religious fears might at any time be aroused again in the soul of
Louis XV.  The dauphin, who had been constantly faithful to them, sought
in vain to plead their cause with the king.  He had attacked the Duke of
Choiseul; the latter so far forgot himself, it is asserted, as to say to
the prince, "Sir, I may have the misfortune to be your subject, but I
will never be your servant."  The minister had hitherto maintained a
prudent reserve; he henceforth joined the favorite and the Parliament
against the Jesuits.

On the 6th of August, 1761, the Parliament of Paris delivered a decree
ordering the Jesuits to appear at the end of a year for the definite
judgment upon their constitutions; pending the judicial decision, all
their colleges were closed.  King Louis XV. still hesitated, from natural
indolence and from remembrance of Cardinal Fleury's maxims.  "The
Jesuits," the old minister would often say, "are bad masters, but you can
make them useful tools."  An ecclesiastical commission was convoked; with
the exception of the Bishop of Soissons, the prelates all showed
themselves favorable to the Jesuits and careless of the old Gallican
liberties.  On their advice, the king sent a proposal to Rome for certain
modifications in the constitutions of the order.  Father Ricci, general
of the Jesuits, answered haughtily, "Let them be as they are, or not be"
(_Sint ut sunt, aut non sint_).  Their enemies in France accepted the
challenge.  On the 6th of August, 1762, a decree of the Parliament of
Paris, soon confirmed by the majority of the sovereign courts, declared
that there was danger (_abus_) in the bulls, briefs, and constitutions of
the Society, pronounced its dissolution, forbade its members to wear the
dress and to continue living in common under the sway of the general and
other superiors.  Orders were given to close all the Jesuit houses.  The
principle of religious liberty, which had been so long ignored, and was
at last beginning to dawn on men's minds, was gaining its first serious
victory by despoiling the Jesuits in their turn of that liberty for the
long-continued wrongs whereof they were called to account.  A strange and
striking reaction in human affairs; the condemnation of the Jesuits was
the precursory sign of the violence and injustice which were soon to be
committed in the name of the most sacred rights and liberties, long
violated with impunity by arbitrary power.

Vaguely and without taking the trouble to go to the bottom of his
impression, Louis XV. felt that the Parliaments and the philosophers were
dealing him a mortal blow whilst appearing to strike the Jesuits; he
stood out a long while, leaving the quarrel to become embittered and
public opinion to wax wroth at his indecision.  "There is a hand to mouth
administration," said an anonymous letter addressed to the king and
Madame de Pompadour, "but there is no longer any hope of government.  A
time will come when the people's eyes will be opened, and peradventure
that time is approaching."

The persistency of the Duke of Choiseul carried the day at last; an edict
of December, 1764, declared that "the Society no longer existed in
France, that it would merely be permitted to those who composed it to
live privately in the king's dominions, under the spiritual authority of
the local ordinaries, whilst conforming to the laws of the realm."  Four
thousand Jesuits found themselves affected by this decree; some left
France, others remained still in their families, assuming the secular
dress.  "It will be great fun to see Father Perusseau turned abbe," said
Louis XV. as he signed the fatal edict.  "The Parliaments fancy they are
serving religion by this measure," wrote D'Alembert to Voltaire, "but
they are serving reason without any notion of it; they are the,
executioners on behalf of philosophy, whose orders they are executing
without knowing it."  The destruction of the Jesuits served neither
religion nor reason, for it was contrary to justice as well as to
liberty; it was the wages and the bitter fruit of a long series of wrongs
and iniquities committed but lately, in the name of religion, against
justice and liberty.

Three years later, in 1767, the King of Spain, Charles III., less
moderate than the government of Louis XV., expelled with violence all the
members of the Society of Jesus from his territory, thus exciting the
Parliament of Paris to fresh severities against the French Jesuits, and,
on the 20th of July, 1773, the court of Rome itself, yielding at last to
pressure from nearly all the sovereigns of Europe, solemnly pronounced
the dissolution of the Order.  "Recognizing that the members of this
Society have not a little troubled the Christian commonwealth, and that
for the welfare of Christendom it were better that the Order should
disappear."  The last houses still offering shelter to the Jesuits were
closed; the general, Ricci, was imprisoned at the castle of St. Angelo,
and the Society of Jesus, which had been so powerful for nearly three
centuries, took refuge in certain distant lands, seeking in oblivion and
silence fresh strength for the struggle which it was one day to renew.

