit of seeing me; and an accident, which I shall have occasion to relate, rendered him very familiar with me. He talked without any constraint when I was in the room. During Madame de Pompadour’s illness I scarcely ever left her chamber, and passed the night there. Sometimes, though rarely, I accompanied her in her carriage with Doctor Quesnay, to whom she scarcely spoke a word, though he was–a man of great talents. When I was alone with her, she talked of many affairs which nearly concerned her, and she once said to me, “The King and I have such implicit confidence in you, that we look upon you as a cat, or a dog, and go on talking as if you were not there.” There was a little nook, adjoining her chamber, which has since been altered, where she knew I usually sat when I was alone, and where I heard everything that was said in the room, unless it was spoken in a low voice. But when the King wanted to speak to her in private, or in the presence of any of his Ministers, he went with her into a closet, by the side of the chamber, whither she also retired when she had secret business with the Ministers, or with other important persons; as, for instance, the Lieutenant of Police, the Postmaster-General, etc. All these circumstances brought to my knowledge a great many things which probity will neither allow me to tell or to record. I generally wrote without order of time, so that a fact may be related before others which preceded it. Madame de Pompadour had a great friendship for three Ministers; the first was M. de Machault, to whom she was indebted for the regulation of her income, and the payment of her debts. She gave him the seals, and he retained the first place in her regard till the attempt to assassinate the King. Many people said that his conduct on that occasion was not attributable to bad intentions; that he thought it his duty to obey the King without making himself in any way a party to the affair, and that his cold manners gave him the appearance of an indifference which he did not feel. Madame de Pompadour regarded him in the light of a faithless friend; and, perhaps, there was some justice on both sides. But for the Abbe de Bernis; M. de Machault might, probably, have retained his place. The second Minister, whom Madame de Pompadour liked, was the Abbe de Bernis. She was soon disgusted with him when she saw the absurdity of his conduct. He gave a singular specimen of this on the very day of his dismissal. He had invited a great many people of distinction to a splendid entertainment, which was to have taken place on the very day when he received his order of banishment, and had written in the notes of invitation–M. Le Comte de Lusace will be there. This Count was the brother of the Dauphine, and this mention of him was deservedly thought impertinent. The King said, wittily enough, “Lambert and Moliere will be there.” She scarcely ever spoke of the Cardinal de Bernis after his dismissal from the Court. He was extremely ridiculous, but he was a good sort of man. Madame, the Infanta, died a little time before, and, by the way, of such a complication of putrid and malignant diseases, that the Capuchins who bore the body, and the men who committed it to the grave, were overcome by the effluvia. Her papers appeared no less impure in the eyes of the King. He discovered that the Abbe de Bernis had been intriguing with her, and that they had deceived him, and had obtained the Cardinal’s hat by making use of his name. The King was so indignant that he was very near refusing him the barrette. He did grant it–but just as he would have thrown a bone to a dog. The Abbe had always the air of a protege when he was in the company of Madame de Pompadour. She had known him in positive distress. The Due de Choiseul was very differently situated; his birth, his air, his manners, gave him claims to consideration, and he far exceeded every other man in the art of ingratiating himself with Madame de Pompadour. She looked upon him as one of the most illustrious nobles of the Court, as the most able Minister, and the most agreeable man. M. de Choiseul had a sister and a wife, whom he had introduced to her, and who sedulously cultivated her favourable sentiments towards him. From the time he was Minister, she saw only with his eyes; he had the talent of amusing her, and his manners to women, generally, were extremely agreeable. Two persons–the Lieutenant of Police and the Postmaster-General–were very much in Madame de Pompadour’s confidence; the latter, however, became less necessary to her from the time that the King communicated to M. de Choiseul the secret of the post-office, that is to say, the system of opening letters and extracting matter from them: this had never been imparted to M. d’Argenson, in spite of the high favour he enjoyed. I have heard that M. de Choiseul abused the confidence reposed in him, and related to his friends the ludicrous stories, and the love affairs, contained in the letters which were broken open. The plan they pursued, as I have heard, was very simple. Six or seven clerks of the post-office picked out the letters they were ordered to break open, and took the impression of the seals with a ball of quicksilver. Then they put each letter, with the seal downwards, over a glass of hot water, which melted the wax without injuring the paper. It was then opened, the desired matter extracted, and it was sealed again, by means of the impression. This is the account of the matter I have heard. The Postmaster-General carried the extracts to the King on Sundays. He was seen coming and going on this noble errand as openly as the Ministers. Doctor Quesnay often, in my presence, flew in such a rage about that infamous Minister, as he called him, that he foamed at the mouth. “I would as soon dine with the hangman as with the Postmaster-General,” said the Doctor. It must be acknowledged that this was astonishing language to be uttered in the apartments of the King’s mistress; yet it went on for twenty years without being talked of. “It was probity speaking with earnestness,” said M. de Marigny, “and not a mere burst of spite or malignity.” The Duc de Gontaut was the brother-in-law and friend of M. de Choiseul, and was assiduous in his attendance on Madame de Pompadour. The sister of M. de Choiseul, Madame de Grammont, and his wife were equally constant in their attentions. This will sufficiently account for the ascendency of M. de Choiseul, whom nobody would have ventured to attack. Chance, however, discovered to me a secret correspondence of the King, with a man in a very obscure station. This man, who had a place in the Farmers General, of from two to three hundred a year, was related to one of the young ladies of the Parc-aux-cerfs, by whom he was recommended to the King. He was also connected in some way with M. de Broglie, in whom the King placed great confidence. Wearied with finding that this correspondence procured him no advancement, he took the resolution of writing to me, and requesting an interview, which I granted, after acquainting Madame de Pompadour with the circumstance. After a great deal of preamble and of flattery, he said to me, “Can you give me your word of honour, and that of Madame de Pompadour, that no mention whatever of what I am going to tell you will be made to the King?”–“I think I can assure you that, if you require such a promise from Madame de Pompadour, and if it can produce no ill consequence to the King’s service, she will give it you.” He gave me his word that what he requested would have no bad effect; upon which I listened to what he had to say. He shewed me several memorials, containing accusations of M. de Choiseul, and revealed some curious circumstances relative to the secret functions of the Comte de Broglie. These, however, led rather to conjectures than to certainty, as to the nature of the services he rendered to the King. Lastly, he shewed me several letters in the King’s handwriting. “I request,” said he, “that the Marquise de Pompadour will procure for me the place of Receiver-General of Finances; I will give her information of whatever I send the King; I will write according to her instructions, and I will send her his answers.” As I did not choose to take liberties with the King’s papers, I only undertook to deliver the memorials. Madame de Pompadour having given me her word according to the conditions on which I had received the communication, I revealed to her everything I had heard. She sent the memorials to M. de Choiseul, who thought them very maliciously and very cleverly written. Madame de Pompadour and he had a long conference as to the reply that was to be given to the person by whom those disclosures were made. What I was commissioned to say was this: that the place of Receiver-General was at present too important, and would occasion too much surprise and speculation; that it would not do to go beyond a place worth fifteen thousand to twenty thousand francs a year; that they had no desire to pry into the King’s secrets; and that his correspondence ought not to be communicated to any one; that this did not apply to papers like those of which I was the bearer, which might fall into his hands; that he would confer an obligation by communicating them, in order that blows aimed in the dark, and directed by malignity and imposture, might be parried. The answer was respectful and proper, in what related to the King; it was, however, calculated to counteract the schemes of the Comte de Broglie, by making M. de Choiseul acquainted with his attacks, and with the nature of the weapons he employed. It was from the Count that he received statements relating to the war and to the navy; but he had no communication with him concerning foreign affairs, which the Count, as it was said, transacted immediately with the King. The Duc de Choiseul got the man who spoke to me recommended to the Controller-General, without his appearing in the business; he had the place which was agreed upon, and the hope of a still better, and he entrusted to me the King’s correspondence, which I told him I should not mention to Madame de Pompadour, according to her injunctions. He sent several memorials to M. de Choiseul, containing accusations of him, addressed to the King. This timely information enabled him to refute them triumphantly. The King was very fond of having little private correspondences, very often unknown to Madame de Pompadour: she knew, however, of the existence of some, for he passed part of his mornings in writing to his family, to the King of Spain, to Cardinal Tencin, to the Abbe de Broglie, and also to some obscure persons. “It is, doubtless, from such people as these,” said she to me, one day, “that the King learns expressions which perfectly surprise me. For instance, he said to me yesterday, when he saw a man pass with an old coat on, ‘il y a la un habit bien examine.’ He once said to me, when he meant to express that a thing was probable, ‘il y a gros’; I am told this is a saying of the common people, meaning, ‘il y a gros a parier’.” I took the liberty to say, “But is it not more likely from his young ladies at the Parc, that he learns these elegant expressions? “She laughed, and said, “You are right; ‘il y a gros’.” The King, however, used these expressions designedly, and with a laugh. The King knew a great many anecdotes, and there were people enough who furnished him with such as were likely to mortify the self-love of others. One day, at Choisy, he went into a room where some people were employed about embroidered furniture, to see how they were going on; and looking out of the window, he saw at the end of a long avenue two men in the Choisy uniform. “Who are those two noblemen?” said he. Madame de Pompadour took up her glass, and said, “They are the Duc d’Aumont, and ——” “Ah!” said the King; “the Duc d’Aumont’s grandfather would be greatly astonished if he could see his grandson arm in arm with the grandson of his valet de chambre, L——, in a dress which may be called a patent of nobility!” He went on to tell Madame de Pompadour a long history, to prove the truth of what he said. The King went out to accompany her into the garden; and, soon after, Quesnay and M. de Marigny came in. I spoke with contempt of some one who was very fond of money. At this the Doctor laughed, and said, “I had a curious dream last night: I was in the country of the ancient Germans; I had a large house, stacks of corn, herds of cattle, a great number of horses, and huge barrels of ale; but I suffered dreadfully from rheumatism, and knew not how to manage to go to a fountain, at fifty leagues’ distance, the waters of which would cure me. I was to go among a strange people. An enchanter appeared before me, and said to me, ‘I pity your distress; here, I will give you a little packet of the powder of “prelinpinpin”; whoever receives a little of this from you will lodge you, feed you, and pay you all sorts of civilities.’ I took the powder, and thanked him.” “Ah!” said I, “how I should like to have some powder of prelinpinpin! I wish I had a chest full.”–“Well,” said the Doctor, “that powder is money, for which you have so great a contempt. Tell me who, of all the men who come hither, receives the greatest attentions?”–“I do not know,” said I. “Why,” said he, “it is M. de Monmartel, who comes four or five times a year.”–“Why does he enjoy so much consideration?”–“Because his coffers are full of the powder of prelinpinpin. Everything in existence,” said he, taking a handful of Louis from his pocket, “is contained in these little pieces of metal, which will convey you commodiously from one end of the world to the other. All men obey those who possess this powder, and eagerly tender them their services. To despise money, is to despise happiness, liberty, in short, enjoyments of every kind.” A cordon bleu passed under the window. “That nobleman,” said I, “is much more delighted with his cordon bleu than he would be with ten thousand of your pieces of metal.”–“When I ask the King for a pension,” replied Quesnay, “I say to him, ‘Give me the means of having a better dinner, a warmer coat, a carriage to shelter me from the weather, and to transport me from place to place without fatigue.’ But the man who asks him for that fine blue ribbon would say, if he had the courage and the honesty to speak as he feels, ‘I am vain, and it will give me great satisfaction to see people look at me, as I pass, with an eye of stupid admiration, and make way, for me; I wish, when I enter a room, to produce an effect, and to excite the attention of those who may, perhaps, laugh at me when I am gone; I wish to be called Monseigneur by the multitude.’ Is not all this mere empty air? In scarcely any country will this ribbon be of the slightest use to him; it will give him no power. My pieces of metal will give me the power of assisting the unfortunate everywhere. Long live the omnipotent powder of prelinpinpin!” At these last words, we heard a burst of laughter from the adjoining room, which was only separated by a door from the one we were in. The door opened, and in came the King, Madame de Pompadour, and M. de Gontaut. “Long live the powder of prelinpinpin!” said the King. “Doctor, can you get me any of it?” It happened that, when the King returned from his walk, he was struck with a fancy to listen to our conversation. Madame de Pompadour was extremely kind to the Doctor, and the King went out laughing, and talking with great admiration of the powder. I went away, and so did the Doctor. I immediately sat down to commit this conversation to writing. I was afterwards told that M. Quesnay was very learned in certain matters relating to finance, and that he was a great ‘economiste’. But I do not know very well what that means. What I do know for certain is, that he was very clever, very gay and witty, and a very able physician. The illness of the little Duke of Burgundy, whose intelligence was much talked of, for a long time occupied the attention of the Court. Great endeavours were made to find out the cause of his malady, and ill-nature went so far as to assert that his nurse, who had an excellent situation at Versailles, had communicated to him a nasty disease. The King shewed Madame de Pompadour the information he had procured from the province she came from, as to her conduct. A silly Bishop thought proper to say she had been very licentious in her youth. The poor nurse was told of this, and begged that he might be made to explain himself. The Bishop replied, that she had been at several balls in the town in which she lived, and that she had gone with her neck uncovered. The poor man actually thought this the height of licentiousness. The King, who had been at first uneasy, when he came to this, called out, “What a fool!” After having long been a source of anxiety to the Court, the Duke died. Nothing produces a stronger impression upon Princes, than the spectacle of their equals dying. Everybody is occupied about them while ill–but as soon as they are dead, nobody mentions them. The King frequently talked about death–and about funerals, and places of burial. Nobody could be of a more melancholy temperament. Madame de Pompadour once told me that he experienced a painful sensation whenever he was forced to laugh, and that he had often begged her to break off a droll story. He smiled, and that was all. In general, he had the most gloomy ideas concerning almost all events. When there was a new Minister, he used to say, “He displays his wares like all the rest, and promises the finest things in the world, not one of which will be fulfilled. He does not know this country–he will see.” When new projects for reinforcing the navy were laid before him, he said, “This is the twentieth time I have heard this talked of–France never will have a navy, I think.” This I heard from M. de Marigny. I never saw Madame de Pompadour so rejoiced as at the taking of Mahon. The King was very glad, too, but he had no belief in the merit of his courtiers–he looked upon their success as the effect of chance. Marechal Saxe was, as I have been told, the only man who inspired him with great esteem. But he had scarcely ever seen him in his closet, or playing the courtier. M. d’Argenson picked a quarrel with M. de Richelieu, after his victory, about his return to Paris. This was intended to prevent his coming to enjoy his triumph. He tried to throw the thing upon Madame de Pompadour, who was enthusiastic about him, and called him by no other name than the “Minorcan.” The Chevalier de Montaign was the favourite of the Dauphin, and much beloved by him for his great devotion. He fell ill, and underwent an operation called ‘l’empieme’, which is performed by making an incision between the ribs, in order to let out the pus; it had, to all appearance, a favourable result, but the patient grew worse, and could not breathe. His medical attendants could not conceive what occasioned this accident and retarded his cure. He died almost in the arms of the Dauphin, who went every day to see him. The singularity of his disease determined the surgeons to open the body, and they found, in his chest, part of the leaden syringe with which decoctions had, as was usual, been injected into the part in a state of suppuration. The surgeon, who committed this act of negligence, took care not to boast of his feat, and his patient was the victim. This incident was much talked of by the King, who related it, I believe, not less than thirty times, according to his custom; but what occasioned still more conversation about the Chevalier de Montaign, was a box, found by his bed’s side, containing haircloths, and shirts, and whips, stained with blood. This circumstance was spoken of one evening at supper, at Madame de Pompadour’s, and not one of the guests seemed at all tempted to imitate the Chevalier. Eight or ten days afterwards, the following tale was sent to the King, to Madame de Pompadour, to the Baschi, and to the Duc d’Ayen. At first nobody could understand to what it referred: at last, the Duc d’Ayen exclaimed, “How stupid we are; this is a joke on the austerities of the Chevalier de Montaign!” This appeared clear enough–so much the more so, as the copies were sent to the Dauphin, the Dauphine, the Abbe de St. Cyr, and to the Duc de V—. The latter had the character of a pretender to devotion, and, in his copy, there was this addition, “You would not be such a fool, my dear Duke, as to be a ‘faquir’–confess that you would be very glad to be one of those good monks who lead such a jolly life.” The Duc de Richelieu was suspected of having employed one of his wits to write the story. The King was scandalised at it, and ordered the Lieutenant of Police to endeavour to find out the author, but either he could not succeed or he would not betray him. Japanese Tale. At a distance of three leagues from the capital of Japan, there is a temple celebrated for the concourse of persons, of both sexes, and of all ranks, who crowd thither to worship an idol believed to work miracles. Three hundred men consecrated to the service of religion, and who can give proofs of ancient and illustrious descent, serve this temple, and present to the idol the offerings which are brought from all the provinces of the empire. They inhabit a vast and magnificent edifice, belonging to the temple, and surrounded with gardens where art has combined with nature to produce enchantment. I obtained permission to see the temple, and to walk in the gardens. A monk advanced in years, but still full of vigour and vivacity, accompanied me. I saw several others, of different ages, who were walking there. But what surprised me was to see a great many of them amusing themselves by various agreeable and sportive games with young girls elegantly dressed, listening to their songs, and joining in their dances. The monk, who accompanied me, listened with great civility and kindness to the questions I put to him concerning his order. The following is the sum of his answers to my numerous interrogations. The God Faraki, whom we worship, is so called from a word which signifies the fabricator. He made all that we behold– the earth, the stars, the sun, etc. He has endowed men with senses, which are so many sources of pleasure, and we think the only way of shewing our gratitude is to use them. This opinion will, doubtless, appear to you much more rational than that of the faquirs of India, who pass their lives in thwarting nature, and who inflict upon themselves the most melancholy privations and the most severe sufferings. As soon as the sun rises, we repair to the mountain you see before us, at the foot of which flows a stream of the most limpid water, which meanders in graceful windings through that meadow-enamelled with the loveliest flowers. We gather the most fragrant of them, which we carry and lay upon the altar, together with various fruits, which we receive from the bounty of Faraki. We then sing his praises, and execute dances expressive of our thankfulness, and of all the enjoyments we owe to this beneficent deity. The highest of these is that which love produces, and we testify our ardent gratitude by the manner in which we avail ourselves of this inestimable gift of Faraki. Having left the temple, we go into several shady thickets, where we take a light repast; after which, each of us employs himself in some unoppressive labour. Some embroider, others apply themselves to painting, others cultivate flowers or fruits, others turn little implements for our use. Many of these little works are sold to the people, who purchase them with eagerness. The money arising from this sale forms a considerable part of our revenue. Our morning is thus devoted to the worship of God and to the exercise of the sense of Sight, which begins with the first rays of the sun. The sense of Taste is gratified by our dinner, and we add to it the pleasure of Smell. The most delicious viands are spread for us in apartments strewed with flowers. The table is adorned with them, and the most exquisite wines are handed to us in crystal goblets. When we have glorified God, by the agreeable use of the palate, and the olfactory nerve, we enjoy a delightful sleep of two hours, in bowers of orange trees, roses, and myrtles. Having acquired a fresh store of strength and spirits, we return to our occupations, that we may thus mingle labour with pleasure, which would lose its zest by long continuance. After our work, we return to the temple, to thank God, and to offer him incense. From thence we go to the most delightful part of the garden, where we find three hundred young girls, some of whom form lively dances with the younger of our monks; the others execute serious dances, which require neither strength nor agility, and which only keep time to the sound of musical instruments. We talk and laugh with our companions, who are dressed in a light gauze, and whose tresses are adorned with flowers; we press them to partake of exquisite sherbets, differently prepared. The hour of supper being arrived, we repair to rooms illuminated with the lustre of a thousand tapers fragrant with amber. The supper-room is surrounded by three vast galleries, in which are placed musicians, whose various instruments fill the mind with the most pleasurable and the softest emotions. The young girls are seated at table with us, and, towards the conclusion of the repast, they sing songs, which are hymns in honour of the God who has endowed us with senses which shed such a charm over existence, and which promise us new pleasure from every fresh exercise of them. After the repast is ended, we return to the dance, and, when the hour of repose arrives, we draw from a kind of lottery, in which every one is sure of a prize; that is, a young girl as his companion for the night. They are allotted thus by chance, in order to avoid jealousy, and to prevent exclusive attachments. Thus ends the day, and gives place to a night of delights, which we sanctify by enjoying with due relish that sweetest of all pleasures, which Faraki has so wisely attached to the reproduction of our species. We reverently admire the wisdom and the goodness of Faraki, who, desiring to secure to the world a continued population, has implanted in the sexes an invincible mutual attraction, which constantly draws them towards each other. Fecundity is the end he proposes, and he rewards with intoxicating delights those who contribute to the fulfilment of his designs. What should we say to the favourite of a King from whom he had received a beautiful house, and fine estates, and who chose to spoil the house, to let it fall in ruins, to abandon the cultivation of the land, and let it become sterile, and covered with thorns? Such is the conduct of the faquirs of India, who condemn themselves to the most melancholy privations, and to the most severe sufferings. Is not this insulting Faraki? Is it not saying to him, I despise your gifts? Is it not misrepresenting him and saying, You are malevolent and cruel, and I know that I can no otherwise please you than by offering you the spectacle of my miseries? “I am told,” added he, “that you have, in your country, faquirs not less insane, not less cruel to themselves.” I thought, with some reason, that he meant the fathers of La Trappe. The recital of the matter afforded me much matter for reflection, and I admired how strange are the systems to which perverted reason gives birth. The Duc de V—– was a nobleman of high rank and great wealth. He said to the King one evening at supper, “Your Majesty does me the favour to treat me with great kindness: I should be inconsolable if I had the misfortune to fall under your displeasure. If such a calamity were to befall me, I should endeavour to divert my grief by improving some beautiful estates of mine in such and such a province;” and he thereupon gave a description of three or four fine seats. About a month after, talking of the disgrace of a Minister, he said, “I hope your Majesty will not withdraw your favour from me; but if I had the misfortune to lose it, I should be more to be pitied than anybody, for I have no asylum in which to hide my head.” All those present, who had heard the description of the beautiful country houses, looked at each other and laughed. The King said to Madame de Pompadour, who sat next to him at table, “People are very right in saying that a liar ought to have a good memory.” An event, which made me tremble, as well as Madame, procured me the familiarity of the King. In the middle of the night, Madame came into my chamber, en chemise, and in a state of distraction. “Here! Here!” said she, “the King is dying.” My alarm may be easily imagined. I put on a petticoat, and found the King in her bed, panting. What was to be done? –it was an indigestion. We threw water upon him, and he came to himself. I made him swallow some Hoffman’s drops, and he said to me, “Do not make any noise, but go to Quesnay; say that your mistress is ill; and tell the Doctor’s servants to say nothing about it.” Quesnay, who lodged close by, came immediately, and was much astonished to see the King in that state. He felt his pulse, and said, “The crisis is over; but, if the King were sixty years old, this might have been serious.” He went to seek some drug, and, on his return, set about inundating the King with perfumed water. I forget the name of the medicine he made him take, but the effect was wonderful. I believe it was the drops of General Lamotte. I called up one of the girls of the wardrobe to make tea, as if for myself. The King took three cups, put on his robe de chambre and his stockings, and went to his own room, leaning upon the Doctor. What a sight it was to see us all three half naked! Madame put on a robe as soon as possible, and I did the same, and the King changed his clothes behind the curtains, which were very decently closed. He afterwards spoke of this short attack, and expressed his sense of the attentions shown him. An hour after, I felt the greatest possible terror in thinking that the King might have died in our hands. Happily, he quickly recovered himself, and none of the domestics perceived what had taken place. I merely told the girl of the wardrobe to put everything to rights, and she thought it was Madame who had been indisposed. The King, the next morning, gave secretly to Quesnay a little note for Madame, in which he said, ‘Ma chere amie’ must have had a great fright, but let her reassure herself–I am now well, which the Doctor will certify to you. From that moment the King became accustomed to me, and, touched by the interest I had shown for him, he often gave me one of his peculiarly gracious glances, and made me little presents, and, on every New Year’s Day, sent me porcelain to the amount of twenty louis d’or. He told Madame that he looked upon me in the apartment as a picture or statue, and never put any constraint upon himself on account of my presence. Doctor Quesnay received a pension of a thousand crowns for his attention and silence, and the promise of a place for his son. The King gave me an order upon the Treasury for four thousand francs, and Madame had presented to her a very handsome chiming-clock and the King’s portrait in a snuffbox. The King was habitually melancholy, and liked everything which recalled the idea of death, in spite of the strongest fears of it. Of this, the following is an instance: Madame de Pompadour was on her way to Crecy, when one of the King’s grooms made a sign to her coachman to stop, and told him that the King’s carriage had broken down, and that, knowing her to be at no great distance, His Majesty had sent him forward to beg her to wait for him. He soon overtook us, and seated himself in Madame de Pompadour’s carriage, in which were, I think, Madame de Chateau-Renaud, and Madame de Mirepoix. The lords in attendance placed themselves in some other carriages. I was behind, in a chaise, with Gourbillon, Madame de Pompadour’s valet de chambre. We were surprised in a short time by the King stopping his carriage. Those which followed, of course stopped also. The King called a groom, and said to him, “You see that little eminence; there are crosses; it must certainly be a burying-ground; go and see whether there are any graves newly dug.” The groom galloped up to it, returned, and said to the King, “There are three quite freshly made.” Madame de Pompadour, as she told me, turned away her head with horror; and the little Marechale [The Marechale de Mirepois died at Brussels in 1791, at a very advanced age, but preserving her wit and gaiety to the last. The day of her death, after she had received the Sacrament, the physician told her that he thought her a good deal better. She replied, “You tell me bad news: having packed up, I had rather go.” She was sister of the Prince de Beauveau. The Prince de Ligne says, in one of his printed letters: “She had that enchanting talent which supplies the means of pleasing everybody. You would have sworn that she had thought of nothing but you all her life.”