Thus, by mutually weakening each other, the great powers and the great influences in the state were wasting away; the reverses of the French arms, the loss of their colonies, and the humiliating peace of Paris aggravated the discontent. In default of good government the people are often satisfied with glory. This consolation, to which the French nation had but lately been accustomed, failed it all at once; mental irritation, for a long time silently brooding, cantoned in the writings of philosophers and in the quatrains of rhymesters, was beginning to spread and show itself amongst the nation; it sought throughout the state an object for its wrath; the powerful society of the Jesuits was the first to bear all the brunt of it.

A French Jesuit, Father Lavalette, had founded a commercial house at Martinique. Ruined by the war, he had become bankrupt to the extent of three millions; the order having refused to pay, it was condemned by the Parliament to do so. The responsibility was declared to extend to all the members of the Institute, and public opinion triumphed over the condemnation with a " quasi-indecent " joy, says the advocate Barbier. Nor was it content with this legitimate satisfaction. One of the courts which had until lately been most devoted to the Society of Jesus had just set an example of severity. In 1759, the Jesuits had been driven from Portugal by the Marquis of Pombal, King Joseph I.'s all-powerful minister; their goods had been confiscated, and their principal, Malagrida, handed over to the Inquisition, had just been burned as a heretic (Sept. 20, 1761).

The Portuguese Jesuits had been feebly defended by the grandees; the clergy were hostile to them. In France, their enemies showed themselves bolder than their defenders. Proudly convinced of the justice of their cause, the Fathers had declined the jurisdiction of the grand council, to which they had a right, as all ecclesiastical bodies had, and they had consented to hand over to the Parliament the registers of their constitutions, up to that time carefully concealed from the eyes of the profane. The skilful and clear-sighted hostility of the magistrates was employed upon the articles of this code, so stringently framed of yore by enthusiastic souls and powerful minds, forgetful or disdainful of the sacred rights of human liberty. All the services rendered by the Jesuits to the cause of religion and civilization appeared effaced; forgotten were their great missionary enterprises, their founders and their martyrs, in order to set forth simply their insatiable ambition, their thirst after power, their easy compromises with evil passions condemned by the Christian faith. The assaults of the philosophers had borne their fruit in the public mind; the olden rancor of the Jansenists imperceptibly promoted the severe inquiry openly conducted by the magistrates. Madame de Pompadour dreaded the influence of the Jesuits; 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!"



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.



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 given him the name of Well-beloved, and whose attachment he had worn out by his cold indifference about affairs and the national interests as much as by the irregularities of his life. With him died the old French monarchy, that proud power which had sometimes ruled Europe whilst always holding a great position therein. Henceforth France was marching towards the unknown, tossed about as she was by divers movements, which were mostly hostile to the old state of things, blindly and confusedly as yet, but, under the direction of masters as inexperienced as they were daring, full of frequently noble though nearly always extravagant and reckless hopes, all founded on a thorough reconstruction of the bases of society and of its ancient props. Far more even than the monarchy, at the close of Louis XV.'s reign, did religion find itself attacked and threatened; the blows struck by the philosophers at fanaticism recoiled upon the Christian faith, transiently liable here below for human errors and faults over which it is destined to triumph in eternity.



CHAPTER LV.——LOUIS XV., THE PHILOSOPHERS.

