Before Louis sank irrevocably into the slothful indulgence that stained his later years, he was stirred to essay a kingly rôle by Madame de Chateauroux, the youngest of four sisters who had successively been his mistresses. She fired his indolent imagination by appeals to the memory of his glorious ancestors, and the war of the Austrian succession being in progress, Louis set forth with the army of the great Marshal Saxe for Metz, where in August 1744 he was stricken down by a violent fever, and in an access of piety was induced to dismiss his mistress and return to his abused queen. As he lay on the brink of death, given up by his physicians and prepared for the end by the administration of the last sacraments, a royal phrase admirably adapted to capture the imagination of a gallant people came from his lips. “Remember,” he said to Marshal Noailles, “remember that when Louis XIII. was being carried to the grave, the Prince of Condé won a battle for France.” The agitation of the Parisians as the king hovered between life and death was indescribable. The churches were thronged with sobbing people praying for his recovery; when the courtiers came with news that he was out of danger they were borne shoulder high in triumph through the streets, and fervent thanksgiving followed in all the churches. People hailed him as Louis le Bien-Aimé (the Well-Beloved); even the callous heart of the king was pierced by their loyalty and he cried, “What have I done to deserve such love?” So easy was it to win the affection of his warm-hearted people.
The brilliant victories of Marshal Saxe, and the consequent Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, brought some years of prosperity to France. Wealth increased; Paris became more than ever a centre of intellectual splendour and social refinement, where the arts administered to luxurious ease. But it was a period of regal licentiousness unparalleled even in the history of France. Louis XIV. at least exacted good breeding and wit in his mistresses, but his descendant enslaved himself to the commonest and most abandoned of women.
For twenty years the destinies of the French people, and the whole patronage of the Government, the right to succeed to the most sacred and exalted offices in the Church, were bartered and intrigued for in the chamber of a harlot and procuress. Under the influence of the Pompadours and the Du Barrys a crowned roué allowed the state to drift into financial, military and civil[148] disaster.
“Authentic proofs exist,” says Taine, “demonstrating that Madame de Pompadour cost Louis XV. a sum equal to about seventy-two millions of present value (£2,880,000).” She would examine the plans of campaign of her marshals in her boudoir, and mark with patches (mouches) the places to be defended or attacked. Such was the foolish extravagance of the court that to raise money recourse was had to an attempted taxation of the clergy, which the prelates successfully resisted; the old quarrel with the Jansenists was revived, and soon Church and Crown were convulsed by an agitation that shook society to its very base. During the popular ferment the king was attacked in 1757 by a crack-brained fanatic named Damiens, who scratched him with a penknife as he was entering his coach at Versailles. The poor crazy wretch, who at most deserved detention in an asylum, was first subjected to a cruel judicial torture, then taken to the Place de Grève, where he was lacerated with red-hot pincers and, after boiling lead had been poured into the wounds, his quivering body was torn to pieces by four horses, and the fragments burned to ashes.
A few years later the long-suffering Jansenists were avenged with startling severity. The Jesuits, to their honour be it said, shocked by the infamies of the royal seraglio in the Parc aux Cerfs, made use of their ascendency at court to awaken in the king’s mind some sense of decency: they did but add the bitter animosity of Madame de Pompadour to the existing hostility of the Parlement of Paris. Louis, urged by his minister the Duke of Choiseul, and by the arts of his mistress, abandoned the Jesuits to their enemies; the Parlement suppressed the Society in France, secularised its members and confiscated its property.
The closing years of the Well-Beloved’s reign were years of unmitigated ignominy and disaster to France. Her rich Indian conquests were muddled away, and the gallant Dupleix died broken-hearted and in misery at Paris. Canada was lost. During the Seven Years’ War the incapacity and administrative corruption of Madame de Pompadour’s favourites made them the laughing-stock of Paris. In 1770 the Duke of Choiseul refused to tolerate the vile Du Barry, whom we may see in Madame Campan’s Memoirs sitting on the arm of Louis’ chair at a council of state, playing her monkey tricks to amuse the old sultan, snatching sealed orders from his hand and making the foolish monarch chase her round the council chamber. She swore to ruin the duke and, aided by a cabal of Jesuit sympathisers and noble intriguers, succeeded in compassing his dismissal. The Parlement of Paris paid for its temerity; it and the whole of the parlements in France were suppressed, and seven hundred magistrates exiled by lettres de cachet. Every patriotic Frenchman now felt the gathering storm. Madame Campan writes that twenty years before the crash came it was common talk in her father’s house (he was employed in the Foreign Office) that the old monarchy was rapidly sinking and a great change at hand. Indeed, the writing on the wall was not difficult to read. The learned and virtuous Malesherbes and many another distinguished member of the suppressed parlements warned the king of the dangers menacing the crown, but so sunk was its wearer in bestial stupefaction that he only murmured: “Well, it will last my time,” and with his flatterers and strumpets uttered the famous words—“Après nous le déluge.” So lost to all sense of honour was Louis, that he soiled his hands with bribes from tax-farmers who ground the faces of the poor, and became a large shareholder in an infamous syndicate of capitalists that bought up the corn of France in order to export it and then import it at enormous profit. This abominable Pacte de Famine created two artificial famines in France; its authors battened on the misery of the people, and for any who lifted their voices against it the Bastille yawned.
In 1768 the poor abused, injured and neglected queen, Marie Leczynski died. The court went from bad to worse: void of all dignity, all gaiety, all wit and all elegance, it drifted to its doom. Six years passed, and Louis was smitten by confluent small-pox and a few poor women were left to perform the last offices on the mass of pestiferous corruption that once was the fifteenth Louis of France.[149] None could be found to embalm the corpse, and spirits of wine were poured into the coffin which was carried to St. Denis without pomp and amid the half-suppressed curses of the people. Before the breath had left the body, a noise as of thunder was heard approaching the chamber of the Dauphin and Marie Antoinette: it was the sound of the courtiers hastening to grovel before the new king and queen. Warned that they had now inherited the awful legacy of the French monarchy, they flung themselves in tears on their knees, and exclaimed—“O God, guide and protect us! We are too young to govern.”