–En.] gaily said, “This is indeed enough to make one’s mouth water.” Madame de Pompadour spoke of it when I was undressing her in the evening. “What a strange pleasure,” said she, “to endeavour to fill one’s mind with images which one ought to endeavour to banish, especially when one is surrounded by so many sources of happiness! But that is the King’s way; he loves to talk about death. He said, some days ago, to M. de Fontanieu, who was, seized with a bleeding at the nose, at the levee: ‘Take care of yourself; at your age it is a forerunner of apoplexy.’ The poor man went home frightened, and absolutely ill.” I never saw the King so agitated as during the illness of the Dauphin. The physicians came incessantly to the apartments of Madame de Pompadour, where the King interrogated them. There was one from Paris, a very odd man, called Pousse, who once said to him, “You are a good papa; I like you for that. But you know we are all your children, and share your distress. Take courage, however; your son will recover.” Everybody’s eyes were upon the Duc d’Orleans, who knew not how to look. He would have become heir to the crown, the Queen being past the age to have children. Madame de —– said to me, one day, when I was expressing my surprise at the King’s grief, “It would annoy him beyond measure to have a Prince of the blood heir apparent. He does not like them, and looks upon their relationship to him as so remote, that he would feel humiliated by it.” And, in fact, when his son recovered, he said, “The King of Spain would have had a fine chance.” It was thought that he was right in this, and that it would have been agreeable to justice; but that, if the Duc d’Orleans had been supported by a party, he might have supported his pretensions to the crown. It was, doubtless, to remove this impression that he gave a magnificent fete at St. Cloud on the occasion of the Dauphin’s recovery. Madame de Pompadour said to Madame de Brancas, speaking of this fete, “He wishes to make us forget the chateau en Espagne he has been dreaming of; in Spain, however, they build them of solider materials.” The people did not shew so much joy at the Dauphin’s recovery. They looked upon him as a devotee, who did nothing but sing psalms. They loved the Duc d’Orleans, who lived in the capital, and had acquired the name of the King of Paris. These sentiments were not just; the Dauphin only sang psalms when imitating the tones of one of the choristers of the chapel. The people afterwards acknowledged their error, and did justice to his virtues. The Duc d’Orleans paid the most assiduous court to Madame de Pompadour: the Duchess, on the contrary, detested her. It is possible that words were put into the Duchess’s mouth which she never uttered; but she, certainly, often said most cutting things. The King would have sent her into exile, had he listened only to his resentment; but he feared the eclat of such a proceeding, and he knew that she would only be the more malicious. The Duc d’Orleans was, just then, extremely jealous of the Comte de Melfort; and the Lieutenant of Police told the King he had strong reasons for believing that the Duke would stick at nothing to rid himself of this gallant, and that he thought it his duty to give the Count notice, that he ought to be upon his guard. The King said, “He would not dare to attempt any such violence as you seem to apprehend; but there is a better way: let him try to surprise them, and he will find me very well inclined to have his cursed wife shut up; but if he got rid of this lover, she would have another to-morrow. “Nay, she has others at this moment; for instance, the Chevalier de Colbert, and the Comte de l’Aigle.” Madame de Pompadour, however, told me these two last affairs were not certain. An adventure happened about the same time, which the Lieutenant of Police reported to the King. The Duchesse d’Orleans had amused herself one evening, about eight o’clock, with ogling a handsome young Dutchman, whom she took a fancy to, from a window of the Palais Royal. The young man, taking her for a woman of the town, wanted to make short work, at which she was very much shocked. She called a Swiss, and made herself known. The stranger was arrested; but he defended himself by affirming that she had talked very loosely to him. He was dismissed, and the Duc d’Orleans gave his wife a severe reprimand. The King (who hated her so much that he spoke of her without the slightest restraint) one day said to Madame de Pompadour, in my presence, “Her mother knew what she was, for, before her marriage, she never suffered her to say more than yes and no. Do you know her joke on the nomination of Moras? She sent to congratulate him upon it: two minutes after, she called back the messenger she had sent, and said, before everybody present, ‘Before you speak to him, ask the Swiss if he still has the place.’” Madame de Pompadour was not vindictive, and, in spite of the malicious speeches of the Duchesse d’Orleans, she tried to excuse her conduct. “Almost all women,” she said, “have lovers; she has not all that are imputed to her: but her free manners, and her conversation, which is beyond all bounds, have brought her into general disrepute.” My companion came into my room the other day, quite delighted. She had been with M. de Chenevieres, first Clerk in the War-office, and a constant correspondent of Voltaire, whom she looks upon as a god. She was, by the bye, put into a great rage one day, lately, by a print-seller in the street, who was crying, “Here is Voltaire, the famous Prussian; here you see him, with a great bear-skin cap, to keep him from the cold! Here is the famous Prussian, for six sous!”–“What a profanation!” said she. To return to my story: M. de Chenevieres had shewn her some letters from Voltaire, and M. Marmontel had read an ‘Epistle to his Library’. M. Quesnay came in for a moment; she told him all this: and, as he did not appear to take any great interest in it, she asked him if he did not admire great poets. “Oh, yes; just as I admire great bilboquet players,” said he, in that tone of his, which rendered everything he said diverting. “I have written some verses, however,” said he, “and I will repeat them to you; they are upon a certain M. Rodot, an Intendant of the Marine, who was very fond of abusing medicine and medical men. I made these verses to revenge AEsculapius and Hippocrates. “What do you say to them?” said the Doctor. My companion thought them very pretty, and the Doctor gave me them in his handwriting, begging me, at the same time, not to give any copies. Madame de Pompadour joked my companion about her ‘bel-esprit’, but sometimes she reposed confidence in her. Knowing that she was often writing, she said to her, “You are writing a novel, which will appear some day or other; or, perhaps, the age of Louis XV.: I beg you to treat me well.” I have no reason to complain of her. It signifies very little to me that she can talk more learnedly than I can about prose and verse. She never told me her real name; but one day I was malicious enough to say to her, “Some one was maintaining, yesterday, that the family of Madame de Mar—- was of more importance than many of good extraction. They say it is the first in Cadiz. She had very honourable alliances, and yet she has thought it no degradation to be governess to Madame de Pompadour’s daughter. One day you will see her sons or her nephews Farmers General, and her granddaughters married to Dukes.” I had remarked that Madame de Pompadour for some days had taken chocolate, ‘a triple vanille et ambre’, at her breakfast; and that she ate truffles and celery soup: finding her in a very heated state, I one day remonstrated with her about her diet, to which she paid no attention. I then thought it right to speak to her friend, the Duchesse de Brancas. “I had remarked the same thing,” said she, “and I will speak to her about it before you.” After she was dressed, Madame de Brancas, accordingly, told her she was uneasy about her health. “I have just been talking to her about it,” said the Duchess, pointing to me, “and she is of my opinion.” Madame de Pompadour seemed a little displeased; at last, she burst into tears. I immediately went out, shut the door, and returned to my place to listen. “My dear friend,” she said to Madame de Brancas, “I am agitated by the fear of losing the King’s heart by ceasing to be attractive to him. Men, you know, set great value on certain things, and I have the misfortune to be of a very cold temperament. I, therefore, determined to adopt a heating diet, in order to remedy this defect, and for two days this elixir has been of great service to me, or, at least, I have thought I felt its good effects.” The Duchesse de Brancas took the phial which was upon the toilet, and after having smelt at it, “Fie!” said she, and threw it into the fire. Madame de Pompadour scolded her, and said, “I don’t like to be treated like a child.” She wept again, and said, “You don’t know what happened to me a week ago. The King, under pretext of the heat of the weather, lay down upon my sofa, and passed half the night there. He will take a disgust to me and have another mistress.”–“You will not avoid that,” replied the Duchess, “by following your new diet, and that diet will kill you; render your company more and more precious to the King by your gentleness: do not repulse him in his fond moments, and let time do the rest; the chains of habit will bind him to you for ever.” They then embraced; Madame de Pompadour recommended secrecy to Madame de Brancas, and the diet was abandoned. A little while after, she said to me, “Our master is better pleased with me. This is since I spoke to Quesnay, without, however, telling him all. He told me, that to accomplish my end, I must try to be in good health, to digest well, and, for that purpose, take exercise. I think the Doctor is right. I feel quite a different creature. I adore that man (the King), I wish so earnestly to be agreeable to him! But, alas! sometimes he says I am a macreuse (a cold-blooded aquatic bird). I would give my life to please him.” One day, the King came in very much heated. I withdrew to my post, where I listened. “What is the matter?” said Madame de Pompadour. “The long robes and the clergy,” replied he, “are always at drawn daggers, they distract me by their quarrels. But I detest the long robes the most. My clergy, on the whole, is attached and faithful to me; the others want to keep me in a state of tutelage.”–“Firmness,” said Madame de Pompadour, “is the only thing that can subdue them.”–“Robert Saint Vincent is an incendiary, whom I wish I could banish, but that would make a terrible tumult. On the other hand, the Archbishop is an iron-hearted fellow, who tries to pick quarrels. Happily, there are some in the Parliament upon whom I can rely, and who affect to be very violent, but can be softened upon occasion. It costs me a few abbeys, and a few secret pensions, to accomplish this. There is a certain V— who serves me very well, while he appears to be furious on the other side.”–“I can tell you some news of him, Sire,” said Madame de Pompadour. “He wrote to me yesterday, pretending that he is related to me, and begging for an interview.”–“Well,” said the King, “let him come. See him; and if he behaves well, we shall have a pretext for giving him something.” M. de Gontaut came in, and seeing that they were talking seriously, said nothing. The King walked about in an agitated manner, and suddenly exclaimed, “The Regent was very wrong in restoring to them the right of remonstrating; they will end in ruining the State.”–“All, Sire,” said M. de Gontaut, “it is too strong to be shaken by a set of petty justices.” “You don’t know what they do, nor what they think. They are an assembly of republicans; however, here is enough of the subject. Things will last as they are as long as I shall. Talk about this on Sunday, Madame, with M. Berrien.” Madame d’Amblimont and Madame d’Esparbes came in. “Ah! here come my kittens,” said Madame de Pompadour; “all that we are about is Greek to them; but their gaiety restores my tranquility, and enables me to attend again to serious affairs. You, Sire, have the chase to divert you–they answer the same purpose to me.” The King then began to talk about his morning’s sport, and Lansmatte. [See the “Memoirs of Madame Campan,” vol. iii., p. 24. Many traits of original and amusing bluntness are related of Lansmatte, one of the King’s grooms.] It was necessary to let the King go on upon these subjects, and even, sometimes, to hear the same story three or four times over, if new persons came into the room. Madame de Pompadour never betrayed the least ennui. She even sometimes persuaded him to begin his story anew. I one day said to her, “It appears to me, Madame, that you are fonder than ever of the Comtesse d’Amblimont.”–“I have reason to be so,” said she. “She is unique, I think, for her fidelity to her friends, and for her honour. Listen, but tell nobody–four days ago, the King, passing her to go to supper, approached her, under the pretence of tickling her, and tried to slip a note into her hand. D’Amblimont, in her madcap way, put her hands behind her back, and the King was obliged to pick up the note, which had fallen on the ground. Gontaut was the only person who saw all this, and, after supper, he went up to the little lady, and said, ‘You are an excellent friend.’–‘I did my duty,’ said she, and immediately put her finger on her lips to enjoin him to be silent. He, however, informed me of this act of friendship of the little heroine, who had not told me of it herself.” I admired the Countess’s virtue, and Madame de Pompadour said, “She is giddy and headlong; but she has more sense and more feeling than a thousand prudes and devotees. D’Esparbes would not do as much most likely she would meet him more than half-way. The King appeared disconcerted, but he still pays her great attentions.” –“You will, doubtless, Madame,” said I, “show your sense of such admirable conduct.”–“You need not doubt it,” said she, “but I don’t wish her to think that I am informed of it.” The King, prompted either by the remains of his liking, or from the suggestions of Madame de Pompadour, one morning went to call on Madame d’Amblimont, at Choisy, and threw round her neck a collar of diamonds and emeralds, worth between fifty thousand and seventy-five thousand francs. This happened a long time after the circumstance I have just related. There was a large sofa in a little room adjoining Madame de Pompadour’s, upon which I often reposed. One evening, towards midnight, a bat flew into the apartment where the Court was; the King immediately cried out, “Where is General Crillon?” (He had just left the room.) “He is the General to command against the bats.” This set everybody calling out, “Ou etais tu, Crillon?” M. de Crillon soon after came in, and was told where the enemy was. He immediately threw off his coat, drew his sword, and commenced an attack upon the bat, which flew into the closet where I was fast asleep. I started out of sleep at the noise, and saw the King and all the company around me. This furnished amusement for the rest of the evening. M. de Crillon was a very excellent and agreeable man, but he had the fault of indulging in buffooneries of this kind, which, however, were the result of his natural gaiety, and not of any subserviency of character. Such, however, was not the case with another exalted nobleman, a Knight of the Golden Fleece, whom Madame saw one day shaking hands with her valet de chambre. As he was one of the vainest men at Court, Madame could not refrain from telling the circumstance to the King; and, as he had no employment at Court, the King scarcely ever after named him on the Supper List. I had a cousin at Saint Cyr, who was married. She was greatly distressed at having a relation waiting woman to Madame de Pompadour, and often treated me in the most mortifying manner. Madame knew this from Colin, her steward, and spoke of it to the King. “I am not surprised at it,” said he; “this is a specimen of the silly women of Saint Cyr. Madame de Maintenon had excellent intentions, but she made a great mistake. These girls are brought up in such a manner, that, unless they are all made ladies of the palace, they are unhappy and impertinent.” Some time after, this relation of mine was at my house. Colin, who knew her, though she did not know him, came in. He said to me, “Do you know that the Prince de Chimay has made a violent attack upon the Chevalier d’Henin for being equerry to the Marquise.” At these words, my cousin looked very much astonished, and said, “Was he not right?”–“I don’t mean to enter into that question,” said Colin–“but only to repeat his words, which were these: ‘If you were only a man of moderately good family and poor, I should not blame you, knowing, as I do, that there are hundreds such, who would quarrel for your place, as young ladies of family would, to be about your mistress. But, recollect, that your relations are princes of the Empire, and that you bear their name.”–“What, sir,” said my relation, “the Marquise’s equerry of a princely house?”–“Of the house of Chimay,” said he; “they take the name of Alsace “–witness the Cardinal of that name. Colin went out delighted at what he had said. “I cannot get over my surprise at what I have heard,” said my relation. “It is, nevertheless, very true,” replied I; “you may see the Chevalier d’Henin (that is the family name of the Princes de Chimay), with the cloak of Madame upon his arm, and walking alongside her sedan-chair, in order that he may be ready, on her getting in, to cover her shoulders with her cloak, and then remain in the antechamber, if there is no other room, till her return.” From that time, my cousin let me alone; nay, she even applied to me to get a company of horse for her husband, who was very loath to come and thank me. His wife wished him to thank Madame de Pompadour; but the fear he had lest she should tell him, that it was in consideration of his relationship to her waiting-woman that he commanded fifty horse, prevented him. It was, however, a most surprising thing that a man belonging to the house of Chimay should be in the service of any lady whatever; and, the commander of Alsace returned from Malta on purpose to get him out of Madame de Pompadour’s household. He got him a pension of a hundred louis from his family, and the Marquise gave him a company of horse. The Chevalier d’Henin had been page to the Marechal de Luxembourg, and one can hardly imagine how he could have put his relation in such a situation; for, generally speaking, all great houses keep up the consequence of their members. M. de Machault, the Keeper of the Seals, had, at the same time, as equerry, a Knight of St. Louis, and a man of family–the Chevalier de Peribuse–who carried his portfolio, and walked by the side of the chair. Whether it was from ambition, or from tenderness, Madame de Pompadour had a regard for her daughter,–[The daughter of Madame de Pompadour and her husband, M. d’Atioles. She was called Alexandrine.]–which seemed to proceed from the bottom of her heart. She was brought up like a Princess, and, like persons of that rank, was called by her Christian name alone. The first persons at Court had an eye to this alliance, but her mother had, perhaps, a better project. The King had a son by Madame de Vintimille, who resembled him in face, gesture, and manners. He was called the Comte du —–. Madame de Pompadour had him brought: to Bellevue. Colin, her steward, was employed to find means to persuade his tutor to bring him thither. They took some refreshment at the house of the Swiss, and the Marquise, in the course of her walk, appeared to meet them by accident. She asked the name of the child, and admired his beauty. Her daughter came up at the same moment, and Madame de Pompadour led them into a part of the garden where she knew the King would come. He did come, and asked the child’s name. He was told, and looked embarrassed when Madame, pointing to them, said they would be a beautiful couple. The King played with the girl, without appearing to take any notice of the boy, who, while he was eating some figs and cakes which were brought, his attitudes and gestures were so like those of the King, that Madame de Pompadour was in the utmost astonishment. “Ah!” said she, “Sire, look at ——–.” –“At what?” said he. “Nothing,” replied Madame, “except that one would think one saw his father.” “I did not know,” said the King, smiling, “that you were so intimately acquainted with the Comte du L—— .”–“You ought to embrace him,” said she, “he is very handsome.”–“I will begin, then, with the young lady,” said the King, and embraced them in a cold, constrained manner. I was present, having joined Mademoiselle’s governess. I remarked to Madame, in the evening, that the King had not appeared very cordial in his caresses. “That is his way,” said she; “but do not those children appear made for each other? If it was Louis XIV., he would make a Duc du Maine of the little boy; I do not ask so much; but a place and a dukedom for his son is very little; and it is because he is his son that I prefer him to all the little Dukes of the Court. My grandchildren would blend the resemblance of their grandfather and grandmother; and this combination, which I hope to live to see, would, one day, be my greatest delight.” The tears came into her eyes as she spoke. Alas! alas! only six months elapsed, when her darling daughter, the hope of her advanced years, the object of her fondest wishes, died suddenly. Madame de Pompadour was inconsolable, and I must do M. de Marigny the justice to say that he was deeply afflicted. His niece was beautiful as an angel, and destined to the highest fortunes, and I always thought that he had formed the design of marrying her. A dukedom would have given him rank; and that, joined to his place, and to the wealth which she would have had from her mother, would have made him a man of great importance. The difference of age was not sufficient to be a great obstacle. People, as usual, said the young lady was poisoned; for the unexpected death of persons who command a large portion of public attention always gives birth to these rumours. The King shewed great regret, but more for the grief of Madame than on account of the loss itself, though he had often caressed the child, and loaded her with presents. I owe it, also, to justice, to say that M. de Marigny, the heir of all Madame de Pompadour’s fortune, after the death of her daughter, evinced the sincerest and deepest regret every time she was seriously ill. She, soon after, began to lay plans for his establishment. Several young ladies of the highest birth were thought of; and, perhaps, he would have been made a Duke, but his turn of mind indisposed him for schemes either of marriage or ambition. Ten times he might have been made Prime Minister, yet he never aspired to it. “That is a man,” said Quesnay to me, one day, “who is very little known; nobody talks of his talents or acquirements, nor of his zealous and efficient patronage of the arts: no man, since Colbert, has done so much in his situation: he is, moreover, an extremely honourable man, but people will not see in him anything but the brother of the favourite; and, because he is fat, he is thought dull and heavy.” This was all perfectly true. M. de Marigny had travelled in Italy with very able artists, and had acquired taste, and much more information than any of his predecessors had possessed. As for the heaviness of his air, it only came upon him when he grew fat; before that, he had a delightful face. He was then as handsome as his sister. He paid court to nobody, had no vanity, and confined himself to the society of persons with whom he was at his ease. He went rather more into company at Court after the King had taken him to ride with him in his carriage, thinking it then his duty to shew himself among the courtiers. Madame called me, one day, into her closet, where the King was walking up and down in a very serious mood. “You must,” said she, “pass some days in a house in the Avenue de St. Cloud, whither I shall send you. You will there find a young lady about to lie in.” The King said nothing, and I was mute from astonishment. “You will be mistress of the house, and preside, like one of the fabulous goddesses, at the accouchement. Your presence is necessary, in order that everything may pass secretly, and according to the King’s wish. You will be present at the baptism, and name the father and mother.” The King began to laugh, and said, “The father is a very honest man;” Madame added, “beloved by every one, and adored by those who know him.” Madame then took from a little cupboard a small box, and drew from it an aigrette of diamonds, at the same time saying to the King, “I have my reasons for it not being handsomer.”– “It is but too much so,” said the King; “how kind you are;” and he then embraced Madame, who wept with emotion, and, putting her hand upon the King’s heart, said, “This is what I wish to secure.” The King’s eyes then filled with tears, and I also began weeping, without knowing why. Afterwards, the King said, “Guimard will call upon you every day, to assist you with his advice, and at the critical moment you will send for him. You will say that you expect the sponsors, and a moment after you will pretend to have received a letter, stating that they cannot come. You will, of course, affect to be very much embarrassed; and Guimard will then say that there is nothing for it but to take the first comers. You will then appoint as godfather and godmother some beggar, or chairman, and the servant girl of the house, and to whom you will give but twelve francs, in order not to attract attention.”–“A louis,” added Madame, “to obviate anything singular, on the other hand.”