"If I had to do only with my old friends, Horace and Petronius," said the King, "my digestion would be all right. Unfortunately I have found a few modern subjects well calculated to annoy Master Gaster—for the vermin of Juvenal and Persius would be honey of Hymethus compared with the bile of the books I speak of—"
The King pointed out to the doctor a few open pamphlets which lay about the table.
"Norman Letters. The Man in the Grey Coat—Minerva," said the doctor, looking at them; "who dared to bring these books hither?"
"My majesty dared. I am as good a doctor as you are, but I have more patients. I have a whole nation to cure, and to administer a tonic we must at least be aware of the debility. Look hither," said the King, "here is an antidote to poison. The Conservative, edited by the most learned doctors of the political faculty—by de Chateaubriand, de Bonald, de Villèle, Fiévée. Castelbajac, and a certain Abbé de Lamennais, an eloquent, sharp, and able man, I am sure, who has, though, one fault, he is a greater royalist than his King."
"And may I venture to ask your majesty how the works of Etienne, Jay, Jony and company, came hither?"
"Smuggled in," said Louis XVIII., with a smile; "F——, one of my valets de chambre, whom I have placed at the head of what I call my secret ministry, brings them to me. The fellow has taste. He said to me the other day: 'I have something devilish good here. The scoundrels do not spare your majesty.' But," continued the King, "no man can be great to his valet or his physician, and I will therefore confess that the works of these liberal gentlemen trouble my digestion not a little, and I wish my good friend the Duke d'Escars to bring me back that purée de cailles truffées, of which he is the inventor. He is the Prince of Gourmands."
"Then," said Père Elysée, glad to be able thus to pass to the principal object of his visit, "I am just in time to amuse your majesty, and to announce the visit of one of your best friends—the Prince de Maulear."
"Just in time," said the King; "he is a gentleman of the old school, and has chosen for fifty years to be such. He yet believes in a King of France, fully, perhaps more fully, than he does in God. He is a true enemy of the Jacobins and Revolutionists. Tell him to come in, doctor, and we will be able to bear up against the attacks of the authors of those books."
The doctor soon brought the Prince de Maulear, and then left.
"Come in, my dear Prince," said the King; "you do not spoil your friends, and I see you too rarely, as I see others too frequently, to be able to forget you."