LOUIS XV. IN 1768

Marie Leczinska was just dead, and saddened Versailles presented a funeral aspect. Mademoiselle Genet, the future Madame Campan, who had recently become reader to Mesdames de France, was profoundly struck by the doleful spectacle offered by the château. “Those grand apartments hung with black,” she wrote, “those State armchairs raised upon several steps and overhung by a canopy adorned with plumes, those caparisoned horses, that immense procession in deep mourning, those enormous shoulder-knots embroidered with gold and silver spangles which decorated the habits of the pages and even those of the footmen, all that pageantry, in fine, produced such an effect on my senses that I could hardly hold myself up straight when I was brought into the apartment of the Princesses. The first day on which I read in Madame Victoire’s private room, it was impossible for me to pronounce more than two sentences; my heart palpitated, my voice trembled, my sight was dim.”

Within two years and a half, Louis XV. had lost his son, his daughter-in-law, and his wife. These three saintly and affecting deaths were for a moment to reawaken sentiments of religion and repentance in his heart. During the long sufferings of Marie Leczinska he had surrounded her with such assiduous attentions that the poor Queen, little accustomed to such solicitude, knew not how to show him her gratitude. After she had breathed her last, it was with sincere emotion and respectful tenderness that her husband imprinted a last kiss on her icy forehead. People fancied that so many warnings could not be in vain. Louis XV. was fifty-eight years old. His surgeon had recommended virtue to him as being good for the body as well as the soul, and advised him to not merely rein up his horses, but to take them out of the traces. Excusable to a certain degree in a young man, vice is ignoble, ridiculous, revolting, in an old one. Everything combined to induce the King to amend; health, honor, self-interest, conscience, the clamor of public opinion, the voice of morality and religion, the dignity of his throne, and the salvation of his soul. During the last four years, since the death of Madame de Pompadour that is, he had had no acknowledged mistress. The Deer Park was not closed; but the mean debaucheries of that mysterious rendezvous gave less occasion for scandal to the court and the people than would a reigning favorite in the palace of Versailles. Louis XV. showed affection for his four remaining daughters, Mesdames Adelaide, Victoire, Sophie, and Louise, and it was hoped they would bring their father back to truly religious ideas. The Most Christian King had faith, and it might be believed that, age having blunted his passions, he would at last repair the evils wrought by his bad example, by a pious and respectable life. He may himself have desired a reconciliation with God, but the force of habit, the interested suggestions of persons speculating in vice, a sort of impulse and giddiness, were still to prevail over reason and remorse.

The dominant sentiment in the heart of the aging Louis XV. was not the religious one, but a mixture of apathy and indifference. Men who have reigned for a long time, whether they end their days on the throne, abdicate, or die in exile, are nearly always attacked, at the close of their career, by a sort of lassitude and disgust. They have seen so many intrigues, meannesses, and recantations; they have been the object of such stupid adulations and loathsome flatteries; they know the ugliness of men’s souls so thoroughly, that they end by conceiving an absolute contempt for human nature. This contempt does not go so far as wrath and indignation; it is tranquil, indolent, disdainful. An experienced sovereign retains no illusions concerning others or himself. Whatever may be proposed to him, he feels inclined to answer: What is the good of it?

His ministers, his courtiers, his mistresses, his people, inspire him with equal mistrust. There are hours when he would like to abandon the governmental machine to itself, so much is he afflicted by the past and discouraged by the present. Like an old pilot contemplating from some rocky height the barks threatened by the tempest, which he can no longer aid, the monarch, from the interior of his palace, sees the ship foundering in the distance, and sadly tells himself that he is powerless to save the crew.

Disturbed by gloomy presentiments, Louis XV. believed no longer either in the prestige of his throne or the future of his family. He had recourse to petty means, shabby tricks, conspiracies against himself, in the hope of strengthening his tottering power. As Madame Campan has so well remarked, “to separate Louis de Bourbon from the King of France was what the monarch found the most piquant thing in his royal existence.” “They wanted it so, they thought it would be for the best.” That was the way he talked when the operations of his ministers had been unsuccessful. One might say he had a dual reign, with two policies and two diplomacies, a private treasury and an occult government in opposition to the official one.