Nowhere and at no epoch had literature shone with so vivid a lustre as in the reign of Louis XIV.; never has it been in a greater degree the occupation and charm of mankind, never has it left nobler and rarer models behind it for the admiration and imitation of the coming race; the writers of Louis XV.'s age, for all their brilliancy and all their fertility, themselves felt their inferiority in respect of their predecessors. Voltaire confessed as much with a modesty which was by no means familiar to him. Inimitable in their genius, Corneille, Bossuet, Pascal, Moliere left their imprint upon the generation that came after them; it had judgment enough to set them by acclamation in the ranks of the classics; in their case, greatness displaced time. Voltaire took Racine for model; La Mothe imagined that he could imitate La Fontaine. The illustrious company of great minds which surrounded the throne of Louis XIV., and had so much to do with the lasting splendor of his reign, had no reason to complain of ingratitude on the part of its successors; but, from the pedestal to which they raised it, it exercised no potent influence upon new thought and new passions. Enclosed in their glory as in a sanctuary, those noble spirits, discreet and orderly even in their audacities, might look forth on commotions and yearnings they had never known; they saw, with astonishment mingled with affright, their successors launching without fear or afterthought upon that boundless world of intellect, upon which the rules of conscience and the difficulties of practical life do not come in anywhere to impose limits. They saw the field everywhere open to human thought, and they saw falling down on all sides the boundaries which they had considered sacred. They saw pioneers, as bold as they were thoughtless, marching through the mists of a glorious hope towards an unknown future, attacking errors and abuses, all the while that they were digging up the groundwork of society in order to lay new foundations, and they must have shuddered even in their everlasting rest to see ideas taking the place of creeds, doubt substituted for belief, generous aspirations after liberty, justice, and humanity mingled, amongst the masses, with low passions and deep-seated rancor. They saw respect disappearing, the church as well as the kingly power losing prestige every day, religious faith all darkened and dimmed in some corner of men's souls, and, amidst all this general instability, they asked themselves with awe, "What are the guiding-reins of the society which is about to be? What will be the props of the new fabric? The foundations are overturned; what will the good man do?"



Good men had themselves sometimes lent a hand to the work, beyond what they had intended or foreseen, perhaps; Montesquieu, despite the wise moderation of his great and strong mind, had been the first to awaken that yearning for novelty and reforms which had been silently brooding at the bottom of men's hearts. Born in 1689 at the castle of La Brede, near Bordeaux, Montesquieu really belonged, in point of age, to the reign of Louis XIV., of which he bears the powerful imprint even amidst the boldness of his thoughts and expressions. Grandeur is the distinctive characteristic of Montesquieu's ideas, as it is of the seventeenth century altogether. He was already councillor in the Parliament of Bordeaux when Louis XIV. died; next year (1716) he took possession of a mortar-cap president's (president d mortier) office, which had been given up to him by one of his uncles. "On leaving college," he says, "there were put into my hands some law-books; I examined the spirit of them." Those profound researches, which were to last as long as his life, were more suited to his tastes than jurisprudence properly so called. "What has always given me rather a low opinion of myself," he would say, "is that there are very few positions in the commonwealth for which I should be really fit. As for my office of president, I have my heart in the right place, I comprehend sufficiently well the questions in themselves; but as to the procedure I did not understand anything about it. I paid attention to it, nevertheless; but what disgusted me most was to see fools with that very talent which, so to speak, shunned me." He resolved to deliver himself from the yoke which was intolerable to him, and resigned his office; but by this time the world knew his name, in spite of the care he had taken at first to conceal it. In 1721, when he still had his seat on the fleurs-de-lis, he had published his Lettres persanes, an imaginary trip of two exiled Parsees, freely criticising Paris and France. The book appeared under the Regency, and bears the imprint of it in the licentiousness of the descriptions and the witty irreverence of the criticisms. Sometimes, however, the future gravity of Montesquieu's genius reveals itself amidst the shrewd or biting judgments. It is in the Lettres persanes that he seeks to set up the notion of justice above the idea of God himself. "Though there were no God," he says, "we should still be bound to love justice, that is to say, make every effort to be like that Being of whom we have so grand an idea, and who, if He existed, would of necessity be just." Holy Scripture, before Montesquieu, had affirmed more simply and more powerfully the unchangeable idea of justice in every soul of man. "He who is judge of all the earth, shall not He do right?." Abraham had said when interceding with God for the righteous shut up in Sodom.