The Parliaments were triumphant, but their authority, which seemed never
to have risen so high or penetrated so far in the government of the
state, was already tottering to its base.  Once more the strife was about
to begin between the kingly power and the magistracy, whose last victory
was destined to scarcely precede its downfall.  The financial
embarrassments of the state were growing more serious every day; to the
debts left by the Seven Years' War were added the new wants developed by
the necessities of commerce and by the progress of civilization.  The
Board of Works, a useful institution founded by Louis XV., was everywhere
seeing to the construction of new roads, at the same time repairing the
old ones; the forced labor for these operations fell almost exclusively
on the peasantry.  The Parliament of Normandy was one of the first to
protest against "the impositions of forced labor, and the levies of money
which took place in the district on pretext of repairs and maintenance of
roads, without legal authority."  "France is a land which devours its
inhabitants," cried the Parliament of Paris.  The Parliament of Pau
refused to enregister the edicts; the Parliament of Brittany joined the
Estates in protesting against the Duke of Aiguillon, the then governor,
"the which hath made upon the liberties of the province one of those
assaults which are not possible save when the crown believes itself to be
secure of impunity."  The noblesse having yielded in the states, the
Parliament of Rennes gave in their resignation in a body.  Five of its
members were arrested; at their head was the attorney-general, M. de la
Chalotais, author of a very remarkable paper against the Jesuits.  It was
necessary to form at St. Malo a King's Chamber to try the accused.  M. de
Calonne, an ambitious young man, the declared foe of M. de la Chalotais,
was appointed attorney-general on the commission.  He pretended to have
discovered grave facts against the accused; he was suspected of having
invented them.  Public feeling was at its height; the magistrates loudly
proclaimed the theory of Classes, according to which all the Parliaments
of France, responsible one for another, formed in reality but one body,
distributed by delegation throughout the principal towns of the realm.
The king convoked a bed of justice, and, on the 2d of March, 1766, he
repaired to the Parliament of Paris.  "What has passed in my Parliaments
of Pau and of Rennes has nothing to do with my other Parliaments," said
Louis XV. in a firm tone, to which the ears of the Parliament were no
longer accustomed.  "I have behaved in respect of those two courts as
comported with my authority, and I am not bound to account to anybody.  I
will not permit the formation in my kingdom of an association which might
reduce to a confederacy of opposition the natural bond of identical
duties and common obligations, nor the introduction into the monarchy of
an imaginary body which could not but disturb its harmony.  The
magistracy does not form a body or order separate from the three orders
of the kingdom; the magistrates are my officers.  In my person alone
resides the sovereign power, of which the special characteristic is the
spirit of counsel, justice, and reason; it is from me alone that my
courts have their existence and authority.  It is to me alone that the
legislative power belongs, without dependence and without partition.  My
people is but one with me, and the rights and interests of the nation
whereof men dare to make a body separate from the monarch are necessarily
united with my own, and rest only in my hands."

This haughty affirmation of absolute power, a faithful echo of Cardinal
Richelieu's grand doctrines, succeeded for a while in silencing the
representations of the Parliaments; but it could not modify the course of
opinion, passionately excited in favor of M. de la Chalotais.  On the
24th of December, 1766, after having thrice changed the jurisdiction and
the judges, the king annulled the whole procedure by an act of his
supreme authority.  "We shall have the satisfaction," said the edict, "of
finding nobody guilty, and nothing will remain for us but to take such
measures as shall appear best adapted to completely restore and maintain
tranquillity in a province from which we have on so many occasions had
proofs of zeal for our service."  M. de la Chalotais and his comrades
were exiled to Saintes.  They demanded a trial and a legal justification,
which were refused.  "It is enough for them to know that their honor is
intact," the king declared.  A Parliament was imperfectly reconstructed
at Rennes.  "It is D'Aiguillon's bailiff-court," was the contemptuous
saying in Brittany.  The governor had to be changed.  Under the
administration of the Duke of Duras, the agitation subsided in the
province; the magistrates who had resigned resumed their seats; M. de la
Chalotais and his son, M. de Caradeuc, alone remained excluded by order
of the king.  The restored Parliament immediately made a claim on their
behalf, accompanying the request with a formal accusation against the
Duke of Aiguillon.  The states supported the Parliament.  "What! sir,"
said the remonstrance; "they are innocent, and yet you punish them!  It
is a natural right that nobody should be' punished without a trial; we
have property in our honor, our lives, and our liberty, just as you have
property in your crown.  We would spill our blood to preserve your
rights; but, on your side, preserve us ours.  Sir, the province on its
knees before you asks you for justice."  A royal ordinance forbade any
proceedings against the Duke of Aiguillon, and enjoined silence on the
parties.  Parliament having persisted, and declaring that the accusations
against the Duke of Aiguillon attached (_entachaient_) his honor, Louis
XV., egged on by the chancellor, M. de Maupeou, an ambitious, bold, bad
man, repaired in person to the office, and had all the papers relating to
the procedure removed before his eyes.  The strife was becoming violent;
the Duke of Choiseul, still premier--minister but sadly shaken in the
royal favor, disapproved of the severities employed against the
magistracy.  All the blows dealt at the Parliaments recoiled upon him.

King Louis XV. had taken a fresh step in the shameful irregularity of his
life; on the 15th of April, 1764, Madame de Pompadour had died, at the
age of forty-two, of heart disease.  As frivolous as she was deeply
depraved and baseminded in her calculating easiness of virtue, she had
more ambition than comported with her mental calibre or her force of
character; she had taken it into her head to govern, by turns promoting
and overthrowing the ministers, herself proffering advice to the king,
sometimes to good purpose, but more often still with a levity as fatal as
her obstinacy.  Less clever, less ambitious, but more potent than Madame
de Pompadour over the faded passions of a monarch aged before his time,
the new favorite, Madame Dubarry, made the least scrupulous blush at the
lowness of her origin and the irregularity of her life.  It was,
nevertheless, in her circle that the plot was formed against the Duke of
Choiseul.  Bold, ambitious, restless, presumptuous sometimes in his views
and his hopes, the minister had his heart too nearly in the right place
and too proper a spirit to submit to either the yoke of Madame Dubarry or
that of the shameless courtiers who made use of her influence.
Chancellor Maupeou, the Duke of Aiguillou, and the new comptroller-
general, Abbe Terray, a man of capacity, invention, and no scruple at
all, at last succeeded in triumphing over the force of habit, the only
thing that had any real effect upon the king's listless mind.  After
twelve years' for a long while undisputed power, after having held in his
hands the whole government of France and the peace of Europe, M. de
Choiseul received from the king on the 24th of December, 1770, a letter
in these terms:--

"Cousin, the dissatisfaction caused me by your services forces me to
banish you to Chanteloup, whither you will repair within twenty-four
hours.  I should have sent you much further off, but for the particular
regard I have for Madame de Choiseul, in whose health I feel great
interest.  Take care your conduct does not force me to alter my mind.
Whereupon I pray God, cousin, to have you in His holy and worthy
keeping."

