His monarchical faith is like his religious faith; it disturbs rather than reassures him. He feels himself unworthy to be the anointed of the Lord. His conscience as a king troubles him as much as his conscience as a Christian. He esteems neither himself nor those who surround him. He willingly agrees with his minister of foreign affairs, the Marquis d’Argenson, a monarchist who talks like a republican, that “Numerous and magnificent courts, the bait of fools and the wicked, will never make the splendor of royalty. There will always be display enough in decency.... Be persuaded that the greatest vice of monarchical governments is what is called the court. To begin with the monarch, it is from him that all vices are drawn, and from him that they spread as from the box of Pandora.” But do not exaggerate, do not force the note. Recollect especially that republican courts—and there are such, for democrats in power also have their courtiers—are neither more rigid nor more moral than those of kings and emperors.
It must always be remembered that a real difference exists between the royalty of Louis XIV. and that of Louis XV. Louis XIV. performed his kingly duties with the facility of a great actor playing his part, or, better, with the dignity of an officiating priest. Louis XV., on the contrary, in spite of his noble bearing and the successful beginnings of his reign, is almost ashamed of his royal dignity. He does not like what is grand; what he prefers are small apartments, little suppers, petty conversations. At times the monarch is not even a private gentleman; he is a bourgeois who makes up his own kitchen accounts, who saves candle-ends, who haggles with his domestics, who leads a mean and grovelling existence. It is not he who would have chosen the haughty device of the Sun King: Nec pluribus impar. The beams of the royal star dazzle his eyes. What pleases him is not the splendid glittering Gallery of Mirrors, but smart residences, little dwellings hid in verdure; Choisy for example, where, as the Duke de Luynes puts it, he is almost like a private person who takes pleasure in doing the honors of his château.
But neither let us forget that from time to time Louis XV. has inklings of greatness, dreams of glory and power. He is not the sluggard king that badly informed historians portray. Military instincts revive in him. The pride of his race awaked. “The King amidst his troops, becomingly uniformed in white or blue or jonquil, his hat placed coquettishly above his ear, the white cord, the shoulder-knot on his coat, himself starts the gay speeches, the tales of gallantry. The nobleman goes to battle in ruffles and powdered hair, with perfume on his Brussels lace handkerchief; elegance has never done harm to courage, and politeness is nobly allied to bravery.”[18]
1745 is a triumphant year, the year of Fontenoy, one of our greatest national victories. There Louis XV. and the Dauphin behave like sons of Henri IV. Voltaire’s enthusiasm when he celebrates this great day is not made to order, and the advocate Barbier is sincere in exclaiming that the reign of Louis XV. is the finest in all French history.
Nor let us believe that this monarch, over-lauded by his contemporaries but too much decried by history, is as indolent as people like to say. On the contrary, he works, and works a great deal. He not merely presides with the greatest regularity at the ministerial council, but he busies himself in a very special way with military and diplomatic affairs. If he readily agrees with what is proposed by his ministers without troubling himself to contradict them, it is because apart from official politics he has a secret policy whose springs he personally controls.[19] His intentions are good, he loves France sincerely. What then will ruin him? Two defects which are nearly always inseparable: sensuality and indecision.
Sensuality enfeebles, enervates; the man who is its victim can no longer either act or will. In the end he arrives at that commonplace benevolence, that insignificant good nature, that absence of character and energy, those inconsistencies and hesitations which rob sovereigns as well as private individuals of the very notion of just ideas and the courage of salutary resolutions. Louis XV. comes from the arms of his mistresses without force enough left to be a king.
Distrust and timidity form the basis of his character. “He knows he is badly served,” says M. Boutaric; “absolute master, he has only to speak to be obeyed, and, fortified by conscience, he can command, but he is so timid, let us say the word, so pusillanimous, that after having carefully sought the best way and seen it clearly, he nearly always decides, although with regret, for the worst which is proposed to him by his ministers or his mistresses. It is of public notoriety that when the King proposes anything in council, his opinion is always combated, and that, after making a number of objections, the prince always ends by adopting that of his counsellors, knowing, meantime, that he is doing wrong, and muttering to himself, ‘So much the worse; they would have it.’” Thus he illustrates those lines of Horace:—
“Video meliora proboque,
Deteriora sequor.”
