only Vice-Chancellor, had betrayed such symptoms of his ambition and hostile designs that the friends of the Duc de Choiseul earnestly exhorted him not to raise a secret enemy higher. Choiseul, with his usual rashness of confidence in himself, replied, “I know Maupeou is a rogue, but there is nobody so fit to be Chancellor;” and Chancellor he made him. Maupeou, who thought himself fitter to be Minister, did not pique himself on gratitude, and was a capital instrument in the Duke’s disgrace. I never saw character written in more legible features than in those of Maupeou. He was sallow and black, with eyes equally penetrating, acute, and suspicious. His complexion spoke determinate villany; his eyes seemed either roving in quest of prey for it, or glaring on snares that he apprehended. His parts were great and his courage adventurous. Power was his object, despotism his road, the clergy his instruments: but the hardness and cruelty of his nature showed that severity was as agreeable to his temper as to his views.[197] Not being qualified like D’Aiguillon to shine in a voluptuous Court where a woman governed, and probably having noticed the tendency of the King’s gloomy mind to superstition, he reckoned, not injudiciously, on the triumph that bigotry would gain over love in a veteran Monarch; and accordingly insinuated himself into the confidence of the King’s Carmelite daughter, Madame Louise, the almost only engine that the Church of Rome had employed in the spirit of its ancient maxims during its late disgraces. At that Princess’s cell, the Chancellor obtained weekly audiences of his master: and though, during the suspense of power, Maupeou and D’Aiguillon acted in a kind of concert, it became notorious that the first founded his hopes on the King’s devotion and the other on his vices. More instances than one broke out of this contrast of piety and irreligion, not only in the King but in his own family. His daughters had all been bred by the Queen to habitual strictness. They were very weak women; but Madame Adelaide, the eldest, was something more--she was gallant.[198] One or two of her ladies had been punished many years before for furnishing her with indecent novels; and the King, whose palace was a brothel, in the very sight of his wife and daughters, had expressed great offence at that scandal. Madame Adelaide, though not corrected, yet become more wary, was suspected of covering her private history with the cloak of religion, or rather with that of the Bishop of Senlis, an ambitious prelate: and it was probably by his suggestions that she drew her sister, Madame Victoire, into a step very contradictory to their professions, for all the King’s daughters engaged warmly in hostilities against the new mistress. Soon after the Duc de Choiseul’s fall, Madame Victoire sent, on a feigned pretence, for the Bishop of Orleans, who had the _feuille de bénéfices_. The Bishop, though possessed of the