The success of the Lettres persanes was great; Montesquieu had said what many people thought without daring to express it; the doubt which was nascent in his mind, and which he could only withstand by an effort of will, the excessive freedom of the tone and of the style scared the authorities, however; when he wanted to get into the French Academy, in the place of M. de Sacy, Cardinal Fleury opposed it formally. It was only on the 24th of January, 1728, that Montesquieu, recently elected, delivered his reception speech. He at once set out on some long travels; he went through Germany, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, and ended by settling in England for two years. The sight of political liberty had charmed him. "Ambassadors know no more about England than a six months' infant," he wrote in his journal; "when people see the devil to pay in the periodical publications, they believe that there is going to be a revolution next day; but all that is required is to remember that in England as elsewhere, the people are dissatisfied with the ministers and write what is only thought elsewhere. England is the freest country in the world; I do not except any republic." He returned to France so smitten with the parliamentary or moderate form of government, as he called it, that he seemed sometimes to forget the prudent maxim of the Lettres persanes. "It is true," said the Parsee Usbeck, "that, in consequence of a whimsicality (bizarrerie) which springs rather from the nature than from the mind of man, it is sometimes necessary to change certain laws; but the case is rare, and, when it occurs, it should not be touched save with a trembling hand."

On returning to his castle of La Brede after so many and such long travels, Montesquieu resolved to restore his tone by intercourse with the past. "I confess my liking for the ancients," he used to say; "this antiquity enchants me, and I am always ready to say with Pliny, 'You are going to Athens; revere the gods.'" It was not, however, on the Greeks that he concentrated the working of his mind; in 1734, he published his Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur et de la decadence des Romaine. Montesquieu did not, as Bossuet did, seek to hit upon God's plan touching the destinies of mankind; he discovers in the virtues and vices of the Romans themselves the secret of their triumphs and of their reverses. The contemplation of antiquity inspires him with language often worthy of Tacitus, curt, nervous, powerful in its grave simplicity. "It seemed," he says, "that the Romans only conquered in order to give; but they remained so positively the masters that, when they made war on any prince, they crushed him, so to speak, with the weight of the whole universe."

Montesquieu thus performed the prelude to the great work of his life; he had been working for twenty years at the Esprit des lois, when he published it in 1748. "In the course of twenty years," he says, "I saw my work begin, grow, progress, and end." He had placed as the motto to his book this Latin phrase, which at first excited the curiosity of readers: Prolem sine matre creatam (Offspring begotten without a mother). "Young man," said Montesquieu, by this time advanced in years, to M. Suard (afterwards perpetual secretary to the French Academy), "young man, when a notable book is written, genius is its father, and liberty its mother; that is why I wrote upon the title-page of my work, "Prolem sine matre creatam."

It was liberty at the same time as justice that Montesquieu sought and claimed in his profound researches into the laws which have from time immemorial governed mankind; that new instinctive idea of natural rights, those new yearnings which were beginning to dawn in all hearts, remained as yet, for the most part, upon the surface of their minds and of their lives; what was demanded at that time in France was liberty to speak and write rather than to act and govern. Montesquieu, on the contrary, went to the bottom of things, and, despite the natural moderation of his mind, he propounded theories so perilous for absolute power that he dared not have his book printed at Paris, and brought it out in Geneva; its success was immense; before his death, Montesquieu saw twenty-one French editions published, and translations in all the languages of Europe. "Mankind had lost its titledeeds," says Voltaire; "Montesquieu recovered and restored them."

The intense labor, the immense courses of reading, to which Montesquieu had devoted himself, had exhausted his strength. "I am overcome with weariness," he wrote in 1747; "I propose to rest myself for the remainder of my days." "I have done," he said to M. Suard; "I have burned all my powder, all my candles have gone out." "I had conceived the design of giving greater breadth and depth to certain parts of my Esprit; I have become incapable of it; my reading has weakened my eyes, and it seems to me that what light I have left is but the dawn of the day when they will close forever."

