[194] Lord Shelburne had attached himself to Mr. Pitt, and would not enter the Government without him.--(Chatham Correspondence, vol. ii. p. 357.)--E. [195] He was affectionate to his daughters, but surely not to the Dauphin, whose life he made unhappy by excluding him from active employment, and whose death he bore with feelings of very slight regret.--E. [196] He even stood at a window to see her coffin carried out of the palace. [197] If the French were thus ignorant of the real character of the Dauphin, the ignorance has been of long continuance. All the French historians regard him as a fanatic. According to Sismondi (Histoire des Français, vol. xxix. p. 328) the Archbishop of Paris and the Molinist clergy formed around him a cabal which at first inspired alarm, next disdain, and at last pity. The story of his scepticism came, probably, to Walpole from the Duc de Choiseul, who had always been on the worst terms with him; nor is the Duc de Nivernois, the partizan of Choiseul, a courtier of pursuits and feelings utterly dissimilar to those of the prince, a much better authority. The only vice which the irreproachable conduct of the Dauphin admitted of being imputed to him, was hypocrisy. Whether he had sufficient energy of character to have averted the destruction which afterwards overwhelmed his unfortunate son, is more doubtful. He was personally brave, and is said to have shown spirit and readiness at Fontenoy, and it was with difficulty that the jealousy of the Duc de Choiseul could prevent his serving in the seven years’ war; but the qualities requisite for the successor of Louis the Fifteenth, were hardly compatible with his gentle, yielding, and amiable disposition. He died on the 20th of December, 1765, in his thirty-seventh year.--E. [198] The Dauphin certainly preserved a tender attachment for the memory of his first wife, the Infanta Maria Therese. She died in child-bed in July, 1746. This did not, however, prevent his appreciating the merit of the second Dauphiness. Observing him in tears just before their marriage, she bade him indulge his grief, for it assured her of what she too might expect from his regard if she had the happiness to deserve it. She was by no means popular in the coteries frequented by Walpole, but by the nation at large she was held in high estimation. Her death was ascribed to a disorder she had contracted in nursing her husband. The Duchesse de Lauragais might have treated the expressions of a person in the agonies of death with more indulgence. Judging from this speech, she must have been as heartless as her lover the Maréchal de Richelieu, than whom, allowing for the difference of sex, she was not much more respectable.--E.