He had the good sense to hold his tongue
about the favor with which he was honored, and knew how to entertain the
monarch in those familiar chats in which Louis XVIII. delighted as
much as in a well-written note, by his brilliant manner of
repeating political anecdotes, and the political or parliamentary
tittle-tattle--if the expression may pass--which at that time was rife.
It is well known that he was immensely amused by every detail of his
Gouvernementabilite--a word adopted by his facetious Majesty.

Thanks to the Comte de Fontaine's good sense, wit, and tact, every
member of his numerous family, however young, ended, as he jestingly
told his Sovereign, in attaching himself like a silkworm to the leaves
of the Pay-List. Thus, by the King's intervention, his eldest son
found a high and fixed position as a lawyer. The second, before the
restoration a mere captain, was appointed to the command of a legion on
the return from Ghent; then, thanks to the confusion of 1815, when the
regulations were evaded, he passed into the bodyguard, returned to a
line regiment, and found himself after the affair of the Trocadero
a lieutenant-general with a commission in the Guards. The youngest,
appointed sous-prefet, ere long became a legal official and director of
a municipal board of the city of Paris, where he was safe from changes
in Legislature. These bounties, bestowed without parade, and as secret
as the favor enjoyed by the Count, fell unperceived. Though the father
and his three sons each had sinecures enough to enjoy an income in
salaries almost equal to that of a chief of department, their political
good fortune excited no envy. In those early days of the constitutional
system, few persons had very precise ideas of the peaceful domain of the
civil service, where astute favorites managed to find an equivalent for
the demolished abbeys. Monsieur le Comte de Fontaine, who till lately
boasted that he had not read the Charter, and displayed such indignation
at the greed of courtiers, had, before long, proved to his august
master that he understood, as well as the King himself, the spirit
and resources of the representative system. At the same time,
notwithstanding the established careers open to his three sons, and the
pecuniary advantages derived from four official appointments,
Monsieur de Fontaine was the head of too large a family to be able to
re-establish his fortune easily and rapidly.

His three sons were rich in prospec