Montesquieu was at Paris, ill and sad at heart, in spite of his habitual serenity; notwithstanding the scoffs he had admitted into his Lettres persanes, he had always preserved some respect for religion; he considered it a necessary item in the order of societies; in his soul and on his own private account he hoped and desired rather than believed. "Though the immortality of the soul were an error," he had said, "I should be sorry not to believe it; I confess that I am not so humble as the atheists. I know not what they think, but as for me I would not truck the notion of my immortality for that of an ephemeral happiness. There is for me a charm in believing myself to be immortal like God himself. Independently of revealed ideas, metaphysical ideas give me, as regards my eternal happiness, strong hopes which I should not like to give up." As he approached the tomb, his views of religion appeared to become clearer. "What a wonderful thing!" he would say, "the Christian religion, which seems to have no object but felicity in the next world, yet forms our happiness in this." He had never looked to life for any very keen delights; his spirits were as even as his mind was powerful. "Study has been for me the sovereign remedy against the disagreeables of life," he wrote, "never having had any sorrow that an hour's reading did not dispel. I awake in the morning with a secret joy at beholding the light; I gaze upon the light with a sort of enchantment, and all the rest of the day I am content. I pass the night without awaking, and in the evening, when I go to bed, a sort of entrancement prevents me from giving way to reflections."

Montesquieu died as he had lived, without retracting any of his ideas or of his writings. The priest of his parish brought him the sacraments, and, "Sir," said he, "you know how great God is!" "Yes," replied the dying man, "and how little men are!" He expired almost immediately on the 10th of February, 1755, at the age of sixty-six. He died at the beginning of the reign of the philosophers, whose way he had prepared before them without having ever belonged to their number. Diderot alone followed his bier. Fontenelle, nearly a hundred years old, was soon to follow him to the tomb.



Born at Rouen in February, 1657, and nephew of Corneille on the mother's side, Fontenelle had not received from nature any of the unequal and sublime endowments which have fixed the dramatic crown forever upon the forehead of Corneille; but he had inherited the wit, and indeed the brilliant wit (bel esprit), which the great tragedian hid beneath the splendors of his genius. He began with those writings, superfine (precieux), dainty, tricked out in the fashion of the court and the drawing-room, which suggested La Bruyere's piquant portrait.

"Ascanius is a statuary, Hegio a metal-founder, AEschines a fuller, and Cydias a brilliant wit. That is his trade; he has a sign, a workshop, articles made to order, and apprentices who work under him. Prose, verse, what d'ye lack? He is equally successful in both. Give him an order for letters of consolation, or on an absence; he will undertake them. Take them ready made, if you like, and enter his shop; there is a choice assortment. He has a friend whose only duty on earth is to puff him for a long while in certain society, and then present him at their houses as a rare bird and a man of exquisite conversation, and thereupon, just as the musical man sings and the player on the lute touches his lute before the persons to whom he has been puffed, Cydias, after coughing, pulling up his wristband, extending his hand and opening his fingers, gravely spouts his quintessentiated ideas and his sophisticated arguments."

Fontenelle was not destined to stop here in his intellectual developments; when, at forty years of age, he became perpetual secretary to the Academy of Sciences, he had already written his book on the Pluralite des Mondes, the first attempt at that popularization of science which has spread so since then. "I believe more and more," he said, "that there is a certain genius which has never yet been out of our Europe, or, at least, has not gone far out of it." This genius, clear, correct, precise, the genius of method and analysis, the genius of Descartes, which was at a later period that of Buffon and of Cuvier, was admirably expounded and developed by Fontenelle for the use of the ignorant. He wrote for society, and not for scholars, of whose labors and discoveries he gave an account to society. His extracts from the labors of the Academy of Science and his eulogies of the Academicians are models of lucidness under an ingenious and subtle form, rendered simple and strong by dint of wit. "There is only truth that persuades," he used to say, "and even without requiring to appear with all its proofs. It makes its way so naturally into the mind, that, when it is heard for the first time, it seems as if one were merely remembering."

