"And what writing, except good poetry, is not noxious?" disdainfully inquired the king. "A perpetual conflagration should exist for the consuming of all private letters and documents. Continue the destruction. My desire is well known to you, namely, that only purely official documents remain after me. Spare not a page of confidences, intrigues or anything calculated to embroil historians or encourage romanticists. To ashes with the whole! While the verses of the great poets, the Latins especially, exist, what matters it about other writing? Here is a Petrarch in antique vignettes which I secured yesterday. Crude, is it? Why, the devil, Excellency! There was no mock modesty in those days."
Lecazes smiled, remembering Talleyrand's epigram: "The King reads Horace in public and yellow-backs when alone."
"Your Majesty," said he, "ever discourses on the intellectual and the artistic—"
"Ever, ever," rejoined the flattered monarch. "It is this diversion alone that buoys me up in supporting the weight of the crown, for 'tis heavy, so heavy! Lecazes, I do not lie on roses. If 'twere not for madrigals—eh? The prettiest madrigal ever written to my sister-in-law, Marie Antoinette, was from my pen. Do you remember it? 'Twas of the zephyr and love. Not even Voltaire surpassed it. I ought to have devoted my life to the art of verse and not been obliged to desert the Muse in order to treat with those devilish emigrants who return from exile as they left, having learned nothing, forgotten nothing. The importunate creatures wish to obliterate the Red Terror with the White. They would return to '86, and the guillotine, hang, drown, seeking only a fierce revenge. Such imbecility! One may take vengeance on an individual, but never on a nation. Do you follow me, Lecazes? The fools! They would be better royalists than the King himself."
The Superintendent was pleased at this apt epigram, heard then for the first time.
"They must be restrained," he said. "Between them and the Carbonari the throne totters."
The King turned his face with a look half quizzical, half contemptuous.
"Lecazes, you talk inanities. Do you think we are to last long enough for that? Do you believe in a future for us? Better that I repeat with my great-grandfather and Pompadour, 'After us, the deluge.' Had I ambition—You well know how foreign 'tis to my nature—"
Again Lecazes assumed the mellow expression, and again came to his mind words of Talleyrand, uttered many years earlier before Revolutions were dreamed of: "A king loves his crown."
"Were I ambitious," resumed the monarch, "I should now be contented. But ambition is puerile. I was not born for the throne but for art—highest art! Beauty sways my soul. Poetic art rather than the prerogatives of supreme rank should have filled my life. You, who are also an artist, can understand how I am starved in my exalted station, not filled. Happiness is found in the refined pleasures of the imagination rather than in state-craft and pomp. What memory is my reign to perpetuate? I have been despoiled of the nation's conquests. I have acquired the crown by giving up thirty-six strong-holds and ten thousand cannon. Glory has turned her face and fled from me. Is the fault my own?"