The thunderbolt which came striking the Duke of Choiseul called forth a
fresh sign of the times.  The fallen minister was surrounded in his
disgrace with marks of esteem and affection on the part of the whole
court.  The princes themselves and the greatest lords felt it an honor to
pay him a visit at his castle of Chanteloup.  He there displayed a
magnificence which ended by swallowing up his wife's immense fortune,
already much encroached upon during his term of power.  Nothing was too
much for the proud devotion and passionate affection of the Duchess of
Choiseul: she declined the personal favors which the king offered her,
setting all her husband's friends the example of a fidelity which was
equally honorable to them and to him.  Acute observers read a tale of the
growing weakness of absolute power in the crowd which still flocked to a
minister in disgrace; the Duke of Choiseul remained a power even during a
banishment which was to last as long as his life.

With M. de Choiseul disappeared the sturdiest prop of the Parliaments.
In vain had the king ordered the magistrates to resume their functions
and administer justice.  "There is nothing left for your Parliament,"
replied the premier president, "but to perish with the laws, since the
fate of the magistrates should go with that of the state."  Madame
Dubarry, on a hint from her able advisers, had caused to be placed in her
apartments a fine portrait of Charles I. by Van Dyck.  "France," she was
always reiterating to the king with vulgar familiarity, "France, thy
Parliament will cut off thy head too!"

[Illustration: "France, thy Parliament will cut off thy Head too!"--249]

A piece of ignorant confusion, due even more to analogy of name than to
the generous but vain efforts often attempted by the French magistracy in
favor of sound doctrines of government.  The Parliament of Paris fell
sitting upon curule chairs, like the old senators of Rome during the
invasion of the Gauls; the political spirit, the collected and combative
ardor, the indomitable resolution of the English Parliament, freely
elected representatives of a free people, were unknown to the French
magistracy.  Despite the courage and moral, elevation it had so often
shown, its strength had been wasted in a constantly useless strife; it
had withstood Richelieu and Mazarin; already reduced to submission by
Cardinal Fleury, it was about to fall beneath the equally bold and
skilful blows of Chancellor Maupeou.  Notwithstanding the little natural
liking and the usual distrust he felt for Parliaments, the king still
hesitated.  Madame Dubarry managed to inspire him with fears for his
person; and he yielded.

During the night between the 19th and 20th of January, 1771, musketeers
knocked at the doors of all the magistrates; they were awakened in the
king's name, at the same time being ordered to say whether they would
consent to resume their service.  No equivocation possible!  No margin
for those developments of their ideas which are so dear to parliamentary
minds!  It was a matter of signing yes or no.  Surprised in their
slumbers, but still firm in their resolution of resistance, the majority
of the magistrates signed no.  They were immediately sent into
banishment; their offices were confiscated.  Those members of the
Parliament from whom weakness or astonishment had surprised a yes
retracted as soon as they were assembled, and underwent the same fate as
their colleagues.  On the 23d of January, members delegated by the grand
council, charged with the provisional administration of justice, were
installed in the Palace by the chancellor himself.  The registrar-in-
chief, the ushers, the attorneys, declined or eluded the exercise of
their functions; the advocates did not come forward to plead.  The Court
of Aids, headed by Lamoignon de Malesherbes, protested against the attack
made on the great bodies of the state.  "Ask the nation themselves, sir,"
said the president, "to mark your displeasure with the Parliament of
Paris, it is proposed to rob them--themselves--of the essential rights of
a free people."  The Court of Aids was suppressed like the Parliament;
six superior councils, in the towns of Arras, Blois, Chalons-sur-Marne,
Lyon, Clermont, and Poitiers parcelled out amongst them the immense
jurisdiction of Paris; the members of the grand council, assisted by
certain magistrates of small esteem, definitively took the places of the
banished, to whom compensation was made for their offices.  The king
appeared in person on the 13th of April, 1771, at the new Parliament;
the chancellor read out the edicts.  "You have just heard my intentions,"
said Louis XV.; "I desire that they may be conformed to.  I order you to
commence your duties.  I forbid any deliberation contrary to my wishes
and any representations in favor of my former Parliament, for I shall
never change."

