MONSIEUR LE DUC,—You have long honoured me by your good-will and your undisguised protection. The latter you withdrew from me only out of consideration for the Duc de Praslin, my enemy and your relative and colleague. I have always been glad of your good-will and have never complained of your desertion. Now that your fair-weather friends are about to disown and forsake you in the hour of your disgrace, I draw nearer to you and lay at your feet the homage of my devotion and gratitude, which will endure to the end of my days. Pray accept them, and believe me your very humble and devoted servant, THE CHEVALIER D’EON. Louis XV., who had once more sacrificed his minister to his favourite, no longer even bethought himself of making up, as formerly, for his disgraceful surrenders by clandestine intrigues. The secret correspondence, at which he had laboured every day for fifteen years, did not interest him any more. The letters published by Boutaric testify to the fact, barely including a few notes from the King for the years 1773 and 1774. Such indifference on the part of the King continually exposed the secret correspondence, formerly guarded so jealously, to the danger of discovery. Moreover, the ministers had not been long in suspecting its existence. The Duc d’Aiguillon, who had guessed the part played by the Comte de Broglie, was now watching for an opportunity for detecting the intrigue, and also for revenging himself on a hidden rival whose arrogance had exasperated him. The still somewhat mysterious excursion of two agents of the secret service, Favier and Dumouriez, who appear to have attempted at that time to enter into a negotiation with Prussia to the prejudice of Austria, supplied the long-sought means of putting the Comte de Broglie in a false position. The duke caused a report to be spread at Versailles that a conspiracy had lately been discovered, and gave orders for the imprisonment in the Bastille of Favier and Dumouriez, who had just been arrested—the former in Paris, and the latter at The Hague, on his way to Germany. Failing to discover anything sufficiently compromising on the persons of these two subordinate agents, he made bold to suggest to the King that the Comte de Broglie’s papers should be seized.