This was certainly just, and at the same time ungrateful.
Louis XI. had rendered France great service, but in a manner void of
frankness, dignity, or lustre; he had made the contemporary generation
pay dearly for it by reason of the spectacle he presented of trickery,
perfidy, and vindictive cruelty, and by his arbitrary and tyrannical
exercise of kingly power. People are not content to have useful service;
they must admire or love; and Louis XI. inspired France with neither of
those sentiments. He has had the good fortune to be described and
appraised, in his own day too, by the most distinguished and independent
of his councillors, Philip de Commynes, and, three centuries afterwards,
by one of the most thoughtful and the soundest intellects amongst the
philosophers of the eighteenth century, Duclos, who, moreover, had the
advantage of being historiographer of France, and of having studied the
history of that reign in authentic documents. We reproduce here the two
judgments, the agreement of which is remarkable:--
|