One single prince of the blood, the Count of La Marche, son of the Prince
of Conti, had been present at the bed of justice.  All had protested
against the suppression of the Parliament.  "It is one of the most useful
boons for monarchs and of those most precious to Frenchmen," said the
protest of the princes, "to have bodies of citizens, perpetual and
irremovable, avowed at all times by the kings and the nation, who, in
whatever form and under whatever denomination they may have existed,
concentrate in themselves the general right of all subjects to invoke the
law."  "Sir, by the law you are king, and you cannot reign but by it,"
said the Parliament of Dijon's declaration, drawn up by one of the
mortarcap presidents (_presidents a mortier_), the gifted president De
Brosses.  The princes were banished; the provincial Parliaments,
mutilated like that of Paris or suppressed like that of Rouen, which was
replaced by two superior councils, ceased to furnish a centre for
critical and legal opposition.  Amidst the rapid decay of absolute power,
the transformation and abasement of the Parliaments by Chancellor Maupeou
were a skilful and bold attempt to restore some sort of force and unity
to the kingly authority.  It was thus that certain legitimate claims had
been satisfied, the extent of jurisdictions had been curtailed, the
salability of offices had been put down, the expenses of justice had been
lessened.  Voltaire had for a long time past been demanding these
reforms, and he was satisfied with them.  "Have not the Parliaments often
been persecuting and barbarous?" he wrote; "I wonder that the _Welches_
[i. e., Barbarians, as Voltaire playfully called the French] should take
the part of those insolent and intractable cits."  He added, however,
"Nearly all the kingdom is in a boil and consternation; the ferment is as
great in the provinces as in Paris itself."

The ferment subsided without having reached the mass of the nation; the
majority of the princes made it up with the court, the dispossessed
magistrates returned one after another to Paris, astonished and mortified
to see justice administered without them and advocates pleading before
the Maupeou Parliament.  The chancellor had triumphed, and remained
master; all the old jurisdictions were broken up, public opinion was
already forgetting them; it was occupied with a question more important
still than the administration of justice.  The ever-increasing disorder
in the finances was no longer checked by the enregistering of edicts; the
comptroller-general, Abbe Terray, had recourse shamelessly to every
expedient of a bold imagination to fill the royal treasury; it was
necessary to satisfy the ruinous demands of Madame Dubarry and of the
depraved courtiers who thronged about her.  Successive bad harvests and
the high price of bread still further aggravated the position.  It was
known that the king had a taste for private speculation; he was accused
of trading in grain and of buying up the stores required for feeding the
people.  The odious rumor of this famine pact, as the bitter saying was,
soon spread amongst the mob.  Before its fall, the Parliament of Rouen
had audaciously given expression to these dark accusations; it had
ordered proceedings to be taken against the monopolists.  A royal
injunction put a veto upon the prosecutions.  "This prohibition from the
crown changes our doubts to certainty," wrote the Parliament to the king
himself; "when we said that the monopoly existed and was protected, God
forbid, sir, that we should have had your Majesty in our eye, but
possibly we had some of those to whom you distribute your authority."
Silence was imposed upon the Parliaments, but without producing any
serious effect upon public opinion, which attributed to the king the
principal interest in a great private concern bound to keep up a certain
parity in the price of grain.  Contempt grew more and more profound; the
king and Madame Dubarry by their shameful lives, Maupeou and Abbe Terray
by destroying the last bulwarks of the public liberties, were digging
with their own hands the abyss in which the old French monarchy was about
to be soon ingulfed.

For a long while pious souls had formed great hopes of the dauphin;
honest, scrupulous, sincerely virtuous, without the austerity and
extensive views of the Duke of Burgundy, he had managed to live aloof,
without intrigue and without open opposition, preserving towards the king
an attitude of often sorrowful respect, and all the while remaining the
support of the clergy and their partisans in their attempts and their
aspirations.  The Queen, Mary Leczinska, a timid and proudly modest
woman, resigned to her painful situation, lived in the closest intimacy
with her son, and still more with her daughterin-law, Mary Josepha of
Saxony, though the daughter of that elector who had but lately been
elevated to the throne of Poland, and had vanquished King Stanislaus.
The sweetness, the tact, the rare faculties of the dauphiness had
triumphed over all obstacles.  She had three sons.  Much reliance was
placed upon the influence she had managed to preserve with the king, and
on the dominion she exercised over her husband's mind.  In vain had the
dauphin, distracted at the woes of France, over and over again solicited
from the king the honor of serving him at the head of the army; the
jealous anxiety of Madame de Pompadour was at one with the cold
indifference of Louis XV. as to leaving the heir to the throne in the
shade.  The prince felt it deeply, in spite of his pious resignation.
"A dauphin," he would say, "must needs appear a useless body, and a king
strive to be everybody" (_un homme universel_).

Whilst trying to beguile his tedium at the camp of Compiegne, the
dauphin, it is said, overtaxed his strength, and died at the age of
thirty-six on the 20th of December, 1765, profoundly regretted by the
bulk of the nation, who knew his virtues without troubling themselves,
like the court and the philosophers, about the stiffness of his manners
and his complete devotion to the cause of the clergy.  The new dauphin,
who would one day be Louis XVI., was still a child; the king had him
brought into his closet.  "Poor France!"  he said sadly, "a king of
fifty-five and a dauphin of eleven!"  The dauphiness and Queen Mary
Leczinska soon followed the dauphin to the tomb (1767-1768).  The king,
thus left alone and scared by the repeated deaths around him, appeared
for a while to be drawn closer to his daughters, for whom he always
retained some sort of affection, a mixture of weakness and habit.  One of
them, Madame Louise, who was deeply pious, left him to enter the convent
of the Carmelites; he often went to see her, and granted her all the
favors she asked.  But by this time Madame Dubarry had become all-
powerful; to secure to her the honors of presentation at court, the king
personally solicited the ladies with whom he was intimate in order to get
them to support his favorite on this new stage; when the youthful Marie
Antoinette, Archduchess of Austria, and daughter of Maria Theresa, whose
marriage the Duke of Choiseul had negotiated, arrived in France, in 1770,
to espouse the dauphin, Madame Dubarry appeared alone with the royal
family at the banquet given at La Muette on the occasion of the marriage.
After each reaction of religious fright and transitory repentance, after
each warning from God that snatched him for an instant from the depravity
of his life, the king plunged more deeply than before into shame.  Madame
Dubarry was to reign as much as Louis XV.

