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.