“Let us, without delay, begin the war again, and then we shall drive the English out of Canada; whereas, by continuing the peace, they will dispossess us. This is no time for parlying; we must either give up that part of America to England, or prepare to dispute it.
“The savage nations are our allies, they mortally hate the English; and shall we delay availing ourselves of such a favourable disposition? A people without any fixed laws, is naturally given to change. The Canadians love war, and despise such nations as live in peace: twenty years inactivity would give them an ill opinion of the French; whereas, seeing us at war with a nation whom they hate, they will esteem us, and come into a closer alliance with us than before, &c.”
These memorials made no alteration in the general system; both sides continued to dissemble, and express a desire of cultivating the peace. England applied itself to increase its navy, and France sent orders to Brest and Rochfort, for building ships with the utmost dispatch.
Amidst the most earnest concern to redress the calamities of the state, no expedients could be found for so great and good an end. The people could not be relieved but by abolishing the taxes; and the expences of the state could not be answered but by new imposts: every branch of the government was embarrassed; so that the King often said to me, with a painful sense of such a situation, I know not where to begin.
The advantages of the encouragement of tillage, the improvement of arts, the increase of trade, the discharge of the national debt, were only in perspective; whereas the people stood in need of present relief. Observing that the public affairs greatly affected the King’s temper and constitution, I contrasted them with diversions. I may say, the most gay and striking conceits of imagination, for pleasing the senses, were now exhibited at Versailles. In all the entertainments which I gave to the Monarch, there was little of my own; I had people of taste at Paris who furnished me with original materials, to which I only gave a few retouches.
Amidst all my inventions to draw the court from that mournful state which the perplexity of affairs shed on it, I perceived that the King was not so chearful as I could have desired. He had a cloudiness in his looks, which were naturally sprightly; he was, likewise, more thoughtful than usual. Alarmed at this lugubrious scene, I took the liberty to ask his Majesty the cause of so unhappy an alteration. He vaguely answered, “that he was not sensible of any alteration, and that my company still was his chief delight:” the revolution, however, was but too certain.
My enemies having miscarried in their design of inducing the King to remove me from court, by political motives, set religion to work; and no less a person than his Majesty’s confessor was put at the head of this cabal. He was a Jesuit with only morality for his instrument; but as that, with a Prince, seldom gets the better of pleasure, he contrived a way which struck my Monarch.
This reverend father employed one of the best hands in Paris, in a picture representing the torments of hell. Several crowned heads seemed chained down in dreadful sufferings; there was no beholding their contortions without shuddering. This infernal master-piece he made a present of to Lewis XV. The King having viewed it for some time with a frown, asked the meaning of the picture, the very thing the son of Loyola wanted.
“Sire, said he, the Prince you see there suffering eternal torments, was an ambitious Monarch, who sacrificed his people to his vain delight in glory and power. He next to him, whom the devils are insulting, was an avaricious monarch, who laid up in his coffers immense treasures, squeezed from his oppressed subjects. This third wretch was an indolent sovereign, who minded nothing, and instead of governing by himself, left every thing to his ministers, whose incapacity produced infinite mischiefs. This fourth, whose sufferings exceed those of the others, his crime being greater, was a voluptuous King, openly keeping a concubine at his court; and by this scandalous example had filled his kingdom with debauchery, &c.”
The allegory was coarse, and becoming a monk, who, in the want of the means to attain his ends in this world, has recourse to things of the other life. Lewis XV. who saw into the drift of the picture, ordered the moralist to withdraw, but the impression remained.