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usual fate of such precautions; to set them aside recourse was had to the Parliament; by restoring their right of remonstrance, Philip succeeded in obtaining the annullation of the late King's will, and became sole Regent, while the Duke of Maine renounced the guardianship of the child unaccompanied with any share in the Government. The infant King was placed under the care of Fleury, then Bishop of Fréjus, whose chief aim was to win the affection and confidence of his pupil, in which he entirely succeeded; but he utterly failed to cultivate the nobler parts of his character, or to prepare him for the duties of his high position. It is impossible without indignation to think of the bright-haired boy, the darling of the people-who is said by d'Argenson to have appeared as beautiful as Eros himself at his coronation at Rheims-the hope of the grandest monarchy in Europe, consigned to an instructor who would neither cultivate his mind nor discipline his character. Day by day the preceptor appeared, bringing with him toys, a cup and ball, or a pack of cards to amuse the indolent child, whilst it was observed that the book-marker remained in the same place for six months together in the Quintus Curtius he was reading. The companions who were provided for him were remarkable chiefly for their frivolous and effeminate precocity. The chief of these were the Dukes of Epernon and La Tremouille and de Gesvres. From one he acquired a taste for working tapistry, from another a singular proficiency in the art of cookery, which he continued to practice in the maturer years of his life; and in their society was fostered that royal sense of irresponsibility, that pride of despotism, which he expressed with his latest breath-"Si veut le roi, si veut la loi." This seems to have been the sum and substance of his youthful education. The orphan child thus brought up, without a single relative to exercise upon bim a humanizing influence, became a silent and a sullen youth, pale and of feeble health. His effeminacy might have

That Louis XV. was extremely beautiful as a child, may be seen in the portrait at Versailles by Rigaud. In later times he was considered the handsomest man in France.

become inveterate, had not the Duc de Bourbon taken compassion on him and given him that love of hunting and field sports which has distinguished French monarchs from the days of the Merovingian kings even in their most degenerate representatives, and which became one of the young King's ruling passions, and invigorated his failing constitution. But even in his sports, one of his early exploits gives a painful impression of his character. He had a pet white doe at Versailles, at which one day he fired in mere wantonness. The poor creature came wounded towards him, and licked his hand; the young King drove it away from him and shot at it again and again till it died.

The Government and the Court had fallen under a worse domination than the King suffered in the tutelage of Fleury. The Regent was that Duke of Orleans of whom his mother, the stern old Princess Palatine, said that all the fairies save one had been invited to his birth, and had given him all the richest gifts of nature and intelligence, but she who was uninvited, finding she could not take away the good gifts of her comrades, fixed upon him the incapacity of making use of them. Under the eight year's rule of Philip and his band of roués,* Paris and Versailles became the scenes of the wildest saturnalia of modern times. The orgies of the masked bals d'opéra were then first invented, and the chevalier who contrived the method of carrying a dancing floor across the stage and pit was rewarded with 6,000 livres of pension. The courtiers who had restrained their passions by a hypocritical austerity in the last days of Louis XIV., rushed now into mad excesses to make favor with the Regent, who cynically declared that a perfect courtier should be humeur et sans honneur." The ministers of France became the paid agents of England. The utopian schemes of Law served still further to debase the morality of court and country. The princes of the blood-royal practiced the arts and cunning of the lowest money-dealers. Two national bankruptcies were declared in six years. The rigors of persecu

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sans

*So called by the Regent because ils méritaient de l'être.

tion lay heavy on those of the Huguenot and the Jansenist faith; but as if to make the dominant religion for ever contemptible, the Regent named as prime minister his former preceptor, Dubois, a shameless, cynical, blaspheming priest of sixty, whose weasel-face and bloated aspect denoted the vulgarity of his nature and a constitution vitiated by a life of low debauchery. In order to support his new dignity he was made an archbishop, and a prince of the Church: Massillon, alas! consented to preside at his conse-. cration. This profligate ecclesiastic continued to direct the destinies of France, and was even an aspirant for the chair of St. Peter, until one day as he was reviewing the household troops with the airs of a Richelieu, and amusing the mousquetaires of the guard with his grotesque appearance, an abrupt movement of his horse inflicted an injury from which his diseased constitution was unable to recover. The Regent shortly after followed him to the grave; having exhausted the whole round of profligate pleasure and his own constitution, and become disgusted with life at the age of fortyeight, he made no effort to escape from death, but died like a Roman epicurean in the arms of sensual enjoyment.

