ed all power there, except his own, by the most
violent acts, constraining himself in no way, despising his master and
his mistress, whose will and whose authority he had utterly absorbed.
He braved successively all the powers of Europe, and aspired to nothing
less than to deceive them all, then to govern them, making them serve all
his ends; and seeing at last his cunning exhausted, tried to execute
alone, and without allies, the plan he had formed.

This plan was nothing less than to take away from the Emperor all that
the peace of Utrecht had left him in Italy; all that the Spanish house of
Austria had possessed there; to dominate the Pope and the King of Sicily;
to deprive the Emperor of the help of France and England, by exciting the
first against the Regent through the schemes of the ambassador Cellamare
and the Duc du Maine; and by sending King James to England, by the aid of
the North, so as to keep King George occupied with a civil war. In the
end he wished to profit by all these disorders, by transporting into
Italy (which his cardinalship made him regard as a safe asylum against
all reverses) the immense treasures he had pillaged and collected m
Spain, under pretext of sending the sums necessary to sustain the war,
and the conquests he intended to make; and this last project was,
perhaps, the motive power of all the rest. The madness of these schemes,
and his obstinacy in clinging to them, were not discovered until
afterwards. The astonishment then was great indeed, upon discovering the
poverty of the resources with which he thought himself capable of
carrying out these wild projects. Yet he had made such prodigious
preparations for war, that he had entirely exhausted the country without
rendering it able for a moment to oppose the powers of Europe.

Alberoni, abhorred in Spain as a cruel tyrant, in France, in England, in
Rome, and by the Emperor as an implacable and personal enemy, did not
seem to have the slightest uneasiness. Yet he might have had some, and
with good cause, at the very moment when he fancied himself most powerful
and most secure.

The Regent and the Abbe Dubois, who for a long time had only too many
reasons to regard Alberoni as their personal enemy, were unceasingly
occupied in silently plotting his fall; they believed the present moment
favourable, and did not fail to profit by it. How they did so is a
curious fact, which, to my great regret, has never reached me. M. le Duc
d'Or