“Such an offensive letter holds good against a devoted servitor?”
“Against the servitor—you who received a letter in your house here, from Lady Grammont, by courier—— ”
“Surely brother and sister may correspond?”
“Not with such letters—” And the monarch held out a copy of the letter dictated by Balsamo’s Voice—this time made by the King’s own hand. “Deny not—you have the original locked up in the iron safe in your bedroom.”
Pale as a spectre the duke listened to the sovereign continuing pitilessly.
“This is not all. You have an answer for Lady Grammont in your pocketbook only waiting for its postscript to be added when you leave my presence. You see I am well informed.”
The duke bowed without saying a word and staggered out of the room as though he were struck by apoplexy. But for the open air coming on his face he would have dropped backwards; but he was a man of powerful will and recovering composure, he passed through the courtiers to enter his rooms where he burnt certain papers. A quarter of an hour following he left the palace in his coach.
The disgrace of Choiseul was a thunderbolt which set fire to France.
The Parliament which his tolerance had upheld, proclaimed that the State had lost its strongest prop. The nobility sustained him as one of their order. The clergy felt fostered by a man whose severe style made his post almost sacerdotal. The philosophical party, very numerous by this time and potent, because the most active, intelligent and learned formed it, shouted aloud when “their” Government escaped from the hands of the protector of Voltaire, the pensioner of the Encyclopedist writers and the preserver of the traditions of Lady Pompadour playing the Maccenas-in-petticoats for the newspaper writers and pamphleteers.
The masses also complained and with more reason than the others. Without deep insight they knew where the shoe pinched.