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Updated: May 28, 2025
I remember once going on a steamer towards the site of Maurepas. The ship drew lightest of draft. While we were anchored the breeze fell, and the ship was stranded as if by ebb tide for twenty-four hours. The action of the wind explained the Indian tales of an ocean tide, which had misled La Vérendrye into expecting to find the Western Sea at this point.
The Marquis de Croisy and his wife were married forty years; M. and Mme. de Maurepas lived together for fifty years, without being separated one day. Instances are many in which reconciliations were effected after years of unfaithfulness; these seldom occurred, however, until the end of life was near.
Vengeance on her enemies was the only price she would accept for forgiveness, and this price Louis promised to pay in liberal measure. One after the other, those who had brought about her humiliation were sent to disgrace or exile from the Duc de Chatillon to La Rochefoucauld and Perusseau. Maurepas, the most virulent of them all, the King declined to exile, but he consented to a compromise.
At the same period, M. de Lafayette, although in disgrace himself at court, wrote to the Count de Maurepas, to propose to him a still more important enterprise against the English factories, but also under American colours. The old minister, from prudential motives, did not adopt this project, but he spoke publicly in praise of it, and expressed, ever after, a great partiality for Lafayette.
Already, however, far-seeing spirits were disquieted; scarcely had he mounted the throne, when the king summoned to his side, as his minister, M. de Maurepas, but lately banished by Louis XV., in 1749, on a charge of having tolerated, if not himself written, songs disrespectful towards Madame de Pompadour. "The first day," said the disgraced minister, "I was nettled; the second, I was comforted."
Knowing that M. de Maurepas wished to drive M. Necker to resign, she urged him to have patience until the death of an old man whom the King kept about him from a fondness for his first choice, and out of respect for his advanced age. She even went so far as to tell him that M. de Maurepas was always ill, and that his end could not be very distant. M. Necker would not wait for that event.
Or, more undoubtedly, some pretty little Pompadour overcome by that Parisian infirmity so pleasantly described by M. de Maurepas in that quatrain which cost him his protracted disgrace and certainly contributed to the disasters of Louis XVI's reign: "Iris, we love those features sweet, Your graces all are fresh and free; And flowerets spring beneath your feet, Where naught, alas! but flowers are seen."
Being early introduced at Court, he acquired, with the common corruption, also the pleasing manners of a courtier; and by his assiduities about the Ministers, Comte de Maurepas and Comte de Vergennes, he procured from the latter the place of an Ambassador to the Court of St. Petersburg.
On their return the two brothers separated when they arrived at Bayou Manchac. Bienville was ordered to go down the river to the French fleet, to give information of what they had seen and heard. Iberville went through Bayou Manchac to those lakes which are known under the names of Pontchartrain and Maurepas.
They say that Monsieur de Maurepas, who is dying, being told that the Duc de Lauzun had brought the news of Lord Cornwallis's surrender, said, from Racine's "Mithridate" I think: Mes derniers regards out vu fuir les Romains. How Lord Chatham will frown when they meet! for, since I began my letter, the papers say that Maurepas is dead.
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