On the 21st of April, the young Prince of Wales, and his brother, the Bishop of Osnabrugh, were allowed, under the conduct of their new governor, the Earl of Holderness, to go to Gravesend, and see the men-of-war and Indiamen lying there. There was nothing remarkable in this; but it was so that the King himself, the Sovereign of an island and of a maritime power, had never seen the sea, nor ever been thirty miles from London at the age of thirty-four; so great was his indolence, and the restraint in which his mother had kept him!
On the 24th, the poll began for sheriffs of Middlesex. Wilkes from the first had by far the greatest show of hands for him, and Alderman Oliver the fewest,—the consequence of his connection with Shelburne’s faction, whose opposition to Wilkes recoiled on themselves, and who were hissed and ill-treated by the mob. The Livery assembled on that occasion determined to make another remonstrance to the King, and the Lord Mayor offered to present it, which was accepted. One Bull, a devotee of Wilkes, joined him; but Kirkman, a ministerial alderman, gained ground on them, till the indiscretion of the courtiers, who laboured indefatigably to defeat Wilkes, overthrew their own purpose. An imprudent letter from Lord North’s secretary to a voter being made public, it enraged the Livery, and Wilkes and Bull were chosen. Little less offence was taken at a party novel,[195] written by the profligate hireling Smollett, to vindicate the Scots and cry down juries.
The remonstrance being ready, the Lord Chamberlain wrote to the Lord Mayor, that his Majesty would not receive more persons with the remonstrance than were allowed by law. This was resented, but complied with.
The Chevalier D’Eon, of whom I have given an account, occasioned at this period much and strange discourse. A notion had for some time prevailed that he was a woman in man’s habit. The Duc de Choiseul believed it from the report of a female English spy who pretended to be certain of it from having washed his linen; and as the report spread, it gained farther credit from assertions that he never dressed himself before any witness, nor could any of his comrades recollect an instance of his amours. His beard, though black, was inconsiderable; and though he was strong and an excellent fencer, his legs had a feminine turn. At first he pretended to resent the report, but afterwards spoke and wrote so dubiously on his sex, that the most judicious suspected him for author of the fable from interested views. Sometimes he disappeared and returned again, till by the usual discrepancy of opinions, very great sums were wagered on the question; and he, though he denied the charge in print, was taxed with encouraging those bets in order to share the spoil, according as he should pronounce on his own gender: but the question came to no issue, and was forgotten like other legends of the day.[196]
In August this year I again went to Paris, and was witness to the final overthrow of their constitution. Since the removal of the Duc de Choiseul, no Prime Minister had been named. Over the King’s mind Madame du Barry had almost unlimited ascendant, except that she could not prevail on him to place his confidence on the Duc d’Aiguillon, who certainly intrigued with her husband’s sister, a very sensible woman, and was suspected of having secured the mistress herself to his interest by the same attention. Yet, whether it was owing to the King’s aversion to strangers, or that Choiseul had instilled lasting prejudices into his mind against D’Aiguillon, the latter could not entirely surmount them. He was a dark, violent, and vindictive man, with less parts than passions; but the rancour borne to him and the mortifications it had brought on him, had taught him to curb his temper; and he now affected universal benignity and condescension; proceeding even to obtain the arrears of the pension due to La Chalotais, the patriot magistrate of Bretagne, whom he had so cruelly oppressed. Yet would not this ostentatious benevolence have expunged the odium his persecutions had created, if another man had not presented himself as a still more offensive object to the indignation of the public. This was the Chancellor Maupeou, a man who had mounted by the regular steps of villany from flattery through treachery to tyranny. He had affected such loathsome idolatry of Choiseul that he had been heard to declare he would on no consideration change his house, because, from the upper windows, he could survey at least the chimneys of the Hôtel de Choiseul. Yet while there was but a very dubious prospect of that Minister’s disgrace, Maupeou, then only Vice-Chancellor, had betrayed such symptoms of his ambition and hostile designs that the friends of the Duc de Choiseul earnestly exhorted him not to raise a secret enemy higher. Choiseul, with his usual rashness of confidence in himself, replied, “I know Maupeou is a rogue, but there is nobody so fit to be Chancellor;” and Chancellor he made him. Maupeou, who thought himself fitter to be Minister, did not pique himself on gratitude, and was a capital instrument in the Duke’s disgrace. I never saw character written in more legible features than in those of Maupeou. He was sallow and black, with eyes equally penetrating, acute, and suspicious. His complexion spoke determinate villany; his eyes seemed either roving in quest of prey for it, or glaring on snares that he apprehended. His parts were great and his courage adventurous. Power was his object, despotism his road, the clergy his instruments: but the hardness and cruelty of his nature showed that severity was as agreeable to his temper as to his views.[197] Not being qualified like D’Aiguillon to shine in a voluptuous Court where a woman governed, and probably having noticed the tendency of the King’s gloomy mind to superstition, he reckoned, not injudiciously, on the triumph that bigotry would gain over love in a veteran Monarch; and accordingly insinuated himself into the confidence of the King’s Carmelite daughter, Madame Louise, the almost only engine that the Church of Rome had employed in the spirit of its ancient maxims during its late disgraces. At that Princess’s cell, the Chancellor obtained weekly audiences of his master: and though, during the suspense of power, Maupeou and D’Aiguillon acted in a kind of concert, it became notorious that the first founded his hopes on the King’s devotion and the other on his vices. More instances than one broke out of this contrast of piety and irreligion, not only in the King but in his own family. His daughters had all been bred by the Queen to habitual strictness. They were very weak women; but Madame Adelaide, the eldest, was something more—she was gallant.