Volume VI Part 3 (1/2)

The Regent saw the necessity of firmness. ”It is a maxim,” he declared, ”that the king is always a major as regards justice; that which was done without the states-general has no need of their intervention to be undone.” The decree of the council of regency, based on the same principles, suppressed the right of succession to the crown, and cut short all pretensions on the part of the legitimatized princes' issue to the rank of princes of the blood; the rights thereto were maintained in the case of the Duke of Maine and the Count of Toulouse, for their lives, by the bounty of the Regent, ”which did not prevent the d.u.c.h.ess of Maine from uttering loud shrieks, like a maniac,” says St. Simon, ”or the d.u.c.h.ess of Orleans from weeping night and day, and refusing for two months to see anybody.” Of the thirty-nine members of the n.o.bility who had signed the pet.i.tion to Parliament, six were detained in prison for a month, after which the Duke of Orleans pardoned them. ”You know me, well enough to be aware that I am only nasty when I consider myself positively obliged to be,” he said to them. The patrons, whose cause these n.o.blemen had lightly embraced, were not yet at the end of their humiliations.

[Ill.u.s.trations: The d.u.c.h.ess of Maine----72]

The Duke of Bourbon was not satisfied with their exclusion from the succession to the throne; he claimed the king's education, which belonged of right, he said, to the first prince of the blood, being a major. In his hatred, then, towards the legitimatized, he accepted with alacrity the Duke of St. Simon's proposal to simply reduce them to their rank by seniority in the peerage, with the proviso of afterwards restoring the privileges of a prince of the blood in favor of the Count of Toulouse alone, as a reward for his services in the navy. The blow thus dealt gratified all the pa.s.sions of the House of Conde and the wrath of Law, as well as that of the keeper of the seals, D'Argenson, against the Parliament, which for three months past had refused to enregister all edicts. On the 24th of August, 1718, at six in the morning, the Parliament received orders to repair to the Tuileries, where the king was to hold a bed of justice., The Duke of Maine, who was returning from a party, was notified, as colonel of the Swiss, to have his regiment under arms; at eight o'clock the council of regency was already a.s.sembled; the Duke of Maine and the Count of Toulouse arrived in peer's robes. The Regent had flattered himself that they would not come to the bed of justice, and had not summoned them. He at once advanced towards the Count of Toulouse, and said out loud that he was surprised to see him in his robes, and that he had not thought proper to notify him of the bed of justice, because he knew that, since the last edict, he did not like going to the Parliament. The Count of Toulouse replied that that was quite true, but that, when it was a question of the welfare of the State, he put every other consideration aside. The Regent was disconcerted; he hesitated a moment, then, speaking low and very earnestly to the Count of Toulouse, he returned to St. Simon. ”I have just told him all,” said he, ”I couldn't help it; he is the best fellow in the world, and the one who touches my heart the most. He was coming to me on behalf of his brother, who had a shrewd notion that there was something in the wind, and that he did not stand quite well with me; he had begged him to ask me whether I wished him to remain, or whether he would not do well to go away. I confess to you that I thought I did well to tell him that his brother would do just as well to go away, since he asked me the question; that, as for himself, he might safely remain, because he was to continue just as he is, without alteration; but that something might take place rather disagreeable to M. du Maine. Whereupon, he asked me how he could remain, when there was to be an attack upon his brother, seeing that they were but one, both in point of honor and as brothers. I do believe, there they are just going out,” added the Regent, casting a glance towards the door, as the members of the council were beginning to take their places: ”they will be prudent; the Count of Toulouse promised me so.” ”But, if they were to do anything foolish, or were to leave Paris?” ”They shall be arrested, I give you my word,” replied the Duke of Orleans, in a firmer tone than usual. They had just read the decree reducing the legitimatized to their degree in the peerage, and M. le Duc had claimed the superintendence of the king's education, when it was announced that the Parliament, in their scarlet robes, were arriving in the court of the palace. Marshal de Villeroi alone dared to protest. ”Here, then,” said he with a sigh, ”are all the late king's dispositions upset; I cannot see it without sorrow. M. du Maine is very unfortunate.” ”Sir,” rejoined the Regent, with animation, ”M. du Maine is my brother-in-law, but I prefer an open to a hidden enemy.”

