The great lords had made a decided failure in government.  Since 1718, the different councils had been abolished; defended by Abbe St. Pierre, under the grotesque title of Polysynodie, they had earned for the candid preacher of universal peace his exclusion from the French Academy, which was insisted upon by the remnants of the old court, whom he had mortally offended by styling Louis XIV.’s governmental system a viziership.  The Regent had heaped favors upon the presidents and members of the councils, but he had placed Dubois at the head of foreign affairs and Le Blanc over the war department.  “I do not inquire into the theory of councils,” said the able Dubois to the Regent by the mouth of his confidant Chavigny; “it was, as you know, the object of worship to the shallow pates of the old court.  Humiliated by their nonentity at the end of the last reign, they begot this system upon the reveries of M. de Cambrai.  But I think of you, I think of your interests.  The king will reach, his majority, the grandees of the kingdom approach the monarque by virtue of their birth; if to this privilege they unite that of being then at the head of affairs, there is reason to fear that they may surpass you in complaisance, in flattery, may represent you as a useless phantom, and establish themselves upon the ruin of you.  Suppress, then, these councils, if you mean to continue indispensable, and haste to supersede the great lords, who would become your rivals, by means of simple secretaries of state, who, without standing or family, will perforce remain your creatures.”

The Duke of Antin, son of Madame de Montespan, one of the most adroit courtiers of the old as well as of the new court, “honorless and passionless” (sans honneur et sans humeur), according to the Regent’s own saying, took a severer view than Dubois of the arrangement to which he had contributed.  “The councils are dissolved,” he wrote in his memoirs; “the nobility will never recover from it—­to my great regret, I must confess.  The kings who hereafter reign will see that Louis XIV., one of the greatest kings in the world, never would employ people of rank in any of his business; that the Regent, a most enlightened prince, had begun by putting them at the head of all affairs, and was obliged to remove them at the end of three years.  What can they and must they conclude therefrom?  That people of this condition are not fitted for business, and that they are good for nothing but to get killed in war.  I hope I am wrong, but there is every appearance that the masters will think like that, and there will not be wanting folks who will confirm them in that opinion.”  A harsh criticism on the French nobility, too long absorbed by war or the court, living apart from the nation and from affairs, and thereby become incapable of governing, put down once for all by the iron hand of Richelieu, without ever having been able to resume at the head of the country the rank and position which befitted them.