“The Queen, prompted by the Abbe Vermond, even after Brienne’s dismission, gave him tokens of her royal munificence.  Her Majesty feared that her acting otherwise to a Minister, who had been honoured by her confidence, would operate as a check to prevent all men of celebrity from exposing their fortunes to so ungracious a return for lending their best services to the State, which now stood in need of the most skilful pilots.  Such were the motives assigned by Her Majesty herself to me, when I took the liberty, of expostulating with her respecting the dangers which threatened herself and family, from this continued devotedness to a Minister against whom the nation had pronounced so strongly.  I could not but applaud the delicacy of the feeling upon which her conduct had been grounded; nor could I blame her, in my heart, for the uprightness of her principle, in showing that what she had once undertaken should not be abandoned through female caprice.  I told Her Majesty that the system upon which she acted was praiseworthy; and that its application in the present instance would have been so had the Archbishop possessed as much talent as he lacked; but, that now it was quite requisite for her to stop the public clamour by renouncing her protection of a man who had so seriously endangered the public tranquillity and her own reputation.

“As a proof how far my caution was well founded, there was an immense riotous mob raised about this time against the Queen, in consequence of her having, appointed the dismissed Minister’s niece, Madame de Canisy, to a place at Court, and having given her picture, set in diamonds, to the Archbishop himself.

“The Queen, in many cases, was by far too communicative to some of her household, who immediately divulged all they gathered from her unreserve.  How could these circumstances have transpired to the people but from those nearest the person of Her Majesty, who, knowing the public feeling better than their royal mistress could be supposed to know it, did their own feeling little credit by the mischievous exposure?  The people were exasperated beyond all conception.  The Abbe Vermond placed before Her Majesty the consequences of her communicativeness, and from this time forward she never repeated the error.  After the lesson she had received, none of her female attendants, not even the Duchesse de Polignac, to whom she would have confided her very existence, could, had they been ever so much disposed, have drawn anything upon public matters from her.  With me, as her superintendent and entitled by my situation to interrogate and give her counsel, she was not, of course, under the same restriction.  To his other representations of the consequences of the Queen’s indiscreet openness, the Abbe Vermond added that, being obliged to write all the letters, private and public, he often found himself greatly embarrassed by affairs having gone forth to the world beforehand.  One misfortune of putting this seal upon the lips of Her Majesty was that it placed her more thoroughly in the Abbe’s power.  She was, of course, obliged to rely implicitly upon him concerning many points, which, had they undergone the discussion necessarily resulting from free conversation, would have been shown to her under very different aspects.  A man with a better heart, less Jesuitical, and not so much interested as Vermond was to keep his place, would have been a safer monitor.