With the same air the Duke of Orleans pa.s.sed to the bed of justice, ”with a gentle but resolute majesty, which was quite new to him; eyes observant, but bearing grave and easy; M. le Duc staid, circ.u.mspect, surrounded by a sort of radiance that adorned his whole person, and under perceptible restraint; the keeper of the seals, in his chair, motionless, gazing askance with that witful fire which flashed from his eyes and which seemed to pierce all bosoms, in presence of that Parliament which had so often given him orders standing at its bar as chief of police, in presence of that premier president, so superior to him, so haughty, so proud of his Duke of Maine, so mightily in hopes of the seals.” After his speech, and the reading of the king's decree, the premier president was for attempting a remonstrance; D'Argenson mounted the step, approached the young king, and then, without taking any opinion, said, in a very loud voice, ”The king desires to be obeyed, and obeyed at once.”

There was nothing further for it but to enregister the edict; all the decrees of the Parliament were quashed.

Some old servants of Louis XIV., friends and confidants of the Duke of Maine, alone appeared moved. The young king was laughing, and the crowd of spectators were amusing themselves with the scene, without any sensible interest in the court intrigues. The d.u.c.h.ess of Maine made her husband pay for his humble behavior at the council; ”she was,” says St.

Simon, ”at one time motionless with grief, at another boiling with rage, and her poor husband wept daily like a calf at the biting reproaches and strange insults which he had incessantly to pocket in her fits of anger against him.”

In the excess of her indignation and wrath, the d.u.c.h.ess of Maine determined not to confine herself to reproaches. She had pa.s.sed her life in elegant entertainments, in sprightly and frivolous intellectual amus.e.m.e.nts; ever bent on diverting herself, she made up her mind to taste the pleasure of vengeance, and set on foot a conspiracy, as frivolous as her diversions. The object, however, was nothing less than to overthrow the Duke of Orleans, and to confer the regency on the King of Spain, Philip V., with a council and a lieutenant, who was to be the Duke of Maine. ”When one has once acquired, no matter how, the rank of prince of the blood and the capability of succeeding to the throne,” said the d.u.c.h.ess, ”one must turn the state upside down, and set fire to the four corners of the kingdom, rather than let them be wrested from one.” The schemes for attaining this great result were various and confused.

Philip V. had never admitted that his renunciation of the crown of France was seriously binding upon him; he had seen, by the precedent of the war of devolution, how a powerful sovereign may make sport of such acts; his Italian minister, Alberoni, an able and crafty man, who had set the crown of Spain upon the head of Elizabeth Farnese, and had continued to rule her, cautiously egged on his master into hostilities against France.

They counted upon the Parliaments, taking example from that of Paris, on the whole of Brittany, in revolt at the prolongation of the t.i.the-tax, on all the old court, accustomed to the yoke of the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds and of Madame de Maintenon, on Languedoc, of which the Duke of Maine was the governor; they talked of carrying off the Duke of Orleans, and taking him to the castle of Toledo; Alberoni promised the a.s.sistance of a Spanish army.

