THE REGENCY AND LOUIS XV.
State of France.--The Regency.--Financial Embarrassment.--Crimes of
the Rulers.--Recoining the Currency.--Renewed Persecution of the
Protestants.--Bishop Dubois.--Philosophy of Voltaire.--Anecdote
of Franklin.--The King's Favorites.--Mademoiselle Poisson.--Her
Ascendency.--_Parc aux Cerfs._--Illustrative Anecdote.--Letter to the
King.--Testimony of Chesterfield.--Anecdote of La Fayette.--Death of
Pompadour.--Mademoiselle Lange.--Power of Du Barry.--Death of Louis
XV.
The reign of Louis XIV. was that of an Oriental monarch. His authority
was unlimited and unquestioned. The people had two powerful foes,
the king and the nobles. The nobles, as the most numerous, were the
most dreaded. The people consequently looked to the kings to protect
them against the nobles, as sheep will look to their natural enemy,
the dogs, to defend them from their still worse enemies, the wolves.
The king had now obtained a perfect triumph over the nobles, and
had gathered all the political power into his own hands. He had
accomplished this by bribery, as well as by force. The acquiescence of
the nobles in his supremacy was purchased by his conferring upon them
all the offices of honor and emolument, by exempting them from all
taxes, and by supporting them in indolence, luxury, and vice, from the
toil of the crushed and starving masses. There were now in the nation
two classes, and two only, with an impassable gulf between them. On the
one side were eighty thousand aristocratic families living in idleness
and luxury; on the other were twenty-four millions of people, who, as
a mass, were kept in the lowest poverty, maintaining by their toil the
haughty nobles, from whom they received only outrage and contempt.
Louis XIV. just before his death drew up an edict appointing a council
of regency during the minority of his great-grandson, the young king.
The Parliament of Paris, however, declared the will null, and appointed
the Duke of Orleans, who was considered favorable to the nobles,
regent! For eight years, from 1715 to 1723, the regent, by shameless
profligacy and extravagance, was but filling up the measure of wrath
which had been accumulating for ages. Nothing was done to promote
the welfare of the people, and, notwithstanding the misery which was
actually depopulating the provinces, the gorgeous palaces of France
exhibited scenes of voluptuousness which the wealth of the Orient had
never paralleled.
Louis XIV. had expended upon the single palace of Versailles more than
two hundred millions of dollars. The roofs of that vast pile would
cover a surface of twenty-five French acres. Thirty thousand laborers
were frequently employed simultaneously in embellishing the magnificent
park sixty miles in circuit.[16] Marly, with its fountains, its parks,
and gardens, had also been constructed with equal extravagance. Both of
these palaces exhibited scenes of measureless profligacy gilded by the
highest fascinations of external refinement and elegance. Louis XIV.
left the nation in debt eight hundred and fifty millions of dollars.
For several years the expenditure had exceeded the income by nearly
thirty millions of dollars a year. The regent during the seven years
of his profligate administration had added to this debt a hundred and
fifty millions of dollars.
There was now fearful embarrassment in the finances. All the measures
for extorting money seemed to be exhausted, and it was found impossible
to raise the sums necessary to meet the expenses of the court and
to pay the interest upon the debt. Taxation had gone to its last
extremity; and no more money could be borrowed. The Duke of St. Simon
proposed that the treasury should declare itself bankrupt.
"The loss," said he, "will fall upon the commercial and moneyed
classes, whom no one fears or pities. The measure," he continued, "will
also be a salutary rebuke to the ignoble classes, teaching them to
beware how they lend money to the king which will enable him to gain
the supremacy over the nobles."
The Duke of Orleans, who was regent only, not king, could sympathize in
these views. The general discontent, however, was such, that he did not
dare to resort to so violent a measure. The end was accomplished in a
more circuitous way. A commission of courtiers was appointed to examine
the accounts of the public creditors. Three hundred and fifty millions
of francs ($76,000,000) were peremptorily struck from their claims.
There was no appeal. This mode of paying debts seemed so successful
that the commission established itself as an inquisitorial chamber, and
summoned before it all those who had been guilty of lending money to
the king. Most of these were thrown into prison, and threatened with
death unless they purchased pardon for the crime with large sums of
money. The regent and the nobles made themselves merry with the woes of
these low-born men of wealth, and filled their purses by selling their
protection.
