the chief of all, in the midst
of his weakness and his fears, and to hold a helm he was radically
incapable of managing. I speak here only of his conduct since the
establishment of the regency. Elsewhere, in more than one place, the
little or nothing he was worth has been shown; how his ignorance and his
jealousy lost us Flanders, and nearly ruined the State; how his felicity
was pushed to the extreme, and what deplorable reverses followed his
return. Sufficient to say that he never recovered from the state into
which this last madness threw him, and that the rest of his life was only
bitterness, regret, contempt! He had persuaded the King that it was he,
alone, who by vigilance and precaution had preserved his life from poison
that others wished to administer to him. This was the source of those
tears shed by the King when Villeroy was carried off, and of his despair
when Frejus disappeared. He did not doubt that both had been removed in
order that this crime might be more easily committed.

The prompt return of Frejus dissipated the half, of his fear, the
continuance of his good health delivered him by degrees from the other.
The preceptor, who had a great interest in preserving the King, and who
felt much relieved by the absence of Villeroy, left nothing undone in
order to extinguish these gloomy ideas; and consequently to let blame
fall upon him who had inspired them. He feared the return of the
Marechal when the King, who was approaching his majority, should be the
master; once delivered of the yoke he did not wish it to be reimposed
upon him. He well knew that the grand airs, the ironies, the
authoritative fussiness in public of the Marechal were insupportable to
his Majesty, and that they held together only by those frightful ideas of
poison. To destroy them was to show the Marechal uncovered, and worse
than that to show to the King, without appearing to make a charge against
the Marechal, the criminal interest he had in exciting these alarms, and
the falsehood and atrocity of such a venomous invention. These
reflections; which the health of the King each day confirmed, sapped all
esteem, all gratitude, and left his Majesty in full liberty of conscience
to prohibit, when he should be the master, all approach to his person on
the part of so vile and so interested an impostor.

Frejus made use of these means to shelter himself against the possibility
of the Marechal's return, and to attach himself to the