Before his fall the Duke of Choiseul had made a last effort to revive
abroad that fortune of France which he saw sinking at home without his
being able to apply any effective remedy.  He had vainly attempted to
give colonies once more to France by founding in French Guiana
settlements which had been unsuccessfully attempted by a Rouennese
Company as early as 1634.  The enterprise was badly managed; the numerous
colonists, of very diverse origin and worth, were cast without resources
upon a territory as unhealthy as fertile.  No preparations had been made
to receive them; the majority died of disease and want; New France
henceforth belonged to the English, and the great hopes which had been
raised of replacing it in Equinoctial France, as Guiana was named, soon
vanished never to return.  An attempt made about the same epoch at St.
Lucie was attended with the same result.  The great ardor and the rare
aptitude for distant enterprises which had so often manifested themselves
in France from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century seemed to be
henceforth extinguished.  Only the colonies of the Antilles, which had
escaped from the misfortunes of war, and were by this time recovered from
their disasters, offered any encouragement to the patriotic efforts of
the Duke of Choiseul.  He had been more fortunate in Europe than in the
colonies: henceforth Corsica belonged to France.

In spite of the French occupations, from 1708 to 1756, in spite of the
refusals with which Cardinal Fleury had but lately met their appeals, the
Corsicans, newly risen against the oppression of Genoa, had sent a
deputation to Versailles to demand the recognition of their republic,
offering to pay the tribute but lately paid annually to their tyrannical
protectress.

The hero of Corsican independence, Pascal Paoli, secretly supported by
England, had succeeded for several years past not only in defending his
country's liberty, but also in governing and at the same time civilizing
it.  This patriotic soul and powerful mind, who had managed to profit by
the energetic passions of his compatriots whilst momentarily repressing
their intestine quarrels, dreamed of an ideal constitution for his
island; he sent to ask for one of J. J.  Rousseau, who was still in
Switzerland, and whom he invited to Corsica.  The philosophical chimeras
of Paoli soon vanished before a piece of crushing news.  The Genoese,
weary of struggling unsuccessfully against the obstinate determination of
the Corsicans, and unable to clear off the debts which they had but
lately incurred to Louis XV., had proposed to M. de Choiseul to cede to
France their ancient rights over Corsica, as security for their
liabilities.  A treaty, signed at Versailles on the 15th of May, 1768,
authorized the king to perform all acts of sovereignty in the places and
forts of Corsica; a separate article accorded to Genoa an indemnity of
two millions.

A cry arose in Corsica.  Paoli resolved to defend the independence of his
country against France, as he had defended it against Genoa.  For several
months now French garrisons had occupied the places still submitting to
Genoa; when they would have extended themselves into the interior, Paoli
barred their passage; he bravely attacked M. de Chauvelin, the king's
lieutenant-general, who had just landed with a proclamation from Louis
XV. to his new subjects.  "The Corsican nation does not let itself be
bought and sold like a flock of sheep sent to market," said the protest
of the republic's Supreme Council.  Fresh troops from France had to be
asked for; under the orders of Count Vaux they triumphed without
difficulty over the Corsican patriots.  Mustering at the bridge of Golo
for a last effort, they made a rampart of their dead; the wounded had
lain down amongst the corpses to give the survivors time to effect their
retreat.  The town of Corte, the seat of republican government,
capitulated before long.  England had supplied Paoli with munitions and
arms; he had hoped more from the promises of the government and the
national jealousy against France.  "The ministry is too weak and the
nation too wise to make war on account of Corsica," said an illustrious
judge, Lord Mansfield.  In vain did Burke exclaim, "Corsica, as a
province of France, is for me an object of alarm!"  The House of Commons
approved of the government's conduct, and England contented herself with
offering to the vanquished Paoli a sympathetic hospitality; he left
Corsica on an English frigate, accompanied by most of his friends, and it
is in Westminster Abbey that he lies, after the numerous vicissitudes of
his life, which fluctuated throughout the revolutions of his native land,
from England to France and from France to England, to the day when
Corsica, proud of having given a master to France and the Revolution,
became definitively French with Napoleon.

[Illustration: Defeat of the Corsicans at Golo----256]

Corsica was to be the last conquest of the old French monarchy.  Great or
little, magnificent or insignificant, from Richelieu to the Duke of
Choiseul, France had managed to preserve her territorial acquisitions; in
America and in Asia, Louis XV. had shamefully lost Canada and the Indies;
in Europe, the diplomacy of his ministers had given to the kingdom
Lorraine and Corsica.  The day of insensate conquests ending in a
diminution of territory had not yet come.  In the great and iniquitous
dismemberment which was coming, France was to have no share.

