RETURN TO PARIS.--INTERVIEW WITH BOLINGBROKE.--A GALLANT
ADVENTURE.--AFFAIR WITH DUBOIS.--PUBLIC LIFE IS A DRAMA, IN WHICH
PRIVATE VICES GENERALLY PLAY THE PART OF THE SCENE-SHIFTERS.
IT is a strange feeling we experience on entering a great city by
night,--a strange mixture of social and solitary impressions. I say by
night, because at that time we are most inclined to feel; and the mind,
less distracted than in the day by external objects, dwells the more
intensely upon its own hopes and thoughts, remembrances and
associations, and sheds over them, from that one feeling which it
cherishes the most, a blending and a mellowing hue.
It was at night that I re-entered Paris. I did not tarry long at my
hotel, before (though it was near upon midnight) I conveyed myself to
Lord Bolingbroke's lodgings. Knowing his engagements at St. Germains,
where the Chevalier (who had but a very few weeks before returned to
France, after the crude and unfortunate affair of 1715), chiefly
resided, I was not very sanguine in my hopes of finding him at Paris. I
was, however, agreeably surprised. His servant would have ushered me
into his study, but I was willing to introduce myself. I withheld the
servant, and entered the room alone. The door was ajar, and Bolingbroke
neither heard nor saw me. There was something in his attitude and
aspect which made me pause to survey him, before I made myself known.
He was sitting by a table covered with books. A large folio (it was the
Casaubon edition of Polybius) was lying open before him. I recognized
the work at once: it was a favourite book with Bolingbroke, and we had
often discussed the merits of its author. I smiled as I saw that that
book, which has to statesmen so peculiar an attraction, made still the
study from which the busy, restless, ardent, and exalted spirit of the
statesman before me drew its intellectual food. But at the moment in
which I entered his eye was absent from the page, and turned
abstractedly in an opposite though still downcast direction. His
countenance was extremely pale, his lips were tightly compressed, and an
air of deep thought, mingled as it seemed to me with sadness, made the
ruling expression of his lordly and noble features. "It is the torpor
of ambition after one of its storms," said I, inly; and I approached,
and laid my hand on his shoulder.
After our mutual greetings, I said, "Have the dead so strong an
attraction that at this hour they detain the courted and courtly
Bolingbroke from the admiration and converse of the living?"
The statesman looked at me earnestly: "Have you heard the news of the
day?" said he.
"How is it possible? I have but just arrived at Paris."
"You do not know, then, that I have resigned my office under the
Chevalier!"
"Resigned your office!"
"Resigned is a wrong word: I received a dismissal. Immediately on his
return the Chevalier sent for me, embraced me, desired me to prepare to
follow him to Lorraine; and three days afterwards came the Duke of
Ormond to me, to ask me to deliver up the seals and papers. I put the
latter very carefully in a little letter-case, and behold an end to the
administration of Lord Bolingbroke! The Jacobites abuse me terribly;
their king accuses me of neglect, incapacity, and treachery; and Fortune
pulls down the fabric she has built for me, in order to pelt me with the
stones!"*
* Letter to Sir W. Windham.--ED.
"My dear, dear friend, I am indeed grieved for you; but I am more
incensed at the infatuation of the Chevalier. Surely, surely he must
already have seen his error, and solicited your return?"
"Return!" cried Bolingbroke, and his eyes flashed fire,--"return!--Hear
what I said to the Queen-Mother who came to attempt a reconciliation:
'Madam,' said I, in a tone as calm as I could command, 'if ever this
hand draws the sword, or employs the pen, in behalf of that prince, may
it rot!' Return! not if my head were the price of refusal! Yet,
Devereux,"--and here Bolingbroke's voice and manner changed,--"yet it is
not at these tricks of fate that a wise man will repine. We do right to
cultivate honours; they are sources of gratification to ourselves: they
are more; they are incentives to the conduct which works benefits to
others; but we do wrong to afflict ourselves at their loss. 'Nec
quaerere nec spernere honores oportet.'* It is good to enjoy the
blessings of fortune: it is better to submit without a pang to their
loss. You remember, when you left me, I was preparing myself for this
stroke: believe me, I am now prepared."
* "It becomes us neither to court nor to despise honours."
And in truth Bolingbroke bore the ingratitude of the Chevalier well.
