arms of France, and year after year more money was wrung from the groaning people to support the hopeless struggle and to supply the criminal expenditure of the sovereign and his favourites. Yet Louis was neither tyrannical nor cruel; but sunk in indolent voluptuousness he heeded not the cries of his people, and suffered acts of despotism to be committed of which he sincerely disapproved. The nation was governed, not by him, but by his mistresses and their ministers. They would have it so, they thought it for the best!" was his cry at every fresh break down in the executive.

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But he was not all sybarite, nor is the record of his reign all evil. Few are aware how much he did to beautify and improve Paris, or how many admirable institutions, which survive as glories of the nation to this day, owe their origin to him. With his own hand he drew the plan of the École Militaire for the gratuitous education of young gentlemen destined to the profession of arms. He formed three camps for practical instruction in the science of war. With his own hand he traced the plan of seventeen new routes, having Paris for their centre, together with several canals, notably that of Picardy, in the construction of which he employed his soldiers. He founded a school for the study of the Oriental languages, for the advancement of commerce and diplomacy, and despatched the Abbé Surin to Constantinople to gather such manuscripts as might prove useful to the institution. He converted his garden into a scientific establishment-the now famous Jardin des Plantes-and wrote himself the ordinances which instituted a course of instruction in Botany and Natural History. In addition to these enduring monuments he made vast improvements in the capital, constructing new and splendid buildings, opening new streets, and commenced planting the boulevards. In all these works Madame de Pompadour shares with him the honour, and in one not yet mentioned, the manufactory at Sèvres, the glory is all her own.

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'The evils that men do live after them,

The good is oft interred with their bones."

So it has been with Louis the Fifteenth.

At the first commencement of the King's brief illness Madame du Barry was ordered to remove to Ruel, and it was there that tidings were brought her of his death. Immediately afterwards came an order from the new sovereign, commanding her to retire to the convent of the Pont-aux-Dames, "for reasons known to me which concern the tranquillity of my kingdom, and for the safety of certain state secrets which have been confided to you." So ran the letter. After a time she made a humble appeal to Marie-Antoinette to be allowed to return to Luciennes. Her request was granted. Her Court friends, except a few-De Brissac, d'Aiguillon, Richelieu, and Soubise-deserted her upon her fall. But Madame la Comtesse's gay frivolous nature was not clouded by this ingratitude; she amused herself in embellishing

her retreat, bestowing alms, encouraging the fine arts, and giving balls, fêtes and petits soupers.

Hitherto her life had been all sunshine, but darkness was at hand. The air was filled with the mutterings of the coming tempest, and the rumblings of the earthquake were heard far and near; but her laugh rang as clearly as ever; no shadow of the coming doom oppressed her heart, and her feet still danced blithely over the trembling earth. This butterfly thought that, sheltered within the petals of her rosy world, the storm could not touch her; that it would pass away, and leave her to disport once more beneath the cloudless sky.

But by-and-by a Jacobin club is established at Louveciennes, of which the negro Zamore, whom we last saw carrying a scarlet umbrella over his mistress's head, is the president. He is no longer her humble slave, but boasts himself to be the friend of Franklin and Marat, and spouts bombastic speeches about liberty and equality.

We now come to the brightest spot in this erring woman's tarnished life.

Marie-Antoinette, thanks to the politic counsels of her mother, Maria Theresa, had met the favourite with something of cordiality; but it was impossible that this agrément between two such opposite persons and such opposite interests could be of long duration; wicked jest made upon him by Madame du Barry being reported to the Dauphin, there was an immediate rupture, which was never healed during the lifetime of Louis the Fifteenth. But when serious tribulation fell upon the royal family they found no truer nor more devoted friend than Madame du Barry. She wrote to the Queen, begging her to accept of all that she possessed. She sold her jewels to aid her necessity; she risked and ultimately lost her life in her service.

In 1791, she raised a cry that she had been robbed of a number of valuable jewels, and offered a large reward for the discovery of the robber. Soon afterwards she pretended that the thief had been captured in London, and that it was necessary for her to go thither to identify and claim her property. She accordingly obtained a passport, and journeyed to England. There is little or no doubt that the whole story was a fabrication; De Brissac, probably, had conveyed the diamonds to Marie-Antoinette; the story of the capture was a ruse to leave France on a secret mission. In London she was handsomely received by Pitt, and in the best society. She returned home in the December of the same year. But in the early part of 1792 she again returned to England, still ostensibly upon the diamond business, pledging herself, upon obtaining her passport, to return within a month. The exact nature of her mission would be difficult to discover among the countless intrigues of the émigrés at this period; as the accredited agent of the Queen, however, she visited the Princess of Lorraine, De Rohan, M. de Calonne, and many others, and assisted in a solemn funeral service for the King. This sealed her doom. Pitt endeavoured

to persuade her not to return to Paris, predicting that if she did she would meet the fate of Regulus.

His words were indeed prophetic. She found all wild confusion at Louveciennes; Zamore and the patriot club in possession, her treasures rifled, her splendid salons wrecked by a troop of drunken ruffians who robbed in the name of liberty. Too late she repented of the rash confidence which had urged her to plunge herself into the vortex ; escape was now impossible. On the 3rd of July, 1793, having been denounced by the treacherous black, an order was issued for her arrest. By a strange coincidence, her cell at the Conciergerie was the same which had just previously been occupied by Marie-Antoinette. These two women had reigned as rival queens at Versailles, and that vast palace was not large enough to contain them both; they had all the noblesse of France for attendants. Could any magician at that time have lifted the roseate veil and shown them the torrent beyond— the dim narrow cell, the heap of filthy straw, the black loaf, the earthen pitcher of stagnant water, the rough red-capped, sabot-footed, but kindly Richard, the concierge, and his wife, their sole attendants, themselves arrayed in coarse prison dress! Once more I cannot refrain from quoting the wondrous wise words of the mad Ophelia: We know what we are, but we know not what we may be!

