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prince, compounded of royal Popery and legal Anglicanism, had his
Catholic house and his Protestant house, and might have pushed
Barkilphedro in one or the other hierarchy; but he did not judge him to
be Catholic enough to make him almoner, or Protestant enough to make him
chaplain. So that between two religions, Barkilphedro found himself with
his soul on the ground.
Not a bad posture, either, for certain reptile souls.
Certain ways are impracticable, except by crawling flat on the belly.
An obscure but fattening servitude had long made up Barkilphedro's whole
existence. Service is something; but he wanted power besides. He was,
perhaps, about to reach it when James II. fell. He had to begin all over
again. Nothing to do under William III., a sullen prince, and exercising
in his mode of reigning a prudery which he believed to be probity.
Barkilphedro, when his protector, James II., was dethroned, did not
lapse all at once into rags. There is a something which survives deposed
princes, and which feeds and sustains their parasites. The remains of
the exhaustible sap causes leaves to live on for two or three days on
the branches of the uprooted tree; then, all at once, the leaf yellows
and dries up: and thus it is with the courtier.
Thanks to that embalming which is called legitimacy, the prince himself,
although fallen and cast away, lasts and keeps preserved; it is not so
with the courtier, much more dead than the king. The king, beyond there,
is a mummy; the courtier, here, is a phantom. To be the shadow of a
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