“Sire—­It is a zealous servant who writes to Your Majesty.  Truth is always better, particularly to Kings; habituated to flattery, they see objects only under those colours most likely to please them.  I have reflected, and read much; and here is what my meditations have suggested to me to lay before Your Majesty.  They have accustomed you to be invisible, and inspired you with a timidity which prevents you from speaking; thus all direct communication is cut off between the master and his subjects.  Shut up in the interior of your palace, you are becoming every day like the Emperors of the East; but see, Sire, their fate!  ’I have troops,’ Your Majesty will say; such, also, is their support:  but, when the only security of a King rests upon his troops; when he is only, as one may say, a King of the soldiers, these latter feel their own strength, and abuse it.  Your finances are in the greatest disorder, and the great majority of states have perished through this cause.  A patriotic spirit sustained the ancient states, and united all classes for the safety of their country.  In the present times, money has taken the place of this spirit; it has become the universal lever, and you are in want of it.  A spirit of finance affects every department of the state; it reigns triumphant at Court; all have become venal; and all distinction of rank is broken up.  Your Ministers are without genius and capacity since the dismissal of mm. d’Argenson and de Machault.  You alone cannot judge of their incapacity, because they lay before you what has been prepared by skilful clerks, but which they pass as their own.  They provide only for the necessity of the day, but there is no spirit of government in their acts.  The military changes that have taken place disgust the troops, and cause the most deserving officers to resign; a seditious flame has sprung up in the very bosom of the Parliaments; you seek to corrupt them, and the remedy is worse than the disease.  It is introducing vice into the sanctuary of justice, and gangrene into the vital parts of the commonwealth.  Would a corrupted Parliament have braved the fury of the League, in order to preserve the crown for the legitimate sovereign?  Forgetting the maxims of Louis XIV., who well understood the danger of confiding the administration to noblemen, you have chosen M. de Choiseul, and even given him three departments; which is a much heavier burden than that which he would have to support as Prime Minister, because the latter has only to oversee the details executed by the Secretaries of State.  The public fully appreciate this dazzling Minister.  He is nothing more than a ‘petit-maitre’, without talents or information, who has a little phosphorus in his mind.  There is a thing well worthy of remark, Sire; that is, the open war carried on against religion.  Henceforward there can spring up no new sects, because the general belief has been shaken, that no one feels inclined to occupy himself with