The d.u.c.h.ess of Maine had fired the train, without the knowledge, she said, and probably against the will, too, of her husband, more indolent than she in his perfidy. Some scatter-brains of great houses were mixed up in the affair; MM. de Richelieu, de Laval, and de Pompadour; there was secret coming and going between the castle of Sceaux and the house of the Spanish amba.s.sador, the Prince of Cellamare; M. de Malezieux, the secretary and friend of the d.u.c.h.ess, drew up a form of appeal from the French n.o.bility to Philip V., but n.o.body had signed it, or thought of doing so. They got pamphlets written by Abbe Brigault, whom the d.u.c.h.ess had sent to Spain; the mystery was profound, and all the conspirators were convinced of the importance of their manoeuvres; every day, however, the Regent was informed of them by his most influential negotiator with foreign countries, Abbe Dubois, his late tutor, and the most depraved of all those who were about him. Able and vigilant as he was, he was not ignorant of any single detail of the plot, and was only giving the conspirators time to compromise themselves. At last, just as a young abbe, Porto Carrero, was starting for Spain, carrying important papers, he was arrested at Poitiers, and his papers were seized. Next day, December 7, 1718, the Prince of Cellamare's house was visited, and the streets were lined with troops. Word was brought in all haste to the d.u.c.h.ess of Maine. She had company, and dared not stir. M. de Chatillon came in; joking commenced. ”He was a cold creature, who never thought of talking,” says Madame de Stael in her memoirs. ”All at once he said, 'Really there is some very amusing news: they have arrested and put in the Bastille, for this affair of the Spanish amba.s.sador, a certain Abbe Bri . . . . Bri' he could not remember the name, and those who knew it had no inclination to help him. At last he finished, and added, 'The most amusing part is, that he has told all, and so, you see, there are some folks in a great fix.' Thereupon he burst out laughing for the first time in his life. The d.u.c.h.ess of Maine, who had not the least inclination thereto, said, 'Yes, that is very amusing.' 'O! it is enough to make you die of laughing,' he resumed; 'fancy those folks who thought their affair was quite a secret; here's one who tells more than he is asked, and names everybody by name!'” The agony was prolonged for some days; jokes were beginning to be made about it at the d.u.c.h.ess of Maine's; she kept friends with her to pa.s.s the night in her room, waiting for her arrest to come. Madame de Stael was reading Machiavelli's conspiracies.

”Make haste and take away that piece of evidence against us,” said Madame du Maine, laughingly, ”it would be one of the strongest.”

The arrest came, however; it was six A.M., and everybody was asleep, when the king's men entered the Duke of Maine's house. The Regent had for a long time delayed to act, as if he wanted to leave everybody time to get away; but the conspirators were too scatter-brained to take the trouble.

The d.u.c.h.ess was removed to Dijon, within the government, and into the very house of the Duke of Bourbon, her nephew, which was a very bitter pill for her. The Duke of Maine, who protested his innocence and his ignorance, was detained in the Castle of Dourlans in Picardy. Cellamare received his pa.s.sports and quitted France. The less ill.u.s.trious conspirators were all put in the Bastille; the majority did not remain there long, and purchased their liberty by confessions, which the d.u.c.h.ess of Maine ended by confirming. ”Do not leave Paris until you are driven thereto by force,” Alberoni had written to the Prince of Cellamare, ”and do not start before you have fired all the mines.” Cellamare started, and the mines did not burst after his withdrawal; conspiracy and conspirators were covered with ridicule; the natural clemency of the Regent had been useful; the part of the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of Maine was played out.

The only serious result of Cellamare's conspiracy was to render imminent a rupture with Spain. From the first days of the regency the old enmity of Philip V. towards the Duke of Orleans and the secret pretensions of both of them to the crown of France, in case of little Louis XV.'s death, rendered the relations between the two courts th.o.r.n.y and strained at bottom, though still perfectly smooth in appearance. It was from England that Abbe Dubois urged the Regent to seek support. Dubois, born in the very lowest position, and endowed with a soul worthy of his origin, was ”a little, lean man, wire-drawn, with a light colored wig, the look of a weasel, a clever expression,” says St. Simon, who detested him; ”all vices struggled within him for the mastery; they kept up a constant hubbub and strife together. Avarice, debauchery, ambition, were his G.o.ds; perfidy, flattery, slavishness, his instruments; and complete unbelief his comfort. He excelled in low intrigues; the boldest lie was second nature to him, with an air of simplicity, straightforwardness, sincerity, and often bashfulness.” In spite of all these vices, and the depraving influence he had exercised over the Duke of Orleans from his earliest youth, Dubois was able, often far-sighted, and sometimes bold; he had a correct and tolerably practical mind. Madame, who was afraid of him, had said to her son on the day of his elevation to power, ”I desire only the welfare of the state and your own glory; I have but one request to make for your honor's sake, and I demand your word for it, that is, never to employ that scoundrel of an Abbe Dubois, the greatest rascal in the world, and one who would sacrifice the state and you to the slightest interest.” The Regent promised; yet a few months later and Dubois was Church-councillor of State, and his growing influence with the prince placed him, at first secretly, and before long openly, at the head of foreign affairs.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Cardinal Dubois----78]

