commercial advantages. Dubois yielded on all the points, defending to
the last with fruitless tenacity the title of King of France, which the
English still disputed. The negotiations came to an end at length on the
6th of January, 1717, and Dubois wrote in triumph to the Regent, "I
signed at midnight; so there are you quit of servitude (your own master),
and here am I quit of fear." The treaty of the triple alliance brought
the negotiator before long a more solid advantage; he was appointed
secretary of state for foreign affairs; it was on this occasion that he
wrote to Mr. Craggs, King George's minister, a letter worthy of his
character, and which contributed a great deal towards gaining credit for
the notion that he had sold himself to England. "If I were to follow
only the impulse of my gratitude and were not restrained by respect, I
should take the liberty of writing to H. B. Majesty to thank him for the
place with which my lord the Regent has gratified me, inasmuch as I owe
it to nothing but to the desire he felt not to employ in affairs common
to France and England anybody who might not be agreeable to the King of
Great Britain."

At the moment when the signature was being put to the treaty of the
triple alliance, the sovereign of most distinction in Europe, owing to
the eccentric renown belonging to his personal merit, the czar Peter the
Great, had just made flattering advances to France. He had some time
before wished to take a trip to Paris, but Louis XIV. was old,
melancholy, and vanquished, and had declined the czar's visit. The
Regent could not do the same thing, when, being at the Hague in 1717,
Peter I. repeated the expression of his desire. Marshal Cosse was sent
to meet him, and the honors due to the king himself were everywhere paid
to him on the road. A singular mixture of military and barbaric
roughness with the natural grandeur of a conqueror and creator of an
empire, the czar mightily excited the curiosity of the Parisians.