tally
offended by styling Louis XIV.'s governmental system a viziership. The
Regent had heaped favors upon the presidents and members of the councils,
but he had placed Dubois at the head of foreign affairs and Le Blanc over
the war department. "I do not inquire into the theory of councils," said
the able Dubois to the Regent by the mouth of his confidant Chavigny; "it
was, as you know, the object of worship to the shallow pates of the old
court. Humiliated by their nonentity at the end of the last reign, they
begot this system upon the reveries of M. de Cambrai. But I think of
you, I think of your interests. The king will reach, his majority, the
grandees of the kingdom approach the monarque by virtue of their birth;
if to this privilege they unite that of being then at the head of
affairs, there is reason to fear that they may surpass you in
complaisance, in flattery, may represent you as a useless phantom, and
establish themselves upon the ruin of you. Suppress, then, these
councils, if you mean to continue indispensable, and haste to supersede
the great lords, who would become your rivals, by means of simple
secretaries of state, who, without standing or family, will perforce
remain your creatures."

The Duke of Antin, son of Madame de Montespan, one of the most adroit
courtiers of the old as well as of the new court, "honorless and
passionless" (_sans honneur et sans humeur_), according to the Regent's
own saying, took a severer view than Dubois of the arrangement to which
he had contributed. "The councils are dissolved," he wrote in his
memoirs; "the nobility will never recover from it--to my great regret,
I must confess. The kings who hereafter reign will see that Louis XIV.,
one of the greatest kings in the world, never would employ people of rank
in any of his business; that the Regent, a most enlightened prince, had
begun by putting them at the head of all affairs, and was obliged to
remove them at the end of three years. What can they and must they
conclude therefrom? That people of this condition are not fitted for
business, and that they are good for nothing but to get killed in war.
I hope I am wrong, but there is every appearance that the masters will
think like that, and there will not be wanting folks who will confirm
them in that opinion." A harsh criticism on the French nobility, too
long absorbed by war or the court, living apart from the nation and from
affairs, and thereby become incapab