Two days later, Count d’Argenson received the following letter from the King: “Your service is no longer necessary to me. I order you to send me your resignation as Secretary of State for War and all which concerns the employments thereunto adjoined, and to retire to your estate of Ormes.” Things resumed their customary course. At the end of January, 1757, the advocate Barbier wrote in his journal: “The King is perfectly well. Madame the Marquise de Pompadour has not quitted Versailles. A few days after his recovery the King paid her a visit of a quarter of an hour, but since he holds his councils as usual he has resumed his own occupations; he has hunted several times, and the little suppers have begun again.” The chronicler, often cynical, concludes as follows: “Notwithstanding the criticisms of evil-minded persons, the best thing that could happen to both him and us, that is to all good citizens, would be for him to banish from his mind a misfortune which ought not to affect one, and continue his ordinary dissipations.” Baron de Besenval’s conclusion must also be quoted: “Thus in the whole of this affair, M. d’Argenson had been willing to sacrifice the King to the Dauphin in order to prolong his own power. The King had been willing to sacrifice his mistress to public opinion and the terrors which disturbed his mind. M. de Machault consented to sacrifice Madame de Pompadour, his friend, by giving her advice which might please the monarch. And in the end everything was sacrificed to love, which is what happens and will happen always.” Here the word “love” is not accurate; “habit” is what he should have said. Once more the favorite had triumphed; but in her victory she bore a mortal grudge against the Jesuits who had nearly succeeded in banishing her. She began that underhand but violent struggle against them which, a few years later, was to result in the suppression of their order. She had the audacity to forward secretly to the Pope a note which was a censure on their conduct and, if one can believe it, a defence of her own. This note, a copy of which has been discovered in the papers of the Duke de Choiseul, is a veritable monument of cynicism or else of a perverted conscience. It proves in the woman who conceived it an entire lack of moral sense, a forgetfulness of the most elementary decorum, and of the respect which unbelievers themselves owe to religion. This curious document opens as follows:-- “At the beginning of 1752, determined by motives which it is useless to give an account of, to no longer preserve for the King any sentiments but those of gratitude and the purest attachment, I declared as much to His Majesty, supplicating him to cause the doctors of the Sorbonne to be consulted, and to write to his confessor that he might consult with others, in order that I might be left near his person, since he desired it, without being exposed to the suspicion of a weakness which I no longer had.”