Cardinal Conti was old and feeble; all means were brought to bear upon
him.  Dubois had for a long time past engaged the services of Chevalier
St. George; when the new pope was proclaimed, under the name of Innocent
XIII., he had signed a conditional promise in favor of Dubois.  The
Regent, who had but lately pressed his favorite's desires upon Clement
XI., was not afraid to write to the new pontiff--

"MOST HOLY FATHER,

"Your Holiness is informed of the favor which the late pope had granted
me on behalf of the Archbishop of Cambrai, of which his death alone
prevented the fulfilment.  I hope that Your Holiness will let it be seen,
on your accession to the throne of St. Peter, that services rendered to
the Church lose nothing by the death of the sovereign pontiffs, and that
you will not think it unworthy of your earliest care to give me this
public mark of the attention paid by the Holy See to the zeal which I
profess for its interests.  This kindness on the part of Your Holiness
will crown the wishes I formed for your exaltation, will fill up the
measure of the joy which it has caused me, will maintain our kindly
relations to the advantage of the peace of the Church and the authority
of the Holy See, and will fortify the zeal of the Archbishop of Cambrai
in the execution of my orders to the glory of the Pontificate and of Your
Holiness."


On the 16th of July, 1721, Dubois was at last elected Cardinal; it was
stated that his elevation had cost eight millions of livres.  The
frivolous curiosity of the court was concerned with the countenance the
new Eminence would make in his visits of ceremony, especially in that to
Madame, his declared foe at all times.  "He had nearly two months to
prepare for it," says St. Simon, and it must be admitted that he had made
good use of them.  He got himself up for his part, and appeared before
Madame with deep respect and embarassment.  He prostrated himself, as she
advanced to greet him, sat down in the middle of the circle, covered his
head for a moment with his red hat, which he removed immediately, and
made his compliments; he began with his own surprise at finding himself
in such a position in presence of Madame, spoke of the baseness of his
birth and his first employments; employed them with much cleverness and
in very choice terms to extol so much the more the kindness, courage, and
power of the Duke of Orleans, who from so low had raised him to where he
found himself; gave Madame some delicate incense; in fine, dissolved in
the most profound respect and gratitude, doing it so well that Madame
herself could not help, when he was gone, praising his discourse and his
countenance, at the same time adding that she was mad to see him where he
was."

The bearing of the newly-elected was less modest at the council of
regency; he got himself accompanied thither by Cardinal Rohan; their rank
gave the two ecclesiastics precedence.  The Duke of Noailles,
d'Aguesseau, and some other great lords refused to sit with Dubois.
"This day, sir, will be famous in history," said the Duke of Noailles to
the new cardinal; "it will not fail to be remarked therein that your
entrance into the council caused it to be deserted by the grandees of the
kingdom."  Noailles was exiled, as well as d'Aguesseau.

The great lords had made a decided failure in government.  Since 1718,
the different councils had been abolished; defended by Abbe St. Pierre,
under the grotesque title of Polysynodie, they had earned for the candid
preacher of universal peace his exclusion from the French Academy, which
was insisted upon by the remnants of the old court, whom he had mortally
offended by styling Louis XIV.'s governmental system a viziership.  The
Regent had heaped favors upon the presidents and members of the councils,
but he had placed Dubois at the head of foreign affairs and Le Blanc over
the war department.  "I do not inquire into the theory of councils," said
the able Dubois to the Regent by the mouth of his confidant Chavigny; "it
was, as you know, the object of worship to the shallow pates of the old
court.  Humiliated by their nonentity at the end of the last reign, they
begot this system upon the reveries of M. de Cambrai.  But I think of
you, I think of your interests.  The king will reach, his majority, the
grandees of the kingdom approach the monarque by virtue of their birth;
if to this privilege they unite that of being then at the head of
affairs, there is reason to fear that they may surpass you in
complaisance, in flattery, may represent you as a useless phantom, and
establish themselves upon the ruin of you.  Suppress, then, these
councils, if you mean to continue indispensable, and haste to supersede
the great lords, who would become your rivals, by means of simple
secretaries of state, who, without standing or family, will perforce
remain your creatures."

The Duke of Antin, son of Madame de Montespan, one of the most adroit
courtiers of the old as well as of the new court, "honorless and
passionless" (_sans honneur et sans humeur_), according to the Regent's
own saying, took a severer view than Dubois of the arrangement to which
he had contributed.  "The councils are dissolved," he wrote in his
memoirs; "the nobility will never recover from it--to my great regret,
I must confess.  The kings who hereafter reign will see that Louis XIV.,
one of the greatest kings in the world, never would employ people of rank
in any of his business; that the Regent, a most enlightened prince, had
begun by putting them at the head of all affairs, and was obliged to
remove them at the end of three years.  What can they and must they
conclude therefrom?  That people of this condition are not fitted for
business, and that they are good for nothing but to get killed in war.
I hope I am wrong, but there is every appearance that the masters will
think like that, and there will not be wanting folks who will confirm
them in that opinion."  A harsh criticism on the French nobility, too
long absorbed by war or the court, living apart from the nation and from
affairs, and thereby become incapable of governing, put down once for all
by the iron hand of Richelieu, without ever having been able to resume at
the head of the country the rank and position which befitted them.