Soon afterwards he carried his long cherished wishes for retirement into
effect; and Fate, who delights in reversing her disk, leaving in
darkness what she had just illumined, and illumining what she had
hitherto left in obscurity and gloom, for a long interval separated us
from each other, no less by his seclusion than by the publicity to which
she condemned myself.
Lord Bolingbroke's dismissal was not the only event affecting me that
had occurred during my absence from France. Among the most active
partisans of the Chevalier, in the expedition of Lord Mar, had been
Montreuil. So great, indeed, had been either his services or the idea
entertained of their value, that a reward of extraordinary amount was
offered for his head. Hitherto he had escaped, and was supposed to be
still in Scotland.
But what affected me more nearly was the condition of Gerald's
circumstances. On the breaking out of the rebellion he had been
suddenly seized, and detained in prison; and it was only upon the escape
of the Chevalier that he was released: apparently, however, nothing had
been proved against him; and my absence from the head-quarters of
intelligence left me in ignorance both of the grounds of his
imprisonment and the circumstances of his release.
I heard, however, from Bolingbroke, who seemed to possess some of that
information which the ecclesiastical intriguants of the day so curiously
transmitted from court to court and corner to corner, that Gerald had
retired to Devereux Court in great disgust at his confinement. However,
when I considered his bold character, his close intimacy with Montreuil,
and the genius for intrigue which that priest so eminently possessed, I
was not much inclined to censure the government for unnecessary
precaution in his imprisonment.
There was another circumstance connected with the rebellion which
possessed for me an individual and deep interest. A man of the name of
Barnard had been executed in England for seditious and treasonable
practices. I took especial pains to ascertain every particular
respecting him. I learned that he was young, of inconsiderable note,
but esteemed clever; and had, long previously to the death of the Queen,
been secretly employed by the friends of the Chevalier. This
circumstance occasioned me much internal emotion, though there could be
no doubt that the Barnard whom I had such cause to execrate had only
borrowed from this minion the disguise of his name.
The Regent received me with all the graciousness and complaisance for
which he was so remarkable. To say the truth, my mission had been
extremely fortunate in its results; the only cause in which the Regent
was concerned the interests of which Peter the Great appeared to
disregard was that of the Chevalier; but I had been fully instructed on
that head anterior to my legation.
There appears very often to be a sort of moral fitness between the
beginning and the end of certain alliances or acquaintances. This
sentiment is not very clearly expressed. I am about to illustrate it by
an important event in my political life. During my absence Dubois had
made rapid steps towards being a great man. He was daily growing into
power, and those courtiers who were neither too haughty nor too honest
to bend the knee to so vicious yet able a minion had already singled him
out as a fit person to flatter and to rise by. For me, I neither sought
nor avoided him: but he was as civil towards me as his /brusque/ temper
permitted him to be towards most persons; and as our careers were not
likely to cross one another, I thought I might reckon on his neutrality,
if not on his friendship. Chance turned the scale against me.
One day I received an anonymous letter, requesting me to be, at such an
hour, at a certain house in the Rue ------. It occurred to me as no
improbable supposition that the appointment might relate to my
individual circumstances, whether domestic or political, and I certainly
had not at the moment any ideas of gallantry in my brain. At the hour
prescribed I appeared at the place of assignation. My mind misgave me
when I saw a female conduct me into a little chamber hung with tapestry
descriptive of the loves of Mars and Venus. After I had cooled my heels
in this apartment about a quarter of an hour, in sailed a tall woman, of
a complexion almost Moorish. I bowed; the lady sighed. An
/eclaircissement/ ensued; and I found that I had the good fortune to be
the object of a /caprice/ in the favourite mistress of the Abbe Dubois.
Nothing was further from my wishes! What a pity it is that one cannot
always tell a woman one's mind!
I attempted a flourish about friendship, honour, and the respect due to
the /amante/ of the most intimate /ami/ I had in the world.
"Pooh!" said the tawny Calypso, a little pettishly, "pooh! one does not
talk of those things here."
"Madame," said I, very energetically, "I implore you to refrain. Do not
excite too severe a contest between passion and duty! I feel that I
must fly you: you are already too bewitching."
Just as I rose to depart in rushes the /femme de chambre/, and
announces, not Monsieur the Abbe, but Monseigneur the Regent. Of course
(the old resort in such cases) I was thrust in a closet; in marches his
Royal Highness, and is received very cavalierly. It is quite
astonishing to me what airs those women give themselves when they have
princes to manage! However, my confinement was not long: the closet had
another door; the /femme de chambre/ slips round, opens it, and I
congratulate myself on my escape.
