The Duc d’Aiguillon, a man as ambitious as Choiseul, but of a nature as dark as the other was frank and too boldly unreserved, had long been an enemy of the Prime Minister. The Parliaments of France, partly from contempt of the King’s weakness, partly from the intrigues of Choiseul, who had played them and the clergy against each other; and yet more from that free spirit of thinking which they had contracted from applying to English literature and politics, and which Voltaire, Montesquieu, and their modern philosophers, had brought into vogue; the Parliaments, I say, had long given much trouble to the Crown, and none more than that of Bretagne, who, by the marriage of their Duchess Anne with the Kings Charles the Eighth and Louis the Twelfth, had obtained the strongest confirmations of their privileges. Over that province, Choiseul had set his competitor, D’Aiguillon, with a view, it was believed, of destroying him by the difficulty of managing that Parliament. D’Aiguillon’s arbitrary nature, and his observation of the aversion in which Choiseul was held by the Jesuits, whom he had crushed, naturally threw him into the arms of that society; but as the Parliament of Bretagne had led the way to their destruction, the presidents and councillors of that assembly could not brook the countenance shown by their governor to that odious society. At the head of the patriots was the Advocate-General, La Chalotais; a man of invincible spirit and intrepidity--of wonderful parts--of integrity perhaps more wonderful--of some vanity--and of no small indiscretion. Opposition soon commenced, and soon grew inveterate between two characters so dissimilar. The imprudences of La Chalotais were immediately transmitted to Court; and as his nature was unwary, his enemies thought that whatever wore that impress would appear natural; and accordingly there were no follies so outrageous and improbable with which they did not charge him. His business passed through the hands of the Comte de St. Florentin, afterwards Duc de la Vrillière, an ancient drudge of office hackneyed in prosecutions and punishments, and steeled to insensibility by a long series of personal prosperity, and by being as long conversant with the sufferings of others.[141] To passive insensibility he had learnt and added the tricks of treachery; and being now connected with D’Aiguillon, he easily circumvented the provincial credulity of La Chalotais, and drew all his secrets from him by a creature of his own, who acted the friend of the Advocate-General, and went so far as to leave (by a pretended mistake) an important letter he had received from La Chalotais in St. Florentin’s own room. The public did justice on the lower of these tools, one Calonne, by hissing him in the theatre. The King was so weak as to justify the wretch publicly--which did but serve to make his infamy more known; but on La Chalotais the storm burst. He was dragged from prison to prison