It had been easy for Fleury, with the ascendancy which he exercised over the King's mind, to have secured the chief place in the government for himself; but the placid egotist desired at first a more unapparent domination without public responsibility. At his suggestion the next prince of the blood, the Duc de Bourbon, was named Regent by the young King.

The second Regency had a more lamentable influence on the young King than the first. It lasted three years. The Duc de Bourbon was as great a profligate as the late Regent, and moreover was entirely directed by a bold, brilliant, and abandoned woman, the Marquise de Prie, who, by the aid of her creature Pâris Duvernai the financier, endeavored to get the government completely in her hands and to undermine the influence of Fleury. The late Regent with all his follies had refused to permit any of his mistresses, including even his favorite, Madame de Parabère, to meddle with the affairs of state; but Madame de Prie did precisely

what she would with the Dac. This government is remarkable only for a renewal of the barbarous persecution of the Protestants, and for the marriage of the King, which was brought about by an intrigue of the Regent's mistress; and thus Louis XV., after a shameful education, was married, by the caprice of an unprincipled woman. to a wife in every respect unsuited either to his character or dignity.

Never was a royal marriage brought about under more inauspicious circumstances. The alliance which was originally planned by the Regent and Dubois with the Infanta of Spain, who was already at the French Court, was one more worthy of a King of France; and if the Court of Madrid had consented to make the husband of the Marquise de Prie a grandee of Spain, a better future might have been reserved for Louis XV. Such a demand was made of Philip V. and Elizabeth Farnese, but rejected with contempt, and the Duc de Bourbon took advantage of the disturbed relations of France and Spain to break off the Spanish marriage.

An illness of the young King frightened the Duke into precipitation. The Infanta was but six years of age, consequently would not be marriageable for several years, and if during that time Louis died without heirs, the crown would pass into the House of Orleans. It was determined to send back the Infanta, to marry the young monarch forth with, and thus secure the succession of the crown. Madame de Prie looked round on all sides for a queen who might remain forever bound to her by ties of gratitude and deference. After examining all the courts of Europe, two princesses alone seemed eligible, and these were resident in France. The one was Mademoiselle de Vermandois, daughter of the late Regent. In order to form a judgment of her character, Madame de Prie visited in disguise the convent in which she was being educated-and in the course of conversation brought out Mademoiselle de Vermandois's opinion of herself. The young princess spoke of the mistress of the Duc de Bourbon in such terms of indignation and aversion, that the latter departed immediately, declaring, "she shall never be queen of France." The

royal crown was then destined for Maria Lecszinska, a daughter of Stanislas, the exiled King of Poland, the remaining object of her choice, who was then living in poverty with her father at Weissembourg in Alsace. The bride elect was twenty-two years of age; she had escaped by an adventurous flight with her father from Poland, in daily and hourly fear of the Russians in pursuit; her hand had already been refused as too poor a match by a colonel in the French army. In the society of her mother and father in Alsace, surrounded by a little court, she breathed the purity and simplicity of an older time. The dissolute life of Versailles, its corruption, and its elegance, were there known only by rumor; and when the unexpected intelligence of the elevation of the daughter reached the family, all three fell on their knees in silent astonishment and thanksgiving. So little adequate were their resources to provide for the contingency, that every article had to be furnished to the royal bride, even down to her linen and her gloves. The marriage took place in the chapel at Fontainebleau, on September 4th, 1725, the King being seven years younger than his wife.

Maria Lecszinska was plain, homely, matronly, and good-natured, without a trace of that coquetry of manner which had become a second nature among the court ladies of France. She would have made a good housewife for a country nobleman in Germany, but was little suited to figure even as a spectator in the brilliant saloons of Versailles. She had been brought up to habits of almost inonastic piety and seclusion, and never travelled without a skull which she called her gentil mignon, to assist her in preserving the serious bent of her character. Between herself and her king no confidence was ever established, and the youthful possessor of the crown of the oldest monarchy in Europe saw in his mature wife a poor-spirited, embarrassed matron, unequal to her queenly duties, with none of the graces or the arts he looked for in woman, and with no accomplishment capable of dissipating or beguiling his ennui. The favorite occupa tion of the queen was to sit by the fireside in innocent and dull converse with the oldest-fashioned and most respectable

Dur

people of the court, and to pass her evening in monotonous games of cavagnole. Artful intriguers, moreover, suggested to her to adopt precisely the line of conduct calculated to widen the distance between herself and her husband, and her restless old-maidenish habits so irritated the impressionable monarch that he often quitted her in the middle of the night with disgust and vexation. Though the King was faithful to her for nine years, he exclaimed ironically before his court"Est-elle plus belle que la reine?" when a pretty woman was mentioned. ing this period the Queen became the mother of two sons and several daughters, but, arrived at the age of twentyfive, he commenced that series of adulterous alliances and shameful amours in which he persisted for the remaining forty years of his life. The Queen bore the trials and sorrows of her deserted position with exemplary patience; though cruelly compelled to admit the King's mistresses to her presence as her maids of honor, and to give them a position at Versailles, she seldom murmured a complaint, except that when she was reduced to receive the Pompadour as an attendant, she exclaimed, "J'ai un Roi dans le ciel pour m'écouter, et un roi sur la terre auquel j'obtirai toujours."

