Paris under the Regency and Louis XV.—The brooding Storm
Under the regency of the profligate Philip of Orleans, a profounder depth was sounded. The vices of Louis' court were at least veiled by a certain regal dignity, and the Grand Monarque was always keenly sensitive, and at times nobly responsive, to any attack upon the honour of France; but under the regent, libertinage and indifference to national honour were flagrant and shameless. The Abbé Dubois, a minister worthy of his prince, was, says St. Simon, "a mean-looking, thin little man, with the face of a ferret, in whom every vice fought for mastery." This creature profaned the seat of Richelieu and Colbert, and rose to fill a cardinal's chair. The revenues of seven abbeys fed his pride and luxury, and his annual income was estimated at 1,534,000 livres, including his bribe from the English Government.
Visitors to Venice whose curiosity may have led them into the church of S. Moisè, will remember to have seen there a monument to a famous Scotchman—John Law. This is the last home of an outlaw, a gambler, and an adventurer, who, by his amazing skill and effrontery, plunged the regency into a vortex of speculation, and for a time controlled the finances of France. He persuaded the regent that by a liberal issue of paper money he might wipe out the accumulated national deficit of 100,000,000 livres, revive trade and industry, and inaugurate a financial millennium. In 1718 Law's Bank at Paris after a short and brilliant career as a private venture, was converted into the Banque Royale, and by the artful flotation of a gigantic trading speculation called the Mississippi Company, the bank-notes and company shares were so manipulated that the latter were inflated to twenty times their nominal value. The whole city seethed in a ferment of speculation. The offices of the Bank in the Rue Quincampoix were daily besieged by a motley crowd of princes, nobles, fine ladies, courtesans, generals, prelates, priests, bourgeois and servants. A hunchback made a fortune by lending his back as a desk; lacqueys became masters in a day, and a parvenu foot-man, by force of habit, jumped up behind his own carriage in a fit of abstraction. The inevitable catastrophe came at the end of 1719. The Prince of Conti was observed taking away three cartloads of silver in exchange for his paper; a panic ensued, every holder sought to realise, and the colossal fabric came down with a crash, involving thousands of families in ruin and despair. Law, after bravely trying to save the situation and narrowly escaping being torn in pieces, fled to poverty and death at Venice, and the financial state of France was worse than before. Law was not, however, absolutely a quack; there was a seed of good in his famous system of mobilising credit, and the temporary stimulus it gave to trade permanently influenced mercantile practice in Europe.
In 1723, Louis XV. reached his legal majority. The regent became chief minister, and soon paid the penalty of his career of debauchery, leaving as his successor the Duke of Bourbon, degenerate scion of the great Condé and one of the chief speculators in the Mississippi bubble. A perilous lesson had two years before been instilled into the mind of the young Louis. After his recovery from an illness, an immense concourse of people had assembled at a fête given in the gardens of the Tuileries palace; enormous crowds filled every inch of the Place du Carrousel and the gardens; the windows and even the roofs of the houses were alive with people crying "Vive le roi!" Marshal Villeroi led the little lad of eleven to a window, showed him the sea of exultant faces turned towards him, and exclaimed, "Sire, all this people is yours; all belongs to you. Show yourself to them, and satisfy them; you are the master of all."
The Infanta of Spain, at four years of age, had been betrothed to the young king, and in 1723 was sent to Paris to be educated for her exalted future. She was lodged in the Petite Galerie of the Louvre, over the garden still known as the Garden of the Infanta,[151] and after three years of exile the homesick little maid was returned to Madrid; for Louis' weak health made it imperative that a speedy marriage should be contracted if the succession to the throne were to be assured. The choice finally fell on the daughter of Stanislaus Leczynski, a deposed king of Poland and a pensioner of France. Voltaire relates that the poor discrowned queen was sitting with her daughter Marie in their little room at Wissembourg when the father, bursting in, fell on his knees, crying, "Let us thank God, my child!" "Are you then recalled to Poland?" asked Marie. "Nay, daughter, far better," answered Stanislaus, "you are the queen of France." A magnificent wedding at Fontainebleau exalted gentle, pious Marie from poverty to the richest queendom in Europe; to a life of cruel neglect and almost intolerable insult.
The immoral Duke of Bourbon was followed by Cardinal Fleury, and at length France experienced a period of honest administration, which enabled the sorely-tried land to recover some of its wonted elasticity. The Cardinal was, however, dominated by the Jesuits, and both Protestants and Jansenists felt their cruel hand. During the persecution of the Jansenists in 1782 a deacon, named Pâris, died and was canonised by the popular voice. Miracles were said to have been wrought at his sepulchre in the cemetery of St. Médard; fanatics flung themselves down on the tomb and writhed in horrible convulsions. So great was the excitement and disorder that the Archbishop of Paris denounced the miracles as the work of Satan, and the Government ordered the cemetery to be closed. The next morning a profane inscription was found over the entrance to the cemetery: —
"De par le roi défense à Dieu
De faire miracle en ce lieu."[152]
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 promise 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; 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 this warm-hearted people.
The brilliant victories of Marshal Saxe, and the consequent Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, brought some years of prosperity. Wealth increased; Paris became more than ever a centre of intellectual splendour and social refinement, where the arts administered to luxurious ease and to the fair frailties of passion. But it was a period of riotous pride and regal licentiousness unparalleled even in the history of France. Louis XIV. at least exacted good breeding and wit in his mistresses: his descendant enslaved himself to the commonest and most abandoned of women. For twenty years the destinies of the 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, and under the influence of the Pompadours and the Du Barrys a crowned roué allowed the state to drift into financial, military and civil[153] disaster.