and the myrtle instead of the laurel the reward of victory, while these
gentlemen were conversing of some occurrence under the old government,
the Duke de Lauraguais, in order to more nearly fix the date of the
occurrence of which they were speaking, remarked to the marquis, "It was
in the year in which I had my _liaison_ with your wife."

"Ah, yes," replied the marquis, with perfect composure, "that was in the
year 1776."

Neither of the gentlemen found anything strange in this allusion to the
past. The _liaison_ in question had been a perfectly commonplace matter,
and it would have been as ridiculous in the duke to deny it as for the
marquis to have shown any indignation.

The wisest and most enlightened of all these gentlemen was their head,
King Louis XVIII. himself.

He was well aware of the errors of those who surrounded him, and placed
but little confidence in the representatives of the old court. But he
was nevertheless powerless to withdraw himself from their influence, and
after he had accorded the people the charter, in opposition to the will
and opinion of the whole royal family, of his whole court and of his
ministers, and had sworn to support it in spite of the opposition of
"Monsieur" and the Prince de Conde, who was in the habit of calling the
charter "_Mademoiselle la Constitution de 1791,_" Louis withdrew to the
retirement of his apartments in the Tuileries, and left his minister
Blacas to attend to the little details of government, the king deeming
the great ones only worthy of his attention.

CHAPTER VII.

KING LOUIS XVIII.

King Louis XVIII. was, however, in the retirement of his palace, still
the most enlightened and unprejudiced of the representatives of the old
era; he clearly saw many things to which his advisers purposely closed
their eyes. To his astonishment, he observed that the men who had risen
to greatness under Bonaparte, and who had fallen to the king along with
the rest of his inheritance, were not so ridiculous, awkward, and
foolish, as they had been represented to be.

"I had been made to suppose," said Louis XVIII., "that these generals of
Bonaparte were peasants and ruffians, but such is not the case. He
schooled these men well. They are polite, and quite as shrewd as the
representatives of the old court. We must conduct ourselves very
cautiously toward them."

This kind of recognition of the past which sometimes escaped Louis
XVIII., was a subject of bitter disple