It was to no mistiness of mind or constitutional indecision that the vagaries of his ministry were due; but simply to the fact that his voice was drowned by the clamour of the Council, and his position sacrificed by the desertion of the King.
D'Argenson could not fail to attract remark, but he was not strong enough to make himself necessary. Chauvelin had received him with curiosity and unfeigned regard; but after a time he lost the freshness of originality, and his shrinking eccentricity alone remained. The Minister treated him not unkindly. He put him off with promises, and was lavish of countenance and encouragement; and d'Argenson passed a couple of years in continual expectation of preferment, and in constant labour in the directions suggested by his patron. It was at this time that he began those researches upon foreign politics which were afterwards to prove so fruitful; and his Journal is henceforth enriched with discussions of the interests of France abroad, interesting in themselves, and often admirable for breadth and originality of view. They suggest that though d'Argenson may have been a student and a recluse, a pedant he certainly was not. One of them, presented to Chauvelin in 1734 in the form of a memoir, enables us to bring into just focus the relations between d'Argenson and his political mentor. It was criticised with his usual directness and vigour by St. Pierre, who, after pointing out its faults and admonishing the author, exhorts him not to be discouraged. "At your age," he says,[191] "I was very far from thinking so profoundly upon public affairs," and he predicts a brilliant future as the reward of his perseverance. It is in mentioning this same memoir that d'Argenson sums his opinion, repeatedly expressed, of the man who had been so long his friend. "No one knows this admirable citizen, and he does not even know himself. He has given to the public a number of his political works; he has his eyes fixed upon a goal too far removed from us; and so it happens that he repeats himself, is always harping upon the same themes, and is not appreciated. For all that, he is deeply versed in modern history, present and past; he is an able man; and he has given himself up to a branch of philosophy, profound and abandoned by all the world, namely, the true method of political action most conducive to human happiness."[192]
It was no such fate that d'Argenson designed for himself; and with keen anxiety did he watch for an opening which would enable him to reap the fruit of his researches. For a long time he had been secure in the friendship of the minister; but that resource appeared to be failing him; nor was he reassured by his keen-witted brother, who warned him that Chauvelin spent his days in a continual course of duplicity. D'Argenson's apprehensions were soon confirmed. In July, 1734, upon rumours of a congress to arrange the preliminaries of peace, he offered to act as one of the plenipotentiaries.[193] His services were declined. The same fate awaited a request preferred by him shortly afterwards in favour of a relative.
"I was mortified, and I see that I was only agreeable and accredited at the Court, in so far as I was useful; c'est un commerce!"
he exclaims, flinging down his pen in disgust.[194] He took it up again to write to Chauvelin, informing him that there were some estates for sale in Touraine, of which the minister might be glad to have the refusal. He received in reply a letter[195] which, considering their former friendship, seems cruelly cold. It is barbed with that icy politeness with which one declines an intimacy no longer desired. In November the refusal of some vacant places which he had a right to expect, and which had been directly promised,[196] sufficed to complete his discomfiture; he could see but the wreck of those ambitions which had charged his Journal with energy and fire; and throughout the year 1735, the silence of disillusion is scarcely broken.
Not the least of d'Argenson's embarrassments[197] had come from a quarter where a happier man would have found but help and encouragement. It was in the course of the year 1733 that the relations between d'Argenson and his wife ended, by mutual consent, in a judicial separation.[198] As the conduct of the husband has given rise to animadversions which are often more true than charitable, it may be worth while to dwell upon it for a moment. D'Argenson had been married in the winter of 1718[199] to Mademoiselle Méliand, daughter of the Intendant of Lille. The passive form is used advisedly, for the transaction was arranged between the two families like the transfer of land;[200] and d'Argenson was only introduced to his betrothed a few days before the ceremony took place. The lady who became his wife "would be fifteen next January";[201] and d'Argenson, as we learn from some amusing letters to Madame de Balleroy, was not a little embarrassed by his new rôle of "elderly husband."[202] Notwithstanding, he accepted it with dutiful complaisance; and for some years his attitude towards his young wife was one of affectionate loyalty, not ungraced by a certain kindly amusement. About the time of their return from Valenciennes, the relations between them changed for the worse. Madame d'Argenson was a woman in fact as in name; her character had developed, and she proved to be a person of average brain and strong nerve, the very antithesis of her husband. Circumstances were not wanting to sharpen these radical differences of character, and to provide occasions of offence. Her husband's affairs were in disorder,[203] and his political success was long in coming; while the philosophy which was to him excuse and consolation kindled in his wife but impatient scorn. She took upon herself the cares of the household, regarding herself, and possibly not without reason, as its sole support; while her husband chafed against a solicitude which he looked upon as mere vexatious interference.[204] A conservative in these matters as in so many more, he probably told her that a wife who was worth anything would know her place, and she may have replied that she had indeed good reason to know it only too well. She held ideas upon it which raise one's opinion of her, and which were very unusual in her day.
"It is this too," says her husband, "which has led her to affect an air of absolute independence. She has formed a narrow-minded conception of all that concerns the proper submission of a wife, and she is up in arms against everything which detracts from the position of women in the world. She has far too exalted an idea of the dignity of the mistress of a house, and thinks very little of that of the master,"[205] etc.
The position at last became unbearable; and Madame d'Argenson resolved to defy that sacred tradition which guarded legal relationship in old French families, and to look forward to "a position of scandal as one would long for Paradise." Her will was inflexible; the separation took place, and one at least of the parties profited by it to return to a better mind. D'Argenson, looking back upon his married life, writes of it as reasonably and contritely as a man can do when he regrets the past and is sorry for his own share in it. In speaking of the separation, he says that
"the world has done me the justice to believe that I had not deserved it, that I did everything I could to avoid it, and that I acted in the matter with a good feeling and generosity seldom met with."[206]
For the truth of that statement we have the written testimony of Madame d'Argenson's own counsel;[207] and it is surely her husband's only reparation, as it is his best excuse, that for three and twenty years he loyally fulfilled the burdensome obligations which his own past misdoing may have contributed to entail.