[198] One or two of her ladies had been punished many years before for furnishing her with indecent novels; and the King, whose palace was a brothel, in the very sight of his wife and daughters, had expressed great offence at that scandal. Madame Adelaide, though not corrected, yet become more wary, was suspected of covering her private history with the cloak of religion, or rather with that of the Bishop of Senlis, an ambitious prelate: and it was probably by his suggestions that she drew her sister, Madame Victoire, into a step very contradictory to their professions, for all the King’s daughters engaged warmly in hostilities against the new mistress. Soon after the Duc de Choiseul’s fall, Madame Victoire sent, on a feigned pretence, for the Bishop of Orleans, who had the feuille de bénéfices. The Bishop, though possessed of the recommendation of proper churchmen, was a jolly, luxurious, dissolute priest, who kept an opera-dancer[199] publicly at a great expense, and lodged her in a convent. He had been a favourite of Choiseul, and remained attached to him. After the Princess had discoursed with the Bishop on her pretended business, she asked him negligently his opinion of the late revolution. He replied, it did not become him to meddle with affairs of state; but the Princess insisting, and he knowing her an enemy to Madame du Barry, ventured to open his heart to her. The consequences were, her betraying the conversation to her father, and the exile of the Bishop to an abbey: nor could the prayers of his aged mother, who begged to see him before her death, obtain a permission for him to visit her at the capital of his diocese,—a rigour of which the Chancellor gave many more and some similar instances in cases of banished presidents and avocats of the Parliaments.
There was another man who, though not pretending to the first place, bore, during the King’s indecision, a large share of the public aversion both from the necessity of his office and the rigour and partialities with which he executed it. This was the Abbé du Terray, the new Comptroller-General, recommended by the Chancellor. It was a considerable addition to the Comptroller’s unpopularity that he was wholly governed by a corrupt and rapacious mistress,[200]—a woman so notorious for the sale of offices, that her protector was at last forced to dismiss her; while the old Duc de la Vrillière was suffered to indulge his concubine[201] in the same infamous venality.
Madame du Barry, as I have said, was the fountain or channel of all these disorders. The doting Monarch was enchanted with her indelicacy, vulgarism, and indecencies, the novelty of which seemed to him simplicity. Her mirth was childish romping; her sallies, buffoonish insults; her conversation, solecisms and ignorance. She pulled off the Chancellor’s wig, spat in the Duc de Laval’s face at her levee—he deserved it, for he let her repeat it; and the King, who deserved it still more, she called “fool!” and bade hold his tongue. Those who offended her, she threatened with her power; those who bowed to her, she treated little better. To none she was generous, for herself she was rapacious. She had two governesses of very different characters and understandings, but the congenial idiot had most weight with her. This was the Comtesse de Valentinois, wife of, but parted from, the brother of the Prince of Monaco, and herself sole heiress of the Duc de St. Simon. She was a handsome woman, finely made, but mischievous, impertinent, and too notorious for her promiscuous amours even to pass for gallant. The Maréchale Duchesse de Mirepoix had preceded Madame de Valentinois in the direction of the mistress. No head was better, no temper colder than the Maréchale’s. Of great pride, but capable of any meanness to supply her profusions at play, she had joined the mistress to supplant the Minister; but whether Madame du Barry’s want of generosity chilled the Maréchale’s importunities for money, or whether her alliance with the House of Lorrain[202] made her incapable of digesting the low familiarities of the mistress, or whether a prospect of ingratiating herself with the young Dauphiness, governed by Madame Adelaide, and consequently an enemy to the mistress, swayed the Maréchale to swerve from her plan, it is certain she conceived and expressed both aversion and contempt for Madame du Barry, and even declined attending her to an audience of the Dauphiness, to which Madame de Valentinois, more compliant, introduced her. While I was now at Paris, having been long intimate with Madame de Mirepoix and her family, at Florence, in England, and at Paris, she told me many anecdotes of that silly and imperious favourite, most of which I heard attested by the general voice, or at least corroborated by similar incidents. One I will mention. At supper with the King she drank out of the punch-ladle, and returned it into the bowl. The King said, “Fy donc! vous donnez votre crachat à boire à tout le monde;” she replied “Eh bien! je veux que tout le monde boive mon crachat.” The same night my friend Madame du Deffand asking the Maréchale what would become of Madame du Barry should the King die? she replied bitterly, “Elle iroit à la Salpêtrière, et elle est très faite pour y aller.” As Madame de Mirepoix was not in the odour of sincerity, I much suspected her of being concerned in an event of that time, which, however, she affected to assign as the cause of her resentment to the mistress,—I mean the disgrace of her brother, the Prince of Beauvau, which happened during this journey of mine to Paris; and of which I was in a situation of knowing many secret particulars, Madame du Deffand being the confidant both of the brother and sister, as she had been before their rupture, continuing loyal to both sides, and by both esteemed as a woman void of intrigue. As they supped alternately at her house several times in a week, and as her friendship for me induced her to insist on my being admitted to their most private conferences, I was privy to the effusions of both parties: and, indeed, they had so little reserve before me, that one evening the Prince and Princess of Beauvau were so explicit on their situation and enemies, that I felt uneasy, and thinking myself an improper auditor of such secrets, I begged permission to retire, but the Princess reproved me sensibly, saying, “Your thinking these things improper for you to hear, is telling us that they are improper for us to speak.” I have already given the character of that Princess, and mentioned how deeply she had been concerned in the disgrace of the Duc de Choiseul, in whose fall she involved herself and her husband, who was a man of honour, very confined in his understanding, and acquired accomplishments, which were restrained to a pedantic purity in his own language, and who was a mixture of bashfulness and frankness, with signal courage and unbounded pride. To introduce his story, I must revert to the situation of his friend, the late Minister.
