Ask anything
else in my power to bestow, and it shall be yours."
This was no hypocrisy on the part of Louis XV, who, spite of his
somewhat irregular mode of life, professed to hold religion in
the highest honor and esteem; to all that it proscribed he paid
the submission of a child. We had ample proofs of this in the
sermons preached at Versailles by the abbe de Beauvais, afterwards
bishop of Senetz.
This ecclesiastic, filled with an inconsiderate zeal, feared not
openly to attack the king in his public discourses; he even went
so far as to interfere with many things of which he was not a
competent judge, and which by no means belonged to his jurisdiction:
in fact, there were ample grounds for sending the abbe to the
Bastille. The court openly expressed its dissatisfaction at this
audacity, and for my own part I could not avoid evincing the
lively chagrin it caused me. Yet, would you believe it, Louis XV
declared, in a tone from which there was no appeal, that this
abbe had merely done his duty, and that those who had been less
scrupulous in the performance of theirs, would do well to be
silent on the subject. This was not all; the cardinal de la
Roche Aymon, his grand almoner, refused to sanction the nomination
of M. de Beauvais to the bishopric, under the pretext of his not being
nobly descended.
M. de Beyons, bishop of Carcassone, a prelate of irreproachable
character, was deeply distressed to find that the want of birth
would exclude M.
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