A wealthy financier was perishing in one of the dungeons of the
Bastille. A count visited him and offered to procure his release for
sixty thousand dollars. "I thank you, Monsieur le Comte," was the
reply, "but Madame, your countess, has just been here, and has promised
me my liberty for half that sum."
The reign of the regent Duke of Orleans was the reign of the nobles,
and they fell eagerly upon the people, whom Louis XIV. had sheltered
from their avarice that more plunder might be left for him. The
currency was called in and recoined, one fifth being cut from the
value of each piece. By this expedient the court gained nearly fifteen
millions of dollars.
Soon this money was all gone. The horizon was darkening and the
approaching storm gathering blackness. Among the nobles there were some
who abhorred these outrages. A party was organized in Paris opposed to
the regent. They sent in a petition that the States-General might be
assembled to deliberate upon the affairs of the realm. All who signed
this petition were sent to the Bastille. There had been no meeting of
the States-General called for more than one hundred years. The last had
been held in 1614. It consisted of 104 deputies of the clergy, 132 of
the nobles, and 192 of the people. The three estates had met separately
and chosen their representatives. But the representatives of the
people in this assembly displayed so much spirit that the convention
was abruptly dismissed by the king, and neither king nor nobles were
willing to give them a hearing again.
A bank was now established with a nominal capital of six millions of
francs ($1,200,000). The shares were taken up by paying half in money
and half in valueless government bills. Thus the _real_ capital of the
bank was $600,000. Upon this capital bills were issued to the amount
of three thousand millions of francs ($600,000,000). Money was of
course for a time plenty enough. The bubble soon burst. This operation
vastly increased the financial ruin in which the nation was involved.
Five hundred thousand citizens were plunged into bankruptcy.[17] The
Parliament of Paris, though composed of the privileged class, made a
little show of resistance to such outrages and was banished summarily
to Pontoise.
Dubois, one of the most infamous men who ever disgraced even a court,
a tool of the regent, and yet thoroughly despised by him, had the
audacity one morning to ask for the vacant archbishopric of Cambray.
Dubois was not even a priest, and the demand seemed so ridiculous as
well as impudent that the regent burst into a laugh, exclaiming,
"Should I bestow the archbishopric on such a knave as thou art, where
should I find a prelate scoundrel enough to consecrate thee?"
"I have one here," said Dubois, pointing to a Jesuit prelate who was
ready to perform the sacrilegious deed. Dubois had promised Rohan that
if he would consecrate him he would bring back the favor of the court
to the Jesuit party. One of the mistresses of the regent had been won
over by Dubois, and the bloated debauchee was consecrated as Archbishop
of Cambray. Dubois was now in the line of preferment. He soon laid
aside his mitre for a cardinal's hat, and in 1722 was appointed prime
minister. The darkness of the Middle Ages had passed away, and these
scandals were perpetrated in the full light of the 18th century. The
people looked on with murmurs of contempt and indignation. It was too
much to ask, to demand reverence for such a church.[18]
The infamous Jesuit, Lavergne de Tressan, Bishop of Nantes, who
consecrated Dubois, revived from their slumber the most severe
ordinances of Louis XIV. Louis XV. was then fourteen years of age.
Royal edicts were issued, sentencing to the galleys for life any man
and to imprisonment for life any woman who should attend other worship
than the Catholic. Preachers of Protestantism were doomed to death;
and any person who harbored such a preacher, or who should neglect
to denounce him, was consigned to the galleys or the dungeon. All
children were to be baptized within twenty-four hours of their birth
by the curate of the parish, and were to be placed under Catholic
instructors until the age of fourteen. Certificates of Catholicity were
essential for all offices, all academical degrees, all admissions into
corporations of trade. This horrible outrage upon human rights was
received by the clergy with transport. When we contemplate the seed
which the king and the court thus planted, we can not wonder at the
revolutionary harvest which was reaped.
The Catholic Church thus became utterly loathsome even to the most
devout Christians. They preferred the philosophy of Montesquieu, the
atheism of Diderot, the unbelief of Voltaire, the sentimentalism of
Rousseau, to this merciless and bloody demon, assuming the name of the
Catholic Church, and swaying a sceptre of despotism which was deluging
France in blood and woe. The sword of persecution which had for a time
been reposing in its scabbard was again drawn and bathed in blood. Many
Protestant ministers were broken upon the wheel and then beheaded.
