It is abasement which directs.  Nothing is easier of comprehension.  It is he who is below who pulls the strings.  No position more convenient.  He is the eye, and has the ear.  He is the eye of the government; he has the ear of the king.  To have the eye of the king is to draw and shut, at one’s whim, the bolt of the royal conscience, and to throw into that conscience whatever one wishes.  The mind of the king is his cupboard; if he be a rag-picker, it is his basket.  The ears of kings belong not to kings, and therefore it is that, on the whole, the poor devils are not altogether responsible for their actions.  He who does not possess his own thought does not possess his own deed.  A king obeys—­what?  Any evil spirit buzzing from outside in his ear; a noisome fly of the abyss.

This buzzing commands.  A reign is a dictation.

The loud voice is the sovereign; the low voice, sovereignty.  Those who know how to distinguish, in a reign, this low voice, and to hear what it whispers to the loud, are the real historians.

CHAPTER IX.

HATE IS AS STRONG AS LOVE.

Queen Anne had several of these low voices about her.  Barkilphedro was one.

Besides the queen, he secretly worked, influenced, and plotted upon Lady Josiana and Lord David.  As we have said, he whispered in three ears, one more than Dangeau.  Dangeau whispered in but two, in the days when, thrusting himself between Louis XIV., in love with Henrietta, his sister-in-law, and Henrietta, in love with Louis XIV., her brother-in-law, he being Louis’s secretary, without the knowledge of Henrietta, and Henrietta’s without the knowledge of Louis, he wrote the questions and answers of both the love-making marionettes.

Barkilphedro was so cheerful, so accepting, so incapable of taking up the defence of anybody, possessing so little devotion at bottom, so ugly, so mischievous, that it was quite natural that a regal personage should come to be unable to do without him.  Once Anne had tasted Barkilphedro she would have no other flatterer.  He flattered her as they flattered Louis the Great, by stinging her neighbours.  “The king being ignorant,” says Madame de Montchevreuil, “one is obliged to mock at the savants.”

To poison the sting, from time to time, is the acme of art.  Nero loves to see Locusta at work.

Royal palaces are very easily entered; these madrepores have a way in soon guessed at, contrived, examined, and scooped out at need by the gnawing thing which is called the courtier.  A pretext to enter is sufficient.  Barkilphedro, having found this pretext, his position with the queen soon became the same as that with the Duchess Josiana—­that of an indispensable domestic animal.  A witticism risked one day by him immediately led to his perfect understanding of the queen and how to estimate exactly her kindness of heart.  The queen was greatly attached to her Lord Steward, William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire, who was a great fool.  This lord, who had obtained every Oxford degree and did not know how to spell, one fine morning committed the folly of dying.  To die is a very imprudent thing at court, for there is then no further restraint in speaking of you.  The queen, in the presence of Barkilphedro, lamented the event, finally exclaiming, with a sigh,—­