Equitable and moderate in mind, prudent and cold in temperament, Fontenelle passed his life in discussion without ever stumbling into disputes. "I am no theologian, or philosopher, or man of any denomination, of any sort whatever; consequently I am not at all bound to be right, and I can with honor confess that I was mistaken, whenever I am made to see it." "How did you manage to keep so many friends without making one enemy?" he was asked in his old age. "By means of two maxims," he answered: "Everything is possible; everybody may be right" (tout le monde a raison). The friends of Fontenelle were moderate like himself; impressed with his fine qualities, they pardoned his lack of warmth in his affections. "He never laughed," says Madame Geoffrin, his most intimate friend. "I said to him one day, 'Did you ever laugh, M. de Fontenelle?' 'No,' he answered; 'I never went ha! ha! ha!' That was his idea of laughing; he just smiled at smart things, but he was a stranger to any strong feeling. He had never shed tears, he had never been in a rage, he had never run, and, as he never did anything from sentiment, he did not catch impressions from others. He had never interrupted anybody, he listened to the end without losing anything; he was in no hurry to speak, and, if you had been accusing against him, he would have listened all day without saying a syllable."

The very courage and trustiness of Fontenelle bore this stamp of discreet moderation. When Abbe St. Pierre was excluded from the French Academy under Louis XV. for having dared to criticise the government of Louis XIV., one single ball in the urn protested against the unjust pressure exercised by Cardinal Fleury upon the society. They all asked one another who the rebel was; each defended himself against having voted against the minister's order; Fontenelle alone kept silent; when everybody had exculpated himself, "It must be myself, then," said Fontenelle half aloud.

So much cool serenity and so much taste for noble intellectual works prolonged the existence of Fontenelle beyond the ordinary limits; he was ninety-nine and not yet weary of life. "If I might but reach the strawberry-season once more!" he had said. He died at Paris on the 9th of January, 1759; with him disappeared what remained of the spirit and traditions of Louis XIV.'s reign. Montesquieu and Fontenelle were the last links which united the seventeenth century to the new era. In a degree as different as the scope of their minds, they both felt respect for the past, to which they were bound by numerous ties, and the boldness of their thoughts was frequently tempered by prudence. Though naturally moderate and prudent, Voltaire was about to be hurried along by the ardor of strife, by the weaknesses of his character, by his vanity and his ambition, far beyond his first intentions and his natural instincts. The flood of free-thinking had spared Montesquieu and Fontenelle; it was about to carry away Voltaire almost as far as Diderot.



Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire was born at Paris on the 21st of November, 1694. "My dear father," said a letter from a relative to his family in Poitou, "our cousins have another son, born three days ago; Madame Arouet will give me some of the christening sugar-plums for you. She has been very ill, but it is hoped that she is going on better; the infant is not much to look at, having suffered from a fall which his mother had." M. Arouet, the father, of a good middle-class family, had been a notary at the Chatelet, and in 1701 became paymaster of fees (payeur d'epices) to the court of exchequer, an honorable and a lucrative post, which added to the easy circumstances of the family. Madame Arouet was dead when her youngest son was sent to the college of Louis-le-Grand, which at that time belonged to the Jesuits. As early as then little Arouet, who was weak and in delicate health, but withal of a very lively intelligence, displayed a freedom of thought and a tendency of irreverence which already disquieted and angered his masters. Father Lejay jumped from his chair and took the boy by the collar, exclaiming, "Wretch, thou wilt one of these days raise the standard of Deism in France!" Father Pallou, his confessor, accustomed to read the heart, said, as he shook his head, "This, child is devoured with a thirst for celebrity."

