In politics, Louis XV had only one abiding objective: that of conspiring against his government. He is the first king who chooses to place himself in the role of provocateur. The Secret of the King was a parallel policy that often caught him out in his own secrets. The Duc de Broglie, who made the first attempt to reconstruct this vain and acrobatic story of multiple deceptions, records one exemplary moment—when, in 1773, Louis XV, while plotting behind the scenes with Sweden, “had full satisfaction: needing to conduct an affair that was half-diplomatic and half-military, he succeeded in hiding one part from the minister of war, the other part from the foreign minister, and finally the whole of it from the person to whom he generally entrusted his secret policies.⁶¹⁸ Three secrets carried on together, unconnected one from the other, were the crowning achievement of his system and a work of genius of its kind.” Then, when Louis XV succeeded even in deceiving his secret confidants, revealing part of the secret to his ministers, who had always played the role of the dupe, a sort of paralyzing peace hovered over him. All external purpose had faded before the evidence of the king’s trick, which forced him to play all and everything against himself, and thus to betray the betrayers whom he had chosen. The strands of the plot, once brought together, neutralized one another—and left in the middle of it was the lone, powerless sovereign: whether or not he resorted to hypochondriac inaction or to feverishly covering his tracks, he was thwarted at every turn, and was now damned.

Of all Louis XV’s bastard children, the son of Mademoiselle de Romans was honored with an evocative name. From Versailles, one December day, the king sent one of his very few intimate notes, which has since passed through the hands of many collectors: “I am well aware ma grande that you had some idea in your head when you left, though I couldn’t guess exactly what it was.⁶¹⁹ I do not want our child to be under my name on the certificate of baptism, but nor do I want to be unable to recognize him in a few years’ time, if I so wish. I therefore want it to be put down as Louis Aimé or Louise Aimée, son or daughter of Louis Le Roy or of Louis Bourbon, as you prefer … I also want the godfather and the godmother to be poor people, or servants, excluding anyone else.”