on the part of England, Dubois proceeded to draw close CHAP. the family bonds between France and Spain by a double XXXIV. marriage, the betrothal of the infanta with Louis the Fifteenth, and the espousal of the heir to the Spanish throne, Louis, Prince of the Asturias, and Don Carlos, to the two daughters of the regent.

Nothing could be more unexpected to the party of the grandees of the old court,* who looked to Spain, its antagonistic policy and ideas, as their great stay. Dubois took the ground from under them by reconciling the King of Spain and the regent, and cementing the reconciliation by the intermarriage of their families. Even St. Simon himself, the great enemy of Dubois, consented to become the agent of his policy, and undertook to conduct the young princesses to Madrid. Duclos recounts how an effort was made to indispose the young king to the arrangement, and how at last Fleury's good sense induced him to acquiesce.

There was a rock ahead, however the young king's majority. In February 1723 Louis the Fifteenth would attain the age of thirteen, and with it the right to enter upon the exercise of the royal authority. The regency would then vanish, and the authority of the Duke of Orleans at least assume another title. Dubois, in view of such a project, dismissed the Maréchal de Villeroy, who had hitherto retained the guardianship of the young king's person, and who had performed its functions with a mixture of grossness and adulation which was anything but salutary. In order that he and the regent might exercise their supremacy, Dubois had the court removed to Versailles. Fleury, who had been preceptor to the young monarch under Villeroy, was desired to remain, his tranquil nature inspiring no umbrage. Dubois caused himself to be declared first minister, and a Council of State was formed of himself, Fleury, and the princes of the blood. A regular

Duclos, Régence.

government thus arranged, Louis the Fifteenth was brought to Rheims to be crowned, and soon after his return the Duke of Orleans ceased to bear the title of regent. Cardinal Dubois survived the period of the king's majority but a few months. No great political event marked these. But the cardinal would not repose. Though seventy years of age, he laboured to amass inore wealth, acquire more honour and more favour, monopolising the direction of every State department. The ministers indulged him by throwing upon Dubois the settlement of every difficult affair. This but hastened the progress of the disease under which he succumbed in August 1721. The regent strove to save the cardinal's life, by insisting on his undergoing a painful operation. But it was too late; gangrene had set in.

He must be a bold man that would offer himself as the apologist of Dubois. That, dissolute himself, he had encouraged the Duke of Orleans in sensual pleasures, and formed a creed of religion and morality, or rather a negation of them, favourable to such dissoluteness, is not to be denied. As his life and character thus offered so convenient a surface for malice, as well as resentment to shed calumny upon, Dubois' memory has been buried under a more than ordinary heap of filth. The regent himself, as well as Law and many others, may be adduced as examples, that having shared in the fashionable immorality of an epoch, does not at the same time imply criminality in all other respects. The regent acknowledged the principle of honour, and was not the assassin which his contemporaries so often supposed; and Dubois was, in all probability, as honest a politician as the generality of his contemporaries and calumniators.* His policy was peace, general peace, to which he may have sacrificed some ideas of French vanity, but nothing whatever of French interests. Had he

* For Dubois, see his Mémoires Secrets, the Mémoires de la Régence, Duclos, St. Simon, &c.

XXXIV.

continued the old superannuated policy of Louis the CHAP.
Fourteenth, enmity against England and the House of
Hanover, as Lord John Russell says, "his utmost possible
gain would not have equalled his utmost probable loss."
Indeed, Dubois' unwarlike policy, which Fleury fol-
lowed out, gave France and the French monarchy
another and a fairer chance of redeeming itself in
finance and administration, and thus arresting the final
ruin into which mad despotism was driving. The
French writers who vilified Dubois and gibbeted him,
less for the immorality, which they pardon in others,
than for the crime of his alliance with England, seem
to forget that the antagonism of Louis the Fourteenth
to England, which they regret not to have continued,
was an antagonism to constitutional freedom, to reli-
gious tolerance, to industrial developement, and to every
principle of progress. How writers calling themselves
liberal can abet such antagonism, and regret its aban-
donment, appears as inexplicable as it is retrograde.