Profound disquietude was beginning to agitate Europe: the King of Poland,
Augustus III., had died in 1763, leaving the unhappy country over which
he had reigned a prey to internal anarchy ever increasing and
systematically fanned by the avidity or jealousy of the great powers, its
neighbors.  "As it is to the interest of the two monarchs of Russia and
Prussia that the Polish commonwealth should preserve its right to free
election of a king," said the secret treaty concluded in 1764 between
Frederick II.  and the Empress Catherine, "and that no family should
possess itself of the elective throne of that country, the two
undermentioned Majesties engage to prevent, by all means in their power,
Poland from being despoiled of its right of election and transformed into
an hereditary kingdom; they mutually promise to oppose in concert, and,
if necessary, by force of arms, all plans and designs which may tend
thereto as soon as discovered."

A second article secured to the dissidents, as Protestants and Greeks
were called in Poland, the protection of the King of Prussia and of the
empress, "who will make every effort to persuade, by strong and friendly
representations, the king and the commonwealth of Poland to restore to
those persons the rights, privileges, and prerogatives they have acquired
there, and which have been accorded them in the past, as well in
ecclesiastical as in civil matters, but have since been, for the most
part, circumscribed or unjustly taken away.  But, should it be impossible
to attain that end at once, the contracting parties will content
themselves with seeing that, whilst waiting for more favorable times and
circumstances, the aforesaid persons are put beyond reach of the wrongs
and oppression under which they are at present groaning."  In order to
remain masters of Poland and to prevent it from escaping the dissolution
with which it was threatened by its internal dissensions, Frederick and
Catherine, who were secretly pursuing different and often contrary
courses, united to impose on the Diet a native prince.  "I and my ally
the Empress of Russia," said the King of Prussia, "have agreed to promote
the selection of a Piast (Pole), which would be useful and at the same
time glorious for the nation."  In vain had Louis XV. by secret policy
sought for a long while to pave the way for the election of the Prince of
Conti to the throne of Poland; the influence of Russia and of Prussia
carried the day.  Prince Poniatowski, late favorite of the Empress
Catherine, was elected by the Polish Diet; in discouragement and sadness,
four thousand nobles only had responded to the letters of convocation.
The new king, Stanislaus Augustus, handsome, intelligent, amiable,
cultivated, but feeble in character and fatally pledged to Russia, sought
to rally round him the different parties, and to establish at last, in
the midst of general confusion, a regular and a strong government.  He
was supported in this patriotic task by the influence, ever potent in
Poland, of the Czartoriskis.  The far-seeing vigilance of Frederick II.
did not give them time to act.  "Poland must be left in her lethargy," he
had said to the Russian ambassador Saldern.  "It is of importance," he
wrote to Catherine, "that Her Majesty the empress, who knows perfectly
well her own interests and those of her friends and allies, should give
orders of the most precise kind to her ambassador at Warsaw, to oppose
any novelty in the form of government, and, generally speaking, the
establishment of a permanent council, the preservation of the commissions
of war and of the treasury, the power of the king and the unlimited
concession on the prince's part of ability to distribute offices
according to his sole will."  The useful reforms being thus abandoned and
the king's feeble power radically shaken, religious discord came to fill
up the cup of disorder, and to pave the way for the dismemberment, as
well as definitive ruin, of unhappy Poland.

Subjected for a long time past to an increasing oppression, which was
encouraged by a fanatical and unenlightened clergy, the Polish dissidents
had conceived great hopes on the accession of Stanislaus Augustus; they
claimed not only liberty of conscience and of worship, but also all the
civil and political rights of which they were deprived.  "It is no
question of establishing the free exercise of different religions in
Poland," wrote Frederick to Catherine; "it is necessary to reduce the
question to its true issue, the demand of the dissident noblesse, and
obtain for them the equality they demand, together with participation in
all acts of sovereignty."  This was precisely what the clergy and the
Catholic noblesse were resolved never to grant.  In spite of support from
the empress and the King of Prussia, the demand of the dissidents was
formally rejected by the Diet of 1766.  At the Diet of 1767, Count
Repnin, Catherine's ambassador and the real head of the government in
Poland, had four of the most recalcitrant senators carried off and sent
into exile in Russia.  The Diet, terrified, disorganized, immediately
pronounced in favor of the dissidents.  By the modifications recently
introduced into the constitution of their country, the Polish nobles had
lost their liberum veto; unanimity of suffrages was no longer necessary
in the Diet; the foreign powers were able to insolently impose their will
upon it; the privileges of the noblesse, as well as their traditional
faith, were attacked at the very foundations; religious fanaticism and
national independence boiled up at the same time in every heart; the
discontent, secretly fanned by the agents of Frederick, burst out, sooner
than the skilful weavers of the plot could have desired, with sufficient
intensity and violence to set fire to the four corners of Poland.  By a
bold surprise the confederates gained possession of Cracow and of the
fortress of Barr, in Podolia; there it was that they swore to die for the
sacred cause of Catholic Poland.  For more than a century, in the face of
many misatkes and many misfortunes, the Poles have faithfully kept that
oath.