Her judge was the brutal Fouquier-Tinville; her accuser, Zamore. The blow might have well come from some other hand than his. The principal accusations against her were, having during the late King's life squandered vast sums of the people's money (that accusation was just and true), of being still possessed of great treasures thus wrongfully acquired, and having been engaged in secret plots to restore the royal family. At first she met these charges scornfully and boldly, but when sentence of death was pronounced all courage deserted her and she was carried almost fainting back to her prison.

The painful scene of her execution is thus vividly described by one who was an eye-witness:

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Upon arriving at the Pont au Change I found a very large crowd assembled there. I had no need to ask the reason of the assemblage, for at that moment I heard the most terrible cries, and almost immediately saw come out of the court of the Palace of Justice that fatal cart which Barrère, in one of those fits of gaiety which are so common to him, called the bier of the living. A woman was in that cart, which slowly drew near to the spot upon which I was standing. Her figure, her attitude, her gestures expressed the most frightful despair. Alternately red and deathly pale, she struggled with the executioner and his two assistants, who could scarcely hold her upon the bench, and uttering those piercing cries which had first arrested me, she turned incessantly from one to the other, invoking pity. It was Madame du Barry, being conveyed to execution. . . . Only about forty-two or forty-three years of age,* she was still, in spite

* Others say fifty.

...

of the terror which disfigured her features, remarkably beautiful. Clothed wholly in white, like Marie-Antoinette, who had preceded her a few weeks previously upon the same route, her beautiful black hair formed a contrast similar to that presented by a funeral pall cast over a coffin. In the name of heaven!' she cried amidst her tears and sobs, 'in the name of heaven save me. I have never done ill to any one. Save me!' The delirious frenzy of this unfortunate woman produced such an impression among the people that even those who came to gloat over her sufferings had not the courage to cast at her a word of insult. Every one around appeared stupefied, and no cries were heard but hers; but her cries were so piercing that I believe they would have drowned even those of the mob had they been uttered. . . . During the whole route she never ceased her shrieks for 'Life, life!' and to struggle frantically to elude death which had seized upon her already. Upon arriving at the scaffold it was necessary to employ force to attach her to the fatal plank, and her last words were, Mercy! Mercy! but one moment longer, but one'- and all was said."

She was the only one of the aristocrats who disgraced the order by any show of cowardice; all others, women as well as men, met their doom with Spartan courage.

Between the writers of De Choiseul's party and those of the Revolution more foul stories and harsher judgments have been circulated against Madame du Barry than any other woman of her generation. And even at the present day the popular ideas concerning her, both in France and England, are derived from those mendacious sources. No human being during his or her lifetime was ever overwhelmed with more opprobrium, and yet she never committed one revengeful act against her defamers and enemies; never once solicited a lettre de cachet. On the contrary, we have seen that she not only interceded to save De Choiseul from a prison, but even conferred benefits upon him at a time when he was straining every nerve to destroy her. Many anecdotes are told of her tenderness of heart and of her generosity, and how frequently she pleaded to the King for poor prisoners condemned to death upon slight or pitiable charges. No person in distress ever appealed to her in vain. Her behaviour towards Marie-Antoinette has been already commented upon. When the actor Dauberval, overwhelmed by debts, wrote to her for assistance, she immediately set about raising a subscription; she compelled every great lord of the Court to lay down five louis, until, with her own donation, she had gathered for him two thousand. This is but one out of many anecdotes told of her generosity. She was the protectress of all débutants at the theatres, and a munificent patroness to artists and all men of genius; not, like Pompadour, from the exquisite appreciation of an artistic mind, but rather from good-heartedness.

She was a creation as essentially of the eighteenth century as butterflies are of June. With her the moral faculties were not merely weak and easily subjugated, but positively had no existence; her nature

was all sensuous, and sensuousness ripened into sensualism; every fancy, passion, whim, enslaved her for the time being; self-denial she knew not; with her, free indulgence was the only happiness; restraint, privation, were unbearable. Pain, and gloom, and sorrow, whether menacing herself or others, were abhorrent to her. She loved to see only sunshine and smiling faces. Life was to her a carnival, a bacchanalian orgie, in which all should eat, drink and be merry.

To moralise upon the life of royal favourites would be impertinently superfluous. The story of each one carries its own moral. La Vallière, even in her days of passionate love and of exaltation, haunted by the shadow of her sin, atoning in the Carmelite cell for her brief rapture through years of mortification and penitence; De Montespan, expiating her short-lived splendour by all the tortures of degraded pride and the bitterness of remorse; De Maintenon, dying solitary and unloved within the gloomy walls of St.-Cyr; De Mailly, weeping away her life in penitential tears; De Châteauroux, struck dead in the moment of returning triumph; De Pompadour, slowly dying, yet still wearing out her heart in inventing new diversions to dispel the morbid ennui of her royal lover, and ever racked by apprehension lest another should usurp her place; Du Barry, shrieking for life in the headsman's cart, dying despairing upon the guillotine: could the most eloquent of moralists or preachers heighten the effect of such lessons as these?