Persecution assumed every form of insult and cruelty. Thousands fled
from the realm. Religious assemblies were surrounded by dragoons,
and fired upon with the ferocity of savages, killing and maiming
indiscriminately men, women, and children. Enormous sums of money were,
by the lash, torture, the dungeon, and confiscation, extorted from the
Protestants. Noblemen, lawyers, physicians, and rich merchants were
most eagerly sought.
The seizure of Protestant children was attended with nameless outrages.
Soldiers, sword in hand, headed by the priests, broke into the houses,
overturned every thing in their search, committed brutal violence upon
the parents, and, reckless of their lamentations and despair, seized
the terrified children, especially the young girls, and forced them
into the convents.
Fanaticism so cruel was revolting to the intelligence and to the
general conscience of the age. Maddened priests could easily goad on
a brutal and exasperated populace to any deeds of inhumanity, but
intelligent men of all parties condemned such intolerance. It is,
however, worthy of note that few of the _philosophers_ of that day
ventured to plead for religious toleration. They generally hated
Christianity in all its forms, and were not at all disposed to shield
one sect from the persecutions of another. Voltaire, however, was an
exception. He had spent a year and a half in the Bastille on the charge
of having written a libel against the government, which libel he did
not write. When it was proved to the court that he did not write the
libel he was liberated from prison and banished from France. Several
years after this, Voltaire, having returned to France, offended a
nobleman, the Chevalier de Rohan. The chevalier disdainfully sent his
servant to chastise the poet. Voltaire, enraged by the degradation,
sent a challenge to De Rohan. For the crime of challenging a noble he
was again thrown into the Bastille. After six months he was released
and again exiled. Soon after his _Lettres Philosophiques_ were
condemned by the Parliament to be burned, and an order was issued for
his arrest. For many years he was compelled to live in concealment. He
thus learned how to sympathize with the persecuted. In his masterly
treatise upon toleration, and in his noble appeals for the family of
the murdered Protestant, Jean Calas, he spoke in clarion tones which
thrilled upon the ear of France. When Franklin in Paris called upon
Voltaire, with his grandson, he said, "My son, fall upon your knees
before this great man." The aged poet, then over eighty years of age,
gave the boy his blessing, with the characteristic words, "_God and
freedom_." The philosophy of Voltaire overturned the most despicable of
despotisms. His want of religion established another despotism equally
intolerable.
The miserable regent died in a fit in the apartment of his mistress in
1723. The young king was now fourteen years of age. He was a bashful
boy, with no thought but for his own indulgence. When a child he was
one day looking from the windows of the Tuileries into the garden,
which was filled with a crowd.
"Look there, my king," said Villeroi, his tutor; "all these people
belong to you. All that you see is your property; you are lord and
master of it."
Louis XV. carried these principles into vigorous practice during his
long reign of fifty-nine years. When fifteen years of age he married
Maria, daughter of Stanislaus, the exiled King of Poland. Maria was
not beautiful, but through a life of neglect and anguish she developed
a character of remarkable loveliness and of true piety. There is but
little to record of France during these inglorious years which is
worthy of the name of history. The pen can only narrate a shameful tale
of puerility, sin, and oppression. Weary and languid with worn-out
excitements, the king at one time took a sudden freak for worsted-work,
and the whole court was thrown into commotion as imitative nobles
and ecclesiastics were busy in the saloons of Versailles with wool,
needles, and canvas.
The king at one of his private suppers noticed a lady, Madame de
Mailly, whose vivacity attracted him. Simply to torture the queen he
took her for his favorite, and received her into the apartment from
which he excluded his meek and virtuous wife. Maria could only weep
and look to God for solace. Madame de Mailly had a sister, a bold,
spirited girl, Mademoiselle de Nesle. She came to visit the court, and
after vigorous efforts succeeded in supplanting her sister, and took
her degrading place. She was suddenly cut off in her sins by death;
but there was another sister of the same notorious family, Madame
Tournelle, who endeavored to solace the king by throwing herself into
his arms. The king received her, and she became his acknowledged
favorite, and for some time maintained the position of sultana of the
royal harem. Wherever she went a suite of court-ladies followed in her
train. All were compelled to pay homage to the reigning favorite of
the day, for all power was in her hands, and she was the dispenser of
rewards and punishments. The king conferred upon this guilty woman, who
was as cruel as she was guilty, the title of Duchess of Chateauroux.