Even at school and among the Jesuits, that passion for getting talked about, which was one of the weaknesses of Voltaire's character, as well as one of the sources of his influence, was already to a certain extent gratified. The boy was so ready in making verses, that his masters themselves found amusement in practising upon his youthful talent. Little Arouet's snuff box had been confiscated because he had passed it along from hand to, hand in class; when he asked for it back from Father Poree, who was always indulgent towards him, the rector required an application in verse. A quarter of an hour later the boy returned with his treasure in his possession, having paid its ransom thus:

"Adieu, adieu, poor snuff-box mine; Adieu; we ne'er shall meet again: Nor pains, nor tears, nor prayers divine Will win thee back; my efforts are in vain! Adieu, adieu, poor box of mine; Adieu, my sweet crowns'-worth of bane; Could I with money buy thee back once more, The treasury of Plutus I would drain. But ah! not he the god I must implore; To have thee back, I need Apollo's vein. . . 'Twixt thee and me how hard a barrier-line, To ask for verse! Ah! this is all my strain! Adieu, adieu, poor box of mine; Adieu; we ne'er shall meet again!"

Arouet was still a child when a friend of his family took him to see Mdlle. Ninon de l'Enclos, as celebrated for her wit as for the irregularity of her life. "Abbe Chateauneuf took me to see her in my very tender youth," says Voltaire; "I had done some verses, which were worth nothing, but which seemed very good for my age. She was then eighty-five. She was pleased to put me down in her will; she left me two thousand francs to buy books; her death followed close upon my visit and her will."

Young Arouet was finishing brilliantly his last year of rhetoric, when John Baptist Rousseau, already famous, saw him at the distribution of prizes at the college. "Later on," wrote Rousseau, in the thick of his quarrels with Voltaire, "some ladies of my acquaintance had taken me to see a tragedy at the Jesuits in August, 1710; at the distribution of prizes which usually took place after those representations, I observed that the same scholar was called up twice. I asked Father Tarteron, who did the honors of the room in which we were, who the young man was that was so distinguished amongst his comrades. He told me that it was a little lad who had a surprising turn for poetry, and proposed to introduce him to me; to which I consented. He went to fetch him to me, and I saw him returning a moment afterwards with a young scholar who appeared to me to be about sixteen or seventeen, with an ill-favored countenance, but with a bright and lively expression, and who came and shook hands with me with very good grace."

Scarcely had Francois Arouet left college when he was called upon to choose a career. "I do not care for any but that of a literary man," exclaimed the young fellow. "That," said his father, "is the condition of a man who means to be useless to society, to be a charge to his family, and to die of starvation." The study of the law, to which he was obliged to devote himself, completely disgusted the poet, already courted by a few great lords who were amused at his satirical vein; he led an indolent and disorderly life, which drove his father distracted; the latter wanted to get him a place. "Tell my father," was the young man's reply to the relative commissioned to make the proposal, "that I do not care for a position which can be bought; I shall find a way of getting myself one that costs nothing." "Having but little property when I began life," he wrote to M. d'Argenson, his sometime fellow-pupil, "I had the insolence to think that I should have got a place as well as another, if it were to be obtained by hard work and good will. I threw myself into the ranks of the fine arts, which always carry with them a certain air of vilification, seeing that they do not make a man king's counsellor in his councils. You may become a master of requests with money; but you can't make a poem with money, and I made one."

This independent behavior and the poem on the Construction du Choeur de Notre-Dame de Paris, the subject submitted for competition by the French Academy, did not prevent young Arouet from being sent by his father to Holland in the train of the Marquis of Chateauneuf, then French ambassador to the States General; he committed so many follies that on his return to France, M. Arouet forced him to enter a solicitor's office. It was there that the poet acquired that knowledge of business which was useful to him during the whole course of his long life; he, however, did not remain there long: a satire upon the French Academy which had refused him the prize for poetry, and, later on, some verses as biting as they were disrespectful against the Duke of Orleans, twice obliged their author to quit Paris. Sent into banishment at Sully-sur-Loire, he there found partisans and admirers; the merry life that was led at the Chevalier Sully's mitigated the hardships of absence from Paris. "Don't you go publishing abroad, I beg," wrote Arouet, nevertheless, to one of his friends, "the happiness of which I tell you in confidence: for they might perhaps leave me here long enough for me to become unhappy; I know my own capacity; I am not made to live long in the same place."

