and your will,” said the marshal at the outset of his correspondence, “confining myself solely to what relates to the frontier on which you have given me the command, I shall speak with frankness and freedom about the object confided to my care, and shall hold my peace as regards the rest.  If you, Sir, desire the silence to be broken, it is for you to order it.”  For the first time Louis XV. seemed to awake from the midst of that life of intellectual lethargy and physical activity which he allowed to glide along, without a thought, between the pleasures of the chase and the amusements invented by his favorite; a remembrance of Louis XIV. came across his mind, naturally acute and judicious as it was.  “The late king, my great-grandfather,” he writes to Marshal Noailles on the 26th of November, 1743, “whom I desire to imitate as much as I can, recommended me, on his death-bed, to take counsel in all things, and to seek out the best, so as always to follow it.  I shall be charmed, then, if you will give me some; thus do I open your mouth, as the pope does the cardinals, and I permit you to say to me what your zeal and your affection for me and my kingdom prompt you.”  The first fruit of this correspondence was the entrance of Marshal Noailles into the Council.

[Illustration:  Louis XV. and his Councillors——­148]

“One day as he was, in the capacity of simple courtier, escorting the king, who was on his way to the Council, his Majesty said to him, “Marshal, come in; we are going to hold a council,” and pointed to a place at his left, Cardinal Tencin being on his right.  “This new minister does not please our secretaries of state.  He is a troublesome inspector set over them, who meddles in everything, though master of nothing.”  The renewal of active hostilities was about to deliver the ministers from Marshal Noailles.

The prudent hesitation and backwardness of Holland had at last yielded to the pressure of England.  The States-general had sent twenty thousand men to join the army which George II. had just sent into Germany.  It was only on the 15th of March, 1744, that Louis XV. formally declared war against the King of England and Maria Theresa, no longer as an auxiliary of the ’emperor, but in his own name and on behalf of France.  Charles VII., a fugitive, driven from his hereditary dominions, which had been evacuated by Marshal Broglie, had transported to Frankfurt his ill fortune and his empty titles.  France alone supported in Germany a quarrel the weight of which she had imprudently taken upon herself.

The effort was too much for the resources; the king’s counsellors felt that it was; the battle of Dettingen, skilfully commenced on the 27th of June, 1743, by Marshal Noailles, and lost by the imprudence of his nephew, the Duke of Gramont, had completely shaken the confidence of the armies; the emperor had treated with the Austrians for an armistice; establishing the neutrality of his troops, as belonging to the empire.