carry on the
considerable correspondence with which I was charged for the same
courier. He found an admirable expedient, which was to prepare on
Thursday the answer to the despatches we were expected to receive on the
next day. This appeared to him so happily imagined, that notwithstanding
all I could say on the impossibility of the thing, and the absurdity of
attempting its execution, I was obliged to comply during the whole time I
afterwards remained with him, after having made notes of the few loose
words he spoke to me in the course of the week, and of some trivial
circumstances which I collected by hurrying from place to place.
Provided with these materials I never once failed carrying to him on the
Thursday morning a rough draft of the despatches which were to be sent
off on Saturday, excepting the few additions and corrections I hastily
made in answer to the letters which arrived on the Friday, and to which
ours served for answer. He had another custom, diverting enough and
which made his correspondence ridiculous beyond imagination. He sent
back all information to its respective source, instead of making it
follow its course. To M. Amelot he transmitted the news of the court; to
M. Maurepas, that of Paris; to M. d' Havrincourt, the news from Sweden;
to M. de Chetardie, that from Petersbourg; and sometimes to each of those
the news they had respectively sent to him, and which I was employed to
dress up in terms different from those in which it was conveyed to us.
As he read nothing of what I laid before him, except the despatches for
the court, and signed those to other ambassadors without reading them,
this left me more at liberty to give what turn I thought proper to the
latter, and in these therefore I made the articles of information cross
each other. But it was impossible for-me to do the same by despatches of
importance; and I thought myself happy when M. de Montaigu did not take
it into his head to cram into them an impromptu of a few lines after his
manner. This obliged me to return, and hastily transcribe the whole
despatch decorated with his new nonsense, and honor it with the cipher,
without which he would have refused his signature. I was frequently
almost tempted, for the sake of his reputation, to cipher something
different from what he had written, but feeling that nothing could
authorize such a deception, I left him to answer for his own folly,
satisfying myself with having spoken to him wi