The Bishop of Kaminck, Kraminski, had gone to Versailles to solicit the
support of France.  The Duke of Choiseul, at first far from zealous in
the cause of the Polish insurrection, had nevertheless sent a few troops,
who were soon re-enforced.  The Empress Catherine had responded to the
violence of the confederates of Barr by letting loose upon the Ukraine
the hordes of Zaporoguian Cossacks, speedily followed by regular troops.
The Poles, often beaten, badly led by chieftains divided amongst
themselves, but ever ardent, ever skilful in seizing upon the smallest
advantages, were sustained by the pious exhortations of the clergy, who
regarded the war as a crusade; they were rejoiced to see a diversion
preparing in their favor by the Sultan's armaments.  "I will raise the
Turks against Russia the moment you think proper," was the assurance
given to the Duke of Choiseul by the Count of Vergennes, French
ambassador at Constantinople, "but I warn you that they will be beaten."
Hostilities broke out on the 30th of October, 1768; a Turkish army set
out to aid the Polish insurrection.  Absorbed by their patriotic
passions, the Catholic confederates summoned the Mussulmans to their
assistance.  Prince Galitzin, at the head of a Russian force very
inferior to the Ottoman invaders, succeeded in barring their passage; the
Turks fell back, invariably beaten by the Russian generals.  Catherine at
the same time summoned to liberty the oppressed and persecuted Greeks;
she sent a squadron to support the rising which she had been fomenting
for some months past.  After a few brilliant successes, her arms were
less fortunate at sea than on land.  A French officer, of Hungarian
origin, Baron Tott, sent by the Duke of Choiseul to help the Sublime
Porte, had fortified the Straits of the Dardanelles; the Russians were
repulsed; they withdrew, leaving the Greeks to the vengeance of their
oppressors.  The efforts which the Empress Catherine was making in Poland
against the confederates of Barr had slackened her proceedings against
Turkey; she was nevertheless becoming triumphant on the borders of the
Vistula, as well as on the banks of the Danube, when the far-sighted and
bold policy of Frederick II. interfered in time to prevent Russia from
taking possession of Poland as well as of the Ottoman empire.

Secretly favoring the confederates of Barr whom he had but lately
encouraged in their uprising, and whom he had suffered to make purchases
of arms and ammunition in Prussia, Frederick II. had sought in Austria a
natural ally, interested like himself in stopping the advances of Russia.
The Emperor, Maria Theresa's husband, had died in 1764; his son, Joseph
II., who succeeded him, had conceived for the King of Prussia the
spontaneous admiration of a young and ardent spirit for the most
illustrious man of his times.  In 1769, a conference which took place at
Neisse brought the two sovereigns together.  "The emperor is a man eaten
up with ambition," wrote Frederick after the interview; "he is hatching
some great design.  At present, restrained as he is by his mother, he
is beginning to chafe at the yoke he bears, and, as soon as he gets
elbow-room, he will commence with some 'startling stroke; it was
impossible for me to discover whether his views were directed towards the
republic of Venice, towards Bavaria, towards Silesia, or towards
Lorraine; but we may rely upon it that Europe will be all on fire the
moment he is master."  A second interview, at Neustadt in 1770, clinched
the relations already contracted at Neisse.  Common danger brought
together old enemies.  "I am not going to have the Russians for
neighbors," the Empress Maria Theresa was always repeating.  The
devastating flood had to be directed, and at the same time stemmed.  The
feeble goodwill of France and the small body of troops commanded by
Dumouriez were still supporting the Polish insurrection, but the Duke of
Choiseul had just succumbed to intrigue at home.  There was no longer any
foreign policy in France.  It was without fear of intervention from her
that the German powers began to discuss between them the partition of
Poland.

She was at the same time suffering disseverment at her own hands through
her intestine divisions and the mutual jealousy of her chiefs.  In Warsaw
the confederates had attempted to carry off King Stanislaus Augustus,
whom they accused of betraying the cause of the fatherland; they had
declared the throne vacant, and took upon themselves to found an
hereditary monarchy.  To this supreme honor every great lord aspired,
every small army-corps acted individually and without concert with the
neighboring leaders.  Only a detachment of French, under the orders of
Brigadier Choisi, still defended the fort of Cracow; General Suwarrow,
who was investing it, forced them to capitulate; they obtained all the
honors of war, but in vain was the Empress Catherine urged by D'Alembert
and his friends the philosophers to restore their freedom to the glorious
vanquished; she replied to them with pleasantries.  Ere long the fate of
Poland was about to be decided without the impotent efforts of France in
her favor weighing for an instant in the balance.  The political
annihilation of Louis XV. in Europe had been completed by the dismissal
of the Duke of Choiseul.

The public conscience is lightened by lights which ability, even when
triumphant, can never altogether obscure.  The Great Frederick and the
Empress Catherine have to answer before history for the crime of the
partition of Poland, which they made acceptable to the timorous jealousy
of Maria Theresa and to the youthful ambition of her son.  As prudent as
he was audacious, Frederick had been for a long time paving the way for
the dismemberment of the country he had seemed to protect.  Negotiations
for peace with the Turks became the pretext for war-indemnities.  Poland,
vanquished, divided, had to pay the whole of them.  "I shall not enter
upon the portion that Russia marks out for herself," wrote Frederick to
Count Solms, his ambassador at St. Petersburg.  "I have expressly left
all that blank in order that she may settle it according to her interests
and her own good pleasure.  When the negotiations for peace have advanced
to a certain stage of consistency, it will no longer depend upon the
Austrians to break them off if we declare our views unanimously as to
Poland.  She cannot rely any further upon France, which happens to be in
such a fearful state of exhaustion that it could not give any help to
Spain, which was on the point of declaring war against England.  If that
war do not take place, it must be attributed simply to the smash in the
finances of France.  I guarantee, then, to the Russians all that may
happen to suit them; they will do as much for me; and, supposing that the
Austrians should consider their share of Poland too paltry in comparison
with ours, and it were desirable to satisfy them, one would only have to
offer them that strip of the Venetian dominions which cuts them off from
Trieste in order to keep them quiet; even if they were to turn nasty, I
will answer for it with my head that our union with Russia, once clearly
established, will tide them over all that we desire.  They have to do
with two powers, and they have not a single ally to give them a
shoulder."