The special councils were dissolved, the council of regency diminished;
Dubois became premier minister in name--he had long been so in fact.

He had just concluded an important matter, one which the Regent had much
at heart--the marriage of the king with the Infanta of Spain, and that of
Mdlle. de Montpensier, daughter of the Duke of Orleans, with the Prince
of the Asturias.  The Duke of St. Simon was intrusted with the official
demand.  Philip V. was rejoiced to see his daughter's elevation to that
throne which he still regarded as the first in the world; he purchased it
by the concession made to the Regent.

The age of the Infanta was a serious obstacle; she was but three years
old, the king was twelve.  When the Duke of Orleans went in state to
announce to Louis XV. the negotiation which tarried for nothing further
but his consent, the young prince, taken by surprise, was tongue-tied,
seemed to have his heart quite full, and his eyes grew moist.  His
preceptor, Fleury, Bishop of Frejus, who had just refused the
Archbishopric of Rheims, seeing that he must make up his mind to please
the Regent or estrange him, supported what had just been said.  "Marshal
Villeroy, decided by the bishop's example, said to the king, 'Come, my
dear master; the thing must be done with a good grace.'  The Regent, very
much embarrassed, the duke, mighty taciturn, and Dubois, with an air of
composure, waited for the king to break a silence which lasted a quarter
of an hour, whilst the bishop never ceased whispering to the king.  As
the silence continued, and the assembly of all the council, at which the
king was about to appear, could not but augment his timidity, the bishop
turned to the Regent, and said to him, 'His Majesty will go to the
council, but he wants a little time to prepare himself for it.'
Thereupon the Regent replied, that he was created to await the
convenience of the king, saluted him with an air of respect and
affection, went out and made signs to the rest to follow him.  A quarter
of an hour later the king entered the council, with his eyes still red,
and replied, with a very short and rather low yes, to the Regent's
question, whether he thought proper that the news of his marriage should
be imparted to the council."  "It was the assurance of peace with Spain,
and the confirmation of the recent treaties; the Regent's enemies saw in
it the climax of the policy, by the choice of an infant, which retarded
the king's marriage."  [Memoires secrets de Dubois, t. ii.  p. 163.]

Accusations of greater gravity had been recently renewed against the Duke
of Orleans.  The king had been ill; for just a moment the danger had
appeared serious; the emotion in France was general, the cabal opposed to
the Regent went beyond mere anxiety.  "The consternation everywhere was
great," says St. Simon; "I had the privileges of entry, and so I went
into the king's chamber.  I found it very empty; the Duke of Orleans
seated at the chimney-corner, very forlorn and very sad.  I went up to
him for a moment, then I approached the king's bed.  At that moment,
Boulduc, one of his apothecaries, was giving him something to take.  The
Duchess of la Ferte was at Boulduc's elbow, and, having turned round to
see who was coming, she saw me, and all at once said to me, betwixt loud
and soft, 'He is poisoned, he is poisoned.'  'Hold your tongue, do,' said
I; 'that is awful!'  She went on again, so much and so loud, that I was
afraid the king would hear her.  Boulduc and I looked at one another, and
I immediately withdrew from the bed and from that madwoman, with whom I
was on no sort of terms.  The illness was not a long one, and the
convalescence was speedy, which restored tranquillity and joy, and caused
an outburst of Te Deums and rejoicings.  On St. Louis' day, at the
concert held every year on that evening at the Tuileries, the crowd was
so dense that a pin would not have fallen to the ground in the garden.
The windows of the Tuileries were decorated and crammed full, and all the
roofs of the Carrousel filled with all that could hold on there, as well
as the square.  Marshal Villeroy revelled in this concourse, which bored
the king, who kept hiding himself every moment in the corners; the
marshal pulled him out by the arm and led him up to the windows.
Everybody shouted 'Hurrah! for the king!' and the marshal, detaining the
king, who would still have gone and hidden himself, said, 'Pray look, my
dear master, at all this company, all this people; it is all yours, it
all belongs to you; you are their master; pray give them a look or two
just to satisfy them!'  A fine lesson for a governor, and one which he
did not tire of impressing upon him, so fearful was he lest he should
forget it; accordingly he retained it very perfectly."

[Illustration: The Boy King and his People----104]

The Duke of Beauvilliers and Fenelon taught the Duke of Burgundy
differently; the Duke of Montausier and Bossuet himself, in spite of the
majestic errors of his political conceptions, had not forgotten in the
education of the granddauphin the lesson of kings' duties towards their
peoples.

Already, over the very infancy of Louis XV. was passing the breath of
decay; little by little that people, as yet so attached to their young
sovereign, was about to lose all respect and submission towards its
masters; a trait long characteristic of the French nation.

