Noailles wrote to the king on the 8th of July, “It is necessary to uphold this phantom, in order to restrain Germany, which would league against us, and furnish the English with all the troops therein, the moment the emperor was abandoned.”  It was necessary, at the same time, to look out elsewhere for more effectual support.  The King of Prussia had been resting for the last two years, a curious and an interested spectator of the contests which were bathing Europe in blood, and which answered his purpose by enfeebling his rivals.  He frankly and coolly flaunted his selfishness.  “In a previous war with France,” he says in his memoirs, “I abandoned the French at Prague, because I gained Silesia by that step.  If I had escorted them to Vienna, they would never have given me so much.”  In turn the successes of the Queen of Hungary were beginning to disquiet him; on the 5th of June, 1744, he signed a new treaty with France; for the first time Louis XV. was about to quit Versailles and place himself at the head of an army.  “If my country is to be devoured,” said the king, with a levity far different from the solemn tone of Louis XIV., “it will be very hard on me to see it swallowed without personally doing my best to prevent it.”

He had, however, hesitated a long while before he started.  There was a shortness of money.  For all his having been head of the council of finance, Noailles had not been able to rid himself of ideas of arbitrary power.  “When the late king, your great-grandfather, considered any outlay necessary,” he wrote to Louis XV., “the funds had to be found, because it was his will.  The case in question is one in which your Majesty ought to speak as master, and lay down the law to your ministers.  Your comptroller-general ought, for the future, to be obliged to furnish the needful funds without daring to ask the reasons for which they are demanded of him, and still less to decide upon them.  It was thus that the late king behaved towards M. Colbert and all who succeeded him in that office; he would never have done anything great in the whole course of his reign, if he had behaved otherwise.”  It was the king’s common sense which replied to this counsel, “We are still paying all those debts that the late king incurred for extraordinary occasions, fifty millions a year and more, which we must begin by paying off first of all.”  Later on, he adds, gayly, “As for me, I can do without any equipage, and, if needful, the shoulder of mutton of the lieutenants of infantry will do perfectly well for me.”  “There is nothing talked off here but the doings of the king, who is in extraordinary spirits,” writes the advocate Barbier; “he has visited the places near Valenciennes, the magazines, the hospitals; he has tasted the broth of the sick, and the soldiers’ bread.  The ambassador of Holland came, before his departure, to propose a truce in order to put us off yet longer.  The king, when he was presented, merely said, ’I know what you are going to say to me, and what it is all about.  I will give you my answer in Flanders.’  This answer is a proud one, and fit for a king of France.”