A beautiful letter addressed to the Regent and disavowing all the satirical writings which had been attributed to him, brought Arouet back to Paris at the commencement of the year 1717; he had been enjoying it for barely a few months when a new satire, entitled J'ai vu (I have seen), and bitterly criticising the late reign, engaged the attention of society, and displeased the Regent afresh. Arouet defended himself with just cause and with all his might against the charge of having written it. The Duke of Orleans one day met him in the garden of the Palais-Royal. "Monsieur Arouet," said he, "I bet that I will make you see a thing you have never seen." "What, pray, monseigneur?" "The Bastille." "Ah! monseigneur, I will consider it seen." Two days later, young Arouet was shut up in the Bastille.

I needs must go; I jog along in style, With close-shut carriage, to the royal pile Built in our fathers' days, hard by St. Paul, By Charles the Fifth. 0 brethren, good men all, In no such quarters may your lot be cast! Up to my room I find my way at last A certain rascal with a smirking face Exalts the beauties of my new retreat, So comfortable, so compact, so neat. Says he, "While Phoebus runs his daily race, He never casts one ray within this place. Look at the walls, some ten feet thick or so; You'll find it all the cooler here, you know." Then, bidding me admire the way they close The triple doors and triple locks on those, With gratings, bolts and bars on every side, "It's all for your security," he cried. At stroke of noon some skilly is brought in; Such fare is not so delicate as thin. I am not tempted by this splendid food, But what they tell me is, "'Twill do you good So eat in peace; no one will hurry you." Here in this doleful den I make ado, Bastilled, imprisoned, cabined, cribbed, confined, Nor sleeping, drinking, eating-to my mind; Betrayed by every one, my mistress too! O Marc Rene! [M. d'Argenson] whom Censor Cato's ghost Might well have chosen for his vacant post, O Marc Rene! through whom 'tis brought about That so much people murmur here below, To your kind word my durance vile I owe; May the good God some fine day pay you out!

Young Arouet passed eleven months in the Bastille; he there wrote the first part of the poem called La Henriade, under the title of La Ligue; when he at last obtained his release in April, 1718, he at the same time received orders to reside at Chatenay, where his father had a country house. It was on coming out of the Bastille that the poet took, from a small family-estate, that name of Voltaire which he was to render so famous. "I have been too unfortunate under my former name," he wrote to Mdlle. du Noy er; "I mean to see whether this will suit me better."

The players were at that time rehearsing the tragedy of OEdipe, which was played on the 18th of November, 1718, with great success. The daring flights of philosophy introduced by the poet into this profoundly and terribly religious subject excited the enthusiasm of the roues; Voltaire was well received by the Regent, who granted him an honorarium. "Monseigneur," said Voltaire, "I should consider it very kind if his Majesty would be pleased to provide henceforth for my board, but I beseech your Highness to provide no more for my lodging." Voltaire's acts of imprudence were destined more than once to force him into leaving Paris; he all his life preserved such a horror of prison, that it made him commit more than one platitude. "I have a mortal aversion for prison," he wrote in 1734; once more, however, he was to be an inmate of the Bastille.

Launched upon the most brilliant society, everywhere courted and flattered, Voltaire was constantly at work, displaying the marvellous suppleness of his mind by shifting from the tragedies of Artemise and Marianne, which failed, to the comedy of L'Indiscret, to numerous charming epistles, and lastly to the poem of La Henriade, which he went on carefully revising, reading fragments of it as he changed his quarters from castle to castle. One day, however, some criticisms to which he was not accustomed angered him so much, that he threw into the fire the manuscript he held in his hand. "It is only worth burning, then," he exclaimed in a rage. President Henault dashed at the papers. "I ran up and drew it out of the flames, saying that I had done more than they who did not burn the AEneid as Virgil had recommended; I had drawn out of the fire La Henriade, which Voltaire was going to burn with his own hands.