The king's majority was approaching, the Regent's power seemed on the
point of slipping from him; Marshal Villeroy, aged, witless, and
tactless, irritated at the elevation of Dubois, always suspicious of the
Regent's intentions towards the young king, burst out violently against
the minister, and displayed towards the Regent an offensive distrust.
"One morning," says Duclos, "when the latter came to give an account to
the king of the nomination to certain benefices, he begged his Majesty to
be pleased to walk into his closet, where he had a word to say to him in
private.  The governor objected, saying that he knew the duties of his
place, that the king could have no secrets from his governor, protested
that he would not lose sight of him for an instant, and that he was bound
to answer for his person.  The Regent, then taking a tone of superiority,
said to the marshal, 'You forget yourself, sir; you do not see the force
of your expressions; it is only the king's presence that restrains me
from treating you as you deserve.'  Having so said, he made a profound
bow to the king and went out.  The disconcerted marshal followed the
Regent to the door, and would have entered upon a justification; all his
talk all day long was a mixture of the Roman's haughtiness and the
courtier's meanness."  [_Memoires de St. Simon_.]

"Next day, at noon, Marshal Villeroy repaired to the Duke of Orleans' to
excuse himself, fancying he might attempt an explanation as equal with
equal.  He crosses with his grand airs, in the midst of the whole court,
the rooms which preceded the prince's closet; the crowd opens and makes
way for him respectfully.  He asks, in a loud tone, where the Duke of
Orleans is; the answer is that he is busy.  'I must see him,
nevertheless,' says he; 'announce me!'  The moment he advances towards
the door, the Marquis of La Fare, captain of the Regent's guards, shows
himself between the door and the marshal, arrests him, and demands his
sword.  Le Blanc hands him the order from the king, and at the same
instant Count d'Artagnan, commandant of the musketeers, blocks him on the
opposite side to La Fare.  The marshal shouts, remonstrates; he is
pitched into a chair, shut up in it, and passed out by one of the windows
which opens door-wise on to the garden; at the bottom of the steps of the
orangery behold a carriage with six horses, surrounded by twenty
musketeers.  The marshal, furious, storms, threatens; he is carried into
the vehicle, the carriage starts, and in less than three hours the
marshal is at Villeroi, eight or nine leagues from Versailles."  The king
wept a moment or two without saying a word; he was consoled by the return
of the Bishop of Frejus, with whom it was supposed to be all over, but
who was simply at Baville, at President Lamoignon's; his pupil was as
much attached to him as he was capable of being; Fleury remained alone
with him, and Marshal Villeroy was escorted to Lyons, of which he was
governor.  He received warning not to leave it, and was not even present
at the king's coronation, which took place at Rheims, on the 25th of
October, 1722.  Amidst the royal pomp and festivities, a significant
formality was for the first time neglected; that was, admitting into the
nave of the church the people, burgesses and artisans, who were wont to
join their voices to those of the clergy and nobility when, before the
anointment of the king, demand was made in a loud voice for the consent
of the assembly, representing the nation.  Even in external ceremonies,
the kingship was becoming every day more and more severed from national
sentiment and national movement.

The king's majority, declared on the 19th of February, 1723, had made no
change in the course of the government; the young prince had left Paris,
and resumed possession of that Palace of Versailles, still full of
mementoes of the great king.  The Regent, more and more absorbed by his
pleasures, passed a great deal of time at Paris; Dubois had the
government to himself.

His reign was not long at this unparalleled pinnacle of his greatness; he
had been summoned to preside at the assembly of the clergy, and had just
been elected to the French Academy, where he was received by Fontenelle,
when a sore, from which he had long suffered, reached all at once a
serious crisis; an operation was indispensable, but he set himself
obstinately against it; the Duke of Orleans obliged him to submit to it,
and it was his death-blow; the wretched cardinal expired, without having
had time to receive the sacraments.

The elevation and power of Dubois had the fatal effect of lowering France
in her own eyes; she had felt that she was governed by a man whom she
despised, and had a right to despise; this was a deep-seated and lasting
evil; authority never recovered from the blow thus struck at its moral
influence.  Dubois, however, was more able and more farsighted in his
foreign policy than the majority of his predecessors and his
contemporaries were; without definitively losing the alliance of Spain,
re-attached to the interests of France by the double treaty of marriage,
he had managed to form a firm connection with England, and to rally round
France the European coalition but lately in arms against her.  He
maintained and made peace ingloriously; he obtained it sometimes by
meannesses in bearing and modes of acting; he enriched himself by his
intrigues, abroad as well as at home; his policy none the less was
steadfastly French, even in his relations with the court of Rome, and
in spite of his eager desire for the cardinal's hat.  He died sadly,
shamefully, without a friend and without regret, even on the part of the
Regent, whom he had governed and kept in hand by active and adroit
assiduity, by a hardihood and an effrontery to the influence of which
that prince submitted, all the while despising it.  Dubois had raised up
again, to place himself upon it, that throne of premier minister on which
none had found a seat since Richelieu and Mazarin; the Duke of Orleans
succeeded him without fuss, without parade, without even appearing to
have any idea of the humiliation inflicted upon him by that valet, lying
in his coffin, whom he had raised to power, and whose place he was about
to fill for a few days.