Madame de Tencin, one of the ladies of the court, in a confidential
letter to Richelieu, written at this time, says:
"What happens in his kingdom seems to be no business of the king's.
It is even said that he avoids taking any cognizance of what occurs,
averring that it is better to know nothing than to learn unpleasant
tidings. Unless God visibly interferes, it is physically impossible
that the state should not fall to pieces."
Even Madame Chateauroux, herself one of the most corrupt members of
that court of unparalleled corruption, remarked to a friend,
"I could not have believed all that I now see. If no remedy is
administered to this state of things, there will, sooner or later, be a
great overthrow."[19]
Though the Duchess of Chateauroux was the reigning favorite, she
had another younger sister who was a member of the royal harem. The
princess of the blood, Mademoiselle Valois, and the Princess of Conti
were also in this infamous train. These revolting facts must be stated,
for they are essential to the understanding of the French Revolution.
Up to this time the king, of whom the people knew but little, was
regarded with affection. They looked upon him as the only barrier
to protect them from the nobles. Soon after this Madame Chateauroux
was taken sick and died in remorse, crying bitterly for mercy, and
promising, if her life could be spared, amendment and penance. She was
so detested by the people that an armed escort conducted her remains to
the grave to shield them from popular violence.
The king, for a time, was quite chagrined by the death of this woman,
who had obtained a great control over him. While profligacy and
boundless extravagance were thus rioting in the palace, bankruptcy was
ruining merchants and artisans, and misery reigned in the huts of the
peasants.
A citizen of Paris by the name of Poisson had a daughter of marvelous
grace and beauty. Mademoiselle Poisson married a wealthy financier, M.
Etoilles. She then, conscious of her beauty and of her unrivaled powers
of fascination, formed the bold and guilty resolve to throw herself
into the arms of the king. When the king was hunting in the forest of
Senart she placed herself in his path, as if by accident, in an open
barouche, dressed in a manner to shed the utmost possible lustre upon
her charms. The voluptuous king fixed his eye upon her and soon sent
for her to come to the palace of Versailles. The royal mandate was
eagerly obeyed. She immediately engrossed the favor of the king, was
established in the palace, and henceforth became the great power before
which all France was constrained to bow. Her disconsolate husband, who
had loved her passionately, entreated her to return to him, promising
to forgive every thing. Scornfully she refused to turn her back upon
the splendors of Versailles. Receiving from the king as the badge
of her degradation the title of Marchioness of Pompadour, Jeannette
Poisson was enthroned as the real monarch of France. She was a woman of
vast versatility of talent, brilliant in conversation, and possessed
unrivaled powers of fascination. For twenty years she held the king in
perfect subjection to her sway. She never for one moment lost sight
of her endeavor to please and to govern the monarch. "Sometimes she
appeared before him clad as a peasant-girl, assuming all the simplicity
and rustic grace of this character. She took with equal ease the
appearance of a languishing Venus or the proud beauty of a Diana. To
these disguises often succeeded the modest garb of a nun, when, with
affected humility and downcast eyes, she came to meet the king."
Her power soon became unlimited and invincible, for her heart was of
iron, and even her feminine hand could wield all the terrors of court
banishment, confiscation, exile, and the Bastille. It is said that a
witticism of Frederic II. of Prussia, at her expense, plunged France
into all the horrors of the Seven Years' War. The most high-born ladies
in the land were her waiting-women. Her steward was a knight of the
order of St. Louis. When she rode out in her sedan-chair, the Chevalier
d'Hénin, a member of one of the noblest families of the kingdom, walked
respectfully by her side, with her cloak upon his arm, ready to spread
it over her shoulder whenever she should alight.
She summoned embassadors before her, and addressed them with the
regal _we_, assuming the style of royalty. She appointed bishops and
generals, and filled all the important offices of Church and State with
those who would do her homage. She dismissed ministers and created
cardinals, declared war and made peace. Voltaire paid court to her,
and devoted his muse to the celebration of her beauty and her talents.
