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He therefore released the child-king, obtained the co-operation of Hoje Tirumala, assumed the office of minister, and began to raise troops. "Several tributary roies, who were disgusted with Ramraaje, flew with speed to Beejanuggur to obey their lawful king; and in a short time thirty thousand horse and vast hosts of foot were assembled under his standard at the city."
Whether in this wrangle he risked the life of the child-King or not mattered to him not at all. It was de Batz who was to get the reward, and whose welfare and prosperity mattered more than the most precious life in Europe. St. Just would have given much to be back in his lonely squalid lodgings now.
When Louis XIV. laid down, one September day in the year 1715, the crown which he had worn with such splendour for more than seventy years, his sceptre fell into the hands of his nephew Philippe, Duc d'Orléans, who for eight years ruled France as Regent, and as guardian of the child-King, the fifteenth Louis.
Thus in a few hours the balance was turned, and it was once more the Chancellor and not the Governor who could issue ordinances and make regulations in the name of the King. Nothing, however, could be more tedious and trifling in the record than these struggles over the small person of the child-king.
The child-king was considered unintelligent, and ungraceful, and ungracious. When, on the day after Christmas, he started on his way back to Rouen, and from Rouen to England, he did not confer on Paris "any of the boons expected, either by releasing prisoners or by putting an end to black-mails, gabels, and wicked imposts."
As a boy, still in his teens, he had begun to play the rôle of Don Juan at the Court of the child-King, Louis XV. The most beautiful women at the Court, we are told, went crazy over the handsome boy, who bore the most splendid name in France; and thus early his head was turned by flatteries and attentions which followed him almost to the grave.
It is pitiful to look at the magnificent portrait, still hanging in the palace where he reigned, of the child-king seated in his robes of State, the sceptre in his hand, looking with eyes of innocent wonder into the future, then to think upon the depth of degradation reached by the once revered Monarch before his body was dragged in dishonour and darkness to its last resting-place.
Scornfully the cardinal remarked, "I presume the governor of the king must put on his shoes and stockings, as I perceive his valet de chambre is teaching him history." The young king entertained an instinctive aversion to the proud cardinal, who assumed imperial airs, and who was living in splendor far surpassing that of the regent or of the child-king.
Happy man, whose bulging eyes, always smiling condescendingly, and whose habit of reigning on the stage had procured for him for life that exceptional position of a spoiled and admired child-king! When he left the house, the shopkeepers on the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, with the predilection of the Parisian for everything and everybody connected with the theatre, saluted him respectfully.
Happy man, whose bulging eyes, always smiling condescendingly, and whose habit of reigning on the stage had procured for him for life that exceptional position of a spoiled and admired child-king! When he left the house, the shopkeepers on the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, with the predilection of the Parisian for everything and everybody connected with the theatre, saluted him respectfully.
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