When a Frenchwoman is piqued, she passes all understanding. The next
day I am very quietly employed at breakfast, when my valet ushers in a
masked personage, and behold my gentlewoman again! Human endurance will
not go too far, and this was a case which required one to be in a
passion one way or the other; so I feigned anger, and talked with
exceeding dignity about the predicament I had been placed in the day
before.
"Such must always be the case," said I, "when one is weak enough to form
an attachment to a lady who encourages so many others!"
"For your sake," said the tender dame, "for your sake, then, I will
discard them all!"
There was something grand in this. it might have elicited a few strokes
of pathos, when--never was there anything so strangely provoking--the
Abbe Dubois himself was heard in my anteroom. I thought this chance,
but it was more; the good Abbe, I afterwards found, had traced cause for
suspicion, and had come to pay me a visit of amatory police. I opened
my dressing-room door, and thrust in the lady. "There," said I, "are
the back-stairs, and at the bottom of the back-stairs is a door."
Would not any one have thought this hint enough? By no means; this very
tall lady stooped to the littleness of listening, and, instead of
departing, stationed herself by the keyhole.
I never exactly learned whether Dubois suspected the visit his mistress
had paid me, or whether he merely surmised, from his spies or her
escritoire, that she harboured an inclination towards me; in either case
his policy was natural, and like himself. He sat himself down, talked
of the Regent, of pleasure, of women, and, at last, of this very tall
lady in question.
"/La pauvre diablesse/," said he, contemptuously, "I had once compassion
on her; I have repented it ever since. You have no idea what a terrible
creature she is; has such a wen in her neck, quite a /goitre/. /Mort
diable/!" (and the Abbe spat in his handkerchief), "I would sooner have
a /liaison/ with the witch of Endor!"
Not content with this, he went on in his usual gross and displeasing
manner to enumerate or to forge those various particulars of her
personal charms which he thought most likely to steel me against her
attractions. "Thank Heaven, at least," thought I, "that she has gone!"
Scarcely had this pious gratulation flowed from my heart, before the
door was burst open, and, pale, trembling, eyes on fire, hands clenched,
forth stalked the lady in question. A wonderful proof how much sooner a
woman would lose her character than allow it to be called not worth the
losing! She entered, and had all the furies of Hades lent her their
tongues, she could not have been more eloquent. It would have been a
very pleasant scene if one had not been a partner in it. The old Abbe,
with his keen, astute marked face, struggling between surprise, fear,
the sense of the ridiculous, and the certainty of losing his mistress;
the lady, foaming at the mouth, and shaking her clenched hand most
menacingly at her traducer; myself endeavouring to pacify, and acting,
as one does at such moments, mechanically, though one flatters one's
self afterwards that one acted solely from wisdom.
But the Abbe's mistress was by no means content with vindicating
herself: she retaliated, and gave so minute a description of the Abbe's
own qualities and graces, coupled with so any pleasing illustrations,
that in a very little time his coolness forsook him, and he grew in as
great a rage as herself. At last she flew out of the room. The Abbe,
trembling with passion, shook me most cordially by the hand, grinned
from ear to ear, said it was a capital joke, wished me good-by as if he
loved me better than his eyes, and left the house my most irreconcilable
and bitter foe!
How could it be otherwise? The rivalship the Abbe might have forgiven;
such things happened every day to him: but the having been made so
egregiously ridiculous the Abbe could not forgive; and the Abbe's was a
critical age for jesting on these matters, sixty or so. And then such
unpalatable sarcasms on his appearance! "'Tis all over in that
quarter," said I to myself, "but we may find another," and I drove out
that very day to pay my respects to the Regent.
What a pity it is that one's pride should so often be the bane of one's
wisdom. Ah! that one could be as good a man of the world in practice as
one is in theory! my master-stroke of policy at that moment would
evidently have been this: I should have gone to the Regent and made out
a story similar to the real one, but with this difference, all the
ridicule of the situation should have fallen upon me, and the little
Dubois should have been elevated on a pinnacle of respectable
appearances! This, as the Regent told the Abbe everything, would have
saved me. I saw the plan; but was too proud to adopt it; I followed
another course in my game: I threw away the knave, and played with the
king, /i.e./, with the Regent. After a little preliminary conversation,
I turned the conversation on the Abbe.