Montesquieu, Diderot, and Quesnay waited in her antechamber, imploring
her patronage. Those authors who pleased her she pensioned and honored;
those who did not were left in poverty and neglect. Even the imperial
Maria Theresa, seeking the alliance of France, wrote to her with her
own hand, addressing her as her "dear friend and cousin." "Not only,"
said Madame de Pompadour one day to the Abbé de Bernis, "not only have
I all the nobility at my feet, but even my lap-dog is weary of their
fawnings." Rousseau, strong in the idolatry of the nation, refused to
join the worshipers at the shrine of Pompadour. She dared not send
_him_ to the Bastille, but vexatiously exclaimed "I will have nothing
more to do with that _owl_."
As Madame de Pompadour found her charms waning, she maintained her
place by ministering to the king's appetites in the establishment of
the most infamous institution ever tolerated in a civilized land.
Lacretelle, in his History of France, thus describes this abomination:
"Louis XV., satiated with the conquests which the court offered him,
was led by a depraved imagination to form an establishment for his
pleasures of such an infamous description that, after having depicted
the debaucheries of the regency, it is difficult to find terms
appropriate to an excess of this kind. Several elegant houses, built
in an inclosure called the _Parc aux Cerfs_, near Versailles, were
used for the reception of beautiful female children, who there awaited
the pleasure of their master. Hither were brought young girls, sold
by their parents, and sometimes forced from them. It was skillfully
and patiently fostered by those who ministered to the profligacy of
Louis; whole years were occupied in the debauchery of girls not yet in
a marriageable age, and in undermining the principles of modesty and
fidelity in young women."
When some one spoke to Madame de Pompadour of this establishment, she
replied,
"It is the king's heart that I wish to possess, and none of these
little uneducated girls will deprive me of that."
If the king in his rides chanced to see a pretty child who gave promise
of unusual beauty, he sent his servants to take her from her parents
to be trained in his harem. The parents had their choice to submit
quietly at home, or to submit in the dungeons of the Bastille. One
incident, related by Soulavie, in his "Anecdotes of the Reign of Louis
XV.," illustrates the mode of operation:
"Among the young ladies of very tender age with whom the king amused
himself during the influence of Madame de Pompadour or afterward, there
was also a Mademoiselle Treicelin, whom his majesty ordered to take
the name of Bonneval the very day she was presented to him. The king
was the first who perceived this child, when not above nine years old,
in the care of a nurse, in the garden of the Tuileries, one day when
he went in state to his good city of Paris; and having in the evening
spoken of her beauty to Le Bel, the servant applied to M. de Sartine,
who traced her out and bought her of the nurse for a few louis. She
was the daughter of M. de Treicelin, a man of quality, who could not
patiently endure an affront of this nature. He was, however, compelled
to be silent; he was told his child was lost, and that it would be best
for him to submit to the sacrifice unless he wished to lose his liberty
also."
The expense of the _Parc aux Cerfs_ alone, according to Lacretelle,
amounted to 100,000,000 francs--$25,000,000.
These were not deeds of darkness. They were open as the day. France,
though bound hand and foot, saw them, and exasperation was advancing to
fury. An anonymous letter was sent to Louis, depicting very vividly the
ruinous state of affairs and announcing the inevitable shock. Madame de
Hausset, in her memoirs, gives the following synopsis of this letter:
"Your finances are in the greatest disorder, and the great majority of
states have perished through this cause. Your ministers are without
capacity. Open war is carried on against religion. The encyclopedists,
under pretense of enlightening mankind, are sapping the foundations
of Christianity. All the different kinds of liberty are connected.
The philosophers and the Protestants tend toward republicanism. The
philosophers strike at the root, the others lop the branches, and their
efforts will one day lay the tree low. Add to these the economists,
whose object is political liberty, as that of others is liberty of
worship, and the government may find itself in twenty or thirty years
undermined in every direction, and it will then fall with a crash. Lose
no time in restoring order to the state of the finances. Embarrassments
necessitate fresh taxes, which grind the people and induce toward
revolt. A time will come, sire, when the people will be enlightened,
and that time is probably near at hand."
The king read this letter to Madame de Pompadour, and then, turning
upon his heel, said,
"I wish to hear no more about it. Things will last as they are as long
as I shall."
