I sent him the following answer:
Sir,
“I shall lay hold of the very first opportunity to desire his Majesty to give your son a regiment. But I likewise have a favour to ask of you, which is to dispense me from the honour of being related to you. I have some family reasons which forbid me to think, that my forefathers have ever been allied to any of the ancient houses of this kingdom.”
Half France would hide themselves for shame, were I to give a detail of all the mean, fawning letters sent to me by persons of the first families in the kingdom. A Princess could write to me in this manner:
“My dear Friend,
“I beg you would ask the King for a grant of farmer-general for Mr. Armand M——, a superannuated clerk, whose fortune I would gladly make. For this favour I shall hold myself obliged to you as long as I live.
I am, my dear,
With all possible regard,
Your most humble servant.”
The public envy, however, increasing with the marks of royal favour, the world, at any rate, would make me answerable for the events of the times. It has been in every body’s mouth, that all the misfortunes of France were owing to me. If there were any grounds for such a charge, the kingdom must have been in a prosperous and flourishing state when his Majesty called me to Versailles; whereas it was very far from being so. The cause of the evil lay deep; so that France, under all its pressures, was only fulfilling its destiny. The misfortunes of the administration in this reign are to be considered as flowing from the former administration.
At the time of the demise of Lewis XIV. the kingdom was in a dreadful disorder; the debts of the nation were immense, and the public credit totally ruined; so that the state then laboured under an evil, which was not to be cured by temporary remedies. Lewis the Great, by his excessive fondness for splendor, had impoverished the people. The preceding Kings were contented with being the stewards or managers of the general wealth, but he made himself the proprietor of it: he became master of the nation’s treasure, all the finances were in his hands: he had augmented the crown revenues beyond all relative proportion: in the course of three years the whole species of France came into his coffers: besides, his magnificence had set his subjects the pernicious example of impoverishing themselves by profuse expences.
The duke of Orleans, who was at the head of the state after Lewis XIV. so far from restoring order, increased the confusion. He promoted a system of finances, which proved their utter ruin. All the riches of the monarchy changed hands. No such thing as money was to be seen; foreigners ran away with one part, and domestic stock-jobbers secreted the other; no plan of administration could be contrived, capable of putting a stop to evils, unprecedented from the very foundation of the monarchy. This revolution greatly affected the several branches of the national strength. Agriculture, trade, arts, and ingenuity, were sufferers by it, and still suffer: for I have heard very knowing persons say, that the grand system had given birth to many detrimental systems in the state.