. Your Highness is in the
right to set about the mending of it, because nobody else is capable of
doing it; but in order to do this must you join with those that would
knock it in pieces?

"You are convinced of the Cardinal's extravagances, and that his only
view is to establish in France a form of government known nowhere but in
Italy. If he should succeed, will the State be a gainer by it, according
to its only true maxims? Would it be an advantage to the Princes of the
blood in any sense? But, besides, has he any likelihood of succeeding?
Is he not loaded with the odium and contempt of the public? and is not
the Parliament the idol they revere? I know you despise them because the
Court is so well armed, but let me tell you that they are so confident of
their power that they feel their importance. They are come to that pass
that they do not value your forces, and though the evil is that at
present their strength consists only in their imagination, yet a time may
come when they may be able to do whatever they now think it in their
power to do.

"Your Highness lately told me that this disposition of the people was
only smoke; but be assured that smoke so dark and thick proceeds from a
brisk fire, which the Parliament blows, and, though they mean well, may
blaze up into such a flame as may consume themselves and again hazard the
destruction of the State, which has been the case more than once. Bodies
of men, when once exasperated by a Ministry, always aggravate their
failures, and scarcely ever show them any favour, which, in some cases,
is enough to ruin a kingdom.

"If, when the proposition was formerly made to the Parliament by the
Cardinal to declare whether they intended to set bounds to the royal
authority, if, I say, they had not wisely eluded the ridiculous and
dangerous question, France would have run a great risk, in my opinion, of
being entirely ruined; for had they answered in the affirmative, as they
were on the point of doing, they would have rent the veil that covers the
mysteries of State. Every monarchy has its peculiar veil; that of France
consists in a kind of religious and sacred silence, which, by the
subjects generally paying a blind obedience to their Kings, muffles up
that right which they think they have to dispense with their obedience in
cases where a complaisance to their Kings would be a prejudice to
themselves. It is a wonder that the Parliament did not strip off this
veil by a formal dec