On another occasion, Mirabeau the elder remarked in the drawing-room of
Madame de Pompadour,
"This kingdom is in a deplorable state. There is neither national
energy nor money. It can only be regenerated by a conquest like that of
China, or by some great internal convulsion. But woe to those who live
to see that. The French people do not do things by halves."
Madame de Pompadour herself was fully aware of the catastrophe which
was impending, but she flattered herself that the storm would not burst
during her life. She often said, "Après nous le déluge"--"_After us
comes the deluge_."
The indications of approaching ruin were so evident that they could
not escape the notice of any observing man. Even Louis XV. himself was
not blind to the tendency of affairs, and only hoped to ward off a
revolution while his day should last.
Lord Chesterfield visited France in 1753, twenty years before the death
of Louis XV., and wrote as follows to his son:
"Wherever you are, inform yourself minutely of, and attend particularly
to the affairs of France. They grow serious, and, in my opinion, will
grow more so every day. The French nation reasons freely, which they
never did before, upon matters of religion and government. In short,
all the symptoms which I have ever met with in history previous to
great changes and revolutions now exist and daily increase in France."
The great difficulty of raising money and the outrages resorted to for
the accomplishment of that purpose alarmed the courtiers. One night,
an officer of the government, sitting at the bedside of the king
conversing upon the state of affairs, remarked,
"You will see, sire, that all this will make it absolutely necessary to
assemble the States-General."
The king sprang up in his bed, and, seizing the courtier by his arm,
exclaimed,
"Never repeat those words. I am not sanguinary; but, had I a brother,
and did he dare to give me such advice, I would sacrifice him within
twenty-four hours to the duration of the monarchy and the tranquillity
of the kingdom."
It is not strange that in such a court as this Christianity should have
been reviled, and that infidelity should have become triumphant.
"When I was first presented to his majesty Louis XV.," La Fayette
writes, "I well remember finding the eldest son of the Church, the
King of France and Navarre, seated at a table between a bishop and a
prostitute. At the same table was seated an aged philosopher, whose
writings had conveyed lustre upon the age in which he flourished;
one whose whole life had been spent in sapping the foundation of
Christianity and undermining monarchy. Yet was this philosopher,
at that moment, the object of honor from monarchs and homage from
courtiers. A young abbé entered with me, not to be presented to
royalty, but to ask the benediction of this enemy of the altar. The
name of this aged philosopher was _Voltaire_, and that of the young
abbé was Charles Maurice Talleyrand."
Nearly all the infidel writers of the day--Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot,
D'Alembert--were men hopelessly corrupt in morals. Many of them were
keen-sighted enough distinctly to perceive the difference between
Christianity and the lives of debauched ecclesiastics. But most of
them hated Christianity and its restraints, and were glad to avail
themselves of the corruptions of the Church that they might bring
the religion of Christ into contempt. But there were not wanting,
even then, men of most sincere and fearless piety, who advanced
Christianity by their lives, and who with heroism rebuked sin in high
places.
The Bishop of Senez was called to preach before the king. With the
spirit of Isaiah and Daniel he rebuked the monarch for his crimes in
terms so plain, direct, and pungent as to amaze the courtiers. The king
was confounded, but God preserved his servant as Daniel was preserved
in the lions' den.
At length Madame de Pompadour died, in 1764, and the execrations of
France followed her to her burial. It was a gloomy day of wind and rain
when the remains of this wretched woman were borne from Versailles to
the tomb. The king had now done with her, and did not condescend to
follow her to her burial. As the funeral procession left the court-yard
of the palace he stood at a window looking out into the stormy air, and
chuckled at his heartless witticism as he said, "The marchioness has
rather a wet day to set out on her long journey." This remark is a fair
index of the almost inconceivable heartlessness of this contemptible
king.
Madame de Pompadour breathed her last at Versailles in splendid misery.
She was fully conscious of the hatred of the nation, and trembled in
view of the judgment of God. "My whole life," said she, in a despairing
hour, "has been a continual death."
