The situation of the Duc de Choiseul dispelled those clouds. Prone as he was to attack us, and impatiently as he wished for occasions of signalizing his ambitious genius, his master’s pacific and indolent humanity, the embarrassed state of the French finances, and the storm ready to burst on his own head, left Choiseul neither means nor power of embroiling Europe farther. Their funds were deficient, their army not paid, and the Prime Minister was too extravagant and too volatile to attend to details of economy, or to strike out any considerable plans of frugality. He could neither find resources, nor men who could find any. D’Invau,[2] an honest man, whom he had made Comptroller-General, fairly abandoned the trial in less than a year. It was a strange succedaneum on which the Duke pitched, and which in a man less mercurial would have spoken despair. He refused to select a new Comptroller, and told the King that the Chancellor ought to choose one,--thus screening himself from blame if the successor should fail, as was most probable; but at the same time certain, that a man placed by his enemy would not, if successful, prove a friend to one that had not recommended him. Maupeou, the Chancellor, was a very able man, as false as Choiseul was indiscreetly frank, and had long been that Duke’s most shameless flatterer.[3] The Duke’s true friends had warned him against raising Maupeou from the post of Vice-Chancellor to that of Chancellor. Choiseul did not deny that there was danger in it, but said, no other man was fit for the post. Choiseul presumed on maintaining ascendant enough to control him. Maupeou, too, did not want confidence, but his was backed by art and method. Choiseul despised his enemies--Maupeou despised nothing but principles. The Duc de Choiseul, denying all hostile intentions in his Court, offered to allow us to send a person to Toulon to see that no preparations for war were carrying on there; and before the end of the year, the Comte du Châtelet returned to England to confirm the pacific assurances that had been given. As the interior of the Court of France is scarce known in this country, a short account of the intrigues at the time I am describing, may be a present not unacceptable to posterity. I passed many months at Paris in four different years, had very intimate connections there with persons of the first rank, and of various factions; and I spent five evenings in a week with the Duchesse de Choiseul and her select friends in the summer of 1769. The Duke was often of the party; and his levity and her anxiety on his account let me into many secrets, and explained enough of the rest to make me sufficiently master of the critical situation of the Minister at that time. I must take up his story a little farther back to make it perfectly intelligible.