A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 6Guizot, François
History
A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 6
Guizot, François
France -- History
For a long while pious souls had formed great hopes of the dauphin;
honest, scrupulous, sincerely virtuous, without the austerity and
extensive views of the Duke of Burgundy, he had managed to live aloof,
without intrigue and without open opposition, preserving towards the king
an attitude of often sorrowful respect, and all the while remaining the
support of the clergy and their partisans in their attempts and their
aspirations. The Queen, Mary Leczinska, a timid and proudly modest
woman, resigned to her painful situation, lived in the closest intimacy
with her son, and still more with her daughterin-law, Mary Josepha of
Saxony, though the daughter of that elector who had but lately been
elevated to the throne of Poland, and had vanquished King Stanislaus.
The sweetness, the tact, the rare faculties of the dauphiness had
triumphed over all obstacles. She had three sons. Much reliance was
placed upon the influence she had managed to preserve with the king, and
on the dominion she exercised over her husband’s mind. In vain had the
dauphin, distracted at the woes of France, over and over again solicited
from the king the honor of serving him at the head of the army; the
jealous anxiety of Madame de Pompadour was at one with the cold
indifference of Louis XV. as to leaving the heir to the throne in the
shade. The prince felt it deeply, in spite of his pious resignation.
“A dauphin,” he would say, “must needs appear a useless body, and a king
strive to be everybody” (_un homme universel_).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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