"Monseigneur," replied Bonvilliers, who realised that if he did not interrupt the conversation, it would degenerate into mere personalities, "we have still another fear...."
"What is it, gentlemen?" asked the prince. "Oh! say it out whilst you are about it."
"Well, we are afraid (and we have reason for so being), we are afraid, I say, of seeing the Royalists and the priests block the avenues to the new régime."
"Oh! as to those people," exclaimed the prince, with an almost menacing gesture, "set your minds at rest; they have given too many hard knocks to our House for me to forget them! Half the calumnies to which I have referred came from them; an eternal barrier separates us.... It was a good thing for the Elder Branch!"
The Republicans looked at one another in astonishment at the strong feeling, almost amounting to hatred, with which the prince uttered the words, "It was a good thing for the Elder Branch!"
"Well, gentlemen," the prince continued, "have I perchance advanced a truth which was unknown to you, in proclaiming thus openly the difference of principles and interests which have always divided the Younger Branch from the Elder, the House of Orléans from the reigning House? Oh! our hatred does not date from yesterday, gentlemen; it goes back as far as Philippe, the brother of Louis XIV.! It is like the case of my grandfather, the Regent; who was it that slandered him? The priests and the Royalists; for some day, gentlemen, when you have studied historical questions more profoundly, and dug to the roots of the tree you want to cut down, you will realise what the Regent was, and the services he rendered France by decentralising Versailles, and by making money circulate all over the country, to the extreme arteries of social life, as he did by his system of finance. Ah! I only ask one thing: if God calls upon me to reign over France, as you said just now, I hope He will grant me a portion of the Regent's genius!"
He then held forth at length upon the ameliorations to which the Regent's scheme of politics had led in the diplomatic relations of France with Europe; in connection with England, he spoke a few words showing that he should look for the same support from her as his grandfather had received.
"Pardon me, monsieur," Cavaignac said, "but I think a King of France should find his real support in his own country."
The Duc d'Orléans did not evade giving an explanation, but, with his customary facility of elocution, to do him justice, he revealed the system which afterwards gained great celebrity under the name of Juste milieu.