LETTER 128
Rica to Ibben, at Smyrna
You have heard much talk
of the famous king of Sweden:1
while he was visiting the trenches, with an engineer as his sole companion,
during the siege of a town in a kingdom called Norway, he received a wound
in the head, of which he died. His prime minister2
was immediately arrested, and the assembled states condemned him to lose
his head.
He was accused of a very
grave crime; that of having slandered the nation, and of having caused
the king to lose confidence in it: an offence which, in my judgment,
deserves a thousand deaths.
For, in short, if it is
a villainous action to blacken the character of the meanest of his subjects
in the eyes of a prince, what must it be to traduce an entire nation, and
to withdraw from it the goodwill of him whom providence has set over it
for its welfare?
I would have men talk with
kings, as the angels talked with our holy Prophet.
You know that, in the sacred
banquets, when the king of kings descends from the most sublime throne
in the world to converse with his slaves, I laid a severe injunction on
myself to restrain an unruly tongue: no one ever heard escape from
me a single word which could be disagreeable to the meanest of his subjects.
When it behoved me to cease to be sober, I never ceased to be a gentleman;
and in that test of our fidelity I risked my life, but never my virtue.
I know not how it happens,
but the wickedest king is hardly ever so bad as his minister; if
he commits a vile action, it has nearly always been suggested to him:
thus the ambition of princes is never so dangerous as the baseness of their
advisers. But can you understand how a man who was yesterday made
minister, and may perhaps to-morrrow be disgraced, can become in a moment
his own enemy, the enemy of his family, of his country, and of the people
who are yet to be born of those he is about to oppress?
A prince has passions; the minister works on them:
it is in that way that he manages his ministry: that is his only
aim, nor does he desire another. The courtiers mislead him by their
applause; and he flatters him more dangerously by his advice, by the designs
with which he inspires him, and by the maxims which he proposes to him.
Paris, the 25th of the moon of Saphar, 1719.