Said Tartuffe:
Le scandale du monde est ce qui fait l’offense
Et ce n’est pas pécher que pécher en silence.
Under the Maintenon régime the theory had been very fully exploited. Multiple turpitudes were committed but in the dark. Under the Regency they occurred openly, unhypocritically, in the daylight. The mud that was there was dried by the sun. It ceased to be unwholesome. Though vile it was not vicious. Moreover, in the air was a carnival gayety, put there by the Regent, who, while not the best man in the world was not the worst, an artistic Lovelace that gave the tone to a Neronian society, already in dissolution, one that Law tossed into the Niagara of bankruptcy and Cartouche held up, a society of which Béranger said:
Tous les hommes plaisantaient,
Et les femmes se prêtaient
A la gaudriole.
Mme. de Longueville being in the country was asked, would she hunt. Mme. de Longueville did not care for hunting. Would she fish, would she walk, would she drive? No, she would not. Mme. de Longueville did not care for innocent pleasures. Mme. de Longueville was a typical woman of the day. Life to such as she was a perpetual bal d’opéra and love, the image of Fragonard’s Cupid, who, in the picture of the Chemise enlevée, divested it of modesty with a smirk.[74]
Modesty then was neither appreciated nor ingrained. The instinct of it was lacking. It was a question of pins, a thing attachable or detachable at will. Women of position received not necessarily in a drawing-room, or even in a boudoir but in bed. In art and literature there was an equal sans-gêne. In affairs of the heart there was an equivalent indifference. There was no romance, no dream, no beyond. Chivalric ideals were regarded as mediæval bric-a-brac and fine sentiments as rubbish. Even gallantry with its mimic of being jealous and its pretended constancy was vieux jeu. Love, or what passed for it, had become a fugitive caprice, lightly assumed and as readily discarded, without prejudice to either party.
On s’enlace. Puis, un jour,
On s’en lasse. C’est l’amour.
It had, however, other descents, a fall to depths of which history hitherto had been ignorant. Meanwhile the Regent had gone. Louis XV had come. With him were the real sovereigns of the realm, Mme. de Chateauroux, Petticoat I; the Pompadour, Petticoat II; the Du Barry, Petticoat III—legitimatized queens of love, with courts of their own, with the rights, prerogatives and immunities of princesses of the blood, the privilege of dwelling with the king, of receiving foreign ambassadors and of pillaging France.
“Sire,” said Choiseul, “the people are starving.” Louis XV answered: “I am bored.”
The boredom came from precocious pleasures that had left him, without energy or conviction, a cold, dreary brute, Asiatic and animal, a sort of Oriental idol gloomy and gilded, who, while figuratively a spoke in the wheel of monarchy then rolling down to ’89, personally was a minotaur in a feminine labyrinth which he filled, emptied, renewed, indifferent to the inmates as he was to his wife,[75] wringing for the various Petticoats prodigal sums from a desolate land, supplying incidentally to fermiers généraux and grands seigneurs an example in Tiberianism which, assured of immunity, they greedily followed and, generally, making himself so loathed that when he died, delight was national.