liked to form them, as he said; liked to teach them even the most trifling things.  It was the same with his generals.  He took credit to himself for instructing them; wished it to be thought that from his cabinet he commanded and directed all his armies.  Naturally fond of trifles, he unceasingly occupied himself with the most petty details of his troops, his household, his mansions; would even instruct his cooks, who received, like novices, lessons they had known by heart for years.  This vanity, this unmeasured and unreasonable love of admiration, was his ruin.  His ministers, his generals, his mistresses, his courtiers, soon perceived his weakness.  They praised him with emulation and spoiled him.  Praises, or to say truth, flattery, pleased him to such an extent, that the coarsest was well received, the vilest even better relished.  It was the sole means by which you could approach him.  Those whom he liked owed his affection for them to their untiring flatteries.  This is what gave his ministers so much authority, and the opportunities they had for adulating him, of attributing everything to him, and of pretending to learn everything from him.  Suppleness, meanness, an admiring, dependent, cringing manner—­above all, an air of nothingness—­were the sole means of pleasing him.

This poison spread.  It spread, too, to an incredible extent, in a prince who, although of intellect beneath mediocrity, was not utterly without sense, and who had had some experience.  Without voice or musical knowledge, he used to sing, in private, the passages of the opera prologues that were fullest of his praises.

He was drowned in vanity; and so deeply, that at his public suppers—­all the Court present, musicians also—­he would hum these self-same praises between his teeth, when the music they were set to was played!

And yet, it must be admitted, he might have done better.  Though his intellect, as I have said, was beneath mediocrity, it was capable of being formed.  He loved glory, was fond of order and regularity; was by disposition prudent, moderate, discreet, master of his movements and his tongue.  Will it be believed?  He was also by disposition good and just!  God had sufficiently gifted him to enable him to be a good King; perhaps even a, tolerably great King!  All the evil came to him from elsewhere.  His early education was so neglected that nobody dared approach his apartment.  He has often been heard to speak of those times with bitterness, and even to relate that, one evening he was found in the basin of the Palais Royal garden fountain, into which he had fallen!  He was scarcely taught how to read or write, and remained so ignorant, that the most familiar historical and other facts were utterly unknown to him!  He fell, accordingly, and sometimes even in public, into the grossest absurdities.