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Versailles reminds us of a singular overstatement by Sir Henry Maine of the blindness of the privileged classes in France to the approach of the Revolution. He speaks as if Lord Chesterfield's famous passage were the only anticipation of the coming danger. There is at least one utterance of Louis XV. himself, which shows that he did not expect things to last much beyond his time.
He did not know how to converse with one who could not be answered by a play upon words, nor satisfied by an appeal to precedents, or the authority of numbers and of high names. Lord Chesterfield's style of conversation, and that of any of the personages in Xenophon's Cyropaedia, could not be more different, or less compatible, than the simplicity of Miss Montenero and the wit of Lord Mowbray.
For five minutes she sat at some fashionable kind of work wafer work, I think it was called, a work which has been long since consigned to the mice; then her ladyship yawned, and exclaiming, "Oh, those lines of Lord Chesterfield's, which Colonel Topham gave me; I'll copy them into my album. Where's my album? Mrs. Harrington, I lent it to you. Oh! here it is. Mr.
D'Argenson, in the very year of Chesterfield's prophecy, pronounced that a revolution was inevitable, and he even went so close to the mark as to hint that it would arise on the first occasion when it should be necessary to convoke the States General. Rousseau, in a page of the Confessions, not only divined a speedy revolution, but enumerated the operative causes of it with real precision.
Set to compile a biography from thirty years of "Moniteurs," the author of Waverley, like Lord Chesterfield's diamond pencil, produced one miracle of dulness; it might well be feared that Kinglake's volatile pen, when linked with forceful feeling and bound to rigid task-work, might lose the charm of casual epigram, easy luxuriance, playful egotism, vagrant allusion, which established "Eothen" as a classic.
'That man is never happy for the present is so true, that all his relief from unhappiness is only forgetting himself for a little while. Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment. 'Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son, I think, might be made a very pretty book. Take out the immorality, and it should be put into the hands of every young gentleman.
IT would be difficult to express the sense of etiquette on this subject better than by quoting Lord Chesterfield's words: "I am more upon my guard," he writes, "as to my behavior to my servants and to others who are called my inferiors than I am towards my equals, for fear of being suspected of that mean and ungenerous sentiment of desiring to make others feel that difference which fortune has, and perhaps too undeservedly, made between us."
Lady Chesterfield's minuet was the last dance before supper, served with royal splendour in the dining-room, to which the Queen passed at twelve o'clock. After supper the Queen danced in a quadrille and in the two next minuets.
Judging of Chesterfield's conduct in the Irish Viceroyalty by Chesterfield's past career, men would have been entitled to assume that his sympathies would go altogether with the governing race in Ireland. With them were the wealth, the rank, the fashion, the elegance, the refinement. With them was the easy-going profession of State religion just the sort of thing that suited Chesterfield's ways.
Discerning students of womankind, however, know that if every woman would make the best of her possibilities, physically, mentally, and spiritually, it would be delightfully probable that "in the merciful scheme of nature" there need be no plain women. Have we not Lord Chesterfield's word for it, that "No woman is ugly when she is dressed"?
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