"Ah! the /scelerat/!" said Philip, smiling, "'tis a sad dog, but very
clever and /loves me/, he would be incomparable, if he were but decently
honest."
"At least," said I, "he is no hypocrite, and that is some praise."
"Hem!" ejaculated the Duke, very slowly, and then, after a pause, he
said, "Count, I have a real kindness for you, and I will therefore give
you a piece of advice: think as well of Dubois as you can, and address
him as if he were all you endeavoured to fancy him."
After this hint, which in the mouth of any prince but Philip of Orleans
would have been not a little remarkable for its want of dignity, my
prospects did not seem much brighter; however, I was not discouraged.
"The Abbe," said I, respectfully, "is a choleric man: one /may/
displease him; but dare I hope that so long as I preserve inviolate my
zeal and my attachment to the interests and the person of your Highness,
no--"
The Regent interrupted me. "You mean nobody shall successfully
misrepresent you to me? No, Count" (and here the Regent spoke with the
earnestness and dignity, which, when he did assume, few wore with a
nobler grace)--"no, Count, I make a distinction between those who
minister to the state and those who minister to me. I consider your
services too valuable to the former to put them at the mercy of the
latter. And now that the conversation has turned upon business I wish
to speak to you about this scheme of Gortz."
After a prolonged conference with the Regent upon matters of business,
in which his deep penetration into human nature not a little surprised
me, I went away thoroughly satisfied with my visit. I should not have
been so had I added to my other accomplishments the gift of prophecy.
Above five days after this interview, I thought it would be but prudent
to pay the Abbe Dubois one of those visits of homage which it was
already become policy to pay him. "If I go," thought I, "it will seem
as if nothing had happened; if I stay away, it will seem as if I
attached importance to a scene I should appear to have forgotten."
It so happened that the Abbe had a very unusual visitor that morning, in
the person of the austere but admirable Duc de St. Simon. There was a
singular and almost invariable distinction in the Regent's mind between
one kind of regard and another. His regard for one order of persons
always arose either out of his vices or his indolence; his regard for
another, out of his good qualities and his strong sense. The Duc de St.
Simon held the same place in the latter species of affection that Dubois
did in the former. The Duc was just coming out of the Abbe's closet as
I entered the anteroom. He paused to speak to me, while Dubois, who had
followed the Duc out, stopped for one moment, and surveyed me with a
look like a thundercloud. I did not appear to notice it, but St. Simon
did.
"That look," said he, as Dubois, beckoning to a gentleman to accompany
him to his closet, once more disappeared, "that look bodes you no good,
Count."
Pride is an elevation which is a spring-board at one time and a
stumbling-block at another. It was with me more often the
stumbling-block than the spring-board. "Monseigneur le Duc," said I,
haughtily enough, and rather in too loud a tone considering the chamber
was pretty full, "in no court to which Morton Devereux proffers his
services shall his fortune depend upon the looks of a low-born insolent
or a profligate priest."
St. Simon smiled sardonically. "Monsieur le Comte," said he, rather
civilly, "I honour your sentiments, and I wish you success in the
world--and a lower voice."
I was going to say something by way of retort, for I was in a very bad
humour, but I checked myself: "I need not," thought I, "make two
enemies, if I can help it."
"I shall never," I replied gravely, "I shall never despair, so long as
the Duc de St. Simon lives, of winning by the same arts the favour of
princes and the esteem of good men."
The Duc was flattered, and replied suitably, but he very soon afterwards
went away. I was resolved that I would not go till I had fairly seen
what sort of reception the Abbe would give me. I did not wait long. he
came out of his closet, and standing in his usual rude manner with his
back to the fireplace, received the addresses and compliments of his
visitors. I was not in a hurry to present myself, but I did so at last
with a familiar yet rather respectful air. Dubois looked at me from
head to foot, and abruptly turning his back upon me, said with an oath,
to a courtier who stood next to him,--"The plagues of Pharaoh are come
again; only instead of Egyptian frogs in our chambers, we have the still
more troublesome guests,--English adventurers!"
Somehow or other my compliments rarely tell; I am lavish enough of them,
but they generally have the air of sarcasms; thank Heaven, however, no
one can accuse me of ever wanting a rude answer to a rude speech. "Ha!
ha! ha!" said I now, in answer to Dubois, with a courteous laugh, "you
have an excellent wit, Abbe. /A propos/ of adventures, I met a Monsieur
St. Laurent, Principal of the Institution of St. Michael, the other day.
