peace with France.

France was in sore need of peace. The infatuation that had
turned her from her own true interest to serve the passions
of Maria Theresa and the Czarina Elizabeth had brought military
humiliation and financial ruin. Abbe de Bernis, Minister of Foreign
Affairs, had lost the favor of Madame de Pompadour, and had been
supplanted by the Duc de Choiseul. The new Minister had gained his
place by pleasing the favorite; but he kept it through his own ability
and the necessities of the time. The Englishman Stanley, whom Pitt
sent to negotiate with him, drew this sketch of his character: "Though
he may have his superiors, not only in experience of business,
but in depth and refinement as a statesman, he is a person
of as bold and daring a spirit as any man whatever in our
country or in his own. Madame Pompadour has ever been looked upon by
all preceding courtiers and ministers as their tutelary deity, under
whose auspices only they could exist, and who was as much out of
their reach as if she were of a superior class of beings; but this
Minister is so far from being in subordination to her influence that
he seized the first opportunity of depriving her not of an equality,
but of any share of power, reducing her to the necessity of applying
to him even for those favors that she wants for herself and her dependents.
He has effected this great change, which every other man
would have thought impossible, in the interior of the Court,
not by plausibility, flattery, and address, but with a high hand,
with frequent railleries and sarcasms which would have ruined any other,
and, in short, by a clear superiority of spirit and resolution."[862]

[Footnote 862: _Stanley to Pitt, 6 Aug. 1761_, in _Grenville
Correspondence_, I. 367, _note_.]

Choiseul was vivacious, brilliant, keen, penetrating; believing
nothing, fearing nothing; an easy moralist, an uncertain
ally, a hater of priests; light-minded, inconstant; yet a kind of
patriot, eager to serve France and retrieve her fortunes.

He flattered himself with no illusions. "Since we do not
know how to make war," he said, "we must make peace;"[863]
and he proposed a congress of all the belligerent Powers at
Augsburg. At the same time, since the war in Germany was
distinct from the maritime and colonial war of France and
England, he proposed a separate negotiation with the British
Court in order to settle the questions between them as a
preliminary to the general pacifi