–“It is you who make me economical, under certain circumstances,” said the King. “Do you remember the driver of the fiacre? I wanted to give him a LOUIS, and Duc d’Ayen said, ‘You will be known;’ so that I gave him a crown.” He was going to tell the whole story. Madame made a sign to him to be silent, which he obeyed, not without considerable reluctance. She afterwards told me that at the time of the fetes given on occasion of the Dauphin’s marriage, the King came to see her at her mother’s house in a hackney- coach. The coachman would not go on, and the King would have given him a LOUIS. “The police will hear of it, if you do,” said the Duc d’Ayen, “and its spies will make inquiries, which will, perhaps, lead to a discovery.” “Guimard,” continued the King, “will tell you the names of the father and mother; he will be present at the ceremony, and make the usual presents. It is but fair that you also should receive yours;” and, as he said this, he gave me fifty LOUIS, with that gracious air that he could so well assume upon certain occasions, and which no person in the kingdom had but himself. I kissed his hand and wept. “You will take care of the accouchee, will you not? She is a good creature, who has not invented gunpowder, and I confide her entirely to your direction; my chancellor will tell you the rest,” he said, turning to Madame, and then quitted the room. “Well, what think you of the part I am playing?” asked Madame. “It is that of a superior woman, and an excellent friend,” I replied. “It is his heart I wish to secure,” said she; “and all those young girls who have no education will not run away with it from me. I should not be equally confident were I to see some fine woman belonging to the Court, or the city, attempt his conquest.” I asked Madame, if the young lady knew that the King was the father of her child? “I do not think she does,” replied she; “but, as he appeared fond of her, there is some reason to fear that those about her might be too ready to tell her; otherwise,” said she, shrugging her shoulders, “she, and all the others, are told that he is a Polish nobleman, a relation of the Queen, who has apartments in the castle.” This story was contrived on account of the cordon bleu, which the King has not always time to lay aside, because, to do that, he must change his coat, and in order to account for his having a lodging in the castle so near the King. There were two little rooms by the side of the chapel, whither the King retired from his apartment, without being seen by anybody but a sentinel, who had his orders, and who did not know who passed through those rooms. The King sometimes went to the Parc-aux-cerfs, or received those young ladies in the apartments I have mentioned. I must here interrupt my narrative, to relate a singular adventure, which is only known to six or seven persons, masters or valets. At the time of the attempt to assassinate the King, a young girl, whom he had seen several times, and for whom he had manifested more tenderness than for most, was distracted at this horrible event. The Mother-Abbess of the Parc-aux-cerfs perceived her extraordinary grief, and managed so as to make her confess that she knew the Polish Count was the King of France. She confessed that she had taken from his pocket two letters, one of which was from the King of Spain, the other from the Abbe de Brogue. This was discovered afterwards, for neither she nor the Mother-Abbess knew the names of the writers. The girl was scolded, and M. Lebel, first valet de chambre, who had the management of all these affairs, was called; he took the letters, and carried them to the King, who was very much embarrassed in what manner to meet a person so well informed of his condition. The girl in question, having perceived that the King came secretly to see her companion, while she was neglected, watched his arrival, and, at the moment he entered with the Abbess, who was about to withdraw, she rushed distractedly into the room where her rival was. She immediately threw herself at the King’s feet. “Yes,” said she, “you are King of all France; but that would be nothing to me if you were not also monarch of my heart: do not forsake me, my beloved sovereign; I was nearly mad when your life was attempted!” The Mother-Abbess cried out, “You are mad now.” The King embraced her, which appeared to restore her to tranquility. They succeeded in getting her out of the room, and a few days afterwards the unhappy girl was taken to a madhouse, where she was treated as if she had been insane, for some days. But she knew well enough that she was not so, and that the King had really been her lover. This lamentable affair was related to me by the Mother-Abbess, when I had some acquaintance with her at the time of the accouchement I have spoken of, which I never had before, nor since. To return to my history: Madame de Pompadour said to me, “Be constantly with the ‘accouchee’, to prevent any stranger, or even the people of the house, from speaking to her. You will always say that he is a very rich Polish nobleman, who is obliged to conceal himself on account of his relationship to the Queen, who is very devout. You will find a wet-nurse in the house, to whom you will deliver the child. Guimard will manage all the rest. You will go to church as a witness; everything must be conducted as if for a substantial citizen. The young lady expects to lie in in five or six days; you will dine with her, and will not leave her till she is in a state of health to return to the Parc-aux-cerfs, which she may do in a fortnight, as I imagine, without running any risk.” I went, that same evening, to the Avenue de Saint Cloud, where I found the Abbess and Guimard, an attendant belonging to the castle, but without his blue coat. There were, besides, a nurse, a wet-nurse, two old men- servants, and a girl, who was something between a servant and a waiting- woman. The young lady was extremely pretty, and dressed very elegantly, though not too remarkably. I supped with her and the Mother-Abbess, who was called Madame Bertrand. I had presented the aigrette Madame de Pompadour gave me before supper, which had greatly delighted the young lady, and she was in high spirits. Madame Bertrand had been housekeeper to M. Lebel, first valet de chambre to the King. He called her Dominique, and she was entirely in his confidence. The young lady chatted with us after supper; she appeared to be very naive. The next day, I talked to her in private. She said to me, “How is the Count?” (It was the King whom she called by this title.) “He will be very sorry not to be with me now; but he was obliged to set off on a long journey.” I assented to what she said. “He is very handsome,” said she, “and loves me with all his heart. He promised me an allowance; but I love him disinterestedly; and, if he would let me, I would follow him to Poland.” She afterwards talked to me about her parents, and about M. Lebel, whom she knew by the name of Durand. “My mother,” said she, “kept a large grocer’s shop, and my father was a man of some consequence; he belonged to the Six Corps, and that, as everybody knows, is an excellent thing. He was twice very near being head- bailiff.” Her mother had become bankrupt at her father’s death, but the Count had come to her assistance, and settled upon her fifteen hundred francs a year, besides giving her six thousand francs down. On the sixth day, she was brought to bed, and, according to my instructions, she was told the child was a girl, though in reality it was a boy; she was soon to be told that it was dead, in order that no trace of its existence might remain for a certain time. It was eventually to be restored to its mother. The King gave each of his children about ten thousand francs a year. They inherited after each other as they died off, and seven or eight were already dead. I returned to Madame de Pompadour, to whom I had written every day by Guimard. The next day, the King sent for me into the room; he did not say a word as to the business I had been employed upon; but he gave me a large gold snuff-box, containing two rouleaux of twenty-five louis each. I curtsied to him, and retired. Madame asked me a great many questions of the young lady, and laughed heartily at her simplicity, and at all she had said about the Polish nobleman. “He is disgusted with the Princess, and, I think, will return to Poland for ever, in two months.”–“And the young lady?” said I. “She will be married in the country,” said she, “with a portion of forty thousand crowns at the most and a few diamonds.” This little adventure, which initiated me into the King’s secrets, far from procuring for me increased marks of kindness from him, seemed to produce a coldness towards me; probably because he was ashamed of my knowing his obscure amours. He was also embarrassed by the services Madame de Pompadour had rendered him on this occasion. Besides the little mistresses of the Parc-aux-cerfs, the King had sometimes intrigues with ladies of the Court, or from Paris, who wrote to him. There was a Madame de L—–, who, though married to a young and amiable man, with two hundred thousand francs a year, wished absolutely to become his mistress. She contrived to have a meeting with him: and the King, who knew who she was, was persuaded that she was really madly in love with him. There is no knowing what might have happened, had she not died. Madame was very much alarmed, and was only relieved by her death from inquietude. A circumstance took place at this time which doubled Madame’s friendship for me. A rich man, who had a situation in the Revenue Department, called on me one day very secretly, and told me that he had something of importance to communicate to Madame la Marquise, but that he should find himself very much embarrassed in communicating it to her personally, and that he should prefer acquainting me with it. He then told me, what I already knew, that he had a very beautiful wife, of whom he was passionately fond; that having on one occasion perceived her kissing a little ‘porte feuille’, he endeavoured to get possession of it, supposing there was some mystery attached to it. One day that she suddenly left the room to go upstairs to see her sister, who had been brought to bed, he took the, opportunity of opening the porte feuille, and was very much surprised to find in it a portrait of the King, and a very tender letter written by His Majesty. Of the latter he took a copy, as also of an unfinished letter of his wife, in which she vehemently entreated the King to allow her to have the pleasure of an interview– the means she pointed out. She was to go masked to the public ball at Versailles, where His Majesty could meet her under favour of a mask. I assured M. de —— that I should acquaint Madame with the affair, who would, no doubt, feel very grateful for the communication. He then added, “Tell Madame la Marquise that my wife is very clever and very intriguing. I adore her, and should run distracted were she to be taken from me.” I lost not a moment in acquainting Madame with the affair, and gave her the letter. She became serious and pensive, and I since learned that she consulted M. Berrier, Lieutenant of Police, who, by a very simple but ingeniously conceived plan, put an end to the designs of this lady. He demanded an audience of the King, and told him that there was a lady in Paris who was making free with His Majesty’s name; that he had been given the copy of a letter, supposed to have been written by His Majesty to the lady in question. The copy he put into the King’s hands, who read it in great confusion, and then tore it furiously to pieces. M. Berrier added, that it was rumoured that this lady was to meet His Majesty at the public ball, and, at this very moment, it so happened that a letter was put into the King’s hand, which proved to be from the lady, appointing the meeting; at least, M. Berrier judged so, as the King appeared very much surprised on reading it, and said, “It must be allowed, M. le Lieutenant of Police, that you are well informed.” M. Berrier added, “I think it my duty to tell Your Majesty that this lady passes for a very intriguing person.” “I believe,” replied the King, “that it is not without deserving it that she has got that character.” Madame de Pompadour had many vexations in the midst of all her grandeur. She often received anonymous letters, threatening her with poison or assassination: her greatest fear, however, was that of being supplanted by a rival. I never saw her in a greater agitation than, one evening, on her return from the drawing-room at Marly. She threw down her cloak and muff, the instant she came in, with an air of ill-humour, and undressed herself in a hurried manner. Having dismissed her other women, she said to me, “I think I never saw anybody so insolent as Madame de Coaslin. I was seated at the same table with her this evening, at a game of ‘brelan’, and you cannot imagine what I suffered. The men and women seemed to come in relays to watch us. Madame de Coaslin said two or three times, looking at me, ‘Va tout’, in the most insulting manner. I thought I should have fainted, when she said, in a triumphant tone, I have the ‘brelan’ of kings. I wish you had seen her courtesy to me on parting.”–“Did the King,” said I, “show her particular attention?” “You don’t know him,” said she; “if he were going to lodge her this very night in my apartment, he would behave coldly to her before people, and would treat me with the utmost kindness. This is the effect of his education, for he is, by nature, kind-hearted and frank.” Madame de Pompadour’s alarms lasted for some months, when she, one day, said to me, “That haughty Marquise has missed her aim; she frightened the King by her grand airs, and was incessantly teasing him for money. Now you, perhaps, may not know that the King would sign an order for forty thousand LOUIS without a thought, and would give a hundred out of his little private treasury with the greatest reluctance. Lebel, who likes me better than he would a new mistress in my place, either by chance or design had brought a charming little sultana to the Parc-aux-cerfs, who has cooled the King a little towards the haughty Vashti, by giving him occupation, has received a hundred thousand francs, some jewels, and an estate. Jannette–[The Intendant of Police.]–has rendered me great service, by showing the King extracts from the letters broken open at the post- office, concerning the report that Madame de Coaslin was coming into favour: The King was much impressed by a letter from an old counsellor of the Parliament, who wrote to one of his friends as follows: ‘It is quite as reasonable that the King should have a female friend and confidante– as that we, in our several degrees, should so indulge ourselves; but it is desirable that he should keep the one he has; she is gentle, injures nobody, and her fortune is made. The one who is now talked of will be as haughty as high birth can make her. She must have an allowance of a million francs a year, since she is said to be excessively extravagant; her relations must be made Dukes, Governors of provinces, and Marshals, and, in the end, will surround the King, and overawe the Ministers.’” Madame de Pompadour had this passage, which had been sent to her by M. Jannette, the Intendant of the Police, who enjoyed the King’s entire confidence. He had carefully watched the King’s look, while he read the letter, and he saw that the arguments of this counsellor, who was not a disaffected person, made a great impression upon him. Some time afterwards, Madame de Pompadour said to me, “The haughty Marquise behaved like Mademoiselle Deschamps, [A courtesan, distinguished for her charms, and still more so for an extraordinary proof of patriotism. At a time when the public Treasury was exhausted, Mademoiselle Deschamps sent all her plate to the Mint. Louis XIV. boasted of this act of generous devotion to her country. The Duc d’Ayen made it the subject of a pleasantry, which detracted nothing from the merit of the sacrifice–but which is rather too gai for us to venture upon.] and she is turned off.” This was not Madame’s only subject of alarm. A relation of Madame d’Estrades, [The Comtesse d’Estrades, a relative of M. Normand, and a flatterer of Madame de Pompadour, who brought her to Court, was secretly in the pay of the Comte d’Argenson. That Minister, who did not disdain la Fillon, from whom he extracted useful information, knew all that passed at the Court of the favourite, by means of Madame d’Estrades, whose ingratitude and perfidiousness he liberally paid.] wife to the Marquis de C—-, had made the most pointed advances to the King, much more than were necessary for a man who justly thought himself the handsomest man in France, and who was, moreover, a King. He was perfectly persuaded that every woman would yield to the slightest desire he might deign to manifest. He, therefore, thought it a mere matter of course that women fell in love with him. M. de Stainville had a hand in marring the success of that intrigue; and, soon afterwards, the Marquise de C—–, who was confined to her apartments at Marly, by her relations, escaped through a closet to a rendezvous, and was caught with a young man in a corridor. The Spanish Ambassador, coming out of his apartments with flambeaux, was the person who witnessed this scene. Madame d’Estrades affected to know nothing of her cousin’s intrigues, and kept up an appearance of the tenderest attachment to Madame de Pompadour, whom she was habitually betraying. She acted as spy for M. d’Argenson, in the cabinets, and in Madame de Pompadour’s apartments; and, when she could discover nothing, she had recourse to her invention, in order that she might not lose her importance with her lover. This Madame d’Estrades owed her whole existence to the bounties of Madame, and yet, ugly as she was, she had tried to get the King away from her. One day, when he, had got rather drunk at Choisy (I think, the only time that, ever happened to him), he went on board a beautiful barge, whither Madame, being ill of an indigestion, could not accompany him. Madame d’Estrades seized this opportunity. She got into the barge, and, on their return, as it was dark, she followed the King into a private closet, where he was believed to be sleeping on a couch, and there went somewhat beyond any ordinary advances to him. Her account of the matter to Madame was, that she had gone into the closet upon her own affairs, and that the King, had followed her, and had tried to ravish her. She was at full liberty to make what story she pleased, for the King knew neither what he had said, nor what he had done. I shall finish this subject by a short history concerning a young lady. I had been, one day, to the theatre at Compiegne. When I returned, Madame asked me several questions about the play; whether there was much company, and whether I did not see a very beautiful girl. I replied, “That there was, indeed, a girl in a box near mine, who was surrounded by all the young men about the Court.” She smiled, and said, “That is Mademoiselle Dorothee; she went, this evening, to see the King sup in public, and to-morrow she is to be taken to the hunt. You are surprised to find me so well informed, but I know a great deal more about her. She was brought here by a Gascon, named Dubarre or Dubarri, who is the greatest scoundrel in France. He founds all his hopes of advancement on Mademoiselle Dorothee’s charms, which he thinks the King cannot resist. She is, really, very beautiful.. She was pointed out to me in my little garden, whither she was taken to walk on purpose. She is the daughter of a water-carrier, at Strasbourg, and her charming lover demands to be sent Minister to Cologne, as a beginning.”– “Is it possible, Madame, that you can have been rendered uneasy by such a creature as that?”–“Nothing is impossible,” replied she; “though I think the King would scarcely dare to give such a scandal. Besides, happily, Lebel, to quiet his conscience, told the King that the beautiful Dorothee’s lover is infected with a horrid disease;” and, added he, “Your Majesty would not get rid of that as you have done of the scrofula.” This was quite enough to keep the young lady at a distance. “I pity you sincerely, Madame,” said I, “while everybody else envies you.” “Ah!” replied she, “my life is that of the Christian, a perpetual warfare. This was not the case with the woman who enjoyed the favour of Louis XIV. Madame de La Valliere suffered herself to be deceived by Madame de Montespan, but it was her own fault, or, rather, the effect of her extreme good nature. She was entirely devoid of suspicion at first, because she could not believe her friend perfidious. Madame de Montespan’s empire was shaken by Madame de Fontanges, and overthrown by Madame de Maintenon; but her haughtiness, her caprices, had already alienated the King. He had not, however, such rivals as mine; it is true, their baseness is my security. I have, in general, little to fear but casual infidelities, and the chance that they may not all be sufficiently transitory for my safety. The King likes variety, but he is also bound by habit; he fears eclats, and detests manoeuvring women. The little Marechale (de Mirepoig) one day said to me, ‘It is your staircase that the King loves; he is accustomed to go up and down it. But, if he found another woman to whom he could talk of hunting and business as he does to you, it would be just the same to him in three days.’” I write without plan, order, or date, just as things come into my mind; and I shall now go to the Abbe de Bernis, whom I liked very much, because he was good-natured, and treated me kindly. One day, just as Madame de Pompadour had finished dressing, M. de Noailles asked to speak to her in private. I, accordingly, retired. The Count looked full of important business. I heard their conversation, as there was only the door between us. “A circumstance has taken place,” said he, “which I think it my duty to communicate to the King; but I would not do so without first informing you of it, since it concerns one of your friends for whom I have the utmost regard and respect. The Abbe de Bernis had a mind to shoot, this morning, and went, with two or three of his people, armed with guns, into the little park, where the Dauphin would not venture to shoot without asking the King’s permission. The guards, surprised at hearing the report of guns, ran to the spot, and were greatly astonished at the sight of M. de Bernis. They very respectfully asked to see his permission, when they found, to their astonishment, that he had none. They begged of him to desist, telling him that, if they did their duty, they should arrest him; but they must, at all events, instantly acquaint me with the circumstance, as Ranger of the Park of Versailles. They added, that the King must have heard the firing, and that they begged of him to retire. The Abbe apologized, on the score of ignorance, and assured them that he had my permission. ‘The Comte de Noailles,’ said they, ‘could only grant permission to shoot in the more remote parts, and in the great park.’” The Count made a great merit of his eagerness to give the earliest information to Madame. She told him to leave the task of communicating it to the King to her, and begged of him to say nothing about the matter. M. de Marigny, who did not like the Abbe, came to see me in the evening; and I affected to know nothing of the story, and to hear it for the first time from him. “He must have been out of his senses,” said he, “to shoot under the King’s windows,”–and enlarged much on the airs he gave himself. Madame de Pompadour gave this affair the best colouring she could the King was, nevertheless, greatly disgusted at it, and twenty times, since the Abbe’s disgrace, when he passed over that part of the park, he said, “This is where the Abbe took his pleasure.” The King never liked him; and Madame de Pompadour told me one night, after his disgrace, when I was sitting up with her in her illness, that she saw, before he had been Minister a week, that he was not fit for his office. “If that hypocritical Bishop,” said she, speaking of the Bishop of Mirepoix, “had not prevented the King from granting him a pension of four hundred louis a year, which he had promised me, he would never have been appointed Ambassador. I should, afterwards, have been able to give him an income of eight hundred louis a year, perhaps the place of master of the chapel. Thus he would have been happier, and I should have had nothing to regret.” I took the liberty of saying that I did not agree with her. That he had yet remaining advantages, of which he could not be deprived; that his exile would terminate; and that he would then be a Cardinal, with an income of eight thousand louis a year. “That is true,” she replied; “but I think of the mortifications he has undergone, and of the ambition which devours him; and, lastly, I think of myself. I should have still enjoyed his society, and should have had, in my declining years, an old and amiable friend, if he had not been Minister.” The King sent him away in anger, and was strongly inclined to refuse him the hat. M. Quesnay told me, some months afterwards, that the Abbe wanted to be Prime Minister; that he had drawn up a memorial, setting forth that in difficult crises the public good required that there should be a central point (that was his expression), towards which everything should be directed. Madame de Pompadour would not present the memorial; he insisted, though she said to him, “You will rain yourself.” The King cast his eyes over it, and said “‘central point,’–that is to say himself, he wants to be Prime Minister.” Madame tried to apologize for him, and said, “That expression might refer to the Marechal de Belle- Isle.”–“Is he not just about to be made Cardinal?” said the King. “This is a fine manoeuvre; he knows well enough that, by means of that dignity, he would compel the Ministers to assemble at his house, and then M. l’Abbe would be the central point. Wherever there is a Cardinal in the council, he is sure, in the end, to take the lead. Louis XIV., for this reason, did not choose to admit the Cardinal de Janson into the council, in spite of his great esteem for him. The Cardinal de Fleury told me the same thing. He had some desire that the Cardinal de Tencin should succeed him; but his sister was such an intrigante that Cardinal de Fleury advised me to have nothing to do with the matter, and I behaved so as to destroy all his hopes, and to undeceive others. M. d’Argenson has strongly impressed me with the same opinion, and has succeeded in destroying all my respect for him.” This is what the King said, according to my friend Quesnay, who, by the bye, was a great genius, as everybody said, and a very lively, agreeable man. He liked to chat with me about the country. I had been bred up there, and he used to set me a talking about the meadows of Normandy and Poitou, the wealth of the farmers, and the modes of culture. He was the best-natured man in the world, and the farthest removed from petty intrigue. While he lived at Court, he was much more occupied with the best manner of cultivating land than with anything that passed around him. The man whom he esteemed the most was M. de la Riviere, a Counsellor of Parliament, who was also Intendant of Martinique; he looked upon him as a man of the greatest genius, and thought him the only person fit for the financial department of administration. The Comtesse d’Estrades, who owed everything to Madame de Pompadour, was incessantly intriguing against her. She was clever enough to destroy all proofs of her manoeuvres, but she could not so easily prevent suspicion. Her intimate connection with M. d’Argenson gave offence to Madame, and, for some time, she was more reserved with her. She, afterwards, did a thing which justly irritated the King and Madame. The King, who wrote a great deal, had written to Madame de Pompadour a long letter concerning an assembly of the Chambers of Parliament, and had enclosed a letter of M. Berrien. Madame was ill, and laid those letters on a little table by her bedside. M. de Gontaut came in, and gossipped about trifles, as usual. Madame d’Amblimont also came, and stayed but very little time. Just as I was going to resume a book which I had been reading to Madame, the Comtesse d’Estrades entered, placed herself near Madame’s bed, and talked to her for some time. As soon as she was gone, Madame called me, asked what was o’clock, and said, “Order my door to be shut, the King will soon be here.” I gave the order, and returned; and Madame told me to give her the King’s letter, which was on the table with some other papers. I gave her the papers, and told her there was nothing else. She was very uneasy at not finding the letter, and, after enumerating the persons who had been in the room, she said, “It cannot be the little Countess, nor Gontaut, who has taken this letter. It can only be the Comtesse d’Estrades;–and that is too bad.” The King came, and was extremely angry, as Madame told me. Two days afterwards, he sent Madame d’Estrades into exile. There was no doubt that she took the letter; the King’s handwriting had probably awakened her curiosity. This occurrence gave great pain to M. d’Argenson, who was bound to her, as Madame de Pompadour said, by his love of intrigue. This redoubled his hatred of Madame, and she accused him of favouring the publication of a libel, in which she was represented as a worn-out mistress, reduced to the vile occupation of providing new objects to please her lover’s appetite. She was characterised as superintendent of the Parc-aux-cerfs, which was said to cost hundreds of thousands of louis a year. Madame de Pompadour did, indeed, try to conceal some of the King’s weaknesses, but she never knew one of the sultanas of that seraglio. There were, however, scarcely ever more than two at once, and often only one. When they married, they received some jewels, and four thousand louis. The Parc-aux-cerfs was sometimes vacant for five or six months. I was surprised, some time after, at seeing the Duchesse de Luynes, Lady of Honour to the Queen, come privately to see Madame de Pompadour. She afterwards came openly. One evening, after Madame was in bed, she called me, and said, “My dear, you will be delighted; the Queen has given me the place of Lady of the Palace; tomorrow I am to be presented to her: you must make me look well.” I knew that the King was not so well pleased at this as she was; he was afraid that it would give rise to scandal, and that it might be thought he had forced this nomination upon the Queen. He had, however, done no such thing. It had been represented to the Queen that it was an act of heroism on her part to forget the past; that all scandal would be obliterated when Madame de Pompadour was seen to belong to the Court in an honourable manner; and that it would be the best proof that nothing more than friendship now subsisted between the King and the favourite. The Queen received her very graciously. The devotees flattered themselves they should be protected by Madame, and, for some time, were full of her praises. Several of the Dauphin’s friends came in private to see her, and some obtained promotion. The Chevalier du Muy, however, refused to come. The King had the greatest possible contempt for them, and granted them nothing with a good grace. He, one day, said of a man of great family, who wished to be made Captain of the Guards, “He is a double spy, who wants to be paid on both sides.” This was the moment at which Madame de Pompadour seemed to me to enjoy the most complete satisfaction. The devotees came to visit her without scruple, and did not forget to make use of every opportunity of serving themselves. Madame de Lu—– had set them the example. The Doctor laughed at this change in affairs, and was very merry at the expense of the saints. “You must allow, however, that they are consistent,” said I, “and may be sincere.” “Yes,” said he; “but then they should not ask for anything.” One day, I was at Doctor Quesnay’s, whilst Madame de Pompadour was at the theatre. The Marquis de Mirabeau [The author of “L’Ami des Hommes,” one of the leaders of the sect of Economistes, and father of the celebrated Mirabeau. After the death of Quesnay, the Grand Master of the Order, the Marquis de Mirabeau was unanimously elected his successor. Mirabeau was not deficient in a certain enlargement of mind, nor in acquirements, nor even in patriotism; but his writings are enthusiastical, and show that he had little more than glimpses of the truth. The Friend of Man was the enemy of all his family. He beat his servants, and did not pay them. The reports of the lawsuit with his wife, in 1775, prove that this philosopher possessed, in the highest possible degree, all the anti-conjugal qualities. It is said that his eldest son wrote two contradictory depositions, and was paid by both sides.] came in, and the conversation was, for some time, extremely tedious to me, running entirely on ‘net produce’; at length, they talked of other things. Mirabeau said, “I think the King looks ill, he grows old.”