*

The only faint attempt which she ever made to gain political influence was soon after her marriage. Feeling that her elevation was the work of the Duke and Madame de Prie, she obeyed their suggestions in endeavoring to procure the dismissal of Fleury; but the scheme turned against the contrivers; the King refused to break with his old preceptor; and the latter, aware of the plot, insisted, before he would assent to retain office, on the exile of his enemies. Louis, with the dissimulation which was his habit through life, towards those with whom he was about to break for ever, said to the Duke, with a more than usually graeious smile, "Mon cousin, ne me faites pas attendre pour souper," and a few hours later,

* When the seventh daughter was born the King was asked if she should be called Madame la Septième, he replied, "Madame la Dernière. The birth of this Princess was an immense dis

appointment, as the King, Court, and people had made up their minds that a Duc d'Anjou was to be given to the country.

commanded him, by a curt letter, to be take himself to Chantilly till further notice. Madame de Prie was exiled to Normandy, where, unable to appease her rage, or console her deceived ambition after a life of unparalleled splendor and extravagance, she took deadly poison and died in excruciating agonies, with shrieks which were heard far beyond the walls of her château.

Fleury, at seventy-three years of age, assumed the position of prime minister; he held it for seventeen years, until his death, at eighty-nine; and thus his rule was nearly as long as that of Richelieu or Mazarin. The ascendancy of this bland octogenarian for so long a period over the spirit of a youthful monarch, is one of the strangest anomalies of history. M. Michelet, who loves such suggestions, endeavors to account for it by insinuations of early vices of the King and his young companions-which recall the court of the last Valois-vices, the knowledge of which gave the preceptor complete power over his former pupil. In support of such explanation, he relies on the statement of a valet de chambre that the King was bound to Fleury as long as he lived.* Be this as it may, Fleury managed the government as he had managed the education of the King. Without a policy of any kind, without pride, and without honor, he would submit to any humiliation, and practice any meanness in order to secure a quiet domination. He depended upon economy, or rather parsimony, for securing a quiet government at home; during his administration the army went to pieces for want of pay, and the ships rotted in the harbors for want of repairs, while he relieved pecuniary difficulties on taking office by decreeing another partial bankruptcy.

The Spanish difficulty occasioned by the dismissal of the Infanta was smoothed

*Of the modesty of Fleury, the following anecdote is sufficiently illustrative. He found the King on one occasion reading the "Economies Royales" of Sully, and taking the book, pointed out to the monaich the passage in which Henry IV. is made to say, (to his mistress, Gabrielle): "Je trouve ais duns mon royaume deux cent maitresses aussi belles que vous, mais je n'y trouverais pas deux hommes comme Sully: aussi soyez persuidée qu'ent. e vous deux jopterais pour lui. (D'Arbenson, vol. ii. p. 362.)

over, but the Polish and Austrian successions were both questions pregnant with war for all Europe. The Polish question was the first to start up on the death of Augustus II. Austria and Russia supported the pretensions of Augustus III., son of the late Monarch. France supported the rights of Stanislas, the father-in-law of Louis XV. Fleury, however, gave no energetic support to the French policy, in order to do which it would have been necessary to send a French fleet to the Baltic and secure the possession of Dantzig, where Stanislas had fixed his quarters; but this was an act of vigor beyond the capacity of Fleury. A small detachment of French which accompanied the Polish king, was defeated and taken prisoners at Dantzig by the Russians, after a heroic resistance. Poland was lost. But the old Generals, Villars and Berwick-the last relics of the military glory of Louis XIV. inspired by Chauvelin, the only minister capable of conceiving a large scheme of policy which might unite in a confederative system the chaos of small disjointed states which then checquered the surface of Europe, urged the aged minister to exact compensation from Austria in Italy. The plan of Chauvelin was to drive the Austrians from Italy; his laudable ambition was that France should have the honor of restoring to the Peninsula that independence which she had been the first to assail by the invasion of Charles VIII. Fleury was unable to withstand the warlike passions which beset him. Negotiations were set on foot; Spain and Piedmont entered into the plans of Chauvelin. The Milanese was to be added to Piedmont, and Parma, Tuscany, Naples, and Cicily were to be independent under Spanish princes. A triple declaration of war was launched in October, 1733, and two French armies, under Villars and Berwick crossed the Alps and the Rhine, where at Philipsburg Berwick was to find himself opposed by his former adversary Prince Eugene. The war, conducted without energy on either side,

*This affair is remarkable as being the first occasion on which French and Russian soldiers met in conflict.

