I began to write these Memoirs, at the Vallée-aux-Loups, on the 4th of October 1811; I am about to finish reading and correcting them, in Paris, on the 20th of September 1841: I have, therefore, for thirty years, eleven months and twenty-one days[400], been secretly holding the pen while writing my public books, in the midst of all the revolutions and all the vicissitudes of my existence. My hand is tired: may it not have weighed upon my ideas, which have never wavered and which I feel to be as lively as when I started on my career! I had the intention of adding a general conclusion to my thirty years' work: I meant to say, as I have often mentioned, what the world was like when I entered it, what it is like now that I am leaving it. But the hour-glass is before me; I observe the hand which the sailors used to think that they saw come forth from the waves at the hour of shipwreck: that hand beckons to me to be brief; I will therefore reduce the scale of the picture, without omitting anything essential. Louis XIV. died[401]. The Duc d'Orléans was Regent during the minority of Louis XV. A war with Spain broke out as the result of Cellamare's[402] conspiracy: peace was restored by the fall of Alberoni[403]. Louis XV. attained his majority on the 15th of February 1723. The Regent succumbed ten months later. He had communicated his gangrene to France; he had seated Dubois[404] in Fénelon's pulpit and raised Law[405] to power. The Duc de Bourbon[406] became Prime Minister to Louis XV., and he had as his successor the Cardinal de Fleury[407], whose genius lay in his years. In 1734, the war[408] broke out in which my father was wounded outside Dantzig[409]. In 1745 was fought the Battle of Fontenoy; one of the least warlike of our kings made us triumph in the only great pitched battle that we have won over the English: and the conqueror of the world has, at Waterloo, added one more disaster to the disasters of Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt. The church at Waterloo is decorated with the names of the English officers who fell in 1815; in the church at Fontenoy we find only a stone with these words: NEAR THIS SPOT LIES THE BODY OF MESSIRE PHILIPPE DE VITRY, WHO, AGED 27 YEARS, WAS KILLED AT THE BATTLE OF FONTENOY ON THE 11TH OF MAY 1715 No mark indicates the place of the action; but skeletons are taken from the ground with bullets flattened into their skulls. The French carry their victories written on their foreheads. Later, the Comte de Gisors, son of the Maréchal de Belle-Isle[410] fell at Crefeld[411]. With him died out the name and the direct descent of Fouquet[412]. Things had passed from Mademoiselle de La Vallière to Madame de Châteauroux. There is something sad in seeing names come to their end, from century to century, from beauty to beauty, from glory to glory. [Sidenote: Historical antecedents.]