James Stuart, King James II.'s son, whom his friends called James III.

and his enemies Chevalier St. George, had just unsuccessfully attempted a descent upon Scotland. The Jacobites had risen; they were crying aloud for their prince, who remained concealed in Lorraine, when at last he resolved to set out and traverse France secretly. Agents, posted by the English amba.s.sador, Lord Stair, were within an ace of arresting him, perhaps of murdering him. Saved by the intelligence and devotion of the post-mistress of Nonancourt, he embarked on the 26th of December at Dunkerque, too late to bring even moral support to the men who were fighting and dying for him. Six weeks after landing at Peterhead, in Scotland, he started back again without having struck a blow, without having set eyes upon the enemy, leaving to King George I. the easy task of avenging himself by sending to death upon the scaffold the n.o.blest victims. The Duke of Orleans had given him a little money, had known of and had encouraged his pa.s.sage through France, but had accorded him no effectual aid; the wrath of both parties, nevertheless, fell on him.

Inspired by Dubois, weary of the weakness and dastardly incapacity of the Pretender, the Regent consented to make overtures to the King of England.

The Spanish nation was favorable to France, but the king was hostile to the Regent; the English loved neither France nor the Regent, but their king had an interest in severing France from the Pretender forever.

Dubois availed himself ably of his former relations with Lord Stanhope, heretofore commander of the English troops in Spain, for commencing a secret negotiation which soon extended to Holland, still closely knit to England. ”The character of our Regent,” wrote Dubois on the 10th of March, 1716, ”leaves no ground for fearing lest he should pique himself upon perpetuating the prejudices and the procedure of our late court, and, as you yourself remark, he has too much wit not to see his true interest.” Dubois was the bearer to the Hague of the Regent's proposals; King George was to cross over thither; the clever negotiator veiled his trip under the pretext of purchasing rare books; he was going, he said, to recover from the hands of the Jews Le Poussin's famous pictures of the Seven Sacraments, not long ago carried off from Paris. The order of succession to the crowns of France and England, conformably to the peace of Utrecht, was guaranteed in the scheme of treaty; that was the only important advantage to the Regent, who considered himself to be thus nailing the renunciation of Philip V.; in other respects all the concessions came from the side of France; her territory was forbidden ground to the Jacobites, and the Pretender, who had taken refuge at Avignon on papal soil, was to be called upon to cross the Alps. The English required the abandonment of the works upon the ca.n.a.l of Mardyck, intended to replace the harbor of Dunkerque the Hollanders claimed commercial advantages. Dubois yielded on all the points, defending to the last with fruitless tenacity the t.i.tle of King of France, which the English still disputed. The negotiations came to an end at length on the 6th of January, 1717, and Dubois wrote in triumph to the Regent, ”I signed at midnight; so there are you quit of servitude (your own master), and here am I quit of fear.” The treaty of the triple alliance brought the negotiator before long a more solid advantage; he was appointed secretary of state for foreign affairs; it was on this occasion that he wrote to Mr. Craggs, King George's minister, a letter worthy of his character, and which contributed a great deal towards gaining credit for the notion that he had sold himself to England. ”If I were to follow only the impulse of my grat.i.tude and were not restrained by respect, I should take the liberty of writing to H. B. Majesty to thank him for the place with which my lord the Regent has gratified me, inasmuch as I owe it to nothing but to the desire he felt not to employ in affairs common to France and England anybody who might not be agreeable to the King of Great Britain.”

