My husband loudly complained of my living at Versailles, and wrote to me a very passionate letter, full of reproaches against me, and still more against the King; amidst other indiscreet terms, calling him tyrant. As I was reading this letter, the King came into my apartment; I immediately thrust it into my pocket; the emotion with which I received his Majesty, shewed me to be under some disorder; I was for concealing the cause, but on his repeated instances, I put my husband’s letter into his hands. He read it through without the least sign of resentment: I assured him that I had no share in his temerity; and the better to convince him of it, desired that he would punish the writer severely. No, Madam, said he to me, with that air of goodness which is so natural to him, your husband is unhappy, and should rather be pitied. History does not afford a like passage of moderation in an injured King. My spouse, on being informed of it, left the kingdom to travel.
Though the peace had diffused quiet through Europe, it caused violent agitations in the political bodies of France. The parliament of Paris, amidst its many remonstrances to Lewis XV. exhorted him in a very fine speech, to take off the twentieth denier. The deputies of that body expressed themselves in this manner:
So many millions of men now in indigence, stand in need of immediate ease and relief; whereas, should they be still obliged to pay the twentieth denier, they will be quite unable to lift up their heads again, and repair their shattered fortune, and hence a general despondency.
Whole families will be reduced to the most dreadful distress, and thus be afraid of leaving behind them a numerous issue, which would be a burden to them whilst living, and to whom they can transmit no other inheritance than their wretchedness.
The number of children, who are the hope and support of the state, will be continually decreasing, the villages will be thinned, trade languish, and the culture of land in a great measure at a stand. The ruin of the farmers will necessarily be followed by that of the nobility, as their estates will suffer a very considerable diminution; and thus these people, and that brave nobility, whose valour is their soul and chief resource, will be involved in one common ruin.
Count Saxe used to call the deputies of the parliament the great-chamber pedants. They are for teaching the administration, says he, what it knows better than themselves. They are always harping on the distempers of the state, without any word of a remedy. Once, as the first president was delivering a pathetic harangue before the King, proving the necessity of lessening the weight of the taxes, his Majesty cut him short with these words: Mr. President, let but the parliament enable me to pay off the state debts, and defray the present expences of the Monarchy, and very readily will I abolish every, tax, duty, and impost.
A man of wit, and who knows the French temper, used to say, that these useless representations were become necessary, as keeping up the people’s spirits, who, without a declared Protector, would think themselves for ever undone.
In Cardinal de Fleury’s indolent ministry, and the subsequent wars, the government had not been able to take into consideration an abuse which manifestly tended to dispeople the monarchy. Religion, in all wise governments, a source of population, was thinning the human species. All France was mouldering away in convents: every town and village had numerous communities of girls, who made vows against having children. The following letter, which I received from a nun at Lyons, and communicated to the King, occasioned deliberations for reforming this abuse.
“Madam,
“I was at first for writing to the Pope, but, on farther reflection, I thought it would be full as well to apply to you. The point is this: when I was but seven years of age, my parents shut me up in the convent where I now am; and on my entering into my fifteenth year, two nuns signified to me an order to take the veil. I deferred complying for some time; for though quite a stranger to every thing but the house I was in, yet I suspected there must be another kind of world than the convent, and another state than that of a nun; but the sister of Jesus’s heart, our mother, in order to fix my call, said to me, that all women who married were damned, because they lie with a man, and bore children: this set me a-crying most bitterly for my poor mother, as burning eternally in hell for having brought me into the world.