‘My letters of recall in the form of disgrace,’ he wrote, ‘not having been preceded on the part of the Duke de Praslin by necessary investigation, inquiry, or complete knowledge of all circumstances, whence the decision may be imputed to his own free act and will, are manifestly obreptitious, void, and of no effect. A decision of so great gravity would never have prevailed if truth, in seeking to approach the throne, had not been checked by innumerable obstacles. To have the right to persecute, one should be in the right, and to be in the right, it is sufficient not to be in the wrong. Ministers, like priests, are never in the wrong, and especially when they are strong enough to prove that they are in the right. Pompadour, who imagined that Louis XV. was unable to think, without her permission—those great ministers at Versailles who fancied that the King could do nothing without them, would be greatly astonished were I to prove to them, as clearly as is the light of the sun, and in the King’s own handwriting, that he mistrusted them all as he would a band of robbers; that he avoided them as he would a body of spies; and wishing to enjoy a little domestic peace, he allowed them to go the way of their own follies, for which he would afterwards try to make amends secretly. He had a hundred times more esteem, friendship, and real confidence in the intelligence, wisdom, and probity of the Count de Broglio, and in the valiant qualities of his little D’Eon, than in the whole of his mistresses and ministers put together, the majority of whom he kept about him from the same force of habit, largeness of heart, and regal grandeur, which induced him to keep other strange animals in his menagerie. When, under a despotic monarch, ministers and other great people at Court are corrupt and of prejudiced minds, no other alternative is left to oppressed innocence than an appeal to the King and to God. Under a republic, it is possible to appeal to God, to the people and to the sword; this last appeal being frequently attended with success, when battalions are strong, well disciplined, and artillery is well served.’[131] Had D’Eon gone on to state how injured innocence was to reach a despotic monarch, his experience would have been of service to many, even in this the last but one decade of the nineteenth century; for the absolutism of his adored master, his Most Christian Majesty Louis XV., is not to be compared to that of one Christian ruler of these our times, the Imperial ruler, who, whatever the disposition of his heart, is condemned by tradition and long custom to spend his days in lonely grandeur, invisible and unapproachable to all but one or two dissembling and unfaithful ministers, too often shunned by even his nearest relatives, and therefore unjustly mistrusted and despised by his subjects of every class.