At the moment when the signature was being put to the treaty of the triple alliance, the sovereign of most distinction in Europe, owing to the eccentric renown belonging to his personal merit, the czar Peter the Great, had just made flattering advances to France. He had some time before wished to take a trip to Paris, but Louis XIV. was old, melancholy, and vanquished, and had declined the czar's visit. The Regent could not do the same thing, when, being at the Hague in 1717, Peter I. repeated the expression of his desire. Marshal Cosse was sent to meet him, and the honors due to the king himself were everywhere paid to him on the road. A singular mixture of military and barbaric roughness with the natural grandeur of a conqueror and creator of an empire, the czar mightily excited the curiosity of the Parisians.

”Sometimes, feeling bored by the confluence of spectators,” says Duclos, ”but never disconcerted, he would dismiss them with a word, a gesture, or would go away without ceremony, to stroll whither his fancy impelled him.

He was a mighty tall man, very well made, rather lean, face rather round in shape, a high forehead, fine eyebrows, complexion reddish and brown, fine black eyes, large, lively, piercing; well-opened; a glance majestic and gracious when he cared for it, otherwise stern and fierce, with a tic that did not recur often, but that affected his eyes and his whole countenance, and struck terror. It lasted an instant, with a glance wild and terrible, and immediately pa.s.sed away. His whole air indicated his intellect, his reflection, his grandeur, and did not lack a certain grace. In all his visits he combined a majesty the loftiest, the proudest, the most delicate, the most sustained, at the same time the least embarra.s.sing when he had once established it, with a politeness which savored of it, always and in all cases; masterlike everywhere, but with degrees according to persons. He had a sort of familiarity which came of frankness, but he was not exempt from a strong impress of that barbarism of his country which rendered all his ways prompt and sudden, and his wishes uncertain, without bearing to be contradicted in any.”

Eating and drinking freely, getting drunk sometimes, rus.h.i.+ng about the streets in hired coach, or cab, or the carriage of people who came to see him, of which he took possession unceremoniously, he testified towards the Regent a familiar good grace mingled with a certain superiority; at the play, to which they went together, the czar asked for beer; the Regent rose, took the goblet which was brought and handed it to Peter, who drank, and, without moving, put the gla.s.s back on the tray which the Regent held all the while, with a slight inclination of the head, which, however, surprised the public. At his first interview with the little king, he took up the child in his arms, and kissed him over and over again, ”with an air of tenderness and politeness which was full of nature, and nevertheless intermixed with a something of grandeur, equality of rank, and, slightly, superiority of age; for all that was distinctly perceptible.” We know how he went to see Madame de Maintenon.

One of his first visits was to the church of the Sorbonne; when he caught sight of Richelieu's monument, he ran up to it, embraced the statue, and, ”Ah! great man,” said he, ”if thou wert still alive, I would give thee one half of my kingdom to teach me to govern the other.”

[Ill.u.s.tration: Peter the Great and Little Louis XV----82]

The czar was for seeing everything, studying everything; everything interested him, save the court and its frivolities; he did not go to visit the princesses of the blood, and confined himself to saluting them coldly, whilst pa.s.sing along a terrace; but he was present at a sitting of the Parliament and of the academies, he examined the organization of all the public establishments, he visited the shops of the celebrated workmen, he handled the coining-die whilst there was being struck in his honor a medal bearing a Fame with these words: _Vires acquiret eundo_ ('Twill gather strength as it goes.) He received a visit from the doctors of the Sorbonne, who brought him a memorial touching the reunion of the Greek and Latin Churches. ”I am a mere soldier,” said he, ”but I will gladly have an examination made of the memorial you present to me.”

Amidst all his chatting, studying, and information-hunting, Peter the Great did not forget the political object of his trip. He wanted to detach France from Sweden, her heretofore faithful ally, still receiving a subsidy which the czar would fain have appropriated to himself.

