Note 82 — Chapter IX

The plan was Marshal Belleisle’s. The author of La Vie Privée de Louis XV. says, that Thurot had orders not to commit hostilities on Scotland, but to invite the Jacobites to join him.—Vol. iii. That author has collected a great deal of curious matter, as far as he could be assisted by public materials; but his secret history is far from being equally authentic, nor does he seem to have been conversant with persons well informed, and near the scene of action. He thinks the first cause of the Dauphin’s illness and death proceeded from his vexation at the expulsion of the Jesuits. The Dauphin had been bred a bigot; but, before his death, was grown a free-thinker to a very great latitude, and gave very indubitable marks of it in the last days of his life. The author was as ignorant of the motives of the Duc de Choiseul’s opposition to Madame du Barri, and his consequential fall, which the author imputes to the Duchesse de Grammont, his sister, being provoked at not being the King’s mistress herself—a vulgar story. The author seems to be most versed in the marine, and the great object of his work, to show that all the successes of the English, in 1759 and 1760, were owing to the incapacity of all the Ministers and Commanders, and especially to the cowardice of their Admirals, to the King’s indolence, and to Madame de Pompadour’s ascendant.