The last months of Dubois' administration, as well
as the period intervening between his death and that
of the regent, were scarcely marked by any public
event. The quarrel of the cardinal, for precedence in
council, with the dukes and marshals; the dismissal of
Noailles from court; the arrest and exile of Villeroy
from his government of the king, on account of his
obstinacy in half opposing the wishes of the cardinal;
the assumption of the post and title of the principal
minister by the Duke of Orleans himself, after the
death of Dubois, did not have any great influence in
the march of affairs. The cardinal expired in August.
An apoplectic stroke carried off the regent on the 2nd
of December. His death had been foreseen by himself
and all around him. Suppers and excess every night
left him in a state of lethargy all the morning. He
awoke in the afternoon to necessary business, and to
the consciousness that death was imminent. A dropsy

The

CHAP. on the chest or a stroke of apoplexy threatened.
XXXIV. latter might have been arrested by temperance; but

the regent rather desired and sought the more speedy
deliverance. Wine had ceased to excite and women to
charm him; yet he sacrificed time and life to pleasures
that he no longer felt. The high birth of the regent,
says Lemontey, caused the most imaginary crimes to
be imputed to him. The low extraction of his favourite
authorised envy to exaggerate his vices. Philip and his
minister, surrounded by enemies and outrage, disdained
to take any vengeance, one from his natural temper,
the other from calculated selfishness. Absolute master
of all the wealth of France, the first left seven millions
of livres, the other a simple chattel heritage, not equal
to two years of his revenue.

The Duke of Orleans was the victim of that despotism which made the French king the tyrant of his family as of the State. Almost forcibly married to a princess whom he did not respect, then denied all occupation or employ, though of a spirit and capacity requiring both, Philip of Orleans fell into dissipation. Curbed and kept down by a monarch who had himself indulged in every vice, but who now exchanged it for devotion, the duke, like the age, rushed from a very natural disgust of Jesuitism and its morals into the contrary extreme, not only of dissoluteness and unbelief, but an avowal of both. Infidelity then wore the charm of being new and bold; coupled with indecency, both were taken for wit, but it was in a small circle. That which surrounded the regent was far less in number, and more circumscribed in influence, than the apparently decorous but more flagitious proceedings of Louis the Fourteenth's courtiers, whose bigot persecution of the Church, both Catholic and Protestant, worked inore harm to religion than all the regent's profanity.*

*The Duke of Orleans cannot be better studied than in St. Simon; see also De la Hoade, Duclos, &c.

The Abbé Fleury, a mild and circumspect personage, who had acquired, from congeniality of disposition, as much as from his authoritative post of preceptor, the chief influence over the young king, was advised by St. Simon to assume the place of principal minister on the death of the regent. Though not reluctant to seize the authority, Fleury shrank from the audacity of the act, declared the transfer from the regent to himself would be too great, and that a prince of the blood must necessarily exercise the functions of prime minister. When the Duke of Bourbon, as the chief of the family of Condé, was called to appear at Versailles after the regent's death, Fleury begged him, in presence of the king, to accept the post of prime minister, Louis assenting by an inclination of the head.

The Duke of Bourbon was chiefly known to the public from the ardour with which he had flung himself into Law's speculations, and for the greed which made him largely profit by them. He was a man of such purely personal passions that he could scarcely be said to raise his mind to any view of public affairs. Iracund, brutal, hideous in aspect, and one-eyed, the profit he made of Law, and his ungenerous abandonment of him, alone would stamp him as worthless. As, however, it was not decorous to load even the memory of a first prince of the blood and chief of the family of Condé with any monstrous weight of crime, the memoir writers of the day have transferred the blame of the principal acts of his administration to his mistress, Madame de Prye. Her influence, indeed, was great, especially in one respect. She belonged to one of those families who lent money to the State, and was initiated in their schemes. She it was who introduced the brothers Paris Duvernay, especially the youngest, to the duke, and these cruel enemies of Law became, though without any real title or authority, disposers of the financial affairs of the monarchy.

CHAP.

XXXIV.