In such a France, as in a Powder-tower, where fire unquenched and now unquenchable is smoking and smouldering all round, has Louis xv. lain down to die.  With Pompadourism and Dubarryism, his Fleur-de-lis has been shamefully struck down in all lands and on all seas; Poverty invades even the Royal Exchequer, and Tax-farming can squeeze out no more; there is a quarrel of twenty-five years’ standing with the Parlement; everywhere Want, Dishonesty, Unbelief, and hotbrained Sciolists for state-physicians:  it is a portentous hour.

Such things can the eye of History see in this sick-room of King Louis, which were invisible to the Courtiers there.  It is twenty years, gone Christmas-day, since Lord Chesterfield, summing up what he had noted of this same France, wrote, and sent off by post, the following words, that have become memorable:  ’In short, all the symptoms which I have ever met with in History, previous to great Changes and Revolutions in government, now exist and daily increase in France.’ (Chesterfield’s Letters:  December 25th, 1753.)

Chapter 1.1.III.

Viaticum.

For the present, however, the grand question with the Governors of France is:  Shall extreme unction, or other ghostly viaticum (to Louis, not to France), be administered?

It is a deep question.  For, if administered, if so much as spoken of, must not, on the very threshold of the business, Witch Dubarry vanish; hardly to return should Louis even recover?  With her vanishes Duke d’Aiguillon and Company, and all their Armida-Palace, as was said; Chaos swallows the whole again, and there is left nothing but a smell of brimstone.  But then, on the other hand, what will the Dauphinists and Choiseulists say?  Nay what may the royal martyr himself say, should he happen to get deadly worse, without getting delirious?  For the present, he still kisses the Dubarry hand; so we, from the ante-room, can note:  but afterwards?  Doctors’ bulletins may run as they are ordered, but it is ’confluent small-pox,’—­of which, as is whispered too, the Gatekeepers’s once so buxom Daughter lies ill:  and Louis xv. is not a man to be trifled with in his viaticum.  Was he not wont to catechise his very girls in the Parc-aux-cerfs, and pray with and for them, that they might preserve their—­orthodoxy? (Dulaure, viii. (217), Besenval, &c.) A strange fact, not an unexampled one; for there is no animal so strange as man.

For the moment, indeed, it were all well, could Archbishop Beaumont but be prevailed upon—­to wink with one eye!  Alas, Beaumont would himself so fain do it:  for, singular to tell, the Church too, and whole posthumous hope of Jesuitism, now hangs by the apron of this same unmentionable woman.  But then ‘the force of public opinion’?  Rigorous Christophe de Beaumont, who has spent his life in persecuting hysterical Jansenists and incredulous Non-confessors; or even their dead bodies, if no better