began his incredibly foolish 'secret'--a system of foreign policy
conducted by hidden agents behind the backs of his responsible
ministers at Versailles and in the Courts of Europe. The results
naturally tend to recall a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera of
diplomacy. We find magnificent ambassadors gravely trying to carry out
the royal orders, and thwarted by the King's secret agents. The King
seems to have been too lazy to face his ministers, and compel them to
take his own line, while he was energetic enough to work like Tiberius
or Philip II. of Spain at his secret Penelope's task of undoing by
night the warp and woof which his ministers wove by day. In these
mysterious labours of his the Comte de Broglie, later a firm friend of
d'Eon, was, with Tercier, one of his main assistants.
The King thus enjoyed all the pleasures and excitements of a
conspirator in his own kingdom, dealing in ciphered despatches, with
the usual cant names, carried in the false bottoms of snuff-boxes,
precisely as if he had been a Jacobite plotter. It was entertaining,
but it was not diplomacy, and, sooner or later, Louis was certain to
be 'blackmailed' by some underling in his service.
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