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Counterwork your rivals, with diligence and dexterity, but at the same time with the utmost personal civility to them; and be firm without heat. Messieurs d'Avaux and Servien did no more than this.
Counterwork your rivals, with diligence and dexterity, but at the same time with the utmost personal civility to them; and be firm without heat. Messieurs d'Avaux and Servien did no more than this.
All that I have here related was clearly brought to light in due time. Boisseuil died shortly after D'Avaux. He was a tall, big man, warm and violent, a great gambler, bad tempered, who often treated M. le Grand and Madame d'Armagnac, great people as they were, so that the company were ashamed, and who swore in the saloon of Marly as if he had been in a tap-room.
The Court was surprised, but, however, did not think fit to delay sending full powers to his Royal Highness to treat for peace on such terms as he thought reasonable and advantageous for the King's service; and there were joined with him, though in subordination, MM. Mole, the First President, d'Avaux, and myself, with the title of Ambassadors Extraordinary and Plenipotentiaries.
By means of the Count d'Avaux, its minister, an agreement was concluded between the two powers at Stummsdorf in Prussia, by which the truce was prolonged for twenty-six years, though not without a great sacrifice on the part of the Swedes, who ceded by a single stroke of the pen almost the whole of Polish Prussia, the dear-bought conquest of Gustavus Adolphus.
The Cardinal d'Ossat was looked upon at Rome as an Italian, and not as a French cardinal; and Monsieur d'Avaux, wherever he went, was never considered as a foreign minister, but as a native, and a personal friend. Mere plain truth, sense, and knowledge, will by no means do alone in courts; art and ornaments must come to their assistance.
M. d'Avaux obliged me to assure Don Gabriel de Toledo, in private, that if the Spaniards would but come to reasonable terms, we would conclude a peace with them in two days' time.
By the suggestion of Skelton, the king's minister at Paris, orders were sent to D'Avaux to remonstrate with the states, in Lewis's name, against those preparations which they were making to invade England. The strict amity, said the French minister, which subsists between the two monarchs, will make Lewis regard every attempt against his ally as an act of hostility against himself.
The French king having exhausted the wealth and patience of his subjects, and greatly diminished their number in the course of this war, began to be diffident of his arms, and employed all the arts of private negotiation. While his minister D'Avaux pressed the king of Sweden to offer his mediation, he sent Callieres to Holland with proposals for settling the preliminaries of a treaty.
At the same time the very able French ambassador at the Hague, D'Avaux, did his utmost to foment the divisions and factions in the Provinces. He always insisted that he was accredited to the States-General and not to the Prince of Orange, and carried on correspondence and intrigues with the party in Amsterdam opposed to the stadholder's anti-French policy.
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