168

HISTORY OP ENGLAND.

CHAP.

XII.

JG89.

presented that Court both in Roman Catholic and in Protestantcountries, and who had acquired in his wanderings the art ofcatching the tone of any society into which chance might throwhim. He was eminently vigilant and adroit, fertile in re-sources, and skilful in discovering the weak parts of a character.His own character, however, was not without its weak parts.The consciousness that he was of plebeian origin was thetorment of his life. He pined for nobility with a pining at oncepitiable and ludicrous. Able, experienced and accomplishedas he was, he sometimes, under the influence of this mentaldisease, descended to the level of Moliere’s Jourdain, andentertained malicious observers with scenes almost as laugh-able as that in which the honest draper was made a Mama-mouchi. * It would have been well if this had been the worst.But it is not too much to say that of the difference betweenright and wrong Avaux had no more notion than a brute.One sentiment was to him in the place of religion and morality,a superstitious and intolerant devotion to the Crown which heserved. This sentiment pervades all his despatches, and givesa colour to all his thoughts and words. Nothing that tended topromote the interest of the French monarchy seemed to him acrime. Indeed he appears to have taken it for granted that notonly Frenchmen, but all human beings, owed a natural alle-giance to the House of Bourbon, and that whoever hesitatedto sacrifice the happiness and freedom of his own native countryto the glory of that House was a traitor. While he resided atthe Hague, he always designated thoseDutchmen who had soldthemselves to France as the well intentioned party. In theletters which he wrote from Ireland, the same feeling appears_ still more strongly. He would have been a more sagaciouspolitician if he had sympathized more with those feelings of

* See Saint Simon's account of the trick by which Avaux tried topass himself off at Stockholm as a Knight of the Order of the Holy Ghost.