[Illustration: Death of the Regent---107]

On the 2d of December, 1723, three months and a half after the death of
Dubois, the Duke of Orleans succumbed in his turn.  Struck down by a
sudden attack of apoplexy, whilst he was chatting with his favorite for
the time, the Duchess of Falarie, he expired without having recovered
consciousness.  Lethargized by the excesses of the table and debauchery
of all kinds, more and more incapable of application and work, the prince
did not preserve sufficient energy to give up the sort of life which had
ruined him.  For a long while the physicians had been threatening him
with sudden death.  "It is all I can desire," said he.  Naturally brave,
intelligent, amiable, endowed with a charm of manner which recalled Henry
IV., kind and merciful like him, of a mind that was inquiring, fertile,
capable of applying itself to details of affairs, Philip of Orleans was
dragged down by depravity of morals to the same in soul and mind; his
judgment, naturally straightforward and correct, could still discern
between good and evil, but he was incapable of energetically willing the
one and firmly resisting the other; he had governed equitably, without
violence and without harshness, he had attempted new and daring courses,
and he had managed to abandon them without any excesses or severities;
like Dubois, he had inspired France with a contempt which unfortunately
did not protect her from contagion.  When Madame died, an inscription had
been put on the tomb of that honest, rude, and haughty German: "Here lies
Lazybones" (_Ci-git l'oisivete_).  All the vices thus imputed to the
Regent did not perish with him, when he succumbed at forty-nine years of
age under their fatal effects.  "The evil that men do lives after them,
the good is oft interred with their bones;" the Regency was the signal
for an irregularity of morals which went on increasing, like a filthy
river, up to the end of the reign of Louis XV.; the fatal seed had been
germinating for a long time past under the forced and frequently
hypocritical decency of the old court; it burst out under the easy-going
regency of an indolent and indulgent prince, himself wholly given to the
licentiousness which he excused and authorized by his own example.  From
the court the evil soon spread to the nation; religious faith still
struggled within the soul, but it had for a long while been tossed about
between contrary and violent opinions; it found itself disturbed,
attacked, by the new and daring ideas which were beginning to dawn in
politics as well as in philosophy.  The break-up was already becoming
manifest, though nobody could account for it, though no fixed plan was
conceived in men's minds.  People devoured the memoirs of Cardinal Retz
and Madame de Motteville, which had just appeared; people formed from
them their judgments upon the great persons and great events which they
had seen and depicted.  The University of Paris, under the direction of
Rollin, was developing the intelligence and lively powers of burgessdom;
and Montesquieu, as yet full young, was shooting his missiles in the
_Lettres persanes_ at the men and the things of his country with an
almost cynical freedom, which was, as it were, the alarum and prelude of
all the liberties which he scarcely dared to claim, but of which he
already let a glimpse be seen.  Evil and good were growing up in
confusion, like the tares and the wheat.  For more than eighty years past
France has been gathering the harvest of ages; she has not yet separated
the good grain from the rubbish which too often conceals it.




CHAPTER LII.----LOUIS XV., THE MINISTRY OF CARDINAL FLEURY., 1723-1748.

[Illustration: Louis XV.----110]

The riotous and frivolous splendor of the Regency had suffered eclipse;
before their time, in all their vigor, through disgrace or by death, Law,
Dubois, and the Regent, had suddenly disappeared from the stage of the
world.  To these men, a striking group for different reasons,
notwithstanding their faults and their vices, was about to succeed a
discreet but dull and limp government, the reign of an old man, and,
moreover, a priest.  The Bishop of Frejus, who had but lately been the
modest preceptor of the king, and was quietly ambitious and greedy of
power, but without regard to his personal interests, was about to become
Cardinal Fleury, and to govern France for twenty years; in 1723 he was
seventy years old.

Whether from adroitness or prudence, Fleury did not all at once aspire to
all-powerfulness.  Assured in his heart of his sway over the as yet
dormant will of his pupil, he suffered the establishment of the Duke of
Bourbon's ministry, who was in a greater hurry to grasp the power he had
so long coveted.  When the king received his cousin, head of the house of
Conde, who had but lately taken the place of the Duke of Maine near his
person, he sought in his preceptor's eyes the guidance he needed, and
contented himself with sanctioning by an inclination of the head the
elevation of the duke, presented by Fleury.  The new Duke of Orleans, as
yet quite a youth, hovering between debauchery and devotion, obtained no
portion of his father's heritage; he had taken away from him even the
right of doing business with the king, a right secured to him by his
office of colonel-general.

[Illustration: Cardinal Fleury--110]

The Bishop of Frejus had nursed his power more skilfully; he kept the
list of benefices, and he alone, it was said, knew how to unloosen the
king's tongue; but he had not calculated upon the pernicious and
all-powerful influence of the Marchioness of Prie, favorite "by
appointment" (_attitree_) to the duke.  Clever, adroit, depraved, she
aspired to govern, and chose for her minister Paris-Duverney, one of the
four Dauphinese brothers who had been engaged under the regency in the
business of the visa, and the enemies as well as rivals of the Scotsman
Law.  Whilst the king hunted, and Fleury exercised quietly the measure of
power which as yet contented his desires, the duke, blinded by his
passion for Madame de Prie, slavishly submissive to her slightest wishes,
lavished, according to his favorite's orders, honors and graces in which
she managed to traffic, enriching herself brazen-facedly.  Under Louis
XIV.  Madame de Maintenon alone, exalted to the rank of wife, had taken
part in state affairs; amidst the irregularity of his life the Regent had
never accorded women any political influence, and the confusion of the
orgie had never surprised from his lips a single important secret; Madame
de Prie was the first to become possessed of a power destined to
frequently fall, after her, into hands as depraved as they were feeble.