–“So much the worse, a thousand times so much the worse,” said Quesnay; “it would be the greatest possible loss to France if he died;” and he raised his hands, and sighed deeply. “I do not doubt that you are attached to the King, and with reason,” said Mirabeau: “I am attached to him too; but I never saw you so much moved.”–“Ah!” said Quesnay, “I think of what would follow.”–“Well, the Dauphin is virtuous.”–“Yes; and full of good intentions; nor is he deficient in understanding; but canting hypocrites would possess an absolute empire over a Prince who regards them as oracles. The Jesuits would govern the kingdom, as they did at the end of Louis XIV.’s reign: and you would see the fanatical Bishop of Verdun Prime Minister, and La Vauguyon all-powerful under some other title. The Parliaments must then mind how they behave; they will not be better treated than my friends the philosophers.”–“But they go too far,” said Mirabeau; “why openly attack religion?”–“I allow that,” replied the Doctor; “but how is it possible not to be rendered indignant by the fanaticism of others, and by recollecting all the blood that has flowed during the last two hundred years? You must not then again irritate them, and revive in France the time of Mary in England. But what is done is done, and I often exhort them to be moderate; I wish they would follow the example of our friend Duclos.”–“You are right,” replied Mirabeau; “he said to me a few days ago, ‘These philosophers are going on at such a rate that they will force me to go to vespers and high mass;’ but, in fine, the Dauphin is virtuous, well-informed, and intellectual.”–“It is the commencement of his reign, I fear,” said Quesnay, “when the imprudent proceedings of our friends will be represented to him in the most unfavourable point of view; when the Jansenists and Molinists will make common cause, and be strongly supported by the Dauphine. I thought that M. de Muy was moderate, and that he would temper the headlong fury of the others; but I heard him say that Voltaire merited condign punishment. Be assured, sir, that the times of John Huss and Jerome of Prague will return; but I hope not to live to see it. I approve of Voltaire having hunted down the Pompignans: were it not for the ridicule with which he covered them, that bourgeois Marquis would have been preceptor to the young Princes, and, aided by his brother, would have succeeded in again lighting the faggots of persecution.”–“What ought to give you confidence in the Dauphin,” said Mirabeau, “is, that, notwithstanding the devotion of Pompignan, he turns him into ridicule. A short time back, seeing him strutting about with an air of inflated pride, he said to a person, who told it to me, ‘Our friend Pompignan thinks that he is something.’” On returning home, I wrote down this conversation. I, one day, found Quesnay in great distress. “Mirabeau,” said he, “is sent to Vincennes, for his work on taxation. The Farmers General have denounced him, and procured his arrest; his wife is going to throw herself at the feet of Madame de Pompadour to-day.” A few minutes afterwards, I went into Madame’s apartment, to assist at her toilet, and the Doctor came in. Madame said to him, “You must be much concerned at the disgrace of your friend Mirabeau. I am sorry for it too, for I like his brother.” Quesnay replied, “I am very far from believing him to be actuated by bad intentions, Madame; he loves the King and the people.” “Yes,” said she; “his ‘Ami des Hommes’ did him great honour.” At this moment the Lieutenant of Police entered, and Madame said to him, “Have you seen M. de Mirabeau’s book?”–“Yes, Madame; but it was not I who denounced it?”–“What do you think of it?”–“I think he might have said almost all it contains with impunity, if he had been more circumspect as to the manner; there is, among other objectionable passages, this, which occurs at the beginning: Your Majesty has about twenty millions of subjects; it is only by means of money that you can obtain their services, and there is no money.”–“What, is there really that, Doctor?” said Madame. “It is true, they are the first lines in the book, and I confess that they are imprudent; but, in reading the work, it is clear that he laments that patriotism is extinct in the hearts of his fellow- citizens, and that he desires to rekindle it.” The King entered: we went out, and I wrote down on Quesnay’s table what I had just heard. I them returned to finish dressing Madame de Pompadour: she said to me, “The King is extremely angry with Mirabeau; but I tried to soften him, and so did the Lieutenant of Police. This will increase Quesnay’s fears. Do you know what he said to me to-day? The King had been talking to him in my room, and the Doctor appeared timid and agitated. After the King was gone, I said to him, ‘You always seem so embarrassed in the King’s presence, and yet he is so good-natured.’–‘I Madame,’ said he, ‘I left my native village at the age of forty, and I have very little experience of the world, nor can I accustom myself to its usages without great difficulty. When I am in a room with the King, I say to myself, This is a man who can order my head to be cut off; and that idea embarrasses me.’ –‘But do not the King’s justice and kindness set you at ease?’–‘That is very true in reasoning,’ said he; ‘but the sentiment is more prompt, and inspires me with fear before I have time to say to myself all that is calculated to allay it.’” I got her to repeat this conversation, and wrote it down immediately, that I might not forget it. An anonymous letter was addressed to the King and Madame de Pompadour; and, as the author was very anxious that it should not miscarry, he sent copies to the Lieutenant of Police, sealed and directed to the King, to Madame de Pompadour, and to M. de Marigny. This letter produced a strong impression on Madame, and on the King, and still more, I believe, on the Duc de Choiseul, who had received a similar one. I went on my knees to M. de Marigny, to prevail on him to allow me to copy it, that I might show it to the Doctor. It is as follows: “Sire–It is a zealous servant who writes to Your Majesty. Truth is always better, particularly to Kings; habituated to flattery, they see objects only under those colours most likely to please them. I have reflected, and read much; and here is what my meditations have suggested to me to lay before Your Majesty. They have accustomed you to be invisible, and inspired you with a timidity which prevents you from speaking; thus all direct communication is cut off between the master and his subjects. Shut up in the interior of your palace, you are becoming every day like the Emperors of the East; but see, Sire, their fate! ‘I have troops,’ Your Majesty will say; such, also, is their support: but, when the only security of a King rests upon his troops; when he is only, as one may say, a King of the soldiers, these latter feel their own strength, and abuse it. Your finances are in the greatest disorder, and the great majority of states have perished through this cause. A patriotic spirit sustained the ancient states, and united all classes for the safety of their country. In the present times, money has taken the place of this spirit; it has become the universal lever, and you are in want of it. A spirit of finance affects every department of the state; it reigns triumphant at Court; all have become venal; and all distinction of rank is broken up. Your Ministers are without genius and capacity since the dismissal of MM. d’Argenson and de Machault. You alone cannot judge of their incapacity, because they lay before you what has been prepared by skilful clerks, but which they pass as their own. They provide only for the necessity of the day, but there is no spirit of government in their acts. The military changes that have taken place disgust the troops, and cause the most deserving officers to resign; a seditious flame has sprung up in the very bosom of the Parliaments; you seek to corrupt them, and the remedy is worse than the disease. It is introducing vice into the sanctuary of justice, and gangrene into the vital parts of the commonwealth. Would a corrupted Parliament have braved the fury of the League, in order to preserve the crown for the legitimate sovereign? Forgetting the maxims of Louis XIV., who well understood the danger of confiding the administration to noblemen, you have chosen M. de Choiseul, and even given him three departments; which is a much heavier burden than that which he would have to support as Prime Minister, because the latter has only to oversee the details executed by the Secretaries of State. The public fully appreciate this dazzling Minister. He is nothing more than a ‘petit-maitre’, without talents or information, who has a little phosphorus in his mind. There is a thing well worthy of remark, Sire; that is, the open war carried on against religion. Henceforward there can spring up no new sects, because the general belief has been shaken, that no one feels inclined to occupy himself with difference of sentiment upon some of the articles. The Encyclopedists, under pretence of enlightening mankind, are sapping the foundations of religion. All the different kinds of liberty are connected; the Philosophers and the Protestants tend towards republicanism, as well as the Jansenists. The Philosophers strike at the root, the others lop the branches; and their efforts, without being concerted, will one day lay the tree low. Add to these the Economists; whose object is political liberty, as that of the others is liberty of worship, and the Government may find itself, in twenty or thirty years, undermined in every direction, and will then fall with a crash. If Your Majesty, struck by this picture, but too true, should ask me for a remedy, I should say, that it is necessary to bring back the Government to its principles, and, above all, to lose no time in restoring order to the state of the finances, because the embarrassments incident to a country in a state of debt necessitate fresh taxes, which, after grinding the people, induce them towards revolt. It is my opinion that Your Majesty would do well to appear more among your people; to shew your approbation of useful services, and your displeasure of errors and prevarications, and neglect of duty: in a word, to let it be seen that rewards and punishments, appointments and dismissals, proceed from yourself. You will then inspire gratitude by your favours, and fear by your reproaches; you will then be the object of immediate and personal attachment, instead of which, everything is now referred to your Ministers. The confidence in the King, which is habitual to your people, is shewn by the exclamation, so common among them, ‘Ah! if the King knew it’ They love to believe that the King would remedy all their evils, if he knew of them. But, on the other hand, what sort of ideas must they form of kings, whose duty it is to be informed of everything, and to superintend everything, that concerns the public, but who are, nevertheless, ignorant of everything which the discharge of their functions requires them to know? ‘Rex, roi, regere, regar, conduire’–to rule, to conduct–these words sufficiently denote their duties. What would be said of a father who got rid of the charge of his children as of a burthen? “A time will come, Sire, when the people shall be enlightened–and that time is probably approaching. Resume the reins of government, hold them with a firm hand, and act, so that it cannot be said of you, ‘Faeminas et scorta volvit ammo et haec principatus praemia putat’:–Sire, if I see that my sincere advice should have produced any change, I shall continue it, and enter into more details; if not, I shall remain silent.” Now that I am upon the subject of anonymous letters to the King, I must just mention that it is impossible to conceive how frequent they were. People were extremely assiduous in telling either unpleasant truths, or alarming lies, with a view to injure others. As an instance, I shall transcribe one concerning Voltaire, who paid great court to Madame de Pompadour when he was in France. This letter was written long after the former. “Madame–M. de Voltaire has just dedicated his tragedy of Tancred to you; this ought to be an offering of respect and gratitude; but it is, in fact, an insult, and you will form the same opinion of it as the public has done if you read it with attention. You will see that this distinguished writer appears to betray a consciousness that the subject of his encomiums is not worthy of them, and to endeavour to excuse himself for them to the public. These are his words: ‘I have seen your graces and talents unfold themselves from your infancy. At all periods of your life I have received proofs of your uniform and unchanging kindness. If any critic be found to censure the homage I pay you, he must have a heart formed for ingratitude. I am under great obligations to you, Madame, and these obligations it is my duty to proclaim.’ “What do these words really signify, unless that Voltaire feels it may be thought extraordinary that he should dedicate his work to a woman who possesses but a small share of the public esteem, and that the sentiment of gratitude must plead his excuse? Why should he suppose that the homage he pays you will be censured, whilst we daily see dedications addressed to silly gossips who have neither rank nor celebrity, or to women of exceptional conduct, without any censure being attracted by it?” M. de Marigny, and Colin, Madame de Pompadour’s steward, were of the same opinion as Quesnay, that the author of this letter was extremely malicious; that he insulted Madame, and tried to injure Voltaire; but that he was, in fact, right. Voltaire, from that moment, was entirely out of favour with Madame, and with the King, and he certainly never discovered the cause.` The King, who admired everything of the age of Louis XIV., and recollected that the Boileaus and Racines had been protected by that monarch, who was indebted to them, in part, for the lustre of his reign, was flattered at having such a man as Voltaire among his subjects. But still he feared him, and had but little esteem for him. He could not help saying, “Moreover, I have treated him as well as Louis XIV. treated Racine and Boileau. I have given him, as Louis XIV. gave to Racine, some pensions, and a place of gentleman in ordinary. It is not my fault if he has committed absurdities, and has had the pretension to become a chamberlain, to wear an order, and sup with a King. It is not the fashion in France; and, as there are here a few more men of wit and noblemen than in Prussia, it would require that I should have a very large table to assemble them all at it.” And then he reckoned upon his fingers, Maupertuis, Fontenelle, La Mothe, Voltaire, Piron, Destouches, Montesquieu, the Cardinal Polignac. “Your Majesty forgets,” said some one, “D’Alembert and Clairaut.”–“And Crebillon,” said he. “And la Chaussee, and the younger Crebillon,” said some one. “He ought to be more agreeable than his father.”–“And there are also the Abbes Prevot and d’Olivet.”–“Pretty well,” said the King; “and for the last twenty years all that (tout cela) would have dined and supped at my table.” Madame de Pompadour repeated to me this conversation, which I wrote down the same evening. M. de Marigny, also, talked to me about it. “Voltaire,” said he, “has always had a fancy for being Ambassador, and he did all he could to make the people believe that he was charged with some political mission, the first time he visited Prussia.” The people heard of the attempt on the King’s life with transports of fury, and with the greatest distress. Their cries were heard under the windows of Madame de Pompadour’s apartment. Mobs were collected, and Madame feared the fate of Madame de Chateauroux. Her friends came in, every minute, to give her intelligence. Her room was, at all times, like a church; everybody seemed to claim a right to go in and out when he chose. Some came, under pretence of sympathising, to observe her countenance and manner. She did nothing but weep and faint away. Doctor Quesnay never left her, nor did I. M. de St. Florentin came to see her several times, so did the Comptroller-General, and M. Rouilld; but M. de Machault did not come. The Duchesse de Brancas came very frequently. The Abbe de Bernis never left us, except to go to enquire for the King. The tears came in his eyes whenever he looked at Madame. Doctor Quesnay saw the King five or six times a day. “There is nothing to fear,” said he to Madame. “If it were anybody else, he might go to a ball.” My son went the next day, as he had done the day the event occurred, to see what was going on at the Castle. He told us, on his return, that the Keeper of the Seals was with the King. I sent him back, to see what course he took on leaving the King. He came running back in half an hour, to tell me that the Keeper of the Seals had gone to his own house, followed by a crowd of people. When I told this to Madame, she burst into tears, and said, “Is that a friend?” The Abbe de Bernis said, “You must not judge him hastily, in such a moment as this.” I returned into the drawing-room about an hour after, when the Keeper of the Seals entered. He passed me, with his usual cold and severe look. “How is Madame de Pompadour?” said he. “Alas!” replied I, “as you may imagine!” He passed on to her closet. Everybody retired, and he remained for half an hour. The Abbe returned and Madame rang. I went into her room, the Abbe following me. She was in tears. “I must go, my dear Abbe,” said she. I made her take some orange-flower water, in a silver goblet, for her teeth chattered. She then told me to call her equerry. He came in, and she calmly gave him her orders, to have everything prepared at her hotel, in Paris; to tell all her people to get ready to go; and to desire her coachman not to be out of the way. She then shut herself up, to confer with the Abbe de Bernis, who left her, to go to the Council. Her door was then shut, except to the ladies with whom she was particularly intimate, M. de Soubise, M. de Gontaut, the Ministers, and some others. Several ladies, in the greatest distress, came to talk to me in my room: they compared the conduct of M. de Machault with that of M. de Richelieu, at Metz. Madame had related to them the circumstances extremely to the honour of the Duke, and, by contrast, the severest satire on the Keeper of the Seals. “He thinks, or pretends to think,” said she, “that the priests will be clamorous for my dismissal; but Quesnay and all the physicians declare that there is not the slightest danger.” Madame having sent for me, I saw the Marechale de Mirepoix coming in. While she was at the door, she cried out, “What are all those trunks, Madame? Your people tell me you are going.”–“Alas! my dear friend, such is our Master’s desire, as M. de Machault tells me.”–“And what does he advise?” said the Marechale. “That I should go without delay.” During this conversation, I was undressing Madame, who wished to be at her ease on her chaise-longue. “Your Beeper of the Seals wants to get the power into his own hands, and betrays you; he who quits the field loses it.” I went out. M. de Soubise entered, then the Abbe and M. de Marigny. The latter, who was very kind to me, came into my room an hour afterwards. I was alone. “She will remain,” said he; “but, hush!–she will make an appearance of going, in order not to set her enemies at work. It is the little Marechale who prevailed upon her to stay: her keeper (so she called M. de Machault) will pay for it.” Quesnay came in, and, having heard what was said, with his monkey airs, began to relate a fable of a fox, who, being at dinner with other beasts, persuaded one of them that his enemies were seeking him, in order that he might get possession of his share in his absence. I did not see Madame again till very late, at her going to bed. She was more calm. Things improved, from day to day, and de Machault, the faithless friend, was dismissed. The King returned to Madame de Pompadour, as usual. I learnt, by M. de Marigny, that the Abbe had been, one day, with M. d’Argenson, to endeavour to persuade him to live on friendly terms with Madame, and that he had been very coldly received. “He is the more arrogant,” said he, “on account of Machault’s dismissal, which leaves the field clear for him, who has more experience, and more talent; and I fear that he will, therefore, be disposed to declare war till death.” The next day, Madame having ordered her chaise, I was curious to know where she was going, for she went out but little, except to church, and to the houses of the Ministers. I was told that she was gone to visit M. d’Argenson. She returned in an hour, at farthest, and seemed very much out of spirits. She leaned on the chimneypiece, with her eyes fixed on the border of it. M. de Bernis entered. I waited for her to take off her cloak and gloves. She had her hands in her muff. The Abbe stood looking at her for some minutes; at last he said, “You look like a sheep in a reflecting mood.” She awoke from her reverie, and, throwing her muff on the easy-chair, replied, “It is a wolf who makes the sheep reflect.” I went out: the King entered shortly after, and I heard Madame de Pompadour sobbing. The Abbe came into my room, and told me to bring some Hoffman’s drops: the King himself mixed the draught with sugar, and presented it to her in the kindest manner possible. She smiled, and kissed the King’s hands. I left the room. Two days after, very early in the morning, I heard of M. d’Argenson’s exile. It was her doing, and was, indeed, the strongest proof of her influence that could be given. The King was much attached to M. d’Argenson, and the war, then carrying on, both by sea and land, rendered the dismissal of two such Ministers extremely imprudent. This was the universal opinion at the time. Many people talk of the letter of the Comte d’Argenson to Madame d’Esparbes. I give it, according to the most correct version: “The doubtful is, at length, decided. The Keeper of the Seals is dismissed. You will be recalled, my dear Countess, and we shall be masters of the field.” It is much less generally known that Arboulin, whom Madame calls Bou-bou, was supposed to be the person who, on the very day of the dismissal of the Keeper of the Seals, bribed the Count’s confidential courier, who gave him this letter. Is this report founded on truth? I cannot swear that it is; but it is asserted that the letter is written in the Count’s style. Besides, who could so immediately have invented it? It, however, appeared certain, from the extreme displeasure of the King, that he had some other subject of complaint against M. d’Argenson, besides his refusing to be reconciled with Madame. Nobody dares to show the slightest attachment to the disgraced Minister. I asked the ladies who were most intimate with Madame de Pompadour, as well as my own friends, what they knew of the matter; but they knew nothing. I can understand why Madame did not let them into her confidence at that moment. She will be less reserved in time. I care very little about it, since I see that she is well, and appears happy. The King said a thing, which did him honour, to a person whose name Madame withheld from me. A nobleman, who had been a most assiduous courtier of the Count, said, rubbing his hands with an air of great joy, “I have just seen the Comte d’Argenson’s baggage set out.” When the King heard him, he went up to Madame, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “And immediately the cock crew.” “I believe this is taken from Scripture, where Peter denies Our Lord. I confess, this circumstance gave me great pleasure. It showed that the King is not the dupe of those around him, and that he hates treachery and ingratitude.” ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS: A liar ought to have a good memoryBecause he is fat, he is thought dull and heavy Danger of confiding the administration to noblemen Do not repulse him in his fond momentsHe who quits the field loses itMoney the universal lever, and you are in want of it Offering you the spectacle of my miseries Sentiment is more prompt, and inspires me with fear Sworn that she had thought of nothing but you all her life To despise money, is to despise happiness, liberty… We look upon you as a cat, or a dog, and go on talking When the only security of a King rests upon his troops You tell me bad news: having packed up, I had rather go MEMOIRS OF LOUIS XV. AND XVI. Being Secret Memoirs of Madame du Hausset, Lady’s Maid to Madame de Pompadour, and of an unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe BOOK 2. Madame sent for me yesterday evening, at seven o’clock, to read something to her; the ladies who were intimate with her were at Paris, and M. de Gontaut ill. “The King,” said she, “will stay late at the Council this evening; they are occupied with the affairs of the Parliament again.” She bade me leave off reading, and I was going to quit the room, but she called out, “Stop.” She rose; a letter was brought in for her, and she took it with an air of impatience and ill-humour. After a considerable time she began to talk openly, which only happened when she was extremely vexed; and, as none of her confidential friends were at hand, she said to me, “This is from my brother. It is what he would not have dared to say to me, so he writes. I had arranged a marriage for him with the daughter of a man of title; he appeared to be well inclined to it, and I, therefore, pledged my word. He now tells me that he has made inquiries; that the parents are people of insupportable hauteur; that the daughter is very badly educated; and that he knows, from authority not to be doubted, that when she heard this marriage discussed, she spoke of the connection with the most supreme contempt; that he is certain of this fact; and that I was still more contemptuously spoken of than himself. In a word, he begs me to break off the treaty. But he has let me go too far; and now he will make these people my irreconcilable enemies. This has been put in his head by some of his flatterers; they do not wish him to change his way of living; and very few of them would be received by his wife.” I tried to soften Madame, and, though I did not venture to tell her so, I thought her brother right. She persisted in saying these were lies, and, on the following Sunday, treated her brother very coldly. He said nothing to me at that time; if he had, he would have embarrassed me greatly. Madame atoned for everything by procuring favours, which were the means of facilitating the young lady’s marriage with a gentleman of the Court. Her conduct, two months after marriage, compelled Madame to confess that her brother had been perfectly right. I saw my friend, Madame du Chiron. “Why,” said she, “is the Marquise so violent an enemy to the Jesuits? I assure you she is wrong. All powerful as she is, she may find herself the worse for their enmity.” I replied that I knew nothing about the matter. “It is, however, unquestionably a fact; and she does not feel that a word more or less might decide her fate.”–“How do you mean?” said I. “Well, I will explain myself fully,” said she. “You know what took place at the time the King was stabbed: an attempt was made to get her out of the Castle instantly. The Jesuits have no other object than the salvation of their penitents; but they are men, and hatred may, without their being aware of it, influence their minds, and inspire them with a greater degree of

title: “The Memoirs Of Louis Xv And Xvi Entire By Madame Du Hausset " ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-28” author: “Marie Duffy”

