Court Memoirs of France Series — Complete by Various
page 253 of 2603 (09%)
page 253 of 2603 (09%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
near so brittle and delicate. In a word, I am of opinion there are
greater qualities necessary to make a good head of a party than to make an emperor who is to govern the whole world, and that resolution ought to run parallel with judgment,--I say, with heroic judgment, which is able to distinguish the extraordinary from what we call the impossible. The Count had not one grain of this discerning faculty, which is but seldom to be met with in the sublimest genius. His character was mean to a degree, and consequently susceptible of unreasonable jealousies and distrusts, which of all characters is the most opposite to that of a good partisan, who is indispensably obliged in many cases to suppress, and in all to conceal, the best-grounded suspicions. This was the reason I could not be of the opinion of those who were for engaging the Count in a civil war; and Varicarville, who was the man of the best sense and temper of all the persons of quality he had about him, told me since that when he saw what I wrote in Campion's letter the day I set out for Italy, he very well knew by what motives I was, against my inclination, persuaded into this opinion. The Count held out all this year and the next against every solicitation of the Spaniards and the importunities of his own friends, much more by the wise counsels of Varicarville than by the force of his own resolution; but nothing could secure him from the teasings of the Cardinal de Richelieu, who poured into his ears every day in the King's name his many dismal discoveries and prognostications. For fear of being tedious I shall only tell you in one word that the Cardinal, contrary to his own interest, hurried the Count into a civil war, by such arts of chicanery as those who are fortune's favourites never fail to play upon the unfortunate. |
|