7th.—The sensitive Princess could never reconcile herself to seeing her children given over to the management of a governess. Her complaints never ceased; over and over again she made warm and urgent protests.[47]
Yet who would believe it? These cares and anxieties had nothing to do with the one of her sons who, by right of primogeniture, would have seemed most likely to be most dear to her.
If he informs her that he will be much away with his friend,[48] she is quite willing; assures him that what suits him will always suit her, and tells him that she does not want to restrain him in any way.[49]
Whence arose such indifference in a heart otherwise so warm?
And, on the other side, could real filial love, the love nature must perforce create, exist in one who thought himself lucky that he was not obliged to go to see his mother more than twice a week,[50] and whose affection for his governess was so far greater than that he felt for his own parents?[51]
8th.—His reputation having become somewhat inconvenient, Louis-Philippe-Joseph, in 1782, went to Versailles to ask permission from Louis XVI to absent himself.
“The King,” writes an historian, “received him rather coldly, and answered him in words to this effect—
“I have a Dauphin; Madame may perhaps be enceinte; Monsieur le Comte d’Artois has several children. You can do as you please. I do not see in what way you can be of use to the country; so go when you like and return when it seems good to you.”
Why this momentary silence and thoughtfulness, if it were not to remember a fact about to be the object of veiled rebuke from august lips? And what fact? What cause for so severe a reprimand?