The strictness of the views and of the character of Paris-Duverney
strove, nevertheless, in the home department, against the insensate
lavishness of the duke, and the venal irregularities of his favorite;
imbued with the maxims of order and regularity formerly impressed by
Colbert upon the clerks of the treasury, and not yet completely effaced
by a long interregnum, he labored zealously to cut down expenses and
useless posts, to resuscitate and regulate commerce; his ardor,
systematic and wise as it was, hurried him sometimes into strange
violence and improvidence; in order to restore to their proper figure
values and goods which still felt the prodigious rise brought about by
the System, Paris-Duverney depreciated the coinage and put, a tariff on
merchandise as well as wages.  The commotion amongst the people was
great; the workmen rioted, the tradesmen refused to accept the legal
figure for their goods; several men were killed in the streets, and some
shops put the shutters up.  The misery, which the administration had
meant to relieve, went on increasing; begging was prohibited; refuges and
workshops were annexed to the poorhouses; attempts were made to collect
there all the old, infirm, and vagabond.  The rigor of procedure,
as well as the insufficiency of resources, caused the failure of the
philanthropic project.  Lightly conceived, imprudently carried out, the
new law filled the refuges with an immense crowd, taken up in all
quarters, in the villages, and on the high roads; the area of the
relieving-houses became insufficient.  "Bedded on straw, and fed on bread
and water as they ought to be," wrote the comptroller-general Dodun,
"they will take up less room and be less expense."  Everywhere the poor
wretches sought to fly; they were branded on the arm, like criminals.
All this rigor was ineffectual; the useful object of Paris-Duverney's
decrees was not attained.

Other outrages, not to be justified by any public advantage, were being
at the same time committed against other poor creatures, for a long while
accustomed to severities of all kinds.  Without freedom, without right of
worship, without assemblies, the Protestants had, nevertheless, enjoyed a
sort of truce from their woes during the easy-going regency of the Duke
of Orleans.  Amongst the number of his vices Dubois did not include
hypocrisy; he had not persecuted the remnants of French Protestantism,
enfeebled, dumb, but still living and breathing.  The religious
enthusiasm of the Camisards had become little by little extinguished;
their prophets and inspired ones, who were but lately the only ministers
of the religion in the midst of a people forcibly deprived of its
pastors, had given place to new servants of God, regularly consecrated to
His work and ready to brave for His sake all punishments.  The Church
under the Cross, as the Protestants of France then called themselves, was
reviving slowly, secretly, in the desert, but it was reviving.  The
scattered members of the flocks, habituated for so many years past to
carefully conceal their faith in order to preserve it intact in their
hearts, were beginning to draw near to one another once more; discipline
and rule were once more entering within that church, which had been
battered by so many storms, and the total destruction of which had been
loudly proclaimed.  In its origin, this immense work, as yet silently and
modestly progressing, had been owing to one single man, Antony Court,
born, in 1696, of a poor family, at Villeneuve-de-Berg in the Vivarais.
He was still almost a child when he had perceived the awakening in his
soul of an ardent desire to rebuild the walls of holy Sion; without
classical education, nurtured only upon his reading of the Bible, guided
by strong common sense and intrepid courage, combined with a piety as
sincere as it was enlightened, he had summoned to him the preachers of
the Uvennes, heirs of the enthusiastic Camisards.  From the depths of
caverns, rocks, and woods had come forth these rude ministers, fanatics
or visionaries as they may have been, eagerly devoted to their work and
imbued with their pious illusions; Court had persuaded, touched,
convinced them; some of the faithful had gathered around him, and, since
the 11th of August, 1715, at the first of those synods in the desert,
unknown to the great king whose life was ebbing away at Versailles, the
Protestant church of France had been reconstituting itself upon bases as
sound as they were strong; the functions of the ancients were everywhere
re-established; women were forbidden to hold forth at assemblies; the
Holy Scriptures were proclaimed as the only law of faith; pastoral
ordination was required of preachers and ministers of the religion;
Corteis, a friend of Court's, went to Switzerland to receive from the
pastors of Zurich the imposition of hands, which he transmitted
afterwards to his brethren.  Everywhere the new Evangelical ministry was
being recruited.  "I seek them in all places," said Court, "at the
plough, or behind the counter, everywhere where I find the call for
martyrdom."  Of the six devoted men who signed the statutes of the first
synod, four were destined to a martyr's death.  The restorer of French
Protestantism had made no mistake about the call then required for the
holy ministry.  The synods of the desert became every year more numerous;
deputies from the North, from the West, from the Centre, began to join
those of the South.  Persecution continued, but it was local, more often
prompted by the fanatical zeal of the superintendents than by the
sovereign impulse of government; the pastors died without having to
sorrow for the church, up-risen from its ruins, when a vague echo of this
revival came striking upon the ears of the Duke and Madame de Prie,
amidst the galas of Chantilly.  Their silence and their exhaustion had
for some time protected the Protestants; fanaticism and indifference made
common cause once more to crush them at their reawakening.