† One clause of the treaty of France with Sardinia was, that Savoy should be given up to France if Mantua were taken from the Austrians.

was chiefly remarkable for having carried off Villars and Berwick; Berwick was killed by a cannon-shot at Philipsburg, to the envy of Villars, who always desired such an end, and who, disgusted at the conduct of the war, withdrew from it, and died five days after Berwick in his bed, worn out by the fatigue of the campaign in Lombardy. His chivalrous courage was true to itself to the last, for in his eighty-second year, finding himself in danger of being surrounded in company with the King of Sar dinia, he charged the enemies sword in hand and extricated himself and his royal companion. After languishing for two years, the war was terminated by a treaty between the Cabinets of France and Vienna; none of the objects of Chauvelin's policy were achieved, but the minister even in the defeat of his projects managed to secure one solid advantage for France her last and great permanent accession of territory-the acquisition of Lorraine. Lorraine, a feudal dependency of the Empire, was, in consideration of the reversion of Tuscany being settled on Francis of Lorraine, the affianced husband of Maria Theresa, ceded for ever to France with a provision that Stanislas should enjoy the sovereignty for his lifetime as an indemnification for the lost crown of Poland. The inhabitants of Lorraine regarded with regret their severance from the ancient dynasty which had ruled their little principality for eight centuries, and was as old as the House of the Capets. The ultimate advantage was, however, undoubtedly great both for Lorraine and for France. After the cession was accomplished, the superiority of Chauvelin in the cabinet became intolerable to the mediocre genius of Fleury, and he was exiled to his country house by a lettre de cachet. The conduct of the King was as contemptible as it always was in similar circumstances. He himself had sense enough to appreciate the merit of Chauvelin, and some of his most familiar courtiers attempted to defend the minister and to persuade the King not to dismiss the most capable adviser he had about him. He promised them not to

Villars, when he heard of Berwick's fall on his own death bed, cried, Il y a toujours élé plus heureux que moi, ce coquin-là.

betray their advocacy to Fleury; but in this, as in all like conjunctures, he broke his word and denounced his companions to the Cardinal, and the Duc de la Tremouille declared that he remained the servant but not the friend of Louis. Chauvelin, however, notwithstanding his disgrace, always had one powerful and important friend at Court-Bachelier, the King's valet, whom his master consulted, not only about his mistresses, but also about matters of State.

Such was the only result of the foreign policy of Fleury. Internally commerce was prosperous, and the towns increased in magnitude, while the country populations were devoured by poverty of the most frightful intensity. The eternal war about the Bull Unigenitus carried on by the Ultramontanes and Jesuits against the Jansenists and the Parliament still continued, and its intensity was typified by the strange manifestations of convulsionnaires and the so-called miracles performed at the tomb of the Diacre Paris. But the Court and society, under the domination of a minister of eighty, and with a young king who up to that time had shown no taste for any of the pleasares of intelligence or imagination, and no passion for anything but gambling and field sports, had fallen into a state of dullness and monotony intolerable to those who knew, even by tradition, the elegance and majesty of the Court of Louis XIV., and who had been spectators of the wild extravagance and brilliant spectacles of the Court of the Regent, and of Madame de Prie. Weary of the gloom and desolation of the saloons of the vast palace, and of the domestic monotony of the King's life, all Versailles entered into a conspiracy to give the King a mistress, for this seemed the most natural and ready way of effecting a change. The chief contrivers of the plot were Mademoiselle de Charolais,† a

According to the Duc de Luynes, the King killed 3000 stags in the course of 17 years' hunting.

Mademoiselle de Charolais was a constant participator in the orgies of the King. She made her house at Madrid in the Bois de Boulogne a place of rendezvous for the monarch and his mistresses; she was always in the search of a new roval mistress when occasion required, who might prevent the King from falling back into what she styled his stupid bourgeois life previous to his liaison with Madame de Mailly. The Comte de