[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the file for those who may wish to sample the author’s ideas before making an entire meal of them. D.W.] MEMOIRS OF LOUIS XV. AND XVI. Being Secret Memoirs of Madame du Hausset, Lady’s Maid to Madame de Pompadour, and of an unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe BOOK 7 SECTION XIII. Editor in continuation: I am again, for this and the following chapter, compelled to resume the pen in my own person, and quit the more agreeable office of a transcriber for my illustrious patroness. I have already mentioned that the Princesse de Lamballe, on first returning from England to France, anticipated great advantages from the recall of the emigrants. The desertion of France by so many of the powerful could not but be a deathblow to the prosperity of the monarchy. There was no reason for these flights at the time they began. The fugitives only set fire to the four quarters of the globe against their country. It was natural enough that the servants whom they had left behind to keep their places should take advantage of their masters’ pusillanimity, and make laws to exclude those who had, uncalled for, resigned the sway into bolder and more active hands. I do not mean to impeach the living for the dead; but, when we see those bearing the lofty titles of Kings and Princesses, escaping with their wives and families, from an only brother and sister with helpless infant children, at the hour of danger, we cannot help wishing for a little plebeian disinterestedness in exalted minds. I have travelled Europe twice, and I have never seen any woman with that indescribable charm of person, manner, and character, which distinguished Marie Antoinette. This is in itself a distinction quite sufficient to detach friends from its possessor through envy. Besides, she was Queen of France, the woman of highest rank in a most capricious, restless and libertine nation. The two Princesses placed nearest to her, and who were the first to desert her, though both very much inferior in personal and mental qualifications, no doubt, though not directly, may have entertained some anticipations of her place. Such feelings are not likely to decrease the distaste, which results from comparisons to our own disadvantage. It is, therefore, scarcely to be wondered at, that those nearest to the throne should be least attached to those who fill it. How little do such persons think that the grave they are thus insensibly digging may prove their own! In this case it only did not by a miracle. What the effect of the royal brothers’ and the nobility’s remaining in France would have been we can only conjecture. That their departure caused, great and irreparable evils we know; and we have good reason to think they caused the greatest. Those who abandon their houses on fire, silently give up their claims to the devouring element. Thus the first emigration kindled the French flame, which, though for a while it was got under by a foreign stream, was never completely, extinguished till subdued by its native current. The unfortunate Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette ceased to be Sovereigns from the period they were ignominiously dragged to their jail at the Tuileries. From this moment they were abandoned to the vengeance of miscreants, who were disgracing the nation with unprovoked and useless murders. But from this moment also the zeal of the Princesses Elizabeth and de Lamballe became redoubled. Out of one hundred individuals and more, male and female, who had been exclusively occupied about the person of Marie Antoinette, few, excepting this illustrious pair, and the inestimable Clery, remained devoted to the last. The saint-like virtues of these Princesses, malice itself has not been able to tarnish. Their love and unalterable friendship became the shield of their unfortunate Sovereigns, and their much injured relatives, till the dart struck their own faithful bosoms. Princes of the earth! here is a lesson of greatness from the great. Scarcely had the Princesse de Lamballe been reinstated in the Pavilion of Flora at the Tuileries, when, by the special royal command, and in Her Majesty’s presence, she wrote to most of the nobility, entreating their return to France. She urged them, by every argument, that there was no other means of saving them and their country from the horrors impending over them and France, should they persevere in their pernicious absence. In some of these letters, which I copied, there was written on the margin, in the Queen’s hand, “I am at her elbow, and repeat the necessity of your returning, if you love your King, your religion, your Government, and your country. Marie Antoinette. Return! Return! Return!” Among these letters, I remember a large envelope directed to the Duchesse de Brisac, then residing alternately at the baths of Albano and the mineral waters at Valdagno, near Vicenza, in the Venetian States. Her Grace was charged to deliver letters addressed to Her Majesty’s royal brothers, the Comte de Provence, and the Comte d’Artois, who were then residing, I think, at Stra, on the Brenta, in company with Madame de Polcatre, Diane de Polignac, and others. A few days after, I took another envelope, addressed to the Count Dufour, who was at Turin. It contained letters for M. and Madame de Polignac, M. and Madame de Guiche Grammont, the King’s aunts at Rome, and the two Princesses of Piedmont, wives of His Majesty’s brothers. If, therefore, a judgment can be formed from the impressions of the Royal Family, who certainly must have had ample information with respect to the spirit which predominated at Paris at that period, could the nobility have been prevailed on to have obeyed the mandates of the Queen and prayers and invocations of the Princess, there can be no doubt that much bloodshed would have been spared, and the page of history never have been sullied by the atrocious names which now stand there as beacons of human infamy. The storms were now so fearfully increasing that the King and Queen, the Duc de Penthievre, the Count Fersen, the Princesse Elizabeth, the Duchesse d’Orleans, and all the friends of the Princesse de Lamballe, once more united in anxious wishes for her to quit France. Even the Pope himself endeavoured to prevail upon Her Highness to join the royal aunts at Rome. To all these applications she replied, “I have nothing to reproach myself with. If my inviolable duty and unalterable attachment to my Sovereigns, who are my relations and my friends; if love for my dear father and for my adopted country are crimes, in the face of God and the world I confess my guilt, and shall die happy if in such a cause!” The Duc de Penthievre, who loved her as well as his own child, the Duchesse d’Orleans, was too good a man, and too conscientious a Prince, not to applaud the disinterested firmness of his beloved daughter-in-law; yet, foreseeing and dreading the fatal consequence which must result from so much virtue at a time when vice alone predominated, unknown to the Princesse de Lamballe, he interested the Court of France to write to the Court of Sardinia to entreat that the King, as head of her family, would use his good offices in persuading the Princess to leave the scenes of commotion, in which she was so much exposed, and return to her native country. The King of Sardinia, her family, and her particular friend, the Princess of Piedmont, supplicated ineffectually. The answer of Her Highness to the King, at Turin, was as follows “SIRE, AND MOST AUGUST COUSIN,– “I do not recollect that any of our illustrious ancestors of the house of Savoy, before or since the great hero Charles Emmanuel, of immortal memory, ever dishonoured or tarnished their illustrious names with cowardice. In leaving the Court of France at this awful crisis, I should be the first. Can Your Majesty pardon my presumption in differing from your royal counsel? The King, Queen, and every member of the Royal Family of France, both from the ties of blood and policy of States, demand our united efforts in their defence. I cannot swerve from my determination of never quitting them, especially at a moment when they are abandoned by every one of their former attendants, except myself. In happier days Your Majesty may command my obedience; but, in the present instance, and given up as is the Court of France to their most atrocious persecutors, I must humbly insist on being guided by my own decision. During the most brilliant period of the reign of Marie Antoinette, I was distinguished by the royal favour and bounty. To abandon her in adversity, Sire, would stain my character, and that of my illustrious family, for ages to come, with infamy and cowardice, much more to be dreaded than the most cruel death.” Similar answers were returned to all those of her numerous friends and relatives, who were so eager to shelter her from the dangers threatening Her Highness and the Royal Family. Her Highness was persuaded, however, to return once more to England, under the pretext of completing the mission she had so successfully began; but it is very clear that neither the King or Queen had any serious idea of her succeeding, and that their only object was to get her away from the theatre of disaster. Circumstances had so completely changed for the worst, that, though Her Highness was received with great kindness, her mission was no longer listened to. The policy of England shrunk from encouraging twenty thousand French troops to be sent in a body to the West Indies, and France was left to its fate. A conversation with Mr. Burke, in which the disinclination of England to interfere was distinctly owned, created that deep-rooted grief and apprehension in the mind of the Queen from which Her Majesty never recovered. The Princesse de Lamballe was the only one in her confidence. It is well known that the King of England greatly respected the personal virtues of Their French Majesties; but upon the point of business, both King and Ministers were now become ambiguous and evasive. Her Highness, therefore, resolved to return. It had already been whispered that she had left France, only to save herself, like the rest; and she would no longer remain under so slanderous an imputation. She felt, too, the necessity of her friendship to her royal mistress. Though the Queen of England, by whom Her Highness was very much esteemed, and many other persons of the first consequence in the British nation, foreseeing the inevitable fate of the Royal Family, and of all their faithful adherents, anxiously entreated her not to quit England, yet she became insensible to every consideration as to her own situation and only felt the isolated one of her august Sovereign, her friend, and benefactress. SECTION XIV. Editor in continuation: Events seemed molded expressly to produce the state of feeling which marked that disastrous day, the 20th of June, 1792. It frequently happens that nations, like individuals, rush wildly upon the very dangers they apprehend, and select such courses as invite what they are most solicitous to avoid. So it was with everything preceding this dreadful day. By a series of singular occurrences I did not witness its horrors, though in some degree their victim. Not to detain my readers unnecessarily, I will proceed directly to the accident which withdrew me from the scene. The apartment of the Princesse de Lamballe, in the Pavilion of Flora, looked from one side upon the Pont Royal. On the day of which I speak, a considerable quantity of combustibles had been thrown from the bridge into one of her rooms. The Princess, in great alarm, sent instantly for me. She desired to have my English man servant, if he were not afraid, secreted in her room, while she herself withdrew to another part of the palace, till the extent of the intended mischief could be ascertained. I assured Her Highness that I was not only ready to answer for my servant, but would myself remain with him, as he always went armed, and I was so certain of his courage and fidelity that I could not hesitate even to trust my life in his hands. “For God’s sake, ‘mia cara’,” exclaimed the Princess, “do not risk your own safety, if you have any value for my friendship. I desire you not to go near the Pavilion of Flora. Your servant’s going is quite sufficient. Never again let me hear such a proposition. What! after having hitherto conducted yourself so punctually, would you, by one rash act, devote yourself to ruin, and deprive us of your valuable services?” I begged Her Highness would pardon the ardour of the dutiful zeal I felt for her in the moment of danger. “Yes, yes,” continued she; “that is all very well; but this is not the first time I have been alarmed at your too great intrepidity; and if ever I hear of your again attempting to commit yourself so wantonly, I will have you sent to Turin immediately, there to remain till you have recovered your senses. I always thought English heads cool; but I suppose your residence in France has changed the national character of yours.” Once more, with tears in my eyes, I begged her forgiveness, and, on my knees, implored that she would not send me away in the hour of danger. After having so long enjoyed the honour of her confidence, I trusted she would overlook my fault, particularly as it was the pure emanation of my resentment at any conspiracy against one I so dearly loved; and to whom I had been under so many obligations, that the very idea of being deprived of such a benefactress drove me frantic. Her Highness burst into tears. “I know your heart,” exclaimed she; “but I also know too well our situation, and it is that which makes me tremble for the consequences which must follow your overstepping the bounds so necessary to be observed by all of us at this horrid period.” And then she called me again her cars ‘Inglesina’, and graciously condescended to embrace me, and bathed my face with her tears, in token of her forgiveness, and bade me sit down and compose myself, and weep no more. Scarcely was I seated, when we were both startled by deafening shouts for the head of Madame Veto, the name they gave the poor unfortunate Queen. An immense crowd of cannibals and hired ruffians were already in the Tuileries, brandishing all sorts of murderous weapons, and howling for blood! My recollections from this moment are very indistinct. I know that in an instant the apartment was filled; that the Queen, the Princesse Elizabeth, all the attendants, even the King, I believe, appeared there. I myself received a wound upon my hand in warding a blow from my face; and in the turmoil of the scene, and of the blow, I fainted, and was conveyed by some humane person to a place of safety, in the upper part of the palace. Thus deprived of my senses for several hours, I was spared the agony of witnessing the scenes of horror that succeeded. For two or three days I remained in a state of so much exhaustion and alarm, that when the Princess came to me I did not know her, nor even where I was. As soon as I was sufficiently recovered, places were taken for me and another person in one of the common diligences, by which I was conveyed to Passy, where the Princess came to me in the greatest confusion. My companion in the palace was the widow of one of the Swiss guards, who had been murdered on the 6th of October, in defending the Queen’s apartment at Versailles. The poor woman had been herself protected by Her Majesty, and accompanied me by the express order of the Princesse de Lamballe. What the Princess said to her on departing, I know not, for I only caught the words “general insurrection,” on hearing which the afflicted woman fell into a fit. To me, Her Highness merely exclaimed, “Do not come to Paris till you hear from me;” and immediately set off to return to the Tuileries. However, as usual, my courage soon got the better of my strength, and of every consideration of personal safety. On the third day, I proposed to the person who took care of me that we should both walk out together, and, if there appeared no symptoms of immediate danger, it was agreed that we might as well get into one of the common conveyances, and proceed forthwith to Paris; for I could no longer repress my anxiety to learn what was going on there, and the good creature who was with me was no less impatient. When we got into a diligence, I felt the dread of another severe lecture like the last, and thought it best not to incur fresh blame by new imprudence. I therefore told the driver to set us down on the high road near Paris leading to the Bois de Boulogne. But before we got so far, the woods resounded with the howling of mobs, and we heard, “Vive le roi” vociferated, mingled with “Down with the King,”–“Down with the Queen;” and, what was still more horrible, the two parties were in actual bloody strife, and the ground was strewn with the bodies of dead men, lying like slaughtered sheep. It was fortunate that we were the only persons in the vehicle. The driver, observing our extreme agitation, turned round to us. “Nay, nay,” cried he; “do not alarm yourselves. It is only the constitutionalists and the Jacobins fighting against each other. I wish the devil had them both.” It was evident, however, that, though the man was desirous of quieting our apprehensions, he was considerably disturbed by his own; for though he acknowledged he had a wife and children in Paris, who he hoped were safe, still he dared not venture to proceed, but said, if we wished to be driven back, he would take us to any place we liked, out of Paris. Our anxiety to know what was going forward at the Tuileries was now become intolerable; and the more so, from the necessity we felt of restraining our feelings. At last, however, we were in some degree relieved from this agony of reserve. “God knows,” exclaimed the driver, “what will be the consequence of all this bloodshed! The poor King and Queen are greatly to be pitied!” This ejaculation restored our courage, and we said he might drive us wherever he chose out of the sight of those horrors; and it was at length settled that he should take us to Passy. “Oh,” cried he, “if you will allow me, I will take you to my father’s house there; for you seem more dead than alive, both of you, and ought to go where you can rest in quiet and safety.” My companion, who was a German, now addressed me in that language. “German!” exclaimed the driver on hearing her. “German! Why, I am a German myself, and served the good King, who is much to be pitied, for many years; and when I was wounded, the Queen, God bless her! set me up in the world, as I was made an invalid; and I have ever since been enabled to support my family respectably. D—- the Assembly! I shall never be a farthing the better for them!” “Oh,” replied I, “then I suppose you are not a Jacobin?” The driver, with a torrent of curses, then began execrating the very name of Jacobin. This emboldened me to ask him when he had left Paris. He replied, “Only this very morning,” and added that the Assembly had shut the gates of the Tuileries under the pretence of preventing the King and Queen from being assassinated. “But that is all a confounded lie,” continued he, “invented to keep out the friends of the Royal Family. But, God knows, they are now so fallen, they have few such left to be turned away!” “I am more enraged,” pursued he, “at the ingratitude of the nobility than I am at these hordes of bloodthirsty plunderers, for we all know that the nobility owe everything to the King. Why do they not rise en masse to shield the Royal Family from these bloodhounds? Can they imagine they will be spared if the King should be murdered? I have no patience with them!” I then asked him our fare. “Two livres is the fare, but you shall not pay anything. I see plainly, ladies, that you are not what you assume to be.” “My good man,” replied I, “we are not; and therefore take this louis d’or for your trouble.” He caught my hand and pressed it to his lips, exclaiming, “I never in my life knew a man who was faithful to his King, that God did not provide for.” He then took us to Passy, but advised us not to remain at the place where we had been staying; and fortunate enough it was for us that we did not, for the house was set on fire and plundered by a rebel mob very soon after. I told the driver how much I was obliged to him for his services, and he seemed delighted when I promised to give him proofs of my confidence in his fidelity. “If,” said I, “you can find out my servant whom I left in Paris, I will give you another louis d’or.” I was afraid, at first, to mention where he was to look for him. “If he be not dead,” replied the driver, “I will find him out.” “What!” cried I, “even though he should be at the Tuileries?” “Why, madame, I am one of the national guard. I have only to put on my uniform to be enabled to go to any part of the palace I please. Tell me his name, and where you think it likely he may be found, and depend upon it I will bring him to you.” “Perhaps,” continued he, “it is your husband disguised as a servant; but no matter. Give me a clue, and I’ll warrant you he shall tell you the rest himself by this time to-morrow.” “Well, then,” replied I, “he is in the Pavilion of Flora.” “What, with the Princesse de Lamballe? Oh, I would go through fire and water for that good Princess! She has done me the honour to stand godmother to one of my children, and allows her a pension.” I took him at his word. We changed our quarters to his father’s house, a very neat little cottage, about a quarter of a mile from the town. He afterwards rendered me many services in going to and fro from Passy to Paris; and, as he promised, brought me my servant. When the poor fellow arrived, his arm was in a sling. He had been wounded by a musket shot, received in defence of the Princess. The history of his disaster was this: On the night of the riot, as he was going from the Pont Royal to the apartment of Her Highness, he detected a group of villains under her windows. Six of them were attempting to enter by a ladder. He fired, and two fell. While he was reloading, the others shot at him. Had he not, in the flurry of the moment, fired both his pistols at the same time, he thinks he should not have been wounded, but might have punished the assailant. One of the men, he said, could have been easily taken by the national guard, who so glaringly encouraged the escape that he could almost swear the guard was a party concerned. The loss of blood had so exhausted him that he could not pursue the offender himself, whom otherwise he could have taken without any difficulty. As the employing of my servant had only been proposed, and the sudden interruption of my conversation with Her Highness by the riot had prevented my ever communicating the project to him, I wondered how he got into the business, or ascertained so soon that the apartment of the Princess was in danger. He explained that he never had heard of its being so; but my own coachman having left me at the palace that day, and not hearing of me for some time, had driven home, and, fearing that my not returning arose from something which had happened, advised him to go to the Pont Royal and hear what he could learn, as there was a report of many persons having been murdered and thrown over the bridge. My man took the advice, and armed himself to be ready in case of attack. It was between one and two o’clock after midnight when he went. The first objects he perceived were these miscreants attempting to scale the palace. He told me that the Queen had been most grossly insulted; that the gates of the Tuileries had been shut in consequence; that a small part alone remained open to the public, who were kept at their distance by a national ribbon, which none could pass without being instantly arrested. This had prevented his apprising the Princess of the attempt which he had accidentally defeated, and which he wished me to communicate to her immediately. I did so by letter, which my good driver carried to Paris, and delivered safe into the hands of our benefactress. The surprise of the Princess on hearing from me, and her pleasure at my good fortune in finding by accident such means, baffles all description. Though she was at the time overwhelmed with the imminent dangers which threatened her, yet she still found leisure to show her kindness to those who were doing their best, though in vain, to serve her. The following letter, which she sent me in reply, written amidst all the uneasiness it describes, will speak for her more eloquently than my praises: “I can understand your anxiety. It was well for you that you were unconscious of the dreadful scenes which were passing around you on that horrid day. The Princesse de Tarente, Madame de Tourzel, Madame de Mockau, and all the other ladies of the household owed the safety of their lives to one of the national guards having given his national cockade to the Queen. Her Majesty placed it on her head, unperceived by the mob. One of the gentlemen of the King’s wardrobe provided the King and the Princesse Elizabeth with the same impenetrable shield. Though the cannibals came for murder, I could not but admire the enthusiastic deference that was shown to this symbol of authority, which instantly paralyzed, the daggers uplifted for our extermination. “Merlin de Thionville was the stoic head of this party. The Princesse Elizabeth having pointed him out to me, I ventured to address him respecting the dangerous situation to which the Royal Family were daily exposed. I flattered him upon his influence over the majority of the faubourgs, to which only we could look for the extinction of these disorders. He replied that the despotism of the Court had set a bad example to the people; that he felt for the situation of the royal party as individuals, but he felt much more for the safety of the French nation, who were in still greater danger than Their Majesties had to dread, from the Austrian faction, by which a foreign army had been encouraged to invade the territory of France, where they were now waiting the opportunity of annihilating French liberty forever! “To this Her Majesty replied, ‘When the deputies of the Assembly have permitted, nay, I may say, encouraged this open violation of the King’s asylum, and, by their indifference to the safety of all those who surround us, have sanctioned the daily insults to which we have been, and still are, exposed, it is not to be wondered, at that all Sovereigns should consider it their interest to make common cause with us, to crush internal commotions, levelled, not only against the throne, and the persons of the Sovereign and his family, but against the very principle of monarchy itself.’ “Here the King, though much intimidated for the situation of the Queen and his family, for whose heads the wretches were at that very moment howling in their ears, took up the conversation. “‘These cruel facts,’ said he, ‘and the menacing situation you even now witness, fully justify our not rejecting foreign aid, though God knows how deeply I deplore the necessity of such a cruel resource! But, when all internal measures of conciliation have been trodden under foot, and the authorities, who ought to check it and protect us from these cruel outrages, are only occupied in daily fomenting the discord between us and our subjects; though a forlorn hope, what other hope is there of safety? I foresee the drift of all these commotions, and am resigned; but what will become of this misguided nation, when the head of it shall be destroyed?’ “Here the King, nearly choked by his feelings, was compelled to pause for a moment, and he then proceeded. “‘I should not feel it any sacrifice to give up the guardianship of the nation, could I, in so doing, insure its future tranquillity; but I foresee that my blood, like that of one of my unhappy brother Sovereigns,–[Charles the First, of England.]– will only open the flood- gates of human misery, the torrent of which, swelled with the best blood of France, will deluge this once peaceful realm.’ “This, as well as I can recollect, is the substance of what passed at the castle on this momentous day. Our situation was extremely doubtful, and the noise and horrid riots were at times so boisterous, that frequently we could not, though so near them, distinguish a word the King and Queen said; and yet, whenever the leaders of these organized ruffians spoke or threatened, the most respectful stillness instantly prevailed. “I weep in silence for misfortunes, which I fear are inevitable! The King, the Queen, the Princesse Elizabeth and myself, with many others under this unhappy roof, have never ventured to undress or sleep in bed, till last night. None of us any longer reside on the ground floor. “By the very manly exertions of some of the old officers incorporated in the national army, the awful riot I have described was overpowered, and the mob, with difficulty, dispersed. Among these, I should particularize Generals de Vomenil, de Mandat, and de Roederer. Principally by their means the interior of the Tuileries was at last cleared, though partial mobs, such as you have often witnessed, still subsist. “I am thus particular in giving you a full account of this last revolutionary commotion, that your prudence may still keep you at a distance from the vortex. Continue where you are, and tell your man servant how much I am obliged to him, and, at the same time, how much I am grieved at his being wounded! I knew nothing of the affair but from your letter and your faithful messenger. He is an old pensioner of mine, and a good honest fellow. You may depend on him. Serve yourself, through him, in communicating with me. Though he has had a limited education, he is not wanting in intellect. Remember that honesty, in matters of such vital import, is to be trusted before genius. “My apartment appears like a barrack, like a bear garden, like anything but what it was! Numbers of valuable things have been destroyed, numbers carried off. Still, notwithstanding all the horrors of these last days, it delights me to be able to tell you that no one in the service of the Royal Family failed in duty at this dreadful crisis. I think we may firmly rely on the inviolable attachment of all around us. No jealousy, no considerations of etiquette, stood in the way of their exertions to show themselves worthy of the situations they hold. The Queen showed the greatest intrepidity during the whole of these trying scenes. “At present, I can say no more. Petion, the Mayor of Paris, has just been announced; and, I believe, he wishes for an audience of Her Majesty, though he never made his appearance during the whole time of the riots in the palace. Adieu, mia cara Inglesina!” The receipt of this letter, however it might have affected me to hear what Her Highness suffered, in common with the rest of the unfortunate royal inmates of the Tuileries, gave me extreme pleasure from the assurance it contained of the firmness of those nearest to the sufferers. I was also sincerely gratified in reflecting on the probity and disinterested fidelity of this worthy man, which contrasted him, so strikingly and so advantageously to himself, with many persons of birth and education, whose attachment could not stand the test of the trying scenes of the Revolution, which made them abandon and betray, where they had sworn an allegiance to which they were doubly bound by gratitude. My man servant was attended, and taken the greatest care of. The Princess never missed a day in sending to inquire after his health; and, on his recovery, the Queen herself not only graciously condescended to see him, but, besides making him a valuable present, said many flattering and obliging things of his bravery and disinterestedness. I should scarcely have deemed these particulars honourable as they are to the feelings of the illustrious personages from whom they proceeded– worth mentioning in a work of this kind, did they not give indications of character rarely to be met with (and, in their case, how shamefully rewarded!), from having occurred at a crisis when their minds were occupied in affairs of such deep importance, and amidst the appalling dangers which hourly threatened their own existence. Her Majesty’s correspondence with foreign Courts had been so much increased by these scenes of horror, especially her correspondence with her relations in Italy, that, ere long, I was sent for back to Paris. SECTION XV. Journal of the Princess resumed and concluded: “The insurrection of the 20th of June, and the uncertain state of the safety of the Royal Family, menaced as it was by almost daily riots, induced a number of well-disposed persons to prevail on General La Fayette to leave his army and come to Paris, and there personally remonstrate against these outrages. Had he been sincere he would have backed the measure by appearing at the head of his army, then well- disposed, as Cromwell did when he turned out the rogues who were seeking the Lord through the blood of their King, and put the keys in his pocket. Violent disorders require violent remedies. With an army and a few pieces of cannon at the door of the Assembly, whose members were seeking the aid of the devil, for the accomplishment of their horrors, he might, as was done when the same scene occurred in England in 1668, by good management; have averted the deluge of blood. But, by appearing before the Assembly isolated, without ‘voila mon droit,’ which the King of Prussia had had engraven