enough to propose, and that we were weak enough to
accord to him, that his son of the first bed should be formally excluded
from the letters-patent of Duke and Peer, and that those of the second
bed should alone be entered there? Yet so it was. Berwick was, in
respect to England, like the Jews, who await the Messiah. He coaxed
himself always with the hope of a revolution in England, which should put
the Stuarts on the throne again, and reinstate him in his wealth and
honours. He was son of the sister of the Duke of Marlborough, by which
general he was much loved, and with whom, by permission of the King, and
of King James, he kept up a secret intercourse, of which all three were
the dupes, but which enabled Berwick to maintain other intercourses in
England, and to establish his batteries there, hoping thus for his
reinstatement even under the government established. This explains his
motive for the arrangement he made in the letters-patent. He wished his
eldest son to succeed to his English dukedom and his English estates; to
make the second Duke and Peer of France, and the third Grandee of Spain.
Three sons hereditarily elevated to the three chief dignities of the
three, chief realms in Europe, it must be agreed was not bad work for a
man to have achieved at fifty years of age! But Berwick failed in his
English projects. Do what he could all his life to court the various
ministers who came from England, he never could succeed in reestablishing
himself.

The scandal was great at the complaisance of the King in consenting to a
family arrangement, by which a cadet was put over the head of his elder
brother; but the time of the monsters had arrived. Berwick bought an
estate that he created under the name of Fitz-James. The King, who
allowed him to do so, was shocked by the name; and, in my presence, asked
Berwick the meaning of it; he, without any embarrassment, thus explained
it.

The Kings of England, in legitimatising their children gave them a name
and arms, which pass to their posterity. The name varies. Thus the Duke
of Richmond, bastard of Charles II., had the name of "Lennox;" the Dukes
of Cleveland and of Grafton, by the same king, that of "Fitz-Roi," which
means "son of the king;" in fine, the Duke of Berwick had the name of
"Fitz-James;" so that his family name for his posterity is thus "Son of
James;" as a name, it is so ridiculous in French, that nobody could help
laughing at it, or being astonished at the sc