their small three-cornered hats, powdered perukes, embroidered coats, and lace ruffles.  Their valets served them with ices in the trenches, under the cannon of besieged towns.  A troop of actors formed part of the army-train of Marshal Saxe.  At night there was a comedy, a ballet, or a ball, and in the morning a battle.  Saxe, however, himself a sturdy German, while he recognized their fighting value, and knew well how to make the best of it, sometimes complained that they were volatile, excitable, and difficult to manage.

The weight of the Court, with its pomps, luxuries, and wars, bore on the classes least able to support it.  The poorest were taxed most; the richest not at all.  The nobles, in the main, were free from imposts.  The clergy, who had vast possessions, were wholly free, though they consented to make voluntary gifts to the Crown; and when, in a time of emergency, the minister Machault required them, in common with all others hitherto exempt, to contribute a twentieth of their revenues to the charges of government, they passionately refused, declaring that they would obey God rather than the King.  The cultivators of the soil were ground to the earth by a threefold extortion,—­the seigniorial dues, the tithes of the Church, and the multiplied exactions of the Crown, enforced with merciless rigor by the farmers of the revenue, who enriched themselves by wringing the peasant on the one hand, and cheating the King on the other.  A few great cities shone with all that is most brilliant in society, intellect, and concentrated wealth; while the country that paid the costs lay in ignorance and penury, crushed and despairing.  Of the inhabitants of towns, too, the demands of the tax-gatherer were extreme; but here the immense vitality of the French people bore up the burden.  While agriculture languished, and intolerable oppression turned peasants into beggars or desperadoes; while the clergy were sapped by corruption, and the nobles enervated by luxury and ruined by extravagance, the middle class was growing in thrift and strength.  Arts and commerce prospered, and the seaports were alive with foreign trade.  Wealth tended from all sides towards the centre.  The King did not love his capital; but he and his favorites amused themselves with adorning it.  Some of the chief embellishments that make Paris what it is to-day—­the Place de la Concorde, the Champs Elysees, and many of the palaces of the Faubourg St. Germain—­date from this reign.

One of the vicious conditions of the time was the separation in sympathies and interests of the four great classes of the nation,—­clergy, nobles, burghers, and peasants; and each of these, again, divided itself into incoherent fragments.  France was an aggregate of disjointed parts, held together by a meshwork of arbitrary power, itself touched with decay.  A disastrous blow was struck at the national welfare when the Government of Louis XV. revived the odious persecution of the Huguenots.  The attempt to scour heresy out of France cost her the most industrious and virtuous part of her population, and robbed her of those most fit to resist the mocking scepticism and turbid passions that burst out like a deluge with the Revolution.