which nearly cost Montesquieu his election to the Academy.
'The king of France is the most powerful prince in Europe. He has no gold mines, like his neighbour the king of Spain, but he has greater riches because he draws them from an inexhaustible mine—the vanity of his subjects. He has undertaken and carried on great wars without funds except titles of honour to sell, and, through a prodigy of human pride, his troops have found themselves feared, his fortresses built, his fleets equipped. Moreover he is a great magician. His empire extends to the minds of his subjects: he makes them think as he wishes. If he has only one million crowns in his treasure chest and he wants two, he has merely to tell them that one crown is equal to two, and they believe it. If he has a difficult war to carry on and has no money, he has merely to put it into their heads that a piece of paper is money, and they are convinced at once. But this is no such marvel, for there is another still greater magician, who is called the Pope, and the things which he makes people believe are even more extraordinary.'
Then there was the description of the old king, with his minister of eighteen, and his mistress of eighty[1], surrounded by a swarm of invisible enemies, whom, in spite of his confidential dervishes, he could never discover. There were many references to religion, mostly irreverent, though not with the fierce and bitter irreverence of Voltaire. Usbek finds imperfect and tentative approximations to Mahommedanism in many of the Christian dogmas and rites, and ascribes to the
- ↑ The references, of course exaggerated, were to Barbézieux and Mme de Maintenon.