The storm had now been brewing for some years; the Bishop of Nantes,
Lavergne de Tressan, grand almoner to the Regent, had attempted some time
before to wrest from him a rigorous decree against the Protestants; the
Duke of Orleans, as well as Dubois, had rejected his overtures.  Scarcely
had the duke (of Bourbon) come into power, when the prelate presented his
project anew; indifferent and debauched, a holder of seventy-six
benefices, M. de Tressan dreamed of the cardinal's hat, and aspired to
obtain it from the Court of Rome at the cost of a persecution.  The
government was at that time drifting about, without compass or steersman,
from the hands of Madame de Prie to those of Paris-Duverney.  Little
cared they for the fate of the Reformers.  "This castaway of the
regency," says M. Lemontey, "was adopted without memorial, without
examination, as an act of homage to the late king, and a simple executive
formula.  The ministers of Louis XVI. afterwards found the minute of the
declaration of 1724, without any preliminary report, and simply bearing
on the margin the date of the old edicts."  For aiming the thunderbolts
against the Protestants, Tressan addressed himself to their most terrible
executioner.  Lamoignon de Baville was still alive; old and almost at
death's door as he was, he devoted the last days of his life to drawing
up for the superintendents some private instructions; an able and a cruel
monument of his past experience and his persistent animosity.  He died
with the pen still in his hand.

The new edict turned into an act of homage to Louis XIV. the rigors
of Louis XV.  "Of all the grand designs of our most honored lord and
great-grandfather, there is none that we have more at heart to execute
than that which he conceived, of entirely extinguishing heresy in his
kingdom.  Arrived at majority, our first care has been to have before us
the edicts whereof execution has been delayed, especially in the
provinces afflicted with the contagion.  We have observed that the chief
abuses which demand a speedy remedy relate to illicit assemblies, the
education of children, the obligation of public functionaries to profess
the Catholic religion, the penalties against the relapsed, and the
celebration of marriage, regarding which here are our intentions: Shall
be condemned: preachers to the penalty of death, their accomplices to the
galleys for life, and women to be shaved and imprisoned for life.
Confiscation of property: parents who shall not have baptism administered
to their children within twenty-four hours, and see that they attend
regularly the catechism and the schools, to fines and such sums as they
may amount to together; even to greater penalties.  Midwives, physicians,
surgeons, apothecaries, domestics, relatives, who shall not notify the
parish priests of births or illnesses, to fines.  Persons who shall
exhort the sick, to the galleys or imprisonment for life, according to
sex; confiscation of property.  The sick who shall refuse the sacraments,
if they recover, to banishment for life; if they die, to be dragged on a
hurdle.  Desert-marriages are illegal; the children born of them are
incompetent to inherit.  Minors whose parents are expatriated may marry
without their authority; but parents whose children are on foreign soil
shall not consent to their marriage, on pain of the galleys for the men
and banishment for the women.  Finally, of all fines and confiscations,
half shall be employed in providing subsistence for the new converts."

Just as the last edicts of Louis XIV., the edict of 1724 rested upon an
absolute contradiction: the legislators no longer admitted the existence
of any reformers in the kingdom; and yet all the battery of the most
formidable punishments was directed against that Protestant church which
was said to be defunct.  The same contradiction was seen in the conduct
of the ecclesiastics: Protestants could not be admitted to any position,
or even accomplish the ordinary duties of civil life, without externally
conforming to Catholicism; and, to so conform, there was required of them
not only an explicit abjuration, but even an anathema against their
deceased parents.  "It is necessary," said Chancellor d'Aguesseau,
"either that the church should relax her vigor by some modification,
or, if she does not think she ought to do so, that she should cease
requesting the king to employ his authority in reducing his subjects to
the impossible, by commanding them to fulfil a religious duty which the
church does not permit them to perform."

