about an interview between me and this young
man; you should not have given me the opportunity of appreciating his
worth, but have allowed me to suppose him a common conspirator."

"Yes; and now, because he presented himself to your highness under a
romantic guise, your artistic imagination runs away with you. Diable!
monseigneur, there is a time for everything; so chemistry with Hubert,
engraving with Audran, music with Lafare, make love with the whole
world--but politics with me."

"Mon Dieu!" said the regent, "is it worth while to defend a life,
watched, tortured, calumniated as mine is?"

"But it is not your life you are defending, monseigneur; consider, among
all these calumnies which pursue you, and against which Heaven knows you
should be steeled by this time; your most bitter enemies have never
accused you of cowardice--as to your life, at Steinkirk, at Nerwinden,
and at Lerida, you proved at what rate you valued it. Pardieu! if you
were merely a private gentleman, a minister, or a prince of the blood,
and you were assassinated, a man's heart would cease to beat, and that
would be all; but wrongly or rightly, you coveted a place among the
powerful ones of the world; for that end you broke the will of Louis the
Fourteenth, you drove the bastards from the throne whereon they had
already placed their feet, you made yourself regent of France--that is
to say, the keystone of the arch of the world. If you die, it is not a
man who falls, it is the pillar which supports the European edifice
which gives way; thus our four last years of watchfulness and struggles
would be lost, and everything around would be shaken. Look at England;
the Chevalier de Saint George will renew the mad enterprises of the
pretender; look at Holland---Russia, Sweden, and Prussia would hunt her
to the death; look at Austria--her two-headed eagle seizes Venice and
Milan, as an indemnification for the loss of Spain; cast your eyes on
France--no longer France, but Philip the Fifth's vassal; look, finally,
at Louis the Fifteenth, the last descendant of the greatest monarch that
ever gave light to the world, and the child whom by watchfulness and
care we have saved from the fate of his father, his mother, and his
uncles, to place him safe and sound on the throne of his ancestors; this
child falls back again into the hands of those whom an adulterous law
boldly calls to succeed him; thus, on all sides, murder, desolation,
ruin, civil and foreign war