on his cannon, he lost the opinion of all parties. [In this instance the general grossly committed himself, in the opinion of every impartial observer of his conduct. He should never have shown himself in the capital, but at the head of his army. France, circumstanced as it was, torn by intestine commotion, was only to be intimidated by the sight of a popular leader at the head of his forces. Usurped authority can only be quashed by the force of legitimate authority. La Fayette being the only individual in France that in reality possessed such an authority, not having availed himself at a crisis like the one in which he was called upon to act, rendered his conduct doubtful, and all his intended operations suspicious to both parties, whether his feelings were really inclined to prop up the fallen kingly authority, or his newly-acquired republican principles prompted him to become the head of the democratical party, for no one can see into the hearts of men; his popularity from that moment ceased to exist.] “La Fayette came to the palace frequently, but the King would never see him. He was obliged to return, with the additional mortification of having been deceived in his expected support from the national guard of Paris, whose pay had been secretly trebled by the National Assembly, in order to secure them to itself. His own safety, therefore, required that he should join the troops under his command. He left many persons in whom he thought he could confide; among whom were some who came to me one day requesting I would present them to the Queen without loss of time, as a man condemned to be shot had confessed to his captain that there was a plot laid to murder Her Majesty that very night. “I hastened to the royal apartment, without mentioning the motive; but some such catastrophe was no more than what we incessantly expected, from the almost hourly changes of the national guard, for the real purpose of giving easy access to all sorts of wretches to the very rooms of the unfortunate Queen, in order to furnish opportunities for committing the crime with impunity. “After I had seen the Queen, the applicants were introduced, and, in my presence, a paper was handed by them to Her Majesty. At the moment she received it, I was obliged to leave her for the purpose of watching an opportunity for their departure unobserved. These precautions were necessary with regard to every person who came to us in the palace, otherwise the jealousy of the Assembly and its emissaries and the national guard of the interior might have been alarmed, and we should have been placed under express and open surveillance. The confusion created by the constant change of guard, however, stood us in good stead in this emergency. Much passing and repassing took place unheeded in the bustle. “When the visitors had departed, and Her Majesty at one window of the palace, and I at another, had seen them safe over the Pont Royal, I returned to Her Majesty. She then graciously handed me the paper which they had presented. “It contained an earnest supplication, signed by many thousand good citizens, that the King and Queen would sanction the plan of sending the Dauphin to the army of La Fayette. They pledged themselves, with the assistance of the royalists, to rescue the Royal Family. They, urged that if once the King could be persuaded to show himself at the head of his army, without taking any active part, but merely for his own safety and that of his family, everything might be accomplished with the greatest tranquillity. “The Queen exclaimed, ‘What! send my child! No! never while I breathe! [Little did this unfortunate mother think that they, who thus pretended to interest themselves for this beautiful, angelic Prince only a few months before, would, when she was in her horrid prison after the butchery of her husband, have required this only comfort to be violently torn from her maternal arms! Little, indeed, did she think, when her maternal devotedness thus repelled the very thought of his being trusted to myriads of sworn defenders, how soon he would be barbarously consigned by the infamous Assembly as the foot-stool of the inhuman savage cobbler, Simon, to be the night-boy of the excrements of the vilest of the works of human nature!] Yet were I an independent Queen, or the regent of a minority, I feel that I should be inclined to accept the offer, to place myself at the head of the army, as my immortal mother did, who, by that step, transmitted the crown of our ancestors to its legitimate descendants. It is the monarchy itself which now requires to be asserted. Though D’ORLEANS is actively engaged in attempting the dethronement of His Majesty, I do not think the nation will submit to such a Prince, or to any other monarchical government, if the present be decidedly destroyed. “‘All these plans, my dear Princess,’ continued she, ‘are mere castles in the air. The mischief is too deeply rooted. As they have already frantically declared for the King’s abdication, any strong measure now, incompetent as we are to assure its success, would at once arm the advocates of republicanism to proclaim the King’s dethronement. “‘The cruel observations of Petion to His Majesty, on our ever memorable return from Varennes, have made a deeper impression than you are aware of. When the King observed to him, “What do the French nation want?”– “A republic,” replied he. And though he has been the means of already costing us some thousands, to crush this unnatural propensity, yet I firmly believe that he himself is at the head of all the civil disorders fomented for its attainment. I am the more confirmed in this opinion from a conversation I had with the good old man, M. De Malesherbes, who assured me the great sums we were lavishing on this man were thrown away, for he would be certain, eventually, to betray us: and such an inference could only have been drawn from the lips of the traitor himself. Petion must have given Malesherbes reason to believe this. I am daily more and more convinced it will be the case. Yet, were I to show the least energy or activity in support of the King’s authority, I should then be accused of undermining it. All France would be up in arms against the danger of female influence. The King would only be lessened in the general opinion of the nation, and the kingly authority still more weakened. Calm submission to His Majesty is, therefore, the only safe, course for both of us, and we must wait events.’ “While Her Majesty was thus opening her heart to me, the King and Princesse Elizabeth entered, to inform her that M. Laporte, the head of the private police, had discovered, and caused to be arrested, some of the wretches who had maliciously attempted to fire the palace of the Tuileries. “‘Set them at liberty!’ exclaimed Her Majesty; ‘or, to clear themselves and their party, they will accuse us of something worse.’ “‘Such, too, is my opinion, Sire,’ observed I; ‘for however I abhor their intentions, I have here a letter from one of these miscreants which was found among the combustibles. It cautions us not to inhabit the upper part of the Pavilion. My not having paid the attention which was expected to the letter, has aroused the malice of the writer, and caused a second attempt to be made from the Pont Royal upon my own apartment; in preventing which, a worthy man has been cruelly wounded in the arm.’ “‘Merciful Heaven!’ exclaimed the poor Queen and the Princesse Elizabeth, I not dangerously, I hope! “‘I hope not,’ added I; ‘but the attempt, and its escaping unpunished, though there were guards all around, is a proof how perilous it will be, while we are so weak, to kindle their rancour by any show of impotent resentment; for I have reason to believe it was to that, the want of attention to the letter of which I speak was imputed.’ “The Queen took this opportunity, of laying before the King the above- mentioned plan. His Majesty, seeing it in the name of La Fayette, took up the paper, and, after he had attentively perused it, tore it in pieces, exclaiming, ‘What! has not M. La Fayette done mischief enough yet, but must he even expose the names of so many worthy men by committing them to paper at a critical period like this, when he is fully aware that we are in immediate danger of being assailed by a banditti of inhuman cannibals, who would sacrifice every individual attached to us, if, unfortunately, such a paper should be found? I am determined to have nothing to do with his ruinous plans. Popularity and ambition made him the principal promoter of republicanism. Having failed of becoming a Washington, he is mad to become a Cromwell. I have no faith in these turncoat constitutionalists.’ “I know that the Queen heartily concurred in this sentiment concerning General La Fayette, as soon as she ascertained his real character, and discovered that he considered nothing paramount to public notoriety. To this he had sacrificed the interest of his country, and trampled under foot the throne; but finding he could not succeed in forming a Republican Government in France as he had in America, he, like many others, lost his popularity with the demagogues, and, when too late, came to offer his services, through me, to the Queen, to recruit a monarchy which his vanity had undermined to gratify, his chimerical ambition. Her Majesty certainly saw him frequently, but never again would she put herself in the way of being betrayed by one whom she considered faithless to all.” [Thus ended the proffered services of General La Fayette, who then took the command of the national army, served against that of the Prince de Conde, and the Princes of his native country, and was given up with General Bournonville, De Lameth, and others, by General Dumourier, on the first defeat of the French, to the Austrians, by whom they were sent to the fortress of Olmutz in Hungary, where they remained till after the death of the wretch Robespierre, when they were exchanged for the Duchesse d’Angouleme, now Dauphine of France. From the retired life led by General La Fayette on his return to France, there can be but little doubt that he spent a great part of his time in reflecting on the fatal errors of his former conduct, as he did not coincide with any of the revolutionary principles which preceded the short-lived reign of imperialism. But though Napoleon too well knew him to be attached from principle to republicanism– every vestige of which he had long before destroyed–to employ him in any military capacity, still he recalled him from his hiding- place, in order to prevent his doing mischief, as he politically did–every other royalist whom he could bring under the banners of his imperialism. Had Napoleon made use of his general knowledge of mankind in other respects, as he politically did in France over his conquered subjects, in respecting ancient habits, and gradually weaned them from their natural prejudices instead of violently forcing all men to become Frenchmen, all men would have fought for him, and not against him. These were the weapons by which his power became annihilated, and which, in the end, will be the destruction of all potentates who presume to follow his fallacious plan of forming individuals to a system instead of accommodating systems to individuals. The fruits from Southern climes have been reared in the North, but without their native virtue or vigour. It is more dangerous to attack the habits of men than their religion. The British Constitution, though a blessing to Englishmen, is very ill-suited to nations not accustomed to the climate and its variations. Every country has peculiarities of thought and manners resulting from the physical influence of its sky and soil. Whenever we lose sight of this truth, we naturally lose the affections of those whose habits we counteract.] Here ends the Journal of my lamented benefactress. I have continued the history to the close of her career, and that of the Royal Family, especially as Her Highness herself acted so important a part in many of the scenes, which are so strongly illustrated by her conversation and letters. It is only necessary to add that the papers which I have arranged were received from Her Highness amidst the disasters which were now thickening around her and her royal friends. SECTION XVI. From the time I left Passy till my final departure from Paris for Italy, which took place on the 2nd of August, 1792, my residence was almost exclusively at the capital. The faithful driver, who had given such proofs of probity, continued to be of great service, and was put in perpetual requisition. I was daily about on the business of the Queen and the Princess, always disguised, and most frequently as a drummerboy; on which occasions the driver and my man servant were my companions. My principal occupation was to hear and take down the debates of the Assembly, and convey and receive letters from the Queen to the Princesse de Lamballe, to and from Barnave, Bertrand de Moleville, Alexandre de Lameth, Deport de Fertre, Duportail, Montmorin, Turbo, De Mandat, the Duc de Brissac, etc., with whom my illustrious patronesses kept up a continued correspondence, to which I believe all of them fell a sacrifice; for, owing to the imprudence of the King in not removing their communications when he removed the rest of his papers from the Tuileries, the exposure of their connections with the Court was necessarily consequent upon the plunder of the palace on the 10th of August, 1792. In my masquerade visits to the Assembly, I got acquainted with an editor of one of the papers; I think he told me his name was Duplessie. Being pleased with the liveliness of my remarks on some of the organized disorders, as I termed them, and with some comments I made upon the meanness of certain disgusting speeches on the patriotic gifts, my new acquaintance suffered me to take copies of his own shorthand remarks and reports. By this means the Queen and the Princess had them before they appeared in print. M. Duplessie was on other occasions of great service to me, especially as a protector in the mobs, for my man servant and the honest driver were so much occupied in watching the movements of the various faubourg factions, that I was often left entirely unattended. The horrors of the Tuileries, both by night and day, were now grown appallingly beyond description. Almost unendurable as they had been before, they were aggravated by the insults of the national guard to every passenger to and from the palace. I was myself in so much peril, that the Princess thought it necessary to procure a trusty person, of tried courage, to see me through the throngs, with a large bandbox of all sorts of fashionable millinery, as the mode of ingress and egress least liable to excite suspicion. Thus equipped, and guarded by my cicisbeo, I one day found myself, on entering the Tuileries, in the midst of an immense mob of regular trained rioters, who, seeing me go towards the palace, directed their attention entirely to me. They took me for some one belonging to the Queen’s milliner, Madame Bertin, who, they said, was fattening upon the public misery, through the Queen’s extravagance. The poor Queen herself they called by names so opprobious that decency will not suffer me to repeat them. With a volley of oaths, pressing upon us, they bore us to another part of the garden, for the purpose of compelling us to behold six or eight of the most infamous outcasts, amusing themselves, in a state of exposure, with their accursed hands and arms tinged with blood up to the elbows. The spot they had chosen for this exhibition of their filthy persons was immediately before the windows of the apartments of the Queen and the ladies of the Court. Here they paraded up and down, to the great entertainment of a throng of savage rebels, by whom they were applauded and encouraged with shouts of “Bis! bis!” signifying in English,” Again! again!” The demoniac interest excited by this scene withdrew the attention of those who were enjoying it from me, and gave me the opportunity of escaping unperceived, merely with the loss of my bandbox. Of that the infuriated mob made themselves masters; and the hats, caps, bonnets, and other articles of female attire, were placed on the parts of their degraded carcases, which, for the honour of human nature, should have been shot. Overcome with agony at these insults, I burst from the garden in a flood of tears. On passing the gate, I was accosted by a person who exclaimed in a tone of great kindness, “Qu’as tu, ma bonne? qu’est ce qui vous afflige?” Knowing the risk I should run in representing the real cause of my concern, I immediately thought of ascribing it to the loss of the property of which I had been plundered. I told him I was a poor milliner, and had been robbed of everything I possessed in the world by the mob. “Come back with me,” said he, “and I will have it restored to you.” I knew it was of no avail, but policy stimulated me to comply; and I returned with him into the garden toward the palace. What should I have felt, had I been aware, when this man came up, that I was accosted by the villain Danton! The person who was with me knew him, but dared not speak, and watched a chance of escaping in the crowd for fear of being discovered. When I looked round and found myself alone, I said I had lost my brother in the confusion, which added to my grief. “Oh, never mind,” said Danton; “take hold of my arm; no one shall molest you. We will look for your brother, and try to recover your things;” and on we went together: I, weeping, I may truly say, for my life, stopped at every step, while he related my doleful story to all whose curiosity was excited by my grief. On my appearing arm in arm with Danton before the windows of the Queen’s apartments, we were observed by Her Majesty and the Princesses. Their consternation and perplexity, as well as alarm for my safety, may readily be conceived. A signal from the window instantly apprised me that I might enter the palace, to which my return had been for some time impatiently expected. Finding it could no longer be of any service to carry on the farce of seeking my pretended brother, I begged to be escorted out of the mob to the apartments of the Princesse de Lamballe. “Oh,” said Danton, “certainly! and if you had only told the people that you were going to that good Princess, I am sure your things would not have been taken from you. But,” added he, “are you perfectly certain they were not for that detestable Marie Antoinette?” “Oh!” I replied, “quite, quite certain!” All this while the mob was at my heels. “Then,” said he, “I will not leave you till you are safe in the apartments of the Princesse de Lamballe, and I will myself make known to her your loss: she is so good,” continued he, “that I am convinced she will make you just compensation.” I then told him how much I should be obliged by his doing so, as I had been commissioned to deliver the things, and if I was made to pay for them, the loss would be more serious than I could bear. “Bah! bah!” exclaimed he. “Laissez moi faire! Laissez moi faire!” When he came to the inner door, which I pretended to know nothing about, he told the gentleman of the chamber his name, and said he wished to see his mistress. Her Highness came in a few minutes, and from her looks and visible agitation at the sight of Danton, I feared she would have betrayed both herself and me. However, while he was making a long preamble, I made signs, from which she inferred that all was safe. When Danton had finished telling her the story, she calmly said to me, “Do you recollect, child, the things you have been robbed of?” I replied that, if I had pen and ink, I could even set down the prices. “Oh, well, then, child, come in,” said Her Highness, “and we will see what is to be done!” “There!” exclaimed Danton; “Did I not tell you this before?” Then, giving me a hearty squeeze of the hand, he departed, and thus terminated the millinery speculation, which, I have no doubt, cost Her Highness a tolerable sum. As soon as he was gone, the Princess said, “For Heaven’s sake, tell me the whole of this affair candidly; for the Queen has been in the greatest agitation at the bare idea of your knowing Danton, ever since we first saw you walking with him! He is one of our moat inveterate enemies.” I said that if they had but witnessed one half of the scenes that I saw, I was sure their feelings would have been shocked beyond description. “We did not see all, but we heard too much for the ears of our sex.” I then related the particulars of our meeting to Her Highness, who observed, “This accident, however unpleasant, may still turn out to our advantage. This fellow believes you to be a marchande de modes, and the circumstance of his having accompanied you to my apartment will enable you, in future, to pass to and from the Pavilion unmolested by the national guard.” With tears of joy in her eyes for my safety, she could not, however, help laughing when I told her the farce I kept up respecting the loss of my brother, and my bandbox with the millinery, for which I was also soon congratulated most graciously by Her Majesty, who much applauded my spirit and presence of mind, and condescended, immediately, to entrust me with letters of the greatest importance, for some of the most distinguished members of the Assembly, with which I left the palace in triumph, but taking care to be ready with a proper story of my losses. When I passed the guard-room, I was pitied by the very wretches, who, perhaps, had already shared in the spoils; and who would have butchered me, no doubt, into the bargain, could they have penetrated the real object of my mission. They asked me if I had been paid for the loss I sustained. I told them I had not, but I was promised that it should be settled. “Settled!” said one of the wretches. “Get the money as soon as you can. Do not trust to promises of its being settled. They will all be settled themselves soon!” The next day, on going to the palace, I found the Princesse de Lamballe in the greatest agitation, from the accounts the Court had just received of the murder of a man belonging to Arthur Dillon, and of the massacres at Nantes. “The horrid prints, pamphlets, and caricatures,” cried she, “daily exhibited under the very windows of the Tuileries, against His Majesty, the Queen, the Austrian party, and the Coblentz party, the constant thwarting of every plan, and these last horrors at Nantes, have so overwhelmed the King that he is nearly become a mere automaton. Daily and nightly execrations are howled in his ears. Look at our boasted deliverers! The poor Queen, her children, and all of us belonging to the palace, are in danger of our lives at merely being seen; while they by whom we have been so long buoyed up with hope are quarrelling amongst themselves for the honour and etiquette of precedency, leaving us to the fury of a race of cannibals, who know no mercy, and will have destroyed us long before their disputes of etiquette can be settled.” The utterance of Her Highness while saying this was rendered almost inarticulate by her tears. “What support against internal disorganization,” continued she, “is to be expected from so disorganized a body as the present army of different nations, having all different interests?” I said there was no doubt that the Prussian army was on its march, and would soon be joined by that of the Princes and of Austria. “You speak as you wish, mia cara Inglesina, but it is all to no purpose. Would to God they had never been applied to, never been called upon to interfere. Oh, that Her Majesty could have been persuaded to listen to Dumourier and some other of the members, instead of relying on succours which, I fear, will never enter Paris in our lifetime! No army can subdue a nation; especially a nation frenzied by the recent recovery of its freedom and independence from the shackles of a corrupt and weak administration. The King is too good; the Queen has no equal as to heart; but they have both been most grossly betrayed. The royalists on one side, the constitutionalists on the other, will be the victims of the Jacobins, for they are the most powerful, they are the most united, they possess the most talent, and they act in a body, and not merely for the time being. Believe me, my dear, their plans are too well grounded to be defeated, as every one framed by the fallacious constitutionalists and mad-headed royalists has been; and so they will ever be while they continue to form two separate interests. From the very first moment when these two bodies were worked upon separately, I told the Queen that, till they were united for the same object, the monarchy would be unsafe, and at the mercy of the Jacobins, who, from hatred to both parties, would overthrow it themselves to rule despotically over those whom they no longer respected or feared, but whom they hated, as considering them both equally their former oppressors. “May the All-seeing Power,” continued Her Highness, “grant, for the good of this shattered State, that I may be mistaken, and that my predictions may prove different in the result; but of this I see no hope, unless in the strength of our own internal resources. God knows how powerful they might prove could they be united at this moment! But from the anarchy and division kept up between them, I see no prospect of their being brought to bear, except in a general overthrow of this, as you have justly observed, organized system of disorders, from which at some future period we may obtain a solid, systematic order of government. Would Charles the Second ever have reigned after the murder of his father had England been torn to pieces by different factions? No! It was the union of the body of the nation for its internal tranquillity, the amalgamation of parties against domestic faction, which gave vigour to the arm of power, and enabled the nation to check foreign interference abroad, while it annihilated anarchy at home. By that means the Protector himself laid the first stone of the Restoration. The division of a nation is the surest harbinger of success to its invaders, the death-blow to its Sovereign’s authority, and the total destruction of that innate energy by which alone a country can obtain the dignity of its own independence.” SECTION XVII. While Her Highness was thus pondering on the dreadful situation of France, strengthening her arguments by those historical illustrations, which, from the past, enabled her to look into the future, a message came to her from Her Majesty. She left me, and, in a few minutes, returned to her apartment, accompanied by the Queen and Her Royal Highness the Princesse Elizabeth. I was greatly surprised at seeing these two illustrious and august personages bathed in tears. Of course, I could not be aware of any new motive to create any new or extraordinary emotion; yet there was in the countenances of all of the party an appearance different from anything I had ever witnessed in them, or any other person before; a something which seemed to say, they no longer had any affinity with the rest of earthly beings. They had all been just writing to their distant friends and relations. A fatal presentiment, alas! too soon verified, told them it was for the last time. Her Highness the Princesse de Lamballe now approached me. “Her Majesty,” observed the Princess, “wishes to give you a mark of her esteem, in delivering to you, with her own hands, letters to her family, which it is her intention to entrust to your especial care. “On this step Her Majesty has resolved, as much to send you out of the way of danger, as from the conviction occasioned by the firm reliance your conduct has created in us, that you will faithfully obey the orders you may receive, and execute our intentions with that peculiar intelligence which the emergency of the case requires. “But even the desirable opportunity which offers, through you, for the accomplishment of her mission, might not have prevailed with Her Majesty to hasten your departure, had not the wretch Danton twice inquired at the palace for the ‘little milliner,’ whom he rescued and conducted safe to the apartments of the Pavilion of Flora. This, probably, may be a matter of no real consequence whatever; but it is our duty to avoid danger, and it has been decided that you should, at least for a time, absent Paris. “Per cio, mia cara Inglesina, speak now, freely and candidly: is it your wish to return to England, or go elsewhere? For though we are all sorry to lose you, yet it would be a source of still greater sorrow to us, prizing your services and fidelity as we do, should any plans and purposes of ours lead you into difficulty or embarrassment.” “Oh, mon Dieu! c’est vrai!” interrupted Her Majesty, her eyes at the same time filled with tears. “I should never forgive myself,” continued the Princess, “if I should prove the cause of any misfortune to you.” “Nor I!” most graciously subjoined the Queen. “Therefore,” pursued the Princess, “speak your mind without reserve.” Here my own feelings, and the sobs of the illustrious party, completely overcame me, and I could not proceed. The Princesse de Lamballe clasped me in her arms. “Not only letters,” exclaimed she, “but my life I would trust to the fidelity of my vera, verissima, cara Inglesina! And now,” continued Her Highness, turning round to the Queen, “will it please Your Majesty to give Inglesina your commands.” “Here, then,” said the Queen, “is a letter for my dear sister, the Queen of Naples, which you must deliver into her own hands. Here is another for my sister, the Duchess of Parma. If she should not be at Parma, you will find her at Colorno. This is for my brother, the Archduke of Milan; this for my sister-in-law, the Princesse Clotilde Piedmont, at Turin; and here are four others. You will take off the envelope when you get to Turin, and then put them into the post yourself. Do not give them to, or send them by, any person whatsoever. “Tell my sisters the state of Paris. Inform them of our cruel situation. Describe the riots and convulsions you have seen. Above all, assure them how dear they are to me, and how much I love them.” At the word love, Her Majesty threw herself on a sofa and wept bitterly. The Princesse Elizabeth gave me a letter for her sister, and two for her aunts, to be delivered to them, if at Rome; but if not, to be put under cover and sent through the post at Rome to whatever place they might have made their residence. I had also a packet of letters to deliver for the Princesse de Lamballe at Turin; and another for the Duc de Serbelloni at Milan. Her Majesty and the Princesse Elizabeth not only allowed me the