who grew rich, as those who bought of them grew poor.  The wealth of bankers, brokers, mercers, jewellers, tailors, and coachmakers dates to these times,—­those prosperous and fortunate members of the middle-class who “inhabited the Place Vendome and the Place des Victoires, as the nobles dwelt in the Rue de Grenelle and the Rue St. Dominique.  The nobles ruined themselves by the extravagance into which they were led by the court, and their chateaux and parks fell into the hands of financiers, lawyers, and merchants, who, taking the titles of their new estates, became a parvenu aristocracy which excited the jealousy of the old and divided its ranks.”  The inferior, but still prosperous class, the shopkeepers, also equally advanced in intelligence and power.  In those dark and dingy backrooms, in which for generations their ancestors had been immured, they now discussed their rights, and retailed the scandals which they heard.  They read the sarcasms of the poets and the theories of the new philosophers.  Even the tranquillity which succeeded inglorious war was favorable to the rise of the middle classes; and the Revolution was as much the product of the discontent engendered by social improvements as of the frenzy produced by hunger and despair.  The court favored the improvements of Paris, especially those designed for public amusements.  The gardens of the Tuileries were embellished, the Champs Elysees planted with trees, and pictures were exhibited in the grand salon of the Louvre.  The Theatre Francais, the Royal Opera, the Opera Comique, and various halls for balls and festivals were then erected,—­those fruitful nurseries of future clubs, those poisoned wells of popular education.  Nor were charities forgotten with the building of the Pantheon and the extension of the Boulevards.  The Hopital des Enfants-Trouves allowed mothers, unseen and unheard, to bequeath their children to the State.

There were two events connected with the reign of Madame de Pompadour—­I do not say of the King, or his queen, or his ministers, for philosophical history compels us to confine our remarks chiefly to great controlling agencies, whether they be sovereigns or people; to such a man as Peter the Great, when one speaks of a semi-barbarous nation, to ideas, when we describe popular revolutions—­which had a great influence in unsettling the kingdom, although brought about in no inconsiderable measure by this unscrupulous mistress of the King.  These were the expulsion of the Jesuits, and the triumph of the philosophers.

In regard to the first, I would say, that Madame de Pompadour did not like the Jesuits; not because they were the enemies of liberal principles, not because they were the most consistent advocates and friends of despotism in all its forms, intellectual, religious, and political, or the writers of casuistic books, or the perverters of educational instruction, or boastful missionaries in Japan and China, or cunning intriguers