At this point is revealed a progress in ideas of humanity and justice:
the edict of 1724 equalled in rigor the most severe proclamations of
Louis XIV.; it placed the peace, and often the life, of Reformers at the
mercy not only of an enemy's denunciation, but of a priest's simple
deposition; it destroyed all the bonds of family, and substituted for the
natural duties a barbarous and depraving law; but general sentiment and
public opinion were no longer in accord with the royal proclamations.
The clergy had not solicited the edict, the work of an ambitious man
backed up by certain fanatics; they were at first embarrassed by it.
When the old hatreds revived, and the dangerous intoxications of power
had affected the souls of bishops and priests, the magistracy, who had
formerly been more severe towards the Reformers than even the
superintendents of the provinces had been, pronounced on many points in
favor of the persecuted; the judges were timid; the legislation, becoming
more and more oppressive, tied their hands; but the bias of their minds
was modified; it tended to extenuate, and not to aggravate, the effects
of the edict.  The law was barbarous everywhere, the persecution became
so only at certain spots, owing to the zeal of the superintendents or
bishops; as usual, the south of France was the first to undergo all the
rigors of it.  Emigration had ceased there for a long time past; whilst
the Norman or Dauphinese Reformers, on the revival of persecution, still
sought refuge on foreign soil, whilst Sweden, wasted by the wars of
Charles XII., invited the French Protestants into her midst, the peasants
of the Uvennes or of the Vivarais, passionately attached to the soil they
cultivated, bowed their heads, with a groan, to the storm, took refuge in
their rocks and their caverns, leaving the cottages deserted and the
harvests to be lost, returning to their houses and their fields as soon
as the soldiery were gone, ever faithful to the proscribed assemblies in
the desert, and praying God for the king, to whose enemies they refused
to give ear.  Alberoni, and after him England, had sought to detach the
persecuted Protestants from their allegiance; the court was troubled at
this; they had not forgotten the Huguenot regiments at the battle of the
Boyne.  From the depths of their hiding-places the pastors answered for
the fidelity of their flocks; the voice of the illustrious and learned
Basnage, for a long while a refugee in Holland, encouraged his brethren
in their heroic submission.  As fast as the ministers died on the
gallows, new servants of God came forward to replace them, brought up in
the seminary which Antony Court had founded at Lausanne, and managed to
keep up by means of alms from Protestant Europe.  It was there that the
most illustrious of the pastors of the desert, Paul Rabaut, already
married and father of one child, went to seek the instruction necessary
for the apostolic vocation which he was to exercise for so many years in
the midst of so many and such formidable perils.  "On determining to
exercise the ministry in this kingdom," he wrote, in 1746, to the
superintendent of Languedoc, Lenain d'Asfeldt, "I was not ignorant of
what I exposed myself to; so I regarded myself as a victim doomed to
death.  I thought I was doing the greatest good of which I was capable in
devoting myself to the condition of a pastor. Protestants, being deprived
of the free exercise of their own religion, not seeing their way to
taking part in the exercises of the Roman religion, not being able to get
the books they would require for their instruction, consider, my lord,
what--might be their condition if they were absolutely deprived of
pastors.  They would be ignorant of their most essential duties, and
would fall either into fanaticism, the fruitful source of extravagances
and irregularities, or into indifference and contempt for all religion."
The firm moderation, the courageous and simple devotion, breathed by this
letter, were the distinctive traits of the career of Paul Rabaut, as well
as of Antony Court; throughout a persecution which lasted nearly forty
years, with alternations of severity and clemency, the chiefs of French
Protestantism managed to control the often recurring desperation of their
flocks.  On the occasion of a temporary rising on the borders of the
Gardon, Paul Rabaut wrote to the governor of Languedoc, "When I desired
to know whence this evil proceeded, it was reported to me that divers
persons, finding themselves liable to lose their goods and their liberty,
or to have to do acts contrary to their conscience, in respect of their
marriages or the baptism of their children, and knowing no way of getting
out of the kingdom and setting their conscience free, abandoned
themselves to despair, and attacked certain priests, because they
regarded them as the primal and principal cause of the vexations done to
them.  Once more, I blame those people; but I thought it my duty to
explain to you the cause of their despair.  If it be thought that my
ministry is necessary to calm the ruffled spirits, I shall comply with
pleasure.  Above all, if I might assure the Protestants of that district
that they shall not be vexed in their conscience, I would pledge myself
to bind over the greater number to stop those who would make a
disturbance, supposing that there should be any."  At a word from Paul
Rabaut calmness returned to the most ruffled spirits; sometimes his
audience was composed of ten or twelve thousand of the faithful; his
voice was so resonant and so distinct, that in the open air it would
reach the most remote.  He prayed with a fervor and an unction which
penetrated all hearts, and disposed them to hear, with fruits following,
the word of God.  Simple, grave, penetrating rather than eloquent, his
preaching, like his life, bears the impress of his character.  As
moderate as fervent, as judicious as heroic in spirit, Paul Rabaut
preached in the desert, at the peril of his life, sermons which he had
composed in a cavern.  "During more than thirty years," says one of his
biographers, "he had no dwelling-place but grottoes, hovels, and cabins,
whither men went to draw him like a ferocious beast.  He lived a long
while in a hiding-place, which one of his faithful guides had contrived
for him under a heap of stones and blackberry bushes.  It was discovered
by a shepherd; and such was the wretchedness of his condition, that, when
forced to abandon it, he regretted that asylum, more fitted for wild
beasts than for men."

The hulks were still full of the audience of Paul Rabaut, and Protestant
women were still languishing in the unwholesome dungeon of the Tower of
Constance, when the execution of the unhappy Calas, accused of having
killed his son, and the generous indignation of Voltaire cast a momentary
gleam of light within the sombre region of prisons and gibbets.  For the
first time, public opinion, at white heat, was brought to bear upon the
decision of the persecutors.  Calas was dead, but the decree of the
Parliament of Toulouse which had sentenced him, was quashed by act of the
council: his memory was cleared, and the day of toleration for French
Protestants began to glimmer, pending the full dawn of justice and
liberty.

We have gone over in succession, and without break, the last cruel
sufferings of the French Protestants; we now turn away our eyes with a
feeling of relief mingled with respect and pride; we leave the free air
of the desert to return to the rakes and effeminates of Louis XV.'s
court.  Great was the contrast between the government which persecuted
without knowing why, and the victims who suffered for a faith incessantly
revived in their souls by suffering.  For two centuries the French
Reformation had not experienced for a single day the formidable dangers
of indifference and lukewarmness.