honour to kiss their hands, but they, both gave me their blessing, and good wishes for my safe return, and then left me with the Princesse de Lamballe. Her Majesty had scarcely left the apartment of the Princess, when I recollected she had forgotten to give me the cipher and the key for the letters. The Princess immediately went to the Queen’s apartment, and returned with them shortly after. “Now that we are alone,” said Her Highness, “I will tell you what Her Majesty has graciously commanded me to signify to you in her royal name. The Queen commands me to say that you are provided for for life; and that, on the first vacancy which may occur, she intends fixing you at Court. “Therefore mia cara Inglesina, take especial care what you are about, and obey Her Majesty’s wishes when you are absent, as implicitly as you have hitherto done all her commands during your abode near her. You are not to write to any one. No one is to be made acquainted with your route. You are not to leave Paris in your own carriage. It will be sent after you by your man servant, who is to join you at Chalon sur Saone. “I have further to inform you that Her Majesty the Queen, on sending you the cipher, has at the same time graciously condescended to add these presents as further marks of her esteem.” Her Highness then showed me a most beautiful gold watch, chain and seals. “These,” said she, placing them with her own hands, “Her Majesty desired me to put round your neck in testimony of her regard.” At the same time Her Highness presented me, on her own part, with a beautiful pocketbook, the covers of which were of gold enamelled, with the word “SOUVENIR” in diamonds on one side, and a large cipher of her own initials on the other. The first page contained the names of the Queen and Her Royal Highness the Princesse Elizabeth, in their own handwriting. There was a cheque in it on a Swiss banker, at Milan, of the name of Bonny. Having given me these invaluable tokens, Her Highness proceeded with her instructions. “At Chalon,” continued she, “mia cara, your man servant will perhaps bring you other letters. Take two places in the stage for yourself and your femme de chambre, in her name, and give me the memorandum, that our old friend, the driver, may procure the passports. You must not be seen; for there is no doubt that Danton has given the police a full description of your person. Now go and prepare: we shall see each other again before your departure.” Only a few minutes afterwards my man servant came to me to say that it would be some hours before the stage would set off, and that there was a lady in her carriage waiting for me in the Bois de Boulogne. I hastened thither. What was my surprise on finding it was the Princess. I now saw her for the last time! Let me pass lightly over this sad moment. I must not, however, dismiss the subject, without noticing the visible changes which had taken place in the short space of a month, in the appearance of all these illustrious Princesses. Their very complexions were no longer the same, as if grief had changed the whole mass of their blood. The Queen, in particular, from the month of July to the 2d of August, looked ten years older. The other two Princesses were really worn out with fatigue, anxiety, and the want of rest, as, during the whole month of July, they scarcely ever slept, for fear of being murdered in their beds, and only threw themselves on them, now and then, without undressing. The King, three or four times in the night, would go round to their different apartments, fearful they might be destroyed in their sleep, and ask, “Etes vous la?” when they would answer him from within, “Nous sommes encore ici.” Indeed, if, when nature was exhausted, sleep by chance came to the relief of their worn-out and languid frames, it was only to awaken them to fresh horrors, which constantly threatened the convulsion by which they were finally annihilated. It would be uncandid in me to be silent concerning the marked difference I found in the feelings of the two royal sisters of Her Majesty. I had never had the honour before to execute any commissions for her Royal Highness the Duchess of Parma, and, of course, took that city in my way to Naples. I did not reach Parma till after the horrors which had taken place at the Tuileries on the 10th of August, 1792. The whole of the unfortunate Royal Family of France were then lodged in the Temple. There was not a feeling heart in Europe unmoved at their afflicting situation. I arrived at Colorno, the country residence of the Duchess of Parma, just as Her Royal Highness was going out on horseback. I ordered my servant to inform one of the pages that I came by express from Paris, and requested the honour to know when it would be convenient for Her Royal Highness to allow me a private audience, as I was going, post-haste, to Rome and Naples. Of course, I did not choose to tell my business either to my own or Her Royal Highness’s servant, being in honour and duty bound to deliver the letter and the verbal message of her then truly unfortunate sister in person and in privacy. The mention of Paris I saw somewhat startled and confused her. Meantime, she came near enough to my carriage for me to say to her in German, in order that none of the servants, French or Italian, might understand, that I had a letter to deliver into her own hands, without saying from whom. She then desired I would alight, and she soon followed me; and, after having very graciously ordered me some refreshments, asked me from whom I had been sent. I delivered Her Majesty’s letter. Before she opened it, she exclaimed, “‘O Dio! tutto e perduto e troppo tardi’! Oh, God! all is lost, it is too late!” I then gave her the cipher and the key. In a few minutes I enabled her to decipher the letter. On getting through it, she again exclaimed, “‘E tutto inutile’! it is entirely useless! I am afraid they are all lost. I am sorry you are so situated as not to allow of your remaining here to rest from your fatigue. Whenever you come to Parma, I shall be glad to see you.” She then took out her pocket handkerchief, shed a few tears, and said that, as circumstances were now so totally changed, to answer the letter might only commit her, her sister, and myself; but that if affairs took the turn she wished, no doubt, her sister would write again. She then mounted her horse, and wished me a good journey; and I took leave, and set off for Rome. I must confess that the conduct of the Duchess of Parma appeared to me rather cold, if not unfeeling. Perhaps she was afraid of showing too much emotion, and wished to encourage the idea that Princesses ought not to give way to sensibility, like common mortals. But how different was the conduct of the Queen of Naples! She kissed the letter: she bathed it with her tears! Scarcely could she allow herself time to decipher it. At every sentence she exclaimed, “Oh, my dear, oh, my adored sister! What will become of her! My brothers are now both no more! Surely, she will soon be liberated!” Then, turning suddenly to me, she asked with eagerness, “Do you not think she will? Oh, Marie, Marie! why did she not fly to Vienna? Why did she not come to me instead of writing? Tell me, for God’s sake, all you know!” I said I knew nothing further of what had taken place at Paris, having travelled night and day, except what I had heard from the different couriers, which I had met and stopped on my route; but I hoped to be better informed by Sir William Hamilton, as all my letters were to be sent from France to Turin, and thence on to Sir William at Naples; and if I found no letters with him, I should immediately set off and return to Turin or Milan, to be as near France as possible for my speedy return if necessary. I ventured to add that it was my earnest prayer that all the European Sovereigns would feel the necessity of interesting themselves for the Royal Family of France, with whose fate the fate of monarchy throughout Europe might be interwoven. “Oh, God of Heaven!” cried the Queen, “all that dear family may ere now have been murdered! Perhaps they are already numbered among the dead! Oh, my poor, dear, beloved Marie! Oh, I shall go frantic! I must send for General Acton.” Wringing her hands, she pulled the bell, and in a few minutes the general came. On his entering the apartment, she flew to him like one deprived of reason. “There!” exclaimed she. “There! Behold the fatal consequences!” showing him the letter. “Louis XVI. is in the state of Charles the First of England, and my sister will certainly be murdered.” “No, no, no!” exclaimed the general. “Something will be done. Calm yourself, madame.” Then turning to me, “When,” said he, “did you leave Paris?” “When all was lost!” interrupted the Queen. “Nay,” cried the general; “pray let me speak. All is not lost, you will find; have but a little patience.” “Patience!” said the Queen. “For two years I have heard of nothing else. Nothing has been done for these unfortunate beings.” She then threw herself into a chair. “Tell him!” cried she to me, “tell him! tell him!” I then informed the general that I had left Paris on the 2d of August, but did not believe at the time, though the daily riots were horrible, that such a catastrophe could have occurred so soon as eight days after. The Queen was now quite exhausted, and General Acton rang the bell for the lady-in-waiting, who entered accompanied by the Duchesse Curigliano Marini, and they assisted Her Majesty to bed. When she had retired, “Do not,” said the general to me, “do not go to Sir William’s to-night. He is at Caserte. You seem too much fatigued.” “More from grief,” replied I, “and reflection on the fatal consequences that might result to the great personages I have so lately left, than from the journey.” “Take my advice,” resumed he. “You had much better go to bed and rest yourself. You look very ill.” I did as he recommended, and went to the nearest hotel I could find. I felt no fatigue of mind or body till I had got into bed, where I was confined for several days with a most violent fever. During my illness I received every attention both from the Court, and our Ambassador and Lady Hamilton, who kindly visited me every day. The Queen of Naples I never again saw till my return in 1793, after the murder of the Queen of France; and I am glad I did not, for her agony would have acted anew upon my disordered frame, and might have proved fatal. I was certainly somewhat prepared for a difference of feeling between the two Princesses, as the unfortunate Marie Antoinette, in the letters to the Queen of Naples, always wrote, “To my much beloved sister, the Queen of the two Sicilies, etc.,” and to the other, merely, “To the Duchess of Parma, etc.” But I could never have dreamt of a difference so little flattering, under such circumstances, to the Duchess of Parma. SECTION XVIII. From the moment of my departure from Paris on the 2d of August, 1792, the tragedy hastened to its denouement. On the night of the 9th, the tocsin was sounded, and the King and the Royal Family looked upon their fate as sealed. Notwithstanding the personal firmness of His Majesty, he was a coward for others. He dreaded the responsibility of ordering blood to be shed, even in defence of his nearest and dearest interests. Petion, however, had given the order to repel force by force to De Mandat, who was murdered upon the steps of the Hotel de Ville. It has been generally supposed that Petion had received a bribe for not ordering the cannon against the Tuileries on the night of the 9th, and that De Mandat was massacred by the agents of Petion for the purpose of extinguishing all proof that he was only acting under the instructions of the Mayor. I shall not undertake to judge of the propriety of the King’s impression that there was no safety from the insurgents but in the hall, and under the protection of the Assembly. Had the members been well disposed towards him, the event might have proved very different. But there is one thing certain. The Queen would never have consented to this step but to save the King and her innocent children. She would have preferred death to the humiliation of being under obligations to her sworn enemies; but she was overcome by the King declaring, with tears in his eyes, that he would not quit the palace without her. The Princesses Elizabeth and de Lamballe fell at her feet, implored Her Majesty to obey the King, and assured her there was no alternative between instant death and refuge from it in the Assembly. “Well,” said the Queen, “if our lot be death, let us away to receive it with the national sanction.” I need not expatiate on the succession of horrors which now overwhelmed the royal sufferers. Their confinement at the Feuillans, and their subsequent transfer to the Temple, are all topics sufficiently enlarged upon by many who were actors in the scenes to which they led. The Princesse de Lamballe was, while it was permitted, the companion of their captivity. But the consolation of her society was considered too great to be continued. Her fate had no doubt been predetermined; and, unwilling to await the slow proceedings of a trial, which it was thought politic should precede the murder of her royal mistress, it was found necessary to detach her from the wretched inmates of the Temple, in order to have her more completely within the control of the miscreants, who hated her for her virtues. The expedient was resorted to of casting suspicion upon the correspondence which Her Highness kept up with the exterior of the prison, for the purpose of obtaining such necessaries as were required, in consequence of the utter destitution in which the Royal Family retired from the Tuileries. Two men, of the names of Devine and Priquet, were bribed to create a suspicion, by their informations against the Queen’s female attendant. The first declared that on the 18th of August, while he was on duty near the cell of the King, he saw a woman about eleven o’clock in the day come from a room in the centre, holding in one hand three letters, and with the other cautiously opening the door of the right-hand chamber, whence she presently came back without the letters and returned into the centre chamber. He further asserted that twice, when this woman opened the door, he distinctly saw a letter half- written, and every evidence of an eagerness to hide it from observation. The second informant, Priquet, swore that, while on duty as morning sentinel on the gallery between the two towers, he saw, through the window of the central chamber, a woman writing with great earnestness and alarm during the whole time he was on guard. All the ladies were immediately summoned before the authorities. The hour of the separation between the Princess and her royal friend accorded with the solemnity of the circumstance. It was nearly midnight when they were torn asunder, and they never met again. The examinations were all separate. That of the Princesse de Lamballe was as follows Q. Your name? A. Marie-Therese-Louise de Savoy, Bourbon Lamballe. Q. What do you know of the events which occurred on the 10th of August? A. Nothing. Q. Where did you pass that day? A. As a relative I followed the King to the National Assembly. Q. Were you in bed on the nights of the 9th and 10th? A. No. Q. Where were you then? A. In my apartments, at the chateau. Q. Did you not go to the apartments of the King in the course of that night? A. Finding there was a likelihood of a commotion, went thither towards one in the morning. Q. You were aware, then, that the people had arisen? A. I learnt it from hearing the tocsin. Q. Did you see the Swiss and National Guards, who passed the night on the terrace? A. I was at the window, but saw neither. Q. Was the King in his apartment when you went thither? A. There were a great number of persons in the room, but not the King. Q. Did you know of the Mayor of Paris being at the Tuileries? A. I heard he was there. Q. At what hour did the King go to the National Assembly? A. Seven. Q. Did he not, before he went, review the troops? Do you know the oath he made them swear? A. I never heard of any oath. Q. Have you any knowledge of cannon being mounted and pointed in the apartments? A. No. Q. Have you ever seen Messrs. Mandat and d’Affry in the chateau? A. No. Q. Do you know the secret doors of the Tuileries? A. I know of no such doors. Q. Have you not, since you have been in the Temple, received and written letters, which you sought to send away secretly? A. I have never received or written any letters, excepting such as have been delivered to the municipal officer. Q. Do you know anything of an article of furniture which is making for Madame Elizabeth? A. No. Q. Have you not recently received some devotional books? A. No. Q. What are the books which you have at the Temple? A. I have none. Q. Do you know anything of a barred staircase? A. No. Q. What general officers did you see at the Tuileries, on the nights of the 9th and 10th? A. I saw no general officers, I only saw M. Roederer. For thirteen hours was Her Highness, with her female companions in misfortune, exposed to these absurd forms, and to the gaze of insulting and malignant curiosity. At length, about the middle of the day, they were told that it was decreed that they should be detained till further orders, leaving them the choice of prisons, between that of la Force and of la Salpetriere. Her Highness immediately decided on the former. It was at first determined that she should be separated from Madame de Tourzel, but humanity so far prevailed as to permit the consolation of her society, with that of others of her friends and fellow-sufferers, and for a moment the Princess enjoyed the only comfort left to her, that of exchanging sympathy with her partners in affliction. But the cell to which she was doomed proved her last habitation upon earth. On the 1st of September the Marseillois began their murderous operations. Three hundred persons in two days massacred upwards of a thousand defence less prisoners, confined under the pretext of malpractices against the State, or rather devotedness to the royal cause. The spirit which produced the massacres of the prisons at Paris extended them through the principal towns and cities all over France. Even the universal interest felt for the Princesse de Lamballe was of no avail against this frenzy. I remember once (as if it were from a presentiment of what was to occur) the King observing to her, “I never knew any but fools and sycophants who could keep themselves clear from the lash of public censure. How is it, then, that you, my dear Princess, who are neither, contrive to steer your bark on this dangerous coast without running against the rocks on which so many good vessels like your own have been dashed to pieces?” “Oh, Sire,” replied Her Highness, “my time is not yet come–I am not dead yet!” Too soon, and too horribly, her hour did come! The butchery of the prisons was now commenced. The Duc de Penthievre set every engine in operation to save his beloved daughter-in-law. He sent for Manuel, who was then Procureur of Paris. The Duke declared that half his fortune should be Manuel’s if he could but save the Princesse de Lamballe and the ladies who were in the same prison with her from the general massacre. Manuel promised the Duke that he would instantly set about removing them all from the reach of the blood-hunters. He began with those whose removal was least likely to attract attention, leaving the Princesse de Lamballe, from motives of policy, to the last. Meanwhile, other messengers had been dispatched to different quarters for fear of failure with Manuel. It was discovered by one of these that the atrocious tribunal,–[Thibaudeau, Hebert, Simonier, etc.]– who sat in mock judgment upon the tenants of these gloomy abodes, after satiating themselves with every studied insult they could devise, were to pronounce the word “libre!” It was naturally presumed that the predestined victims, on hearing this tempting sound, and seeing the doors at the same moment set open by the clerks of the infamous court, would dart off in exultation, and, fancying themselves liberated, rush upon the knives of the barbarians, who were outside, in waiting for their blood! Hundreds were thus slaughtered. To save the Princess from such a sacrifice, it was projected to prevent her from appearing before the tribunal, and a belief was encouraged that means would be devised to elude the necessity. The person who interested himself for her safety contrived to convey a letter containing these words: “Let what will happen, for God’s sake do not quit your cell. You will be spared. Adieu.” Manuel, however, who knew not of this cross arrangement, was better informed than its projector. He was aware it would be impossible for Her Highness to escape from appearing before the tribunal. He had already removed her companions. The Princesse de Tarente, the Marquise de Tourzel, her daughter, and others, were in safety. But when, true to his promise, he went to the Princesse de Lamballe, she would not be prevailed upon to quit her cell. There was no time for parley. The letter prevailed, and her fate was inevitable. The massacre had begun at daybreak. The fiends had been some hours busy in the work of death. The piercing shrieks of the dying victims brought the Princess and her remaining companion upon their knees, in fervent prayer for the souls of the departed. The messengers of the tribunal now appeared. The Princess was compelled to attend the summons. She went, accompanied by her faithful female attendant. A glance at the seas of blood, of which she caught a glimpse upon her way to the Court, had nearly shocked her even to sudden death. Would it had! She staggered, but was sustained by her companion. Her courage triumphed. She appeared before the gore-stained tribunes. After some questions of mere form, Her Highness was commanded to swear to be faithful to the new order of government, and to hate the King, the Queen, and royalty. “To the first,” replied Her Highness, “I willingly submit. To the second, how can I accede? There is nothing of which I can accuse the Royal Family. To hate them is against my nature. They are my Sovereigns. They are my friends and relations. I have served them for many years, and never have I found reason for the slightest complaint.” The Princess could no longer articulate. She fell into the arms of her attendant. The fatal signal was pronounced. She recovered, and, crossing the court of the prison, which was bathed with the blood of mutilated victims, involuntarily exclaimed, “Gracious Heaven! What a sight is this!” and fell into a fit. Nearest to her in the mob stood a mulatto, whom she had caused to be baptized, educated, and maintained; but whom, for ill-conduct, she had latterly excluded from her presence. This miscreant struck at her with his halbert. The blow removed her cap. Her luxuriant hair (as if to hide her angelic beauty from the sight of the murderers, pressing tiger- like around to pollute that form, the virtues of which equalled its physical perfection)–her luxuriant hair fell around and veiled her a moment from view. An individual, to whom I was nearly allied, seeing the miscreants somewhat staggered, sprang forward to the rescue; but the mulatto wounded him. The Princess was lost to all feeling from the moment the monster first struck at her. But the demons would not quit their prey. She expired gashed with wounds. Scarcely was the breath out of her body, when the murderers cut off her head. One party of them fixed it, like that of the vilest traitor, on an immense pole, and bore it in triumph all over Paris; while another division of the outrageous cannibals were occupied in tearing her clothes piecemeal from her mangled corpse. The beauty of that form, though headless, mutilated and reeking with the hot blood of their foul crime– how shall I describe it?–excited that atrocious excess of lust, which impelled these hordes of assassins to satiate their demoniac passions upon the remains of this virtuous angel. This incredible crime being perpetrated, the wretches fastened ropes round the body, arms, and legs, and dragged it naked through the streets of Paris, till no vestige remained by which it could be distinguished as belonging to the human species; and then left it among the hundreds of innocent victims of that awful day, who were heaped up to putrefy in one confused and disgusting mass. The head was reserved for other purposes of cruelty and horror. It was first borne to the Temple, beneath the windows of the royal prisoners. The wretches who were hired daily to insult them in their dens of misery, by proclaiming all the horrors vomited from the national Vesuvius, were commissioned to redouble their howls of what had befallen the Princesse de Lamballe. [These horrid circumstances I had from the Chevalier Clery, who was the only attendant allowed to assist Louis XVI. and his unhappy family, during their last captivity; but who was banished from the Temple as soon as his royal master was beheaded, and never permitted to return. Clery told me all this when I met him at Pyrmont, in Germany. He was then in attendance upon the late Comtesse de Lisle, wife of Louie XVIII., at whose musical parties I had often the honour of assisting, when on a visit to the beautiful Duchesse de Guiche. On returning to Paris from Germany, on my way back into Italy, I met the wife of Clery, and her friend M. Beaumont, both old friends of mine, who confirmed Clery’s statement, and assured me they were all for two years in hourly expectation of being sent to the Place de Greve for execution. The death of Robespierre saved their lives. Madame Clery taught Marie Antoinette to play upon the harp. Madame Beaumont was a natural daughter of Louis XV. I had often occasion to be in their agreeable society; and, as might be expected, their minds were stored with the most authentic anecdotes and information upon the topics of the day.] The Queen sprang up at the name of her friend. She heard subjoined to, it, “la voila en triomphe,” and then came shouts and laughter. She looked out. At a distance she perceived something like a Bacchanalian procession, and thought, as she hoped, that the Princess was coming to her in triumph from her prison, and her heart rejoiced in the anticipation of once more being, blessed with her society. But the King, who had seen and heard more distinctly from his apartment, flew to that of the Queen. That the horrid object might not escape observation, the monsters had mounted upon each other’s shoulders so as to lift the bleeding head quite up to the prison bars. The King came just in time to snatch Her Majesty from the, spot, and thus she was prevented from seeing it. He took her up in his arms and carried her to a distant part of the Temple, but the mob pursued her in her retreat, and howled the fatal truth even at her, very door, adding that her head would be the next, the nation would require. Her Majesty fell into violent hysterics. The butchers of human flesh continued in the interior of the Temple, parading the triumph of their assassination, until the shrieks of the Princesse Elizabeth at the state in which she saw the Queen, and serious fears for the safety of the royal prisoners, aroused the commandant to treble the national guards and chase the barbarians to the outside, where they remained for hours. SECTION XIX. It now remains for me to complete my record by a few facts and observations relating to the illustrious victims who a short time survived the Princesse de Lamballe. I shall add to this painful narrative some details which have been mentioned to me concerning their remorseless persecutors, who were not long left unpursued by just and awful retribution. Having done this, I shall dismiss the subject. The execrable and sacrilegious modern French Pharisees, who butchered, on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd of September, 1792, all the prisoners at Paris, by these massacres only gave the signal for the more diabolical machinations which led to the destruction of the still more sacred victims of the 21st of January, and the 16th of October, 1793, and the myriads who followed. The King himself never had a doubt with regard to his ultimate fate. His only wish was to make it the means of emancipation for the Queen and Royal Family. It was his intention to appeal to the National Assembly upon the subject, after his trial. Such also was the particular wish of his saint-like sister, the Princesse Elizabeth, who imagined that an appeal under such circumstances could not be resisted. But the Queen strongly opposed the measure; and His Majesty said he should be loath, in the last moments of his painful existence, in anything to thwart one whom he loved so tenderly. He had long accustomed himself, when he spoke of the Queen and royal infants, in deference to the temper of the times, only to say, “my wife and children.” They, as he told Clery, formed a tie, and the only one remaining, which still bound him to earth. Their last embraces, he said, went so to his aching heart, that he could even yet feel their little hands clinging about him, and see their streaming eyes, and hear their agonized and broken voices. The day previous to the fatal catastrophe, when permitted for the last time to see his family, the Princesse Elizabeth whispered him, not for herself, but for the Queen and his helpless innocents, to remember his intentions. He said he should not feel himself happy if, in his last hour, he did not give them a proof of his paternal affection, in obtaining an assurance that the sacrifice of his life should be the guarantee of theirs. So intent was his mind upon this purpose, said Clery to me, that when his assassins came to take him to the slaughtering-place, he said, “I hope my death will appease the nation, and that my innocent family, who have suffered on my account, will now be released.” The ruffians answered, “The nation, always magnanimous, only seeks to punish the guilty. You may be assured your family will be respected.” Events have proved how well they kept their word. It was to fulfil the intention of recommending his family to the people with his dying breath that he commenced his address upon the scaffold, when Santerre ordered the drums to drown his last accents, and the axe to fall! The Princesse Elizabeth, and perhaps others of the royal prisoners, hoped he would have been reprieved, till Herbert, that real ‘Pere du chene’, with a smile upon his countenance, came triumphantly to announce to the disconsolate family that Louis was no more! Perhaps there never was a King more misrepresented