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Like him, she plays at a great reign; she has her monuments, her arts, her victories, her captains, her men of letters, her privy purse to pension celebrities, her gallery of chefs-d'oeuvre, side by side with those of his Majesty. Her court, too, was a cortège, with the features of a triumph, an order and a march. It was a miniature copy of all the great men of Versailles, not giants themselves.
The next levee day at Versailles, I meant to bring again under the view of the Count de Vergennes, the whole subject of our commerce with France; but the number of audiences of ambassadors and other ministers, which take place, of course, before mine, and which seldom, indeed, leave me an opportunity of audience at all, prevented me that day.
M. d'Orleans and M. de la Rochefoucauld joined hands again, and the King looked on delighted. The public lost soon after a man illustrious by his genius, by his style, and by his knowledge of men, I mean La Bruyere, who died of apoplexy at Versailles, after having surpassed Theophrastus in his own manner, and after painting, in the new characters, the men of our days in a manner inimitable.
You may depend upon it that if he came to Versailles he would debauch some of them." The king, charmed at having said this malicious speech, rubbed his hands again. "Really, sire," I replied, "I am astonished that this prince, having such disgusting inclinations, can have much eclat attached to his name." "Ah, that is because he has great qualities: he will not allow himself to be cheated.
But he declared that he was as poor as the meanest soldier in the ranks. While at St. Germain, there was another petty conflict between the Parliamentary forces and those of the court in the vicinity of Etampes, about forty miles from Versailles. The Fronde was routed with loss. The glad tidings was brought by a courier at night to St. Germain. The news was too good to be kept till morning.
On reaching the bottom of the Champs Elysées he found that a breach had been made in the barricade and that a considerable number of troops were bivouacked in the Place de la Concorde itself. The fire-engines from Versailles, St. Denis, and other places round were already at work, but their efforts seemed futile indeed in face of the tremendous bodies of fire with which they had to cope.
In one of our excursions we visited the manufacture for porcelain, which the king of France has established at the village of St. Cloud, on the road to Versailles, and which is, indeed, a noble monument of his munificence.
His Majesty was sensible of the wisdom of the resolution which she had made not to break with the Court, and to show herself at Saint Germain, or at Versailles, from time to time, as her rank, her near kinship, her birth demanded. He said to me one day: "My cousin is beginning to look up.
For the duchy, by his showing, was a place of small consequence, an asylum of superannuated fashions; whereas no Frenchman of quality ever visited Turin without exclaiming on its resemblance to Paris, and vowing that none who had the entree of Stupinigi need cross the Alps to see Versailles.
Another block of chambers is being built here at a cost of a hundred thousand francs; Marly will soon be a second Versailles. The people, what will become of them?" And later on: "Would you think proper, monsignor, to make out a list of good bishops?
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