those best who were distinguished for their infidel or licentious speculations.  She was the friend of those economists and philosophers who sapped the foundations of the social system.  An imperious and insolent hauteur and reckless prodigality were her most marked peculiarities,—­just such as were to be expected in an unprincipled woman raised suddenly to high position.  In spite of her power, she did not escape the malignant stings of envenomed rivals or anonymous satirists.  “She was rallied on the baseness of her origin; she avenged herself by making common cause with those philosophers who overturned the ancient order.”  She was both mistress and politician, but her politics and alliances subverted the throne which gave her all her glory.  Her ascendency of course rested on her power of administering to the tastes and pleasures of the ’King, and she showed genius in the variety of amusements which she invented.  She reigned twenty years, and lost her empire only by death.  Madame de Maintenon had maintained her ascendency over Louis XIV. by the exercise of those virtues which extorted his respect, but Madame de Pompadour by the faculty of charming the senses.  It was by her that Versailles was enriched with the most precious and beautiful of its countless wonders.  Her own collection of pictures, cameos, antiques, crystals, porcelains, vases, gems, and articles of vertu was esteemed the richest and most valuable in the kingdom, and after her death it took six months to dispose of it.  Her library was valued at more than a million of francs, and contained some of the rarest manuscripts and most curious books in France.  The sums, however, which she spent on literary curiosities or literary men were small compared with the expenses of her toilet, of her fetes, her balls, and her palaces.  And all these expenses were open as the day in the eyes of a nation suffering from ruinous taxation, from famine, and the shame of unsuccessful war!

We are impressed with the blind and suicidal measures which all those connected with the throne instigated or encouraged in this reign,—­from the King to the most infamous of his mistresses.  Whoever pretended to give his aid to the monarchy helped to subvert it by the very measures which he proposed.  “The Duke of Orleans, when he patronized Law, gave a shock to the whole economical system of the old regime.  When this Scotch financier said to the powerful aristocracy around him, ’Silver is only to you the means of circulation, beyond this it belongs to the country,’ he announced the ruin of the glebe and the fall of feudal prejudices.  The bankruptcies which followed the bursting of his bubble weakened the potent charm of the word ‘honor,’ on which was based the stability of the throne.”  The courtiers, when they blazed in jewels, in embroidered silks and satins, in sumptuous equipages, and in all the costly ornaments of their times, gave employment and importance to a host of shopkeepers and handicraftsmen,