The young king was growing up, still a stranger to affairs, solely
occupied with the pleasures of the chase, handsome, elegant, with noble
and regular features, a cold and listless expression.  In the month of
February, 1725, he fell ill; for two days there was great danger.  The
duke thought himself to be threatened with the elevation of the house of
Orleans to the throne.  "I'll not be caught so again," he muttered
between his teeth, when he came one night to inquire how the king was,
"if he recovers, I'll have him married."  The king did recover, but the
Infanta was only seven years old.  Philip V., who had for a short time
abdicated, retiring with the queen to a remote castle in the heart of the
forests, had just remounted the throne after the death of his eldest son,
Louis I.  Small-pox had carried off the young monarch, who had reigned
but eight months.  Elizabeth Farnese, aided by the pope's nuncio and some
monks who were devoted to her, had triumphed over her husband's religious
scruples and the superstitious counsels of his confessor; she was once
more reigning over Spain, when she heard that the little Infanta-queen,
whose betrothal to the King of France had but lately caused so much joy,
was about to be sent away from the court of her royal spouse.  "The
Infanta must be started off, and by coach too, to get it over sooner,"
exclaimed Count Morville, who had been ordered by Madame de Prie to draw
up a list of the marriageable princesses in Europe.  Their number
amounted to ninety-nine; twenty-five Catholics, three Anglicans, thirteen
Calvinists, fifty-five Lutherans, and three Greeks.  The Infanta had
already started for Madrid; the Regent's two daughters, the young widow
of Louis I. and Mdlle. de Beaujolais, promised to Don Carlos, were on
their way back to France; the advisers of Louis XV. were still looking
out for a wife for him.  Spain had been mortally offended, without the
duke's having yet seen his way to forming a new alliance in place of that
which he had just broken off.  Some attempts at arrangement with George
I. had failed; an English princess could not abjure Protestantism.  Such
scruples did not stop Catherine I., widow of Peter the Great, who had
taken the power into her own hands to the detriment of the czar's
grandson; she offered the duke her second daughter, the grand-duchess
Elizabeth, for King Louis XV., with a promise of abjuration on the part
of the princess, and of a treaty which should secure the support of all
the Muscovite forces in the interest of France.  At the same time the
same negotiators proposed to the Duke of Bourbon himself the hand of Mary
Leckzinska, daughter of Stanislaus, the dispossessed King of Poland,
guaranteeing to him, on the death of King Augustus, the crown of that
kingdom.

[Illustration: Mary Leczinska----121]

The proposals of Russia were rejected.  "The Princess of Muscovy," M. de
Morville had lately said, "is the daughter of a low-born mother, and has
been brought up amidst a still barbarous people."  Every great alliance
appeared impossible; the duke and Madame de Prie were looking out for a
queen who would belong to them, and would secure them the king's heart.
Their choice fell upon Mary Leckzinska, a good, gentle, simple creature,
without wit or beauty, twenty-two years old, and living upon the alms of
France with her parents, exiles and refugees at an old commandery of the
Templars at Weissenburg.  Before this King Stanislaus had conceived the
idea of marrying his daughter to Count d'Estrees; the marriage had failed
through the Regent's refusal to make the young lord a duke and peer.  The
distress of Stanislaus, his constant begging letters to the court of
France, were warrant for the modest submissiveness of the princess.
"Madame de Prie has engaged a queen, as I might engage a valet
to-morrow," writes Marquis d'Argenson;--it is a pity."

When the first overtures from the duke arrived at Weissenburg, King
Stanislaus entered the room where his wife and daughter were at work,
and, "Fall we on our knees, and thank God!" he said.  "My dear father,"
exclaimed the princess, "can you be recalled to the throne of Poland?"
"God has done us a more astounding grace," replied Stanislaus: "you are
Queen of France!"

"Never shall I forget the horror of the calamities we were enduring in
France, when Queen Mary Leckzinska arrived," says M. d'Argenson.  "A
continuance of rain had caused famine, and it was much aggravated by the
bad government under the duke.  That government, whatever may be said of
it, was even more hurtful through bad judgment than from interested
views, which had not so much to do with it as was said.  There were very
costly measures taken to import foreign corn; but that only augmented the
alarm, and, consequently, the dearness.

"Fancy the unparalleled misery of the country-places!  It was just the
time when everybody was thinking of harvests and ingatherings of all
sorts of things, which it had not been possible to get in for the
continual rains; the poor farmer was watching for a dry moment to get
them in; meanwhile all the district was beaten with many a scourge.  The
peasants had been sent off to prepare the roads by which the queen was to
pass, and they were only the worse for it, insomuch that Her Majesty was
often within a thought of drowning; they pulled her from her carriage by
the strong arm, as best they might.  In several stopping-places she and
her suite were swimming in water which spread everywhere, and that in
spite of the unparalleled pains that had been taken by a tyrannical
ministry."

It was under such sad auspices that Mary Leckzinska arrived at
Versailles.  Fleury had made no objection to the marriage.  Louis XV.
accepted it, just as he had allowed the breaking-off of his union with
the Infanta and that of France with Spain.  For a while the duke had
hopes of reaping all the fruit of the unequal marriage he had just
concluded for the King of France.  The queen was devoted to him; he