Frederick said truly; his sound and powerful judgment took in the
position of Europe: France, exhausted by the lingering decay of her
government and in travail with new and confused elements which had as yet
no strength but to shatter and destroy; Spain, lured on by France and
then abandoned by her; England, disturbed at home by parliamentary
agitation, favorably disposed to the court of Russia and for a long while
allied to Frederick; Sweden and Denmark, in the throes of serious events;
there was nothing to oppose the iniquity projected and prepared for with
so much art and ability.  It was in vain that the King of Prussia sought
to turn into a joke the unscrupulous manoeuvres of his diplomacy when he
wrote to D'Alembert in January, 1772, "I would rather undertake to put
the whole history of the Jews into madrigals than to cause to be of one
mind three sovereigns amongst whom must be numbered two women."  The
undertaking was already accomplished.  Three months later, the first
partition of Poland had been settled between Russia, Prussia, and
Austria, and on the 2d of September, 1772, the treaty was made known at
Warsaw.  The manifesto was short.  "It is a general rule of policy,"
Frederick had said, "that, in default of unanswerable arguments, it is
better to express one's self laconically, and not go beating about the
bush."  The care of drawing it up had been intrusted to Prince Kaunitz.
"It was of importance," said the document, "to establish the commonwealth
of Poland on a solid basis whilst doing justice to the claims of the
three powers for services rendered against the insurrection."  The king
and the senate protested.  The troops of the allies surrounded Warsaw,
and the Diet, being convoked, ratified by a majority of two voices the
convention presented by the spoilers themselves.  Catherine assigned to
herself three thousand square leagues, and one million five hundred
thousand souls, in Lithuania and Polish Livonia; Austria took possession
of two thousand five hundred square leagues, and more than two million
souls, in Red Russia and the Polish palatinates on the left of the
Vistula; the instigator and plotter of the whole business had been the
most modest of all; the treaty of partition brought Prussia only nine
hundred square leagues and eight hundred and sixty thousand souls, but he
found himself master of Prussian Poland and of a henceforth compact
territory.  England had opposed, in Russia, the cession of Dantzick to
the Great Frederick.  "The ill-temper of France and England at the
dismemberment of Poland calls for serious reflections," wrote the King of
Prussia on the 5th of August, 1772: "these two courts are already moving
heaven and earth to detach the court of Vienna from our system; but as
the three chief points whence their support should come are altogether to
seek in France, and there is neither system, nor stability, nor money
there, her projects will be given up with the same facility with which
they were conceived and broached.  They appear to me, moreover, like the
projects of the Duke of Aiguillon, ebullitions of French vivacity."

France did not do anything, and could not do anything; the king's secret
negotiators, as well as the minister of foreign affairs, had been tricked
by the allied powers.  "Ah! if Choiseul had been here!"  exclaimed King
Louis XV., it is said, when he heard of the partition of Poland.  The
Duke of Choiseul would no doubt have been more clear-sighted and better
informed than the Duke of Aiguillon, but his policy could have done no
good.  Frederick II. knew that.  "France plays so small a part in
Europe," he wrote to Count Solms, "that I merely tell you about the
impotent efforts of the French ministry's envy just to have a laugh at
them, and to let you see in what visions the consciousness of its own
weaknesses is capable of leading that court to indulge."  "O! where is
Poland?" Madame Dubarry had said to Count Wicholorsky, King Stanislaus
Augustus' charge d'affaires, who was trying to interest her in the
misfortunes of his country.

The partition of Poland was barely accomplished, the confederates of
Barr, overwhelmed by the Russian troops, were still arriving in France to
seek refuge there, and already King Louis XV., for a moment roused by the
audacious aggression of the German courts, had sunk back into the
shameful lethargy of his life.  When Madame Louise, the pious Carmelite
of St. Denis, succeeded in awakening in her father's soul a gleam of
religious terror, the courtiers in charge of the royal pleasures
redoubled their efforts to distract the king from thoughts so perilous
for their own fortunes.  Louis XV., fluctuating between remorse and
depravity, ruled by Madame Dubarry, bound hand and foot to the
triumvirate of Chancellor Maupeou, Abbe Terray, and the Duke of
Aiguillon, who were consuming between them in his name the last remnants
of absolute power, fell suddenly ill of small-pox.  The princesses, his
daughters, had never had that terrible disease, the scourge and terror of
all classes of society, yet they bravely shut themselves up with the
king, lavishing their attentions upon him to the last gasp.  Death,
triumphant, had vanquished the favorite.  Madame Dubarry was sent away as
soon as the nature of the malady had declared itself.  The king charged
his grand almoner to ask pardon of the courtiers for the scandal he had
caused them.  "Kings owe no account of their conduct save to God only,"
he had often repeated to comfort himself for the shame of his life.  "It
is just He whom I fear," said Maria Theresa, pursued by remorse for the
partition of Poland.

Louis XV. died on the 10th of May, 1774, in his sixty-fourth year, after
reigning fifty-nine years, despised by the people who had not so long ago