'Count,' said he, hearing I was going to Paris, 'you can do me an
especial favour!' 'What is it?' said I. 'Why, a cast-off valet of mine
is living at Paris; he would have gone long since to the galleys, if he
had not taken sanctuary in the Church: if ever you meet him, give him a
good horsewhipping on my account; his name is William Dubois.' 'Depend
upon it,' answered I to Monsieur St. Laurent, 'that if he is servant to
any one not belonging to the royal family, I will fulfil your errand,
and horsewhip him soundly; if /in/ the service of the royal family, why,
respect for his masters must oblige me to content myself with putting
all persons on their guard against a little rascal, who retains, in all
situations, the manners of the apothecary's son and the roguery of the
director's valet.'"
All the time I was relating this charming little anecdote, it would have
been amusing to the last degree to note the horrified countenances of
the surrounding gentlemen. Dubois was too confounded, too aghast, to
interrupt me, and I left the room before a single syllable was uttered.
Had Dubois at that time been, what he was afterwards, cardinal and prime
minister, I should in all probability have had permanent lodgings in the
Bastile in return for my story. Even as it was, the Abbe was not so
grateful as he ought to have been for my taking so much pains to amuse
him! In spite of my anger on leaving the favourite, I did not forget my
prudence, and accordingly I hastened to the Prince. When the Regent
admitted me, I flung myself on my knee, and told him, /verbatim/, all
that had happened. The Regent, who seems to have had very little real
liking for Dubois, could not help laughing when I ludicrously described
to him the universal consternation my anecdote had excited.*
* On the death of Dubois, the Regent wrote to the Count de Noce, whom be
had banished for an indiscreet expression against the favourite, uttered
at one of his private suppers: "With the beast dies the venom: I expect
you to-night to supper at the Palais Royal."
"Courage, my dear Count," said he, kindly, "you have nothing to fear;
return home and count upon an embassy!"
I relied on the royal word, returned to my lodgings, and spent the
evening with Chaulieu and Fontenelle. The next day the Duc de St. Simon
paid me a visit. After a little preliminary conversation, he unburdened
the secret with which he was charged. I was desired to leave Paris in
forty-eight hours.
"Believe me," said St. Simon, "that this message was not intrusted to me
by the Regent without great reluctance. He sends you many condescending
and kind messages; says he shall always both esteem and like you, and
hopes to see you again, some time or other, at the Palais Royal.
Moreover, he desires the message to be private, and has intrusted it to
me in especial, because hearing that I had a kindness for you, and
knowing I had a hatred for Dubois, he thought I should be the least
unwelcome messenger of such disagreeable tidings. 'To tell you the
truth, St. Simon,' said the Regent, laughing, 'I only consent to have
him banished, from a firm conviction that if I do not Dubois will take
some opportunity of having him beheaded.'"
"Pray," said I, smiling with a tolerably good grace, "pray give my most
grateful and humble thanks to his Highness, for his very considerate and
kind foresight. I could not have chosen better for myself than his
Highness has chosen for me: my only regret on quitting France is at
leaving a prince so affable as Philip and a courtier so virtuous as St.
Simon."
Though the good Duc went every year to the Abbey de la Trappe for the
purpose of mortifying his sins and preserving his religion in so impious
an atmosphere as the Palais Royal, he was not above flattery; and he
expressed himself towards me with particular kindness after my speech.
At court, one becomes a sort of human ant-bear, and learns to catch
one's prey by one's tongue.
After we had eased ourselves a little by abusing Dubois, the Duc took
his leave in order to allow me time to prepare for my "journey," as he
politely called it. Before he left, he, however, asked me whither my
course would be bent? I told him that I should take my chance with the
Czar Peter, and see if his czarship thought the same esteem was due to
the disgraced courtier as to the favoured diplomatist.
That night I received a letter from St. Simon, enclosing one addressed
with all due form to the Czar. "You will consider the enclosed," wrote
St. Simon, "a fresh proof of the Regent's kindness to you; it is a most
flattering testimonial in your favour, and cannot fail to make the Czar
anxious to secure your services."
I was not a little touched by a kindness so unusual in princes to their
discarded courtiers, and this entirely reconciled me to a change of
scene which, indeed, under any other circumstances, my somewhat morbid
love for action and variety would have induced me rather to relish than
dislike.
Within thirty-six hours from the time of dismissal, I had turned my back
upon the French capital.