The Duc de Choiseul had been ordered to restrain himself to his wife’s estate in Touraine, where he had built a magnificent castle. There, though overwhelmed with debts, he lived with an increase of profusion, retaining or affecting his constitutional spirits and levity. It was a new scene in France, a disgraced Minister still the object of veneration and love. It was as new to see the King unpopular, or, which in that country is synonymous, unfashionable. While Louis could scarcely assemble a Court round him and his mistress at Versailles, at Compiègne, the Princes of the Blood, at their several country seats, and the Duc de Choiseul at Chanteloup, were followed by throngs of company. The insult to the King was doubled by the disrespect paid to his intimations; for, as nobody was allowed to resort to Chanteloup without previously applying for his Majesty’s permission, to which demand this oracular response was generally given, “Je ne le defends ni le permets,” and as that oracle was interpreted, or pretended to be interpreted, into consent, the want of respect for his inclination could but be deemed contempt by a Prince so accustomed to have his very looks obeyed. The mode of visiting the Duke spread, and, for a mode, lasted long, nor was confined to his former friends; several persons of both sexes, many ladies whom he had loved, and others who had never loved him, affronted the King rather than be unfashionable, and the Duke, with too much vanity and too much indifference for his friends, encouraged the concourse; but, as may well be supposed, this triumph did but advance his and their destruction, of which the Prince of Beauvau was the first example.
The resolution had been taken, by the Chancellor’s advice, of annihilating or new modelling all the Parliaments in France, which was now executed with rigour, or at great expense, wherever the Court could, by bribes and pensions, persuade the members to enlist in the new system. Bourdeaux, for a day or two, resisted, to the great terror of Maréchal Richelieu, their governor, who retreated precipitately and sent for troops. In Languedoc the Prince of Beauvau commanded. The King wrote to him with his own hand, telling him that, having an intention of dissolving the Parliament of Toulouse, and knowing the Prince’s sentiments to be contrary to that plan, he could not employ him any longer in that province. The rest of the letter was still more kind, but artful, demanding his frequent attendance on his person, as one of the four captains of the guard in whom he could most securely rely, and adding, that his Majesty had seen the time when it was not possible to get one of them to attend him. This sentence alluded to their absence at Chanteloup. I called even the first part of the epistle tender, for the dismission of the Prince from his government was a gentle method of preventing his disobedience by refusing to break the Parliament,—a resistance that must have drawn on his imprisonment. The Prince’s answer was very respectful, but firm. He gave copies of both letters to Madame du Deffand, permitting her to communicate them to me; and he added a comment on that of the King, which fully interpreted its meaning. He said the King was so afraid of assassination, that he dreaded not having his attendance on his person. “He knows,” said the Prince, “my zeal and assiduity so well, that, in the year 17—, when the Imperialists passed the Rhine, and I begged him to allow me to set out immediately for the army, he was three days before he would give me an answer, and it was but by repeated importunities that I could wring from him the permission.”
The moment the Prince’s disgrace was known, the Duc d’Orleans repaired to him, sat all day with him and the Princess, and carried them, in the evening, into his own box at the opera. The next day that haughty woman sat at home, receiving the homage of half France. I went in the crowd. All day were files of coaches passing the whole length of the Rue St. Honoré, at the end of which she lived, and no fallen Minister in England, just commencing patriot, could behave with more insolence and affected satisfaction; but, though nothing could bow her spirit, her husband was reduced to take a humiliating step, and that without success. His paternal fortune had been little or none; all he had was from the King’s bounty. His debts were very great—his income, by the loss of his government, reduced to a trifle. He wrote to the King, representing his situation and begging assistance: it was coldly refused.