Together with his own alliance, he promised that of Poland and of Prussia. ”France has nothing to fear from the emperor,” he said; as for King George, whom he detested, ”if any rupture should take place between him and the Regent, Russia would suffice to fill towards France the place of England as well as of Sweden.”

Thanks to the ability of Dubois, the Regent felt himself infeoffed to England; he gave a cool reception to the overtures of the czar, who proposed a treaty of alliance and commerce. Prussia had already concluded secretly with France; Poland was distracted by intestine struggles; matters were confined to the establishment of amicable relations; France thenceforth maintained an amba.s.sador in Russia, and the czar accepted the Regent's mediation between Sweden and himself. ”France will be ruined by luxury and daintiness,” said Peter the Great, at his departure, more impressed with the danger run by the nation from a court which was elegant even to effeminacy than by the irregularity of the morals, to which elsewhere he was personally accustomed.

Dubois, however, went on negotiating, although he had displayed no sort of alacrity towards the czar; he was struggling everywhere throughout Europe against the influence of a broader, bolder, more powerful mind than his own, less adroit perhaps in intrigue, but equally dest.i.tute of scruples as to the employment of means. Alberoni had restored the finances, and reformed the administration of Spain; he was preparing an army and a fleet, meditating, he said, to bring peace to the world, and beginning that great enterprise by manoeuvres which tended to nothing less than setting fire to the four corners of Europe, in the name of an enfeebled and heavy-going king, and of a queen ambitious, adroit, and unpopular, ”both of whom he had put under lock and key, keeping the key in his pocket,” says St. Simon. He dreamed of reviving the ascendency of Spain in Italy, of overthrowing the Protestant king of England, whilst restoring the Stuarts to the throne, and of raising himself to the highest dignities in Church and State. He had already obtained from Pope Clement XI. the cardinal's hat, disguising under pretext of war against the Turks the preparations he was making against Italy; he had formed an alliance between Charles XII. and the czar, intending to sustain, by their united forces, the attempts of the Jacobites in England. His first enterprise, at sea, made him master of Sardinia within a few days; the Spanish troops landed in Sicily. The emperor and Victor Amadeo were in commotion; the pope, overwhelmed with reproaches by those princes, wept, after his fas.h.i.+on, saying that he had d.a.m.ned himself by raising Alberoni to the Roman purple; Dubois profited by the disquietude excited in Europe by the bellicose att.i.tude of the Spanish minister to finally draw the emperor into the alliance between France and England. He was to renounce his pretensions to Spain and the Indies, and give up Sardinia to Savoy, which was to surrender Sicily to him. The succession to the duchies of Parma and Tuscany was to be secured to the children of the Queen of Spain. ”Every difficulty would be removed if there were an appearance of more equality,” wrote the Regent to Dubois on the 24th of January, 1718.

”I am quite aware that my personal interest does not suffer from this inequality, and that it is a species of touchstone for discovering my friends as well at home as abroad. But I am Regent of France, and I ought to so behave myself that none may be able to reproach me with having thought of nothing but myself. I also owe some consideration to the Spaniards, whom I should completely disgust by making with the emperor an unequal arrangement, about which their glory and the honor of their monarchy would render them very sensitive. I should thereby drive them to union with Alberoni, whereas, if a war were necessary to carry our point, we ought to be able to say what Count Grammont said to the king: ”At the time when we served your Majesty against Cardinal Mazarin.

Then the Spaniards themselves would help us.” In the result, France and England left Holland and Savoy free to accede to the treaty; but, if Spain refused to do so voluntarily within a specified time, the allies engaged to force her thereto by arms.

The Hollanders hesitated; the Spanish amba.s.sador at the Hague had a medal struck representing the quadruple alliance as a coach on the point of falling, because it rested on only three wheels. Certain advantages secured to their commerce at last decided the States-general. Victor Amadeo regretfully acceded to the treaty which robbed him of Sicily; he was promised one of the Regent's daughters for his son.