As M. Boutaric says, “the _man_ spent a part of his life in thwarting and contradicting the _king_. Curious spectacle, that of an absolute monarch reduced to the most obscure intrigues in order to obtain his will, which he is afraid to declare, engaging in an underhand and secret struggle with his ministers, and at last deceived in his expectations, wounded in his self-love, a retired conspirator, persisting to his last breath in intrigues transparent on every side, and owing it solely to his supreme rank that he does not share the captivity or exile of his agents, I was about to say his accomplices.” It was in this way that he admitted to his secret diplomacy such persons as the Chevalier d’Eon, by turns man and woman, and the famous Count de Saint-Germain, who, claiming to be several centuries old, was supposed to possess a prodigious elixir of long life. Baron de Gleichen relates in his _Souvenirs_ that this “led to the composition of the laughable story of the old chambermaid of a lady who had hidden away a phial of this divine liquor; the ancient soubrette discovered it and drank so much of it that by dint of drinking and rejuvenating, she became a little baby.”

There were adventurers in the personnel of the secret diplomacy, but there were remarkable men likewise. Count de Broglie was the chief of these. The mysterious Minister of Foreign Affairs acted simultaneously with the official one. “He presently had trusty agents at every court; sometimes it was the resident minister himself, unknown to the titular Minister of Foreign Affairs; more frequently it was some inferior employee of legation, who thus became a spy on his immediate chief.” M. d’Ogny, director of the secret postal service, recognized the despatches of the initiated diplomatists by an exterior sign; they were sent to Count de Broglie through Guinard, a servant of the château, deciphered in the cabinet of the Count, and then sent back to Louis XV. with draughts of replies, to which the King each time affixed his visa after making corrections. Baron de Breteuil, ambassador to Sweden in 1766, who had been recommended by the King to pay particular attention to the affairs of that country, Count Desalleurs, ambassador to Constantinople, M. de Saint-Priest, and lastly, M. de Vergennes, took part in this secret diplomacy.[35] “Count de Broglie retained the direction of it even after he had been exiled in consequence of an official disgrace which was only apparently such.” As M. Geffroy remarks: “Louis XV., aided by this unknown personnel, liked to direct the principal affairs himself with a certain attention. Perhaps, jealous of all who surrounded him,—ministers, favorites, and mistresses,—he took pleasure in being able to thwart and oppose them secretly, in conspiring against them without taking the trouble to make an open resistance. His hidden policy was frequently more honorable than the avowed policy of the cabinet of Versailles.” M. Théodore Lavallée has made the same reflection. He says: “The secret correspondence of Louis XV. shows that this prince had the sentiment of national grandeur as if by royal instinct and family tradition; it is full of good sense, dignity, and loyalty. No one can read it without regretting that this noble policy should have been rendered sterile by lack of will, that these profound views concerning the interests of France’s future should have been lost sight of in the debaucheries of the Deer Park.”

What was lacking to Louis XV. was not intelligence—he had a great deal of it; nor was it the moral sense, for even while doing evil he had a clear idea of what was right; it was will. From his youth he had had upright and pure intentions, and from time to time he had them still, but he did not feel in himself the needful energy to withstand the torrent of his time. As was said by his huntsman, Le Roy, that master of the hounds whom Sainte-Beuve styles a La Bruyère on horseback, “he despaired of ever being able to do what is right, because one is always more disposed to regard as impossible in itself what one has not the courage to do. To this point had a man arrived by degrees whose intelligence and character, if he had been born a private person, would have made him considered above the common and what is properly called a gallant man.” In growing old he had preserved a noble and elegant figure, regular features, a reserved but subtle and witty style of conversation, an exquisite politeness, and a very great care of his person. “This prince was still beloved; one would have desired that a manner of life suitable to his age and dignity should at last throw a veil over the aberrations of the past and justify the love which the French people had had for his youth. It pained them to condemn him severely. If he had established recognized mistresses at court, the excessive devotion of the Queen was blamed for it. Mesdames were reproached for not trying to avert the danger of seeing the King arrange another intimacy for himself with some new favorite. People regretted Madame Henriette, twin-sister of the Duchess of Parma; this princess had had some influence over the King’s mind; they wrote that if she had lived she would have exerted herself to provide amusements for him in the bosom of his own family; that she would have accompanied the King on his journeys, and would have done the honors of those little suppers which he was fond of giving in his private apartments.”[36]

Count de Ségur, a wit and boon companion _par excellence_, who saw the last years of Louis XV., likewise speaks of them with a certain sympathy. “This good, feeble monarch,” he says in his charming Memoirs, “was in his youth the object of a too little deserved enthusiasm; the rigorous reproaches cast upon his old age are not less exaggerated. Successor to the absolute power of Louis XIV., he reigned sixty years without its being possible to accuse him of an act of cruelty.... No prince can be found who has not more or less participated in the errors, weaknesses, and follies of his time. Moreover, the French have always shown themselves too lenient to this sort of wrong-doings; but they desire at least that these stains should disappear under the rays of some halo of glory. Hence they become only too indulgent and almost panegyrize the same faults when committed by the chivalrous Francis I., the brave Henry, the majestic Louis XIV., while they bitterly reproach the weak Louis XV. on account of them.”

