When this information, given in a very different spirit from that in which I retail it, was over, Madame de Balzac observed, “Doubtless you will obtain a private audience with the king?”
“Is it possible, in his present age and infirmities?”
“It ought to be, to the son of the brave Marshal Devereux.”
“I shall be happy to receive Madame’s instructions how to obtain the honour: her name would, I feel, be a greater passport to the royal presence than that of a deceased soldier; and Venus’s cestus may obtain that grace which would never be accorded to the truncheon of Mars!”
Was there ever so natural and so easy a compliment? My Venus of fifty smiled.
“You are mistaken, Count,” said she; “I have no interest at court: the Jesuits forbid that to a Jansenist, but I will speak this very day to the Bishop of Frejus; he is related to me, and will obtain so slight a boon for you with ease. He has just left his bishopric; you know how he hated it. Nothing could be pleasanter than his signing himself, in a letter to Cardinal Quirini, ‘Fleuri, Eveque de Frejus par l’indignation divine.’ The King does not like him much; but he is a good man on the whole, though jesuitical; he shall introduce you.”
I expressed my gratitude for the favour, and hinted that possibly the relations of my father’s first wife, the haughty and ancient house of La Tremouille, might save the Bishop of Frejus from the pain of exerting himself on my behalf.
“You are very much mistaken,” answered Madame de Balzac: “priests point the road to court as well as to Heaven; and warriors and nobles have as little to do with the former as they have with the latter, the unlucky Duc de Villars only excepted,—a man whose ill fortune is enough to destroy all the laurels of France. Ma foi! I believe the poor Duke might rival in luck that Italian poet who said, in a fit of despair, that if he had been bred a hatter, men would have been born without heads.”
And Madame de Balzac chuckled over this joke, till, seeing that no further news was to be gleaned from her, I made my adieu and my departure.
Nothing could exceed the kindness manifested towards me by my father’s early connections. The circumstance of my accompanying Bolingbroke, joined to my age, and an address which, if not animated nor gay, had not been acquired without some youthful cultivation of the graces, gave me a sort of eclat as well as consideration. And Bolingbroke, who was only jealous of superiors in power, and who had no equals in anything else, added greatly to my reputation by his panegyrics.