The Duc de Choiseul, the Prime Minister, was a man of excellent parts, but of a levity and indiscretion, which most of that nation divest themselves of before his age, or when they enter into business. Except the hours which he spent with the King, the rest of his life was dissipation, pleasure, profuseness, and bons mots. Rash, daring, and presumptuous; good-humoured, but neither good nor ill-natured; frank, gay, and thoughtless, he seemed the Sovereign more than the Minister of a mighty kingdom. Scorning, rather than fearing, his enemies, he seldom undermined and seldom punished them. He dissipated the nation’s wealth and his own; but did not repair the latter by plunder of the former. Mr. Pitt’s superiority he could never digest nor forgive; and though he was incapable of little mischief in his own country, great crimes had rather a charm for him. He excited the war between the Russians and Turks, to be revenged on the Czarina; and I saw him exult childishly in his own house on her first defeats. At last he descended to the mean and cruel oppression of Corsica, for the sake of gathering a diminutive laurel, after being baffled in the large war. Gallantry without delicacy was his constant pursuit. His wife, the most perfect character of her sex, loved him to idolatry;[199] but, though a civil husband, he spared her no mortification that his carelessness could inflict. His sister, the Duchesse de Grammont, too openly connected with him by more ties than of blood, had absolute influence over him, and exerted it cruelly and grossly to insult the Duchesse de Choiseul, who, more than once, was on the point of retiring into a convent, though without the least belief of the doctrines held there. Madame de Grammont, who had none of the accomplishments that graced the small but harmonious figure of the Duchesse de Choiseul, had masculine sense, and almost masculine manners. She was wonderfully agreeable when she pleased, a vehement friend, a rude and insolent enemy. The nation revered and neglected the wife; detested and bowed to the sister. The Minister had crushed the Jesuits, for he loved sudden strokes of _éclat_; and, to carry that measure, had countenanced the Parliaments till they grew almost too ungovernable. But as he seldom acted on deep system, he sometimes took up a tone of authority, and as quickly relaxed it--a conduct that confounded the nation and a little the Parliaments; but that war from thoughtlessness, or to ruin a rival, the Duc d’Aiguillon, he chiefly left to the latter; and he could not have left it to worse hands. Proud, ambitious, vindictive, and void of honour or principle, the Duc d’Aiguillon, with very moderate parts, aimed at power with the Crown, by being the Minister of its tyranny.[200] The infamous oppression exercised on that undaunted man, M. de la Chalotais,[201] flowed from the revenge of this Duc, who, to carry his point, lent himself even to the exploded Jesuits: and though that connection could