a reference to the unhappy administration. In April, a new light breaks upon him, and he conjectures, very truly it appeared, that the moving spirit of the Court opposition was M. Chauvelin himself; his triumph is necessitated by "the horrible weakness of our present ministers."[232] All this time, d'Argenson was assured of a prominent place in the ministerial reconstruction which appeared to be imminent; and he is never tired of enlarging upon the incompetence of the men who were left to bear the weight of the Cardinal's government.
With the Cardinal himself, it is important to remember, he had at this time but one quarrel; and so late as November, 1738, he continues to write as follows:[233]
"Never has any of our kings or ministers had so little knowledge of men as Cardinal Fleury. It has been the greatest misfortune which the nation has suffered under his ministry; for had it not been for this capital defect in any man who governs, we should have gone very far under an administrator so virtuous and so disinterested."[234]
So far from an open rupture having taken place, he received from the Cardinal in January, 1739, a promise of the embassy at Naples;[235] and two months afterwards he was nominated by him to report upon a quarrel which had arisen in connection with the University.[236] At this time his alliance with the forward party at Court had lasted nearly two years; and the ground of his adhesion was not personal disappointment or private pique, but a feeling of the public necessity of strengthening the ministry by pressure brought to bear upon the Cardinal.
Six months afterwards his attitude had changed. The manifest determination of Fleury to repress every influence but his own, combined with a sudden crisis in public affairs to destroy the tone of tolerance or esteem with which d'Argenson had continued to regard him. In July, 1739, he writes:
"The rumours are growing that the tyranny of the Cardinal is nearing its close. I say tyranny; for when all is said, nothing is more hateful than the government of an old tutor, without birth and without ability, eighty-six years of age, choked with self-love and with a mania for ruling, leaning on subordinates worse than himself, whom he maintains without question, and ousting his king from the government at his own will and pleasure."[237]
In a letter to Chauvelin (April 24th) he had expressed the tone which is henceforth assumed.
"Our affairs abroad continue to move only by the impetus which you have given them. As to the rest, it is left to chance, and to a star which may pale. The unity of policy is lost; general plans are treated as chimerical systems, or as 'great questions,' which certainly do create genuine terror among the smallest heads which our nation has ever seen at its own."[238]
So runs the tale for many years. General declamation against the incompetence of the ministers is exchanged for a scathing relentless impeachment of every branch of the administration. The Journal of 1739 contains some of the most terrible pictures ever drawn of the internal condition of France; and the government of the interior is arraigned with all the triumphant detail of an unanswerable indictment. When the extreme of misery had passed, there remained the vicissitudes of foreign policy to sharpen the bitterness of d'Argenson's pen. The war of the Indies, the crisis in the Empire, gave occasion for many a philippic against the senile absurdity of the Cardinal's statecraft.[239] Nor was this all; for his hand is continually upon the Cardinal's pulse; his eyes are perpetually bent upon the King; his own prospects are weighed in an ever-changing balance; and d'Argenson, King and Cardinal are canvassed until the reader is sick and weary of them all. Occasionally the narrative is divested alike of dignity and of reason; and we sometimes meet with a rude savagery of feeling and expression which suggest that beneath d'Argenson's usual beauty of heart there lurked unsightly possibilities.
Such are the facts, unpleasing enough; it remains to determine their critical value.