portrait of the unfortunate reign of Louis XVI., the Marechal du Muy, M.
de Maurepas, M. de Vergennes, M. de Malesherbes, the Duc d'Orleans, M. de
La Fayette, the Abby de Vermond, the Abbe Montesquiou, Mirabeau, the
Duchesse de Polignac, and the Duchesse de Luynes should have noted
faithfully in writing all the transactions in which they took decided
parts. The secret political history of a later period has been
disseminated among a much greater number of persons; there are Ministers
who have published memoirs, but only when they had their own measures to
justify, and then they confined themselves to the vindication of their own
characters, without which powerful motive they probably would have written
nothing. In general, those nearest to the Sovereign, either by birth or
by office, have left no memoirs; and in absolute monarchies the
mainsprings of great events will be found in particulars which the most
exalted persons alone could know. Those who have had but little under
their charge find no subject in it for a book; and those who have long
borne the burden of public business conceive themselves to be forbidden by
duty, or by respect for authority, to disclose all they know. Others,
again, preserve notes, with the intention of reducing them to order when
they shall have reached the period of a happy leisure; vain illusion of
the ambitious, which they cherish, for the most part, but as a veil to
conceal from their sight the hateful image of their inevitable downfall!
and when it does at length take place, despair or chagrin deprives them of
fortitude to dwell upon the dazzling period which they never cease to
regret.

Louis XVI. meant to write his own memoirs; the manner in which his
private papers were arranged indicated this design. The Queen also had
the same intention; she long preserved a large correspondence, and a great
number of minute reports, made in the spirit and upon the event of the
moment. But after the 20th of June, 1792, she was obliged to burn the
larger portion of what she had so collected, and the remainder were
conveyed out of France.

Considering the rank and situations of the persons I have named as capable
of elucidating by their writings the history of our political storms, it
will not be imagined that I aim at placing myself on a level with them;
but I have spent half my life either with the daughters of Louis XV. or
with Marie Antoinette. I knew the characters of those Princesses;