as followed by an answer to
the effect that "their representations should be taken into
consideration, meanwhile they were requested to attend the council of
state as heretofore."

It was evident that the monarch was far from intending to grant their
request; they, therefore, from this tune forth absented themselves from
the state council, and even left Brussels. Not having succeeded in
removing the minister by lawful means they sought to accomplish this end
by a new mode from which more might be expected. On every occasion they
and their adherents openly showed the contempt which they felt for him,
and contrived to throw ridicule on everything he undertook. By this
contemptuous treatment they hoped to harass the haughty spirit of the
priest, and to obtain through his mortified self-love what they had
failed in by other means. In this, indeed, they did not succeed; but
the expedient on which they had fallen led in the end to the ruin of the
minister.

The popular voice was raised more loudly against him so soon as it was
perceived that he had forfeited the good opinion of the nobles, and that
men whose sentiments they had been used blindly to echo preceded them in
detestation of him. The contemptuous manner in which the nobility now
treated him devoted him in a measure to the general scorn and emboldened
calumny which never spares even what is holiest and purest, to lay its
sacrilegious hand on his honor. The new constitution of the church,
which was the great grievance of the nation, had been the basis of his
fortunes. This was a crime that could not be forgiven. Every fresh
execution--and with such spectacles the activity of the inquisitors was
only too liberal--kept alive and furnished dreadful exercise to the
bitter animosity against him, and at last custom and usage inscribed his
name on every act of oppression. A stranger in a land into which he had
been introduced against its will; alone among millions of enemies;
uncertain of all his tools; supported only by the weak arm of distant
royalty; maintaining his intercourse with the nation, which he had to
gain, only by means of faithless instruments, all of whom made it their
highest object to falsify his actions and misrepresent his motives;
lastly, with a woman for his coadjutor who could not share with him the
burden of the general execration--thus he stood exposed to the
wantonness, the ingratitude, the faction, the envy, and all the evil
passions of a licentio