"to Spain, to Holland," etc. In London, they would have been the roads
to Chelsea and Pentonville!

As we were driving slowly along in the Bishop's carriage, I had ample
time for conversation with that personage, who has since, as the
Cardinal de Fleuri, risen to so high a pitch of power. He certainly has
in him very little of the great man; nor do I know anywhere so striking
an instance of this truth,--that in that game of honours which is played
at courts, we obtain success less by our talents than our tempers. He
laughed, with a graceful turn of /badinage/, at the political
peculiarities of Madame de Balzac; and said that it was not for the
uppermost party to feel resentment at the chafings of the under one.
Sliding from this topic, he then questioned me as to the gayeties I had
witnessed. I gave him a description of the party at Boulainvilliers'.
He seemed much interested in this, and showed more shrewdness than I
should have given him credit for in discussing the various characters of
the /literati/ of the day. After some general conversation on works of
fiction, he artfully glided into treating on those of statistics and
politics, and I then caught a sudden but thorough insight into the
depths of his policy. I saw that, while he affected to be indifferent
to the difficulties and puzzles of state, he lost no opportunity of
gaining every particle of information respecting them; and that he made
conversation, in which he was skilled, a vehicle for acquiring that
knowledge which he had not the force of mind to create from his own
intellect, or to work out from the written labours of others. If this
made him a superficial statesman, it made him a prompt one; and there
was never so lucky a minister with so little trouble to himself.*


* At his death appeared the following pnnning epigram:--