Sovereigns are nearly always the personification of their epoch. They seem to give the law, but generally they merely submit to it. The contrasts in the character of Louis XV. reappear in the society of which he was the head. He belongs to that period of dissolution and decay when, according to Chateaubriand’s expression, “statesmen became men of letters, and men of letters statesmen; great nobles bankers, farmers-general great nobles. The fashions were as ridiculous as the arts were in bad taste; they painted shepherdesses in paniers in salons where colonels were embroidering. Everything was out of order in both minds and morals, sure sign of a revolution.... To see the monarch benumbed in voluptuousness, the courtiers corrupted, the ministers malicious or imbecile, some of the philosophers undermining religion, and others the State; the nobles either ignorant or attacked by the vices of the day; the ecclesiastics, at Paris, the disgrace of their order; the provinces full of prejudices,—one would have thought of a crowd of workmen hastening to tear down a great edifice.”

And yet, in appearance, there was very little alteration. As Count de Ségur remarks, “the old social edifice was completely ruined in its lowest foundations, without any sign at the surface which announced its approaching fall. The change in manners was unperceived because it had been gradual; the etiquette at court was the same,—the same throne, the same names, distinctions of rank and formalities were still held there. The parliaments, opposing the government, but in a respectful manner, had become almost republican without suspecting it, and were themselves striking the hour of revolutions while supposing they were merely following the examples of their predecessors when they resisted the concordat of Francis I. and the fiscal despotism of Mazarin.” Louis XV., who was a shrewd observer, in spite of his defects, appreciated the whole gravity of the situation. But to remedy it would have demanded genius,—not merely cleverness, talent, or wisdom. To conciliate, at the close of the eighteenth century, necessary liberties with indispensable authority, was a problem which the greatest of men might have found no means of solving. Louis XV. contented himself with saying: “Things will last as they are as long as I do.”

At his side a minister was governing whose character was in singular contrast with that of his master. The Duke de Choiseul was as enthusiastic, loquacious, good-humored, as Louis XV. was reserved, taciturn, and bored. The monarch, although he understood his religion badly, had a deep and lively faith, while the minister was Voltairean. Liked by the parliaments, the aristocracy, and the men of letters, Choiseul, with his audacious petulance, his brilliant and easy way of transacting business, his seductive and resourceful talent, his witty even eloquent conversation, his faith in his star, his habit of believing all successes possible, his philosophy which stopped at Voltaire and disdained Rousseau, his unconscious prodigality, which, counting on the future suppression of monasteries and the taxation of ecclesiastical property to supply the deficit, was untroubled by the pit dug beneath the throne, Choiseul was the type of that brave and charming, frivolous and adventurous nobility which marches smilingly toward an abyss covered with flowers. “Never,” says Baron de Gleichen in his _Souvenirs_, “have I known a man so capable as he of spreading joy and contentment all around his person. When he entered a room, he rummaged his pockets and seemed to draw from them an inexhaustible abundance of pleasantries and gaiety.”

In spite of his charm and kindliness, the minister, whom Pope Benedict XIV. described as “a fool who had a good deal of genius,” had drawn upon himself irreconcilable enmities. His rivals and those who were jealous of him could not forgive him for his lofty fortune, and anxiously sought means of overthrowing this colossus who dominated everything. In what salon, by what means, could they hope to prepare and bring about the fall of the man who hampered them,—such was the question they incessantly asked themselves. As has been remarked by Madame Campan, Louis XV. had at this time no relations with women except those of a class that could be of no use in a prolonged intrigue; the Deer Park, moreover, was a seraglio in which the beauties were constantly renewed. They would have liked to give the monarch a mistress who, by means of daily insinuations, might have force enough to overthrow the powerful minister. To fight a grand vizier, a sultana was essential. This was why the enemies of the Duke de Choiseul cast their eyes upon the woman whose beginnings we are about to recall,—the Countess Du Barry.