"Very different indeed," beautifully writes Julia Kavanagh, "were the
declining years of Maria Lecsinska and those of the Marchioness of
Pompadour. The patient and pious queen laid her sufferings at the foot
of the cross. Insulted by her husband and his mistresses, neglected by
the courtiers, deeply afflicted by the loss of her children, whom she
loved most tenderly, she still found in religion the courage necessary
to support her grief, and effectual consolation in the practice of a
boundless benevolence."[20]
The old king was now utterly whelmed in the vortex of dissipation;
character, and even self-respect, seemed entirely lost. He looked
around for another female to take the place of Jeannette Poisson. In
one of the low haunts of Parisian debauchery, the courtiers of the king
found a girl of extraordinary beauty, calling herself Mademoiselle
Lange. She had been sewing in the shop of a milliner, but was now
abandoned to vice. She was introduced as a novelty to the voluptuous
monarch, and succeeded in fascinating him. She received the title of
Countess du Barry, and was immediately installed at Versailles as
the acknowledged favorite of the king. Vice never rises, but always
descends in the scale of degradation. The king had first selected
his favorites from the daughters of nobles, he then received one
from the class whom he affected to despise as low-born; and now a
common prostitute, taken from the warehouses of infamy in Paris,
uneducated, and with the manners of a courtesan, is presented to the
nation as the confidant and the manager of the despicable sovereign.
All the high-born ladies, accustomed as they were to the corruptions
of the court, regarded this as an insult too grievous to be borne.
The nobles, the clergy, the philosophers, and the people, all joined
in this outcry. But Madame du Barry, wielding the authority of the
king, was too strong for them all. She dismissed and banished from the
court the Duke of Choiseul, the king's minister, and to his post she
raised one of her own friends. She then, with astounding boldness,
suppressed the Parliaments, thus leaving to France not even the shadow
of representative power. Thus she proceeded, step by step, removing
enemies and supplanting them by friends, until the most noble of the
land were emulous of the honor of admission to the saloon of this
worthless woman.
It is an appalling and a revolting fact that for half a century before
the revolution _France was governed by prostitutes_. The real sovereign
was the shameless woman who, for the time being, kept control of the
degraded and sensual king. "The individual," says De Tocqueville, "who
would attempt to judge of the government by the men at the head of
affairs and not by the women who swayed those men, would fall into the
same error as he who judges of a machine by its outward action and not
by its inward springs."
The king was now so execrated that he dared not pass through Paris in
going from his palace at Versailles to Compiègne. Fearing insult and a
revolt of the people if he were seen in the metropolis, he had a road
constructed which would enable him to avoid Paris. As beautiful female
children were often seized to replenish his seraglio at the _Parc aux
Cerfs_, the people received the impression that he indulged in baths
of children's blood, that he might rejuvenate his exhausted frame. The
king had become an object of horror.[21]
Such was the state of affairs when the guilty king was attacked by the
small-pox, and died at Versailles in 1774, in the sixty-fourth year
of his age and the fifty-ninth of his reign. Such in brief was the
career of Louis XV. His reign was the consummation of all iniquity, and
rendered the Revolution inevitable. The story of his life, revolting
as it is, must be told; for it is essential to the understanding of
the results which ensued. The whirlwind which was reaped was but
the legitimate harvest of the wind which was sown. Truly does De
Tocqueville say, "The Revolution will ever remain in darkness to those
who do not look beyond it. It can only be comprehended by the light
of the ages which preceded it. Without a clear view of society in the
olden time, of its laws, its faults, its prejudices, its sufferings,
its greatness, it is impossible to understand the conduct of the French
during the sixty years which have followed its fall."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 16: Galignani's Paris Guide.]
[Footnote 17: History of French Revolution, by E.E. Crowe, vol. ii., p.
150.--_Enc. Am._]
[Footnote 18: The Duke of St. Simon, who was one of the council of
the regency, in his admirable memoirs, gives the following sketch of
Dubois: "Dubois was a little, thin, meagre man, with a polecat visage.
All the vices, falsehood, avarice, licentiousness, ambition, and the
meanest flattery contended in him for the mastery. He lied to such a
degree as to deny his own actions when taken in the fact. In spite of
his debauchery he was very industrious. His wealth was immense, and his
revenue amounted to millions."]
[Footnote 19: Women of France, p. 91.]
[Footnote 20: Women of France, p. 170.]
[Footnote 21: Historical View of the French Revolution, by J. Michelet,
vol. i., p. 46.]