and less understood, especially by the immediate age in which he lived, than Louis XVI. He was the victim of natural timidity, increased by the horror of bloodshed, which the exigencies of the times rendered indispensable to his safety. He appeared weak in intellect, when he was only so from circumstances. An overwrought anxiety to be just made him hesitate about the mode of overcoming the abuses, until its procrastination had destroyed the object of his wishes. He had courage sufficient, as well as decision, where others were not menaced and the danger was confined to himself; but, where his family or his people were involved, he was utterly unfit to give direction. The want of self-sufficiency in his own faculties have been his, and his throne’s, ruin. He consulted those who caused him to swerve from the path his own better reason had dictated, and, in seeking the best course, he often chose the worst. The same fatal timidity which pervaded his character extended to his manners. From being merely awkward, he at last became uncouth; but from the natural goodness of his heart, the nearest to him soon lost sight of his ungentleness from the rectitude of his intentions, and, to parody the poet, saw his deportment in his feelings. Previous to the Revolution, Louis XVI. was generally considered gentle and affable, though never polished. But the numberless outrages suffered by his Queen, his family, his friends, and himself, especially towards the close of his career, soured him to an air of rudeness, utterly foreign to his nature and to his intention. It must not be forgotten that he lived in a time of unprecedented difficulty. He was a lamb governing tigers. So far as his own personal bearing is concerned, who is there among his predecessors, that, replaced upon the throne, would have resisted the vicissitudes brought about by internal discord, rebellion, and riot, like himself? What said he when one of the heterogeneous, plebeian, revolutionary assemblies not only insulted him, but added to the insult a laugh? “If you think you can govern better, I am ready to resign,” was the mild but firm reply of Louis. How glorious would have been the triumph for the most civilized nation in the centre of Europe had the insulter taken him at his word. When the experimentalists did attempt to govern, we all know, and have too severely felt, the consequences. Yet this unfortunate monarch has been represented to the world as imbecile, and taxed with wanting character, firmness, and fortitude, because he has been vanquished! The despot- conqueror has been vanquished since! His acquirements were considerable. His memory was remarkably retentive and well-stored,–a quality, I should infer from all I have observed, common to most Sovereigns. By the multiplicity of persons they are in the habit of seeing, and the vast variety of objects continually passing through their minds, this faculty is kept in perpetual exercise. But the circumstance which probably injured Louis XVI. more than any other was his familiarity with the locksmith, Gamin. Innocent as was the motive whence it arose, this low connection lessened him more with the whole nation than if he had been the most vicious of Princes. How careful Sovereigns ought to be, with respect to the attention they bestow on men in humble life; especially those whose principles may have been demoralized by the meanness of the associations consequent upon their occupation, and whose low origin may have denied them opportunities of intellectual cultivation. This observation map even be extended to the liberal arts. It does not follow because a monarch is fond of these that he should so far forget himself as to make their professors his boon companions. He loses ground whenever he places his inferiors on a level with himself. Men are estimated from the deference they pay to their own stations in society. The great Frederic of Prussia used to sap, “I must show myself a King, because my trade is royalty.” It was only in destitution and anguish that the real character of Louis developed itself. He was firm and patient, utterly regardless of himself, but wrung to the heart for others, not even excepting his deluded murderers. Nothing could swerve him from his trust in Heaven, and he left a glorious example of how far religion can triumph over every calamity and every insult this world has power to inflict. There was a national guard, who, at the time of the imprisonment of the Royal Family, was looked upon as the most violent of Jacobins, and the sworn enemy of royalty. On that account the sanguinary agents of the self-created Assembly employed him to frequent the Temple. His special commission was to stimulate the King and Royal Family by every possible argument to self-destruction. But this man was a friend in disguise. He undertook the hateful office merely to render every service in his power, and convey regular information of the plots of the Assembly against those whom he was deputed to persecute. The better to deceive his companions, he would read aloud to the Royal Family all the debates of the regicides, which those who were with him encouraged, believing it meant to torture and insult, when the real motive was to prepare them to meet every accusation, by communicating to them each charge as it occurred. So thoroughly were the Assembly deceived, that the friendly guard was allowed free access to the apartments, in order to facilitate, as was imagined, his wish to agonize and annoy. By this means, he was enabled to caution the illustrious prisoners never to betray any emotion at what he read, and to rely upon his doing his best to soften the rigour of their fate. The individual of whom I speak communicated these circumstances to me himself. He declared, also, that the Duc d’Orleans came frequently to the Temple during the imprisonment of Louis XVI., but, always in disguise; and never, till within a few days after the murder of the poor King, did he disclose himself. On that occasion he had bribed the men who were accustomed to light the fires, to admit him in their stead to the apartment of the Princesse Elizabeth. He found her on her knees, in fervent prayer for the departed soul of her beloved brother. He performed this office, totally unperceived by this predestined victim; but his courage was subdued by her piety. He dared not extend the stratagem to the apartment of the Queen. On leaving the angelic Princess, he was so overcome by remorse that he: requested my informant to give him a glass of water, saying, “that woman has unmanned me.” It was by this circumstance he was discovered. The Queen was immediately apprised by the good man of the occurrence. “Gracious God!” exclaimed Her Majesty, “I thought once or twice that I had seen him at our miserable dinner hours, occupied with the other jailers at the outside door. I even mentioned the circumstance to Elizabeth, and she replied, “I also have observed a man resembling D’ORLEANS, but it cannot be he, for the man I noticed had a wooden leg.” “That was the very disguise he was discovered in this morning, when preparing, or pretending to prepare, the fire in the Princesse Elizabeth’s apartment,” replied the national guard. “Merciful Heaven!” said the Queen, “is he not yet satisfied? Must he even satiate his barbarous brutality with being an eye-witness of the horrid state into which he has thrown us? Save me,” continued Her Majesty, “oh, save me from contaminating my feeble sight, which is almost exhausted, nearly parched up for the loss of my dear husband, by looking on him!–Oh, death! come, come and release me from such a sight!” “Luckily,” observed the guard to me, “it was the hour of the general jail dinner, and we were alone; otherwise, I should infallibly have been discovered, as my tears fell faster than those of the Queen, for really hers seemed to be nearly exhausted: However,” pursued he, “that D’ORLEANS did see the Queen, and that the Queen saw him, I am very sure. From what passed between them in the month of July, 1793, she was hurried off from the Temple to the common prison, to take her trial.” This circumstance combined, with other motives, to make the Assembly hasten the Duke’s trial soon after, who had been sent with his young son to Marseilles, there being no doubt that he wished to rescue the Queen, so as to have her in his own power. On the 16th of October, Her Majesty was beheaded. Her death was consistent with her life. She met her fate like a Christian, but still like a Queen. Perhaps, had Marie Antoinette been uncontrolled in the exercise of her judgment, she would have shown a spirit in emergency better adapted to wrestle with the times than had been discovered by His Majesty. Certain it is she was generally esteemed the most proper to be consulted of the two. From the imperfect idea which many of the persons in office entertained of the King’s capacity, few of them ever made any communication of importance but to the Queen. Her Majesty never kept a single circumstance from her husband’s knowledge, and scarcely decided on the smallest trifle without his consent; but so thorough was his confidence in the correctness of her judgment that he seldom, if ever, opposed her decisions. The Princesse de Lamballe used to say, “Though Marie Antoinette is not a woman of great or uncommon talents, yet her long practical knowledge gave her an insight into matters of moment which she turned to advantage with so much coolness and address amid difficulties, that I am convinced she only wanted free scope to have shone in the history of Princes as a great Queen. Her natural tendencies were perfectly domestic. Had she been kept in countenance by the manners of the times, or favoured earlier by circumstances, she would have sought her only pleasures in the family circle, and, far from Court intrigue, have become the model of her sex and age.” It is by no means to be wondered at that, in her peculiar situation, surrounded by a thoughtless and dissipated Court, long denied the natural ties so necessary to such a heart, in the heyday of youth and beauty, and possessing an animated and lively spirit, she should have given way in the earlier part of her career to gaiety, and been pleased with a round of amusement. The sincere friendship which she afterwards formed for the Duchesse de Polignac encouraged this predilection. The plot to destroy her had already been formed, and her enemies were too sharp-sighted and adroit not to profit and take advantage of the opportunities afforded by this weakness. The miscreant had murdered her character long, long before they assailed her person. The charge against her of extravagance has been already refuted. Her private palace was furnished from the State lumber rooms, and what was purchased, paid for out of her savings. As for her favourites, she never had but two, and these were no supernumerary expense or encumbrance to the State. Perhaps it would have been better had she been more thoroughly directed by the Princesse de Lamballe. She was perfectly conscious of her good qualities, but De Polignac dazzled and humoured her love of amusement and display of splendour. Though this favourite was the image of her royal mistress in her amiable characteristics, the resemblance unfortunately extended to her weaknesses. This was not the case with the Princesse de Lamballe; she possessed steadiness, and was governed by the cool foresight of her father-in-law, the Duc de Penthievre, which both the other friends wanted. The unshaken attachment of the Princesse de Lamballe to the Queen, notwithstanding the slight at which she at one time had reason to feel piqued, is one of the strongest evidences against the slanderers of Her Majesty. The moral conduct of the Princess has never been called in question. Amid the millions of infamous falsehoods invented to vilify and degrade every other individual connected with the Court, no imputation, from the moment of her arrival in France, up to the fatal one of her massacre, ever tarnished her character. To her opinion, then, the most prejudiced might look with confidence. Certainly no one had a greater opportunity of knowing the real character of Marie Antoinette. She was an eye-witness to her conduct during the most brilliant and luxurious portion of her reign; she saw her from the meridian of her magnificence down to her dejection to the depths of unparalleled misery. If the unfortunate Queen had ever been guilty of the slightest of those glaring vices of which she was so generally accused, the Princess must have been aware of them; and it was not in her nature to have remained the friend and advocate, even unto death, of one capable of depravity. Yet not a breath of discord ever arose between them on that score. Virtue and vice can never harmonize; and even had policy kept Her Highness from avowing a change of sentiments, it never could have continued her enthusiasm, which was augmented, and not diminished, by the fall of her royal friend. An attachment which holds through every vicissitude must be deeply rooted from conviction of the integrity of its object. The friendship that subsisted between this illustrious pair is an everlasting monument that honours their sex. The Queen used to say of her, that she was the only woman she had ever known without gall. “Like the blessed land of Ireland,” observed Her Majesty, “exempt from the reptiles elsewhere so dangerous to mankind, so was she freed by Providence from the venom by which the finest form in others is empoisoned. No envy, no ambition, no desire, but to contribute to the welfare and happiness of her fellow creatures–and yet, with all these estimable virtues, these angelic qualities, she is doomed, from her virtuous attachment to our persons, to sink under the weight of that affliction, which, sooner or later, must bury us all in one common ruin– a ruin which is threatening hourly.” These presentiments of the awful result of impending storms were mutual. From frequent conversations with the Princesse de Lamballe, from the evidence of her letters and her private papers, and from many remarks which have been repeated to me personally by Her Highness, and from persons in her confidence, there is abundant evidence of the forebodings she constantly had of her own and the Queen’s untimely end. [A very remarkable circumstance was related to me when I was at Vienna, after this horrid murder. The Princess of Lobkowitz, sister to the Princesse de Lamballe, received a box, with an anonymous letter, telling her to conceal the box carefully till further notice. After the riots had subsided a little in France, she was apprised that the box contained all, or the greater part, of the jewels belonging to the Princess, and had been taken from the Tuileries on the 10th of August. It is supposed that the jewels had been packed by the Princess in anticipation of her doom, and forwarded to her sister through her agency or desire.] There was no friend of the Queen to whom the King showed any deference, or rather anything like the deference he paid to the Princesse de Lamballe. When the Duchesse de Polignac, the Comtesse Diane de Polignac, the Comte d’Artois, the Duchesse de Guiche, her husband, the present Duc de Grammont, the Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt, etc., fled from Paris, he and the Queen, as if they had foreseen the awful catastrophe which was to destroy her so horribly, entreated her to leave the Court, and take refuge in Italy. So also did her father-in-law, the Duc de Penthievre; but all in vain. She saw her friend deprived of De Polignac, and all those near and dear to her heart, and became deaf to every solicitation. Could such constancy, which looked death in its worst form in the face unshrinking, have existed without great and estimable qualities in its possessor? The brother-in-law of the Princesse de Lamballe, the Duc d’Orleans, was her declared enemy merely from her attachment to the Queen. These three great victims have been persecuted to the tomb, which had no sooner closed over the last than the hand of Heaven fell upon their destroyer. That Louis XVI. was not the friend of this member of his family can excite no surprise, but must rather challenge admiration. He had been seduced by his artful and designing regicide companions to expend millions to undermine the throne, and shake it to pieces under the feet of his relative, his Sovereign, the friend of his earliest youth, who was aware of the treason, and who held the thunderbolt, but would not crush him. But they have been foiled in their hope of building a throne for him upon the ruin they had made, and placed an age where they flattered him he would find a diadem. The Prince de Conti told me at Barcelona that the Duchesse d’Orleans had assured him that, even had the Duc d’Orleans survived, he never could have attained, his object. The immense sums he had lavished upon the horde of his revolutionary satellites had, previous to his death, thrown him into embarrassment. The avarice of his party increased as his resources diminished. The evil, as evil generally does, would have wrought its own punishment in either way. He must have lived suspected and miserable, had he not died. But his reckless character did not desert him at the scaffold. It is said that before he arrived at the Place de Greve he ate a very rich ragout, and drank a bottle of champagne, and left the world as he had gone through it. The supernumerary, the uncalled-for martyr, the last of the four devoted royal sufferers, was beheaded the following spring. For this murder there could not have been the shadow of a pretext. The virtues of this victim were sufficient to redeem the name of Elizabeth [The eighteen years’ imprisonment and final murder of Mary, Queen of Scots, by Elizabeth of England, is enough to stigmatize her forever, independently of the many other acts of tyranny which stain her memory. The dethronement by Elizabeth of Russia of the innocent Prince Ivan, her near relation, while yet in the cradle, gives the Northern Empress a claim to a similar character to the British Queen.] from the stain with which the two of England and Russia, who had already borne it, had clouded its immortality. She had never, in any way, interfered in political events. Malice itself had never whispered a circumstance to her dispraise. After this wanton assassination, it is scarcely to be expected that the innocent and candid looks and streaming azure eyes of that angelic infant, the Dauphin, though raised in humble supplication to his brutal assassins, with an eloquence which would have disarmed the savage tiger, could have won wretches so much more pitiless than the most ferocious beasts of the wilderness, or saved him from their slow but sure poison, whose breath was worse than the upas tree to all who came within its influence. The Duchesse d’Angouleme, the only survivor of these wretched captives, is a living proof of the baleful influence of that contaminated prison, the infectious tomb of the royal martyrs. That once lovely countenance, which, with the goodness and amiableness of her royal father, whose mildness hung on her lips like the milk and honey of human kindness, blended the dignity, grace, elegance, and innocent vivacity, which were the acknowledged characteristics of her beautiful mother, lost for some time all traces of its original attractions. The lines of deep-seated sorrow are not easily obliterated. If the sanguinary republic had not wished to obtain by exchange the Generals La Fayette, Bournonville, Lameth, etc., whom Dumourier had treacherously consigned into the hands of Austria, there is little: doubt but that, from the prison in which she was so long doomed to vegetate only to make life a burthen, she would have been sent to share the fate of her murdered family. How can the Parisians complain that they found her Royal Highness, on her return to France, by no means what they required in a Princess? Can it be wondered at that her marked grief should be visible when amidst the murderers of her family? It should rather be a wonder that she can at all bear the scenes in which she moves, and not abhor the very name of Paris, when every step must remind her of some out rage to herself, or those most dear to her, or of some beloved relative or friend destroyed! Her return can only be accounted for by the spell of that all-powerful ‘amor patriae’, which sometimes prevails over every other influence. Before I dismiss this subject, it may not be uninteresting to my readers to receive some desultory anecdotes that I have heard concerning one or two of the leading monsters, by whom the horrors upon which I have expatiated were occasioned. David, the famous painter, was a member of the sanguinary tribunal which condemned the King. On this account he has been banished from France since the restoration. If any one deserved this severity, it was David. It was at the expense of the Court of Louis XVI. that this ungrateful being was sent to Rome, to perfect himself in his sublime art. His studies finished, he was pensioned from the same patrons, and upheld as an artist by the special protection of every member of the Royal Family. And yet this man, if he may be dignified by the name, had the baseness to say in the hearing of the unfortunate Louis XVI., when on trial, “Well! when are we to have his head dressed, a la guillotine.” At another time, being deputed to visit the Temple, as one of the committee of public safety, as he held out his snuff-box before the Princesse Elizabeth, she, conceiving he meant to offer it, took a pinch. The monster, observing what she had done, darting a look of contempt at her, instantly threw away the snuff, and dashed the box to pieces on the floor. Robespierre had a confidential physician, who attended him almost to the period when he ascended the scaffold, and who was very often obliged, ‘malgre-lui’, to dine tete-a-tete with this monopolizer of human flesh and blood. One day he happened to be with him, after a very extraordinary number had been executed, and amongst the rest, some of the physician’s most intimate acquaintances. The unwilling guest was naturally very downcast, and ill at ease, and could not dissemble his anguish. He tried to stammer out excuses and get away from the table. Robespierre, perceiving his distress, interrogated him as to the cause. The physician, putting his hand to his head, discovered his reluctance to explain. Robespierre took him by the hand, assured him he had nothing to fear, and added, “Come, doctor, you, as a professional man, must be well informed as to the sentiments of the major part of the Parisians respecting me. I entreat you, my dear friend, frankly to avow their opinion. It may perhaps serve me for the future, as a guide for governing them.” The physician answered, “I can no longer resist the impulse of nature. I know I shall thereby oppose myself to your power, but I must tell you, you are generally abhorred,–considered the Attila, the Sylla, of the age,–the two-footed plague, that, walks about to fill peaceful abodes with miseries and family mournings. The myriads you are daily sending to the slaughter at the Place de Greve, who have, committed no crime, the carts of a certain description, you have ordered daily to bear a stated number to be sacrificed, directing they should be taken from the prisons, and, if enough are not in the prisons, seized, indiscriminately in the streets, that no place in the deadly vehicle may be left unoccupied, and all this without a trial, without even an accusation, and without any sanction but your own mandate–these things call the public curse upon you, which is not the less bitter for not being audible.” “Ah!” said Robespierre, laughing. “This puts me in mind of a story told of the cruelty and tyranny, of Pope Sixtus the Fifth, who, having one night, after he had enjoyed himself at a Bacchanalian supper, when heated with wine, by way of a ‘bonne bouche’, ordered the first man that should come through the gate of the ‘Strada del popolo’ at Rome to be immediately hanged. Every person at this drunken conclave–nay, all Rome–considered the Pope a tyrant, the most cruel of tyrants, till it was made known and proved, after his death, that the wretch so executed had murdered his father and mother ten years previously. I know whom I send to the Place de Greve. All who go there are guilty, though they may not seem so. Go on, what else have you heard?” “Why, that you have so terrified all descriptions of persons, that they fear even your very breath, and look upon you as worse than the plague; and I should not be surprised, if you persist in this course of conduct, if something serious to yourself should be the consequence, and that ere long.” Not the least extraordinary part of the story is that this dialogue between the devil and the doctor took place but a very, few hours previous to Robespierre’s being denounced by Tallien and Carriere to the national convention, as a conspirator against the republican cause. In defending himself from being arrested by the guard, he attempted to shoot himself, but the ball missed, broke the monster’s jaw-bone only, and nearly impeded his speaking. Singularly enough, it was this physician who was sent for to assist and dress his wounds. Robespierre replied to the doctor’s observations, laughing, and in the following language: “Oh, poor devils! they do not know their own interest. But my plan of exterminating the evil will soon teach them. This is the only thing for the good of the nation; for, before you can reform a thousand Frenchmen, you must first lop off half a million of these vagabonds, and, if God spare my life, in a few months there will be so many the less to breed internal commotions, and disturb the general peace of Europe. [When Bonaparte was contriving the Consulship for life, and, in the Irish way, forced the Italian Republic to volunteer an offer of the Consulship of Italy, by a deputation to him at Paris, I happened to be there. Many Italians, besides the deputies, went on the occasion, and, among them, we had the good fortune to meet the Abbe Fortis, the celebrated naturalist, a gentleman of first-rate abilities, who had travelled three-fourths of the globe in mineralogical research. The Abbe chanced one day to be in company with my husband, who was an old acquaintance of his, where many of the chopfallen deputies, like themselves, true lovers of their country, could not help declaring their indignation at its degraded state, and reprobating Bonaparte for rendering it so ridiculous in the face of Europe and the world. The Abbe Fords, with the voice of a Stentor, and spreading his gigantic form, which exceeded six feet in height, exclaimed: “This would not have been the case had that just and wise man Robespierre lived but a little longer.” Every one present was struck with horror at the observation. Noticing the effect of his words, the Abbe resumed: “I knew well I should frighten you in showing any partiality for that bloody monopoliser of human heads. But you do not know the perfidy of the French nation so well as I do. I have lived among them many years. France is the sink of human deception. A Frenchman will deceive his father, wife, and child; for deception is his element. Robespierre knew this, and acted upon it, as you shall hear.” The Abbe then related to us the story I have detailed above, verbatim, as he had it from the son of Esculapius, who himself confirmed it afterwards in a conversation with the Abbe in our presence. Having completed his anecdote, “Well,” said the Abbe, “was I not right in my opinion of this great philosopher and foreseer of evils, when I observed that had be but lived a few months longer, there would have been so many less in the world to disturb its tranquillity?”] The same physician observed that from the immense number of executions during the sanguinary reign of that monster, the Place de Greve became so complete a swamp of human blood that it would scarcely hold the scaffolding of the instrument of death, which, in consequence, was obliged to be continually moved from one side of the square to the other. Many of the soldiers and officers, who were obliged to attend these horrible executions, had constantly their half-boots and stockings filled with the blood of the poor sufferers; and as, whenever there was any national festival to be given, it generally followed one of the most sanguinary of these massacres, the public places, the theatres especially, all bore the tracks of blood throughout the saloons and lobbies. The infamous Carrier, who was the execrable agent of his still more execrable employer, Robespierre, was left afterwards to join Tallien in a conspiracy against him, merely to save himself; but did not long survive his atrocious crimes or his perfidy. It is impossible to calculate the vast number of private assassinations committed in the dead of the night, by order of this cannibal, on persons of every rank and description. My task is now ended. Nothing remains for me but the reflections which these sad and shocking remembrances cannot fail to awaken in all minds, and especially in mine. Is it not astonishing that, in an age so refined, so free from the enormous and flagitious crimes which were the common stains of barbarous centuries, and at an epoch peculiarly enlightened by liberal views, the French nation, by all deemed the most polished since the Christian era, should have given an example of such wanton, brutal, and coarse depravity to the world, under pretences altogether chimerical, and, after unprecedented bloodshed and horror, ended at the point where it began! The organized system of plunder and anarchy, exercised under different forms more or less sanguinary, produced no permanent result beyond an incontestible proof that the versatility of the French nation, and its puny suppleness of character, utterly incapacitate it for that energetic enterprise without which there can be no hope of permanent emancipation from national slavery. It is my unalterable conviction that the French will never know how to enjoy an independent and free Constitution. The tree of liberty unavoidably in all nations has been sprinkled with human blood; but, when bathed by innocent victims, like the foul weed, though it spring up, it rots in its infancy, and becomes loathsome and infectious. Such has been the case in France; and the result justifies the Italian satire: “Un albero senza fruta Baretta senza testa Governo che non resta.” ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS: Honesty is to be trusted before genius More dangerous to attack the habits of men than their religion