United States or United States Minor Outlying Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Clever, adroit, depraved, she aspired to govern, and chose for her minister Paris-Duverney, one of the four Dauphinese brothers who had been engaged under the regency in the business of the visa, and the enemies as well as rivals of the Scotsman Law.
I'm afraid that they do not see at court the alarming state of things to their full extent," says a letter from Paris-Duverney to the Marquis of Cremille, "but I have heard so much of it, and perhaps seen so much since I have been within eyeshot of this army, that I cannot give a glance at the future without being transfixed with grief and dread.
Paris-Duverney and his first clerk were put into the Bastille, where they were detained for two years in unusually rigorous imprisonment, and his three brothers were exiled to their native province.
It was these four brothers, but especially the third brother, Joseph Paris, known in French history as Paris-Duverney, who, by labors almost without example, restored the finances of the country, funded the debt at a reasonable interest, and enabled France to profit by the twenty years of peace that lay before her.
The government was at that time drifting about, without compass or steersman, from the hands of Madame de Prie to those of Paris-Duverney. Little cared they for the fate of the Reformers. "This castaway of the regency," says M. Lemontey, "was adopted without memorial, without examination, as an act of homage to the late king, and a simple executive formula.
The most important of these had been founded at Paris in 1750, by the financier Paris-Duverney. Here several hundred young gentlemen, mostly born poor and preferably the sons of officers, received a military education.
The strictness of the views and of the character of Paris-Duverney strove, nevertheless, in the home department, against the insensate lavishness of the duke, and the venal irregularities of his favorite; imbued with the maxims of order and regularity formerly impressed by Colbert upon the clerks of the treasury, and not yet completely effaced by a long interregnum, he labored zealously to cut down expenses and useless posts, to resuscitate and regulate commerce; his ardor, systematic and wise as it was, hurried him sometimes into strange violence and improvidence; in order to restore to their proper figure values and goods which still felt the prodigious rise brought about by the System, Paris-Duverney depreciated the coinage and put, a tariff on merchandise as well as wages.
He did this by admitting them to a share in army contracts, one of which yielded Voltaire a profit of seven hundred thousand francs, which, with good nursing, made him at last the richest literary man that ever lived. Paris-Duverney was as good a man and patriot as a man could well be who had to work with and under such persons as Louis XV. and Madame de Pompadour.
It was Paris-Duverney who suggested and managed the great military school at Paris, which still exists. It was he also who helped make the fortunes of the most celebrated literary men of his time, Voltaire and Beaumarchais.
The king was engaged with his old preceptor; the queen sent for him; he did not return. Fleury waited a long while. The duke and Paris-Duverney had been found with the queen; they had papers before them; the king had set to work with them. When he went back, at length, to his closet, Louis XV. found the bishop no longer there; search was made for him; he was no longer in the palace.
Word Of The Day